seschicago06

January 15, 2007

Weekend Update

DMOZ Accepting Submissions

News is quickly spreading at places like here, here and here that DMOZ is back from the dead and open for business. The question now is: Do you care?

It’s been pretty well documented that DMOZ had been having some “technical issues” dating back to October 2006, but it seems things are starting to get back on track over there. Site Submission, Update Listings and Forgotten password forms are all online again, though editor applications are still unavailable. (You’ll have to find another way to game the system.) But will its 3.5 month hiatus make it better or are people just over it?

I’m not expecting great improvements from DMOZ, but I wouldn’t cross if off your Search Engine Optimization To Do list. Clearly it has lost the importance it held in its heyday, but it is still worth the time to submit your site if you’re not in there already. Who knows, your DMOZ link may that tiebreaker point you need to help you jump a spot in the rankings. Site submission only takes a few minutes, what do you have to lose? Just submit it and forget it.

As a side note: We would never insinuate that DMOZ’s back-from-the-dead announcement had anything to do with them recently losing their spot on Bruce Clay’s Search Engine Relationship Chart, except we all know it totally does. Bruce’s Search Engine Relationship Chart is just that powerful.

TLD Trouble Down Under?

Evilgreenmonkey notes a problem one SEW forum member is having where a Web site for an Australian local tourism organization isn’t showing up in queries when the “pages from Australia” option is selected because it’s using a .com TLD and is hosted in the United States.

Issues like this are not uncommon; in fact, Matt Cutts mentioned a similar situation in his Infrastructure Update last week. Though you don’t necessarily need to be using your country-specific TLD in order to rank well in your country’s engine, it’s worth doing. If it’s important to Google to show local sites for certain queries, then it should be important enough to be worked into your search engine optimization campaign.

If it’s absolutely impossible for you to make the switch, your best bet is step up the number of links you’re getting from regional sites and at least host your site in the country you want to rank in so your WHOIS information includes a local address.

Google Reader to Evolve?

James Corbett (Via RWW) does some speculating that Google Reader may evolve into a “ReWriter” in 2007:

"The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let's call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together - RSS/ATOM (feeds), OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats."

Those are some hefty goals for 2007, but how awesome would that be? I don’t think we’ll see all that in the next year, but I will say this: If Google Reader can make it so I can bookmark pages, “note” things in Google Notebook, and comment to blog posts directly from GR, I’ll make the switch from Bloglines. Let’s see how badly they want me!

Fun Finds

Congrats to Andy Hagans on winning his bet with Neil Patel, where he had to get this post to rank in the top three for Neil’s name by today. Perhaps now that Andy has won Bruce will stop asking why I keep referring to Neil as a “pretty princess” in the blog. ;) See, I was doing it for Andy!

Rebecca Kelley calls bloggers the ultimate attention whores and the New York Times compares blogs to Labradors, calling them “friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention”. Geez, where’s the love?

Danny Sullivan says sites need to get in the top 5, not the top 10, if they want to be found by searchers. Danny’s analysis of a Microsoft eye-tracking study [PDF] is super informative, extremely telling, and very, very, very, very long. Read it when you have a good 10-15 minutes to spare. [Lisa has a short attention span. I thought Danny's post was great. --Susan] - Were either of those points up for debate?. Funny, I don’t see you commenting on it, Ms. I Read Every Word.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 01/15/07 at 2:46 PM | Comments (6)
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December 8, 2006

SES Chicago Recap

It’s sort of like the Friday Recap, only not.

So we’re back. The entire Bruce Clay, Inc. team has made their way back from snowy Chicago (some of us earlier than others. ~~Jerks.~~). Personally, I had an absolute blast getting to meet everyone and I hope you had a chance to stop by the booth and say hello to the real stars of Bruce Clay – the analysts.

For those that missed it, we hope you enjoyed the session recaps (my fingers have almost stopped bleeding). I really believe the theme of SES Chicago was not how can I run an effective search engine optimization, pay-per-click or branding campaign, but how can I run it correctly. Attendees were intent on learning the trusted ‘white hat’ strategies and to avoid techniques that may be considered spam. It was about creating value, not finding shortcuts.

The industry is growing up and with that comes the realization that it’s not just about doing search engine optimization, it’s about doing it right.

That theme was in full effect during Thursday afternoon’s Organic Listings Forum. Attendees wanted to know what they could do to show the search engines their sites were valuable and informative. We heard SEO bad boy David Naylor talk about creating excellent content to make sites link-worthy. Bruce talked about the importance of doing even the small things, like keyword tags, correctly, while Mike Grehan stressed the importance of compelling content and reiterated that content doesn’t just mean text.

In the Social Media Optimization panel, we learned that building community ties takes time and if you want to get the full benefit, you have to develop real relationships, not just phone it in. Neil Patel gave a hilariously colorful presentation on what not to do in Wikipedia and Todd Malicoat stressed the importance of absolutely NOT spamming. Search marketers and search marketer wannabes know that if you spam, you will be banned.

In the Ads in a Quality Score World session, marketers learned how to optimize relevant landing pages, not how to launch aggressive bidding wars to crush the competition. Attendees flocked to the great usability panels which provided step-by-step guidelines for constructing sites that rank well for the right reasons. Again, it wasn’t about learning ‘tricks’, it was learning what the engines are looking for to adapt to the necessarily methodologies.

That’s not to say that previous Search Engine Strategies conferences supported using black hat and spammy techniques, but an experienced SEO could always spot the twinkle in a questioner’s eye when they were asking how to improve their rankings. You could pick out the person looking to break down the search engines door by appearing as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They wanted fast rankings at no cost. Surely the panelists knew some kind of trick, right?

Wrong.

Fortunately, this year those people were few and far between. I think smart marketers have realized if you’re going to play the game, the only way to play it is to follow the rules. No one wants to walk into their boss’s office and explain that their bad behavior is what resulted in company’s site getting banned.

At SES Chicago, people were there to learn. And that was great to see.

Some quick shout-outs and mentions from me:

First, our condolences to Anne Kennedy who lost her husband on Friday. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family. Your presence at the conference was definitely missed.

Big thanks to Todd Malicoat for acting as my agent Sunday night, introducing me to all the friendly search folk, arranging my first meeting with Rand, and buying me a $4 water. (I do apologize for all the flack you took later thanks to Rand “Troublemaker” Fishkin.)

To all the ladies who attended the Search Lady Lunch. It was great to meet all of you and prove to everyone that neither I, nor Rebecca, are SEO Fangirl! [And that you aren't Bruce either--Susan]

David Temple – I am so glad we had a chance to meet and even share an elevator ride. You are extremely kind and I can’t wait to read all about your forthcoming interview with Bruce.

Thanks to Kim Krause, Loren Baker and Barry Schwartz for letting me blog in their presence. I look up to you all. And Barry, feel free to put those Shadchan powers to work!

Lastly, to my Rand, thanks for being so awesome, warm, and full of life. It’s amazing to me how you remain so unaware and unphased by the fanfare around you. I’ll see you in April. :)

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 8/06 at 4:04 PM
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December 7, 2006

It's Thursday and SES Chicago has come to an end. We hope everyone had a great show and learned lots about search marketing, optimization and this great industry. While the stellar Bruce Clay team heads back home, we'll take a moment to review all the coverage here on the blog.

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

That's everything! What was your favorite part about SES? Let Lisa and me (Susan) know by emailing us.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 7/06 at 2:45 PM
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Organics Listing Forum

Today’s Organic Listings Forum is moderated by Detlev Johnson, with speakers Bruce Clay (Bruce Clay, Inc.), David Naylor (Bronco), Todd Friesen (Range Online Media) and Mike Grehan (international search marketing consultant).

Since this is an open question and answer format, I’ll do my best to paraphrase each question and let you know who’s responding with what. Of course, my job would be easier if these boys didn’t talk over each other. :)

What link building tactics can be done to promote a new site and keep it out of the sandbox?

DN: I don’t think there are any sandbox issues anymore.

TF: The aging process, and how fast your links are getting built, and where those initial links are coming from. Look in your space and find those authority sites that you can get links from. Find other places in your space that have authority. Those kinds of things make you very legitimate and you should be fine.

BC: Does your site look like it’s behaving in a natural way? If you start a new site and the next day you have thousands of links, that doesn’t look natural. No incestuous links, or multiple IPs linking to you. If you look and act in an unnatural way you will get ignored.

MG: Sit down, look at your site. Write down 10 reasons why people would want to link to your Web site. If you can’t get past 5, you’ve created your own sandbox. (zing!)

Best practices for cloaking software?

DN; There levels of user-agent cloaking. Either you have stolen someone else’s content and you don’t want them to know, you have great content you’re hiding behind a subscriber link, or you’re geo targeting.

MG: There are times when cloaking is very useful.

DN: The problem with cloaking is that it’s not a dirty word and people think it is. Ninety-nine percent of cloaking is good cloaking.

Should we split our IP addresses up so our clients, who have similar content, aren’t on the same IP?

DN: Yes, you will have a problem. Yahoo is a classic one where if you got so much content on one server, on one IP address, you’re going to have problems.

I have an established site that’s been out for 10 years, but I may need to change the domain. What kind of techniques should I consider to preserve the PageRank and visibility of the site?

DN: If your site is clean and white hat, email Google and tell them what you’re going to do. They don’t want your site to get lost.

TF: Something we added into the mix as insurance, we made the Google and Yahoo XML sitemaps for the old site and then when we launched the old site with the 301s, we gave them the old site map to give them another chance to spider all the pages.

BC. The entire URL restructuring should not take more than 3 weeks. Be ready with PPC in case there’s a dip, but you should be fine. Your new domain should have a 404 page with a Meta index tag that has a ‘no index’.

When launching a new Web site, what is the appropriate pacing on setting up inbound links?

BC: If you were to create a site from scratch today and suddenly that site announced the cure for cancer, you’d have a million links within a week and that wouldn’t be interpreted as spam. It’s natural for the content. But if you have a 1000 inbound links from the same IP, you might be a redneck.

DN: Launch a site, press release it, and create something on the site that would make people want to link to it. Do something different. Once you are different, a month down the line, give them something else. That’s why the blogosphere does so well.

DJ: Err on the side of fewer links. It’s not the number of links that matters; it’s where the links are coming from.

