sesny07

April 16, 2007

SES NY '07 Session Recap

It was fun while it lasted but Search Engine Strategies New York has come to end. We hope everyone enjoyed the show and took in a lot of great search engine optimization and search marketing knowledge. In case you missed an important session or are having trouble remembering due to all the “networking” you did last week, here’s a recap of Bruce Clay’s session coverage. We hope you enjoyed it.

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/16/07 at 11:51 AM | Comments (4)
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April 13, 2007

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines

Man up, ladies and gents. We have one more session to visit.

Danny Sullivan is moderating the CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines session with panelists Shari Thurow (GrantasticDesigns.com), Jim McFayden (Critical Mass), Ryan Johnston (Critical Mass) Dan Crow (Google) and Amit Kumar (Yahoo! Search).

The Web has evolved as more people are making use of things like CSS, JavaScript and AJAX, and sometimes the engines don’t know what to deal with it.

Up first is Shari Thurow, who suggests the creation after an open bar after the last session of the last day. I am so in agreement with that.

CSS is an HTML addition that allows webmasters to control design parameters such as margins, font/typeface appearance, link appearance, etc. The main reason to use it is because it decreases the download time of a page and makes it easier to control exact positioning of the elements on a page. CSS-formatted text links easily communicate visited/unvisited links.

The disadvantages of CSS are that in order for end users to see the page as you designed them, they have to have the fonts and typefaces you used installed on their computers. (Note: Target your type choices to your target audience). For this reason, don’t put your logo in CSS. Usability testing and focus groups might show that users prefer a font/typeface that is not commonly installed on all computers. CSS-formatted hyperlinks can dominate the content of a Web page, making the content appear unfocused.

CSS can also be used to hide text on a page.

Some SEOs believe that encoding the image in a heading tag will make the alt text appear more important. Don’t do this. It doesn’t make a difference and you may be looked at as a spammer. Badness.

There are legitimate uses to hidden layers. For example, a drop down menu is not spam because the text is clearly meant to be viewed by humans and is easily read.

Should your robots.txt exclude the styles directory from the Web search directory?

Shari says no. The engines don’t want that due to all the misuse of CSS that has gone on. Use CSS but don’t use it to exploit the search engines.

As the Web moves into its second generation, sites are making more use of CSS, AJAX, and other advanced and interactive design techniques. But how are the largely Web 1.0 search engines reacting to this from an SEO perspective?

Ryan Johnston and Jim McFayden are up next. Ooo, a dual presentation. Fancy!

AJAX has become another (overused and annoying) buzzword. Everyone wants it on their site but no one knows what it means. AJAX offers an improved user experience, but you have to make sure you’re still meeting your search engine optimization needs.

AJAX stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It makes Web pages feel more responsive. It’s not a technology but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies. It gains full power from XML and DOM.

AJAX is not a programming language. There are no downloads or installations. All A-grade browsers are AJAX ready.

AJAX is NOT support by the search engines.

Search engines and AJAX don’t mix: the search engines don’t run JavaScript and can’t see AJAX-delivered content. AJAX created navigation goes nowhere; spiders can’t see the links so they won’t follow anything.

The solution to this is to remember that every page needs to be an HTML page and have its own content on the page. There must be a page the search engines can find and index. All links must already be in the HTML. To know if your site is search engine friendly, turn JavaScript off in your browser and see if you can still navigate your site.

When search engine optimization is imperative to the project, it's important to make sure you build your baseline application. For those fully supported users, it is important to understand that the AJAX you’re going to use is going to enhance the Web site. Make sure you are testing for all the different types of users.

Jim uses a recent project he worked on for Rolex.com as a case study.

He says that AJAX breaks the normal browser behavior. This means content is not necessarily corresponding to a URL. When you navigate a site designed in AJAX there is no addition to the browser history, no history, no back button, nothing. This has a great potential for spamming or cloaking the search engines and presents a major usability issues. To fix this, create unique page IDs to each page. Use JavaScript to update the URL using a # sign (the engines don’t look past the # sign). Use JavaScript to fake an entry in the browsers history.

Great example of BAD AJAX implementation: Gucci.com
Great example of GOOD AJAX implementation: Amazon.com

On the Gucci site, if you don’t have JS enabled, you see nothing. No content, no site. AJAX should be used as an enhancement, not a requirement. All of your pages must exist as plain HTML.

Dan Crow and Amit Kumar didn’t give presentations but offered rebuttals on things they’ve heard during the session.

Dan confirms that the search engines don’t look past the # sign in a URL. He does say not to rely on the state of play today to be the state of play in the future. Everything presented in the panel is true for today, but he expects in the next few months and years that we’ll see a major shift to where the engines are able to index this content.

Amit re-emphasizes that the engines are working hard to find a way to index JavaScript and says the reason they can’t is their fault.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/13/07 at 1:50 PM | Comments (6)
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Link Baiting & Viral Success

[Psyched! I made a short mental list of the people I wanted to meet and chat with at SES NY and now that I have just collected my hug from the adorable Jennifer Laycock, I believe my list is complete. At least I can leave New York later today knowing I accomplished something worthwhile while I was here. Huzzah! (Right after I typed that frequent BC commenter Handsome Rob came over and introduced himself. Fun.)]

