SES San Jose 2008

August 21, 2008

Searching For Jobs In Search

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

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

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

Hiring Criteria/Skills

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

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

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

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

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

Frank: Depends on the market.

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

How do you determine that?

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

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

What are employers looking for?

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

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

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

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

What is your feeling about technical people in this arena?

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking In/Finding Jobs

Where can you find a job?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Marketing Training

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

Dana says it's awesome.

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

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

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

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

Advancing Your Career

How do you advance your career?

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

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

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

Do you see a lot of burnout?

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

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

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

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

Everyone says ZOMG YES.

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 3:46 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SES San Jose 2008

Post-Click Marketing: Converting Search Engine Traffic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Self-segmentation after the click

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

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

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

5 reasons that 2 clicks are better than 1:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basic questions:

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

Advanced questions:

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

If you're thinking about outsourcing:

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

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

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

Q&A

How do you get buy in?

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

How do you use Website Optimizer on your home page?

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

How long should a test run?

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

Is it possible to use optimizer against a segmentation page?

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

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

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

How do I test on low volume keywords?

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

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

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

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

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Google, Liveblog, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, SEO Tools, SES San Jose 2008, Search Engine Optimization

Best Kept Secrets To Search

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

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

Up first is Katee Crawford.

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

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

7 Lessons to Improve ROI

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

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

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

Eric Enge is up.

Fix Quick Tips

1. Using Syndicated Content to Get Links Can Backfire

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

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

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

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

2. How to Provide Accurate Data to Local Search Engines

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

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

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

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

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

3. Free Links Using Google Webmaster Tools

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

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

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

4. MSN Search Funnels -- Outgoing

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

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

Richard Zwicky is up.

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

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

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

Links - Google

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

Links - MSN

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

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

Reputation Management

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

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

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

Getting Rid Of A Bad Site

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

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

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

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

I has no comment on the tactics revealed above.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 2:28 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

How to Choose a Search Vendor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are several purchasing considerations.

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

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

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

SEO vendor considerations

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

Paid search vendor considerations

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

Social media vendor considerations

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

Take aways

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

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/21/08 at 2:13 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

Fast, Free, and Easy Tools To Get You Going

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

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

SEO Tools: Firefox and Friends

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

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

Keyword Research Tools

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

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

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

Link Building Tools

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

PPC Tools

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

Domain Tools

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

Spider Tools

• SEO Browser

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

Competitive Research Tools:

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

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

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

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

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

Using WordPress as an SEO Tool

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

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

Recommended WordPress Settings:

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

Wordpress Plugins:

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Abraham is next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 12:36 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, SES San Jose 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/21/08 at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

Trademark Issues: What SEMs Should Know

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

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

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

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

To establish a claim in court:

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

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

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

Again, courts are split on the issue.

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

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

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

Neither have ever been tested in court.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you use the mark:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not permitted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q&A

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

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

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

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

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

Eric: They might still be allowed.

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

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

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

International or foreign marks

Mark: It's a problem.

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

Foreign marks don't help you in the US.

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

What is the law on typo-squatting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

Effective Contextual Search Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ad Position Differences

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

Quality Score Differences

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

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

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

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

Cynthia Tillo is next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Slegg is next.

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

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

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

Are You Leaving Money On The Table

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

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

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

The AdSense Testing Cheat Sheet:

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

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

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

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

Last Minute Takeaways

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

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

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

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/08 at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, SES San Jose 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

The asterisk means ANY BOT.

You can sink your entire site by writing Disallow: /

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

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

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

Fix 302s into 301.

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

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

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

Use a Favicons for branding.

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

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

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

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

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

More info at the SiteLogic Blog.

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

Check for problems: SEO Health Diagnostics.

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

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

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

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

How are we today? Ongoing analytics.

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

Watch for recurring issues!

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

Befriend your IT colleagues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for some thoughts from Greg and Sage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q&A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can a good CMS product fix SEO issues?

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

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

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

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/21/08 at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Design, Liveblog, SEO Tools, SES San Jose 2008, Search Engine Optimization

Morning Keynote: Dan Heath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple

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

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

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

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

Emotion

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

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

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

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

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

The Curse of Knowledge

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

Concrete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/21/08 at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

August 20, 2008

Black Hat, White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience Q&A

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

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

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

Naylor says no. Make it for WordPress instead.

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

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

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

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

I've heard of affiliates being grouped with spammers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now you know!

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/20/08 at 5:31 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

Maximizing SEO Returns with User Generated Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow, lots of info on this slide.

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

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

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

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

Follow best practices. Breadcrumbs, shorter click path.

Make the user experience very pleasant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They found higher conversion rates and higher average order values.

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

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

Rebecca asks about negative reviews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you reach your customers?

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

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

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

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/20/08 at 5:12 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008, Search Engine Optimization

Social Media Analysis and Tracking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media is growing and infecting search as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you use it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breanna steps back up. Results: 86 percent higher CTR compared to historical average for targeted banner campaigns. Conversions increased 5.3 percent in RSS subscriptions and Newsletter subscriptions. 90 percent were new visitors during the campaign, 60 percent higher than site average. There was a lift in time on site as well.

Todd--

Key observations and learnings:

• Active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences. Highly targeted display ads can perform well in this environment
• Social search is different than Web search and traditional site targeting -- it's about sourcing information via what "trusted" people are referring to. This can get you closer to "search" like intent.
• Influencers and their network relationships - the nature of linking connection matter when it comes to ad performance. Sites that connect to each other around specific topic are key targets
• Conversations offer a new window in analyzing user psychology and intent -- the nature of the conversation can impact as performance.

The more personal the experience, the more likely you are to subscribe to something.

Is there enough inventory out there? Todd thinks so and that it's mostly untapped. The question is finding quality inventory.

How does it compare price wise? It varies. In general it's less expensive to advertise on blogs.

Edmund Wong is up next. He's looking at developing a social media engagement measurement framework, looking at the customer experience and how to improve it.

Another case study. Tech forum engagement. Their goal was to be useful and helpful, not to sell a product and instead overtime improve perception of the brand. Natural search ended up driving significant long term brand impressions on accumulated postings. Measurement is key but standard ROI measure doesn't work in social media. Measure things that make sense for the campaign--postings, tonality, number of links, amount of traffic from the links, number of conversations engaged.

Quote from Clive Thompson: "Google isn't a search engine, it's a reputation management system."

Since many forums are optimized for search, engagement is highly visible. Forever. Traffic increased over time from the posting a year prior. SEO continues to drive new page views.

They took a look at what they COULD address and what they COULDN'T. They didn't fight battles that they couldn't win whether it was 'what should I buy' or customer sentiment issues.

They used it to identify issues on the site as well and were able to correct customer confusion.

Key Takeaways:

• There's no one killer metric for social media
• Track anything possible to glean insights
• Not just about numbers
• It's all relative (focus on benchmarking and trends)
• Measuring social media does not equal ROI for social media
• View social media as the world's largest focus group.

Q&A

How do you get people to join your group on Facebook?

Edmund: You have to figure out what your end customers actually need and what you can offer them. Get out there and show engagement. What's the useful and interesting aspects.

Rob: Ask not what the community can do for you, ask what you can do for the community.

What do you do with imposters?

Todd: Did you out the imposter? Yes? Then the social media democracy will take care of it.

Rob: Look at Jeremiah Oywang's post on companies on Twitter. Transparency is key.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/20/08 at 4:02 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Analytics, Branding, Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008, Social Media

SEO Rehab & Intervention

[Okay, kids. I present you with all the craziness that occurred at the SEO Rehab session. Read it at your own risk. The session quickly ended up being less about dealing with your SEO addiction and more about talk of chocolate cake, Twitter bashing and Kevin Ryan trying to get everyone to follow him on Twitter. Take it for what you will.]

Kevin Ryan is here moderating with bad boys David Naylor (Bronco), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Greg Boser (WebGuerrilla) and Andy Atkins-Kruger (WebCertain Europe Ltd.). The lights just got dim. It's romantic now.