BC: During your design you have to ask yourself, if I were another site, would I link to me? If you wouldn’t link to yourself, getting quality sites to link to you will be an uphill battle.

It used to be SEO was all tags. Then it was Content is King. Now linking is so important. Is content still king?

DN: The search engines are link-based, end of story. Larry and Sergey’s papers are all about the importance of linking. When people talked about the engines loving content, it’s not like the engines were reading it and saying, ‘that is the best story I’ve ever heard!’ They recognized that other sites liked it and were linking to it.

DJ: Linking has been important before Google. It’s one factor in many factors that goes into an algorithm. Google has shown that if you make linking the primary focus then you can achieve good results. Linking is still incredibly important because it can increase your indexing and ranking since you have these 3rd party endorsements of your content. The title tag will never go away because HTML has purposes other than search engines. Today, right now, linking is one of those things that are driving rankings.

MG: When you’re talking about content, yes, it’s still king, but what is content? It’s not just text, it could be a tool. If content is king, end user data is queen.

BC: You need to have the content first and the links will follow. You want quality links, not just links.

Do the search engines see 301 redirects?

TF: If you’re doing it at the server level, the search engines see all redirects.

We have a parent Web site with sites for 30 different cities. What’s the best way to optimize that?

BC: Cityscape went with subdomains and optimized each one separately. You can probably optimize one Web site with 30 different themes. If it’s unique content, you can accumulate a whole lot of content about basketball on one domain.

TF: I would subdomain them off. Otherwise you’re splitting your effort across too many domains.

Is a subdomain more valuable than a slash?

DN: Not anymore.

DJ: It was about pooling link popularity. Some people were seeing some incredible results by splitting a site into subdomains and making it appear as one Web site. But people took that too far and the search engines stopped giving that authority.

We do a lot of directory submission. But a lot of the directories only let you put a company name in there. Does that look bad to the search engines?

TF: Not at all. When you look at people’s backlinks, it’s going to completely dominated by brand. When we’re doing directory submissions, we try and roll in a keyword. If we’re submitting for a consumer electronics company we’ll say “stereos from X” and most of the time that will get in.

MG: If you want other people to do it, there are good people out there. It you’re looking for someone, look for client renewals. If they have clients who have been around for years, they’re probably doing something right.

What’s your opinion of the ODP?

DN: They should pay for submission.

TF: There’s a lot more value out there than the ODP. Go do the submission and forget about it.

MG: There’s a lot of stuff you can do offline that will bring in links. Be creative.

BC: I don’t think it’s important enough to spend a lot of time on.

How much attention to the search engines pay to the keyword field. How much attention should we pay to it?

MG: On a rainy day, when there’s nothing else to do… [polite chuckles :)]

TF: I haven’t done a keyword tag in two or three years.

BC: We think any tag worth having is worth doing right. There are 100 variables in the algorithm, what makes you think you’re better than the guy next to you? It only takes 30 seconds to do a keyword tag if you know what the keywords are for the page.

MG: I know for a fact that Yahoo! looks for the keyword tag. It won’t help you with rankings but it says you are a candidate for a result set.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 7/06 at 12:09 PM
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In House: Big PPC

This session discussed what to do when you find yourself in a keyword bidding war with…yourself -- or, more accurately, when subdivisions in your company try to outbid each other for keywords. By not centralizing your marketing divisions, you run the risk of driving up PPC costs as you fight against yourself for your own terms. It’s time to end the civil war.

Panel members include Beth Morgan (Red Bricks Media), Matthew Greitzer (Avenue A | Razorfish), Tim Daly (Sendtec), and Olivier Lemaignen (Intuit).

Beth Morgan starts off identifying the potential sources of own-team conflict, such as the generation gap (corporate programs that compete), sibling rivalry (inter-division competition), new kid syndrome (competition between divisions), and the world cup (international and regional campaigns competing).

She notes the four challenge areas:

Messaging: Different divisions might have varying marketing approaches. If you’re presenting uncoordinated messages to the market place it could ruin the overall corporate message.
Tracking & Reporting: What are you going to track? How are you defining conversions? How are you going to track it? How will that affect the time it takes to report on campaigns? What should you report and how often?
Keyword research and categorization: Keyword research takes time. Without coordination, divisions can duplicate efforts looking for the same words. Different divisions should compare results to limit repetitive work.
Bidding: Google, Yahoo and MSN generally have a policy that only one paid ad from the same company can run at a time. Lack of coordination can lead to irrational bidding, stealing impressions and paying more than necessary.

You can beat these challenges by centralizing your search activity. Identify one agency partner or an internal in-house manager who will coordinate search across all your different divisions. Once you have that person in place they should be monitoring messages to make sure there’s consistency, create cross divisional benchmarks, a central database of terms, and coordinate all bids.

Thing big. Even if your company is starting search in just one division, assume it’s going to spread out. Spending a little extra time planning now to think through future issues will save you time and money later on.

Matthew Greitzer gave attendees four rules for managing internal competition.

Build an Organization and Service Structure to Support Collaboration: In order to have a campaign run effectively you need to create a central marketing team to work with units.
Implement Unified Tracking across Campaigns: You have to have one set of data across different business units or you’ll miss some of the value your search campaign is driving.
Allocated Keyword Ownership through Testing: If you have multiple units claiming the same keyword, you can alternate campaigns to see which one runs better and who will benefit off the term more. You want to manage them in a way that makes them complement each other, NOT compete.
Protect Your Brand Name: All three major engines offer some sort of trademark protection. Restrict affiliates from bidding on your brand name.

Having a single team act as your division-wide SEM resources enables consistent communication across management teams, better sharing of best practices across management teams, complimentary bidding practices on shared keywords, the ability to dictate the rules of engagement, and fosters holistic keyword and SEM strategies.

Once you realize you’re bidding against each other and stop it, you’ll see results immediately. You should notice your CPC, CTA and media costs go down, while sales and orders go up.

Tim Daly and Olivier Lemaignen provided case studies about companies who compete against themselves.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 7/06 at 10:12 AM
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Big Ideas for Small Sites & Small Businesses

Here we are on Day 4. We made it, folks. Let’s dive in.

Jennifer Laycock (Search Engine Guide) starts off the panel, noting that though the Internet was once considered the great equalizer, that’s since changed. The Internet used to give everyone a level playing field, but now money is starting to have more of an influence, helping large companies gain visibility over small business owners.

Common sense is today’s great equalizer. As a small company, you have the ability to make quick changes without cutting through the red tape. You’re more flexible than a larger company. You are as strong as your ideas.

To compete against large companies, small sites need to change the way they think about search engine marketing. Forget about chasing the algorithm or about magic formulas. Instead, understand that the search engines want to be “a real boy” (aka the Pinocchio Effect). They want to be able to judge your page the same way a human being judges your page. There is no magic formula when it comes to SEM.

Pinocchio action in the past:

The best example of the engines’ Pinocchio complex is in the progression of links: At first, the sheer number of links won. Over time, it became about link text. Then they moved into link quality (who’s linking to you?). Lately it’s been about link age. The longer you’ve maintained a link, the more authority it has. We don’t know where it’s going next but you can see a clear progression to replicate human judgment.

Pinocchio in action now:

Is there a sandbox? Jennifer Laycock says there is no sandbox. If you’re Google and you make your money by having people come to your site, it makes no sense to lock every site away for six months or a year. Instead, there’s a Trustbox (a term coined by Aaron Wall).

Jennifer compares it to a Chinese takeout restaurant. If you live in an area with a lot of Chinese restaurants, you’re not going to go flocking when a new one opens. But if that takeout place is still there six months later, you may be more likely to check it out. (I am in love with that example. And sweet and sour chicken.) Jennifer says it’s not so much about age, but about raising the bar to entry. With more sites coming out, it’s getting harder to compete.

Jennifer says the number one rule of organic search is to speak the customer’s language. It’s about researching what your customers are searching for, what they’re doing with those terms and building your campaign around that. Understand the search buying cycle and use it. Are they in the interest (muscle cars), research (fastest muscle cars) or purchasing phase (classic muscle car dealer)?

The number one rule of pay-per-click is that it’s not about buying clicks. It’s about buying customers. (Ooo, buying people!) Learn how to track your pay-per-click campaigns. PPC without direct metrics is like launching TV, yellow pages and direct mail on the same day without taking the time to see which campaign brought which increase in traffic.

The number one rule of link building is to build relationships. Network locally. Think of a link as an online referral. Are you giving someone something worth putting their reputation on the line? The best way to get a link is to earn it.

Matt McGee (Marchex) is up next and says that as a small business owner you have to work smarter and be more creative in your search marketing.

The first decision you have to make as a small business is whether you should try and do SEO yourself or if you should hire out.

If you do it yourself, you’re going to have to invest more time than you do money. You should be reading blogs, joining mailing lists, participating in forums and attending conferences and other industry events.

From there Matt highlights three books wannabe-SEOs can read to gain industry knowledge:

SEO Book by Aaron Wall
Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing by Jennifer Laycock
Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin

If you prefer to learn by attending seminars, Matt recommends:

Search Engine College – Kalena Jordan
SEO Research Labs – Dan Thies
Search Engine Workshops – Robin Nobles and J. Alexander
High Rankings Seminars – Jill Whalen

If you’re going to hire out, you can use directory sites such as TopSEOs.com, SEOconsultants.com, SEOpros.com or SEMPO.org. Realize that not all the firms listed are good and not all the good firms are listed.

Now that you know where to find them, you have to determine what to ask when choosing one. Matt gives attendees five tips to help you choose the right company:

Trust: Ask a lot of questions; build a relationship.
Experience: ask for references.
Risk comfort level: know the tactics and liabilities.
Measure success: set clear goals up front.
Cost: Arm? Leg? Your first-born?

As a small business, you have the luxury of trying out new ideas. Think outside the four search engine box. Practice ‘alternative SEM’. Use participation marketing. Don’t wait for customers to find you; go out and find them. Are they on message boards? Discussion groups? Blogs? Social networking sites?

Rule number one is to avoid the hard sell. People don’t like you coming into their community. Try to build relationships.

Matt recommends focusing on Flickr as a new marketing opportunity. People aren’t just sharing photos; they’re sharing comments and conversations. Use your URL as your screen name, upload your company’s logo as your icon, write a user profile to promote your business, link to your Web site, participate in photo groups and upload quality photos.