So up next is the very popular Link Baiting & Viral Success. I’m kind of bummed I didn’t get here early enough to sit in the front row (second row for me) but what’s a girl to do? The room is packed and there are still 15 minutes until start time. Not that I’m surprised with Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Jennifer Laycock (Search Engine Guide), Chris Boggs (Avenue A | Razorfish), and Cameron Olthuis (Advantage Consulting Services) speaking. It doesn’t get much better than that lineup.

Up first is Rand Fishkin. Hi, Rand!

Rand’s here to (a) make link baiting look good and (b) explain how to leverage the Web’s most powerful linkers into sending traffic, links and higher rankings to your site.

He explains that link bait is about getting content on the Web that is worthy of being shared. I’m glad he mentioned that because it’s important. Link bait is not about passing useless junk around the Web; it’s about promoting quality content.

Promote your content by targeting it to the linkers of the Web, like the bloggers (holla!) and Web journalists out there. These people make up the “linkerati” and are important because they are the ones who link to you. They mean branding, mindshare and getting the word out about your product.

Link bait helps your site rank by giving it global authority, topical popularity, trust metrics, temporal influence, PageRank, anchor test, and topical relevance. Your page will spread link love to the whole site. If you do this consistently and you have pages that have accumulated a lot of trust, you’re going to rank well. Pages on trusted domains rank very well. Just look at Wikipedia.

Rand highlights a few popular articles from Drivl.com and SEOmoz as examples of successful link bait. (If you’re not reading Drivl.com, head over there today for a laugh. It’s a fun way to spend a Friday afternoon.)

Popular link baiting content strategies are creating lists, tips, teaching, using humor or irony, creating controversy, doing interviews, breaking news, product reviews, poll results, aesthetic beauty, tools, treat insight and comprehensive review.

Once you have your content in mind, look through link bait portals to see what people are interested in and find subjects you can target. Topics should have a high visibility, send large amounts of traffic, target the right demographic and have the potential to go viral.

Search sites like Digg, Reddit, Netscape.com, Del,icio.us/Popular and StumbleUpon and see what’s doing well and look for common themes. Rand says that on average a post that reaches the front page of Digg will get 1,000 new links in 3 weeks.

Popular blogs to get on are TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Engagdet, Lifehacker, Slashdot, Techmeme, Scobleizer, and The Huffington Post. I’m sure Rand also meant to mention the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog. He just got confused. All the people and all.

Next up is Cameron Olthuis to talk about how viral search affects traditional search. He says it improves rankings and is a powerful reputation management tool.

If you are doing reputation management (which you should be), you should be monitoring all the social media sites, blog search engines and comment trackers. You want to monitor URLs, company names, product names, public faces, keywords, etc. This helps you to keep the good buzz going and allows you to quickly respond to emerging fires.

Next up is my new friend Jennifer Laycock to focus on the viral marketing aspect of things.

Link bait is all about the links. It’s great for a link/rank booster and new site launches. However, viral marketing is about marketing. It’s about building your brand and driving conversions.

One of the reasons to do viral marketing is that the cost is in the idea. There’s no placement cost. A good viral campaign increases brand evangelists and credibility.

When you’re trying to think of an idea for your marketing campaign, ask yourself what sparks passion in your customers? What hasn’t been done before? How will your idea benefit your users? Will your audience risk their own reputation on it? Remember that ideas spread because they’re important to the spreader. A good viral marketing idea is one that builds and works through relationships.

Viral marketing spreads through opinion leaders. To give your campaign legs, determine who the thought leaders most influential in your industry. Where do people go to get information?

In order for your idea to take off it should be easy to spread (send to friend, one click access, integrate the ad), exploit motivators (use the “cool factor”), use existing networks (people are already talking – find out where), and take advantage of other people’s resources.

Jennifer than uses her recent pork troubles as a fun case study for viral marketing and how it was a match made in social media heaven. She explains how she handled it and shares that after everything went down she saw a 400 percent, branding spike, topical blog spike, a sales spike of 700 percent, and a community spike. Way to go, pork!

Next up is Chris Boggs to talk about leveraging the community.

Chris talks about the friendliness of the search community and all the “link love” we pass around. Oh great, now he’s talking about mysuperproposal.com and the community got behind it to get the site ranking for all of its competitive terms. Yeah, yeah, let’s talk about Rand being engaged. That’s fun. .

Okay, I’m done.

Once your campaign is launched you can measure its success by monitoring things like Technorati, your log files, Yahoo Site Explorer, looking for anchor text and locations of new in-links.

Chris talks about a post Neil Patel created called My 50 Favorite Blogging Resources which hit Digg, del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and lots of other great social media sites. Three weeks later, traffic was still coming in and as of yesterday there are over 1000 inbound links to this page.

Chris goes on to give some more famous examples of viral campaigns, including the Shave Everywhere campaign we first heard about at Ad:Tech New York.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/13/07 at 9:35 AM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Branding, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, sesny07

Linking Strategies

It’s the final day of Search Engine Strategies New York (tear) and I’m seated at the morning Linking Strategies session with Justilien Gaspard (Justilien Internet Marketing), Greg Boser (WebGuerrilla LLC) and Jim Boykin (WeBuildPages). Well, I mean, I’m not sitting with them. They’re speaking and I’m just in the audience. But you probably knew that right? (It’s Friday!)