Kevin spends way too much time talking about rehab and other psychedelic things. He's making me uncomfortable.

Greg says he doesn't admit that he's addicted to search engine optimization. Michael says he's not addicted to Twitter. Dave Naylor is addiction-free. Kevin says we can all leave now. He's kidding.

Kevin: When did you first realize you were addicted?

Michael says it's more of an issue for other people. It's not an issue for him. Hee. Kevin says he doesn't care. He calls Michael out for having a number of addictions, especially chocolate cake. All of his Twitter updates are "why can't they serve cake at this party?". What does that do for you? Why can't you bring your own cake?

Michael has no response. Neither do I

Kevin: Why are you hooked on it?

Michael says he's bored. He's looking for someone to talk to. He's surrounded by children. Kevin says Twitter is the Paris Hilton of the Internet. It's famous but what does it do?

Greg calls Twitter weird. Vanessa Fox got him addicted. He turns it off during the day so he can get work done. Michael hints that maybe he's not on Twitter as much as people think he is. Twitter is a script. You can make it do what you want to. Like maybe update when you're not actually there.

Andy Atkin-Kruger brings a bit of structure to this free for all and is going to give a real presentation. Oh thank, God.

Check your Addiction?

• Do you check your rankings more than once per day?
• Do you feel guilty that you haven't twittered for over an hour?
• Can you list all your back links by URL?

If so, you need treatment. But you've taken the most important first step - you're here.

Andy says that people in the search engine optimization industry sometimes lose perspective. They check their rankings every hour and obsess over it. Why?

Kevin asks how it affects business if you're worrying about the fact you haven't Twittered in an hour?

Andy says his problem isn't Twitter. His problem is counting Michael's tweets. He has other problems. Like when Google tells him he's a robot for using Google too often. Hee.

Greg also gets banned from Google. He's addicted to it. They have tools that collect data from Google that they need to use and they try to block him from doing that. He's just using his own computer at his own desk and he's getting banned for being malware. Is that a sign of an addiction?

SEO (Sanity Escaped Organically): The 12 Step Program

1. Takes care choosing KPIs - Don't rely on rankings.
2. Set realistic objectives.
3. Employ people who know what they're doing.
4. Build your Web site for SEO from the bottom up.
5. Only work on projects which deserve to rank.
6. Only work on projects where there is a market.
7. Be different - ideally unique - in the market place.
8. Get good training (attend SEO conferences).
9. Understand the mechanics (the engines)
10. Don't try to be an expert in every SEO technique. Focus on your strengths. (Greg says being a specialist is a way of saying you suck. You need to maintain an expertise in all areas.)
11. Be patient
12. Enjoy your addiction. It's a great industry to work in.

Kevin has lost control of this session.

He's asking the speakers to STOP Twittering and actual speak into the microphone so the audience can't hear them. Ah, this is comedy. Or it would be if I didn't have to blog it.

Kevin: Is the industry as much fun as it was when you got into it? Do you think it's becoming too corporate?

Greg says it was a lot of fun in the early days. He says longevity has been about being able to adapt as the industry changes and gaining satisfaction in different things. The quick fix has gone away. It's more of a longer haul thing. You have to find new ways to keep yourself energized and excited about the business. All of a sudden Greg Boser is the sound moral compass in the room. I expect a unicorn to walk in any moment.

Michael says search is the best job in the world. He's ADD. Twitter has given him 8,000 followers who will listen to him. Now if he only came with a mute button.

Kevin is amazed by Michael's Follower numbers. Michael says it's because he's a critical person. Twitter has result in consulting money for him.

Dave Naylor has his own presentation.

He shows himself checking emails on vacation. Now he shows his desk at Bronco.

Every SEO addiction has a price to pay. He wasted thousand of hours checking PR back links and anchor text by hand. Now he uses those hours to research what he thinks the engines will do next.

PageRank does not make you any more money. The time you spend checking your PR does not make you money. Over the last 12 months, PR on his site has fluctuated up and down and yet traffic remained the same. PR3 can get far more organic traffic than a PR5. PR only changes about once per quarter, why waste time checking it daily?

Check PR like a professional.

When PR updates, check your market. Did the whole industry move? When PR matters is if everyone else when up and you went down.

But people aren't just addicted to PR. They're also addicted to rankings, backlinks, the number pages indexed, etc.

Rankings: Make sure the keyword combinations you are obsessed about are the ones that actually bring you money. If you are checking rankings, do you know which ones bring home the bacon? Look for overall trend discrepancies.

[Dave Naylor is rocking the comedy. Sadly, I can't repeat most of it here. Family friendly and all. ;) ]

Focus on what matters. Every night he checks 100,000s of Web pages of changes while he sleeps. He gets to see a new big picture if he wants too. He gets an email when things changed.

Kevin Ryan, for as much as I love him, has lost his mind. He's "editing" Dave Naylor's PowerPoint signs with things like "Boser is scary smart", "Gray freaks me out a little", and other such things. And then black hat SEO gets mentioned and Kevin stops the conversation saying he doesn't want a blogger to say that he held a black hat panel.

And with that, I slump down in my chair and close my laptop. Sigh.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/20/08 at 3:55 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SES San Jose 2008

Link Building Basics

Kevin Ryan Mike Grehan is taking over for Kevin and moderating a list of troublemakers that includes Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Jeff Quipp (Search Engine People), PJ Fusco (Netconcepts) and Jody Farmer (CreditCards.com).

Mike says he's fascinated with the application of network theory. He's going to talk about history. Oh noes. He says that back in the day he used to spam the heck out of AltaVista. He used to do a lot of keyword stuffing, but then the search engines realized what was going on. Keywords don't always equate to authority on a subject. A college student can write a paper about Beethoven and it won't be as authoritative as if a known composer did, regardless of how many times the keyword was used.

Mike's a chatty moderator, but it's okay because of his cute little accent. I could listen to Mike talk for hours. In fact, I'm pretty sure I have. ;)

PJ Fusco is first. She immediately takes a shot at Mike due to his lack of height. Aw, poor, Mike. Then she takes some shots at Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman and says she was doing the SEO for Search Engine Watch even though they got the credit. Wow, can we take the bitter somewhere else?

PJ moves on and says that there's a saying that you attract more flies with honey. It's true. However, you can also attract flies with crap.

Link building is the activity of increasing the number of high quality inbound links to a document in order to raise it's visibility in the search engine results for targeted phrases.

Three Reasons for Link Building

1. Increase search-referred traffic
2. Improve search engine visibility for targeted terms
3. Improve relevancy signals to the search engines

Getting Started

Know where your links are coming from. Get used to using Backlinks Analysis and Anchor Text Tools:

1. Free Webmaster Tools: PageRank isn't the only answer
1. Yahoo Site Explorer: Export to spreadsheet and parse for yourself. You can get info on competitors. Get more information if you authenticate your Web site. Allows you to get a decent drill down of your backlinks.
2. Google Webmaster Tools: Export can be a little wonky but it's a great way to see the links that Google sees, when and to what.
3. MSN Webmaster Tools: A thousand backlinks is better than naught. You can go in and get a serious look at backlinks and filter by top level domain, sub folders, etc. Allows you to really understand who's linking to your site.
2. Free Link Analysis Tools: You get what you pay for.
1. Search Status 1.26: Firefox plug-in. Gives you a lot more than just backlinks. At a glance you can check robots.txt, WHOIS, etc.
2. SEO for Firefox: Displays PageRank, Google Cache date, Age, Delicious bookmarks, Compete.com details and lots more.
3. Marketleap Link Popularity Check: Really good for determining which competitors' links you want to raid, assuming you already know who is linking to you.
4. Quintura/Kartoo/Google Enabled Visible Search: Google for visualization
5. Hubfinder: Lets you compare where your site is to where you need to be.
3. Not Free Link Analysis Tools: As good as the tool that wields them.
1. Advanced Link Manager: Great for anchor text link insight, backlink diversity data, as well as pretty charts.
2. Link Survey

Is the time investment worth it in link building? Absolutely! Using these tools you can help align the stars in the right position.