John Carcutt (MoreVisibility) talked about leveraging your company’s advantages and highlighted ways small businesses can find ways to out perform larger competition. You have a tighter product focus, are in better touch with your customers and faster reaction time.

Using these ideas to influence your strategies against larger competitors can help you with organic and paid search.

Here are some other things you can do:

Set Reasonable Goals: You don’t have to be first or the largest to compete. You do need to have a presence and make a profit.
Become part of the community: Start practicing Social Media Optimization. Get involved with sites like Wikipedia, Digg, Reddit, deli.cio.us, etc. You can get content without paying a copywriter and gain trust within these communities.
Create a community: The easiest way to do this is to create a blog.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 7/06 at 9:07 AM
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December 6, 2006

Keynote: Search In 2006

[I’m kicking myself right now for forgetting my camera. Danny Sullivan and Barry Schwartz are sitting huddled together on the edge of the stage quietly chatting and it’s perhaps the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. There’s a total "my buddy" moment going on.]

It’s time for Danny’s keynote and I’m personally psyched. The chair-throwing mood Jason Calacanis inspired yesterday has subsided and now it’s just time to have an interesting conversation about search. You can almost feel the relief.

Danny’s starts off talking about search convergence. The idea that search is colliding and merging with all sorts of other things. Google, Microsoft and Ask have become search utility companies that strive to provide you with whatever your search-heart desires – be it video, Web programs, radio ads, whatever. They’re there for you.

Danny says if you’re a successful SEM, it’s not because you know how to rank for a specific search; it’s because you understand how Google gets information. You take that information and that skill and you apply it elsewhere.

See that, Jason; it’s a skill.

Danny talks about the search wars going on and highlights Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

He says Microsoft is sending out mixed messages. First stating they’ll kill Google and be more relevant, and then saying that we’re just at the beginning of search.

The new challenge facing Microsoft is that they’re trying to build it up from scratch. Microsoft’s Erik Selberg said Microsoft’s engine is “not better yet, but [it’s] no longer laughable”. You might snicker at that, but it’s true and it’s something to be proud of. AdCenter has been an even bigger victory for the company.

Yahoo!’s Susan Decker announced it wasn’t Yahoo!’s goal to be number one in Internet search and that they are fine to simply maintain market share. Later they said the troops were pumped and that Yahoo! was about to take charge. Then we got the Peanut Butter memo. Today we hear they’re reorganizing.

And then there’s Google. They’ve been very busy this year but we hear they’re doing okay. :)

[Notable: I just realized that all Danny’s slides have the Search Engine Land logo sitting on the bottom. That made me smile.]

From there Danny launches into a discussion on video and brings up how important Google’s acquisition of YouTube was because it was very unGoogle. Typically, Google finds a small company they’re interested in and buys it simply because they want the individuals running it. They pay some paltry sum, get the company, and it’s over. But this time Google was willing to shell out $1.6 billion. That’s noteworthy.

He says video search is currently just video on demand. "I want to see that Colbert Report I missed, where can I find it?" Or "I want to see that viral video going around, give it to me." Video sharing has created the FBS network aka the Friends Broadcast System ("you gotta see this").

From there Danny goes back to talking about search. He defines search marketing as putting messages in front of people who overtly and explicitly express a desire – usually via keywords – for a particular product, service of information.

Search engine optimization is the act of doing this by trying to influence unpaid listings, usually crawler-based ones, while search advertising is the act of doing this through direct paid methods.

As the session moved on, Danny talked about all the big dollar issues that were supposed to crash Google but didn’t (clickfraud, copyright), shares his indexing wish list and highlights some of the major search-related news stories that hit the press this year (NY identifies a woman based on her search history, Danny gets interviewed by Nightline, etc.)

If you want to know what kind of a speaker Danny Sullivan is, know that the session went almost an hour over and most people didn’t move an inch. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have even realized it had Danny not kept apologizing. The truth is Danny Sullivan is an amazingly humorous and engaging speaker and people would have been perfectly content to sit there all night listening to what he had to say. He’s our search leader and we look up to him because he motivates us.

And as I sit here, I can’t help but wonder how hard Incisive is kicking themselves right now. They won’t recover from losing Danny. He's what brings the life to these conferences.

He’s on stage right now talking about search, practically tripping over his words because he’s so excited and passionate about it. He makes you passionate about it too. You can feel his energy and it’s contagious…and so are his giggles (yes, grown men do giggle). Sitting here is inspiring and I have Danny to thank for that.

I hope Bruce lets me tag along when Danny launches his own conference in June. If Danny’s involved, it’s going to be amazing.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/06 at 5:28 PM
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Blog & Feeds Search SEO

So a little change of plans, hope you don’t mind. I was planning on attending today’s Usability & SEO session, but at the last minute I found myself being mysteriously drawn into the Blog & Feed Search SEO panel instead. Maybe it’s because I’m a blogger by trade.

Detlev Johnson is acting as moderator for speakers Amanda Watlington (Searching for Profit), Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts) and Rick Klau (Feedburner).

Amanda says 2007 will be the year of RSS. She attributes this to the launch of IE7 (I quietly chuckled), which she says will make RSS accessible to everyone, not just the tech savvy. She notes that people will not even realizing they are using an RSS feed, something we’ve mentioned before.

RSS distributes content and drives traffic to Web sites. Amanda calls it the plumbing of the Web. That’s hot.

She notes that before you start building your feeds, you should ask yourself several important questions:

How many feeds are appropriate for your company?
How much content is needed to keep the feed fresh and attractive?
How much of each content piece should be included in the feed?
Will the feed include multi-media content, audio and video?
How to propagate the feeds both initially and on update? (Prepare the ping!)
How to measure the performance of the feeds?
How can you monetize it?

Once you can answer these questions, it’s time to optimize.

One part of blog optimization is optimizing content. This includes building keyword lists to identify the terms you want to include in your posts. Keywords can be used to focus categories, in blogrolls, in anchor text, in headlines, etc.

Amanda outlined five steps to creating powerful keyword rich content:

Write the post.
Review your keyword research list for keywords applicable to the content you have just written. Narrow your focus on just a few keywords per post.
Include a keyword in your headline.
Review the body of your post. Look for places where you can include other keywords.
Check the anchor text to make sure you’re targeting terms there as well.

I want to stress the importance of NOT stuffing your blog post with keywords. The purpose of a blog post is to start or add to a conversation. If you get overly concerned with keywords, your friendly, informative blog post will start to sound like a press release. Would you subscribe to read a press release?

Blogging is about the free giving of links (unless you’re a Scoble) and sharing information. As someone who loves blogs and blogging, I’d ask you not to taint that.

If you want to bring traffic to your blog, the best thing you can do is to join the discussion and let people know you’re out there. Notify other blogs of your existence by commenting on their blogs or dropping them an email. Better yet, get yourself to a conference and say hello. I’ve met so many great people this week and discovered blogs I never knew existed (and hopefully some people found us too!). People are far more likely to link to you if they know you.

Amanda also suggests hosting your blog on a separate domain and linking between your site and the blog. I don’t necessarily agree with her on that, but I’ll leave that to you.

Other ways to ramp up traffic include getting your content or feeds syndicated in other publications (SiteProNews does this quite a bit), use full text feeds instead of snippets, increase the items in your feeds from 10 to 20, highlight the popular posts and chestnuts on your blog, publish your feed as an HTML page or as a podcast, and, if all else fails, publish headlines from your blog on your MySpace page. I know, I know, but it might work.

Once your blog is optimized, you have to make sure your RSS feed is optimized as well. Make sure you’re using keywords in the feed title. Write your descriptions as if you’re writing for a directory. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item. Include images to help brand recognition. Build a keyword theme for your feed.

Once these things are done, be sure to measure your blogs traffic. Sites like Technorati (which I get intravenously at this point), FeedBurner and FeedCraft can help you stay on top of this.

If you’re interested in monetizing your blog, you need to make sure you’re ad-ready. Know your readership, make sure your template is ready, clean up your content, sharpen your editorial focus, and join an ad network.

Stephan Spencer discussed the various blog search engines.

Like with traditional search, there are only a handful of blog search engines worth noting: Yahoo! News & Blog Search, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub.

There are several things you can do to better your chances at getting your blog listed in these engines.

First, consider tweaking internal hierarchical linking structure. Use tag clouds & tag pages to make it easier for the engines to find your content. Include links to related posts. Start a Top 10 posts section (Friday Recap section, anyone?). And include links to next & previous posts (using keywords in your title!) to help the engines find their way through your blog.

Work at building inbound links. Going back to the joining the conversation thing, try to get on other bloggers blogrolls.

Don’t forget to optimize your Title tags. Your blog name should be at END of the title, not the beginning. Overwrite title tags with custom ones.

Some other tips to keep in mind:

Rewrite URLs to contain keywords.
Use hyphens, not underscores.
If necessary, 301 redirect from yourblog.com to www.yourblog.com.
Maintain legacy URLs even after switching blog platforms.
Always use keyword-rich anchor text.
Create sticky posts to serve as a keyword-rich introduction to all your category pages.
Make it easy for users to subscribe to your blog.
Include 1-click buttons that allow users to easily add your feed to their favorite aggregator.
Get in the habit of pinging the blog engines when you have fresh content.

The most importance thing to take away from this panel is that feeds aren’t just coming from blogs. They’re being used for podcasts, video blogs, Web services, retail outlets and in areas you haven’t yet even realized.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/06 at 4:16 PM
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, Search Engine Optimization, seschicago06

SMO: Social Media Optimization

Next up, the Social Media Optimization panel examines how using community-built Web sites can be a great way to tap into links and search-driven traffic.

Chris Sherman is moderating this one with speakers Andy Hagans (TLA), Neil Patel (Advantage Consulting Services), Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl) and Lee Odden (Online Marketing Blog).

This has nothing to do with the fact that I’m not-so-secretly in love with him, but whose idea was it to put Rand’s gorgeous face behind a large computer screen. It makes no sense. How am I supposed to ~~stare~~ be able to hear him? Life is so cruel.

[Okay, after I typed that Rand peeked out and blew me a kiss (I wonder if we’re so connected he gets a mental RSS feed of everything I type?). I have witnesses, people. We are so getting married.]

