pubcon07

December 6, 2007

Word of Mouth Marketing

Brett Tabke and I rush over next door for the next session (and my last for the day. Lisa and I planned on covering them all but our flight home wouldn't allow it. Bummer.) Anyway, the last session of my Pubcon experience has speakers Louise Rijk, Advanced Media Productions, Inc. and Greg Hartnett, Best of The Web here to talk about how to market via Word of Mouth, hereafter WOM.

Louise Rijk is up first and she'll walk us through what WOM is. Much of what she'll cover is related to social media.

WOM marketing definition: It's the oldest form of marketing. WOM is the act of consumers providing honet information to other consumers. It's driven by influencers with large social networks. Organic WOM is when people naturally talk about something because they're happy about it. If you've got satisfied customers, they're going to talk about it. Good customer feedback helps with WOM. Amplified WOM is when marketers launch campaigns to accelerate the spread of WOM. Social media today allows you to build communities around your brand. You can motivate the right people and they'll become your evangelists. You can use advertising to create a buzz as well. Black Friday is advertising that also spreads via WOM.

How does WOM marketing work? It happens when people are given a reason to talk about a product or service, online or off. It's driven by customer satisfaction, two-way dialogue and transparency.

Online conversations include using tools to spread ideas about products and services through social networks. It's growing.

WOM marketing is based on the principles of influencers to spread a message. People think that online WOM marketing is inexpensive but it really isn't. The success of a campaign is how many people you reach, not how many convert.

How do you recruit influencers? 10 percent of the influencers are the power influencers who reach a lot of people. 90 percent of the rest of the people are moderate influencers. They reach fewer people but there are more of them. You shouldn't ignore that part of the market.

There are four steps that influencers go through: Awarenss research personal experience recommendations

Start by listening online about what people are saying about your product in order to get the unfiltered experiences. There are listening services that will do that for you as well. BuzzLogic is one of them and it returns actionable items for you. [This is similar to brand management research.]

Don’t forget to tap into your in house customer service. You can find your loyal customers that way and reach out to them.

Develop or create something that gives people something to talk about. Target the authority influencers first and their communities. Honesty is key, you have to be part of the community and engage it.

Differences in Social Media Marketing: it's an aspect of WOM marketing. It's online only unlike WOMM which is only 15-20 percent online. It can spread by itself instead of relying on influencers. Not always brand relevant. Message must be outrageous instead of just having a great product that inspires excitement.

Major brand marketers are moving from testing WOMM to including it into fully integrated marketing campaigns.

A WOM campaign generates more online buzz when supported by traditional paid media buys. Greater paid media spend equals greater online buzz. 64 percent of moderate influencers do online research after seeing offline promotions but only 30 percent will transition in the reverse. TV is still a good way to reach influencers but even that is fragmented.

Integration of WOMM and traditional advertising requires extensive planning, integrated execution and comprehensive effectiveness measurement. It's not a one time fix, you can't just send out a single press release and call it a day. You have to stick with it.

I wish she would leave her slides up longer. I can't get more than half of them down.

Reaching the Influencers:
Identify
Motivate
Sustain motivation
Track and Measure

She describes a campaign they created for one of their clients. They started with a free offer as a motivation then started in the social media sites including Flickr and YouTube. They looked out for other influencers as well, bloggers in the space, etc.

They selected 50 influencers and then asked them to complete some other step in order to pass the buzz along--blogs, photo projects in Flickr and videos to YouTube.

It's a matter of carrying through the whole process in order to make an impact.

Greg Hartnett says they basically built the company by WOM and so he's going to use them as a case study. You know why I like case studies? We don't blog them. I'll just take out a couple highlights where it doesn't overlap with Louise's.

He recommends reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz and Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell.

Who are your influencers/happy talkers? Happy customers, online talkers, sweet swag (the people wearing your t-shirts or grabbing things from your booth. Note: Some of them are just swag junkies), eager employees, fans or hobbyists, professionals.

What will they talk about?

• Have a Great Product or Service. Think of Google--they grew entirely by WOM.
• Specials or Discounts.
• Extraordinary Customer Service -- turn that frown upside down.
• Partnering with a Charity.

How do you get them talking?

• Ask for the referral
• Newsletters/Email -- anything that you ever do through WOM you should have an email for
• The Social Network effect
• Blogs
• The power of swag

Don’t put a big cartoony logo on your shirt, try to put something on there that people will actually want to wear. Try to be cool and edgy without being offensive.

He likes Google's Blog search to monitor what people are saying. I have no idea why since it sort of sucks. Has he not ever seen Ask's? He also mentions Technorati. No argument there.

You have to take part in the conversation. There is probably nothing more important than honesty and transparency. If you're in the forums, you need to help, not deliver hype. No one wants to hear what you have to say if your post ends with a pitch.

Have your own blog but also have someone empowered to go out and comment on other industry blogs. Taking part in the overall conversation is important.

Ultimately it's about having happy customers. Focus on it 100 percent. Lead your team by example with respect and ethics. Send thank yous to people. Under promise and over deliver. Make a habit of going above and beyond.

Brett tells us that our name tag holders turn into sunglasses holders. Okay then.

No Q&A, I think everyone is too tired for questions.

And that's it for me! Thanks everyone for reading. We'll be home tomorrow and Lisa will give us some kind of Friday Recap...probably.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 4:03 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, SEM Events, Social Media, pubcon07

Startup Costs – Getting in the Video Game

We heard in the brand management session that it's important to get into video, so what does that take? Now that another delicious boxed lunch has been consumed, it's time to find out. Brett Tabke pulls double duty here as moderator and panelist alongside Robin Liss of Camcorderinfo.com and Michael McDonald of iEntry Inc.

Brett jumps right in by asking Mike how they got into video.

Mike says they saw an opportunity to jump right in and be a forerunner. Pubcon last year was their first big event that they did video for. Some of their big hurdles were format, resolution, platform, how to imbed and what content management system to use.

It was a lot of trial and error to decide on all those elements. You have to think about what the most common, most popular formats are and try to offer those. You also need to think about offering them in multiple sizes for different connection speeds. He says it was easier for us to figure out how we could embed them on our own and then allow other people to do the same. We wanted it to be easy for someone we interviewed to be able to put it on his site as well. It's more of a branding thing.

It's been commerically viable in terms of paying for itself and putting it on at shows. Google is a big sponsor of conference coverage. It hasn't paid for itself in terms of office space and equipment, however.

They have approximately 6 full time video people. He notes that it's nice to be able to use your designers to supplement your video content, so it's not just two guys sitting there talking. Designers are handy for helping them look dynamic and interesting. They edit using Sony Vegas 8 because 7 doesn't work with Vista (it did a few weeks ago, but doesn't anymore.)

Okay, Robin's turn.

Their number one rule is that it's got to be interesting. Video is an illustrated medium, you need to use video to illustrate things. Three minutes of someone talking isn't interesting. They use video as a marketing tool, as a content piece--they don't sell ads on the videos very much. They do direct sells but mostly they do contextual ads.

They've been doing videos for seven or eight years now. Because the site (CamcorderInfo.com) was about camcorders, they wanted to use videos to show it. They started out using Flash and now they're using YouTube.

She takes a quick poll on how many people have camcorders and how old they are then quickly disclaimers that her recommendations are editorial based and not ads.

CamcorderInfo.com is, in her opinion, a must read. She started it 11 years ago and they do lab testing for their reviews. As she mentioned before, all their reviews are editorial based and not paid for by the manufacturers (though they do sell ads to them.)

Robin notes that the reality is that almost any entry level camcorder is going to be good enough for the internet. If you have a limited budget, $7-800, use about half for accessories. You probably won't need the performance if you're going to be doing Web content because the compression factor is going to ruin it anyway.

You're looking for video and low light performance. In fact, you want low light performance, low light performance, low light performance. The average room is DARK for a camcorder. There's no standardized measure so you're doing to have to look at reviews.

A lot of people are moving toward HD right now and she doesn't think you need it yet. Again, the compression on the Web is such that you're going to be paying for quality that you just never see.

When you're making video online, audio is more important than video. It's the number one mistake that people make. AUDIO is half the equation. People will sit through shaky video but they'll leave if it's terrible audio. So many people just buy the camcorder and shoot something. But if you can't hear something, you're not going to keep watching. People will put up with a shaky or grainy picture but not poor audio.

Manual control is very important as well. Once you really get into making videos, you're going to want to have more control over all the options.

Handling--you don't want your videos to shake. As much as it's tempting to buy your camcorder online, you need to go handle the camera and hold it in your hand. When you're holding two or three lbs out for ten minutes, you're going to need something comfortable.

Editing Workflow

$5-700 is going to get a good enough camcorder for most people.

The compression for online video is incredibly lossy.

Have we mentioned: low light performance? Because low light performance, low light performance, low light performance.

If you're not doing any editing, hard drive camcorders are fine, but tape and HDV is much better if you plan to edits. Any post-production should be tape as far as she's concerned. You'll also save money in the long run and archiving is easier.

You need to buy a camcorder with a mic jack. They won't recommend cameras without it and manufacturers have added them back in as a result. There are NO good on camcorder microphones. Even the $5000 ones are worth it.

Headphone jacks are important too because you're also going to need good and tight headphones so that you can hear the audio no matter what. She likes IFBs because they're a tight fit (and she gets to look like a secret service agent.)

If you only spend $250 on a camcorder, you're still going to get better than any digital camera. Buy a camcorder if you're doing videos.

Recommendations:
Canon HV20 - $900
Sony HD96 - $520
Canon hg10 - $1300
JVC MG130 - $1300

If you only buy ONE accessory, buy a good tripod. People were not made to hold camcorders stable. Plan to spend $150- $300 on tripods. They'll last forever. Spend a lot of money on it. Look for a fluid head, it'll make your panning look smooth. Camera tripods aren't good enough. If you're doing walking shots, you might want to invest in a steady cam like SteadiCam Jr.

Buy long life batteries, the largest possible. And buy a bag that can handle a lot of tape and batteries. If you're doing full day shooting, consider a battery belt. Video is a one shot deal, if you're out of batteries, you're out of luck.

Make sure your camcorder has a shoe. Sony requires a converter for the camcorder shoe.

Mics: If you're only going to have one, buy a lavalier mic. $15 wired, $200 wireless. Conference halls are SO loud and full of ambient noise, you're going to need a lavalier. It's the only way to get good audio. Other kinds of mics: Shotgun mics are the long ones with the fuzzy covers. Booms are similar but they're on the long pole. Handhelds are...hand held.

Kits: Sennhiser has a great $300 wireless kit. Look for the frequency. You don't want two As or they'll compete with each other.

Use a left/right 1/8in Y adaptor to mix two mics cheaply. That way when you go into post-production, you can edit more easily.