Jody Farmer is up.

His company believes in being sincere in their link building. Aw, see, I like him already.

He talks about search engine optimization as being a three legged stool between Code, Content and Links. I giggle when he says it because it's something that Bruce mentions in training a lot.

Six Tenets of Linking Theory: Quality, Quantity, Relevance, Anchor Text, Steady Pace and Link Deeply.

Linkbuilding is a basic marketing discipline. It requires specialists with expert knowledge, understanding and a special skill set. Would you let your event planner buy your media?

In practice, there are four(ish) P's of link building:

• Planning
• Purpose & Persuasion
• Personnel
• Patience & Persistence

(Um, isn't that six P's?)

Planning:

• KW selection and URL designation. What pages and for what words?
• Set baselines and goals - SERP Rankings? New links/week?
• ID Target opportunities - Who competes on those KWs? Where are their links from? How did they earn them?
• Think about your bargain - What do you have to offer?
• Evolve some campaigns to run simultaneously. Got a strategy for .gov? Directories? EDU?
• Blog comments? Social media?>
• Outreach - the hardest part. If you build it, they will NOT come. You have to make them come.

Purpose

Give your targets a reason to link to you. What sales people call a "reason to buy". For some targets, like directories, your simple existence or scale will be enough of a reason. But more likely, you'll need content or tools. Some approaches may be to offer your opinion on a relevant blog post, create good content or develop tools.

Personnel

Don't underestimate the importance of a link builder. Dedicate resources to create expertise and accountability. Invest in finding the right person. Technical experience is only a "plus".

Essentially it's a sales role. You want something who is technical but sociable. Easily builds trust and relationships. Good written and verbal communication skills. Efficient and detailed. Goal oriented. [Nice link builder job description right there.]

Patience and Persistence

Avoid the temptation to build too many links too quickly, to just build sporadically, or to focus on just one keyword or one page. Some links will mature over time. Beware the seduction of paid links and directories.

Jeff Quipp is up. He's Canadian!

He's going to play a game! He wants us to think creativity like a link builder. He wants us to stand up. I'm not. I'm blogging. He asks people to put their arms up and reach the highest in the air that they can. People climb on their seats to get an advantage. This sounds dangerous for those in heels.

The point was to imagine if this went on. Look around the room and look who had their hand up the highest. People are going to steal their techniques and use it as part of their strategy. A bit quirky that Jeff, but smart. :)

Link Building Myths:

PageRank Matters: Toolbar PR is a red herring. It's not real. Real PageRank is viewed by Google only. He mentions a page that has a PR 3 and is ranking for a competitive term.

Reciprocal Linking Is Dead: It's not dead. It's a natural pattern when it's used in moderation. If 75 percent of your links are reciprocal or networked, it's a red flag to Google. It should be part of your link strategy, but not the same thing.

PageRank Sculpting: PR Sculpting is not the best use of your time. Vanessa Fox has said that it's seems like a lot of effort for little pay off. External links matter so much more than internal links.

Link Quantity vs. Quality: More links is not better. It's about the quality, not quantity. The more trusted and authoritative the inbound links...the more the site is trusted, the higher the rankings.

Mistakes To Avoid

Not Using Text Links: Text in links is very important. Use targeted keywords in the anchor text. Even the playing field.

Link Farms: FFAs (Free For Alls) links and the like...Yikes! Blatant manipulation gives you bad search engine karma. If it seems too easy, it probably is. You WILL be punished.

Links to the home page only: Sites with content get links to many pages. The search engines know this. Too many links to your main page and too few going to internal pages may raise warning flags. It says you either have bad content or you're trying to inflate your search results.

302 Redirects: If you have out of date pages or sites don't delete or 302 them. Instead, 301 those links. This helps you to keep all the link juice those pages/sites have accumulated.

Nofollow links: Not all links are created equal. Many are designed not to pass link juice. Check to make sure when build links that it doesn't say nofollow in the code.

[Lots of newbies in the room. So far we've had questions asking what nofollow means and if PR1 is higher or lower than a PR10.]

No VALUABLE Content: Content is a natural link opportunity. The more content you have the more opportunities you have to rank. The more deep links the more authority and then all the pages rank better.

Not Socializing Content: Socializing content means creating awareness about it. Hot submissions can create 100s or even 1000s of links. Socializing content also creates other opportunities to get seen in other media.

Buying Links: Some types of links are discounted, some are not. Punishment is possible. Don't buy links unless you know what you're doing.

Tip: Dofollow Social Media

Find: Social media with DoFollow story links. Use the anchor text you want. Imagine 50+ links for each blog post. The content must be good, otherwise it's spam.

Last but not least is Michael Gray. He says if there's trouble on the Internet, he probably caused it. Heh.

Everything you need to know about link building you learned in high school.

If the popular people say nice things about you it's a lot better than if the AV squad does.
If your strict English teach says you're smart, it's probably better than the lazy janitor who's sleeping in the hallway. True that.

These popular and authoritative people are the ones you want to get links from.

Trust, Authority and Popularity

You want links from your popular Web sites, preferably in your sector. Concentrate on your sector, but don't ignore adjacent avenues, either.

Place to get links:

Directories:

Directories are one of the core link building exercises every Web site should engage in.
Older established trusted directories: Yahoo, BOTW
Evaluate the directory quality with Alexa, QuantCast, Hitwise, Compete, AttentionMeter. Look to see if any of the pages in your sector ranks.

Popular and Frequently Visited Sites

Who are the sites in your sector who break the news?
Look at who they are writing about n\and link to and why?
What can you do to replicate it and get their attention?
Crate content specifically targeted to get the attention from links from them.

Authoritative and Trusted Links

Mine the back links of your competition for links from research sites, trade organizations or other authoritative sites.
Look for dead links try to replicate or improve the content and let the author know about your content.
Local sources, local government, resources, libraries are often overlooked opportunities.

Content Syndication

Use it to identify people who are looking for content, filter for quality.
Create unique content specifically for those Web sites.

Blogs and Blogging

Publish full posts, embed KW rich links in your posts.
Embed KW rich links in your footer.
Embed deep links.
Rotate your keywords every three or four months
Look for guest blog opportunities
Look for blog carnival opportunities.

Social Media

Link bait and viral content...it works
It can get you links from Web sites who are never going to give you links any other way.
Target different social media sites.
Spread out your efforts over a period of time.

Satellite and Remote Content

Content sites like Squidoo and Google Knol
Image sites like Flickr: If you can get a picture to rank, you can put a link at the bottom.
Video sites like YouTube or MetaCafe: Put links in videos that are actually ranking.
Spread your efforts out over longer periods of time.

Trust, Authority and Attention

The currency of the link economy is attention.
DO NOT obsess about PageRank.
Toolbar Page Rank is an illusion.
Look for links from established trusted and authority Web sites
Mix in deep links as well as home page links.
Grow links slowly over time not all at once.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/20/08 at 2:32 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

News Search SEO

Despite skipping food, the live lunchtime broadcast of SEM Synergy was delicious and nutritious! Check out the podcast at WebmasterRadio.fm to hear all the yummy insights from Chris Winfield, Cindy Krum and Dave Snyder.

And for dessert? News Search SEO, of course!

Dana Todd, CMO of Newsforce and Chair of SEMPO, is moderating. She asks who in the audience is PR specialists and a few people raise their hand. Many more raise their hand when she asks who is the catch-all marketing person. This session was designed with them in mind.

Up first is Lisa Buyer, President and CEO of The Buyer Group. She's going to focus on the optimized press release, a vital component of effective search strategies.

Defining the online PR opportunity:
The media segment:
• Editors
• Journalists
• Media
• Analysts

Then there's also the people searching online.

Today's journalists are lucky to have a job, they're working on stories 24/7, and many work for multiple publications. Media relations means helping journalists find their stories online. Getting found in search results is now part of media relations.

64 percent of journalists are using online news services to follow the news. 70 percent check a blog list on a regular basis. Three-fourths of reporters see blogs as helpful in getting them story ideas.

