Pub Con Las Vegas 2008

December 3, 2008

SEM Synergy Extras

Has everyone caught the WebProNews interviews with Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts conducted during PubCon? No? Let me catch you up.

During his presentation on the Top Shelf Organic SEO session (alternate coverage available), Bruce made the point that more and more, the future of search marketing is moving toward optimizing for behavior-based, intent-based and blended search. All these increasingly important factors will contribute to the devaluation of rankings as the prime metric for SEOs. What does a ranking mean if SERP placement varies from user to user due to personalized and behaviorally-targeted search results? Instead, Bruce said, SEOs need to switch their focus from rankings to analytics data, traffic, and conversions. The "Ranking is Dead" motto found a lot of word-of-mouth traffic during the conference, and on the final day of PubCon, Mike McDonald of WebProNews was able to sit down with Bruce, letting him share his predictions to the wider audience of SEOs.

Mike then sat down with Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team and a Google spokesperson for the search marketing community. Mike asked Matt about his thoughts on whether or not ranking is becoming less valuable and, if so, how SEOs should alter their search marketing efforts. One of my favorite summaries of the two videos, which makes each experts' points and counterpoints clear, is from Sixth Man Marketing. Go ahead and read that for the condensed version of events. Key takeaways from Matt include his acknowledgment that rankings should not be the end-all-be-all of search engine optimization and that Universal search is very useful for users.

On SEM Synergy today, Bruce further clarified and expanded on his comments at PubCon. In a couple weeks -- December 17, to be exact -- tune in to SEM Synergy for my interview with Matt Cutts. You better believe we talk about personalized search, Universal search, and algorithm factors that Google could be upping in value next year.

Until then, familiarize yourself with the various opinions that professionals across the search industry have expressed regarding the WebProNews interviews. A conversation thread was started over at Cre8asite Forums. The Milwaukee SEO recognizes the issue of devalued ranking importance as a conversation that isn't new, but one that should be carefully considered. Joomla SEO looks at how SearchWiki plays into the increasing importance of personalized search results. Rather than the death of SEO, Global Entrepreneur stresses that Bruce's predictions actually signal the evolution of SEO. And David Harry wants to see research that backs the theory that behavioral metrics and geo-location factors have a weighty affect on personalized search.

Check out SEM Synergy to get the word straight from Bruce. And of course, thanks to Matthew Inman of online dating site Mingle2 for coming on the show to talk about the engaging content that could be more important in the changing search landscape.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 12/ 3/08 at 5:18 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEM Industry, SEM Synergy, Search Engine Optimization

November 13, 2008

Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters - aka: The Search Engine Smackdown

I could not be more excited for this session. Not because this is an easy session to recap, because it's totally not, but because it's the very last one and after this one is over, I get to go home.

Brett Tabke has a whole group of search engine reps on the stage right now: Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.; Sean Suchter, VP, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering, Yahoo!; and Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft. Brett's getting ready to torture them to give up all their secrets.

Brett just called Matt the last man standing. Then the last engine standing. Ouch. He means that everyone else is a new face on this panel, but the truth, she hurts.

Nathan Buggia is up first to give us a Live Search State of the Union. He's going to reframe Satya's keynote from this morning in a more technical way. Oh dear.

Relevance is key. They measure internally in a representative sample of query terms with "how good it is?" from all three engines. Are they in the ball park? They've found they're very similar. Some things they do well, some not so good. Freshness is a factor for them.

• Improved crawling performance
• Standardization of Robots Exclusion Protocol rule -- MSNbot supports regular expressions in robots.txt
• Sitemaps anywhere -- they don't have to be hosted under your root domain anymore. They use them for canonicalization issues as well as for page discovery.
• "Significant" increase in crawling activity

Their webmaster tools are useful for troubleshooting. You can find reports on:

• 404 errors
• Too many parameters
• Blocked by REP
• Unsupported content
• Malware infected -- they won't allow clicks on malware from Live Search

They can crawl up to two sub-domains and two directories down.

You can do an audit to find all your URLs and all the pages linked to those pages. Once you fix a malware issue, you can request a re-crawl and they'll get it done in a couple of days.

Ranking:

• Static ranking
• Dynamic rank within site
• Backlinks
• Penalties -- and steps to resolution

They provide direct support through their forums. They'll get back to you within three days.

The adCenter Excel Keyword research tool pulls data from adCenter and from Passport and you should use it.

They've studied use patterns and they found there are several: targeted, exploratory to targeted, exploratory to multi-targeted, etc. As a result they're providing more rich media to try to give more information upfront for the exploratory pattern. This gives you more ways to reach users: products, reviews, links and videos. This is showing up not just in search results but in other products like Hotmail.

Back to Project Silk Road:

• Increase engagement
• Encance your site with Live Search Web results
• Customize 404 error pages with Web Error Toolkit
• Create rich user experiences with Virtual Earth and Silverlight

Generate traffic:

• Optimize your site with webmaster tools
• Deep content partnerships

[Missed the last pillar]

Live Search API: Based on feedback from publishers, they're giving back control.

• Reorder the results
• Skin results and ads
• Filter out 300 ad providers

Maximum flexibility:

• Unlimited queries (unless you're a scraper)
• Rich query language (advanced queries like site:)
• Many types of content
  • Web
  • News
  • Images
  • Encarta Answers
  • Spelling
  • Implement all standard protocols (REST, JSON, RSS, SOAP)

Check out: APIs, Webmaster Center, adCenter

Sean Suchter is next for Yahoo!

The main thing they're working on is getting past the ten blue links, as well as getting past the limited choice.

They've gotten a lot of response on their search assist features.

They're trying to get from "to do" to "done". They're trying to get people to the answer, to reduce frustration, and to bring out structured information from the Web. He thinks the music integration feature was cool -- full songs off of artist searches.

They're focused on more information in one search. Drawing out deep links, news information, rich media.

The ecosystem is looking at building a richer, more relevant and more personal search experience. SearchMonkey brings outside in and gives control outside of the core search. What does opening search mean? It's a clear win for developers, site owners, users and Yahoo. Before, you had ten simple blue links. Afterwards, you get an engaging look at more information that gets you straight to the answers, increases the quality of site traffic, increases usability and fosters loyalty.

They're continually testing and revising the presentation and testing out different ways to present structured information to provide a better experience.

They have a developer tool to create the applications, pulling data from publishers and sending it to users who can opt in or out.

Some publishers using the application:

• People
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Flickr
• Yelp
• Yahoo! properties

The reverse of this is BOSS. It's sending data out and opening it up to help with the indexing and the crawling. No matter where you are on the Web, search experiences are relevant, comprehensive and fresh.

Sites using BOSS:

• 4hoursearch: it is very simple and open
• PlayerSearch: focused on sports
• Newsline: timeline-based news information pulled out of the search engine
• Tianamo: ...I don't even know. It's topographical. Neat.

Last it's Matt Cutts. His presentation is "State of the Index: What's going on with Google?"

Google Chrome: wicked fast browser -- competition makes everyone better
Android: open-source operating system (He has a Google phone. Jealous.)

• Better machine translation
• Better voice translation
• Google Suggest
• Improving personalization and Universal/blended search

Lots of small things:

• 2001 search index
• Video and voice chat in Gmail
• Ability to track the flu

Google Trends: You can use this to figure out how to target your keywords, compare web site interest.

Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Planner -- doesn't have to be Google ads

2008 Webmaster launches:

• Optical character recognition in PDF docs
• Better crawling of Flash , -- this is NOT license to build your pages entirely in Flash
• Mobile will still break

They're getting better at keyword spam and gibberish. He brings up the 404 link finder in Webmaster Tools and jokes that it's free links when you get them fixed. He also points out the 404 help page.

• Advanced segmentation on Google Analytics
• On-demand indexing for Google Custom Search Engines -- get ten pages re-indexed free immediately
• Webmaster APIs for hosters and Gdata
• Translation gadget for your Web site

Google held three webmaster chats in the last year (700+ people in the last call). They are blogging more and doing more videos. Google added new languages for blogs. Yesterday they released a 30-page beginning SEO guide. Google does not hate SEO.

2009 black hat trends

Jeevesretirement.com -- DO NOT GO THERE -- was bought by Ask when Jeeves retired, but they didn't get it renewed. Now it's a porn site.

He thinks hacking is actually going to get worse -- like real illegal hacking. A Googler actually got hacked. They're getting hacked and linking over to other sites that they're hacked. Black hat moves toward the outright illegal.

Matt has a complicated example of hacking. You'll just have to imagine it until he posts it somewhere for me to link to. Did you hear me, Matt? Post the slide.

• SEOs need to decide on risk tolerance.
• Google will keep communicating with webmasters.
• Google will provide tools to help webmasters. They're working on a tool for canonicalization or preferred URLs.

Q&A

Are you going to change what you present to people in terms of intent?

Sean: Yes.

Matt: There are three types of searches: navigational, informational and transactional. Site links are for the navigational.

Can you send out acknowledgements to reconsideration requests?

Matt: Part of the problem is that you don't want to tell a spammer that you did or did not catch a problem, so Google doesn't want to do that. But he says he thought it might be nice to just say "a computer looked at it at such and such time". They're looking at that.

Can we get a default SearchMonkey format so that we don't have to wait for users to opt in?

Sean: They're trying to test and determine how to auto-on the right things. You need to create the most useful possible added-value apps with your clients so that users can get a better experience. The better that happens, the closer it gets to auto-on.

Matt wants to talk about Rip-off Report. He doesn't think they're spam. They only remove for spam or court order. There's not enough material on Rip-Off Report for him to remove it as spam. If you really hate it that much, get a court order and then they can take action on it. There are free speech and first amendment right issues there. They will take strong action when there is spam but it's not there yet. They already get enough "Google is just taking them out because they don't like them" criticisms.

How about a negative link?

Matt says it's a thought.

Are you guys going to be looking at a way to tell Google News something different than Googlebot?

Matt: You have to prioritize by feedback. [They're going to talk later.]

The cheapest product seems to win in Live Search. Doesn't that compete with my actually good PPC/SEO links?

Nathan: Those products get in through productupload.live.com. They're free and he thinks it's a good feature. [He really did answer the question but I didn't catch it.]

I hear First Click Free is in jeopardy? How do we stay in compliance with that?

Matt: [He explains briefly how First Click Free works.] He thinks they're at a good balance right now, but the challenge is how do they regulate it. They're still doing it. They've just about finalized their policies for it.

I paid for links. [The entire audience turns to look at him.] All our sites were penalized in Google Webmaster Tools. How much privacy is there? Second question, when are you going to share revenue from BOSS with publishers?

Matt: They have tools where they can pretty much always find the related sites.

Sean: He doesn't know the details but there are people actively working on the monetization plan. It's definitely being worked on.

Nathan jumps in to talk about monetization opportunities at Live Search. Poor Nathan, no one cares.

Why is there no way to authenticate that a bot is a bot?

Matt: You can. It's a kind of a hassle, but it's a two step process. Search for "verifying googlebot". It works for all the engines.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 3:17 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, Social Media

Real-World, Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies

Three sessions down, three sessions to go. Chris Tolles is moderating this session with speakers Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting; Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz; Roger Montti, Founder and Owner, martinibuster.com; and Greg Hartnett, President, Best of The Web.

Eric Enge is up first. He urges us to think BIG. He cites yesterday's keynote as an example of a small/medium-sized company that thought big and changed their whole position.

Social New Sites

The first thing to know is that you have to match the demographic of the site's audience. With Digg, it's obviously 13 to 24 year old males.

Baiting the social sites is all well and good but ask:

• Did it help the site?
• What is it relevant to?
• What message would it send about your business?

Try for authoritative and unique information. Remember that timing is important.

• Maximize your success
• Interest the audience
• Be authoritative
• Reflect well on your business
• Use titles targeted at BIG search terms
  • Article title
  • Social news submission title

Facebook Ads

A fantasy sports trade site became a media powerhouse. How?

Created great widgets:

• Primarily through Facebook
• Targeted at sports fans
• Had apps targeted at different events

Why is this link building?

As they gained traction, people started talking about them because they had compelling content that was matched to the site they were on, the demographic of their business and they met their business needs.

Rebecca Kelley is speaking next.

Traditional link building sucks. It's time consuming, repetitive, risky and has low ROI. Obviously though, you need links. (You know the reasons why.)

Strategy one: Find brand mentions and ask for a link.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to find places mentioning "brand name" -linkdomain: -site:

Strategy two: Identify broken inbound links.

[Matt Cutts did a post on this technique.] You can contact those people to update or correct those links.

Strategy three: Take advantage of broken links to your competitors.

• No longer available/no longer offer [keyword]
• Contact site owner and ask them if they want to redirect to you instead
• Contact sites linking to that page and let them know you have a comparable product

Strategy four: Find out who is linking to your competitors and see if there is a reason they're not linking to you.

Strategy five: Take advantage of confirmation emails.

"If you have a Web site or a blog and you like us, please consider placing a link back to us." This is scalable strategy that gets you links that are editorial and relevant.

Strategy six: Embed links in widgets, badges, banners, etc.

• Create a quiz, poll or other shareable content
• Offer embeddable tools, programs
• Include a link back to your site

Strategy seven: Create some link bait.

• Brainstorm content and host it on your site
• Promote content via social media sites, forums, blogs, etc. Don't just assume you have to go to Digg. Your own niche probably has a social news site that you can put content on. Research your sector's link-worthiness. Discover the big players in your fields, what are they doing right? What can you emulate? Analyze the current trends. The election was a big topic for a while.

Rebecca offers up several tools and blog posts as resources but I can't actually type that many URLs with any kind of speed. Lisa may have them over at WBP.

Greg Hartnett from Best of the Web steps up to the plate.

Isn't a directory just a paid link? No way. Pay for placement vs. pay for review. BOTW has a no refund policy. You get the review but perhaps not the link. Neither is it just a link farm. The links are editorial in nature and organized, unlike a link farm.

The real question is how do you find a good directory?

• Have a history
• Contain great resources
• Have populated categories
• Are designed for the user
• Add lots of sites, not just paid submits

Overall, it's about common sense. Is it a labor of love? Is there commitment? Does it feel right to you?