Have an interesting set. White backgrounds are boring. Make an effort. Green screens work great but even lighting is critical.

The world is a dark, dark place. Get lights. Lots of lights. If you have a studio set, you're going to use three point lighting. You can use household lights or buy a $500 light kit.

Filming Tips:

The rule of 3rds: someone's eyes are never going to be entirely centered on the screen. You're going to usually be on the upper bar and probably off to the left or right. This makes more sense with her illustration.

Two camera setups make for great videos. If you're doing an interview, cut in things that are related as B-Role. Ten seconds for each B-Roll shot.

Never interview someone who is looking at the camera. Have a conversation instead and have the camcorder off to the side.

You can fake it by re-recording the questions after the interview earlier.

Keep panning and camcorder movement to a minimum. Don't zoom in your videos. Unwind your body instead of winding if you MUST pan. It just looks better. [She demonstrates.]

Generally speaking the $50 software is going to do you just fine. [Brett disagrees, more on this later.]

NO WIPES, No page turns. Cuts only. Fade only to black. It's a sign of bad video and terrible editors.

Use news tricks like lower 3rds, over the shoulder shots, intros & outros, put your logo in the corner of the video (test it because the compression is terrible.) Saying the site name works much better than graphical reps but use both. Music is great but make sure you have the rights.

You can get pre-made backdrops and graphics from Digital Juice.

Make sure you write people's names down when you shoot.

...wow that was a lot. Awesome.

Brett jumps in now. He starts off by saying not all the cheap products are you going to do you. His presentation isn't working so he's working around it. They built a mini-news studio and he's going to tell about how they did it.

Think about where you're going to use the camera. If it's in the studio and no one will see it, anything is okay. But the bigger, fancier looking ones are better for the conference floor because of the bling factor. The Web is really forgiving, so just about anything will work.

He's repeating a great deal of what Robin said. He notes that the lights are very hot. Be aware. They also get expensive.

[Robin says that their lights are upwards of $20,000. Don't buy a reflector, buy foam core. But be careful of fire.]

He emphasizes how important audio is as well. It's been their biggest money pit.

Software: Adobe Premier, Sony Vegas. Sony has the lower learning curve. It's about $450-$600. For graphics editing: Photoshop and Illustrator.

Spend the time doing the research. Spend a lot of time doing research.

If you're looking at a real studio, it's $25k up.

As for talent? They're difficult to find, highly competitive, have a high turnover rate --every job is a stepping stone to the next job. It's expensive for highly qualified help. The cheap alternative is to get college kids. Also very expensive? The tech help--$80 to $100 each.

[Robin says even they hire editors because it's not efficient for their staff to do it themselves even though they have the expertise. They also take 10 hours to produce 3 minutes of film.]

Biggest mistakes: Not really appreciating how much overhead this was going to require both in time and equipment.

Q&A

Teleprompter

Robin: You can build them for about $100 or buy them for about $200. If you're doing studio, it's a great investment.

Brett says they spend about $1500 on theirs.

YouTube is probably your best friend for learning how to. There are tons of videos on everything.

have you done much with transcribing the videos?

Mike: We hand transcribe them if we do them at all. I like the concept and I want to do more of it.
Robin: We don't do it.
Brett: We've got the script so we just post that. You can hire transcribers cheap as well.

How long is optimal?

Mike: Three to five minutes.
Robin: Oh no, three or less. It's really hard. That's only 200 or 300 words. You can do multiple segments.

Closed captioning

Robin: There's no standard yet online. If you're doing it for broadcast you have to do it legally. Online, you can post a transcript.

Audio: is it worth it to look for an onboard XLR?

Robin: It's for long distance. Frankly if you're going to be posting on YouTube, it’s not going to matter. In her opinion, the best to buy if you have the money is the Canon 8-1. (May not actually be what she said...)

Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 3:59 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, SEM Events, Social Media, pubcon07

Competitive Intelligence

[Coverage Note: Susan and I will NOT be covering the last session of the day for a very important reason. If we do, we’ll miss our flight back to California and will be forced to spend the night camped out in the Las Vegas airport, where we would very likely end up gambling away our huge Bruce Clay salaries and make poor life decisions. You don’t want that for us, do you?

It’s possible that I am very, very tired.]

We’re almost done folks. It’s time for the Competitive Intelligence panel with speakers Jake Baillie, Andy Beal and Larry Mersman. Jake will also be acting as moderator. He must have mad skillz.

Jake asked for cookies and people in the audience randomly got up to give him some. Does that really work? I want a puppy. And over the knee socks.

Up first is Andy Beal to go through some tools for spying on your competitors. Fun!

1. Domaintools.com: Collects a bunch of information about a Web site, like is it listed in Yahoo directory, registration details, etc. It also tells you other sites that are on the same IP. Some SEO companies put their clients on the same IP.
2. ranks.nl/tools/spider.html: Check out keyword densities for your competitors. Breaks it up into 2 word, 3 word and 4 word combinations
3. sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com: Check backlinks for your competition. Yahoo puts the most important backlinks first.
4. seomoz.org/tools: Page Strength Tool – You can see how many times they’ve been put on Digg/Delicious/etc
5. soloseo.com/tools/indexrank.html: Allows you to see how many pages are being indexed by Google over the past year, 6 months, or 2 weeks for a site. You can see how strong the site is.
6. copernic.com: Track site changes.
7. Technorati.com: Find out who’s talking about your competition.
8. google.com/alerts: Use Google News to monitor references.
9. searchanalytics.compete.com: You type in the domain name and Compete will give you an approximation as to what key phrases are bringing traffic to your competitors Web site.
10. touchgraph.com: Helps you find your competitors’ hubs. Visually shows you where their links are coming from.
11. google.brand.edgar-online.com: Keep tracking of public companies’ FCC filings.
12. seekingalpha.com/transcripts: Scan through transcripts.
13. google.com/patents: Keep track of patents of your competitors.
14. oodl.com: Keep an eye out on whether or not your competitors are hiring and where.

Keep an eye on your competitors employees. Watch their blogs. They may reveal a lot of information about what’s going on internally.

Larry Mersman is next.

The definition of competitive intelligence can mean many things depending on the channel we are dealing with. For the most part, it is the gathering of information from several sources relative to the target competitor.

Sources of information can be newspaper articles, blogs and online articles.

Information can be collected several ways and from many sources. The most typical data pools are Internet Service Providers, user panels and Web site Search history.

Do your legwork. Find your online competition using services like HitWise or comScore. Or, you can do your own research using the search engines.

Now that you know who your competition is in your space, find out how they got there and where their traffic is coming from. Look at referring domains/backlinks. Who is sending them traffic? Look at the keyword data. What keywords are actually being clicked on to get the user to your competition? Traffic can be coming from search engines, banner ads, blogs, etc.

Knowing what keywords your competitor is targeting is important, but knowing which keywords are getting clicked on by the user to get to their site is key. Knowing a keywords performance, both paid and organic, will help you optimize your site around proven data, possibly streamline your spending and increase your ROI.

Many companies will optimize their Web site around the keyword they think they will bring users or that customers will type into their search box to find a link to their site. In the end, it’s users that make the choices that drive the traffic and the money to your site.

Maybe Larry has a plane to catch too because he went through that presentation awfully fast!

Jake is up last.

The best webmasters already investigate their competition. Search engine optimization is a game. Know more than your competition and you win. Most novice webmasters have no idea. Use this to your advantage.

WHOiS my competition?

Designed in the 80s (me too!), WHOIS was originally intended to be contact point for technical issues. Evolved to be the “legal documentation” of who owns a domain. Can be forged with very little technical knowledge or even anonymized.

Novice webmasters enter in their real contact information, which makes it easy to find out who they are. Intermediate webmasters will use an anonymizing service. Advanced webmasters will forge the information. Good WHOIS information: www.whois.sc.

Regional IP Databases

First step to social engineering. Use nslookup to find the IP address of the Web site. Plug in the IP address to completewhoisl.com and find out who the ISP is.

Social Engineering:

Social engineering is getting someone to tell you something they’re not supposed to. You would be stunned at how often it works. It’s okay to lie (cover your ears, kids), especially with someone who won’t bother to investigate.

There are lots of people to talk to about your competitor’s site, including:

ISPs
Company Marketing Department
Upstream Providers
Significant Others
Estranged friends/coworkers

[Jake is coming off kind of scary right now. I don’t know him personally but now I’m scared.]

Jake presents a script for getting information out of people. (OMG this is so creepy! I don’t even want to write it! Here goes…)

The Script:

1. Introduce yourself as someone you’re not.
2. Be friendly. People love friendly people. Never become confrontational
3. Learn from the travel industry. If you don’t get what you want the first time, hang up and call back to talk to someone else.

Allinanchor returns all Web pages linked to with that target term. It’s good for discovering networks. Take five keywords from one site and run them all through allinanchor. Find the similar sites that appear. Chances are you’ll be able to find site that have the same “look and feel”.

Google them! Find out where all their links are coming from. You can pretty much tell an SEO’d site these days by a visual link inspection.

Search the damn Internet. It’s all there.

Find out if a competitor is coming to your site. If someone comes to your site after an “allinanchor” query, they’re probably not a legit user. People who type “link” in Google are not your target visitors. People who come through the SE cache are also not your target visitors, not are those who visit your site 20 times in 2 minutes. People who come in from whois.sc are competitors.

If you find out your competitors are continually visiting your site, serve them a 403 access forbidden. Or better yet, porn!

Instruct your employees that they are to talk to no one about your site. Find a trustworthy ISP – most intelligence is gathered at this point. Tell your significant other not to take any business calls at home.

Anyone else feel like they need a shower after all that?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 3:35 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, pubcon07

Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking

Back from lunch. That was one yummy chocolate chip cookie! This time we’re at the Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking session with panelists Tom Leung, Glenn Alsup, Philippe Lang and Rand Fishkin. Moderating will be Gillian Muessig, aka Rand’s mommy.

Gillian isn’t wasting any time. She introduces Glenn. Hi Glenn.

Glenn talks about qualitative vs. quantitative data

Qualitative researchers: Reject the idea that social sciences can be studied like natural or physical sciences. They feel that human behavior is always bound to the context in which it occurs. And it’s usually personal and subjective.

Quantitative researches: Argue that both the natural and social sciences are testable and confirmable theories. They also do lots of other stuff I didn’t have time to get down. Sorry. There was a lot of text on that one slide.

Glenn says qualitative is Gods Fuel:

They look at:

Goals
Overview
Description
Scenarios

And get:

Finding
Usability Issues
Effects on Goals
Lessons Learned

It’s effective to look at this as a sales funnel. Identify all your drivers – Offline, Online, Explicit and Extract. Then take the data and group attributes based on filters.