Up first, Neil Patel on Wikipedia:

Neil touches on all the benefits associated with getting involved with Wikipedia, like authority links, increased traffic, brand recognition and great information.

And though your mouse finger is starting to get a little itchy, Neil gave attendees a humorous rundown on all the things NOT do on Wikipedia:

Don’t use Wikipedia for link building (wink, wink.)
Don’t add biased information about your company.
Don’t delete accurate information because you don’t agree with it.
Don’t break any community rules.
Don’t spam. You won’t get away with it.

Neil gives examples on what happens if you spam, including the famous Steve Colbert elephant example.

To correctly build links, you should first establish a reputation for yourself as a Wikipedia editor. This typically involves modifying around 500 pages before your user account gains a strong reputation. Once you’ve hit this benchmark you’ll be able to edit pages, shall we say, ‘more freely’.

Once you do decide to create a page for your company or brand, add the quality information before you add the links. If Wikipedia thinks you’re adding too many links too quickly, they’ll go in and remove them. Make sure to mention any awards your company has earned or link to news sources that have covered you. This will help you to meet Wikipedia’s ‘notoriety rule’.

Next up, the delicious (not del.icio.us) Rand Fishkin:

I realize that while I was daydreaming about our life together, Rand was actually talking about the benefits of social media marketing, including the ability to control your brand, get link love, show the community that you’re a participant, build traffic from alternative sources and influence traditional media.

I think showing the community you’re involved is really important. Rand notes that social communities view SEOs like we’re a bunch of evil spammers. By sharing valuable content and showing your company is “good” and “friendly” and “helpful”, it helps the community to accept you. It also helps to shape how people view the search engine optimization community as a whole. It’d be nice if they didn’t hate us.

Part of creating that friendly image is to create one user profile for your company and use it among the various sites. This should be a robust profile with a picture so the community you’re dedicated and not just trying to get links (even if you are). Rand mentioned that for SEOmoz, Jane Copland is their community queen. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Jane is the only one responsible for digging article or submitting things to del.icio.us, it just means that when Rand is up late thinking about me and wants to dig my Friday Recap, he’ll log in as “JaneCopland” to do it.

Doing it this way helps these sites to see you as a dedicated member of the community.

Rand listed, in order, the social sites he recommends using:

Digg – Don’t forget to embed the “dig this’ button on sites to allow users to easily submit content for you.
Del.icio.us – All links are nofollow so you’re not getting link love, but you may get click throughs and direct traffic when users find your del.icio.us bookmarks through the search engine’s index.
Flickr – Use popular tags and encourage linking and comments by sharing the photo stream on your blog and other public profiles. Add links to your profile and to relevant photos.
Reddit – Less tech-oriented. Users can communicate with other members through Reddit, vote on content and leave comments.
Newsvine -- Your Newsvine user name becomes your own subdomain, so make sure to use keywords in your profile. Submit news stories, comment on other popular stories, create connections with regular users.

Other social media sites Rand mentioned: StumbleUpon, Technorati, MySpace, Yahoo! Answers, Google Co-Op.

[I’d like to personally thank my boyfriend Rand for all the Bruce Clay shout outs during the panel. I swear we didn’t pay him for it. However, I’d be willing to take one for the team and buy him a drink if he’d like. :)]

Andy Hagans is up next and immediately states that he’s not interested in actually being part of a community or forming warm and fuzzy feelings with members. He just wants to use them to make money. All hail, Andy! [That's my kind of guy. Buy him a drink too, Lisa. --Susan]

That being said, how do you take advantage of social media?

Create Bookmark-able Linkbait: You need to first create a piece of content or a tool that is remarkable enough that people will link to it and really bored people will be interested in.
Get your message in front of the right people: Before you go to Digg, write a personalized email to a dozen or so relevant bloggers in an attempt to get some links. Stroke their ego and ask for their ‘help’ on your content, even if you don’t really want it and you’re just after the link.
A del.icio.us bump: Tag your content on del.icio.us. Take time creating an expert account so that when you submit something it has some weight to it.
Don’t Spam.
Rinse, lather, repeat.

Even if you do all that, chances are it won’t work. But if you keep doing it, eventually it will stick. And once it does, all the time and energy will have been worth it.

Todd Malicoat and Lee Odden didn’t give presentations but they were on hand for the Q&A.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/06 at 12:57 PM
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Images and Search Engines

Okay, to officially kick off Day 3 of SES Chicago I have propped myself up (because let’s face it, at this point I need the propping) at the Images & Search Engines session. Myself, Kim Krause-Berg and Matt McGee have joined forces to form ‘blogger central’ (Matt’s term, not mine) in front of the shiny projection screen (late nights = tired eyes). Don’t tell them but I’m telepathically trying to tap into their blog juice. Shh…

Speaking this morning are Shari Thurow (GrantasticDesigns), Liana Evans (Commerce360), Vanessa Fox (Google) and Chris Smith (Idearc).

First off, Danny warns attendees that hotel chocolate does not a breakfast make. Danny has much knowledge. Yum, yum.

Shari Thurow starts off with giving us a search engine optimization review:

• Web pages should contain the words and phrases that your target audience would type into search queries.
• Give search engine spiders easy access to keyword rich content via information architecture, page layout, URL structure.
• Number and quality of objective, 3rd party links pointing to a URL, commonly referred to as link development.

We’ve covered most of this (or actually, Shari did) during the Create a Search Engine Friendly Site panel, so if you need more info on this stuff, check out that post.

Though it should go without saying, Shari reiterates that creating a Web site comprised solely of images is really not advisable. Images do not replace text, they complement it. However, you can maybe get away with using a largely-based image site if your brand is extremely popular or if your keywords are truly unique.

Shari notes that approximately 15 percent to 16 percent of Web searches are users looking for graphic images. The engines have recognized this and designed their interface to have Image Search appear closest to the Web Search function, or have it first among search verticals.

Search engines may recognize the importance of images, but that doesn’t mean they can read them. It’s been said a million times, but it’s still true. Search engines are blind. They can’t compare query terms with the actual content of a graphic image. Instead they must rely on a number of indirect factors to determine what an image is showing. In other words, they’re looking for captions, primary and secondary text, alt text and nearby body text to figure out what the image is really showing users.

To make it easier for the search engines to ‘see’ your graphic content, Shari ran through a number of video optimization tips:

First, file names are very important for graphic image optimization. Use keyword-rich text to describe them. For example, logo.gif is bad. Atm-machine.jpg is better.
The file should also be named in a way that makes sense to your target audience. Do not let software generate file names (IMG0009).
Include descriptive text around the images to help provide context.
Make sure your format graphic images correctly.
Use captions or labels to provide contextual cues to image search engines.
Make sure you don’t robots exclude your graphic images folder (!)
If you are unable to create captions, make sure the page is optimized for targeted keyword phrases.
Usability counts so minimize download times and always use alt text.

Li Evans looks at the opportunities retailers have in image search, noting that image search is the fastest growing search vertical. Believe it or not, image search has seen a 91 percent increase since this time last year. Image Search is especially important to retailers because it gives them another search marketing avenue where they don’t have to pay for the click.

The four biggest areas of opportunity for image search are in: retail, niche markets, comparison search engines and contextual search engines.

Retail: Though users are searching for images for today’s “hot products”, there is an obvious lack of information coming from retailers. Right now the majority of images coming up in queries are being pulled from manufacturer sites – sites where users can’t actually make a purchase. As a retailer, having your image (and therefore your site) appear for popular product searchers puts you at an obvious advantage over your competition and leads targeted customers to your site.

Niche markets: Image Search provides a great opportunity for small retailers. It provides them with another way to increase traffic, better conversion rates, and puts them in a category with less competition from major retailers

Shopping Comparison Engines: Ensure images match products and keywords. Give descriptions of pictures in feed.

Contextual Search Engines: Three out of the four major engines incorporate images in with their regular searches (one box, smart answers, etc).

Chris Smith is up next to discuss how image sharing sites can drive traffic to your site. Chris notes that there is a large potential search engine optimization value coming from social image sharing sites because they provide a lot more ‘signals’ to the engines than regular Web pages.

Much of the rest of Chris’ presentation is centered around Flickr.

Flickr is the most popular image sharing site, with a PageRank of 9 and 29.2 million pages indexed. The design of Flickr is advantageous to SEO. Each photo uploaded has its own Web page with customizable elements like title tags, H1 tags, captions, tagging, cross-grouping, comments, sharing, alt text, optimal linking hierarchies and date taken with page views displayed.

To help improve image optimization, sites should start off with having high quality pictures to use. Picture with good contrast tend to work better. Also, be broad in experimenting with subject matter for pictures. You never know which image will drive the most traffic and conversions to your site. For example, restaurants might show picturesque views or special events rooms. It’s a good idea to experiment around to see what kinds of photos would work best for your site or company.

Chris offers up some tips for optimizing through Flickr:

Add unique title appropriate to image and use keywords when naming.
Always tag your image with keywords. Be as specific and descriptive as possible.
Make photos publicly viewable.
Consider loose licensing for your pix – people can use the picture if they link back to your site.
Geotag locak specific pictures.
Create thematic sets.
Use Flickr to host pix for your blog articles.
Add links to the description field of your Flickr photo page to related pages on your site.
Post as many pictures as possible into Flickr – more pictures will result in more traffic, which can result in more conversions.
If you are photoblogging, add a Digg link at the end of your text.
Post each picture pages over to del.icio.us.

Google’s Amanda Fox did not present (she said she was ordered not to!), but she is on hand for the Q&A period.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 6/06 at 9:05 AM
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, Search Engine Optimization, seschicago06

December 5, 2006

Successful Site Architecture

I’ll be honest with you. Only about 84 percent of me decided to attend this afternoon’s Successful Site Architecture panel because I’m intelligent and realize how important it is to design a site that knocks down indexing obstacles. The other, more vapid, part of me remembered how absolutely adorable Derrick Wheeler is and very much wanted to spend an hour coyly staring at him. Based on that reasoning, I decided it would be in my best interest to attend. And I’m still pretty glad I did.

Anyway, onto the session.

Barbara Coll, better known as WebMama, moderated today’s panel that included super cutie Derrick Wheeler and known accessibility king Matt Bailey.