Today the topic is link building and up first is Justilien Gaspard. Clap, please.

Justilien makes an educated guess and says that everyone here is looking for links. They’re probably feeling confused, frustrated and lost. Personally, I’m feeling hungry and not caffeinated. Justilien explains that there are lots of different ways to get links and some are better than others.

The first way to get links is through directories. Directories pre-date search engines and are the backbone of the Web. When you’re looking for directories to submit to, you want to find the old directories. Those are the ones that have proven their trust to users and the search engines. They can also help to put you in the right neighborhood – linking out to competitors, nonprofits, etc.

Niche and vertical directories are hidden treasures. They haven’t been overused by the search engine optimization companies (yet). Use directories that rank well in Google, this tells you the directory is trusted. City directories and state directories are also useful. Sometimes being adding just involves becoming a member of a group like your city’s Chamber of Commerce.

Good directories are human-edited, offer static licks, are older and have high quality backlinks. Avoid directories that use nofollows, only have a few pages indexed or sell site-wide links.

When you're submitting your site to a directory make sure to follow their guidelines. Most often you’re paying a review fee, not a submission fee. Write your title and description to sound as natural as possible. Don’t use the same description and title for every directory.

Use content to build links. Create resources like how-to’s, FAQs, instructions, and interviews to attract links. Do keyword research and see what’s attracting links in your industry. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Another way to generate links is to create a blog, forum or a corporate wiki. Starting a news blog is a good way to product content while establishing yourself as an industry expert. It may also attract attention from the press. News organizations are now using blog search for sources.

Once you’ve created content you need to promote it. Be proactive. Find influential media and start selling them leads. Justilien says you have to think like a politician. One link can generate more.

To generate links you must build a solid foundation, create useful content, promote it and use social media for promotion.

Next up is Jim Boykin who is attempting to give a 45 minute presentation in 7 minutes.

Ready, Jim? Go!

Links can be looked at as currency. A link on a back page of a small site is a penny, while a link on a quality, established site is like a dollar (I got a dollar, I got a dollar…). It’s not the quantity of links that matter, it’s the quality. Same with dating.

Jim then lists a series of things that are dead, or at least that's what they seem like. [They're really just pining for the fjords? --Susan] Here are some of things that made Jim’s list of dead tactics:

Submitting to SE is long dead. They find you via spiders following links.
Meta tags and on-page optimization without backlinks is dead.
Google dances are dead. Google changes on a near daily basis.
Linking a bunch of your own sites together doesn’t work.
Link trading is dead. If you link your 500 sites together it’s a giant flare to the engines that you’re an SEO.
Buying high PageRank links is dead.

Google is also a registrar which means if they wanted to sell .com’s, .net’s and .org’s they could but they don’t want to.

If other sites don’t link to you, your great content won’t count for squat. Use Yahoo to look at your backlinks. The [linkdomain:yousite.com –site:yoursite.com] to find your backlinks.

Four trust factor qualities are:

Do you have unique content?
What do you link to and what are their link neighborhoods?
Who links to those who link to you?
Is your link found within the content?

The search engines are trying to better analyze what are the clustered Web sites. Use the ‘similar pages’ option in the SERP to see your site’s neighborhood. The engines want to map the neighborhoods and see who is linking to whom. It’s not just a link from that site, it’s who else links to that site that linked to you. Think neighborhoods, not links.

Jim says if you produce quality content, people will naturally link to you. Link out to other related and trusted Web sites. Get good quality related/trusted places to link to you. Get your links within the content of a Web page.

Show you’re an expert by linking out to trusted sites, .edu's, .gov’s, non-competing resources.

Content and links: the better you have the better you rank.

Greg Boser is up and he’s allergic to PowerPoint.

Greg says he focuses a lot on competitive analysis and creates his own strategy. A lot of people don’t understand the trust rank issue. What are good links for you and what are good links for your competitor can be two different things. Domain age has a lot to do with the kind of links you need.

In a trust rank environment, links from linkbaiting can help your site but they tend to generate a lot of links that are not contextually relevant. Ultimately, Google will have to find a way to make domain trust contextually relevant. They need to be able to say that Site X is a trusted domain for financial information, not lung cancer or real estate and be able to differentiate that. One day Forbes won’t be able to host an unrelated topic page and have it rank highly in the search engines.

And with that, it’s time Q&A.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/13/07 at 9:26 AM | Comments (1)
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April 12, 2007

Evening Forum With Danny Sullivan

Where am I? Do I have to blog again? Is it daytime? Why’s the room doing that funny spinning thing? I’m confused. Susan, are you there? [Oh good heavens. Rae? Becs? Tamar? Someone take care of her! --Susan]

Oh, here we are. I remember now; it’s time for an Evening Forum With Danny Sullivan. I get it. Hi, Danny!

Danny starts out with his usual banter. You know how Danny is. Adorable. Endearing. So cute you just want to eat him up or take him home. Yeah.

I was hoping this would be akin to the speech Danny gave in Chicago last December but tonight (this evening?) it’s mostly question and answer.

The first audience questioner asks where search going to be in 3 to 5 years from now.

Heh.