Look at the stages in the funnel. Weight them by the value of that event. Downloading a white paper is more valuable than looking at a banner. Identify when the action took place. When you convert, those drivers are calculated in different ways. You want to increase conversions by identifying the right mix of marketing drivers.

Tom from Google is next to talk about smart testing. I have a feeling he’s going to talk about Google’s Web site optimizer.

Ooo, I’m right! Tom asks: What do you do when the visitor lands on your site and what can you do to get them to convert?

Driving traffic is just the beginning. You invest in search engine optimization and SEM resources for 100 percent of visitors. Your pages may lose more than half their visitors in seconds. Most that do stay choose not convert. (Industry average for converting customers is 2-3 percent.) Why bother bringing more visitors to a site that convert poorly?

Evolve with continuous improvement. Drive the right traffic to your site. Measure & analyze site activity. Test changes and implement winners. Repeat steps 1-3 until conversation rate is 100 percent.

How Testing Works

Visitors arrive on your site. They’re shown a random version of your site and the testing tool will tell you what percentage of users converted based on what version of your page.

He shows an example of a page Google uses their Web site optimizer on. It’s the home page for Picasa. In the first version of the page, it uses “free” a lot and is very picture and action oriented. They found that the second page, on that is cleaner, includes a Try button and states a clear value proposition converted 30 percent more.

How do you set up a test?

Most of the testing tools involve copy and pasting a piece of JavaScript. The control on top tells you that someone is trying to load the page. The tracking script on the bottom tells you that they saw the page, and then you have another code on the conversion page which tells you they converted and what version of the page they were looking at. If you do a test, each version of the page has a unique sticker for you to identify it by. After the test runs for awhile, Google will populate reports for you.

Best Practices in testing

• Test a small number of variations: Rule of thumb is less than 100 conversions per combination.
• Test big changes: If you can’t see difference between two combos in 8 seconds, visitors probably won’t either.
• Consider early indicators if you don’t have enough conversions: If you’re selling a $100k software package or a small business with modest volume, optimize for conversion indicators such as request info, view product details, etc.
• Don’t jump to conclusions: Less than 2 weeks is no good, focus on absolute conversion difference, don’t get too excited by sliver of green.

More Testing Ideas:

Conversion Cocktail: Headline/Image/Call to action. Those are the best three sections to test.
Trust seals?
Which testimonials
Inspirational or fact-based pitch
YouTube video
Navigation bar

Philippe is up next.

Analytics provides you a ton of data about visitor behavior on your site. This information is very valuable but it can be hard to interpret. Your customers also provide you valuable information when you talk to them.

What if you could see in real time what your visitors are doing on your Web site? Start a dialogue with those visitors. Listen to them. Understand what they are doing and why. It’s like a usability test in the real world.

Things to look for when you monitor your Web site: Visitor referrer information like search engine used, marketing campaign, geolocation, and navigation behavior like page views time on page, shopping cart content, and shopping cart abandonment.

Merge the two sets of data (real time monitoring and feedback) by engaging specific visitors into a chat or leverage the customer support chat transcripts (what if you don’t offer a customer chat feature?). Try to see the patterns or trends that are coming out.

Ultimate Feedback Look

• Start by monitoring visitor on your site
• Identify visitors with unexpected behavior
• Engage visitors by listening to them
• Convert customer feedback into action
• Refine and optimize your Web site

Phillipe presents two case studies. The first is about a university offering an online degree.

Problem: High abandonment rate in the online inquiry form
Cause: Customers annoyed by specific question about the age of applicant. Customers abandoned the form instead of answering the question.
Solution: Removed the question
Result: 20 percent increase in form completion.

Online retailed focused on outdoor gear

Problem: Low conversion rate on sunglasses
Cause: Customers were confused by the sizing chart for the sunglass
Solution: Redesigned the sizing section
Result: 25 percent increase in conversion rate and 20 percent decrease in product returns.

The morale of the story: If you know what’s wrong, you can fix it!

Testing helps companies increase conversion rates, improve the sales process, increase average order value and builds relationships with customers.

Last but not least is Rand Fishkin.

Rand opens by talking about the landing page contest SEOmoz ran a few months back. They let blog readers submit landing pages to them. They got lots of submissions and ended up testing 10 of the 40 entries they received. Rand shares the stats for each page. It’s exciting. Ultimately, the page where you had to scroll forever to get to the end of the page converted the best. That’s why you see so many of those pages.

Once the contest was over, the SEOmoz crew tweaked the winning page to make it convert even better.

Takeaways

• If you think it will work, it probably won’t
• Landing page design is not universal
• Testing is the only way to get better
• Doubling your conversion rate is far easier than doubling your traffic.

Question & Answer

How much did you pay for Offermatica?

He thinks its $10K a month and up.

Rand, it looks like you tested a handful of completely different pages. Can you tell us how Offermatica fit into that? What page elements did each have that helped it convert better?

Rand doesn’t actually answer the question and just says that they were doing A/B testing (testing two different pages), not multivariate testing where you test different images or different headers or different layouts.

I always thought that I should change pages incrementally so that Google wouldn’t think it was a different site. Is that right or am I paranoid?

Rand: Basically conversion testing is a legal form of cloaking. What you’re really doing is showing a bunch of different versions to people to find the best one, but you’re only showing one version to the search engines.

Tom: With Google, the spiders don’t look at the JavaScript content so the source code will look consistent. And even if the layout is different, the spirit of the content is similar.

Glenn: Typically you see smaller changes.

Multivariate testing about pleasing more of the people more of the time. When visitors come back to the page, is there any way to ensure that they see a different version of the page?

Tom: When the experiment is running, users will continue to see the same version of the page they saw the first time to protect the integrity of the experiment.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, pubcon07

International and European Site Optimization

Another quick intro: Dixon Jones is moderating this panel which includes Michael Bonfils, SEM International, Andy Atkins-Krueger, Web Certain Europe Ltd, Thomas Bindl, ThomasBindl.com, and Kim Frederiksen, Addvisors Copenhagen.

Got all that? Good, here we go with the session of cool accents. Michael Bonfils isn't here yet. He thought this session was at 3. Oops.

Kim Frederiksen is first up.

When it comes to marketing you need: More business. Better business. Cheaper business.

He brings up a luxury condo site. They did a good job stateside and locally but it was hard and expensive. So they discussed how they could get more, better, cheaper business.

More business:

There are a great many millionaires who aren't in the US. They're a hot market because a lot of them invest in real estate and 30 percent of those are investing in overseas property. They have 23 percent more buying power as well because of the weakness of the dollar. They can afford more expensive properties as a result.

Better business:

The traffic was 65 percent from the US versus 35 percent from the rest of the world but 40 percent of new clients can from the US and 60 percent in new clients. US clients averaged about $400,000 less in sales than International clients.

Cheaper business:

Strangely there weren't a lot of competitors. Averaging $.40 per click, they got position one in Denmark and Russia but for $3.00 per click on average they only ended up in 4th position on average in the US. So they were able to get the business cheaper and it was better business.

Thomas Bindl is next. He wishes us a good evening. He's from Germany and it's nearly 11pm there. He also speaks quickly, softly and kinda mumbles. I feel sorry for the people in the back.

He puts up a map of Europe pointing at Germany. It's in the middle, y'all. Very good beer and food. There are 82 million people living there. Their GDP per capita is about $31,400. They have 52 million people online and they spend about 46 billion Euros spent online. Lots of opportunity there.

Google is incredibly dominate there, even more than here. About 93 percent marketshare. CPCs are usually a little lower but not much.

Of course, you should always speak the language. For language, make sure your translations are accurate: A nice car and a nice tree have only ONE word in common, not two.

11 million .de domains. If you're thinking about going into Germany get a .de, don’t use a sub-domain. You'll need a local contact but there are companies out there.

Credit cards are just becoming popular in Germany (also Italy and France.) Make sure they have an alternative way to pay.

Get familiar with the legal requirements for ANY international market. You want to build trust and not get sued. Put your addresses on there.

The late (well, tardy) Michael Bonfils is up next to cover Asia for us. He doesn't have a cool accent but he does say that the being late thing is typical. He goes over his bio which I linked above.

Like any one campaign, you start with an assessment then you plan then you implement and organize.

Assessment phase:

Step one: Assess the usability of your translated site. Pay international college students in pizza to review your site. What works here, might not work in Asia.

Step two: Analyze your competition

Step three: Research the Asian market

• China: 162 Million users, 45% female, 54% male and overwhelmingly 18-24 in age.
• Japan: 69.9 percent of the population online--89.1 million people. Women, 20-35, have 80 percent of the purchasing power.
• Korea: Incredible infrastructure, most are online.

Planning Phase:

For ecommerce, start with Japan then Korea and China. If you're branding, start with China then Korea then Japan. You start with China because they'll create a knock off otherwise.

In Japan, Yahoo has a much better reach (65 percent) with lower quality conversions.
In China, it's all about Baidu
In Korea, Naver and Yahoo have 80 to 85 percent of the marketshare. Google has 1.5 percent market share.

KEY: Make well-localized keywords, adcopy and landing pages! Do not use an unnatural mix of English and the local languages. Think of how funny but not trustworthy "Engrish" signs are.

Trust building and face to face interaction is HUGE. Putting a face on the brand is very important.

Monitor your local competition. You're starting at a disadvantage. Look for an edge.

Implementation Phase:

For Japan: Use Yahoo/Overture Japan and Google. Get a .jp domain (co.jp, or.jp, ne.jp). Hosting there is good too. Include contact info. Be international but Japanese.

For China: Start with Google through their interface. For Baidu, They have a minimum implementation fee of $3-5000. WIRE prepayment of funds is the only way to pay. They only have Chinese speaking support. They have a tough validation process. Definitely get .cn (.com.cn if you can). You need to host in China. There are gateway issues otherwise.

Analytics-wise, Baidu and Yahoo provide no impression results. Google Analytics is available. On Baidu, the paid listings are mixed in with the organic and studies suggest that the users don't know the difference.

Korea: Make it complicated. Google and iPods do terribly in Korea because they aren't complicated enough. Get a .kr domain. If you want a North Korean domain, it's .kp but...good luck.

Andy Atkins-Krueger is up next to wrap everything up. Yay!

He offers a few mistranslations. Again, be careful how you do translations!

There's rapid growth all over the world. Don't underestimate Africa. Kenya is providing free broadband access.

Which markets should you enter? Do an analysis: Is it feasible, how competitive is it? What's the audience? And what's the market? If you look at those three, you can pick the more promising first.

Do your keyword research first, them build a glossary for the translators, THEN do the translation so that the keywords are built in.

Think about navigation issues for languages. Local companies for Arabic speaking countries switch the navigation to the right side because of how the language is read.

What do you do if there is no direct translation? Make sure that you're conveying the message even if you have to give up what your word is?

When do you run in English or the local language? If you're using English keywords, you can do a local language creative but NOT vice versa.