The theme of the session: breaking down crawling barriers so the search engines can index your site. The engines want to index your site, and if they can’t, it’s entirely your fault. Fix it.

WebMama’s first assertion is that most site designers pay little, if any, attention to SEO while designing a site. That’s some sad news. If your site is (and thereby your business) important to you and your goals, why would you make search engine optimization an afterthought? It’s just not wise.

Your goal as a site owner is to achieve high rankings in organic search for the keywords that convert best for you. In order to do that, your pages need to show up in the search engines. That’s where site architecture comes in. It’s about constructing the building blocks of your site in a way that encourages indexing. It’s about looking for optimization opportunities and seeking out Web developers and site designers who have SEO experience or partners.

The first step in successful site architecture is to get the team on board. If you don’t have the executives on your side, you’ll never have the support you need to make your site as great as it can be. In order to make friends, you may have to resort to educating them, convincing, or if all else fails, bribing them. I know dark chocolate or coffee works best on me.

Once you have the backing, you need to figure out where you are. How do you take what you have and turn it into successful site architecture?

The fact is most people aren’t starting out with a blank slate. Derrick notes that during this stage you need to:

Uncover all of your site’s domains and subdomains.
Identify the number of unique Web pages on each domain or subdomain.
Measure the number of pages from your site that are indexed at each engine.
Identify sections or pages of your site not indexed.
Track your rankings for business critical keywords at major search engines.
Measure how much traffic you are getting from each engine.
Review the search phrases that are generating traffic from each.
Determine which phrases generate the most conversion.

It may sound like a lot of work (it is), but you can’t help your site move forward until you know where it sits today.

From there, Derek shows users some best practices, explaining how text links are pretty and perfect, and JavaScript links are moderately evil, how footer links should be divided into two groups (SEO-based footer links and the required privacy law kind of stuff), the attractiveness of uncluttered URLs, and lots more good stuff.

He also defines some of the HTTP status codes that, for some reason, I always have difficultly remembering for. For example:

200 OK – This page is okay. We’re ready to go.
301 Object Permanently Moved – This URL has permanently moved to another location.
302 Object Temporarily Moved – It’s a temporary moved. The engine may continue to index the redirecting URL, as well as the old one.
404 Error – Oops. Invalid or mistyped URL.

After talking about the stuff you should be doing, Derek then launches into conversation about what he calls The Circle of Death. These are the very, very bad things that site owners often mistakenly do much to their own demise.

Circle of Death actions include accidentally disallowing the search engines to index your site, making the engines accept cookies before entering, relying on some other kind of user dependant action, using tracking IDs or dynamic URLs, home page redirects and all sorts of other nasty spider traps.

Matt Bailey was last up and discussed the issues currently facing Target and takes attendees on a brief tour of common accessibility issues, like requiring users to perform an action before being allowed in (select a country/language), lack of alt attributes, image based Web sites

Tips for creating an accessible site:

Create a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
Offer a site map.
Create and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your site.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content and links.
Make sure your title and alt tags are descriptive and accurate.
Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element.
Avoid cluttered URLs – rewrite or redirect. Redirect links to the new URL.

Successful site architecture is the process of systematically satisfying the needs of search engines and the needs of your users. Learning to successfully architect your site for search engines and understanding how specific page elements and design technologies impact your ability to gain good organic listings with help your site rank well and stand out from your competition.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 4:50 PM
See more entries in Design, Search Engine Optimization, seschicago06

Mobile Search Optimization

Susan enjoys teasing me about my excitement over mobile search. I realize I’m a geek but I can’t help it. I anxiously wait for the day when I can browse the Web via my cell phone without having to worry about usage fees and have access to as many mobile sites as there are traditional Web sites. I realize this probably causes you to question whether or not I have a life, but I’m okay that.

An out-of-breath Danny Sullivan moderated this afternoon’s Mobile Search Optimization panel, which included speakers Cindy Krum (Blue Moon Works), Gregory Markel (Infuse Creative, LLC), Paul Smith (Pulse Media), and Jason Prescott (JP Communications).

James Prescott starts off the session stating that by 2010 it’s expected that over 300 million people will be using cell phones or PDAs. The industries being most affected by the mobile expansion are consumer packaged goods, fast food restaurants, entertainment, travel, financial, gaming and the adult industry.

Cindy Krum discussed how to optimize your existence site to make it compatible for the mobile Web. We’ve heard numerous times that mobile search engine optimization is a lot like traditional SEO, but there are some differences. There are different browsers, different bots/crawlers, more of an opportunity to get in on the ground level, and unfortunately, at least for now, less traffic.

Cindy offered up some valuable best practices for mobile coding, navigation and basic optimization:

Code Best Practices

Traditional browsers are forgiving. Mobile browsers are not. You must code in XHTML, which has a rigid accessibility standards that make it ideal for mobile.
Avoid unnecessary code which will cause the page to load slower.
Separate content from design with CSS. It will minimize the code required to render the page, decrease your page load time, ensures correct display on different screen resolution and allows you to specify rendering based on the device.
Have a mobile specific CSS for your Web site to make elements appear or not appear on your mobile site.
Use appropriate headers and MIME type.

Navigation Best Practices

Organize buttons logically and consistently. People won’t learn your site; you have to cater to their needs.
Name buttons clearly and use good calls to action.
Include text links for the main navigation on the page.
Have a site map.
Keep important pages within three clicks of the home page.
Make navigation appear below the main content, including menus and submenus. This will keep the more optimized and unique content at the top (this requires you to change your source code).
Use optimized jump links to help people move around on the page without scrolling.

Basic Best Practices

Follow all SEO best practices (use title tags, short descriptions, keywords, etc.)
Use Interchangeable Keyword Elements. This will give you more phone phrases and more chances to rank for shorter keyword phrases
Submit your site to all major mobile search engines
Send confirmations. (People fear the Web because they fear dropped calls/searching)
Test with mobile devices and device simulators
Validate your site with mobile code checkers
Initiate a mobile visibility campaign
Offer an RSS feed for mobile RSS feeders
Purchase text links from mobile and traditional sites
Consider mobile PPC with Google
Offer social tagging/bookmarking options
Mention mobile in press releases
Provide information that would be important to people on the go
Make phone numbers clickable
Offer “Send me this page” links
Include your main address in the footer
Optimize videos and podcasts for mobile too
Submit your site to the mobile search engines

Gregory Merkel noted that there are already 206 million mobile phone subscribers (take that, Susan!). [Yes, yes. I'm a Luddite, I know.--Susan] Interestingly, he also noted that the average number of words entered in a mobile query was 2.3 on a cell phone or 14.5 characters on a PDA. That’s noteworthy because it means your search engine optimization tactics will need to be entirely different based on the device your customer is using (and you’ll need to know what device they are more likely to use!)

It makes sense though that the difficulty of entering keywords on your phone would influence keyword usage.

Other notable stats: Seventeen percent of queries are URLs (that’s not surprising), users are said to average 29-36 seconds scouring search results page, only 85 percent of queries had more than 1 search result requested, and users appear to favor local search focused sites over local queries on a general search site.

Google Mobile Search is the most widely used mobile engine. Google Mobile Search will automatically render any Web site to help promote a better user experience. They translate the pages by analyzing the HTML and converting it to a mobile-ready format. However, to entice users to create mobile specific sites, they allow users to search either the entire Web or ONLY sites designed for the mobile Web. With the mobile Web still in its infancy, creating an optimized mobile site puts you at a significant advantage over your competition.

Google Mobile Search Engine Optimization Tips from Gregory Merkel

As mentioned earlier, the basic rules of SEO still apply.
Build multiple PDA/cell phone handset/browser versions of your site and use a ‘user agent’ detection script to identify the PDA/phone and browser type and thereby serve the best possible users experience.
Economy of page space, graphics (no Flash), and messaging is key.
Assume visitors will not want to scroll.
Remember users use 2-4 word queries.
Your titles and descriptions are more important than ever.

Paul Smith offered up two different case studies during the panel, as well.

Who needs coffee? I do!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 4:17 PM
See more entries in Branding, Design, Search Engine Optimization, seschicago06

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

[Again, I feel I must mention the jazzy Michael Bolton music playing in the background. You really need to be here. It’s just too incredible to miss.]

Jon Glink has stepped up to take over Anne Kennedy’s role as moderator for today’s Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues panel, with speakers Shari Thurow, the always fashionable Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Adam Lasnik (aka MiniMatt) and Tim I’m-Not-Matt-Cutts Converse

Duplicate content continues to be a major issue for webmasters, often resulting in search penalties, if not complete banning. But what really classifies duplicate content and how similar does content have to be in order to be classified “duplicate”?

What is duplicate content?

Shari Thurow says it’s very difficult to get a definitive answer as to what classifies as duplicate content because most can’t agree on how much is too much. Instead, she says the engines are looking for resemblance -- if the page contains roughly the same information, then it’s duplicate and there’s a problem.

Examples of duplicate content: Multiple domains where you have the identical home page on different URLs (often seen on affiliate sites), different links to several different URLs for one site, dynamic content with unique URLs.

Why is duplicate content a problem?

Simple. The search engines want your content, but they only want one copy of it. Too many version of the same material doesn’t offer up a good user experience. As a result, the engines will decide which version of the content to use and filter out the others. You don’t want to leave this decision up to the search engines.

Allowing the same contented to be delivered time and time again would slow down the entire information retrieval process. Not to mention the angry revolt that would form if the engines started presenting users with the same results over and over again. Seriously, people would get hurt. Hide the MiniMatt.

How do the engines determine duplicate content?

Shari Thurow highlighted several factors the engines use to determine duplicate content.

Content properties – By stripping away the “boiler plate” aspects of a site (images, header, footer, etc), the engines can see if what you’re offering is unique or whether it ‘resembles’ something they’ve seen elsewhere.
Linkage properties – The engines take into consider the number of inbound links and outbound links related to the content.
Content Evolution – Most content does not change on a weekly basis. Now, we’re not talking about blogs or news sites updating themselves. We’re talking about article mutation. The engines know which kinds of sites should be ‘mutating’ aka updating on what time frame. If you’re an insurance site updating several times a day, it may signal red flags to the engines.
Host name resolution – The unique name of a machine, such as a Web server. Changing servers too frequently is a sign you may be spamming.
Shingle comparison – Every Web document is as unique as a Chicago snowflake. The search engines can break down content into sets of work patterns. Groups of adjacent words, call shingles, are compared for similarity. More shingles equals more similarities equals big problems.