When she reached out to her media contacts, she found that they are finding their sources through Facebook and LinkedIn. They're asking for press releases with a link to PRWeb. They say Google News is part of my sourcing. Press releases need to be simple and easy to understand as well as factual.

Google alerts deliver press release news to inbox. People search on google news. Optimized press releases come up in natural search results. Over-optimized press releases might get found, but won't get read. AP style writing calls for journalists to write on a seventh grade level, so press releases should, too.

44 percent of American consumers are using social networks at least monthly. News search resources include
• Newsforce.com (optimization tool is cool)
• Businesswire.com
• PRWeb.com

News search strategies
• Newsforce.com guarantees headlines with top tier publications
• Newsroom blogs + Web site newsroom
• Being first to market is the best opportunity for news search results

Newsforce.com has an eye tracking study that underlines the readability and shows how consumers are reading press releases online.

A good news search strategy is creating a 12-month press release editorial claendar. PR + SEO is a marriage made in heaven.

Public relations and search
• Under the radar when it comes to influencing SEO
• SEO agencies should work in synergy with PR agencies
• PR brings boardroom content to SEO
• PR professionals and agencies need to have expert working knowledge about SEO
• Online public relations strategies give business a strategic advantage over the competition
• Work together with PPC/SEM campaigns for best results

The PR/SEO investment, according to a recent SEMPO survey
• 9 out of 10 advertising respondents engage in organic SEO
• 10 to 1 ratio budget spend on paid versus organic SEO

What's cool about optimized press releases?
• SEO
• Credibility
• Perception
• Vanity
• Journalists find you and write about you
• People find you
• Online branding
• Lead generation (maybe)

Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing follows up with the mechanics of SEO news content. He says journalists are increasingly leveraging search for story ideas and sources to populate those stories. In this case, it's not just a search engine, it's an influence engine. Most SEO efforts optimize for lead/sales generation.

Consumer --> Google --> Features, Benefits, Buy --> Customer

News content is optimized for a different audience and outcome.

Journalist --> Google --> Facts, Experts Trends --> Trusted source/Media relationship

News SEO fundamentals
• Focus on facts, research, case studies
• Keywords in news doc titles, navigation, content and links
• Archive by category (not just date) - build up the internal linking structure
• Offer photos, video and demos
• Promote content and attract links
• Monitor social and Web analytics

What's news content to optimize?
• Press releases
• Online newsrooms
• Corporate blog
• Reports/white paper
• Email newsletters
• Webinars
• Podcasts/Internet radio show
• Interviews (coach interviewee on keywords)

In digital asset optimization, match the news to the channel
• Announcements
• Press releases
• Images
• Video
• Blog/RSS
• Media coverage
• Social news/bookmark

The channels will then respond to well-packaged media by driving traffic and links.

You never want to stop acquiring inbound links. Link news content, not to the press release site but to your site as well. Include a link to your site on the press release because it will show you as the original, authoritative document. The bottom line is to package news that will travel.

Press release optimization
• Think upward and to the left
• Optimize for people first, search engines next
• Use keywords in the Title, subheading and body
• Don't obsess over keyword density
• In a 500 word release, use the keyword two to four times
• Use keywords in links to company Web site
• Add media: images, podcast, video, PDF/Word docs

Press release SEO analytics
• Pick ups - traditional and bloggers
• Inbound links
• Google and Yahoo News inclusion
• Social bookmarks
• Keyword ranking of press release
• Keyword ranking of target Web page
• Traffic to Web site
• Conversions: media inquiries

Search for "social media monitoring" for a great resource for analytics.

Parting thoughts
• Journalists increasingly relying on search for news sources.
• If it can be searched, it can be optimized.
• Focus news SEO for the media more than sales.

Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR will add to the conversation with a case study and some advanced tactics.

Parents magazine recently launched a photo contest, the winner of which will appear on the November cover of the magazine. The contest began in May and ended in June. They got 4,000 entries in the first few weeks and it didn't seem to be taking off. Greg got pulled in at that poing and was faced with the challenge of optimizing for "not news". The press ignored it. The blogosphere ignored it.

They decided to combine press release optimization and blog outreach. With press releases, someone has to be looking for you to find you. But what if no one's looking for you? To address this they added blogger outreach as a push for a push-pull approach of

The campaign offered useful content and was rolled out over two phases. In late May they offered picture taking tips from the sittings editor to moms and dads entering their kids in the contest. They optimized in all the right places (headline, sub-head) and they added graphics. In June they retooled the release and published it a second time. The press release is still ranking number one 26 days after the release went out.

PRWeb allows you to compare the headline impressions of different releases. Their click-through rate was a healthy three percent. Also, this was across two press releases, so double the impact. This wasn't really news, or useful information, but insider information. Bloggers started picking it up and there was a ripple effect. They didn't just get coverage either, but 142 backlinks. The contest entry page ranks number three in Google for their term "cutest kid in America".

U.S. people visiting parents.com jumped to 112,591 per day from a low-point of 40,000. 85,878 original photos were received by the deadline. Each one comes with an email address.

Lessons learned
• Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
• The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.
• Creating good content pays off. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

How many keywords should we put in the tags for press release images?
Lee Odden: Follow the same guidelines appropriate for any Web page.

How removed can an image be to the subject of the press release? (For instance, a picture of a hormone or security system isn't interesting)
Lisa Buyer: She suggests a short video of someone that was interviewed.
Lee Odden: It depends on who the press release is intended for. General consumers may care about how sexy the image is, but if it's intended for the industry, it may be appropriate to have an image like a security system.
Greg Jarboe: Search engines are really just looking for any graphic.

Can there be too many press releases?
Greg Jarboe: In the old days, there could be too many press releases in the media relations world. But in the news search world, the people looking for news today are different than the people that were looking for news two days ago. If you were working for one of the presidential candidates, you could put out a press release every hour.

We write reviews of what happened at events. We write so many that I think they should be picked up by Google News. Is there a process to submit or will it happen eventually? How can we become considered a news source?
Greg Jarboe: You have to use one of the major wire services.
Lee Odden: If you have a legitimate news source, you can apply to Google or Yahoo.
Dana Todd: Check out the Website Magazine article on how to get your site included in Google News.

What are three metrics I must track to know if my press release distribution campaign is successful or not?
Lee Odden: Look at pickups, search engine traffic, and tracking URLs for micro-conversion.
Greg Jarboe: Traffic to the site and track that to conversion. How much blog coverage did you get?
Lisa Buyer: Search engine distribution sites give reports for a short term analysis. Long term, look at the momentum over a year to see how it's improved your SEO. Look not just at Google News, but regular search results.
Dana Todd: The ultimate goal of PR is to influence public opinion. That's a messy metric. There's some fuzzy metrics that you'll need to measure. Look at shared voice, total readership and circulation, and how frequently you were part of the message.

How many distribution feeds should I do?
Lisa Buyer: She uses all the distribution services, depending on the industry, recent performance, regions. She wouldn't double up for the press release, but the picks one she thinks is the best fit for the release.
Greg Jarboe: He uses Businesswire and PRWeb both at the same time. They reach different places and will help get a full range of audience.
Lee Odden: For the most part he uses one service, like Lisa, based on the people he's trying to reach.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/20/08 at 2:14 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

Searcher Behavior Research Updates

And we're back from the fastest lunch I've ever eaten. Where does the time go? Moderating this session is Bill Muller (iProspect) and our panelists are John Marshall (Market Motive), Pavan Lee (Microsoft), Dr. Larry Cornett (Yahoo! Search) and Bill Barnes (Enquiro Search). I have to confess I just love the research sessions. Hard data just makes my little heart sing. Come on. You can't tell me you aren't excited about this one too.

I know you are because Bill is telling us about how every year this session totally fills the room it's in. Why? Because if you know more about the way searchers behave, you're going to be a better marketer.

John Marshall starts us off.