The long tail still applies outside of English speaking countries. From the shortest tails to the longest by language families: Romance, Scandinavia, English, Dutch/Germany, Portuguese. (also toward the end, French Canadians.)

You need local links. You NEED local links.

Google's new geolocation tool isn't really working yet in their experience.

The number of people who use the "Pages from" radio button depends by country and query. In some cases it might be VERY important to have that local ccTLD.

[Envision a cool slide of search engine market shares mapped by country in Europe. Google is everywhere.]

His theory is that social networks aren't going to go global with quite the same ease that search did. They don't translate as easily. Social sites tend to be locally based and not known outside their area.

Q&A

Will English become the global internet language for commerce?

Andy: He doesn't think that's going to be the case. There are more speakers of other languages than there are English. What happens more is that words get adopted with different meaning.

Thomas: China is going to be going in the opposite direction. The Web used to be mostly English, now they're creating their own content. People like interacting in their own language.

Better tools for keyword research internationally?

Pretty much they all agree that Google and Yahoo work best overall with a slight preference for Google.
Kim: For Europe, Google's sandbox is the best.
Michael: Asia, too.

If you're shipping internationally from Germany, would you recommend still having the .de domain or should you have a .com? What sort of links should you be targeting?

Thomas: If you're looking for people who already have interest in Germany, the .de makes more sense, I think. If you're trying to get people who aren't aware, try a .com. I don't think there is a 100 percent solution.

Andy: I'd be inclined to go with a .de domain because I think people associate the domain with the language. However you can't pick .de as English in Webmaster tools so maybe go with a .com instead.

We have a Bavaria-based client. We have a .de but we wonder if we shouldn't get a .eu?

Thomas: I'm not a big fan of .eu domains. I'd secure it but wouldn't use it and I'd stick with .com instead. It's just not popular enough yet.

Andy: "I wouldn't touch a .eu with a barge pole."

Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 12:54 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in International, Pay Per Click, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, pubcon07

Search and Blogging Reporters Forum

It’s time to talk search blogging with Andy Beal, Lee Odden, Michael McDonald and Rand Fishkin. I’m not going to lie. I’ve been waiting for this session for months. Let the heckling begin!

(But hey, where are the lady bloggers? Don’t be pretending you don’t know we exist! Me, Jane and Tamar are all sitting in the front row.)

Michael starts with blogs becoming a primary news source. It’s getting to be a big thing. Lee says blogs make it easy for journalists to subscribe to centers of influence to keep them up to date on their own terms instead of getting pitched to. It’s a great tool for businesses big and small.

Rand says he opened up his email this morning and saw an email from a reporter with Inc. Magazine asking him about the paid links session that happened this week. Rand was mentioned in a blog post about it and the reported wanted to follow up.

Andy says 52 percent of journalists read blogs to get story ideas. Andy says bloggers get to the news first and because we can share our opinions, we craft how the story goes.

Michael says at the same time the mainstream media will often discount blogs as a primary source for news. They listen to us but they don’t trust us. Andy says sometimes they don’t want their readership to know they’re getting their big stuff from bloggers. Lee says with over 7K journalists losing their jobs, a lot of them are a lot more progressive at leveraging technology than they used to be.

Michael says that when mainstream media talks about bloggers, they say that they make mistakes and that they never get the story right. But if you think about it, every newspaper has a corrections section that they hide in the back section of their paper. When bloggers make a mistake, they make the correct visible.

How can the audience take advantage of how blogging and traditional journalism intersect?

Lee: You want to market your site and gain thought leadership in a category. Leverage blogs as a platform to talk about what’s unique about you. Use it as a way to make their job easier to find industry experts. A lot of times you write a good blog post and a journalist will see it and ask you to write an op-ed as an extension of that. Use a blog as a place to point to. When you pitch to mainstream media, include a link to your blog.

Andy says journalists want to know what they’re getting into. They want to know how your CEO is going to look on camera. Put up a video of yourself speaking at a local conference to show the media that your boss isn’t going to be stuttering a lot and that they can handle themselves on camera.

[Andy takes a shot at Rand about why he’s on TechMeme all the time and Rand’s not. The audience “ooohs”. ] Truthfully, the reason Andy gets on TechMeme is because he posts about news. Rand is more of a discussion site with a community. He can write about what he did last weekend and get 100 comments.

How do people become A-list bloggers?

Lee says if you’re just starting out, find a really specific niche about something you’re fantastic about. Become known for that and then expand.

Andy says an industry is never saturated. Pick something you’re passionate about and you can make it work. Lee says there’s a formula for success. Interview other people, write content, present things in a way other people aren’t. There are a lot of ways to distinguish yourself.

Rand: Use your business. If you’re selling handbags, write about what celebrities are using your bags.

Search engine optimization blogs: How much of that is really reliable in terms of being fresh? Or are people keeping the good stuff for themselves?

Andy says Rand is really secretive about what he shares about his company. Heh.

Rand says if you’re talking about white hat practices or advanced social media techniques, 90 percent of it is out there and 10 percent is behind the curtain. Not everything is out there but you’ll find that in every industry.

Lee says it depends on the purpose of the blog. Some people are more liberal than others. The point of the blog is really important. Give away enough information to show expertise but don’t give away the farm.

Personally, Andy doesn’t hold anything back. Rand doesn’t seem to believe him. Andy says he can talk about things on a generic basis.

Optimizing your blog and getting it to rank in the search engines

Rand says blog CMS’ are really search engine optimization-friendly by nature. WordPress and Movable Type are both very friendly.

Andy agrees but says it’s possible to make them SEO friendly, but they don’t come like that out of the box. You have to work for it.

Is it possible to rank well if you’re not updating every day?

Rand says it’s possible. He’s seen blogs that do well even though they only publish every week or so. Todd Malicoat is the best example of this. Greg Boser is another one.

Michael says you don’t have to update your corporate blog every day. (Really? You don’t? I’m taking next week off!)

Andy says you have to take into consideration what you’re looking to get out of it. Are you looking to establish yourself as an expert or to make money?

Question & Answer

Lee did a post on Monday about PubCon. Can you talk about how effective that way?

Lee says he’s been playing around with tapping into communities. Lee thought his Why PubCon Rocks post was valuable. He pinged people and aggregated the responses into a single post. He got a lot of positive outside emails from people. He also got feedback from people saying it was spammy and blatantly promotional.

Rand had a similar problem. They did a post about a small event that some friends of their friends threw and people commented asking if it was a for-pay post.

What are the essential WP plugins?

Rand says to go to Bill Hartzer’s blog. There’s a list there.

Lee talks about the SEO plugin that Stephan Spencer created.

Andy says you just have to be aware of the posts.

Rand says they do testing and found that with all the search engines the first link that points to a blog post is the one that counts. What he means is that if Rand writes a post that links to the same page twice, the anchor text he uses in the first instance will count, not the second. (if you nofollow the top link, it’ll count for the second link.)

An audience member says that she was told if she puts a posting into more than one category that it would be perceived as Google by duplicate content?

Rand says blogs can definitely have major duplicate content problems. The content of every blog post is on your blog page and in the archives. You have to use a nofollow so that the permalink page ranks.

When you’ve got a corporate blog and it goes popular, do you feel like you have to create a personal blog to really be yourselves?

Andy says its goes both ways. Robert Scoble can do it. For Andy, Marketing Pilgrim is his business blog and he has AndyBeal.com to do all his personal blogging. He doesn’t think you have to follow that path but, if you don’t, you have to be careful about what users will tolerate.

Lee says you should plan for your blog to wildly successful. You have to set the framework for the blog and anticipate issues. Lee says to have multiple RSS feeds for your categories. This way people can get the cat posts if they want to. [Susan, can we do that? We need a Jack Jack category!]

SEOmoz has faced this a lot. Rebecca will write a lot of inner circle-type posts and people will leave angry comments. He also mentions that time Mystery Guest wrote a personal-type post and it got a bunch of thumbs downs and negative comments. Once you create an expectation and you don’t meet it, people get upset. People are there for the information.

Some of your readers don’t realize they can skip posts.

If you look at the Technorati Top 100 blogs, there’s a ton of people telling other bloggers how to be bloggers. They’re giving away awesome tips. If you do that you’ll get a lot of links and become people.

Andy says he hates that. It’s okay for Darren Rowse, but most people don’t know what they’re talking about. But people buy into it. He’d rather focus on delivering a great experience than pandering to what’s going to make him popular quickly.

What’s your take: RSS full text or partial text?

SEOmoz does full text. Danny Sullivan says to do partial text. Full text if you want more people to be aware of you. Partial text if you want more visitors.

How do niche blogs support themselves and create interest when there isn’t a blogosphere to do that for you?

Lee says to link out to other blogs and do stuff offline to support online efforts. Rand says to reach out to the big blogging industries and make your content appeal to them.

How important is adding multimedia?

SEOmoz has Whiteboard Friday every week. They get about 1,000-1,500 views every week. But then you look at the blog readership and they get 3,000 page views per post. People aren’t consuming video the way they’re consuming text. There are limitations. However, in terms of branding, it can be one of the best things you can do.

Andy says people keep asking him when he’ll be doing more Marketing Pilgrim Live videos.

Michael says video can be really, really complicated or really, really simple. It depends what you want to put into it.

What is Google going to do with the data they get from Google Reader?

Rand says that Matt would call it potentially noisy data because it’s easy to scam.

In terms of Universal, does it matter where you upload your videos to?

Absolutely. When Rand looks for video online, all he sees are YouTube videos.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, pubcon07

Brand Management

Last day, first session. I'm going to make this intro short because we're all anxious to get to the content. Here's the lineup. Speaking are Jessica L Bowman, Yahoo! Inc., Lauren Vaccarello, Forex Capital Markets LLC, Matt Tuens, CKMG Inc. Joe Laratro moderates.

Lauren Vaccarello is up first to discuss building, maintaining and defending your brand.

What is branding? It's what your company is associated with, it's your search results and who are you.

What's your story and why should I as a consumer care? People do I buy Jif because choosy moms choose Jif and that works for me.

Competitive research is one of the most important thing to do. You have to know who you're up against how they're telling their story.

Build your keyword list, find out who are your competitor, build a list of the 5-10 biggest competitors and learn what their stories are, discover the holes in their brand and use those to make yours better. SEObook as a good competitive research tool. Look at the social media stories, find out what stories are ranking well and selling. At the end of the day, no one is going to link to you if you're not compelling.

Once research is done, sit down and build your content. Tell your story.

Monitor your brand, learn the popular forms, blogs. Find out where your audience lives. No one can read every RSS feed, newsletter etc. So use Google Alerts to aggregate it for you. Follow not just your own brand but key terms, players and your competitors.