What are some common technical duplicate content issues?

URLs With or without WWW: Less of a problem today than in the past. Most engines are learning how to handle common use of www and non-www. The problem is it dilutes your links.
Dynamic URLs/ Session IDs: Every time a session ID is used, the engines see a new page. Dump all session information into a cookie and don’t use it in the URL.
URL rewriting: When you rewrite URLs to make them more user-friendly, it doesn’t block the other, it rewrites it, creating two identical pages.
Many-to-one problems in forum: You can get to the same forum page by using different URLs – the page ID and the thread ID
Sort order parameters: the URL changes depending on how the information is sorted (time, visitors, etc), but the information is still the same.
Bread crumb navigation: If your breadcrumb navigation is reflected in your URL you may have a problem. The URL path may change (shoes/running/adidas vs. sports/equipment/shoes/adidas), but the content is the same – a page on adidas running shoes
Mirror Sites- The same site running on two domains.

So if you are suffering from duplicate content, what do you do?

First, if you find your site ranks for both its www and non-www version, you need to decide which domain you want to use and 303 redirect the other domain to that site. This will transfer all your related PageRank and link information. You’ll know you have performed the redirect correctly if your home page only displays for the one URL. Only use a 302 redirect for content that is going to change very frequently.

Other things you can do: Use static URLs instead of dynamic ones, don’t list products on more than one page, and if you’re going to rewrite a URL, make sure you’re redirecting the original URL, not just adding an alternative.

If you know that your content management system is delivering duplicate content, use the robots exclusion protocol to prevent the duplicate site from being crawled and indexed.

It’s very important that you do this because otherwise you leave it up to the engines to determine which version of your site they’ll index. You want to make sure you are able to rank for the one you want. If you don’t know which site is converting better, take a look at your Web analytics data.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 4:12 PM
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization, seschicago06

Bulk Submit 2.0

Reminiscing a bit, Danny Sullivan remembers that back in the good old days of search engine optimization, bulk submit was all the rage. Webmasters could email InfoSeek a list of all their URLs and they’d be put in the index almost immediately. Unsurprisingly, these bulk submits disappeared over time, but now, years later, we’re starting to see new automated submit and spidering tools emerge. And that’s what this panel is set to focus on.

First up to tackle the issue, Google engineer Amanda Camp:

To start things off, Amanda mentioned all the ways you can add content that she WOULDN’T be talking about, including, Google Base, Google Book Search, Local Business Center (gets your business in Google Local), Google Video, Blogger, Google Page Creator and Picasa Web Center. I’m glad she did that, because these are all often overlooked ways to get your content to appear in Google. Sometimes going in through the side door is more effective as ringing the doorbell or breaking in a window.

Not surprisingly, Amanda is here to talk about Google Sitemaps. With Sitemaps, webmasters create a list of Web pages that the want Google to know about. This improves comprehensiveness, notifies them of changes or new pages to help freshness, and identifies unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling and improve efficiency

Google Sitemaps accepts four different file submission types: text files, RSS/Atom feed, Sitemap protocol and OAI-PMG (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Meta Data Harvested) – which you’ll probably never use, so pretend we didn’t even mention that one.

Amanda recommends that your site map be placed in the highest directory of the URLs you are submitting. Also, the domain of the URLs needs to match the location of the site map exactly (i.e. http:// vs. https://, www. vs. non-www, blog.google.com vs. google.com).

Tips for using Google Sitemaps:

Always including the full path to the URL
Remove any unnecessary parameters (session IDs)
You may name the file anything you want (we recommend using the correct extension
URLS must use UTF-8 encoding
All URLs must be coded for readability
Sitemaps should be a max of 50,000 URLs or 10MB
Index files a max of 1,000 Sitemaps
Use Gzip to compress your Sitemaps

Once you’ve created your Sitemap, go to Google’s Webmaster tools and let them know at what URL the file is located. Once they know, Google will go fetch it.

Amanda also went over the new Sitemaps.org site, which we blogged about at launch, so I won’t repeat that here.

Next up, Yahoo Engineering Manager Amit Kumar:

Amit is here to give attendees all the goods regarding Yahoo Site Explorer, which he calls a window to webmasters. Aw. Through the interface, webmasters can authenticate their site, browse their pages and in-links, and perform bulk submission (sitemaps, RSS, OPML).

He stresses the importance for users to authenticate their site. To do this, the webmaster must download an authentication key and upload it onto their system. Once the file is uploaded, notify Yahoo and your site should be authenticated within 24 hours.

Once complete, it tells Yahoo! that you own your site and they will be more willing to share information with you, like your subdomain information, your language (or at least, what language Yahoo! thinks your site is in), and your last crawl date. Additionally, you’ll also be able to export your first 1000 results to TSV.

Amit says the best is yet to come! Yahoo! is working on a lot of new features and product services so keep your eyes on Yahoo!’s Search Blog for updates.

Performics Eric Papczun is up next and says submitting a site map is important in order to get a complete and accurate list of your URLs. This is especially useful for small sites. Be careful not to add noise to the crawl by supplying multiple URLs to the same page.

Once submitted, Eric notes that site maps are usually picked up within 1-2 days, with the entire site map being crawled in 3-14 days (7 days is the average).

Eric offers up several site map management tips

• Have an optimized native sitemap: link to it in your global footer
• Focus the crawler on the right content by excluding redundant content, disembodied content or spammy stuff
• Use preferred domain tool to tell Google if you want www.domain.com or domain.com to appear on the SERP
• Including separate sitemaps for news and mobile content

Google sitemaps is just a tool; use it to help you accomplish your objectives.

Last up is my new SEO crush (don’t worry, Rand, you’re still my number one), Range Online Media’s Todd Friesen.

Todd’s presentation focused around using feed listings and comparison shopping engines (Google Base, Yahoo! Shipping, Microsoft Shopping) as another way to get your listings to show up on the SERP. He notes that RSS and XML aren’t just for blogs anymore – they are the preferred format of CSE’s and can help site get indexed via Paid Inclusion. If you submit it, they will come.

The benefits of using shopping feeds is that you can get product listings to appear in the “natural results’ within 48 hours, provide relevant and targeting copy, quickly update listings to reflect sales or promotions, and provide detailed tracking and reporting for testing

Todd mentions that though paid inclusion is often seen as a competitor to SEO, it can be used to achieve immediate results or to bulk up areas where site content is limited. Webmasters will find they can get results in days, not months, it doesn’t tie up clients IT resources and it makes A/B Testing in Natural Results Possible.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 11:08 AM
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, seschicago06

It's Full of Stars -- Tuesday's Keynote

[You want to talk about star struck? While I waited for the doors to open and for people to pile into this keynote, I somehow found myself chatting with hero Kim Krause (she’s sitting next to me right now!), blogging champ Barry Schwartz, my conference buddy Simon Heseltine, and the I-can’t-believe-he’s-talking-to-me Loren Baker. I am in blog heaven.]

Danny Sullivan starts out by welcoming Jason and giving everyone a rundown of his background. In case you haven’t been following the history of Jason Calacanis, he’s the guy who sold Weblogs to AOL, created a ~~Digg clone~~ social media site, and makes controversial blog posts calling people stars. He’s also that guy who just left AOL suddenly.

We hadn’t heard what Jason was planning to do after leaving AOL, but he quickly announces that he recently accepted a position at Sequoia Capital as their EIA. It’s a new position and he says he’s looking to build something and asks the audience for ideas as to what he can build. Danny suggests a new iPod.

The question he always asks himself when thinking of new projects: How can I make this suck less?

I’d say that’s a pretty good way to look at things. Danny and Jason hit on a couple of great topics during the 45-minute keynote, so I thought it best to break them down by subject matter.

Jason on blogging:

Jason pretty much scoffed at the idea of being an A List blogger. He says if you want to join the blogging elite, all you have to do is head to TechMeme everyday, see what people are talking about, say something interesting about it and repeat the process for 30 days. At the end of the month, Jason says you’ll be considered an A-List blogger. (He also threw in a fair share of cuss words, but I won’t subject you to that).

I see what he’s getting at I suppose, but I don’t necessarily agree. There’s a lot more to being an A-List blogger (or so I’ve heard, I haven’t reached that pinnacle yet), than just mimicking what everyone else is talking about. It’s about being relevant, but also offering something new. It’s about building connections and establishing your voice. But I’ve ranted about all that before, so I won’t do it here.

Something I did find interesting was that Jason mentioned he liked blogging because there’s nothing between you and the "publish" key. You post something in lieu of playing a video game and suddenly it has the power to launch a conversation. I’m with him on that.

On his Netscape Navigators idea:

You probably remember that Jason’s Netscape Navigator idea got quite a bit of flack. People, myself included, accused him of trying to ruin a good thing and trying to buy his way into social media. Jason obviously didn’t see it that way and he still doesn’t.

Slightly paraphrased, Jason commented that the people who say he copied Digg or was out to harm them are the 12-year-olds Digg users themselves. He says they don’t realize that Digg piggybacked off del.icio.us technology.

First of all, did he just call me a 12-year-old because I disagree with him? And second, he’s really starting to frustrate me.

What the controversy did teach Jason was that when you work for a big company, you can’t act like a startup guy anymore because people interpret your actions differently when you’re perceived as having an army behind you. He noted that the idea he was trying to kill Digg was ridiculous, since he believes all aspects of social media will rise and fall together.

What Jason was trying to do was put editorial controls into the Netscape system, commenting that Digg has no safeguards. According to Jason, all paid Navigators do is fact check stories once they make it to the home page to ensure the story is viable and not a spam attempt. He stated that Netscape has actually been very successful and is increasing page views, even though the folks at Valleywag and Nick Denton keep saying it’s a total failure.

Jason on SEO

Remember when Jason made his public proclamation that SEO is bullsh – well, you know? Yeah, well now it’s time for him to defend that statement to an audience full of salivating SEOs.