Danny says it’ll be called Google: Even More Powerful and Potent Then Before (hee!). No, no, putting his serious face back on, Danny says he wouldn’t be surprised if search still looks similar to how we’re seeing it today. He does think that in three years you’ll be able to type in “ny hotels” and instead of getting links going to info about New York hotels you’ll get a big map featuring New York hotels. Or if you type in “Madonna videos”, you’ll get videos, not pages that may have a video. I think the search engines are going to get smarter about presenting the information you want faster, says our leader.

As for the major players, he still thinks Google, Yahoo and MSN will be there, but he’s not sure if MSN will have grown by then. Danny predicts more human intervention in the search results, maybe even a Digg-like thing. It just seems to be a wave that’s not dying off.

Next question: What technologies or search companies are you really excited about?

Nobody. Danny says he hasn’t seen anything that’s made him jump up and down but he was pleased with Hakia. Overall, he thinks there’s a lot of hype that goes into natural language search, but it’s not going to go anywhere. He does look at the social media sites, finds them fascinating, and wonders if they’ll transfer into better search results as a whole. The fascinating thing about Digg is that it’s all run behind the scenes. By and large he just doesn’t see a lot happening and when he does, the companies are usually overpriced and over hyped. Word.

Next question: When will the incentive of spamming through AdSense break?

Danny says Google did roll out all that stuff to take away the attractive of creating MFA sites. However, it doesn’t cost a lot of money to do. So…he’s not sure.

Out of nowhere Danny starts cracking on Windows Mobile. It’s beautiful.

Also out of nowhere (I think), Danny starts trying to remember that one engine that was designed for the older 55 crowd. He’s mumbling to himself until he comes up with it – Crusty! Heh, no, Danny; it was Cranky. Kind of like all the old people in the audience you just insulted. :)

Someone questions Danny on his thoughts on personalized search? (I guess she doesn’t read Search Engine Land.) Danny answers (slightly paraphrased, naturally.):

“I’ve always described this as when you do a search you’d have multiple fronts. Right now there’s a lot of incentive to get the top ranking to get eyeballs. When you do personalized search, one person might see my results, but another person won’t. It makes it harder for me to go out and blatantly spam. That’s one benefit.

It doesn’t make SEO go away thought because if I have a good site and I still hit all the good ranking criteria than it gives you a good search at ranking.”

Danny talks about the old regime of personalized search. Where you’d perform an ego search, get excited by the results, and then see the little Turn Off Personalized Results link mocking you on the right hand side. I can’t tell you how many times I got excited over something, told Susan, and then had my heart broken when she told me I was probably logged in. It’s funny; she always had a smile on her face when she said that. Curious.

Another audience member asks if a toggle button (like the one that lets you switch between searching UK results and the entire Web) be a good idea to let users turn personalized search on and off at their own discretion.

Danny says yes, it would be, but Google doesn’t want that. She asks why and Danny says because Google doesn’t want you to be toggling. Heh.

He then asks if people think it’s weird Larry and Sergey have to share the Google jet. He finally concludes that, no, it’s a good thing – they’re doing it for the economy. (And sharing is caring!)

Next question: Who’s going to win the local space?

Danny responds, “who knows” and asks if there’s anyone left not in it. He then recounts a fun story where him and Jim Lanzone almost got into a fight over search while out to dinner. But then controlled themselves, because it was time to order desert.

Danny says his difficulty with local search is that he lives in a small town where there’s no sense local searching anything. He jokes: If I need a painter, there’s one person who does it and I know him. (His name is Terry and he’s from Wilshire. Hi, Terry!).

After many rants and rambles, Danny says he imagines it’ll be one of the bigger players who wins local search because they’re the trusted resource for users.

After lots of questions and attempts to poll the audience, Danny realizes that no one is raising their hands. He then asks how many people are alive and about 2 percent of the room humored him with a hand raise. The rest of us have just admitted to being dead.

Another questioner asks Danny to describe the biggest session disaster he’s ever seen. He offers up several responses:

“In San Jose I lost the bet in the World Cup and I had to weird lederhosen for the last session of the day.”

“Two years ago there was the big “Google is small” scandal when Yahoo rolled out the big index. When they ran out of food at the Google Dance, everyone ended up at the local In “N Out Burger. Tim Meyer from Yahoo was there with Paul Gardey [Ask.com] and a Google guy and [everyone’s] mocking each other. Paul finally gets up on his chair and goes, look at me, I’m Yahoo, I’m the tallest of them all.”

“There was one show where we had one guy about to speak and then he ran off the stage saying “I can’t do this!”. He showed up the next day and was fine.”

"I have a whole lot of stories. I should write more of them down, shouldn’t I?" (YES!)

Oh, no the lights just almost went out. I think they’re telling Danny he has to go. Lastly, some guy asks everyone to thank Danny for his contribution to search and everyone claps and hollers. Aw. I think we all had a moment.

Search hearts Danny.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/12/07 at 4:11 PM | Comments (2)
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Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues

It’s time for this afternoon’s Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues panel moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs (Optiem, LLC), Shuman Ghosemajumder (Google), Tom Cuthbert (Click Forensics), Reggie Davis (Yahoo) and John Marshall (ClickTracks.com).

Quite a bit of star power on this panel. I’m curious to see whether it gets a little heated or not. We’ll have to see. Let’s hope the chairs are bolted down.