What kind of traffic can you expect from a directory? It's not the Digg effect. What you get is targeted, qualified traffic. You can get your site listed multiple times through deep linking. You will need to have relevant content for the category.

Is the Yahoo Directory worth it? He thinks yes, broadly. It's an aged, trusted domain and a primary hub of Internet mapping.

Is the ODP corrupt? [Hee.] No, they're not. You might have heard of corrupt editors, people taking bribes, people who are anti-competitive. He's not saying that didn't happen. However, a few bad apples doesn't mean the whole thing is bad.

Most trustworthy directories:

• Yahoo
• DMOZ
• BOTW
• Business.com
• Librarian Internet Index -- LII.org (This directory is the hardest to get into.)

How can I ensure I'm going to be listed after paying the review fee?

There's no guarantee of listing. Follow the rules. Read the directory guidelines and give a good title and descriptions for your listings. Beef up your content.

Where can I submit my blog?

• Yahoo and DMOZ have categories
• BOTW has a category
• Lee Odden has a post on TopRankBlog

Roger Montti starts off by advising people to become an editor at DMOZ in order to get your site indexed. Chris says that's a good way not to be an editor anymore. Everyone's a comedian today.

On to the presentation.

There are two main link building initiatives: traffic and link popularity. Use links that you already have to prove authority in your link building.

.Edu links are not special. However, they're not usually in bad neighborhoods, and in maps of link relationships, they tend to fall outside of known clusters.

.Edus might not be good because: the pages aren't authoritative, the pages might be a link farm and the pages probably don't have good links themselves.

Charitable opportunities:

• Sponsor a conference or event to get links
• Search linkdomain:example.com site:.edu sponsors/donors or linkdomain:example.com site:.org sponsors/donors

Pay attention to where a site links. If they only link to .edu or .gov pages, they're probably not going to want to link to commercial sites.

Roger says that nearly every black hat strategy can be made white hat with nofollow attributes or by rendering the link with JavaScript.

These will bring you traffic but won't pass link popularity:

• Blog widgets
• Counters
• Calculators
• WordPress themes

Q&A

Chris asks if they've seen a shift in how people are willing to get links.

Roger says yes, people want white hat only links because Google is getting better and better at tracking them down. Eric thinks that more people are reporting competitors for spam. Greg thinks the days of "tricking" Google are over. The message of content is king isn't new, it's just that it's becoming the only way to work.

Chris asks the audience how many people think that the presences of links will bring you more traffic, not people clicking on the links but the actual presence. Does PageRank still work?

Greg says a link is a link is a link. On another panel, people were asking if nofollow links still have value. He says, yes. It's still a link. People can still follow it and come to your site.

Chris asks what the emerging trends are.

Rebecca says that widgets are popular still and they're still a good way to get links, despite the rash of spammy products out there.

Eric agrees that widgets are a smart way to distribute content. But he says they are not good for link building if you want to pass link popularity. You can still do it but it takes more work.

Roger thinks people are more open to forming relationships now and finding creative solutions using bartering.

What about reciprocal links?

Roger: If you're linking to a quality site, if a quality site is linking to you, I don't buy into that leaking popularity.

Greg: Some reciprocal linking is normal.

Rebecca reminds everyone that you need to link out. Don't worry about leaking link popularity. Greg agrees.

Eric: Think about it from a search engine perspective. You have a crawler and imagine you've hit a site that has no outbound links. That looks strange.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 2:28 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Linking Strategy, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008

Mostly Viral Top Traffic Alternatives, or SEO on a Shoestring Budget

Why are all these rooms so cold? I have my gloves back on again and I'm still shivering.

Carolyn Shelby is our moderator for this session. Speakers are Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com; Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear.com; Jessie Stricchiola, Founder & CEO, Alchemist Media, Inc.; and Gary Kirk, Co-Founder, Technical Director, Rating Room Ltd.

Gary Kirk is up first.

Three basics for a successful site:

• Good, relevant links to your Web site: He's not talking about that in this session.
• No obstacles to search engine spiders: He's not talking about this either.
• Content that attracts and converts: This one he's talking about.

Good content is available for $0 so he'll be concentrating on that. He's also focusing on local search because 90 percent of transactions are local.

Why is content king?

Google can't send valuable, relevant users to your site without it. It's a vital component in the decision making process for visitors. It doesn't have to cost a cent, but it is always worth investing time into. You're the best person to write it because you know your business. It doesn't have to cost anything because it should all already be in your head. It doesn't have to be terribly detailed either.

To beat the people above you, you need to look at the top ten results in Google. Local business are up against Yellow Pages, directories, Google Local/Maps, franchises, review sites and others. Sometimes Google does indeed value big sites more, so you'll have to pick your battles.

The way to do it is through content. You can be more granular. You know your business better than they do. You have a choice between being a provider or being THE provider. Good content on local business Web sites will reassure the visitor "this is the right service provider for me". When you get a testimonial, don't just publish it. Tell people what you did in that case by describing the services and process. The best that many non-local competitors can do is to provide a list of potential providers of the service.

Link to testimonials in two ways: with their name and location. This way you will get traffic from location-based searches and from service pages, so you should link with the service you provided.

Most local searches are unique and combine geography (town, country, state, neighborhood, zip code, etc.) with a service descriptor ("plumbing", "blocked sinks", etc.). You need to pick the ones that are you target area -- don't pick every query, but all the important ones. Once you have a decent list, take those to Google and do searches to see who your competitors are.

Rewards from local content:

• Conversion from visitor to customer can be remarkable for specific searches.
• Targeting lots of well researched text phrases can and often does work fast.
• Better organic results, often combined with PPC, can reduce overall ad costs.

Marty Weintraub is our next speaker. He engages in a little rant about how his blog vanished. Hee. He's so energetic.

He reads the session notes. He promises to keep this lily white. Nothing that you wouldn't tell your mom. Thanks, Marty!

Okay, the assumption is that you have you, your WordPress blog and a grudge.

Set up to publish quick, clean and viral. For this, we're assuming a primary and secondary publishing system. How do you mashup WordPress into your site? Integrate it to pull in headlines from your blog that will relate to the page content. Make sure you're publishing cleanly.

If you have existing content + fanatical attitude + half a brain = free content.

Figure out what you do already and who cares about it. What communications already emanating from our company might have viral proclivity if published properly? What if we could get others to champion our content? Email is the greatest social network.

[This all sounds much less amusing than it really is. It is, however, just as schizophrenic as it looks. Wish you were here.]

Good content can come from:

• Media relations
• Investor relations
• Community
• Customer
• Internal
• Human interests
• Public relations

Nuclear "send to friends" degrees of separations. Everyone you know knows someone else. Make them share it.

Believe in "signs of human life". Mash evidence of it onto PPC landing pages.

Viral means getting everyone else to do your work for you. Vanity bait with your business feed, talk about people you know, about your employee product recommendations, requests of input, link out to non-competitive and complimentary resources.

What's already going on?

• Owner's manual updates, product registration
• Any press releases
• Internal procedure and event logistics
• Product recall information and other disasters
• Weekly specials
• Annual report

Tips for content SEO sourcing, SEO success:

• Set up a schedule and stick to it. Example: every Tuesday at 1:00.
• Don't write the Magna Carta every time.
• List posts are famous for a reason.
• Link out/vanity bait other writers.

Time for a tactic. An experimental tactic. One that was talked about during the SMX Advanced. Oh, it's the one that Lisa called totally unethical. Hee. The nice part about this is that now I don't have to recap it. You all know where to find Lisa's rant about SMX, right? Don't worry, Lisa and Marty are BFFs now.

Brett Tabke wraps it up. His presentation is called "What if there were no search engines?"

Brett used to work for John Deere and they used to do awesome things online. Then one day the search engine traffic just vanished. What happened? The CMS was throwing 404 errors and there was no way to search. So if the search engines go away, where do you get your traffic?

Google generates 80 to 90 percent of search engine referral, depending on who you ask. Sixty-four percent of Internet users arrive at sites by direct navigation.

Where do you get your traditional traffic? From type-in traffic, from reciprocal link exchanges, strategic alliances. Directories still offer some traffic, but stay away from fake directories, affiliate farms and FFAs, top 100 sites, and awards managers.

[And they whine about nofollow links on Twitter profiles. Am I the only one who thought that was awesome?]

Sources of traffic:

• Press releases and the local paper are low cost alternatives.
• Contests can be good lead generators. You need to do you homework first or you'll run into legal issues or management issues.
• Awards are old and directed but they still work.
• Guest books are still out there. They tend to work better for female centric sites.
• E-greeting cards are dead in Brett's opinion.
• Email newsletters still work, but they have a downside: huge commitment, monthly work, labor intensive.
• Send to a friend.
• Kids! They're great at viral marketing. They swap SMS messages and mention and recommend products.
• Pete and Repeat.
• Usenet and forums. Always check the TOS of sites to see what is acceptable. There is little that is more powerful than a good old profile referral.
• Coupons. Nearly 20 percent of U.S. Internet users have redeemed a coupon online. Sixty percent of Pubcon attendees used a coupon.

[I just noticed that Brett isn't using the official Pubcon PPT template. Branding fail.]

Giveaways are big.
Blogs are great.
Traditional offliners work -- classifieds, trade magazines, radio and TV commercials.

The main thing is that once you get people to your site you need to DO something with them. Give them great service. Email, email, email. Speed. Answer quick and give them a real response.

An audience member suggests sending out reminder emails halfway through the month to get people to come read your monthly newsletters.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Linking Strategy, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks

Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All

No fancy intro here, just right to the content. The moderator for this panel is Rand Fishkin. Speakers are super funny Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optimization Architect, Microsoft; Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Google; and Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search. Rahul Lahiri, VP of Search Product Management, Ask, is a might show. Hmm.

Ben D'Angelo is up first. He's been with Google a little more than three years. I think that means he went to Google straight out of grade school.

What are duplicate content issues? There are actually multiple disjoint problems.

• Duplicate content within your site or sites:
  • Multiple URLs point to the same page or similar pages
  • Different countries (same language)
• Duplicate content across other sites:
  • Syndicated content
  • Scraped content

The guiding principle behind the search engines' indexing is ONE URL for one piece of content. Why? Because users don't like duplicates in results. It saves resources in Google's index, leaving more room for other pages from your site. And it saves resources on their server. [So Ben is telling us to keep duplicate content low to save Google money? Man, that stock price must really be suffering.]

Sources of duplicate content:

• Multiple URLs pointing to the same page
  • www vs. non-www
  • Session IDs, URL parameters
  • Printable versions of pages
  • CNAMEs
• Similar content on different pages
  • Manufacturer's databases
  • Different countries

How does Google handle this? They cluster like content and pick the best representative. There are variations on this depending on where it is in the pipeline. Different filters are used for different types of duplicate content. In general, it's just a filter and it's not going to destroy your site.

The problem comes in when Google doesn't choose the page you want or makes a mistake in clustering. You need to take back control.

Use 301 redirects for exact duplicates, like tracking URLs, and to solve www vs. non-www issue. You can also address exact duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools, but that only solves the problem for Google. He demos briefly.

For near duplicates, no index or block with robots.txt. Things like printer pages and site clones should have this.

Domains by country are a little different. Different languages are not duplicate content. Same language, different country? Don't worry about it -- the right one will usually be okay. You can geo-target in GWT or use different TLDs to help Google recognize where the content belongs. Best of all is creating unique content for that country.

Leave out URL parameters if you can. Put that data into a cookie instead.

In Webmaster Tools you can check for all sorts of other problems too, like duplicate Title and Meta data. Fix those things.

If another site has content that duplicates yours, there's less that you can do.

Duplicate content from syndication should include a link back to your site to make the canonical origin clear. Another option is to syndicate different content than what you publish on your site. If you're publishing content you have syndicated, manage your expectations.

Don't worry about scrapers or proxies too much. They generally don't affect your rankings. If you're concerned, file a DMCA request or a spam report with Google.

Duplicate content best practices:

• Avoid duplicate content in the first place.
• Generate unique, compelling content for users.
• Don't be overly concerned with duplicate content.
• Let us know about any issues at the Webmaster Help Forum.

You can always check out the Webmaster Central Blog and check out the Webmaster discussion group.

Priyank Garg is next up. He's got a sore throat so he'll be brief. His voice is all scratchy. Aw.

Much of this will be similar to Ben's presentation -- I'll pull out the Yahoo-specific stuff. Like Google, Yahoo filters at several places in the pipeline. Session IDs and other "content neutral" parameters can really hurt your crawl queue. They might never get to the rest of your content because they're crawling the same page over and over with a session ID. "Soft" 404 pages can also cause duplicate content problems. Repeated elements (perhaps with just a keyword replace) lead to problems.

Abusive dupes include scrapers/spammers, weaving and stitching, etc.

• Slurp supports wildcards in robots.txt.
• Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to delete URLs or an entire path from the index for authenticated sites.
• Use the robots-nocontent tag on non-relevant parts of a page.
  • Robots-nocontent can be used to mark out boilerplate content
  • Robots-nocontent can be used for syndicated content that may be useful to the user in context but not for search engines.

You can do dynamic URL rewriting in Site Explorer. Tell them which parameters are content neutral for your sites:

• Ability to indicate parameter to remove URLs from site
• More efficient crawl with less duplicates
• Better site coverage as fewer resources are wasted on duplicates
• Fewer risks of crawler traps
• Cleaner URL, easier for user to read and more likely to be clicked
• Better ranking due to reduced link juice fragmentation -- it's equivalent to 301ing all the duplicates back to one URL, saves time because they don't have to crawl it

Derrick Wheeler is up. Here's a bit of vintage Derrick for you all: "This crowd is a perfect Web site. You're all unique. I would crawl, index and rank all of you." Rand interjects "That's dirty." Derrick: "But I wouldn't click or take action." Hee.

Final points (he likes to get these done first):

• Consider search engine crawler detection
• Know your parameters
• Link to URLs with parameters always in the same order
• Dig deep into search results for your domain
• Exclude duplicates by robots.txt first, Meta Robot exclusion second, and nofollow link attribute last
• Don't assume engines can't follow JavaScript
• Get a regular crawl report of your Web site
  • Request a tab file that includes: referring URL, fetched URL, redirect path with type, landing URL with status code, Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords
  • Open file using Excel 2007, sort by Title then landing URL
  • Review suspect URLs to look for dupes
• Focus on your strengths

Look for spider traps, adding a parameter and creating new pages every time you go back and forth several times.