Defending your brand:

Respond to negative publicity in a timely way. Buy YourCompanySucks.com. Fight back. It's easier to get someone from 13 to 3 than it is to come from nowhere so empower your affiliates and partners. Create buzz and get things linked together. Push the hate sites down.

Never feed the forum trolls. If there is a valid, negative complaint on a forum, then have someone --just one person-- empowered to respond. Make sure you're not talking to them like you're the CEO and they're nothing. Talk to them as equals, listen to them and respond.

Empower your loyalists. In a crisis, don't pretend they don't know what's going on. Talk to them and let them do your defense as well. Back them up. They'll do your work for you in a lot of instances.

She notes at the end, if you're doing a presentation on brand management you should use branded slides. (She didn't.)

Matt Tuens is up next to explain this equation: Brand Management = Content Management

The importance of content has been discussed far and wide but very few people take full advantage of its power. The people who have done it well are awesome: Edmunds.com, About.com, Wikipedia.com.

Content:

• Extends brand coverage
• Drives your customers
• Delivers your messages

Brand management is communicating and maintaining the brand messages, strategic development of the brand to maximize its market value.

Content is crucial to brand management

Negative postings are HUGE opportunities, not just to defend your brand but to promote and extend your brand to audiences and demographics that you haven't reached before. You can put a face to your company that gives them that certain je ne said quoi about a brand that makes people like you. People like Apple because of the personal brand.

Increased perceived value leads to increased revenue and industry traction customer loyalty, and tremendous increased to the market value overall.

A significant and complete content strategy is crucial. Brand management is necessary in all aspects of the brand. All the words should be carefully chosen to portray your brand. Information is the

The brands that have the most information about an industry are usually the ones generating the most traffic. The good news is that you don't have to start from scratch. You can build on a long-term brand and take it to new audiences.

Content has four pronged value:

• Generate high quality organic traffic
• Establish trust with your visitor
• Maximize the monetization of each page
• Simultaneously each page of content is another opportunity to spread and reinforce your brand message and value.

Content is responsible for multiple levels of brand awareness. Search engines rank by information, bloggers and forums link to quality content, if you're writing articles then each article can rank for multiple terms and every one of those is an opportunity for you to extend and shape your brand.

Build your site to be informative and you'll also start to build a relationship with people, they'll trust your information and learn to rely on you as a resource. When you're improving all your landing pages with information, you're improving your Quality Score and conversions. That's instant ROI. The nice thing about content is that you only have to write it once but if it's good quality, it'll be evergreen and pay off for years.

He talks really fast.

Just how much content should you strive for? Really the way you want to be thinking is how can I make my site as usable as possible for people. How can I answer every single question they have? That's the approach that successful brands today are taking. Look at the long term value of that. Consider iVillage, as much as they're worth now, think about how much more they'll be worth in five years with all of that content.

If you were looking to buy something, wouldn't it be great if you stumbled across one site that had answers to every single question you had about that product? People don't have time to look at 25 sites, they just want one. That's what you want your site to be--why aren't you that company in your vertical.

The key is to diversify your content. You're going to want all sorts of content, some shorter facts articles for the people who are just looking for that, longer ones for people who need more depth, interviews with other experts so they know you're not in a bubble, authoritative articles from the CEO. With blogs, people feel like they're on the inside, like they're getting tips that other people aren't getting. He highly suggests getting into video.

Maintaining your brand--now that you're the best, you should go out and do the same on other sites. Don't just live on your site, go out, be on Facebook, on MySpace. Set up other sites and blogs from your employees outside of the corporate blog. Update often and be out there, in your face.

This leads in well to protecting your brand. If you go in and respond intelligently and caringly to a complaint then you can turn a negative into a positive. If I see someone posted something negative and the company actually goes out and respond to try to make things better, I have more respect for that brand and I'm even grateful because I feel like they're educating me.

And...he's done. Wow, there was a lot of information there to dig through.

Tony Wright is next. He's going to be getting all Sun Tzu on us with brand management and the Art of War. Awesome.

He says that it's a cliché but it works. It doesn't have the horrors of war but brand management does have its own horrors. As in war, winning goes to the prepared and many times, the goal is minimal damage--you don't want to blow everything up.

Know the battlefield: You have to know your brand. There are a number of ways to do that Google, Yahoo, SERPs, Social Media, even hiring reputation management services but you have to do it. If you're missing intelligence on what's going on, you're going to be hit by crisis.

Avoid the War: Obviously, the best way to get out of rep problems is by not getting into them in first. You want to keep your customers happy. Don't screw your ex-employees. Don't screw partners. Practice good business. Practice good customer service. And admit your wrongs when you're wrong. But through the proper channels. If it's one customer, deal with them individually. If it's a bigger problem, speak more broadly. [And don't speak to other people before you talk to your customers. They're going to be irritated if the press gets a statement before they do. --Susan]

Train your soldiers: Your employees should know how to deal with a crisis. Keep them in the know. If you don't tell them when there is a problem, they could get blindsided and end up saying something they shouldn't. Provide drills, discuss how your companies. Prepare for EVERY situation but also be prepared that you won't be prepared. He worked for American Airlines during 9/11. No one expected it but they had

Keep your Mercenaries Happy: Your affiliates are your mercenaries. Transparency is still key. You have to treat them with respect and equality. The guy who brings in the most should get the same respect as the least. Have policies for dealing with rogue affiliates so that you don't get them turning on you in the crisis. Get the button pusher (the one who can create meltdown--usually the lawyer) involved before something happens. If they come in after, there's going to be huge damages. Keep them informed but NOT in charge. Lawyers might save you legally but they're going to do huge brand damage. Cease and desists will end up on blogs. Listen to their advice but don't let them make the decisions. You want to use them as a last resort.

Know your friends and enemies: Monitor your ex-employees, especially the disgruntled ones.

He's got a 3 hour seminar on x-train.com on brand management

Jessica Bowman is up next as the in-house SEO for Yahoo.

She asks how many people are engaging in brand management already--a few hands go up and she's pleased by the number. She's less happy by the number who are now considering doing it now after this session--it's not a lot.

Brand management for search engines should maximize traffic and revenue for brand search terms while simultaneously hedging against negative content and competitors who are trying to rank for your brand.

Leverage all your properties to rank for your brand. Your main site is going to have two listings maximum in the search engine, don't leave the other 8 on the page to chance. Dominate the SERPs as much as possible. Use multiple properties to reach different kinds of audiences.

Coordinate your SEO/SEM campaigns. Make sure all your other marketing efforts are on the same page as well. One message, multiple forms.

Recognize threats from competitors, unfavorable reactions and develop proactive and reactive strategies. Make sure that you stay on top of the tactics that people are using for unfavorable reactions. Hate sites are popular, forums, even recordings from customers that get posted on the Web.

Anything negative out there is a risk. Don’t think that just because it's not ranking yet doesn't mean that it won't. Someone on page three might end up on page one. Any Web savvy customer can rank for your brand and be a problem for you. Don’t just think that it's only your brand that's at risk. Your employees are going to affect your brand too. A photo of an employee with a caption describing her as rude could become a universal view of your company.

"You might be the only person in your company who can fully comprehend the rish that your company faces." Make sure that you bring it up when you see it. Identify threats, get legal involved (but not letting them make the first move), they will champion you.

Takeaways: Look at Brand Management in the SERPs holistically. It can make you money and it hedges against risk. Respond to issues but don't get sucked into online debates. Be proactive. Squat on your brand before unofficial squatters do--not just domains but social media sites too so that you don't have to be reactive in that area.

Q&A

For Lauren: what companies do you use for helping your research?

Lauren: SEObook's competitive research tool and Technorati.

What other sites do you get involved in to protect your brand?

Tony: Pligg, Mix, Flickr, YouTube, a ton of places out there show up in the SERPs. Get involved.

How would you go about getting something off page one?

Jessica: You want favorable things to rank above it. Link to things that support you: news articles, blogs, etc.

Tony: Like matt said, create new content. Contact the people and see if you can't help and fix it. If it's four years old, they might not care anymore. Just talk to them. Have everyone in your company create a Linked In profile; they rank well for company names.

Matt: Use third party sites, create new profiles. Also contact other people who might have something good to day.

Any horror stories?

Jessica: I know of one. A famous blogger had a bad experience, he'd paid for premium service and when he needed it, it wasn't there for him. The company didn't do anything about it and they didn't respond. Then other bloggers picked it up and it became a huge thing.

Tony: I had a former client; they were a start up, got a bunch of press. They had a disgruntled ex-employee post horrible things on a blog and they mandated that everyone in the company respond with something positive. At the same time--every comment was one minute apart. That company isn't in business anymore. They went overboard on a good idea.

Matt: If you have a problem and successfully resolve it, put it on your site. Get the word out that you made a mistake and fixed it. People love when you admit that you're human and you make mistakes because we all make mistakes. Don't just ignore it.

How do you combat bad reviews on things like TripAdvisor?

Tony: Try providing incentives to loyalists. If someone has a great stay, offer them 10 percent off on their next stay if they'll post a review. You can't beat TripAdvisor, they rank for everything. Remember that people expect to see a couple bad reviews. It's when you're in great volume.

Jessica: If the company won't provide the incentives, show up with your laptop and your Verizon card and ask people to review their stay right there.

[An audience member warns against a bunch of reviews coming from the same IP address, someone else suggests posting them through AOL instead. Hee.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 6/07 at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, pubcon07

Effective Action Based Copywriting

Seated at the Effective Action-Based Copywriting session with speakers Brain Clark (I will admit to being a huge Brian fangirl), Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen. I’ll be sure to take extra careful notes today to prove to Jill that not all liveblogging is inaccurate. ;)

Heather says today is going to be a different format. It’s not going to be a lot of talking heads. This session is going to be very PowerPoint light. Most of the session will be Q&A and site reviews.

Heather is not only acting as moderator, she’s also our first speaker!

Content is not only important for search engine purposes, it’s also a must for users. The way you write your copy can make the difference between getting a so-so sale or having tremendous success.

Five Six Tips:

• Learning to love key phrases: Optimize for three related key phrase per page. Chances are you’re going to be focused on one key phrase per page with tertiary terms thrown in their, as well. That’s okay. It’s only natural for one term to be your money maker. How you focus your key phrases depends on the page type (Home, product, resource). As you get into the inner pages of your site, your key phrases will become more specific. Don’t fear key phrase overlap, it’s a good thing!
• Work with your word count: Words are wonderful because that’s what the search engines are indexing. It’s good to be able to provide information. Heather recommends using about 250 words per page. If it’s a product page, you can write less. If it’s an ecommerce site, you can write more. Heather doesn’t believe in key phrase density. As long as you can look at a page and see that it’s relevant for those phrases, you’re cool.

  Power key phrase positions: Put keywords in the main body text copy, top to bottom, headlines and sub headlines, and in your hyperlinks.