Clearly, click fraud is a major problem facing advertisers. How do you know if the clicks you were charged for last month were legitimate or if something else was going on? Are you reviewing your clicks? The hope is that this panel will show us how to spot abnormalities and follow-up with search engines if you suspect a competitor or someone else.

Up first is John Marshall to talk about distinguishing click fraud from poorly performing ads.

It turns out distinguishing a badly designed ad from click fraud is actually quite difficult because they look very similar. John gives some tips on how to distinguish them and some tips for spotting weak ads.

Case Study: John noticed he got lots of traffic on one particular ad without a corresponding increase in sales. It looked suspicious but is it click fraud? Maybe it was just that an ad appeared on a new affiliate site or an affiliate generated low-quality clicks.

He started going through a thought experiment, creating a hypothetical situation in his head. What if on deep analysis he saw that the clicks weren’t covering to sales and that lots of clicks are coming from India. Then it’s definitely click fraud, right? Not necessarily.

It could be that his ad got picked up by a publication that was particularly targeted toward readership based in India (riiiight.). Maybe when searchers clicked through the ad they found it was too expensive to ship the product to in India they went away immediately.

So how do you know what the true story was?

When he looked even more carefully he saw the clicks came from different IP addresses, most of the clicks were from the US, they had different user agents, they executed JavaScript and took cookies and loaded images. On the other side, he also found that a very high proportion were single-page visits and that the referring site looked very suspicious. Eventually, he concluded it was probably click fraud. He submitted the data and got his refund.

The moral is that distinguishing between click fraud and badly performing ad is tough. The data looks very similar and requires human judgment to examine what’s going on. It also requires knowledge of your specific Web site and visitor demographics.

Use statistical analysis to look at multiple data points for your clicks. Don’t rely on ROI. The computer shows campaigns which are worse than average in anyway. They could have a low conversion rate, have a lot of single-page visits, have a lot of clicks from China, etc.

If you go through this process you’ll also find poorly performing ads, which you can then fix.

Next up is Shuman Ghosemajumder from Google to talk about auditing paid listings and click fraud issues.

Click fraud comes from two main places – attacking advertisers and inflating affiliates – and it can happen in a variety of ways. It could be manual clicking, click farms, pay-to-click sites, click bots or botnets.

How about some definitions? Shuman gives some insight on commonly heard terms:

Invalid clicks: Clicks Google decides not to charge for.
Click fraud: Something which is very difficult to define because it’s a question of intent. You’re trying to read people’s mind to see why they clicked the ad.
Click fraud attempts: Clicks on AdWords campaigns made with malicious or fraudulent intent.

Shuman details the three step process for invalid click detection. The two initial stages are proactive detection and the third stage is reactive detection. Google wants all clicks to be caught in the first two stages so users are never charged. Also, they want most of the clicks to be caught in the first stage.

He says you want to make sure that your filters are sensitive enough that you’re really catching malicious activity.

Click fraud estimates vary slightly. In 2006 it was said to be 12% of clicks and in 2007, it is estimated click fraud cost advertisers $666 million. (See, click fraud is evil!)

The reality is that there is a significant number of clicks that are filtered (<10 percent). Nearly all invalid clicks are detected pro-actively. Reactively detected invalid clicks are a negligible proportion. Google wants to see more over-reporting than under-reporting. The level of reporting today is at a record high.

Where do fictitious clicks come from? Take a look at the scenario below:

A user searches on “flowers”
That user clicks on an ad and is taken to an advertiser’s landing page
Visits to landing page are tracking in the advertiser's log
Advertisers log shows new hit
User hits the back button
Advertiser’s log records a reload of the page

Right there an advertiser sees an invalid click, but that’s not the case.

The only way to resolve this is to use redirects or to use AdWords auto tagging which appends a unique ID to the user befriending the back button.

Google has several unique features like AdWords Auto-Tagging, invalid clicks reporting, and enhanced reporting (coming Q2 2007)

Shuman says Google is trying to become more transparent but they don’t want to aid fraudsters from in attacking users. He blames CSI for fraudsters becoming more savvy. Weirdest. Analogy. Ever.

Tom Cuthbert is up next to talk about the progress on the click fraud front.

Tom says he’s hearing from advertisers that things are improving. He’s here to give some good news. Yay for good news!

Google revealed plans for an IP exclusion list and announced enhanced reporting format. Yahoo named Reggie David as VP level exec to combat click fraud. They’ve also announced domain level blocking. None of this, however, eliminates the need for third parties. (Or the need for you to study your own clicks.)

Other signs of industry progress include that industry progress, awareness of click fraud at an all time high, IAB Click Measurement Working Group, Click Quality Council meeting monthly, and the Enhancing Click Fraud Network launched.

Tom says his company will soon be releasing the click fraud numbers for quarter one.

What’s next? Working to take advantage of site exclusion opportunities by pooling community data and using it to make better decision.

Up last is Reggie Davis.

The mission of Yahoo’s click fraud team is to create the world’s highest quality search and display advertising network. It’s about additional quality initiatives, new features and functionality. It’s about greater visibility and control. To have more dialogue with advertisers and publishers.

Reggie says in the past an average of 12-15 percent of clicks were not billed because they were thought to be fraudulent. Yahoo’s committed to providing good quality traffic.