Make sure that when you're creating sites for users, you still avoid spider traps. Just because you don't think the search engines will need to index it, doesn't mean that you don't have other pages that the search engines won't get to because they're busy with your trap.

Document why you're doing things. One site removed session IDs for search engines and got 10 million pages indexed. Down the line, someone forgot why it had been done, started giving session IDs to the engines again and their index pages plummeted again.

Look for things that might be causing problems, like dynamic breadcrumbs, based on how someone clicked through the site (Brookstone does this), related products, etc. They might be helpful for users but you're probably going to get into trouble. Make your internal linking consistent and useful. Some products might be able to live in multiple categories, but you need to make a decision.

Anytime you see related, sort or compare, think "possible duplicate content". When you see "select region" or "sign in", think duplicate content. Disallow those pages in your robots.txt. "Email an article", "send to a friend" -- think duplicate content.
Once you screw up the parameter order, it's hard to fix. Keep it consistent.

Use absolute links, not relative links, especially when switching between http:// and https://. Other people could link to you with https:// as well and you can't really do anything about that.

Priyank suggests going after the low-hanging fruit. Try the dynamic URLs first so that you can see the benefit right away.

Brent Payne asks: How do you credit a story properly when you're the Chicago Tribune? Can I get a link attribute or something? Just linking back doesn't work. Google tells me it's not a big deal but it is.

There's not so much that the reps can say to that. They're trying and he's already doing the right thing. Poor Brent.

Derrick doesn't think there is a solution right now. (He also reminded everyone that he's an in-house SEM, not a search engine representative.)

How detrimental are different link IDs?

Priyank: Every different URL linking to the same content is duplicate content. That's why you should use dynamic URL rewriting.

Ben: We try to handle that automatically. We might have to crawl the page once but we try to learn which parameters don't affect the page content.

[Most of these questions are site specific, so I'm skipping them.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 12:06 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks, Yahoo

PubCon Keynote: Satya Nadella

Last day! I'm so excited, it's actually kind of pathetic. All I want to do is go home and watch all the TiVo that's been piling up. But before I can do that, we have six sessions to get through so let's not dilly dally.

Today's keynote is by Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, MSN Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft, which is a lot of commas to have in one title.

He's got two topics today: the evolution of search, specifically about what they're doing at Microsoft, and the evolution of services.

Consumer Web ecosystem: Advertisers < -- > Services < -- > Publishers

Services happen at three levels. At the base is a core infrastructure level, above that is an audience level, and finally, an ad platform level. What we're going to see more of is an increasing opening up of scale.

Evolution of Search

He says this is not keynote-level information, but it gives a base to start from. We get a little bit of a history lesson on how search has changed since the industry began -- the changes in the consumer, the market and the search technology itself.

The real question is what's next? Search is driven by the feedback loop of data. About half of users are doing long research sessions of 30 minutes or more. Half are also resuming previous research. A typical research session might take an hour or more, from research words down through the buying cycle.

comScore did a study where they connected latent behavior with the active behavior. The idea is that search engines need to do things to facilitate task completion.

There are three things that the search engines need to get a deeper understanding of in order to solve this problem: queries, content (beyond text) and actions. They're having to connect keywords to semantics.

The next evolution of search technology is rich semantics and user experience. For the consumer, what they'll begin to expect is not merely answers found but tasks completed. To monetize this, the engines will be looking at paid engagement, growing visibility for advertisers and being more proactive in terms of giving the publishers tools.

It's not just a back end technology that they need, it's an increase in user experience. They need to figure out the problem of how do you provide a rich experience through a relatively simple interface.

There's a lot of innovation and testing to be done before they get to this point.

Live Search is focused on:

• Delivering the best search results: The acquisition of Powerset was done so they could apply the natural language processing to the core search. They want to change the definition of relevance. They don't look just at the text results in terms of delivering the best results -- they include images and video in that, too.
• Simplifying key tasks: They are moving from a single query to a session model, defining the difference between commercial and non-commercial domains. It's a broad definition of definition that includes anything with high user engagement and high user task.
• Innovate in the business model: Live Search's cashback program is part of this initiative.

He says they're keeping pace with the leaders in the industry. Aw, so cute.

Satya brings Alexandra Mickel onto the stage for some demos. She does a search for the Bellagio as an image search. They've integrated Virtual Earth into image results. There are refinement tools on the side -- like Ask's refinement, but green instead of red.

Image results have an infinite scroll button. Okay, that's cool.

Travel results include Farecast. Actually, I'm sure that there are people who are using Live that don't know about Farecast, so this is useful for them.

Product results in general search: Results include images, buying guides, and Sitelinks (or whatever Live calls them) for the Canon Web site. Product search has integrated cashback into it so you can see where you're going to get a better deal.

...and now we're looking at Hotmail. That reminds me, I should check my Hotmail so that I don't lose that account. It's been a few months. I'm ignoring the rest of this part of the pitch. Something about that weird sidebar they've added. Hotmail will forever remind me of high school. I'm getting emails about my reunion again. I have no interest in talking to those girls.

Okay, video search! They have that mouse over playback thing, which is kinda neat. They're doing integrations of popular TV shows. Hmm, may have to check that out when I can't get my TiVo fix.

Satya takes back the mic. They release new things every six months, but they are always trying to innovate on relevance. Their Fall '08 release is the stuff that Alexandra just showed us. He'd like you to give Live search a shot for just one day and email him your results. I'm not mean enough to include his email here. Comment below and I'll email him for you!

Now he wants to talk about the cashback program. They're looking to bring the research mode into the buying mode. The primary purpose of a search engine is to bring you information, so they see cashback as a way to integrate advertising into the research part of the cycle without being jarring.

They measure success in three ways:

• Consumer choice: 30 percent increase in products offered
• Advertiser ROI: eBay improved ROI by 50 percent (and other success stories as well)
• Query growth: 4.5 million unique users per month using cashback, referring 13 percent of total online spending. Live Search ranks as the number one engine by commercial dollars spent per player

All those facts can be found in the press release coming out today.

Live Search's new release is Project Silk Road, a service for developers and publishers. It is a broad project in the context of opening up and enabling developer and publisher information. [I'm getting lost in all the buzz words.] They have three goals for the project: increase engagement, generate traffic and drive insight.

Their overall goal is to boost agility and control. There's a whole cloud of technologies they're using to get to that, including APIs, FAST, Instant Answers, etc. The uber goal is to enable publishers to take advantage of the data and platforms that they have built.

Bringing all that together will enable users and publishers to boost productivity. Using Azure to extend site data into the cloud, FAST and SharePoint services to enable powerful site search.

Today they're announcing the next generation of APIs: API 2.0 It's available today from the Live Search Webmaster Center works and that it can find 404 errors for you. No new information here.

The adCenter plugin for Excel is actually good, and if you're advertising with them, you should go get it. Even if you're not, it's got keyword research potential for SEO.

Okay, Alexandra went away again.

Satya says that the keyword intelligence from the Excel tool can help you create a good user experience in your own site. He urges you to sign up for adCenter. I do too. It's their best product.

And we're done. No questions? Okay then.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 11:35 AM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Live Search, Liveblog, Microsoft, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008

The Secret Life of On-Site Search Exposed

Last session of the day! Yay! The room is pretty empty right now. I think everyone is over in the Five Bloggers and a Microphone session. Lisa's recapping that one, so you lucky people get to "attend" both through the magic of liveblogging. Over here, we have Jessica Bowman moderating with speakers Laura Dansbury, SEO Manager, CafePress; Marc Cull, Senior Manager, Ecommerce Technology, CafePress; and William Leake, CEO, Apogee Search.

Laura Dansbury is first. She gives us a few stats on CafePress. The gist is they have millions of possible products for customers. They rely on on-site search to get them to the right one.

Search is the voice of the customer. You have three ways to listen and respond: on-site search, SEO and SEM.

Once a customer reaches your page, if the landing page isn't quite right, they have to either navigate or use the on-site search. On-site search and SEO benefit from the same sort of best practices. Redirect old content to help both. Use features like taxonomy and tag clouds to help users.

You need to measure SEO, SEM and on-site search both independently and comparatively. If your on-site search isn't converting as well as your PPC, that's a problem. Same goes with SEO and on-site search. Look for opportunities. You'll get shared insights.

Make your internal search behaviors act like the general search engines. Suggestions for misspellings make sense to have on both. Develop special features similar to SEM & banner ads. Offer both product and document results in the online store of large corporate sites.

Consider integrating different types of information in your search. Along with products, you should also have images and help and explanations. Be flexible in your AND logic vs. OR logic -- graceful expansion is the key.

How can you avoid internal silos that keep paid, organic and on-site goals from each other? Leverage relationships, have regular meetings, and share information across teams.

Aw, Kate Morris should be here. Laura's using Twilight as an example of multi-purpose landing pages. That's a bunch of pale people right there.

Marc Cull is up next. Maybe he'll have more Twilight!

CafePress first approached search through scale, then optimizing, then integration.

Marc talks fast. Slow down and enunciate, dude. I can't keep up this late in the day.

They have had 40 million unique search terms in the last four years and 2 million unique terms daily. Three of the 2 million terms make up 5 percent of the daily searches. If they can get those three terms, they're pretty good. Yesterday those terms were "Obama", "Barack Obama" and "Twilight". Nice.

Unique terms are only used once on average. The average lifespan of a product on the site is only one hour. It's not just finding the right page, it's about finding it at the right time. As a result, they have to publish in real-time. Once a product is added to the site, it's immediately available in the search.

In order to answer the problem of search, you need to aggregate or segment the traffic.

They use the same landing pages for off-site search as on-site search. It gives them more bang for their buck.

Bill Leake comes in to finish off the day. He's doing this sans power point. Because he hates bloggers.

Oh heavens, it's worse than I thought. He's just traveling through ...ooh shoes! We're on Zappos and using their site search.

He thinks the world is about to change. Google wants to organize the world's information. La, la, amusing Google bashing. Hee.

Okay, same search for Zappos. This time we'll use the embedded search in this site box from the SERPs. Lots of blue links. Paid links, too.

Google is taking the search out of your hands even on your own site. It might not deliver the "right" page for your users.

Bill has just gone off the rails entirely.

Every page on your site needs to be ready to stand alone and be a conversion page.

You don't get to decide anymore where people are coming into the site. You have to be ready to greet your visitors no matter where they're entering the site.

Bill is now suggesting that Google is trying to chase down old competitors in general search who have retreated into enterprise search. They need to hunt them down and make sure they're destroyed. Because they can't be trusted not to do evil.

There really are good points in all of this, but it's lost in the Google ranting.

Good night, everyone.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/13/08 at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, On-Site Search, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008

November 12, 2008

How to Move Your Web Site without Chaos

Zero minutes between sessions is not good! Also it's cold. And my wrists hurt. And other complaints that you've heard from me before.

Jake Baillie, Managing Director, STN Labs, is pulling double duty today as moderator and speaker. Also speaking is Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI and Ralf Schwoebel Founder & CEO, Tradebit Inc. Ralf is actually presenting in this panel and in another panel this session. Wow. That's better than Andy Langton, who isn't here at all.

Ralf Schwoebel is going first, because of the aforementioned doublebooking.

Reasons to move your site:

• More than three downtimes in the last three months
• Scalability
• Operating System change
• Space requirements

Requirements of the process:

• No down-time
• Database integrity
• Within short time frame
• SERPs preservation

Concepts of moving:

• Sudden death: "this domain has moved and your name server doesn't know -- come back later"
• Slow death nameserver switched - both servers deliver the same pages, orders might be messed up.
• New domain - "this domain has moved here..." - redirects, links
• Tunnel view - Reverse proxy setup on old IP to the new one

Prepare the new site -- in peace

Edit your hosts file to point to the new server and double-check your set up. There was more on that slide but Ralf is zipping right through. He's got places to be, after all.

You should test all aspects of your Web application once you move. This includes: Installed mods, language, dynamic pages, database, tools like ffmpeg, file system/OS and drives / storage.

The tough part is moving databases. If you run a larger e-commerce site, you might have a large databse with orders coming in very minute. What now?

• Disable the order process for "maintenance"
• Dump the DB
• Copy and load the dump
• Flip the switch.

For 30 GB, it took 180 minutes. Pretty fast.

For those with no downtime, there's the slow death method:
After the new server is prepared and up, move the database like described above, change database host in application to remote, change DNS entries

For the tunnel view, switch off the webserver on the old serve, fire up the reverse proxy (Squid, nginx, IP tables, Apache, others), change the DNS entries. Easy-peasy.

Now he's got to go. Bye, Ralf!

Oh, hey, Andy's back! Hi, Andy. But before we get to Andy, it's time for Guillaume Bouchard.

Things to do during the pre-move:

When starting the pre-move, you have to take into account the need vs risk in switching domain names. The first question is do you really need to change the domain name? No, really, do you NEED to change the domain names? Think about this. Is this the brilliant brain child of some marketing exec who has no clue of how the internet works?

Answer: Probably.

Fight to death to avoid weak reasons for changing the domain name. Tell your boss:

• Rankings will inevitably going to drop, temporarily
• Chances are when rankings return, they won't be as strong as before
• There is a fair amount of work involved
• There is a fair amount of risk that it won't be done right
• If it's not done right, rankings might tank for months and months.

There are a lot of steps to taking in switching domain names, and it's easy to miss one. Seriously, don't take the risk if you don't have to.

But if you simply must, here's some things to consider:

Nature of the move (whole or partial transfer)

• Shifting to a new domain and transferring all content
• Shifting to a new domain and transferring partial content
• Splitting off some content to a new domain for RP or marketing purposes
• Splitting to a new domain and changing URI structure
• Splitting to a new domain and changing content

In each case you would need to do 301s properly.

What to expect in terms of indexing time and rankings:

Indexing time for a new domain after the old site has been redirected:

• Google: one month
• Yahoo: one to three months
• Microsoft: Quick indexing, less than a month

To get rankings back:

• Google two to four months
• Yahoo: one month
• Microsoft: one month

Make sure you're pointing links at your new page. Seriously.

Registration of the domain and the IP neighborhood.