The interesting thing about search behavior is that it's not that difficult to get good data. The question is on Monday morning, do you understand search behavior? Most people turn to the keywords report in your analytics tool. That's a reasonable place to start but it's an extremely narrow view of the activity on the Web. You're only look at the keywords that brought people to your site. You only see the search results that brought people to your site. You're running into sample bias.

How can we really see the intent of people, not just the people who made it to your Web site. You don't want the whole forest view. You're probably not going to get the whole forest view anyway unless you have a Hitwise account or something. What you can look at is the single tree of your site.

The trick is to use the site search on your Web site. If you don't have site search, implement it. Even if it doesn't work, it's a great source of user intent. Search engine keywords only give you the people who came to your site. Site search gives you the intent of your users, conversion rate information. A lot of people ignore this data because it's free. Free data is often ignored. If you pay for something, you value it more.

Things that can go wrong:

• Mixed Case -- Google Analytics doesn't automatically change case for you so your data gets scattered across case. You need to convert it.
• Multiple results pages -- Some site search pages for 'no results found' don't get tracked by analytics. Make sure all the pages contain your analytics tracking.
• Usual JavaScript breakage
• Injected terms -- Most Web sites that have site search, they use it as a cheap landing page creation system. You have to filter that out of your data if you're doing that because it's not real data. No one is typing it in.

By using site search you're answering the question: what's the true intent of the users when they're on the site.

Site search data cannot replace competitive analysis but it's the cheapest way to get good data fast.

Pavan Lee is up next. She's from Shanghai.

Background from the New York SES: They've discovered that search listings have a branded value. Paid search listings have a stronger branding impact than organic search. There is a positive branding effect for both. They're trying to measure the brand lift.

They studied five brands in five spaces.

Methodology: Eyetracking and post-search survey.

Key findings: Search display and content ads are effective for branding stand alone but more effective together.

They asked "did you remember seeing an ad" 21% lift content 30% display. 38% both.

I can't see her slides at all.

In all cases with all questions, including lift in purchase intent, there was a brand lift and it was stronger for paired ads.

On the eye tracking side, search is still the most effective tool in attracting attention. There's a roll over impact on a multi-channel exposure. If you see search and display or search and content or search and display and content, it's more effective than just seeing any one of those.

Key takeaway: The power of three. There's a synergistic branding impact across content, display and search ads.

None of this data is public information.

Larry Cornett steps up to the podium.

His talk will build on John's presentation in a lot of ways.

Users do a lot before and after they're on the search page. He's going to talk about that, about the research they're doing, how users experience search, a little about crafting search and how they get from 'to do' to 'done'.

The reality is that the search page is just a tiny slice of online activity. Before the search, the user somehow comes to need to do a search. After the search, they want to go somewhere. They're going somewhere because they want to fulfill a task. The task is not getting to best buy. It's getting an iPhone. You need to know what happens after and how it all links back. How do you support them through the whole lifecycle of what they're trying to accomplish.

There is no single methodology that gives you the whole picture. Some ways that Yahoo does testing are:

• Search editorial
• Bucket testing
• Metrics & Analysis
• Search Science
• Focus Groups and surveys
• Eye-tracking research
• Ethnographic studies

How users experience search

• Starting context (what have they seen and experience before they query)
• Quick Scanning (one to three seconds)
• Information Scent
• Matching intent
• Quick Decisions
• Looking for answers (not a homework exercise. "Don't make me work")
• Feeling safe

They try to help crafting searches with 'search assist' (suggested searches). For most people search is hard. They're not experts.

Focus on the ultimate goal. They're looking to do something, they're wanting an answer. Yahoo SearchMonkey is an attempt at giving them that answer. It gives the user more information about what's behind the link and what's important to know.

What does this mean for marketers?

• Before the SERP
  • Starting context
  • The "Real task"
• On the SERP
  • Intent and information scent
  • Searchmonkey
• After the SERP
  • Fulfilling expectations
  • Being their "answer" and living up to the promise of the search result.

We thought that the reason people were having trouble with search was that it was an artificial session. But field studies showed us that the users were really having trouble formulating queries so we really tried to implement something that would help them.

Bill Barnes is the last to speak.

Their research is grounded in their search marketing and grew out of that.

Why is the first listing seen so important
Why do we scan in groups of 3 or 4
Why branding is important

[Standard heat map image, you've seen it a million times.]

They did experiments with the top SPONSORED listing and played around with really great ad copy versus just 'okay' ad copy.

When they did a survey they didn't ask about the listing, they asked about the search engine and if they'd use it again. The only difference was the ad copy but there was a huge lift in trust in the engine with the great copy.

Working memory: It's what comes to mind with recall. For some reason, we're hardwired to think in threes or fours.

[Oh no, my battery is dying]

There's a 16 percent increase in brand association when brand is the Top Sponsored and Top Organic Results. On an unbranded query. The really interesting thing is that the recognition of OTHER brands drops away at the same time.

There's an 8 percent lift in brand purchase. If you're not there, you lose 16 percent brand lift.

Even for branded queries, you get a brand lift if you appear. Should you buy your branded terms? Yes.

Eyetracking finding: Brand fixation only occurs in the TITLE and the URL not in the description.

If you're a familiar brand to the searcher, they will often skip the sponsored listings at the top. If you're buying the top sponsored, write your copy for a NEW user.

If you have brand A and brand B in sponsored with Brand A in top organic, brand A gets a HUGE lift.

Key Findings:

• INTENT is the most important thing
• Organic and sponsored combined give the biggest brand lift.
• Be aware of who else is on the serp
• Write your ad copy to new clients.
• Don't assume your brand will be in the consideration set. If you're not on the page, you're forgotten.

Q&A

The first question is does offline affect offline. The answer is yes, though the panelists don't say that. Go read the Re Search Online, Purchase Offline session from yesterday.

Why do search views get longer?

Pavan thinks it's because searchers are looking for something in particular whereas display and content ads are push forms of advertising.

Do they really only spend 1-3 seconds and how often do they click?

Larry: It's on average. In some cases, for navigational queries, that's less than a second. It might be longer at home but yeah, it's amazingly fast.

Bill: Females look longer and shop around, males just go straight to results. There's a free paper available.

Pavan: Search intentions lead to searcher behavior. Fact based search stays organic. Commercial searches tend to be more broad. It also varies by culture. Chinese spend twice as long as Americans.

John mentions that his contention is that the site search queries are the same queries that are being typed into the search engines but they're just not getting to your site.

Is the suggested search condensing the search queries?

Larry: Yes. People are moving to longer queries and that search assist does jump them to the queries that will get them to the answer faster.

Are there differences in lift by categories?

Pavan: Yes there is a difference in lift across different verticals but in all cases it does result in lift.

[Long set up about pretending to be a confused searcher and poor SERPS] What can be done to help confused searchers?

Larry: Search assist is just one way. It works mostly for shorter queries?

Does the golden triangle change with non-roman character sets?

Pavan: In Chinese, the scanning pattern is very different. It's a rectangle. You have to look at everything to put together meaning.

Would you suggest not trying to dominate the organic?

Bill: No, never. Always optimize.

What plays into search assist? How does it affect PPC?

Larry: Nothing is paid in those.

John: The hidden message there is: No you can't spam the suggestions.

John says that the other thing site search is good for is manifesting usability problems and for doing competitive intelligence.

If you rank 1 on a non branded term, should you also be number one in paid search as well?

Bill: That's exactly what our research showed. That said, always test and retest and see if the ROI is worth it. Clicks went 50/50 on paid and organic, so make sure that you're testing and monitoring.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/20/08 at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Live Search, Liveblog, Pay Per Click / Online Ads, SEO Tips & Tricks, SES San Jose 2008, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo

Social Media Marketing: What Is It And What Is It Good For?

Pauline Ores (IBM Corporation) is moderating with speakers Erik Qualman (Search Engine Watch, EF Education), Brent Csutoras (Brent Csutoras), and Vanina Delobelle (Monster Worldwide). Also, my battery is about to die. Guess who forgot to charge it last night. Blogger Fail.