Reggie speeds through explaining Yahoo’s clickthrough protection system. I think he did it on purpose so that I couldn’t blog al of it. The first three steps are as follows:

Thousands of filters assess all attributes of each and every click.
results include black-list/white-lists
Behavioral pattern matching

To provide a better experience for users, Yahoo is aiming for an improved publisher assessment, deeper advertiser case studies, increased advertiser's adoption of conversion tracking tools and improvements to matching technologies

As a result of this, Yahoo has seen a significant decrease in the number of claims being sent in.

Reggie briefly discusses Panama and says for 2007 Yahoo is working on quality based pricing, domain blocking, Advertisers Marketplace Quality Council, additional investigation detail, and to continue IAB efforts.

[Whose idea was it to space session 15 minutes apart? Why are people trying to kill me? (Mine and yes. I also told them to turn on the AC.--Susan)]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/12/07 at 3:14 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Analytics, Ask, Google, Pay Per Click, Search Engines, Yahoo, sesny07

Bookmark Strategies

I’m excited, I’m excited.

I’m seated in the Bookmark Strategies session with speakers Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Lee Odden (Online Marketing Blog), Todd Malicoat (Independent SEM consultant), and Neil Patel (Advantage Consulting Service). You have to admit; this is a pretty kick ass panel. And even more fun, I know all of them. My coolness factor is almost immeasurable.

[Things worth noting: Michael Gray has a Yoda laptop cover. Not quite sure what to say about that.]

Okay, first up is Lee Odden to deliver an introduction to social bookmarking. The first thing Lee does is comment about the freezingness that is this room. No harping; just saying.

Lee explains that in the olden days of the Web, bookmarks were browser-based. You could save Web pages for future reference but they were often difficult to manage, presented navigation issues and had annoying single location access.

These days, bookmarks have gone social and are Web-based. This means one click saving opportunities, tagging, sharing, wisdom of crowds, RSS capabilities and portability. With social bookmarks, the intention is to save that great post so you can revisit it on a regular basis.

The major players in social bookmarking are:

Del.icio.us: Most popular bookmarking site. High opportunity for traffic, syndication and the ability to use social features. Uses both tags and folders. (Lee gives the audience a walkthrough of how to bookmark something on del.icio.us.)
Furl: A LookSmart property. Medium traffic opportunity and medium-low syndication opportunities. One of its unique features is that it caches your content. Notes are searchable and you can export your bookmarks from Furl with the cached pages.
Blinklist: Medium traffic opportunity and medium-high syndication opportunity.
Magnolia: Medium traffic opportunity with a low syndication opportunity; very group oriented. Its API rivals that of del.icio.us. Cache’s content and offers thumbnails.
Google bookmarks: Medium to low traffic opportunity with a medium opportunity for syndication. The unique features are that it affects personalized search results. There are multiple ways to add bookmarks, and your content can be access via the IE toolbar.

Use chicklets to entice your users to bookmarket your content via text links, combination, drop downs, fold outs, or pop ups.

Lee offers up two great tools you may be interested in:

Share This: Wordpress plug-in. Once installed it creates a Share This link which lets users bookmark something while staying on the site
AddThis.com: If opens a new browser window when users bookmark something. It gives you statistics about who’s clicking on what.

If you’re going to get into social bookmarking, become a user first. Pick a tool, place buttons prominently, but don’t overkill it. Match bookmark service to audience. Track referrals and understand they’re not limited to blogs. You can use them on Web pages, email, etc.

Up next is Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl to talk about why del.icio.us is yummy. Mmm.

[Keep yourself amused. Todd broke the projector. He’s from Albany, what do you expect?]

Okay, we’re back. Why should you care about del.icio.us? Because it gives the right links, offers bookmark aggregation, gives real bookmarks, delivers real traffic, and has great users (aka they actually purchase things).

Todd offers some tips to get the most out of social bookmarking:

Coordinate the launch: When you’re trying to making del.icio.us’s popular page, coordinate your launch with others. Go through your contact/AIM list and get people to give you some early bookmarks. You need 30 to 50 bookmarks in a 24 hour period to be considered “popular”.
Offer a Call to Action: Put an “Add This” chicklet right after the article to encourage users to bookmark it.
Tagometer: Tag badges tell other users how many other users have bookmarked it. Peer pressure is always effective.
Firefox plug-in: Put the icon in your browser
Feedburner
Know your audience

The thing to remember with social media is that if turns into this snowball of buzz, traffic, links, top SERPs.

And now troublemaker Michael Gray. Let’s get ready for some accent!

Michael is here to talk about using social bookmarking sites for research. Research is important because it allows you to find out what’s working, what’s not working, discover trends, identify key players, identify your competition and keep track of who’s saying good or band things about you.

Sorry, Susan, but Michael says social bookmarking is about being social. To be successful you have to get people to like you. [Thanks, Glinda, I'll keep that in mind.--Susan]

Michael likes RSS because it’s big, fast, easy, orange and one of the best ways to keep track of info that changes quickly. Hell, yes!

When you’re getting ready to build content start by talking a look at Digg and do a search for your topic. See what other stories have been dugg or read through things that have been buried and find out why they were buried so you can better them.