Jason stands by his statement and says that as long as you have good content and you construct your page halfway well, Google will index your site. It’s only when you start playing games (games = SEO) and become over aggressive that you end up in the Google penalty box suffering the consequences. Jason, the non-SEO, says if everyone would just ‘chill out’ and construct their pages, the world would be a better place. Make great content. The world will link to it and your traffic will go up. He also says he finds long term SEO contracts shady.

This is me speechless.

All I’m going to say is that when I first heard about Jason’s I’m-Going-To-Buy-My-Users idea, I didn’t walk into Netscape’s offices and tell him how to do his job (or that his job ‘complicates’ things), so I kind of wish he didn’t walk into mine and tell me all I do is complicate things. I have my mother for that. [Down, girl. --Susan]

Jason on protecting your city:

Internet marketers have worked hard to build up a beautiful Internet city, so it’s our job to turn in the slime buckets that are intent on coming in and ruining that.

Do you see where I’m going with that? Moving on then.

You know, I was nervous about heading into this session because I felt like I’ve never really given Jason Calacanis a chance and I wasn’t sure what I was walking into. I had always lumped him into the same category as I put Mark Cuban and I wasn’t sure if that was fair, or if I was just misjudging him.

I can now say I feel totally justified in putting Jason Calacanis in the same category as Mark Cuban. He gives me that same kind of dirty feeling. And I don’t like that he uses the fact that he’s from New York as to why he’s… we’ll say blunt.

However, I’ve gotten a lot of comments lately that people enjoying reading this blog because of the warm and friendly vibe it leaves them with, so instead of talking about Jason, I’ll leave you with his answers from Danny’s Word Association game. They’re far more warm and fuzzy.

Digg… brilliant
Google… brilliant – and unstoppable and good
AOL… transition (heh!)
TechCrunch… brilliant, opinionated, more right than wrong
Spam… evil, die, die
Netscape… the future
SEO… keep it simple
Podcasting… addictive
AdSense… I love you
Valleywag… liar, evil, idiot, stupid
Jason Calacanis… striving, just trying to do interesting things, I like to work. I like to learn, I’m always striving to figure out the next thing.

I don’t think Jason understands how to play the word association game…

Oh well, on to the next session.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 10:49 AM
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, Search Engine Optimization, seschicago06

How to Make Friends and Influence Clients

Let’s be honest now. We didn’t all graduate from the kindergarten How to Make Friends class Rebecca Kelley mentioned in the un-edited (borderline hilarious) version of SEOmoz’s notorious hiring article. And it’s for that reason that today’s Working with Clients panel piqued my anti-social interest. Isn’t it time we all learn to get along, work together and set realistic goals? Who wants a hug?

The last session of the day was moderated by Danny Sullivan with Ed Kim (Red Bricks Media), Scott Orth (Selytics) and Rob Murray (iProspect) speaking. It was also about 90 degrees in the conference room, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the old days of search engine marketing, all you had to do to make a client happy was to get them a top ten ranking, or at least get them ranking above their competitors. Then a shift started to occur. Clients wanted to know what exactly there were getting for their money? What was the search engine optimizer actually doing? What progress was being made?

In short, they wanted search engine marketers to be held accountable.

To maintain a positive working relationship between yourself and a client, it’s important to set business goals up front, before the contract is signed.

Determine the purpose of the client’s search marketing campaign. Is it a search engine optimization campaign designed to get them to rank higher? Or are they running a pay per click campaign to help increase brand awareness? Each will have different business objectives, so you’ll need to be able to differentiate between the two.

You should also set key performance indicators to help you define and measure the progress your client is making towards their goals. Create strategy documents or in-depth goal reports to let clients know what you’re doing for them and how you’re helping them meet their goals. Help them quantify their search marketing efforts by giving them measurable number. How much market share have they increased this month?

It’s relatively easy to determine if you’re working with a happy client or a sulking quietly, could-snap-at-any-moment client. If your client is happy, they should be able to positively answer the following questions:

Do I trust my Vendor: Does my vendor keep me in the loop? Does my vendor look out for my best interests?
Is my vendor hitting my numbers and goals: Have they defined success measures and achieved? Is my vendor driving performance for my company?
Is my client service team strategic: Does my vendor understand the nuances of our marketing strategy and help me define clear objectives for search?
Does my vendor keep me ahead with new ideas: Does my vendor keep me abreast of the latest trends and new opportunities?
Is my vendor equipped with the technology and tools: Does my vendor have the technology and tools to keep us ahead of the competition?

Remember that clients are coming to you looking for trust, performance, strategy, thoughtful leadership, and technology and tools. If any piece of this pyramid is missing, your client will be not feel comfortable working with you, and they may end their contract.

How do you help clients to trust you? You build a relationship of transparency. Give them weekly reports to let them know what you’re working on, how things are going and what could be tweaked to foster better results.

Once you set a foundation of trust, the most important thing to show your clients are results. Being able to benchmark client progress is very useful. You should be able to show your client where they started and where they are today.

As a search marketing professional you need to understand your clients objectives (force them to identify their objectives up front so you know how you will be measuring success). Have a game plan for how you’re going to run the search engine optimization campaign and keep your clients ahead of the game.

Treat your client’s money like it’s your own, because if you think about it, it sort of is.

Rob Murray outlined several Pitfalls to SEO Implementation:

Problem: Inability of clients to assess potential of SEO.
Solution: Forecasting to predict a low and a high for expected returns. Use relevant case studies to predict the future. DO NOT let the client see you dusting off your crystal ball.

Problem: Lack of solid expectation setting.
Solution: Educate clients on SEO. Provide timelines with specific milestones. Check in consistently and reset timelines. In most instances, clients understand that sometimes timelines need to be tweaked. Don’t be afraid to tell them that.

Problem: Lack of prioritized recommendations.
Solution: Rank items as low, med or high impact so clients know what to work on first; assess effort of implementation vs. return; show them what their competitors are doing to encourage them to act.

Problem: Your client wants to run before they can walk.
Solution: Make sure to cover the fundamentals first and understand their organization limits. Educate them on the search engine optimization process.

If you want to make your clients really happy, you have to win over the entire team. Rob offered four ways to help clients win company resources:

Recognize that SEO is not the same for every industry. Avoid using canned SEO solutions. Customize their plan for them. Don’t do anything just for search engine optimization purposes.

Don’t focus only on your clients weaknesses. No one likes to hear their baby is ugly (even if it totally is!). Compliment their strengths and spend your client’s time and resources efficiently.

Get senior management commitment to SEO. Find at least one senior management sponsor. Demonstrate quick wins. Have regular briefings to keep people updated and promote what’s going on.

Be your client’s advocate. Cater the program to clients goals and make them look like heroes.

There you go. Consider yourself graduated. Now go play nice with your clients. Otherwise it’s straight to the naughty step for you.

[Note from the editor: Due to a technical glitch, Monday's session reports were delayed a day.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 10:30 AM
See more entries in seschicago06

Create a Search Engine Friendly Web Site

I’m a sucker for usability sessions, and if you’re into usability, Shari Thurow is your queen (not to be confused with your Sex Goddess, Kim Krause).

Queen Shari starts off today’s Search Engine Friendly Design session by defining what a search engine friendly site is. According to Shari, it’s a site that can be easily found on both the crawler-based and human-based search engines.

How you display words, graphics images and multimedia files communicates to the search engines what you feel is most important on your Web site, so you want to make sure you’re sending the right message.

Shari outlined the Eight Basic Rules of Web Design:

For Human Power Search Engines:

Easy-to-read – Easy-to-read from your target audience’s perspective, not from yours, your PR or legal department. Is it legible? Is it written on the right level? Are you using too much jargon?
Easy to navigate – People should know where they are on your Web site. It helps keeps them oriented and gives them a path to find their way out should they get lost.
Easy to find – Speaking externally, the info on your site should be easy to find on the search engines. Internally, your site should be laid out so that your keywords and most important information are easy to find and above the fold.
Consistent in layout and design – Be consistent in how you use various style elements, like CSS, color, fonts. This communicates trust and reliability.
Quick to download – The majority of any page should download in 30 seconds or less on a 56K modem. Fifteen seconds is better.

For Crawler-Based Search Engines:

Keyword-rich text – Never waste an opportunity to use relevant keywords. This includes using them in Meta tags, titles, body text and throughout your site.
Site and Page architecture – Make it easy for users to navigate through your site, keep them informed as to what page their on, help them orient themselves when they got lost.
High-quality link development – Use horizontal, vertical and contextual links on your site. Know who you’re linking out to.

Okay, so it’s nothing we haven’t heard before, but at the same time, I can’t tell you how many sites we’ve come across that don’t adhere to these very simple rules, so I’m okay with giving it another mention.

Sites should be created to put users’ needs first. If you’re addressing their needs, you’re giving the search engines what they want too. It’s that beautiful two-for-one thing in action. Take advantage of it.

To understand the principles behind creating a search engine friendly Web site, you need to understand the three basic functions of the search engines. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask all index text, follow links and measure popularity. That’s all they do.

Knowing that should help demonstrate the importance of using words and phrases that target your audience, as well as the importance of using keyword-rich title tags, headlines contextual links and cross links. You need to create text-based links that search engines can crawl. Don’t make them jump through a form, they can’t do it and if you make them try, your site will go un-indexed.

If you’re wondering WHY people ignore these eight basis rules even after we’ve repeated them almost as many times as I’ve been accused of being SEO Fangirl, the answer is simple: MPABS.

Now, now, don’t tweak your head like that it might get stuck. It means Most People Are Basically Stupid. (Heh, greatest acronym ever.)

The truth is site owners are used to designing sites for other site designers. They create sites users can’t navigate through and search engines can’t index. They don’t consider users needs, they don’t give a thought to linking, and they don’t understand why making users fill out a form before entering your site is an SEO design no-no. Don’t be stupid; don’t design your site for other designers, design it for your customers.

Write your content so that it appears focused to users. Employ accurate Meta tags, use introductory and conclusion paragraphs, find the best keyword density, use images and avoid using splash pages.

One of the best pieces of advice offered by Shari was to consult an SEO before your site is fully designed. Getting a search engine friendly designer on board will give you a strategic advantage against your competition and will save you money and time over the long term. There’s nothing worse than designing an expensive site, only to realize users will never be able to get through it.