Make sure it's really new, not just burned and dumped by a spammer in the past. Do a bit of research. Do the same with your IP neighborhood. Use seoegghead.com to find out what's hosted on that IP.

Some people recommend registering a domain for at least two years before you move to it. Rand says to post in Google's webmaster forum. Guilliame thinks that's pretty much just something that works because he's Rand. Hee.

The Move:

Before any content is moved to the new domain, TEMPORARILY block search engines from indexing with Robots.txt. Do NOT forget to take it down again later.
Be careful of your database, and test test test. Use comprehensive 301 redirects for each type of content move. And please don't rush. You only have one chance to do it right.

Post move:

Ask your biggest referrers to update their links to the new site. Launch your new domain with a bang - include press releases and news mentions and linkbait, etc. etc... This is a good time to try for really good new links.

Maintain the old site and 301 redirect for an extended period. Minimum 6 months but he recommended never taking down the 301s.

Andy Langton ...is so forgiven for being late. Cutest accent ever. This is the best session. German Ralf, Quebecois Guillaume and English Andy. [girlie happy sigh][*insert jealousy on behalf of the rest of the writers*]

Do 301s still rule the day? Yes.

Even well planned migrations go wrong. The only way to ensure rankings are maintained is not to change them. Cool URIs don't change, so plan for permanence.

A 301 is a permanent move (check out all the status codes on the W3C site). Use the new URL in the future, not the old one.

301s can preserve ranking signals. It's more than just links. It's history and trust and analytics data. That's all tied into the URL. [Ooh, good point.] Theoretically, a 301 will maintain all those things but it's no guarantee.

When should you use a 301?

Whenever your URLs that don't change, change:

• Domain names
• Content into a subdomain (or vice versa)
• Moving pages or files
• To avoid duplication problems

How to implement 301s:

• Best way: mod_rewrite, mod_alias (apache) or an ISAPI filter (IIS)
• On Web server (eg for IIS)
• Via "smart 404 pages"
• Via individual server-side scripts. Not good in bulk.
• Meta Refresh=0 [Google and Yahoo claim it works but the audience here is skeptical of this.]

Best practices:

• The goal is to preserve ranking signals so redirect to same or similar content.
• Don't chain redirects.
• Avoid blanket redirects (many pages to one page).

At minimum, focus on pages with external links and visitor entry points.

404 or 410 if similar content isn't available anymore. If you have pages without external links, don't worry about redirecting those. You can fix any links heading to that page internally.

Monitor impact:

• Crawling activity
• Indexing activity
• Rankings, traffic and other existing KPIs (Web analytics)

Q&A

What if you want to take down a 301?
Andy: Try not to do that.

Is there a danger in having a lot of 301s in an .htaccess file?
Guillaume: Only from a speed standpoint, yes. Use regular expressions to avoid that if you can.
Andy: They'll probably look at it case by case rather than a numeric limit. It's more about linking to similar content.

What about changing shopping cart software?
Guillaume thinks that would be even faster than changing domains because Google still trusts it. Submit your XML sitemap and it should be fine.
For a new web site, submit to the social networks, not to try to rank on Digg but just to get a few links and hope you don't get buried. They get indexed a lot so you're link will get picked up fast too. Heh.

My new domain is 302ing to my old domain: is that good, bad or indifferent?
Andy: That's fine. 302 is temporary, it basically just says 'keep checking back here for the original content.'
Guillaume: It's not bad but I'd put up a wordpress blog up instead and throw up a few pages of content with a call to action. Get some trust.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/12/08 at 4:39 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008

Alternative Discovery & SEO: Feeds, PDFs & Blog SEO

Back from yet another dismal boxed lunch. Honestly, food shouldn't be so depressing. Or soggy. Significantly less depressing than lunch? Moderator Joe Laratro and speakers Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts, George Aspland Founder & President, eVision, LLC and Greg Jarboe President and co-founder, SEO-PR, seo-pr.com. Rick Klau from Google didn't make it.

Bear with me, my computer refused to turn back on after lunch so it had to be punished with a hard reboot. We're still trying to make up the lost progress.

George Aspland is up first to teach us about optimizing PDFs. His goal is to teach us how to get higher rankings and more click-throughs from SERP listings for PDFs and also how to take advantage of active links in PDFs.

His advice is to use mostly formatted as text. Just like in HTML, search engines can't read text as an imagine. What you get when you do that is just page numbers being indexed which isn't useful to rank for anything.

Also, optimize the text in the document. Pay special attention to the headline in a PDF. Like regular results, Google includes snippets from the PDF and puts the words and phrases of the query in bold.

It's very important to update the Document Title. It's just as important as the Title tag is on a Web Page. Double check to be sure that you've put in a proper Title. If not, it will just choose a title for you from the text in the PDF (usually the first headline), which will not entice people to click-through to this document.

To update the Title in Word 2003, just go to File, Properties and fill in the proper box. It's better to update your title in Acrobat. Word will put "Microsoft Word" in front of your Title which isn't optimal.

How to get your PDF indexed: Link to it from one or more pages that already indexed. Simple.

In order to take advantage of active hyperlinks, you have to make them in the first place: For text URLs, format the look of your URLs (Acrobat won't make it blue and underlined), export/print as PDF, Open with Acrobat Standard or Pro. In Pro: Advanced > Links > Create from URLs.

Adding links gives search engines a way to travel out of the PDF and onto the site. This is good for PDFs that you're keeping on your site as well as ones that you're distributing to customers.

You can promote your PDF by linking to it from multiple pages on your site and by getting other sites to link to it too.

Download "Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines - 2008" from their blog: evisionsem/blog

Greg Jarboe is our next speaker.

His first point is that 30 percent of searches on Google sites aren't web searches. It's a percentage that's only increasing. 15 percent are video searches.

Optimizing .docs

Google News pulls press releases, which are usually given to the wire services as Word docs. It's time stamped, so recent is better. You would optimize your press release like any other Web page, so use your keywords. Also in Google News, headlines count more than Body copy. The first paragraph is worth more than the last paragraph.

Google Blog Search examines a blog's title, content and popularity. It indexes blogs by their feeds which will be checked frequently for new content. Blog searches reward recent posts and tend to be indexed faster than regular Web search.

CEO Watch used SEO Samba to optimize their Web site and RSS feeds and saw a traffic jump over time.

YouTube examines dozens of aspects including hits and rating. YouTube gets more searches per month than Yahoo. If you're not in video, you're missing out on the second biggest search audience.

What's different about what they look at:

• Hits
• Comments
• Ratings

You have to have views before you'll get rankings, and you have to allow comments or it won't do well.

Universal search incorporates all of the "other stuff" that's in the 30 percent of other search. It's not just about optimizing for that 30 percent, it's about the fact that that 30 percent is creeping into the 70 percent.

Stephan Spencer is next.

More people use Blogger than Movable Type in this audience. Almost everyone uses Wordpress. [Maybe now I can convince IT to change us over to WordPress.]

Big SEO mistakes for bloggers:

• Leaving the Title Tags auto-generated
• Squandering your "crawl equity" by letting pages get indexed that don't deserve to be.
• Having multiple homes for your blog (www vs non-www).
• Not using Optional Excerpt to minimize duplicate content.
• Not using rel=no follow.
• Overreliance on date-based archives.
• No stability in keyword focus on category & tag pages (fix with sticky posts).
• Suboptimial URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories).
• Only one RSS feed and it's un-optimized.
• Hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don't own.
• Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally.

Rejig internal linking structure

• Tag clouds and Tag pages and tag conjunction pages -- carefully. With great power comes great responsibility.
• Related posts
• Top 10 posts
• Next & Previous / pagination

Use the Web Developer for Firefox on your pages to spot overuse of links. Also? Use a sticky post on your tag pages so that the first post will always set your keyword theme.

You also need to optimize your Title and URLs. A good headline doesn't mean you'll have a good Title tag. Use rel=no follow to direct your PageRank.

Other hints for optimizing your Blog's:

For your Titles:

• Thin Slicing: make quick decisions, don't over think.
• Only really works if you're an expert.
• SEO Title Tags plugin for WP will allow you to mass edit Title tags.
• Name your blog something with good keywords.

Optimize your URLs:

• Shorter URLs get twice as many clicks as longer URLs in the SERPs.
• Subdomains/subdirectories/newdomains? Figure it out from your business rules.
• Rewrite to contain keywords, hyphens not underscores
• Test and optimize

Optimize your anchor text:

• Make the post's title a link to the permalink page
• Use SEOMoz Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool or BLA
• (tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) to look for links

Minimize Duplicate Content:

• Use Optional Excerpts -- paraphrase the post and only put the content on the permalink page.
• Your dates should not be H1 tags
• Use emphasis tags

Optimize your RSS feeds:

• Full text, not summaries
• 20 or more items in your feed
• Multiple feed (by category, latest comments, comments by post)
• Keyword-rich items
• Your brand name in the item
• Your most important keyword in the site container
• Don't use source tracking parameters.
• Fix your description field

For a bunch of goodies about optimizing your blog, email him at SEO@Netconcepts.com

Q&A

Why would you want to do full text when the scrapers are going to steal it?

Stephan: it's going to happen no matter what. You're going to frustrate your core audience with a summary feed. I wouldn't worry about the scrapers. They can scrape the HTML just as easily. Put a link or a photo in the bottom of your posts so that they're linking back to you when they repost it.

Does changing the slug 301 the old URL to the new one?

Stephan: Yes. In fact it links from the original to whatever the newest one is, not just to the one right after it.

We already have RSS feeds with information, should we have a blog with that same information?
Greg: Do commentary on the information, not just republish it.
Stephan: Think of your blog as a microsite for those links.

Is there any value in putting current content into a PDF?
George: It creates duplicate content.

Where is the Optional Excerpt?
Stephan: It's on the update page but you also need to update the template to 'if it's not the permalink page and optional excerpt is defined, use it'.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/12/08 at 3:19 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Blogging, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, SEO Tips & Tricks

The Big Dedicated Server Payoff

There was no passing period between session one and session two. I ended up having to sprint. It wasn't pretty, folks. But now we're here with speakers Alexander Barbara CEO, ReidBrown Enterprises, Inc., Jeremy Wright CEO, B5media and moderator Roger B. Dooley, so let's not dwell on having no time and just get started.

Roger begins by saying dedicated servers are fun and addictive. [I say, like potato chips? Or doll collecting?]

Alexander Barbara is up first. He's going to talk about when his company hit the tipping point and had to get their own server. Their server was slow and the down time was losing them more money than they were getting credited.

Instead, they wanted a fast site with high uptime. Their server had to have great support and room for growth. The speed was important because ads and analytics are often the last thing to load. They had to weigh the pros and cons of different servers, like:

A "Virtual" private server

• Dedicated meets Shared -- lots of people on one server but with root access
• Often oversold
• Resources - $
• Know what you're getting

Dedicated vs Shared

• 100% resources available (vs. .4%)
• 100% control
• 100% responsibility

They wanted a managed dedicated server. Someone able to migrate sites, update software, troubleshoot and offer phone support. For them the bottom line was that the speed of the site affected revenue.

There are some things you have to do in order to figure out the right server:

• Do a speed check. How many backbones do they have?
• Do an example IP traceroute.
• Also consider database/software vs static.
• Pageviews.

There are alternatives to changing to a dedicated server, though. You can reduce images, JavaScript, etc. You can also optimize your HTML and CSS. Also host your images and video separately. [ED: Don't do that last one. Not good for blended search]

Dedicated is not necessarily:

• More reliable than shared
• Needed for high traffic
• Better for SEO

Questions to ask your potential server host:

• How often do they do back ups and do they have limits?
• Do they have an uptime service level agreement?
• Are they in the data center? Can someone go push a button for you?
• Site uptime monitoring? A decent host should know your site is down before you do.

It's also a good idea to ask for references. There's a forum on Webmaster World just for dedicated servers. Find out how old the servers are. The newer the better. Also, what's the cost and availability of IPs and C-Blocks?

If you're getting a VPS, know how many instances are on a box. Check to see what your guaranteed amount of RAM is. You'll need a separate DNS server or it'll slow you down. And of course, find out if there's a money back guarantee. Look for someone who is willing to stand behind their product.

For managed hosting: You need to ask, will they compile and install custom software? Is their support 24/7 (and check their response time. Put in a ticket just to check.) Is phone support available?

Those with add on costs: CPanel, WHM, Fantastico, Plesk, etc
Microsoft (IIS / ASP .NET / MSSQL) will require licenses.

No one can guarantee 100% uptime. Not even Rackspace, who is extremely reliable. Keep that in mind when you're looking.

The bottom line is that you need to find something that meets your needs, which is still cost-effective. Focus on the things that matter to you.

Jeremy Wright follows Alexander. Ooh, confidential non-bloggable information. You wish you were here.

His blog network has gone to 350 blogs on 10 boxes. Servers matter, because what they do is serve content. So uptime is super important.

They went from one server to three servers to many more to a whole buncha lotta. In every case, they hit problems and they kept outgrowing their space.

For them:

• Quality is more important than price -- Ask for an RFP, low quality responses there is a clue. They put out a request for RFPs, got 400 responses and found 12 that were worth it. Give them two weeks as a trial. If you don't like them then, things are only going to get worse.
• Get referrals -- but realize that everyone is going to have bad reviews unless they're a tiny shop.
• Know what you NEED vs what you WANT
• Don't switch to dedicated too soon
• Go with a larger shop vs a smaller one

Biggest mistakes that they made:

• Didn't plan for growth.
• Moved to dedicated hosting too soon (could have moved to a large shared hosting account, saved tech $).
• Stayed with bad providers too long (hint: when the power goes out in your data center more than once? MOVE).
• Overpaid for managed hosting when a full-time tech resource would have been cheaper (and then they hired one anyway).
• Didn't use RFPs until this year to get the best pricing and service they could.

Beyond Dedicated:

Don't buy unless you have to. Use "lease to own" (almost the same price as dedicated, but with more control and actual long-term $ value). Find (independently of the vendor) similar clients at their datacenters and talk to them. Consider combining forces with another similar-sized company to save $ and share resources.