StumbleUpon is another good way to research what’s popular, as is del.icio.us. When you add things to del.cio.us you can see how many people bookmarked that content. It will tell you who posted it first, the tags they used, and who else tagged it. Did it happen overnight, over time? You can add people to your network so you can monitor them and see what they’re doing.

Track your company name and your mentions in news services like Google Alerts, Google News, Track your URL (and your competitors') in Digg, Netscape, del.icio.us and Technorati.

Oh, and don’t push crap. Write good stuff and use varying friend networks to get stuff moving.

I think Michael is scaring the audience by repeatedly using the world “stalker”. They’d be really scared if they knew he meant it. Michael Gray really is a stalker.

Neil didn’t deliver a presentation; he’s just on hand for the Q&A. Slacker.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/12/07 at 12:32 PM | Comments (1)
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Local Search Marketing

Okay, I’m starting to get my composure back after my total geek out last session. I’m planted in the Local Search Marketing session right looking at moderator Greg Sterling and the pretty, pretty panelists Patricia Hursh (SmartSearch Marketing), Justin Sanger (LocalLaunch!) and Stacy Williams (Prominent Placement, Inc.).

Not surprisingly, the room for this session is pretty packed with the start time just 10 minutes away. Local search is hot, or “nice and rough” as Greg Sterling’s first slide readers, can’t wait to hear what that’s about…

Greg Sterling starts out by giving a marketplace overview. There’s some kind of odd music/song lyric reference using that line from above that I don’t completely understand. Everyone but me is laughing. I feel young, very, very young. (Apparently, it was a Proud Mary reference. Or something. Tina Turner was in Proud Mary? [Are you even from this planet?--Susan] Why are we even talking about this? Can we talk about search now?)

comScore defines local search as search with geo-modifiers, using a local search engine or searching with an Internet yellow pages site. Greg defines it as a process where users seek info online, but the ultimate intention is to complete an offline transaction at a retail store. It’s about the Internet influencing real-world buying decision. I think Greg’s definition makes far more sense than the one provided by comScore.

The local search market is fragmented, invisible, and hard to track. Practically every week a new local search destination is launched. Greg rattles off about 10 local search engines and I haven’t heard of any of them. Local really is invisible.

Local searchers are invisible to search engines because of missing modifiers. Nobody sees the overall purchase cycle, let alone the offline transaction…there’s a cliff from online to offline. Customers appear off-line and no one knows where they came from. They’re just there.

People shop online, but buy offline. Jupiter reports that $400 billion of US offline spending in 2006 was influenced by the Internet. They projects that half of US retail sales will be influenced by online in 2007.

Three emerging local search segments are:

World of mouth/social media: Online communities such as Yelp or Lilaguide or even MySpace
Verticals: Citysearch, Zillow, TheKnot, ServiceMagic
Mobile: WAP-based local search, text, Voice Search/Free DA

I was hoping we’d get into mobile local search a bit, but unfortunately it’s time to move on. Such is life.

Up next is Stacy Williams who reinforces Greg’s statement that local search is extremely fragmented. There are the local results of the big engines, local-only search engines, internet yellow pages, business data providers and local review sites. It’s often difficult for a site owner to know where to start.

Interestingly, we’re told that local search makes up less than 1 percent of each of the three big engines, so right now you’re better off targeting the main search results.

You do this by optimizing your site using geo-targeted search terms (i.e. New York yoga academy) to get in the local/Map results. Tracy suggested adding a physical address at the bottom of every page. This tells the engines you are a brick and mortar business and that you do exist somewhere in the real world.

You can also submit your business profile directly to the main search engines. Basically, you head over and simply fill out a form about your business, giving the address details, phone number, description, etc. If possible, you should also include the year established, operating hours, payment methods accepted, languages spoken, products you carry, services offered, professional associations, specials, awards, etc. You can usually select up to five categories to list your business in, so give some thought to which are best for you.

Most of the sites will publish exactly what is sent to them; however, there are security steps in place. You typically have to enter an email address that will be used to verify the information. The review time to get your listing approved is usually 5-60 days.

Other ways to target local are by using:

Local Only Search Engines: Local,com and TrueLocal.com. TrueLocal will tell you how many impressions and clicks you can expect in your category and zip code.

Internet Yellow Pages: SuperPages.com, YellowPages.com, Dex, YellowBook

Business Data Providers: InfoUSA, Axciom, Localeze (supplies to MSN)

Review sites: InsidePages, Citysearch

Local search is important because it helps your business to be found by local prospects, build links, and dominate the search engines results page by appearing in more than one location. Be sure that the data you enter is accurate and complete.

Patricia Hursh is next to cover local search advertising.