• Pen tantalizing titles: The first opportunity for conversions is the on the SERP. When writing titles, think clickability, create unique titles for every page, include each page’s main key phrases, don’t necessarily target your company name (that’s something to test for clickthrough) and write each title to be between 50-75 characters. Heather says that key phrase rich content + Key phrase rich titles = search engine love.
• Mastering Google snippet trick: Place your benefit statements near your main key phrases. When Google takes your snippet for the SERP, the description will boost your benefits. It lets you control the description as much as you can. Google won’t always use the description that you wrote. This gives you another opportunity to make sure your benefits are front and center.
• Leverage lots of content opportunities: Content is not just your blog or product copy. It can be reviews. It’s anything you want to write about a product or service. Help people find you in a lot of different places. It helps to brand you as an expert.
• Remember what search engine optimization copywriting is and isn’t: Adding key phrases into content isn’t that big of a thing. Search engine optimization copywriting is the same as direct response copywriting. It makes arguments so convincing that customers can’t help but want to buy the product being advertised. It’s not the Easy Bake Oven approach where you throw in some key phrases and call it good. You write for you customers, not the search engines.

Jill Whalen is next.

Jill says this topic is near and dear to her heart. Back in 1994-6 people were talking about how to put the words on the page and trying to hide them. She used to see that all the time. She says she was the first person really talking about getting words on the page in a way that helps users.

What is Good Content?

It’s the regular pages on your site. It’s not mysterious. Every page should have content. It should speak to your target audience and describe what you do. It solves problems, answers questions and provides information. People are at your Web site because they’re looking for something, especially if they came from a search engine.

Content that is king is content that is written for your users, while keeping the search engines in mind. It’s all about balance, much like the see-saw image Jill’s is touting on her PowerPoint slide.

Good content starts with keyword research. You have to find the key words that people are using to try and find a site like yours. Base your copywriting around those words. Answer their search on your Web page.

Choose Keyword Phrases

For the home page, use the more general terms. The ones that describe your whole business in general. These are the more competitive phrases. As you get deeper into the site, use the more specific terms.

The engines have to be able to see your content. You don’t want to hide it. Avoid graphic headlines, all Flash or all graphic sites, and using technical programming that traps spiders. She uses the Web site for her son’s school as an example of how pretty, all graphical sites are nice, but Google can’t see them.

Search engine optimization writing tips:

• Be descriptive: Not “our product” or “our service”. Use keyword phrases like “our Toronto event planning services”.
• Edit your current text: Find generic words and replace them with descriptive ones.
• Don’t optimize for single words: Expand into phrases. “Marketing’ can become “Internet marketing strategy”, “Marketing your business”, “opt-in email marketing”, etc.
• Fix your Site: You don’t need to add useless articles. Write clearly and descriptively to target your audience.

Content is indeed king. It brings highly targeted visitors that want exactly what your offer and converts them into customers.

Copyblogger’s Brian Clark is next.

Brian says he’s a lot like us. He builds Web sites. He’s not a professional copywriter.

How can you create a piece of content that attracts links and encourages conversions? No one is going to link to your sales page because a sales pitch has very little independent value.

Attention and Persuasion Checklist

• Independent Value: What can you offer customers to make yourself valuable? He mentions How To or tutorial content. This approach allows you to naturally create a story that leads to the action you want people to take.
• Headline and Hook: The headline is the title. The hook is the angle. It’s the beginning of what kind of story you’re going to tell. You have to create content that engages people, gets their attention and gets them to read. If you’re on the first page of Google, you’re competing with 9 people. There has to be more there than just repeating keywords.
• Scannable Content: People run their eyes right down a page. You need to chunk up your content in ways that allows you to communication your story even if people aren’t ready every word.
• What’s the Story: Ties everything together.

Example: You want to sell a product or something to that relates to people who want to sell ebooks. You find out your most relevant keywords are [create ebook] or [sell ebook]. He uses an article about ebooks that he wrote for Copyblogger as the example.

It’s hard to get people’s attention. He breaks down his content to show how it uses the Attention and Persuasion checklist he outlined above.

Selling Tips from Aristotle

• Opening: You’re trying to structure a story that has an opening statement. This is where your hook is.
• Empathy: You have to show people you understand their pain.
• Solution: The solution appears. You tell people what it takes to solve the problem.
• Action: You present your call to action.

It’s very hard to get people to link to something that’s selling something else. But it can be done. You just have to show that the value is there. It’s almost helpful to think of yourself as an affiliate marketer even if you’re selling your own stuff. It keeps your from touting your own horn. Look at is as a pre-sale.

Heather stresses the importance of the emotional component. You have to find people’s emotional button. Know what they like about working with you and what they don’t like about working with you.

Heather: When writing content, don’t be a bad date. If you’re always talking about yourself and telling people that you’re the best and the greatest, you’re going to push people away. Back it up with facts that show your expertise.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, SEOToolSet, Search Engine Optimization, pubcon07

Keynote Coffee Chat with Matt Cutts

Coffee? Did someone say coffee? Why is the Starbucks closed downstairs? I bet Bruce paid them to close it. Or maybe it was Susan. Yeah, it was probably Susan.

I love that the PubCon people are trying to wake us up by blasting “Shiny Happy People” and the theme song to Ferris Bueller. Fine, it’s maybe working. [taps foot] Hee, Matt Cutts is on stage all out dancing to Smashmouth. People have lost their minds in Vegas.

Getting back on topic, we’re seated at yet another Matt Cutts on the hot seat keynote. Poor Matt. How many times can you put one man on the hot seat? Does he even have any secrets left? I guess we’ll find out.

Brett gets things started by offering up some housekeeping stuff. Yey for sponsors. Yey for exhibitors. Yey, yey, yey.

Okay, onto Matt.

Matt says he’s glad to be here and that he’ll be here all day and all day tomorrow. Matt loves how friendly and open PubCon is. True that.

This all question and answer, so let’s do it! [I’m going to try and lump questions together so it’s easier for readers to follow. Hope that helps – Lisa]

Matt and Google-specific Questions

How did you get to Google? What’s a typical day for you look like?

He was in grad school studying computer graphics and needed to take some outside classes. He ended up taking two Information and Library Science classes and they were about search engines. This was 1999 and the class was about Northern Light. He sent the Northern Lights people an email and asked how much they paid. They said they don’t pay unless they’re in active negotiations with someone. They called Matt back a few days later and asked if he’d like be in active negotiations. He said yes.

Matt says that you never know what the day is going to be like when you walk in. You have a plan. You come in with priorities. But then you get in and PC World or John Dvorak has written about malware on .cn domains and you have to investigate it and figure out what’s going on. It’s exciting because you never know what’s going to happen and its fun. It’s the sort of thing where you can sit around a pool table and say, how do I fix this problem? What’s going to be the next big thing in search?

What’s your employee number? There’s a rumor that it’s 69.

Matt says that’s not true. It’s in the first hundred.

Linking/Paid Links Questions

A million years ago we learned that links are important but you can’t link to a “bad neighborhood”. How does someone identify what that is?

In general, what he likes to say is use your gut. People have pretty good intuition. This is a very smart group of webmasters and SEOs. If someone writes you out of the blue and asks for a link exchange, you have to realize that that’s kind of strange. Especially if they can’t even spell your name.

Trading links is a natural thing around the Web. Natural reciprocal links do happen but if 50 percent of your links are coming from link exchanges it begins to looks like you’re trying to build and artificial reputation and bump up the amount of links you don’t have. For times when you don’t know if you can trust a link, use a nofollow. If you think a site is a great site, link right to it. If you’re worried, just use a nofollow.

Speaking of links, there’s been a lot of talk about paid links. What’s the deal?

A few years ago there was another search engine called Overture where you would go to that engine and typed in a term and the SERP was sorted by money, not relevance. If you typed in Harvard, you’d get test prep companies, not Harvard University. It showed him that you don’t want a search engine that’s sorted by pocketbook. Recently they did a blog post where there gave a timeline of what they’ve been saying for years about paid links. Then, he put up some screen shots on his personal blog. People don’t realize that if you’re just trying to buy a review, the people taking that money aren’t the most interested in relevance. The danger of paid links is that it biases the search results and gives users something they don’t want. They’ve tried to be pretty clear about their policy. He talks about the article Andy Greenberg did about paid links and how all the search engines agreed it was something they were working on and trying to eliminate. This is not a Google-only issue. All the search engines have agreed.

Going back to paid links, where’s the link between linking to manipulate the algorithm and just selling advertising?

A lot of people make the argument that Google sells paid links, but the fact is those links don’t pass PageRank. He takes the feedback, though.

What’s advertising and what’s paid links? If you’re getting paid for the link and it passes PageRank (manipulates search engines) then that’s bad. There are paid links and then there are paid links that affect search engines. He wants to have a clean index and accurate search results. He has no problem advocating things that would cost Google money, like pushing MFA sites off the Web.

International Issues

Google recently purchased a domain in China G.cn. Can you elaborate?

If you’re in China and you speak Chinese, even remembering the word Google is a little hard. They wanted to make it really easy for Chinese users to remember. They have a Google.cn and G.cn and a Google.com and they all work. If you go to Google.com, you get the main search results. He wishes they could go to G.com.

Back to the China affair and the backlinks. Looking at competitors, we’ve seen that they often buy a lot of links that come from specific regions of the world. So essentially, the very good link popularity they have is because they have backlinks from high PR pages located in Russia and China. Have you thought about investigating this?

It’s a good question. (He’s looking around trying to find the person he’s talked to about this.)

If you look at the .cn domains, a lot of the spam is not in Chinese, it’s in English. And the backlinks are all from Japan. That starts to look a little suspicious. Sometimes you see spammers and they have backlinks from every TLD. At the same time, sometimes you do get cross TLD backlinks. Google will try and continue to do a better job. He agrees that looking at that kind of signal is important. There’s always more Google could do.

Advertising Questions

Google makes a lot of money on the content networks, but more than half of park domains are typo squatted names. What are Google’s feelings about trying to block these people or shutting them down?

Matt puts in his disclaimer that he’s not an expert in this area and this is his personal opinion.

It’s weird because even the simple approaches can be difficult. Suppose you want to say I’m going to stop all typo squatting and eliminate all domains that are one letter away. But then you’d have a problem with BBC and ABC.

Back in the day, domain related advertising could get really skuzzy, it’s not like that today. In a lot of ways, Google legitimized domain related advertising. He’s really heartened to see that SER has written a few articles about how you can email Google and ask your ad representative not to put you on any domain related advertising. They’ve always talked about features that Google is trialing where you don’t have to show up for domain related advertising. In his ideal world it would be easy to opt-out of things like that and he says Google is moving in that direction. They listen to feedback.

Technical & General Search Engine Optimization Questions

If I’m on a VPS, I want to know if I have a neighbor doing some shady stuff. Can that poison the entire subnet?