David Driskill who was scheduled to be here is mysteriously absent so Roger gets to talk. He follows up on Alexander's presentation by emphasizing the importance of fast page loads. He also suggests that you ask about the internal migration policy is, find out if they're doing it for you or if they're just going to leave you hanging. Be wary if your hosting company gets bought.

How do you publish to get RFPs? Jeremy says they post to WebhostingTalk.com, Webmaster World, SitePoint and they issue press releases.

Q&A

How do you determine cost effectiveness?

Alex: For us it was a case of how much were we losing during downtime.

Where can you get tech guys instead of managed?

Jeremy: Search for managed server support. It's an industry and you can get everything from one guy to the big firms in India. Your hosting company might have references too.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/12/08 at 12:07 PM | Comments (1)
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Brand Management

Somehow, even though we had half an hour between the keynote and the first session, it doesn't feel like any time at all.

Speakers Brian Combs, Senior VP & Chief Futurist, Apogee Search; Lauren Vaccarello, Director of Publishing, Forex Capital Markets LLC; Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC; and Jessica L. Bowman, Founder and President, SEOinhouse.com with moderator Joe Laratro are the entertainment experts for this brand management session. I think Jessica is still writing her presentation. Everyone else is discussing the order in which they want to present.

Joe says that of the four presentations, two are going to be very broad and two are going to be very specific, so we're going to start with the two broads. [He means Lauren and Jessica... Oh, Joe.]

Jessica Bowman steps up.

Yesterday we started talking about the halo effect. You need to create a consistent customer experience. You might have a grip on your customer service line, on your news cycle, or on the real world locations, but you might not have taken into account the SERPs and social media.

Traditional media gives you less than 50 percent of the halo, and that's going to be decreasing over time. It's super easy these days to complain online to a lot of people at once. If you get on the wrong side of a Guy Kawasaki, your complaint goes to the masses.

Last night's packed Zappos party was only advertised on Twitter.

The iPhone makes it even easier to surf and post and review things. It used to be, you'd have to wait to get home and your anger would have time to calm down. Not anymore.

British Airways had employees on Facebook who were commenting and it actually damaged their reputations. Virgin Atlantic fired 13 employees for negative comments. It probably isn't malicious, it's just venting to friends.

You need to train your company:

• Great customer service needs to be company culture.
• Train all customer touch points on how to handle customers -- especially those who WILL go post things online.
• It's too easy for anyone to complain, to thousands of people.
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • iPhone

Establish boundaries and rules.

Add guidelines for online commenting and blogging to your employee handbook.

Grant access to social media sites and allow employees to access social media sites to monitor buzz.

Monitor and report what's being said.

Jessica had a problem with her airline so she started dreaming about what she'd do if she had time:

• Comments at Yahoo and Google Local
• Comment on her blog
• Twitter update (which pushes out to Facebook)
• AdWords ad with the complaint
  • Primary purpose: To get the attention of a VP who can instill change
  • If on a budget, she'd geo-target the ad to appear only where the company is headquartered

Complaints need to be addressed before they become complaint sites.

Lauren Vaccarello is up next. She's an SEO mercenary. Like CShel!

Lauren will be sharing tips for maintaining and defending your brand. The best offense is a good defense.

Get the best players:

• Buy domains around your target
• Keywords and brand name
• Make sure to own MyBrandSucks.com
• Own your CEOName.com
• Don't overlook social media
• Register your brand name on social media platforms:
  • Twitter
  • Create a Facebook group
  • Naymz
• Know what your competitors are doing
  • Use SpyFu
• Keep an eye on your key players
  • Create alerts for your name with Google Alerts and Trackur
• Monitor everything (and once you do, be proactive)
  • Tweet Pro is a paid product that helps you monitor Twitter
• Use Twitter to help your reputation.
  • By monitoring brand mentions on Twitter, you can prevent customer loss.
• Be on the offense by empowering your brand loyalists.
• Respond to negative publicity quickly

Brian Combs is up next.

Before you have a problem, dedicate resources to online customer service, monitor online conversations, use consistent naming conventions, and create and propagate multiple sites. Engage your customers.

Upon finding a problem:

• Engage and attempt to diffuse.
  • This may create an online fan.
  • Don't get defensive or attempt to strong arm; you'll make it worse.
  • Don't engage with trolls and Internet tough guys.
  • Take it offline if possible.
• Ask if they'll block with robots.txt.
• If all else fails, attempt to scrub the listing.

How do you scrub the listing? You take up more shelf space. Sub-domains, product sites, international domains, social media profiles, articles on third-party sites, micro-sites to address specific concerns, blended search results. In order for this to work, the content needs to be unique. Sites may require link building before they rank.

Risky techniques include Wikipedia, Pay-Per-Post, ReviewMe (for scrubbing), Google bowling, and deceptive practices.

There are better ways to do rep management than getting into risky behavior. He doesn't recommend any of these ways.

Takeaways:

• Reputations problems are easier to prevent than to fix.
• Customer Service 101: Engage and don't be defensive.
• If you must scrub the listings, take a diversified approach.

Last up is Tony Wright. He's only got ten slides. Yay!

First, story time: Paris, Texas.

The facts:

• Conservative town
• Homosexual elementary school principal
• Vindictive lover
• Hot-headed District Attorney threatening violence
• Small town politics with a very involved audience

Horrible things ensued. Naturally. The Internet is serious business, folks.

This story was posted on Topix. But they couldn't keep it down. The ADA was reprimanded, lost his bid and nearly his job.

The lessons:

• Emotions can ruin an online reputation.
• Sometimes responding makes it worse.
• If you are an employer, you need to have policies in place to keep employees from responding inappropriately
• Threatening violence on the Internet can be dangerous, but most of the time it makes you look like an idiot.

Reputation branding and influence are the not same. Work on reputation first, the others will follow. Don't let good branding get in the way of a good reputation. Logo police are a problem. If a fan is using your logo, don't freak out about it and send a Cease and Desist. Monitor your reputation (Trackur, Google Alerts, etc.) and create a formula for keeping your reputation solid. Deal with snags as they come up.

To create a formula, assign weight to each element below and use that to prioritize response.

Items to consider:

• Reach of the venue
• Influence of the poster
• Tone of the content (get three people to average the tone)
• Follow up on the post (watch for on-topic vs. off-topic)
• Viral effects

Q&A

Have you seen fake complaints on Rip Off Report, etc., by competitors?

Tony: No, not fake complaints. That's dangerous.

Brian: No, there are enough trolls out there who will do it on their own. Fake isn't needed.

Do you have suggestions or ideas around building activity with your loyalists?
Lauren: Starbucks is really good about it on Twitter. Take the opposite approach from cell phone providers. They reward you for switching. Reward people for staying.

Tony: A caveat -- giving away free stuff can backfire. Microsoft sent out Vista to bloggers but it turned into a PR nightmare because it came off as bribery. It's about authenticity in social media. When someone says something nice about you, thank them. If you have their physical address, thank them with a hand-written note. Publically thank them.

Jessica gives a few examples, including Microsoft Ambassadors.

Brian: In many cases, engagement is all that's needed.

Should you be combating negative pay per click ads on brand names?

Tony: Make sure you've filed your proper trademark with Google. Engage them first and find out why they're doing it. If they're really hurting your business and they won't stop, then yes, you might want to sue. But he always advocates taking the high road.

Brian: It depends whether or not it's malicious.

Jessica: If you have multiple domains, throw up ads for those sites on those keywords to create noise.

Brian says that if you take Jessica's approach, you should do it with different Google Accounts.

Tony: Non-response can be a very effective technique.

Why doesn't eBay go after PayPalSucks.com?

Lauren: They can't really do anything about it, because it's not making money. They also have terrible reputation management. Jennifer Convertibles has the same problem. Positions three through six are hate sites, but they don't want to spend the money to push them down.

Brian: If they sued, they'd probably lose. It's free speech.

Tony: They'd have to prove consumer confusion and no one will think PayPalSucks is PayPal. Before you contact your lawyer, you might just want to contact the person. Don't say anything that will get you in trouble, but try talking first.

Lauren: Offer them $500 to $2000. Sometimes that will work.

Who should take ownership of rep management? Should you do it yourself?

Jessica: I'm a fan of doing things yourself, but not in this case.

All agree that you should train brand advocates in-house but you should hire a social media person to help you set it up. You need legal, customer service, product management and IT involved. You need someone with political capital in the company on board or the legal department will try to kill your social media campaign. Keep legal in the loop but out of your planning meetings.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/12/08 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
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PubCon Keynote: George Wright of Blendtec

Day two keynote. I have orange juice, not coffee. I may come to regret this decision later but for right now, I'm going with it. The wireless is incredibly bad, and yet, still miles better than the in-room wireless at Treasure Island. There's a blender on the stage in front of me but no people yet. Some guy is taking a picture of the blender. This is what we've come to.

Oh yay, Brett's here. I can stop babbling. He says the Wi-Fi upstairs will be better than yesterday. Which was still better than Treasure Island's.

George bounds up on stage to jaunty music. He's got a blender and a rake and apparently a talent for confusing the airlines. "I've got a blender and a rake and I'm going to blend the rake... But isn't that dangerous?"

Hee.

He started with Blendtec two or three years ago. It was a small company with a good product but no brand awareness. Very few people had heard of them. We're going to be watching lots of videos.

We're starting, of course, with the iPhone blending video.

The blended iPhone was put up one eBay and someone bought it for $1000. They donated that to a local children's hospital. The winner of the auction did some research and donated more after that. Wow.

Blendtec began in Utah. They have lots of popular commercial products. They also made a home product, which is the one that he has here today.

Great products + weak branding = weak sales

They didn't have money for a brand campaign ($50), so they had to do something cheap. He went into the demo room and discovered a pile of sawdust on the floor. "Don't worry, Tom's just testing the blenders," someone said. He'd blended two by fours to test the blender. Everyone else just accepted it but George saw potential.

Video extreme blending was a common practice in the company, but it was unknown to the rest of the world. So, they decided to distribute the videos on the Web.

He spent his budget on a domain name, a lab coat, a six-pack of coke and some things to blend. Marbles, a rotisserie chicken, a rake, a McDonald's value meal.

They've managed to blend almost everything that they've attempted. The only thing that didn't work was...

Chuck Norris. [Badum cha!]

They sent the blender and the video to Chuck Norris but didn't get any response at the time. A month ago, they got a call from their Dallas office saying that Chuck Norris was on the radio talking about "his" blender commercial. George calls Chuck an A-List celebrity. Let's not get crazy.

What really matters for viral video:

1. It has to be entertaining or worth watching. It doesn't have to be funny. It could be inspirational or thought-provoking. Mostly, it has to be worth passing along.
2. It has to tie-in to the corporate objective. It's not enough just to [censored for animal abuse]. You have to make it tie-in to the corporate objective. They used to try to explain the technical aspects of why the blender was great. Now they can just blend 50 marbles and it's much more convincing.
3. It's okay for it to be sponsored by the manufacturer. Don't try to sneak around and give people a reason to believe it's slippery or non-authentic. It's okay to sponsor your own stuff as long as it's entertaining (see rule 1).
4. It has to be based on real people. Don't force your employees to be someone they're not. Tom from Blendtec is just being himself. It's easy to reproduce.
5. It has to be interactive.
   • Comments: Negative comments are chances for debate.
   • Suggestions of what to blend next: Initially the suggestions all went to his BlackBerry. It pretty much broke his phone. Heh. When they blended the iPhone, the people who had suggested it became brand ambassadors because it was their idea.

The risks of viral video:

• Surrender control of the message upon distribution: You have to be honest and accurate. You don't have control once it's gone. They once said that ceramic magnets were neodymium magnets and got in trouble for it.
• Public scrutiny of content: It's free to put content on the Web but it's also free to put content on the Web that combats it.
• Distribution is global: You cannot limit geographic location. It's the World Wide Web for a reason.

The numbers:

• 65 million YouTube views
• 120 million WillItBlend.com views
• 200 million + subscribers

Blendtec saw a 700 percent increase in retail sales. Not bad for a $50 campaign!

With commercial sales you should pull through impact. "How do I know that your blender is going to make it through the abuse our employees are going to put it through?" If the retail product can do it, the commercial product can.

Media coverage:

National TV

• The Big Idea
• Today Show
• iVillage Live
• Tonight Show
• Food Network
• History Channel
• Discovery Channel

The Food Network had actually turned them down before the Will It Blend campaign. Afterward, the network called and asked for a blender to include in their content.

[Now we're watching a clip from The Big Idea.]

Local TV Coverage

• Magazines and newspapers
• Online blogs and sites
  • WSJ
  • Engadget
  • NYTimes.com
  • Forbes.com
  • AdAge
  • Blendtec even got a mention in Congress!

Success breeds success.

[Now we're watching a clip from OTM in which there is an argument over whether or not the Will It Blend videos are worth it.]

The old school thinking was, "Why not just take out an ad in the local paper? Isn't this a lot of work?"

However, a single page ad in a newspaper can be $83,000 and it has a limited reach.

New school thinking understands, "Now the audience knows that all blenders aren't the same. All this publicity came from a $50 viral campaign so the sky's the limit."

Q&A

You did an ad for Nike. Wasn't that paid content?

Yes, they did. Nike called and said, "Can we do this together?" George said, "Sure, if you pay me." Blendtec has done it with several companies, in fact. Will It Blend actually generates revenue. It's a marketing campaign that generates revenue.

How do you make it take off?

First, if it's awesome, it will take off. Second, leverage your assets. All your employees have address books. Send it to those contacts and say, "If it's awesome and you want to share it, please do." Then, do the same to your customers.

What kind of bonus did you get?

George got a free blender! How do you reward runaway performance like that? It's hard. He had a lot of fun.

How do your Web sales do?

They've done well. But the idea was not to drive sales -- it was to build a brand. Building a brand is sustainable. Promotions are not.

Was the 700 percent growth from the launch of the campaign? With what frequency did you launch the videos?

George says it started two years ago and they started out very vigorously. They've backed way off because they want to make sure the quality is high because unsubscribing is one click away.

Brett wants to know if he's going to blend something. Hee!

Of course!