Up first is Vanina Delobelle. She's going to introduce us to social media in case you've been sleeping the past year or so and haven't heard of it.

Social media includes viral universes, the social networks, forums, microblogging, multimedia sharing, diggs, and blogs & livecasts. The tools belong to users with the communities being built around those tools. It's very user-centric.

What can you use social media for?

• Connect with people: Reach people where they are, the way they are used to.
• Keep brand positioning: Keep brand awareness to relay offline marketing campaigns.
• Generate more traffic.
• Enlarge the targeted segment.
• Increase the user experience.

Use social media to leverage current marketing results. Get better brand awareness, better brand management, better user stickiness, better quality products, and better sales. Better, FTW!

The requirements for social media: Global means local; we deal with communities and therefore need to be close to them. Community managers need to get more focus. You want to be consistent. The effort must start and last or you'll lose your community. People are coming to you to entertain them and you have to continue sharing with them or they'll abandon you. The content needs to get more focused.

She shows how Monster has grown in social media since 2007 and where they're planning on going next.

Vanina moves on to search's golden triangles and how well social media does. Social media ranks well because of all the links and because of how often the content is updated.

Next up is Erik Qualman to talk about some stuff he's done with EF Education.

They decided to make an application on Facebook where users could go in and tell everyone where they had traveled in their life. People loved it. They had 50,000 downloads a day for the Global Footprint application. They treated it like a direct response application.

Erik says you don't have to create a new concept in order to be successful on the Web. The Internet has always been about "beg, borrow and make better".

They created another application which they've sinced dubbed a "Field of Nightmares" because they build it and nobody came. Hee. Erik says to figure out what you offer and go for that.
Most of the times you don't want to build out your own community, but sometimes you do. Live Mocha is site they launched to help people learn new languages. You go in and they have different tools there people can use to learn. There's a social aspect where you can instant
message with people who live in countries that language is spoken.

In a different application, they wanted to allow people who were going on trips to see who else would be on the bus with them. To avoid creating a backend nightmare, they've let users find each other. You don't have to do it through your system. Give them the tools and the marketplace to do it and they will.

The biggest thing on Facebook is updating your status. The app lets them update their status so they can brag about what they're doing.

Common Questions

• Where should I start? That comes down to where you think you have the most chance for success. Don't try and tackle all the social networks at once.
• When should I start? Today. Don't wait for the perfect thing or idea. Just get it out there and slap beta on it. Give it a month or two so people can see what they like and what they don't like, and then fix it.
• Can search engines crawl social media networks? Until you stop seeing it rank high, it's obviously working.
• Does Facebook PPC work? It depends, but go in there and test it out. Twenty percent of their traffic comes from Facebook (from their Fan page).
• What's the easiest way for my company to use Twitter? Just go in and put in your company name to see what people are talking about. Keep an eye on it. Be transparent.
• What else is exciting? In 2 or 3 years its' going to be search. The search engine's aren't really delivering to the needs users. If you need to buy a car and use a search engine, Google will give you a bunch of listings. You'd spend 20 hours doing research. But in a year's time with social media, you'll be able to see how many of your friends purchased a car in the past 2 years, of that, 30 have the same demographics as you, 20 purchased an SVU and here are their reviews. It will eliminate individual replication of the same tasks.

Brent Csutoras is next. This should be awesome.

Social media is really broad. There's Twitter, IM, etc. One of the most viable aspects of social media is utilizing it as a way to increase your visibility and your ranking and getting links to your site all through pushing your content.

There are a few basic things that are important when you get into search engine optimization. You look at your domain, if it has a lot of authority, how short it might be, on page factors, linking, etc. One of the most important things you'll do is try to get links. Links are getting harder and harder to get. The engines are saying it's evil to buy links and it's pushed lots of people underground.

That's where social media comes in. It can increase the visibility of your content and get it more eyeballs and links. There's traffic and branding, but the links are the most important.

You have content. You have a service, a Web page, whatever it is. You're going to create content and then you're going to find communities that you think you can work well in and you'll submit it there. Next you want to engage the people in these communities. You want to have a network so that you can acquire votes. Everyone submits content and the votes that come in within that first 24 hours will determine if you go popular or not. The good thing about this is that there's a mass audience on the Web looking for content every single day. People are willing to link to you as the source in order to get your content. But you have to put it in front of them first. When you put your content into these communities, you put an authority stamp on your content.

When you get to this popular point, a lot of people get caught up in what links they're getting. You're getting community links. These are big powerhouse sites. They won't last very long but there's a couple day window that will give you a boost in your rankings. The people who find you through the engines are the ones more likely to convert. That's where the targeted traffic comes from.

And this is all natural linking. Google wants people to find interesting content on the Web and link to it. The search engines embrace this kind of link building.

He talks about two campaigns that worked really well for him - one was about a guy who's name sound liked Batman and Superman together and the other was some inappropriate Chinese to English translations.

They got 3000+ Digg links for each and lots of StumbleUpon links. They got 8,196 inbound links from that superman bait.

Social media has an amazing effect to increase PR, authority, links, and branding. You can make almost anything viral, especially if you look at this from the viewpoint that you're an SEO trying to build links.

Social Media Tips

• Have a site that is social media friendly: Wait to put the ads on your page. Social people don't look at them anymore.
• Pick communities you relate to: Don't go trying to do politics in a dog community.
• Check what worked before: Go to the sites and type is [most dog] or [top dogs] to see what stuff has been popular in the past.
• Create high quality content: Take the time to create something that's going to work. You don't want to put the work into it only to get no links because you're content isn't good.
• Understand how to submit and push social campaigns: How does the community work? What kinds of comments do they respond to?
• Understand what to with success: Know what you're trying to do and have a plan for how you're going to get there.

Brent is teh awesome.

How do you deal with the time management issue of social media? Also, for people who do search engine optimization, how do you segment your time to fit social media into that?

Brent: It has to be what's important to you. Social is not something you're going to do as one of your 10 things to do for the day. If that's all the time you have, then I suggest you stick more to bookmarking. Stick to trying to create content that would be viral on its own and that you won't have to push. You really have to spend the time. The thing about social is that these are the same people you're going to be talking to every day. You can't BS them. You need to be involved. You need to understand how it works. If you don't have a lot of time, pick one community.

Pauline: The challenge with social media is that it's very resource intensive. The holy grail right now at IBM is how are we measuring the value of social media?

Vanina: They have one person per country working on social media.

What are the different third-party applications for Twitter? Which one is the best and why people would benefit from using Twitter?

Brent: Apps making people use Twitter more because it gives people what they want in the format they want. There are a lot of tools out there. It's more a personal thing. There's a tool called TweetPro that allows you to search certain keywords and add people based on keywords. He doesn't want to name too many because some are pretty dark.

Can you talk about online reputation management?

Brent: You don't have a choice. People are going to talk about you whether you're in social media or not. If you participate, at least you have some sort of say in the conversation. If you find a campaign that starts getting negative, you need to bring it to your Web site. Engage the conversation on your platform and then in a few months delete all the stuff. [Yikes, Brent.]

Vanina: If someone leaves a bad comment about you, respond. Don't stay quiet.

Brent: In social communities you have a say on the comments. If the comment is really out there, you can report it to the community and see if you can get it removed. He gets people to down vote comments so they disappear. Know what the community's functions are.

Where do you see social media going in the next 2-3 years?

Erik: You currently pay people for referrals. Paying people for testimonials is just building on that. The search results you get in the social graph are going to be much more valuable to you.

Brent: He believes that social media is about interaction. It's a mechanism that corporations like.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/20/08 at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008

Getting Vertical Search Right

Day 3 of SES San Jose and everyone looks a little tired from partying at the Googleplex last night. The coffee shop was out of bagels. That's a crime. I'm going to starve. My kingdom for some scrambled eggs.

But enough about me. Moderator Lauren Vaccerello (FXCM) and panelists Philip James (Snooth, Inc), Jonathan Dingman (Digitally Imported, Inc) and Paul Forster (Indeed) are ready to go. On with the show!