Matt says not to worry about that. The spammers are smart. If you are domain one and there are 24,000 porn domains and there’s nobody else nearby, that’s odd. In general, it can’t hurt your reputation. The only time they look at IP subnets is if people are hitting them with a lot of queries.

In terms of 301 redirects, if I have a site and I redirect a certain amount of files, is there a rule about when I can redirect those again to maintain the juice?

Matt says he’s never been asked that before. To the best of his knowledge, there’s no limit. You can do a 301 and change it 2 weeks later and you’ll be totally fine. He doesn’t recommend doing a chain of redirects that at some point the bot gets tired and has to lay down. If you have five 301s chained in a row, that’s a little high and things may get lost in the cue. At that point, update the original 301 and make it point to the final location.

When you’re changing servers, is there any issue in regards to how long you should keep the old server up?

Lower your DNS time to live to five minutes. What that means is whenever somebody does a search they’ll have to recheck the IP address every five minutes. Bring up the site on the new IP address, switch the DNS to the new IP, keep both the old and the new live and as soon as you see Googlebot fetching to the new IP address, you’re completely fine in Google. Google tries to be smart about how it crawls and how many fetches it needs.

Regarding scraping: We’re seeing a massive increase of our blog content being copied and being put on AdSense Web sites. Is there a better way to report that to Google?

The answer is we listen to feedback. The general way to do it is to do a general spam report. Tamar Weinberg has done a good walkthrough telling you how to report spam. When you see a spammer with AdSense, click on Ads by Google. At the bottom of the page you’ll give a give feedback to Google link. It brings up a form that allows you to report different types of bad content. Click on the one that says this is a bad publisher.

What’s your take on directories? Is it worthwhile to pay to get in?

Matt has been going back and forth on this over at the Google Webmaster blog with a guy named Jeffrey.

As an SEO, you need to access the quality of a directory. There are absolutely interesting directories out there. You have to find out what the value is. Is there spam in it? Your SEO spidey sense has to help you find the good neighborhoods. Look at the directory, See how long its been around. Look at the sites in it. That will tell you if it’s worthwhile or not.

Don’t people just to submit to directories because they know Google values the links for certain ones?

Matt says no.

Let’s say I have multiple domains and I’m going to repent my ways. What’s the best way to tell you that? What if I want to buy some of those other domains with misspellings and not look like a spammer/

Do a 301 to your one brand site. If you’re only trying to buy a domain because these domains have some preexisting links, then Google doesn’t necessarily want you to get that credit for free. People should earn links.

Are there times where a 302 is interpreted as a 301?

They try to pick the prettiest domain they can. Do you want to go to RedSox.com or mlb.com/teams/redsox?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/07 at 10:58 AM | Comments (1)
See more entries in pubcon07

December 5, 2007

SEO and Big Search

Okay, so now that lunch is over (I almost had food. It was exciting!) we're going to be hearing about how the search engines tackle SEO for their own sites. Moderator Joseph Morin jumps right in by introducing the panellists: Melanie Mitchell for AOL, Dave Roth for Yahoo! Inc, and Maile Ohye, for Google.

Melanie Mitchell is up first.

When you're talking about SEO it's not about the engine itself, it's how you manage it across the whole huge site. How do you optimize when the corporate culture and the site aren't aligned. You can't succeed without the support of the corporate culture particularly in the case of a large site?

How you do align the organization and how do you build a strategy that works? More importantly, it's about how you go about making a search marketing program work at a company without losing your mind.

AOL has over 100 million pages. It's an organizational and corporate challenge. You have to organize and track properly.

She brought the discipline a search marketing to the disorganization of the company. When she came to AOL in 2004, they were very disorganized. They weren't designed for search because they didn't have to be. They were a walled garden so they didn't have to think about search bots. They weren't set up to be search friendly, everything was disparate and in its own kingdom. So she had to come up with an SEO plan to change everything.

She got the CEO on board but the people who were supposed to impelement it just ignored it. She didn't allow them to ignore her however and when up the ladder to sell it to everyone. "Vive le roi". Roi in this case not being King but in fact ROI.

They had the information to show that the content available to succeed, they just didn't yet have the way to put the content out there in a way that would pull people in. [I have no idea what her slide means.] Their titles were poor, their linking wasn't good and their structure wouldn't support it.

They laid out the data in a way that showed the gaps between AOL and its competition in order to show why Yahoo was doing better than they were. They had to show that even thought they both had 10 results, it was about the quality of those results.

Here's the potential. Put it up front and sell the value. What is the revenue mix? What are the estimated page views and visits of the respective leaders in the space? How much would we make if we were as good as the leader?

That'll sell.

Once the brass bought it, she told them that they needed to back her up one this and make it clear that Search engine optimization was important to the company. Everyone in the company needed to understand that their part of the company had to work with the SEO plan. It needed to be in the company DNA, not just responsible of the "SEO Team".

AOL took SEO very seriously. They started rolling it out last year by putting it in the top 3 goals for the company. When people go out onto the web, they go to search, so AOL had to be there.

Where do you start?

• Create core search team -- SMEs: these are the ones who are the experts on SEO. They keep up on the industry and keep everyone on course and up to par. Systems architects: Design the silos Tech lead: Translates for the engineers. Front Liners: SEO leads, silo leaders. Program Managers and Project Managers: Someone's got to keep the project on track. Program is the overseer, projects are the detail watchers.
• Set priorities, goals and incentives -- Puts the teeth in your plan. Make things urgent or things will just slide by the wayside. AOL made search referals their metrics. Goal: 20-30 percent from search. They tied it into bonuses as incentives.
• Train, Train, Train -- They created SEO certification. Take the test, pass the test, get certified. Fail the test, time to find a new job.
• Set Internal Standards -- Know what is important SEO wise, set up best practices and define who is doing what.
• Provide Tools -- People can't do their jobs without tools. Free tools if you need them. Internal wiki to share resources, keep a running FAQ.
• Measure and Track (and adjust) - pages indexed (by percent), search referrals (is it growing month over month and by comparison to industry growth), User behavior (abandonment, return visits, page consumption)

Creating a dashboard--- search referrals, progress, how everything is going. Where are the weaknesses and strengths? Search referrals/overall visits, page views/visit

Final thoughts: You can't ignore search. You have to have executive buy in. If there is no accountability, there will be no success. Be transparent with your data. Be willing to do what it takes, even if it means being the Wicked Witch of the West instead of the Good Witch of the North.

Dave Roth comes up next to tell us all about Yahoo. His middle name is not Lee. Sad times.

He says that there's a new breed of exec out there. There weren't VPs of search and SEO and SEM at the big companies. It says a lot about the industry and its future.

Disclaimer: the numbers in the presentation are made up.

Search Marketing at Yahoo!
Why do they do it? They've been the biggest site for a long time. They do it the same reasons everyone else does. Traffic, revenue. It's the best way to get customers. They do SEO or SEM for just about every one of their properties. They do it among a number of business models -- subscription, ad supported, transactional...just about everything but straight e-tail. They use a lifetime value method. What the present value? What's the acceptable profit margin? It's a little different for SEO, you need to make some assumptions but it still works pretty well.

If you can't attach value to it, you can't get it done.

Central groups provide training, standards, best practices, reporting. Other teams do well. They don't get special treatment from yahoo search (aw.) but they do get limited data. They use tools like Yahoo! Buzz. And they work with YSearch for internal tools to try to make tools to better spider.

Quantifying Opportunity -- Their team says "If you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist."

• Establish predictive models for SEO traffic. The goal is to get the executives to say yes.
• Built virtual SEO 'clickspace' for properties.
• Compare 'virtual' performance against SEO competitors.
• Identify gaps - Find out who is beating you where.
• Attach value - use life time value to get to the 'Show me the money' space.
• Rinse and Repeat.

Infusing SEO into the Process -- Phase one Concept: competitor research, strategies for attracting traffic and links, partner and affiliate SEO possibilities
Phase two Wireframes: site architecture considerations, URL structure internal linking structure planning, SEMantic setup and benchmarking
Phase three Design: Wording& Use of keywords, AJAX Flash and CSS, contention distribution and layout
Etc

Each stage of product development has its own steps so that any team working at any stage knows what they have to do in order to serve SEO functions.

Organizing around SEO -- SEO program manager  SEO product development manager  SEO property managers  SEO producers (keeps an eye on what's published) and SEO analysts (keeps an eye on the value).

Measuring Success -- they use an SEO scorecard internally to track how successful they are. They built an index based on the same methodology as the predictive model and track it over time. They refine it as necessary.

Again, there is an executive dashboard that gives at a glance data so that you can see things in an easily consumed way.

They're doing basic SEO on a very large scale.

Quantify it and value it. Train everyone, hold people accountable. Attach it to people's personal revenue -- bonus or salary or pay. Infuse SEO into the development process.

Maile Ohye is up next for Google. She's a support engineer for webmaster central. Aw, she's all like speech class practiced. And she's....not talking about SEO at Google. She's totally off topic. Hrm, I'll take notes but just be warned that she's not going to actually say anything particularly helpful.

SEO how not to's: Common mistakes [the following is a pitch for Webmaster Central. If you read this blog and aren't using it, hi, welcome to the internet.]

Translate content without modifying site structure to international sites:
--using IP delivery can lead to German content getting shown on an English site.
Using the same URL to serving Googlebot different content from users = cloaking and that's against their guidelines.

Search ranking can be influenced by information relating to URL's language and location.

Users/browsers have language preference to respect. Just because someone lives in Germany doesn't mean they don't want English content.

When designing for IP delivery, keep the content largely the same. Make the dynamic portion small. If the change is substantial, create a separate URL.

Webmaster Tools just came out with a geolocation tool. You can use that.

[This is so not at all what this session is supposed to be about. Just FYI, Google, if you want to hit these points, awesome. Do it some place appropriate next time, please.]

Flash/AJAX are pretty but not properly crawled. (See previous session notes regarding designing with Flash.)

Opportunities in video/book/local/etc -- submit your content at Webmaster Central to all the verticals.

They're using video to reach people (this is almost on topic!). Matt's videos are a viral way to reach out to users and webmasters.

Fundamental SEO truths -- They design for accessibility and speed and easy navigation.
She shows the 'what if Google actually did SEO on their site' presentation. And yeah, not pretty.

For Google, their SEO is delivering great service. [Their other SEO strategy? HAVING 60 PERCENT MARKET SHARE. No wonder they don't have an SEO person. It's good to be the king.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 5/07 at 2:43 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in AOL, Branding, Design, Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, pubcon07

Hosting Issues and SEO/SEM

Back from lunch and back in action. We’re at the Hosting Issues and SEO/SEM session with panelists Derek Vaughan, Scott Henderson and Ben Fisher. Jake Baillie will be acting as moderator.