[Um, I'm going to hide under the table now, okay?]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/12/08 at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
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November 11, 2008

Discover Techniques Used by Enterprise-Level SEOs/SEMs

Last session of day one! YAY! Joe Laratro is moderating the SIXTH session that I'm blogging today. Our panelists are Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times, on the web; Bill Hunt, Search Effectiveness Team Lead, IBM.com, Global Strategies; Ash Nallawalla, Traffic Manager, Yellow Online, Sensis Pty Ltd; and Scott Polk, Senior SEO Analyst, Bruce Clay, Inc. (formerly of Edmunds.com which is how he got this gig). Scott is absolutely coming in for abuse during this recap. I mock because... well, because I can, honestly.

Marshall Simmonds is our first speaker. NYT has a great many properties that they oversee. He's not going to bother to talk about all the basic stuff that everyone knows.

You can't tell a journalist that you're going to write content or that he needs to write content differently. There's a defensive wall there. You have to establish your knowledge and expertise first. Understand the topic, department and division. Ask/answer the questions that they should ask. Explain experiences with metrics and dollars. Be ready to support the plan and for pushback. Find quick wins, leverage relationships and get buy-in.

If you want to see how they do SEO on NYTimes.com, look at the movie section. That's where they first got buy-in.

The first thing they had to do was get the template optimized. They pushed back first and then pulled down the registration walls. They exposed the archives back to 1851. They have monthly network-wide communications, giving each segment what they need to know the most, exposing the quick wins and showing weak points. They're constantly training on SEO basics.

NYT has seen a 223 percent growth since 2006.

Hearst Corporation is different. They focus on audits and reassessments and offer checklists to push SEO progress. They hold technical troubleshooting and teaching workshops for writers, editors, producers. They work on training for evangelism.

For the Toys R Us site, it was about giving the appropriate people control of key on-page elements.

With TV Guide, back when Heroes was actually cool, they were able to promote tie-in products to their specific audience. [Hee, Heroes bashing]

And more and more...

Mistakes to avoid:

• Walling off content
• Under-communicating success
• Not checking in with IT/Production/Design/Ad Sales departments
• Meta Keywords tag -- it's the biggest point of misinformation. Everyone thinks they can solve the problem with Meta tags. Make sure you're training on basics.
• Implementing the changes
• Excessive expectations: timeframes, growth -- SEO is long term. It's not a project, it's a process. They do it year over year.
• Lack of editorial oversight
• Underestimating raising awareness around search

The search "life cycle" is always changing within a company. Careful tracking is always your ally.

Bill Hunt steps up to the podium.

Identify and prioritize recommendations

• What's the issue?
• What are the recommendations?
• What's the search impact?
• What's the resource impact?

Monitor page level performance

If it's a tier-one word, it needs to be in the top four positions. List them out by need level, to give you priority.

Leverage your interconnected network

• Leverage enormous power to build link equity.
• Leverage partners and distributed content to increase link equity.

Integrated Keyword Performance Modeling

• What keywords are really converting in paid and organic?
• What are "low-hanging fruit" that can be optimized?
• What is the cannibalization effect of paid and organic?
• What are the business rules that trigger budget shifts?

Final Thoughts

• Feed the need for information and create compelling information consumers will pull and interact with on demand.
• Workflow integration is the key to success at the enterprise level. Get in front of the people who can change the stream.
• Close the awareness loop with search by monitoring increased demand for new keywords.
• Plan for and take advantage of the increased demand at search engines generated by offline. Don't fight the "who gets credit battle" -- one sets them up, one knocks them down. Work together.

Scott Polk is next. Hi, Scott.

SEO-Friendly CMS

Customization is key. You want to be able to control every element on page and with architecture.

How do you get SEO into the process? Become part of the process, requirements gathering/documentations, project life cycle, SEO QA, etc.

Internal SEO evangelism is never ending and very important.

[Why did I never notice before that Scott mumbles? Quickly?]

The best way to develop relationships is with beer. Food works, too, but mostly alcohol. [Facepalms.]

Get external support and validation. Use experts to prove your expertise.

Ash Nallawalla wraps things up. The site he works on has over two million pages, which is big for Australia.

What's different for big sites?

• Millions of pages and a handful of key terms
• Greater emphasis on site architecture
• Changes can be slow to implement and costly
• Many stakeholders to be consulted
• Easier to get unsolicited links
• Web platforms are usually not search engine friendly
• Site design practices aren't SEF
• Language on Web sites is "marketese", not user speak. Duplicate content abounds.
• Not enough words on Web pages
• Islands of information (Web sites) spread out the business
• Trademark/copyright statement discourage linking by others

Where should an SEO be in a large organization? Ash thinks they should answer directly to the CMO. They shouldn't be in IT.

Like the other speakers, Ash emphasizes how important educating the stakeholders is.

[Here my headache turned migraine-painful. I begged Kate Morris to take over. What's below? That's all her. I love her. Hee.]

I'm supposed to be liveblogging for Susan. Dude is concluding with a checklist. The man is almost done talking -- that's good. Something about an external SEO company. Who needs one of those?? Sending them to training? Can't they read?

...Oops! Missing stuff.

Need a linking budget... Man I don't know how Susan does this. Crazy woman. Need paid links? Did I hear him say use paid links?!?!?!

[Thanks, Kate! What an entertaining conclusion to our first day of PubCon liveblogging frenzy! If you see Susan, tell her to take it easy. She's got to last for two more days! --Virginia]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 5:12 PM | Comments (0)
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Landing Page Optimization

How many more of these do I have to do? I'm so out of liveblogging shape. [Hang in there, Susan! An open bar and a big comfy room are almost yours. --Virginia]

Moderator Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance, and speakers Brad Geddes, Director of Search Engine Marketing, LocalLaunch.com; Lily Chiu, Senior Sales Engineer, Omniture; and Kate Morris, Search Engine Marketing Manager, RateGenius, are ready to teach us all about how to optimize our landing pages. Don't think of this just as a PPC topic. It's just as important for search engine optimization.

Brad Geddes is first. We're having mic issues. This should be fun.

Where should traffic be going?

Informational queries should go to a page that gives an answer. For candle burning times, for example, you want it to go to a page about how long a type of candle will last, not directly to a product pages.

For local queries, you might looking for something that will build trust. What's the intent?

You have to test your landing pages. Don't discount the fact that the best page might be the home page, even though that's not the usual wisdom.

For ambiguous queries, testing is key. You need to get the user to segment themselves first. Give them the information that will help them answer the question.

On your Thank You page, what does it say? Does it just say "thanks, we'll call you" "go away"? Or does it say "create an account", "you may also like", "stay in touch with...", etc? Keeping a customer is cheaper than getting a new customer.

Be aware that offline behavior still affects online behavior. Match your promotions to your buying cycles. If no one is buying, target them earlier in the conversion cycle -- when they are looking for information instead of shopping, or when they are shopping instead of buying.

It's not just about page layout. Test where to send the traffic.

When you're showcasing benefits

In gift retail season, you need to showcase to the shopper, not the receiver. Shipping times, cut off dates, ease of return, etc.

My super favorite Kate Morris is up next to teach us the necessities. She disclaimers first that she's not picking on anyone with her examples.

Call to Action

You cannot have a landing page without a call to action.

• Keep forms as short as possible: Don't ask questions that you don't need right then.
• Always be above the fold: If they don't see it right away, they won't see it.
• Answer the question of the query
• Not the home page: Don't use the home page for the landing page, unless you only have one product.
• Mention the keyword on the page: A search for "Twilight hoodie" brought up an ad that not only didn't have Twilight, it didn't have hoodies. Or even the color black (or sparkly vampires). [I am resisting the urge to tease Kate about liking Twilight.]

Visual Interest

Failing to create visual interest leads to back button buzz kill!

• White space
• Simplicity
• Buttons
• Use pictures as a road map

Navigation

• There are two camps:
  • Give them a choice.
  • Keep them prisoner.
• The answer here is testing.

Tracking

Never start a campaign without it! Metrics to look at:

• Conversation rate: Over time, how many leads/sales happen? What is the benchmark versus other campaigns? Track your entire sales cycle if possible.
• Cost per conversion: $5 vs. $50000 product. You can't be spending $300 to sell a $200 product.
• Bounce rate: Relative to product, about 30 percent is awesome. Fifty percent is good/okay. Over 70 percent, you need to fix something hard.
• Eye/click tracking
• Test, test, test!

Lily Chiu is our last speaker. Her presentation is called "Every page is a landing page." For sure.

Optimize is a word that's been pretty much used to death.

Conversion optimization:

1. Segmentation
2. Relevance

The trouble with a lot of campaigns is that while off-site marketing is targeted, on-site you're dealing with a one-site-fits-all approach. You need to optimize the end-to-end customer experience.

Make sure that your ad is leading to a matching page. Fulfill expectations.

Every page after the first page is yet another landing page.

Once the visitor has made a decision, you now know that much more about them. We need to do more with less. Testing gets you there. Do a better job of taking advantage of what you already have. Take action based on the data you've been gathering.

Where do you begin?

You have to fight inertia. Getting started is the hardest part.

1. Start simple and ID regions that you want to test.
2. Know your end goal.
3. Define your hypothesis. For instance, hypothesize that this thing will be better than that thing.
4. Create distinct alternatives. There should be a significant difference between tests.
5. Measure, act, iterate. One test is not good enough.

Once you've found a winning page, test the elements on the page to discover WHY it was the best.

Test and Target

Reinforce the content throughout the site. If you're targeting without testing, you're still not going to know if you're really doing better.

Where do you start? You have the tools, now you have to work together with all your channels to make your conversions better. If you're doing acquisitions without telling your site people about it, you're not going to be able to match expectations.

Q&A

What tools do you use? Does your company sell the tools?

Lily: [Very kindly tries to make this not a pitch.] Yes, we (Omniture) sell a product (Test&Target) but there are others out there. Google Website Optimizer is free and it's a really good product.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 4:39 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization

Back from lunch, which was an adventure as always. Lisa is sitting next to me and is sharing her power strip. Dueling bloggers! Christine Churchill, President, Key Relevance, is moderating this session with speakers Wil Reynolds, Founder, SEER Interactive; Larry Mersman, Vice President, Trellian; Ken Jurina, President, Epiar Inc.; and Stoney deGeyter, President, Pole Position Marketing.

Wil Reynolds is up first. He's down with OPD, apparently: other people's data.

Amazon gives you their best sellers, their categories. It's a good way to mine for information about what's going to sell. You can prioritize your top ten based on their best sellers.

Google's Hot Trends allows you to sign up and get the hot trends every day so that you can see what's new and upcoming. When Flight of the Conchords went on tour, they spiked on the Hot Trends. Only two ticket brokers were actually advertising for it. You can also see what time of day it happened so that you know if you've actually missed the window.

When would you use this?

CNN, Tribune, gossip sites -- anything that needs to be on top of quick trends. The other thing is that you should be using it to spot trends. If it spikes at around the same time every day, you can run your ads then.

Google Trends sends it right to you. So does Yahoo! Pipes. Parse out the RSS feeds to find a trend. Download the CSV file and analyze it for long term trends. You can automate the clicks to get the file by using the Firefox Macros + Excel to save it.

How do you take advantage of a trend?

Look at the trends around a search term to find new keywords to target. Use more than one tool to find trends because they all have flaws.

Understand that there's regionalism. Look at it world wide and look at it region by region because the trend will change.

Keyword research resources:

Quintura: Gives you a graphical representation of search. The hardest part of doing keyword research is that you have an inherent bias in how you search. You need to use tools to minimize the bias. Look around, see what other words come up.

Out of the box ideas are key.

Delicious: People tag content. Use those tags to discover synonyms and different view points. Track trends there, too.

Microsoft adCenter Labs: Using multiple tools gives you a confirmation on trends. You can discover how often someone looking for one tool goes back to refine the search to something else.

Shopping.com (and other sites that give you their top searches): Rankings for keywords, search terms, etc. Don't just use it as your only data point but use it to confirm your other tools. Just do a search for "top searches" and see what comes up. Track down competitors who are just giving away that data and use it.

Make sure that you're not getting spam. Look for categorization and prioritization, not just link lists.

ESPN: Tells you what the top search term is and why it's the top search. Nice.

Ken Jurina is up next to talk about negative keywords.

He takes a straw poll to find out how many people are using negative keywords. Only 4 are using 10,000 negative keywords or more. When should you be using them? A search for "hosting Tupperware" probably shouldn't bring up hosting companies. That doesn't really appeal to the target audience. Negative keywords are great for filtering out irrelevant queries -- the ones that get clicks but don't convert.

Reasons to make a keyword negative:

• Zero conversions
• Expensive conversions
• Expensive clicks
• Limited budget
• Bad brand associations

It's an iterative process. Lower irrelevant impressions and clicks means you raise your CTR, which lowers your CPC, which means you can afford to spend more, etc.

It has a HUGE effect. They're always seeing 30 to 50 percent increases.

How do you implement negative keywords? Google makes it pretty easy and allows 10,000. Yahoo calls them excluded words and allows up to 250 negative keywords. Live Search allows 1024 characters, or about 65 words.

Exact match is great for targeting specific terms but it's cumbersome and inadequate for reaching the long tail. You want to combine phrase, broad, and NKWs to get the best reach with the fewest bad ad impressions and traffic.

If you're using Dynamic Keyword Insertion on your ads/landing pages, NKWs are a must.

How do you create a NKW list?

• Intuition and brainstorming
• Use the thesaurus
• Talk to your consumers
• Set goals and split the organic from paid and see what's working and what isn't.
• Scan through past referring phrases for phrases that did not convert, had a high bounce rate or "were trash".
• Use the Google Search Query Performance Report (Reports Tab > Create report)
  • Level of detail: ad, unit of time: summary, date range: yesterday, campaigns and ads: all

Tools to find NKWs:

• Search Suggest
• Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Microsoft adCenter Labs: Find mutations, groups and more
• Keyword Discovery
• Wordtracker

Case Study: Vintage Tub & Bath

They thought there was no way that their PPC campaign could be improved by adding NKWs. They had four Google reps on their account. They saved 20 percent by implementing NKWs.

Case Study: Consult Sales, Inc.

They saved $27,000 on the 100k they were spending.

Negative keywords are a relatively simple concept and should be an important part of every paid search campaign. When used with maximum quality and quantity of words, dramatic results can follow. It's a low-hanging fruit opportunity.