Philip James is up first. Snooth is a wine search engine and marketplace. [bookmarks for later] He's going to be talking about how to build your own vertical search and build traffic to it.

Why vertical search? The Web is too big and growing too fast for even the big guys to keep up which is leading to poorer results and endless tweaking of search queries by the searchers to try to get relevance. Vertical search solves that because you can focus on only the relevant part of the Web.

Vertical is a trade off. You're smaller, so you get great relevancy but you have to balance specialization versus market size. Verticals can dominate the space, you only have 1-3 dominate players in any niche.

Getting the word out about your engine:
You use the generic engines. SEO if you have the content, SEM if you have a fast conversion cycle. He thinks you can use social media marketing (SMM) but it depends on the business. In all cases it's about scalability. SMM is the hardest to scale.

Delivering better content:

• New content search - blogs, images, videos
• "Canned Search" -- Dog friendly employers
• Parametric search -- more like a DB query
• Semantic search -- implied meaning, helped out by the fact that they've already self-selected the vertical-- no need to discover what the intent is, it's already clear.
• Filters and relevant post search tools

"Spicy cali cab that's good with beef" -- easy to filter for that because you already know they're looking for wine, not anything else.

Search refinement:

• Price sliders
• Buttons
• Dropdowns
• Tags

You're able to search within results and narrow down your query.

You still need a business model. How to monetize? Advertising (sponsored listings, banner ads) Assuming $50 eCPM, you need 80 million pageviews / month to make $50m annually.

Referrals/lead generation (clicks or sales). At 10% per sale affiliate fees need to refer $500 million in sales. If $100 per transaction then 14000 transaction daily.

Pick your vertical carefully:

• Weigh up market size/competition
• Scalable acquisition of users
• Provide a clear search benefit
• Ensure page view volume or lead gen potential

Paul Forster steps up next. He starts off by defining vertical search (and he uses the blind men and the elephant example! A BC favorite.)

Vertical search characteristics:

• Specialized data
• Hidden Web (often behind forms)
• Structured or semi-structured
• Time-sensitive
• Comprehensive search

Examples:

• Travel - Kayak.com
• Jobs - Indeed.com
• Shopping - Become.com

Vertical search reveals the intent of the user.

Why does vertical search matter to marketers:

• Specialized intent
• Focused audiences (someone searching for SEM jobs in San Jose is probably an SEM in San Jose)
• Google is bad at it (whatever type of vertical "it" is)
• Spectacular traffic growth

First generation verticals sites (walled gardens) like Monster and Expedia still have more traffic than the newer vertical sites but the newer sites (search engines) have a lot of growth (versus stagnation or declined with the older sites). [There's a chart here of the growth over the course of a year. It's impressive.]

How do you market in a vertical engine?:

• Organic inclusion -- many allow you to provide a data feed directly to them. Often free. Optimize your data feeds -- make sure the data is accurate, all fields are filled in correctly and comprehensive. Take out duplicates and make it reliable
• Paid search -- varies by site. Some are flat rate, some are auction based.
• Emails, subscriptions and more. It varies by site.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What audience am I trying to reach? Be creative.
• What kind of vertical search sites to use?
• Does a prospective site get enough traffic? Use hitwise and comScore to see if it's worth your time.
• How significant is their partner networks? (Not as important as people make it seem but a small consideration anyway. Focus on the traffic to the main site.)
• Is free organic inclusion on off?
• Have I optimized my feeds?
• What ad products does the site offer?
• How can I track results and ROI?

Jonathan Dingman is up next. He's the only non-Brit speaking but that's okay, he's from my hometown.

Like everywhere else, content is king. How do you stand out and be unique? If you're a lyrics site, your content will be duplicated all over the Web. You need to make yourself unique in some other way. [He mentions that lyrics sites SERPS don't change much, radio sites SERPS do. Because of content.]

If you're thinking about getting into vertical search, you have to ask yourself if you can keep up.

• Fast moving results
• Staying on top of SEO
• SEO-- Links
• SEO-- Keywords
• SEO-- Stay relevant

Bottom line:

• Be unique
• Bring the visitor back to your site
• Be memorable
• Be unique

Know what the intent of the searcher is. Lyrics sites-- people want the lyrics they're looking for, not what's hot or what's new.

Give the user a good experience. If they don't have a good experience, they don't return. Keep it relevant and unique.

[Is he doing this on the fly?]

People get lazy--offer them an easy way to find the content. It's about how you display the content to the user.

Q&A

Lauren: Why should I choose vertical search over general search?

Paul: Traffic is there and growing. Because many marketers don't recognize this, there's an opportunity there for cost effectiveness. Granularity of targeting can be a lot better. Some things are just easier to do with a vertical search. You can target intent much better.

Lauren: are there differences in semantic searches between generic and vertical engines?

Philip: They already broadcast their intent by coming to the site. The CPM rates and ad rates are higher but your ROI is usually better. It's a better spend to show up and have people click and convert than showing up thousands of times on Facebook and never get the click.

What's the implication of the chart showing the stagnation of growth? Why is that?

Paul: I think that it's a better experience. Vertical searches do a better job of providing results and relevancy.

Philip: There's a limited number of terms so we can refine the relevancy a lot better. Run some algorithms on it and you can find misspellings, synonyms, etc. Irrelevant words can be tossed out much more easily. You don't need to be told you can't spell you just need the results.

[Audience member starts his question by referencing pizza. Mmm, pizza]
How does the relevancy get focused for the people who are less search conscious? What is the interaction between the generics and the verticals?

Paul: I think one answer to the first question is refinement. Kayak has the refinement in the left rail. Indeed will pull up all the jobs that pay at least a salary number. Verticals prompt refinement.

Philip: The second question: there's a symbiosis between the engines. Sometimes you're taking traffic, sometimes you're bringing them more traffic. Yahoo SearchMonkey is imbedding some vertical engines so that you're getting more relevant information. Google has OneSearch. They're clearly looking for ways to provide the content and the verticals can provide that.

Paul: Related to that, one of the problems for general search engines is do you use your own service or do you use whatever the best out there is? Do you use GoogleBase only or do you include Indeed? It's a struggle for them.

How do you define success? Are you trying to get someone to their Chicago pizzeria as quickly as possible? What tools are searchers using?

Jonathan: Success is whatever your marketing goals are. Are you looking to get ad clicks or sales? Tools vary depending on how users are using the site.

Philip: Agrees that it's business goals. The only one that drives all of it is more users, so more users is good. We find that people don't always know where to begin so they start with a generic search (usually price on Snooth) and then they use the refinement tools.

Paul: Agrees with all the previous but says that only 5 or 10 percent use the refinement tools and most people just use the search box. That's a challenge for them is figuring out how to get people to use them. Repeat visitors is a good measure of success.

Lauren: How can the everyday marketers take advantage of the vertical search industry?

Philip: Figure out who the vertical search engines are that are relevant and cut out the ones without enough traffic. That whittles it down pretty quickly for the ad side. Get a feed up and running if you're selling a product is important. Once you set up one feed you can set up others with slightly different standards pretty easily.

Paul: Research what advertising products different sites have. Can you send a feed? Can you do it organically? If not how much does it cost? It is pay for performance? Can you set a budget? Are there email marketing opportunities? It's very diverse. The user experience is much simpler than the marketers' experience. The big point is traffic. Don't waste your time on sites that don't get traffic.

What's the difference between a vertical search engine and a vertical portal?

Paul: I like the thing the difference is that vertical engines are trying to be comprehensive. They've got more inventory and more relevancy than a walled garden.

Philip: I don't know the difference. I think the two converged. There are vertical search engines that interweave social commerce and makes them like a portal.

Jonathan: Looksmart is a good example of a company that really adopted vertical search. But they don't display just their own results. That's the difference to me. Vertical search displays more than just your own results. The user gets a better experience.

Philip: Shop.com is a good example that defines the coalescence. Some you can buy at Shop.com and some you click through to buy at another site.

Lauren: Where do you see vertical search going?