Derek is walking around the audience saying hi and shaking hands with everyone because there are only about 10 people in the room. Hee.

Up first is Derek Vaughan and he thanks everyone for coming. You’re welcome, Derek! My eyes are burning. I think it’s from all the smoke in the casino. I’ve actually been forced to put on my glasses.

Search engine optimization vs. search engine marketing:

Search engine optimization is way harder. With Pay Per Click, you can just buy your way in. SEO is exclusive and creates a brand halo. The processes are similar, but search engine optimization is longer lasting and more impactful.

Tools for generating keyword lists: WordTracker, Yahoo! Search Suggestions, Google’s Keyword Tool, Google Trends, and your competitors Meta tags. Derek really likes Google Trends. You can type in a set of words separated by a comma and they will show you the relative ranking at Google of those words. It showed him that “hosting” is a higher traffic word than “Web hosting”.

Where do searchers look on the Google results page?

He talks about the eye tracking study dong by Enquiro and Did It and the idea of the golden triangle. Shows you’re better off ranking organically then paid.

Tips for registering domains:

• Use the search phrase in the domain name. Dashes are better than underscores.
• Register a “.com” domain name. Survey says that .com TLDs rule the SERPs.
• Register a domain name that is age.
• Register the domain for 10 years.

He disagrees with the keynote this morning where Richard said that .tv TLDs and .com TLDs are equal. The latter tend to rank better because they’re aged.

Types of Web sites and Search Engine Optimization

He’s a big fan of using more traditional sites with traditional HTML. Any site that gives you complete creative control over the architecture of the site. That’s what you need. The challenge with blogs and forums is that they set you into a rigid architecture that is hard to depart from. They’re developed to be cookie cutter. You can still rank well; it just makes your life more difficult.

Derek says you can rank well using a dedicated server or a shared account, though he recommends using a dedicated server. Avoid anything that has to do with free hosting.

Other Hosting Considerations:

Static IP: He likes them, others don’t.
Spreading the hosting around (networks)
Downtime can ruin your rankings
Bad host reputation can hurt
High host rank may indicate search engine optimization knowledge.

Your key to search engine optimization via hosting is anonymity. He quotes Jim Boykin’s Link Buying presentation yesterday where all he said was “Stay under the radar and don’t piss off Google.” He said that’s the most insightful thing he’s heard at the conference.

If there is a network, whether you own it or someone else owns it, you want anonymity. Search engines are looking at your network to see what’s going on and they’re studying links. If they’re seeing that all the links are registered to the same person and they’re all on the same IP block, they’re likely to just discount those links. Better would be for everyone to be on different IP blocks, with different registrants and different Web hosts. Derek says he’s not advocating black hat, but if you have two valid content sites that are excellent, he doesn’t see why you shouldn’t link between them just because they’re owned by the same person.

Scott Hendison is next. He has 1,000+ domains.

He says to ask yourself, “What do you need for your business and your Web hosting?” Consider business requirements, developer recommendations and budgetary requirements.

True or False?

Using a separate IP address for each domain means you’ll rank better: FALSE. If you do a search for competitive phrases, you’ll find that a lot of the top results were all shared IPs, not static. Scott doesn’t think having a static IP is a huge factor.

Shared hosting hurts your search engine visibility: FALSE.

If you have multiple sites, you must have multiple Web hosts: FALSE. Unless you’re doing a lot of crosslinking and trying to hide something.

If you ARE trying to hide something, use private domain registration to hide your identity: FALSE. He says it’s a big red flag to the search engines.

There’s no cheap and easy way to keep site backups and ensure uptime: FALSE

Server response time can affect your search engine rankings: TRUE. Test your own server and if you see a return of 60ms or more, you may have a problem.

Windows Hosting is fine: TRUE – With ISAPI Rewrite. Your host should install.

Things to remember:

• Listen to your developers and get what they need
• Shared hosting and shared IPs can be find on responsive servers
• If there’s a reason to hide, then you’ll have to be pretty clever, because they’re going to find you!

Jake Baillie is up.

Jake’s presentation is called Dynamic Web sites Suck. He’s being sarcastic. He likes dynamic Web sites. I feel better now that that’s been clarified.

The URL is all powerful. Jake says that the mod_rewrite changed a whole generation of SEOs. So did LSD. Um, Jake! With mod_rewrite there is no requirement that a URL has to correspond to a physical file server location. We can make the URL say whatever we want and the server will do what you tell it to do.

Things you can do through mod_rewrite:

• Keyword specific toll-free numbers: Jake says this is good for “old people” who get confused easily. Hee.
• Multivariate content and price testing
• Delivering appropriate content to clients
• Subdomain aliasing as a form of user-friendly input.
• Mining search data.

Jake shows examples of some companies using mod_rewrite for testing purposes. These companies are serving content transparently in different ways to different devices. Jake says to be mindful of your user agents.

Your destiny lies under the hood. You have to mine search results. What mod_rewrite can do is a lot of times if you can’t find a page, you can tell mod_rewrite to pipe the click into an intelligence script. (I hope you all know what that means; I don’t.)

If you can test for it, you can act upon it. Mod_rewrite can give you the following information about your visitors:

Type of browser
Time of day
Length of visits
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Jake talks about content lifting and scraping. He said it’s a common problem that sucks. He lists the nicknames he calls competitors. They’re all very mature, I assure you. He then spent 10-15 minutes explaining how to be a jerk and do bad things to people who are doing bad things to you. For maturity’s sake, I’m going to skip that part. No offense, Jake.

Ben is going to sum things up for us. He doesn’t have a presentation because he didn’t know he was speaking until yesterday. He says that you can use keyword-rich subdomains to help increase rankings. The reason mainly is because subdomains are treated as separate domains. He agrees with Scott that you don’t need separate IPs in order to rank well.

Another thing about dynamic sites: If you’re going to be looking for a CMS, look for one that has a separate type of navigation for every section of your site. You want to be able to customize things; this way even though it’s running off a template system, you can make changes and make it look natural. If your navigation is always the same, it’s very easy for any kind of algorithm to discount blocks of similar text.

That ends his nuggets.

Jake jumps back in and opens it up to the panelists to talk about their experiences with shared vs. dedicated IPs. What are the pros and cons of each?

Jack starts off saying that the con of shared IPs is that you have no control over who you’re sharing it with. There’s always the rumor of guilt by association. Ben says that whenever he looks at his dedicated server company, they ask once a month for a new IP. When they get it, they do a background check to see if it has ever been blacklisted. They run the IP through several different tools to see if it’s clean.

The con of a dedicated IP is the cost. If it costs a few extra dollars and you have a thousand domains, it can add up.

Scott uses a dedicated IP for competitive intelligence reasons. It gives you anonymity.

If you could recommend a host, who would it be?

Derek: HostMySite.com (his company)
Scott: [It sounded like Scott said “Webbers” but I can’t find a hosting company by that name. Can anyone help me out? – Lisa] Weberz.com (Thanks for clearing that up, Scott!)
Jake: JohnCompanies
Ben: HostMySite.com or Rackspace

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/07 at 2:41 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, pubcon07

SEO Design and Organic Site Structure

Ah, finally a session I know something about. Let's get going.

Todd Friesen is our fearless moderator this time around. He's just a little hungover. But the panel looks ready. Here they are. Mark Jackson, President / CEO, VIZION Interactive, Inc., Lyndsay Walker, WestJet / Lyndseo, Paul Bruemmer, Red Door Interactive, Alan K'necht, K'nechtology Inc.

Mark Jackson is first. He begins with the Golden Rule of site building. You want the site to succeed on all levels.

He's covering Keyword Research, competitive analysis and content.

Keyword Research: Most people don’t do it well. They start with the just most popular term. You need to learn your audience. Target words that matter to them. Don’t' get your words from the CEO, get them from your users. Once you've developed that list, then go back and decide relevancy. Put it in a spreadsheet so you can figure out what your words really are.

Know who you are and be real. Don't go after words that you don't have a shot in hell of getting. Know what it will take to compete and then build for success. Make sure that you have content to support your rankings.

Organize yourself and develop a process.

Search engine friendly design does not mean that the sites have to be ugly.

• Avoid JavaScript, Flash, Image navigations.
• Allow space for content
• Use images reasonably
• Include "alt" and "title" attributes in images [Uh, I disagree on the Title attribute. Worthless. But definitely use your alt attributes smartly.]
• Static URLs are preferred

Have a reason for what you're doing.

He's showing TripAdvisor as a good example. Um, there are a lot of links on the page. Can't we get some nice tasty regular content? Heh, someone in the audience agrees.

[black screen] = what your site looks like to the engines.

He just saw a site that was built to be SE friendly....with a flash intro and entirely an image on the homepage. Nice.

Write content that is engaging to readn and conducive to you SEO strategy.
Use opportunies for internal linking (too often people get obessed with external links and forget internal-
Avoid marketing fluff. Call it what it really is not what your marketing team "brands" it to be.
Blogs are great for the long tail words.

Do your research before you get into your design and make sure you're using it. Design for usability and SEO, almost in that order.

Todd says Nike is a perfect example. They rank great for footware and not running shoes because they never use the word.

Alan K'necht wishes us all a Happy Chanukah. Yay!

He's talking about linear design. You've done your information architecture now you're ready to put it into code. Preferably XHTML with CSS. He talks about the problem of tables. [see the table trick for how we solved that in the 'bad old days'.]

SEO a linear approach. You place the candles on from right to left and light them left to right on a menorah.

Search engines care about words, words, words. They also care bout the position of the words. They value things at the top more than the bottom. That means you should be putting words first.

Separate the content from the presentation. Organize content logically. Use CSS to position graphics logically. Give the search engines the words in the code first then use CSS to show the users a pretty page.

Newspapers use a linear presentation. Headlines come first. They contain important words. Where are their links? At the end, when you're done with the article and ready to move on.

Important elements much come first. Ensure these elements contain your targeted keyword phrases.

Put graphical non-essential items lower down in the code.

Stick JavaScript at the end or off page and just include it.

Use Firefox with the developer plugin. Turn off CSS and look at results. How far down does the engine have to go before it gets to the content. You should get to content FIRST. Not navigation first. Decide what's important. What should be seen first?

Make your site "search engine usable."

Lyndsay Walker is next. WestJet is a low cost Canadian airline. 70 percent of their bookings come through the Web site.

Design for your visitors, she says. Remember what you want them to do on your site. Are you focused on brand, on content? What is going to make it for them? You need to have a clear navigation for users and for search engines.

AVOID FLASH. She doesn't think that can be said enough. There's so much you can do with XHTML and style sheets that can mimic flash. The same can be said of images vs text. Nothing is going to beat fresh content.

Divs are your friend.

Use your stats. You have so much data. Learn from it, discover what people are looking for, where they're going.

When you'r