Things to ask yourself when determine how search engine friendly your site is:

Does your site contain the words and phrases your target audience are most likely to type into a search engine?
Are you providing a means for the engines to access your site’s keyword-rich text?
Are you using a navigational structure that the search engine spiders can easily follow?
Are you targeting customers on their level?
Have you placed keywords in your titles, body text, anchor text, Meta tags, alt text, etc?
Have you created a site map with text links to every one of your site’s pages?

Overall, I’d say a good introductory session. I’m a fan of these usability sessions, but I’m anxiously waiting for the day we get a Search Engine Design 2.0 course -- a session that goes beyond the basics we’ve heard so many times before. Until then, this is still a good refresher.

[Note from the editor: Due to a technical glitch, Monday's session reports were delayed a day.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 10:17 AM
See more entries in Design, seschicago06

Landing Pages: It’s All About Relevance

[I feel like it’s very important that I mention Michael Bolton’s Love is a Wonderful Thing is currently playing in the background as attendees pile into this Advanced Organic Track session. I…I have no words for that, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t mention it.]

So, it’s time to talk PPC and landing pages. I wish our PPC guru Nick Guastella was here, because I’m not feeling totally qualified to cover this, but unfortunately his plane doesn’t land for another few hours so you’re stuck with me. You’re okay with that, aren’t you? Please don’t stop reading.

The session was officially called, Ads in a Quality Score World, but a better name would have been, “Be Relevant or Die”, because that seemed to be the theme of today’s session.

But what does that mean?

It signals that paid search is becoming more like its organic cousin. Your ads need to be relevant to the keyword and the landing page for them to appear where you want them to on the SERP. Almost as if your ad is acting as the bridge between your page, your keywords and your customers.

When PPC first launched (aka the early GoTo/ Overture years), to get top ranking you simply had to be willing to pay the most. However, that all changed when Google introduced the idea of the Quality Score, a ‘feature’ that has already been implemented by MSN, and is expected to be a part of Yahoo!’s forthcoming Project Panama.

Personally, I go both ways on the Quality Score issue (which I’ve mentioned before).

First, I understand its importance: It reduces the wild auction-ness of PPC, creates a better user experience, generates more qualified leads, and forces advertisers to create more relevant, truthful copy. I think everyone can get behind that. Google has made it harder for people to buy their way into the top, and in essence, put the ‘marketing’ back into Search Engine Marketing. It’s no longer about paying your way into the SERP a la Mark Cuban, and that’s a good thing.

(Don’t worry. This isn’t the death of bid management. Otherwise our Nick wouldn’t have a job. Hmm, he is kind of loud sometimes… Just kidding, Nick!)

My skepticism comes from the fact that the quality score system set up by Google causes artificial CPC inflation, discourages people from tweaking their landing pages (every time an advertiser changes something, the QS is reset!), and worst of all, it sets the engines up as the authority on what makes a good landing page, not users. That makes me uncomfortable.

I understand that it’s very likely that the Google engineers base their own quality judgments off of what users have complained about/ suggested in the past, but at the same time, it troubles me to give them so much control. I think users should determine what makes a good landing page, not the search engines.

Something I didn’t know was that according to one of the panelists, Google has two separate quality stores. One that affects the minimum bid (keyword status) and the other that affects the ad rank. Interesting, I say. I had never heard that before, but maybe that’s because I don’t spend much time hanging around PPC circles.

So how does Google determine your Quality Score, you ask?

In the simplest terms, Google’s AdBot will crawl your landing page looking for various “markers” that they will use to judge whether the page delivers a positive or negative user experience, and whether you deliver what you promise (I need a Google DatingBot). If they determine your page offers a low quality experience, your bid will increase.

To improve your Quality Score, your landing page needs to be relevant. There needs to be a tightness of the relationship between the keyword, the ad and the landing page. If one seems out of place, it’s likely you’ll score will suffer.

At the very core, it’s about matching the right message to the right audience.

You create a relevant landing page by looking at all the little things that together equal big results. That means segmenting your ad campaign using the right channels, campaign types, AdGroups and keywords to address your audience, while utilizing both local and contextual targeting to create the most relevant landing page possible. The more targeted your landing page, the more likely users are to express an interest in it.

Part of targeting your ads includes knowing your audience well enough to know that you’re using the right kinds of words. For example, say I do a query for the term “stereo”. If I land on your landing page and am met with technical requirements and specifications I’ve never seen before, I’m going to go running for my back button to find a more Lisa-friendly site. However, if I land your site and your products are grouped by brand, something I’m familiar with, I’m more likely to stick around and navigate through.

Know what your users are expecting to find on your site so that you can give it to them. Know their primary goal (to buy a new stereo), their secondary goal (a stereo that can perform X) and their latent goal (a stereo that can perform X, but can also do Y).

When it comes to Quality Score and Ad Rank, your bids and click through rate are still vital in determining where you show up, but both of these factors can be improved by creating targeted, relevant landing pages.

[Note from the editor: Due to a technical glitch Monday's session reports were delayed a day.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 10:16 AM
See more entries in Pay Per Click, seschicago06

Merging Video and Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Watch’s Chris Sherman says video is finally hot.

Yes, yes, it is, and the turnout for this morning’s Video Search Optimization panel is a testament to that. There may be a lot of red eyes in the room, (me thinks some people spent a little too much time at the bar last night), but the bodies are here because marketers want to know how to get those online videos optimized.

Video is the coolest media that everyone is talking about but no one is optimizing for. That means if you are being smart about optimizing your video Meta data, it puts you at a significant advantage over those that aren't.

You may remember 10 years ago when it was relatively easy to get your site to rank well in the SERPs by applying only a moderate amount of effort. Back then optimizing Meta information, finding the right keywords, and applying a good keyword density was enough to control your rankings. Well, that’s where video search engine optimization is at today.

If you’re optimizing your videos, it gives you an enormous strategic advantage over your competition. If you’re not doing it, you may as well get out of the way.

Before you even create video for the Web, you need to determine your plan. What kind of video are you looking to make? What is its purpose? Where will you submit it? What info do you need? Knowing this information upfront will save you time and money later on.

Once you know what you want your video to do, you can start creating your Meta data. It is very, very important that you take the time to create an accurate Meta toolkit for your developers. Your toolkit is a set of instructions that will let them know how big your video is, identify the keyword information, let them know what format you will be using, etc.

Getting this information correct is absolutely the most important part of video search engine optimization.

When you’re creating your keywords, be sure to think like a video searcher. For example, if you’re a news site, realize that your audience is looking for video on the events they missed yesterday (Michael Richards tirade, Britney on how NOT to exit a vehicle), therefore the keywords you choose must be descriptive of the content in the video, not your brand. The panelists urged marketers to be even more descriptive with their video Meta data than they would for their sites Meta tags (likely because, at least for now, they carry significantly more weight).

The Meta information should be added during video encoding, but it can also be included during the initial video creation. Video Meta information includes listing the video’s genre, copyright information, description, keywords and title.

This information is doubly important because your video Meta data will be used much the sam waye your site’s Meta tags are used to identify it in the SERP.

Another thing to keep in mind: file naming is critical. Under no circumstances should you name your video “Video23” (I hear “Video25” is also out too, sorry.). This will hinder indexing because it gives engines and users no idea as to what your video is about. The file should be named based on its content and what you think people are likely to be searching for.

The panel identified two roadblocks to the success of video search engine optimization.

First, the easier sites like YouTube and Google Video make it to upload video, the lesser the quality. People are searching for video, but they’re not searching for quality video. According to Jon, babies blowing bubbles in the background is not quality content. Perhaps not, but it gives me an awesome alliteration high!

Second, publishers and video sites are still working out monetization issues. How much will people pay to watch a video? How should publishers charge?

Like regular site search, each video search engine has unique submission requirements. Here’s a summary of some of the most popular:

Singing Fish: Allows publishers to submit their site URL and video directly. Ideally, you want to keep all site media elements in a single directory in the root of your site. (www.site.com/videos). Like most engines, Singing Fish also utilizes an RSS driven inclusion program.

Google Video: Users can upload videos via either a site submission form or through a downloadable desktop tool. Publishers can add or update Meta and content information for each video, or use the video dashboard to update all files from one screen. The Google dashboard also includes a tab for reporting to see what people are interested in and what video they’re not watching. And of course, since you’ve uploaded your video to Google, they take the bandwidth hit, not you.

YouTube: Converts video to a set format so it’s very important to start with a good quality video. YouTube allows users to include a series of basic meta information, including the title, description, tags, language and video category. The downside of YouTube: it’s flooded with content (dogs riding skateboards = awesomeness), so optimization is imperative.

The panelists mention a series of other factors to keep in mind when creating Web video, including:

Ignore low bandwidth options. With the rise of broadband, bandwidth is becoming less of a concern for users.
Sites like Google Video and YouTube have made file format less of an issue, as well.
Editors should be trained to think like video searchers.
Encode for the right keywords – title, description, and keywords – title is super important.
Allow for encoding of all formats.
Surround video with on-page relevant text.
Crosslink to videos using keywords in anchor text.
Create an optimized video site map.

With the panel reporting that 54 percent of online users are consuming video online, now’s the time to jump into the fledgling market and get ahead of your competition.

[Note from the editor: Due to a technical glitch, Monday's session reports were delayed a day.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 12/ 5/06 at 9:56 AM
See more entries in Search Engine Optimization, seschicago06

December 4, 2006

DrinkBait? No, HatBait!

Without Lisa here, it's my job to ~~keep myself entertained~~ keep up with all the search news that isn't SES Chicago but I simply can't let these feats of haberdashery go uncommented on.

While surfing Flickr's seschicago tag, I discovered the delight that is HatBait.

But who is behind this clever new scheme? Who are the clever haberdashers? Why, it's none other than the folks over at Search Marketing Gurus. Armed with an array of black hats, white hats and ridiculously awesome hats, Li is roving around looking to take the best HatBait picture. The winner gets a $25 gift card. To where? Well, they don't say. Hopefully it's someplace warm.

Why hats? Well, SMG didn't answer that question exactly but here's my take: What's better, drinking or funny hats? The right answer is funny hats because while drinks are temporary, funny hats are forever! Sure everyone likes to have a drink on someone else but what people really like is mocking their friends and associates.

Link bait schemes like HatBait and DrinkBait serve up an interesting question, how well do they work? Sure SMG is going to get links out of this but how much will it help their ranki