Paul: I think it's going to become a dominant way of finding time sensitive, date sensitive, structured material. I think there's a lot of denial from the walled garden sites whose models are threatened by the vertical search experience.

Philip: I think integration with the generic engines is going to be key like SearchMonkey. We'll see if Google continues to license and rebrand or not. When a big engine like Yahoo aligns with one vertical, that's sort of game over for the others in the space. If you're Yelp, you win but everyone else loses.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/20/08 at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008, Search Engine Optimization

August 19, 2008

Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers

Wait, SEM by the numbers? Oh noes. How did I end up in this room? Lisa doesn't do numbers. She's pretty. And talking about herself.

Moving on.

[And Li Evans just snuck up behind me and gave me a full-fledged heart attack. Thanks, Li! :)]

Chris Boggs (Brulant) is moderating speakers Craig Danuloff (Commerce360, Inc.), Brian Cosgrove (AvenueA/Razorfish, SearchMarketingGurus Author), Heather Doughery (Hitwise), Michael Stebbins (MarketMotive) and Brett Crosby (Google).

Up first is Craig Danuloff.

Ooo, he has Superman on his first slide. Susan so wishes she was here.

There are three things you're up against when dealing with Web analytics: Invisibility, deception, and unlimited power & resources.

Invisibility: You miss the full spectrum of what's going on because the start and the end of what you're measuring are both missing. Every search is a question; every ad is an attempt to answer that question. Keywords are simply a connector. ROAS is a "feel good" metrics that you shouldn't take seriously.

Deception: Can you really trust what you see? You have tens of dozens of campaign groups and all that ever comes back are the averages. You see a rollup of your average position of your profit and ROI. It looks good but if you haven't seen the raw data, you can't make informed decisions. You also have to worry about accuracy. You don't always know if you have a statistically significant sample size.

Unlimited Power & Resource: You run huge campaigns and time is an issue. You have to watch where you put your energy and your effort. A change is not a test. Someone needs to be there to record it, to track it and to alert you of the results. Not all the tools provide that, but you have to be more methodical about watching it. You have to manage inter-dependency.

How Good Can Triumph Over Evil

• De-Cloak 'em: Request a way to get information on queries. Demand real margin-net Profit-ROI numbers in SEM Analytics
• Keep 'em Honest: Constantly segregate keywords by performance. Understand revenue and expense attribution and allocation. Don't get lied to by statistics.
• Use the force: Apply math and statistics to numeric problems. Make changes with testing and inter-relations in mind.

Good stuff!

Next up is Brian Cosgrove.

Implementation: If you don't configure your analytics package correctly all of your referrals will come in as organic search. It's just going to bucket it that way. You need to make sure you configure it so that you're separating everything out, especially if you're using something like Yahoo Paid Inclusion.

Filtering: Lots of people don't take into account that they have a lot of internal traffic happening. People come in for different reasons. You want to put filters in there. Go through your reports and look for things you don't understand.

Data Driven: With all these different platforms you have lots of people sending in ad hoc requests asking you to get numbers or reports on something they need. They're not using it to drive business decisions. To get to a data driven organization, changes need to happen.

Roles: Web analysts are very good at looking at data. They have a general understanding of what they're seeing. They come up with insights that they have to feed along to Web developers. But what they're missing is an operations person. There needs to be a Project Manager to keep everyone on task and make sure things are getting organized and done.

Process: Report -> Analyze -> Optimize -> Measure. This process gives you full utilization. Analysts are always putting stuff together and people are always ready to take them.

Create landing page reports. This will help you to find the pages that happen to rank well but where the word isn't exactly the best place for someone to make their way in the funnel. It's important to look at the different words and see which landing pages are really working for you.

In conclusion:

• Implement your platform correctly
• ID actions you can take ahead of time
• Coordinate with other resources
• Separate the analysis cycles
• Staff people to manage the projects

Heather Dougherty is next.

Identify and Maximize SEM Opportunities:

Identify trends and seasonality: Be proactive by planning ahead for trends. Keep in touch with that's going on in marketing. Understand the reliance of paid vs. organic search within specific industries and do the same for any competitive Web sites. Measure the impact of brand awareness upon competitor's organic traffic.

Compare where people are searching to where they are clicking.

Improve keyword list efficiency by breaking out the best terms for optimization vs PPC campaigns.

Identify who is doing well in sponsored listings and learn from their copy. What are they saying that works? What's in their copy? How are they attracting people?

Learn from the best optimizer. See who's getting the most traffic and figure out why they're getting it. If you can't beat them, maybe you can partner with them (ala Google?). Find good partners for product placement, affiliates, etc.

Determine user intent - purchase or new? Can help you optimize for that strategy?

Monitor your brand health and use search for reputation management in a crisis.

Integrate search findings across the organization. Do research to determine the best search engine optimization and PPC opportunities. Take advantage of these findings to help drive all marketing initiatives. Identify advertising opportunities on Web sites that are well optimized for organic results.

Discover affiliate partners that are bidding on competitive terms to maximize your budget.

Michael Stebbins is next.

What's In Your Data?

Basic: Bounce Rate, Average Time, Page Views
More Vital: Conversion Rate, Cost of Visitor and Revenue per Visitor.

The Grim Reaper

1. Tactical Question: Which 10 percent of my ads are not performing?
2. Possible Answers: Find ads with high cost, bad ROI, low engagement, low conversion, etc.
3. Planned Actions: Cut them. Create replacement ads. Increased investment in the areas that are performing.

He runs us through a sample of The Grim Reaper technique. He also mentions that CustomerIntent.com has a calculator to help you figure out your margins, so you should check that out.

Take a look at your keyword stats and see how they're performing. Based on that, mark the candidates for deletion. You want to get rid of the campaigns that are not performing. Don't try and fix them.

In Google Analytics you can sort by ROI. The ones on the top (aka the ones with the highest ROI) you can ignore. The ones on the bottom are your candidates for deletion. Take a look at the number of visits, the ROI percentage, etc, and decide which ones should be deleted

Free Tools Love

• Microsoft's Check Commercial Intent Tool: You put in two different terms and it tells you, in percentage, the commercial intent for that tool.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Tells you the search volume for your keywords with estimated CPC.
• Microsoft's Forecast and Demographics Tool: Tells you who is buying, gives you age and gender information. Helps you to tune your message to your demographic.
• Google Ad Planner: You list the sites you think are most likely to attract that audience and the tool returns sites that have the traffic you're looking for. (I have no idea what that means. I'm hoping you do.)

When you're doing your testing, rig the election by protecting the incumbent. You want to create three copies of the incumbent ad that's performing. You don't want to cut a performing ad in half. Set your ads to rotate evenly. This will give 75 percent to your incumbent ad and 25 percent to the challenger.

Brett Cosby will finish things up.

Brett says that today is the 4 year anniversary that Google approached him about buying Urchin. Aw.

When Google bought Urchin, Brett realized that their audience had changed drastically. They launched a new interface for Google Analytics where the goal was to put data into context. You get the big overview first and then it gets broken down as you go down the page. They kept the deep pool for the experts and added a shallow end for everyone.
Get the right data to the right people.

1. Set up goals and funnels (ecommerce and non-ecommerce).
2. Customize dashboards.
3. Customize your email reports for different roles.

Goals and Funnels: You have funnel reports - traffic goes in and you see how it leaves. Set up your goals via your admin interface. Enter goals, funnels and value. Once you do that, Google can tell you the goal value per visit and other data. Set up actual ecommerce for even better data.

Customized dashboards: You can put any report you want on your dashboard with a click of a button. You can also email reports - either instantly or scheduling them. Get customized data going out to the right people at the right time. Do this for each major role and everyone is happy.

Chris Bogg finishes things off by asking the panel what the audience can do now that will save them money the fastest. Here are their answers:

• Click the revenue data
• Figure out which terms you're going to optimize better
• Segregate your brand terms and look at the ones that are not brand terms.
• Look at your site and see what kind of duplicate content issue you have.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/19/08 at 5:49 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Analytics, Liveblog, SES San Jose 2008