Next up is Stoney deGeyter to talk about organizing and managing keyword lists. Lisa covered Stoney's presentation at last year's Pubcon so I'm going to refer you back there while I take an Aleve real quick. Alternately, you can skate over to the We Build Pages blog for Lisa's take on this year's presentation.

To last year, Stoney adds phase four: segmenting keywords.
You need to know if you're looking at shopping words, buying words or researching words. An article isn't the right choice for someone who is looking to buy and a buy now page will turn off someone who is still shopping.

• Researchers don't know what they're looking for, really. They just need general information. Optimize for them on higher level category pages and articles.
• Shoppers have narrowed their search down to product types and comparing features. Optimize for shoppers on category and comparison pages.
• Buying visitors have a specific product in mind. They're looking for a trustworthy place to buy. Optimize on specific pages.

If you show up in all three places, you'll build up your brand and trust.

Each page can target 5 to 15 pages. Group the qualifiers with a similar meaning or relation, for instance, cheap/discount/bargain, elegant/designer/modern, and vintage/antique/old.

Let your content guide your keywords. Will it fit? Do you have the space? Does it match your message? Is it a distraction? Keywords shouldn't be noticeable, but rather, should flow. Be ready to adjust when something isn't working.

The conclusion is basically don't rush. Take your time, do it right. Rushing will get you poor results. Lay the foundation for the best keywords.

Larry Mersman is our final speaker. He's going to wrap up the most important points: Keyword research is one of the most important elements of SEO. You need to be using the terms that customers are using to find your site. It's about gauging the performance of the searchers.

He has a picture of a young man with long hair wearing Dodgers gear. What's he selling? Is it baseball tickets? Is it authentic baseball jerseys? It is Manny Ramirez hair extensions? You need to think of all the permutations so that you can get all the traffic in.

Case Study: Needmorebeer.com

Changing the order of the keyword makes a huge difference. "Beer Germany" got 49 searches while "German Beers" got 12,000 searches.

Use your site search to mine for keywords. Use advertising brochures to find words. Look at your competitors, check your log files, and use keyword research tools -- more than one.

Aim to gather keywords from all sources.

Compile the lists then weed them down to the words that work for you.

Misspellings are a huge opportunity, but it's important not to look stupid.

Find out what's working for your competitors and optimize for those terms, too.

You have to do your homework and spend some time on it. You need to take advantage of the long tail. You have the tools available, but tools need someone to use them.

Build your lists and then test, test, test!

Q&A

Do you have any recommendations on tools to bid manage keywords if you're not using the API?

Wil: He has no recommendations.

Christine: There's a session later today on that topic.

Should you optimize for misspellings in the content? In the Meta tags?

Ken: He recommends including misspellings in the Title tag and ALT attributes, but incorporate them in subtle ways. It doesn't take much because most people aren't optimizing for them.

Wil doesn't use the Meta Keywords tag anymore. Ken still does because he doesn't believe in algo chasing.

Stoney: Have people link to you with misspellings. [Hee!]

How do you scale keyword research to hundreds of thousands of topics?

Ken: He has a proprietary tool, but nothing to share.

Christine: Excel is good if you know how to use it.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 4:36 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Keyword Research, Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008

Earning Big Bucks with Social Media

Ten minute passing periods aren't any better than five minute ones. I don't even have time for clever commentary! If I'm in the right room, then we're about to listen to speakers Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service, Alexander Barbara, CEO, ReidBrown Enterprises, Inc., and Vanessa Fox, Founder, Nine By Blue. Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz, is moderating this time around which means I don't have to try to liveblog his trademark 15 slides a second.

Rand says that the focus with social media tends to be on the traffic and not why we're getting that traffic, so we're going to talk about that.

Michael Gray is up first and points out the obvious: it's really hard to monetize social media because people aren't looking to social media as a place to buy.

The first rule is don't break the rules. Understand the written and unwritten rules of the community you're in. Learn the tolerances and the tenor first before you try to market to them.

Create a knowledgeable resource:

• Create valuable content that is helpful and solves a problem.
• Offer a FREE solution (directly or through links).

Use social media to promote reviews:

• Compare similar products.
• Social media reviews work best with new or leading-edge products.
• Keep reviews honest. If you're uncomfortable publishing a negative review, don't lie. Just don't publish.
• Be in-depth but avoid being too long or else it probably won't be read.

Use social media to build membership:

• Use blogs, Twitter and email to create a loyal group of followers.
• Feed them information with occasional sales pitches.
• Seth Godin and David Allen are good at this.

Twitter: Creates a sense of urgency
Woot: Follow woot to find the deal of the day
Amazonmp3: Follow to find the daily deal of DRM free music

What works:

• Information resources
• Reviews
• Problem solving
• Deals
• Time sensitive offers

What doesn't work:

• Direct product links
• Hard sell
• No value add

Michael, talk SLOWER.

Next up is Alexander Barbara.

He's going to go through a case study of marketing a new site on Digg. It was not a typical audience for Digg because it was female centric. They built a targeted campaign and every article they submitted had links into the site.

They got 35,000 views over five days.

The first question is "Can you handle it?" Most sites can't handle 600 hits a second. A good server admin will think you're being attacked and will shut you down. Sites on MySQL will hang up and run out of memory.

How do you handle a Digg campaign?

• Static pages
• Google cache: If you get your site indexed by Google, just 302 to their cached version of the page and let them do your serving for you. Hee!
• Coral cache: A little slower than Google but you don't have to wait to be indexed. Visit example.com.nyud.net/page/ (where example.com is your page) and it'll save it for you. It serves all of your ads, too, so you can still earn money.
• WP "super cache" plug-in: Before this, WordPress just died when it got Dugg.
• Leverage other resources to serve files: Flickr, YouTube, Amazon S3 -- avoid concurrent bottlenecks.

Digg users hate AdSense. The click-through rate on day five of their campaign was 14 times higher than on day one. He suggests that you take the ads off for the first couple days so that you're not wasting page views. Put them back on day three when the StumbleUpon traffic starts coming in.

Make sure you have an RSS subscribe link. They got tons of subscribers and lost half of them the next day.

How are you going to monetize it?

• Direct: targeted offers, adsense, CPM ads
• Indirect: subscribers, links, branding

Traffic quality varies depending on the social media site. Digg users won't do what you want them to do. StumbleUpon is more focused. Twitter is quite targeted.

The big picture is that you need to understand your audiences, both the Digg audience and your core audience. You need to choose wisely about how you're monetizing. Don't look spammy. Make sure you can handle the traffic. It's too late to fix it once it hits the front page.

Vanessa Fox is up to tell us how to lose money in social media. Vanessa didn't get the memo that we all want MORE not less. ;)

How search impacts social media:

When you see an ad, you tend to just do a search to learn about it. [She asked for a hand raise poll and got two people. Hee! Liars.]

If you don't show up in the search engines for your viral campaign, you might as well not exist. She shows three results: Got Milk, Easy Button and Just Do It. The first two are good but the third one has Nike exactly nowhere on the page.

Social media helps you impact search, too. With viral marketing, you can push down negative results as well as influence anchor text.

Case Study: Coke Zero

[Time for a video. Yay! Imagine some of the "can we sue Coke Zero" commercials. Also there were billboards for the same. Oh wait, nevermind. The wireless doesn't work. PubCon fail.]

They built up viral Web sites -- one that allows you to sue your friends for having stuff like yours and one about "taste confusion". There was an 800 number to call. Vanessa says that most people would just search instead.

The word-of-mouth marketing was successful, but was the campaign successful? Not if they wanted to show up in the search results. They don't show up for their taglines at all. What was the problem? The page was just one big image. The other site (with the videos) was all in Flash with no way to link in.

Case Study: Blendtec and Will it Blend

They actually managed to influence searcher behavior. People are now looking for "will it blend" when they didn't before.

They have a HUGE call to action on their page. That's something that a lot of marketers leave off with social media.

Before you start your campaign, you need to determine your metrics:

• What are your goals?
• How can you measure success?
• What are your adjustment plans?

Don't abandon a campaign just because it's not successful. Social media is about engagement and dropping your loyal followers could be worse than not having them in the first place.

Just a reminder: Traffic alone isn't enough. You need qualified traffic. Look at your bounce rate to determine if you're getting good traffic.

Double-check that your call to action is actually good. Measure each stage to find the failure points.

Q&A

What would you recommend in terms of brand aversion in social media?

Michael: If you're going someplace where people don't like you, that's probably not the spot to be. Find where your people are and go there. You don't go to a vegetarian conference and try to promote Kobe beef. It's the best in the world but they're still not going to buy it.

Vanessa: There are places online other than Digg.

Alexander: If you really want Digg, come up with something that's sort of related to what you do but isn't directly promoting your product.

[How about a micro-site then 301 that later?]

Vanessa: It's kind of bait-and-switchy. It could be risky, both with users and search engines.

How do you come up with witty relevant sites in real estate? That's why we want to do a micro-site and 301 it.

[I'm actually not going to blog this one because it's sort of a silly question and they pretty much just tell him so. Rand thinks micro-sites are pretty much getting to saturation.]

Vanessa: if you're going to do a micro-site, leave it as a micro-site. Have a call to action to your main site. Don't do the sneaky redirect.

How do you monetize a social news site like Digg?
Michael: CPM is probably the best. Look for the people who are advertising consistently on Digg and get them to advertise on your site.

Alexander: It's hard to monetize because people aren't there to buy things. Go with CPM.

How does EasyTweets work?

Alex: You can manage multiple accounts from one profile, schedule tweets, bookmarklets, RSS feeds, etc. Been built virally.

What is the value of Twitter? We're a publishing company, how are we interesting?

Michael: You can make yourself interesting. You have to be worth something. Be time sensitive, be deal sensitive, be useful to the community. Add value, then add links. News tweets get tons of traffic, too, because people can scan headlines.

Vanessa: Use your bloggers. Have them start on Twitter just to try it out. Experiment with the types of things that kind of work. The more you engage, the better the result will be. Only automate the stuff that you don't need to be engaging on. Use the rest of the time to actually engage.

Michael: Social media is time intensive.

Alex: The level of interaction on Twitter is almost unmatched but it requires a deeper level of commitment. Go to search.twitter.com and put in your keywords and see if people are talking.

Michael: It's not really business to business.

Rand: Put a Twitter widget on your blog.

The biggest problem we run into is staffing problems. How do you get your staff to embrace social media?

Vanessa: The execs need to hire someone for that, then. It's not necessarily someone already in your company who can just take over. It's not just an intern either. It needs to be someone with skill.

Have you seen any pairings of companies succeeding in social media?

Vanessa: I haven't seen it but I don't know if a micro-site would be better or if both sites should do something... If you're the smaller site, maybe let them do the work and just make sure they're mentioning you.

Michael: [Business specific advice] You need to win the gatekeeper. LinkedIn is trying stuff with a lot of partnering.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pub Con Las Vegas 2008, Social Media

Top Shelf Organic SEO

Five minutes between sessions is not enough. In case you were wondering. Here we are in the very first real session of PubCon with moderator Mark Jackson, President and CEO, VIZION Interactive, Inc., and panelists Jill Whalen, CEO, High Rankings; Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Stragegies; Ash Nallawalla, Traffic Manager, Yellow Online, Sensis Pty Ltd; and Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc. This room is packed and I am so going to end up elbowing someone.

Jill Whalen is up first. She says this session is the Grey Goose of SEO.

She's going into the mythbusting business for her presentation.

SEO is NOT:

• Submission. You don't need to submit URLs to search engines, either by hand or using an XML Sitemap. If you have millions of pages, consider it but don't worry about it.
• Tricking the search engines. Work with the engines instead of trying to trick them.
• Following Google's guidelines. They're not your Bible.
• Stuffing keywords. Use them in ways that are natural to your content.
• Optimizing for one keyword phrase. You need to focus on more than one keyword phrase. The more phrases you optimize for, the more you have a chance to be found. Do your keyword research.
• Optimizing for the long tail.
• Creating validated XHTML with a tableless design. It's not a bad thing to do, it's just not SEO. So long as your page renders, don't worry so much. The engines will read your code.
• Submitting to low quality directories.
• An attempt to increase toolbar PageRank. Your goal is to increase qualified traffic, not to increase your PR.
• Placing your page in a specific position in SERPs. Rankings, in general, are a poor measurement these days.
• Proprietary methods and automated tools.

What is SEO? Making your Web site the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines. Have something remarkable (Seth Godin). You need to stand out from the crowd.

What's the best time for SEO? During the planning or redesign phase. You want to build SEO into your Web site.

Basic SEO strategy:

• Keyword research
• Site architecture layout
• Map phrases to pages
• Write compelling keyword-rich Title tags
• Write descriptive benefit-laden copy
• Get the word out (link building)

Next up is Ash Nallawalla who will be speaking on content.

SEO is always evolving. He works for the Australian Yellow Pages. Their challenge was to get content onto their pages, which usually consist of just a name, address and phone number. A more robust page might have a few "ad points", but there is very little crawlable content.

Since they couldn't add more content to the pages very easily, they built feeder sites to bring in qualified traffic and then take users to the listings.

The initial thinking was that they didn't want the search engines to see their content. As new thinking came in, they started adding Heading info. Traffic actually dropped because people were clicking the second result. They didn't submit a Sitemap and he wishes that they had. It would have sped up the indexing process.

They also tried to build an online magazine to bring in traffic. It wasn't bringing a lot of traffic. He looked into why this was so.

• Homegrown CMS was not fully optimized.
• The articles were good but did not have a clear call to action.
• The search box was below the fold.

They replaced the CMS with Joomla as a free trial, licensed a theme and borrowed some articles from the parent site. Every article linked to the index and to the advertisers. The search box was moved above the fold. They went from a 3 percent click through to a 33 percent click through.

They stopped PPC campaigns on the old site. He's trying to prove that the smaller site on the Joomla CMS will overtake the old site in traffic by Christmas.

Tips for outsourcing content:

• Use professionals from the specific niche that you're targeting.
• If you're using writers from Asia, budget in a local editor to fix the spelling, grammar and style (U.S. vs. British spellings).
• Local university students might be a good source of cheap labor.
• Have a good contract in place.

Remember: What you intend and what a search engine sees might not be the same thing. Double-check how your PDFs are getting indexed.

Our next speaker is Bill Hunt, who will be talking about hierarchy.

Apparently he's surprised by the number of people here. Seriously, packed room. The guy next to me just moved. I think he's tired of my typing.

There's some discussion of the algorithm that I don't understand but that's okay. I don't have to because the point is that it's all about relevance.

Keyword relevance requires prominence: in the Title tag, in the Heading, in the sub-heading, in the body and in the link text. Can a simple, non-thinking spider figure out what something is about?

Competitor research is a good way to figure out where your target should be.

He disagrees with Jill in terms of placement. You can do placement a little bit through competitive research.

Disney World's site is Flash heavy, but they're good with "progressive degradation". When you surf the Internet on the phone, degradation is what makes it actually render gracefully. It ensures that error traps are not blocking the engines and that key text is available in XML layers (if you're using Flex).

Internet relevancy relies on:

• Link authority
• How many quality sites/pages are linked to this site/page?

Thematic hubs:

• How relevant are the sites/pages linking to the page?
• Does the exact keyword phrase appear?
• Use tag clouds.

Creating theme hubs:

• It's about linking to the relevant pages and back to emphasize the authority of the page.

You need to balance link authority, link popularity and relevancy. Look not just at the number but at the relative page rank. More high-quality links is the real goal. Run a link tool and find who is linking to your home page and ask them to link to the right page instead of just the home page.

Key questions:

• Is my content linkable?
  • Does this product, news release or event create interest where someone would link to it?
• Is my content portable?
  • Do you have anything you can pass along? PDF, video, widget?
  • Have you included "forward to friends"? Make sharing easy.
• Is my content findable?
  • Have you given it a relevant name and meta data?
• Have you syndicated your portable content?
  • Has it been submitted or shared with key influencers?

Last but not least is our own Bruce Clay. He's taking us to the future. Talk slow, BC.

There are a number of things going on that he's going to talk about.

Behavior-based Search Impact

It's not just personalization, it's overall behavior. Java can be code, coffee or the Caribbean. But even if everyone is looking for travel, it's still granular.

Behavior-based search changes the perception of ranking entirely. Monitors will only pick up the "vanilla" search before the community results get factored in. Bruce can't pretend to be a 17-year-old girl in 90210.

Intent-based Search Impact

Yahoo's Mindset was a great tool that no longer exists. It categorized searches by intent. "Ford Mustang reviews" is research. "Ford Mustang 2008 dealer" is shopping.

Local search tends to include more shopping queries. You must have an address on your site if it is local. But even that's intent based. "Las Vegas hotels" isn't a local search because you probably aren't in Las Vegas. However, "New York pizza" implies that you are in New York.

Universal Search Impact

[Ed: Universal is Google's product. Blended is the generic term.]

When universal came in, Google went from 130 points in the algo to over 200. Bruce doesn't think that we've yet seen the impact of that yet. They're still working on getting words out of video and out of audio.

If you don't have engagement objects, your site is going to drop like a rock.

Overall, ranking is dead. Behavioral, universal and intent are all going to bias the search results in a way that makes ranking worthless. What you're looking for is TRAFFIC. Your only measurement for success is from analytics. If you're not doing analytics, you're missing out. It's going to be hard to defend that you're doing SEO on the basis of doing rankings.

If you're in a behavioral group, use their words on your pages. Design your site for what it is. If it's a shopping site, make it look like a shopping site -- include bulleted lists and shorter pages.

Experiment with and understand how to include engagement objects: images, video, maps, audio, etc.

Q&A

How important are backlinks from syndicated content?

Bruce: We've had many cases where you're syndicating to a site that's higher authority than you and they'll end up outranking you if you're not careful. I don't think it'll help you get ranked.

What is too many links on a page?

Mark: The guidelines say less than a hundred but can you do more? Don't over do it.

Jill: Do what's right for usability. Don't put so many that it's confusing and dilutes your PageRank. However, you do want to link to your important pages. Don't design for search engines. There's no magic number.

[The asker wants a particular number and everyone declines to give him one. Heh.]

How do you balance research and shopping in one site?

Bruce: The architecture tends to reflect one or the other. You can add user-generated content. If you want both, make two pages. Don't try to make one page serve two masters.

Bill: It's a matter of keywords taking you to different places. The pages would look like shopping or research.

Bruce: It's about tie breakers. There's no such thing as a minor part of your Web site when you're in the top 10.

How does one machine do competitive analysis?

Jill: You can turn off personalized search. Firefox has add-ons that can do it.

Bruce: There are third-party products that will bias you across multiple sites. That's really the challenge.

Ash: On my blog, I have links to places where you can opt out of customized ads.

In our experience, Google leans more toward quantity over relevancy. How big of a percentage would you say it's the other way?

Bill: He thinks it's a large percentage. He says that quality -- not just contextually relevant -- links are the real goal. That's the most important part. He totally disagrees that quantity is even a factor.

Mark: He reminds everyone to link to the RIGHT page with the RIGHT keyword.

Does Google treat the top three positions as pretty much equal?

Bruce: You're talking about Wikipedia, Wikipedia and Wikipedia?

Jill: I think it's the authority of sites and the competitiveness of the phrase. If you're looking to buy something, Wikipedia isn't going to show up.

Mark: There's a discussion on Webmaster World about this.

Bill: To get to the number one spot, it's just about having a higher score. No one is going to build a page that looks like Wikipedia because it looks like crap but it's highly functional. It's hard to beat something like that because it's a page that works with lots and lots of relevant links. It depends on what you're looking at. If you're trying to buy a digital camera, it's not going to be Wikipedia that you're going to go to.

Is embedding video to your site just including YouTube videos or hosted?

Bruce: It's hosted. It's got to be yours and it's got to be tied in thematically.

Bill: He agrees with Bruce. If you're embedding YouTube, you're just giving them a backlink. Put it on your own site.

Vertical feeder sites are getting discounted. How do you save them?

Ash: You really need good backlinks. Your content has to be terrific. You need an element of engagement.

IP targeting: How much is that playing in? How do you target that?

Bruce: That's intent based search. It sounds like they're looking at that as a shopping query instead of a research query and so behave in a common way. You can't try to be research for a shopping query.

Bill: It's an even worse position internationally. I was in Switzerland and trying to find snow tires for my daughter in Connecticut. I couldn't do it. You MUST have a local IP and a local TLD if you want to show up for geo-targeting.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
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PubCon 2008 Kickoff Keynote: Shawn Rorick

Good morning. Here we are at the first day of PubCon. Everyone's a little confused this morning because we're in the North Hall instead of the South Hall, unlike every previous year. Luckily my cab driver was a smart bunny and figured it out for me. He also told me that cab drivers in Vegas are only required to know where the hospitals and major government buildings are. Like where to get that shotgun marriage annulled after you get your stomach pumped to avoid alcohol poisoning. [They sure train 'em up good in Vegas. --Virginia]

Brett Tabke gets us started this morning with some housekeeping. Maybe he'll tell us how to get on the Wi-Fi. That would be awesome. This is the biggest PubCon ever, as far as sessions go. When the financial stuff hit in September, registrations just stopped. About a week out from the election, registrations started to build again. Wow. He asks who has seen a decrease from the last six months -- it's about half the room. Those who have seen an increase -- the other half of the room. Almost everyone is optimistic for the next six months.

Microsoft Live Search pretty much underwrote the whole conference. Kudos to them. Yahoo isn't here this time around.

There will be three conferences next year:

• Austin, March 11-13
• London, July 4
• And of course, Las Vegas

Let's get going.

Shawn Rorick is in charge of marketing the Cirque du Soleil shows. Brett asked him to speak because they're on the bleeding edge of marketing. [I heart Cirque du Soleil. Oh, Susan, go to LOVE while you're in Vegas! --Virginia]

This is Shawn's first keynote, he tells us, and he's not a morning person. All his notes are on a cardboard box. Heh.

Shawn got into Internet marketing in 1996 when he joined a marketing firm and they came to him and said "we want a Web site". No one in town knew how to do it so he called Microsoft and they sent him FrontPage. Hee. He spent a couple of years learning Java and HTML while doing consulting. Then he went to the MGM Mirage after a while and built their team from three to fifteen people. After a few years he went to Cirque.

Where we are, where we've been, where we're headed

Where we are: Google's mission statement is to organize the world's information and make it accessible and usable.

The world's information doubles every three years. Five exabytes of storage were required in 2003.

It used to take 50 years, then 25, then 15, etc. It's the half-life formula. If it used to be 50 and in 2003 it was three, imagine what it is now.

Right now we're in the "cloud" which is just a metaphor for the Internet derived from network diagrams.

Imagine:

• No more software titles at Best Buy
• No more cables to your television, phone or stereo
• No more video stores
• No more "hard drives" for storage
• No more Web sites
• No more downloads

How are primary marketing tactics used in a world like this?

The Web is getting smarter. Instead of results we're getting recs; the future of the Web is personalization. There are four parts: the individual's behavior, crowd behavior, item behavior, all three combined.

Looking at the new engines, like Blinkx and Cuil, gives you an idea of where we're going. The look of search is changing.

Look at where online media spending is today: search, display ads, classified, video, rich media, email.

He thinks we'll see virtual worlds coming into play, social media search, search, mobile, widgets and desktop apps, RSS. This is reflected in the growth rates in today's emerging media spending.

The "long tail" is changing because of all those emerging markets. The tail is getting thicker because there are so many different ways of diving into information. The fragmentation of media is the result of an increased online user population over time.

"The future of online media is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." -- Wired

The last big jumps in Internet usage were in 2001 and 2003. They're now five to seven years mature in Internet usage. Shawn's dad got online to play chess against people in China. Now he uses it for eBay, for his business, etc.

He thinks that the recent presidential race is a perfect example of old tactics versus new tactics.

McCain uses: video sharing, blogs/social media
Obama uses: video sharing, in-game advertising, blogs, mobile (SMS), viral campaigns

[Pretend you're watching a viral video blaming Shawn for losing the election right now.]

2.9 million U.S. mobile subscribers received the text message announcing Joe Biden as Barack Obama's running mate. It was the largest mobile campaign to date.

Why are new media tactics approached "conservatively"?

• Unproven application
• Non-applicable demographics (younger)
• Etc.

Most people over the age of 55 are not going to be thinking in terms of new tactics. The average estimated age of someone on a board of directors is 55+. The old school exited with Enron, Friendster, Qwest and Xerox. Once they retire, the new generation will come in and take over.

He sees a merging of media. There used to be a split in media between online and offline channels. Ten years later, they're coming together. It's primarily due to acquisitions and mergers of offline and online agencies. It's also because there are comparable formats. Telemarketing is like mobile marketing, etc.

He proposes a new concept: halo media.

Media fragmentation exhibits users deciding where, how and when they will consume media. This fragmentation results in a cluttered environment, and as marketers, we're forced to have multiple points of advertising.

With halo media, you have your company, then you create a circle of presence around your company. Experience, reference, discuss and purchase when they are ready. The user isn't asked to "click and buy".

So what do marketers need to ask themselves?

Where is my time best spent, and where do I get the most bang for my buck?

• Measurement is critical.
• Remember that not all opportunities are "applicable".
• Forget the "rules".
• Get closer to traditional media.
  • Continue to be the "expert".
  • Educate and share insights.
  • Play the budgets.

Action items:

• Get closer to understanding traditional media (formats, metrics, etc.).
• Attend new or emerging media conferences.
• Don't spend money on what you already know.
• Join or start a local Internet marketing association.
• Ask lots of questions.
• Interrogate the sales people and learn to turn around the pitch.
• Remember that you have the "keys to the car".
• You are only as transparent as you want to be.
• If they're not doing what you're doing today, they're six months behind.
• ALWAYS put yourself in the user's shoes.
• You are a trendsetter and an opinion leader in the digital age. We are at another pivotal point where emerging media is influencing audiences.

You are the innovators. Discover. Evaluate. Evolve.

[We close with another video. It's soundtracked with that music from 2001.]

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/11/08 at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)
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November 4, 2008

PubCon Coverage 2008

PubCon Las Vegas is just around the corner and, as always, we're sending a hapless blogger to type her fingers to the bone and develop RSI. I drew the short straw this time so I'll be covering 18 sessions over three days (yes, six sessions a day. I think Brett Tabke is trying to create some kind of liveblogging ironman event.)

But I'm not the only one who will be working hard during PubCon. Our very own Bruce Clay and Scott Polk will be on panels in several sessions. To be fair, I'm covering one of each. I don't play favorites here.

I also hear that there might be some parties going on. I heard rumors of a reception the first night (sponsored by some truly awesome folks [/biased]), a game of Werewolf, the awesomeness that is Search Bash and of course, the infamous Pub Crawl that gives PubCon its name. Don't take my word for it, though. Last time we were in Vegas, I spent my evenings working in my super gorgeous hotel room at the Wynn. That's my plan for this time around, too, except this time we're staying at Treasure Island. What can I say? I know how to have a good time.

Your official Susan Esparza stalking guide for PubCon:

Tuesday, November 11

9:00 a.m. - Keynote Kickoff Address
10:00 a.m. - Top-Shelf Organic SEO
11:30 a.m. - Earning Big Bucks With Social Media Traffic
1:30 p.m. - Keyword Research Selection and Optimization
2:50 p.m. - Landing Page Optimization
4:10 p.m. - Discover Techniques Use by Enterprise-Level SEOs/SEMs

Wednesday, November 12

9:00 a.m. - Keynote Address by George Wright of Blendtec
10:15 a.m. - Brand Management
11:30 a.m. - The Big Dedicated Server Payoff
1:30 p.m. -Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs and Blog SEO
2:50 p.m. - How to Move Your Web Site Without Chaos
4:10 p.m. - The Secret Life of On-Site Search Exposed

Thursday, November 13

9:00 a.m. - Keynote Address by Satya Nadella of Microsoft Live Search
10:15 a.m. - Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All
11:30 a.m. - Mostly Viral Top Traffic Alternatives, or SEO on a Shoestring Budget
1:30 p.m. - Real-World, Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies
2:50 p.m. - The Wonderful World of Widgets
4:10 p.m. - Super Session: The Search Engine Smackdown

Posted by Susan Esparza on 11/ 4/08 at 8:50 AM | Comments (0)
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