Local search is important. Users are searching locally in increasing numbers (40 percent of searches have a local intent), marketers are raising local search ad budgets, local search ads have proven to be effective, and local search is part of the overall customer experience

To get the most out of local search, Patricia offers 6 great tips:

Integrate multiple PPC targeting methods:

Craft geo-targeted PPC campaigns to reach a large number of local searchers and improve local relevance.
Bid on local keywords to ensure total coverage and to reach a target audience not in a designated area
Advertising nationally on your brand to increase visibility and branding

Focus on the customer’s decision criteria: Create ads that focus on what your prospects care about. If users are looking for a health club they’re looking for proximity to their home, if they’re looking for an emergency number they want immediate availability, if it’s a search for pizza they want price info. Draw them in by focusing on their needs. Every local search is different. Incorporate that into your ads.
Capitalize on the “local speak” advantage: Write culturally relevant ads using local lingo and focusing on the local aspects of your business. This will help you to differentiate yourself from the big national players.
Drive in-store visits and phone calls: If your primary goal is to drive foot traffic or phone calls focus on local search ad products that provide maps, driving directions, contact info, reviews and ratings.
Research available ad positions: Google Local Business Ads are displayed on Google Maps, while Yahoo Local Listings are displayed on Yahoo Local results. However, we’re seeing a lot of cross-over. For a lot of local-based searches, local listings are showing up on top the organic results.
Local search isn’t only for local companies: Big companies can increase their brand and build local relevance by advertising locally.

As you can see, there is more than one way to reach a local searcher and all the ad products are very different. A combination strategy is required to maximize results.

Justin Sanger is up next. He’s a quiet talker; I think I’m in trouble.

We are witnessing a consumer revolution, says quiet Justin. What is happening right now requires perspective. We, the user, are driving this marketplace. It’s the birth of a new savvy consumer. We shouldn’t be surprised; however, local consumption isn’t anything new. In fact, eighty percent of all our purchasing activity is consumed in a five-mile radius of our home. What is new is the Internet and its ability to augment our traditional local activities. Seventy percent of local consumers are using the Web to find products and services locally.

We used to just call our mother for a restaurant recommendation, hit the yellow pages or newspapers, and used word of mouth. Today we have the Internet.

Things are fragmented today, but it’s gong to get better. At least for users.

From here Justin pretty much goes on a tirade about we just don’t understand. The fact of the matter is, he says, local consumption patterns have varying characteristics and user/prospect needs.

There are several constructs of local search behavior: Social networking, special events, life events, health, shopping and business look-up, travel and transportation, work life. What constructs do all the local search engines fill? What is Yelp to users? What is CitySearch? What need do these engines fill? What do you do? How are you different?

Justin says the problem here is that the definition of local search is that includes almost everything we do because our behavior is inherently local. If local is everything we do then it makes it hard to define and target.

The way local is defined is one of its problems. Local connotes geography and search describes an activity. What is missing is the construct. This has led to a proliferation of what we commonly refer to as horizontal local search sites. They want to be everything to everyone.

He believes that local search utilities will segment even further into topical vertical themes. To “win”, the horizontal local search engines must transform themselves into deep and rich vertical aggregators. The change is awesome but is absolutely necessary.

Vertical and local search requires the same thing: structured content. Local search gets content from ad products, UGC local content, syndicated authority content, internet index local content and offline-derived content.

To win in this space you must think beyond your Web site, think atomization, study the SERPs, find vertical authorities beyond the normal, search on Google Maps and look for the reference sites they use, check the backlinks of your competitors.

I think Justin just spoke 10 completely sentences without taking a breath. He’s starting to sound like that guy with the cardboard sign standing on the corner and preaching about how we’re going to hell but no one gets it. No one but him. It’s somewhat…unsettling.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Greg Sterling just interrupted Justin to poll the audience on how many people are now totally confused. Hee! No one raised there hand but I’m pretty it was because they know what I know – that Justin is hiding an AK47 behind the podium.

Justin continues to talk. His pleas are passionate and I’m 100 percent sure he’s exactly right with what he’s saying but it’s somehow getting lost. Greg just called Justin a frustrated college professor, which I think sums things up pretty accurately.

I’m out of here before people start getting hurt. See you at the next session.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/12/07 at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)
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Social Search Overview

Happy Day 3, everyone.

[I don’t know if my head is just getting big now that I’ve met Danny, but someone just walked into the session room and asked to look at my SES schedule and I’m pretty sure it was Seth Godin. Like, The Seth Godin. I know! Could it be? -- (10 minutes later) It was Seth Godin. I just spoke to Seth Godin. I am so cool!] [So. Jealous!--Susan]

I have my Grande White Mocha in hand ($4.99 for a GWH? I was totally ripped off due to my tourist status…but it sure is delicious) and it’s time to enjoy this morning’s Social Search Overview session. Chris Sherman (Search Engine Watch) is moderating the session which features Grant Ryan (Eurekster), Tomi Poutanen (Yahoo), and new late additions Apostolos Gerasoulis (Ask.com) and Seth Godin (Squidoo) speaking.

Seth Godin and the father of Ask.com in one session? I am in geek heaven right now. I’m so star struck I’m sitting frozen in my seat but what I really want to do is jump up and down a whole bunch of times and maybe run up and down the aisle. However, that would probably be seen as “not cool” so I’ll try and stay planted.

Okay, back to the session.

According to the fancy wording in my SES program agenda, “humans are hot again”. And not just any humans (humans like Sadie), us geeky humans. The search engines are categorizing the Web by tapping into our obsessive tags, watching our clicks and using our search history to try and see things the way us dorks see them. Things have sure changed since high school.

Chris Sherman starts off by explaining social search. He says it is simply Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment. I’m sorry, but there is nothing simple about that definition, Chris. In fact, I’m not even sure what it means. Chris says informed can mean many things – including egregiously uninformed. No good industry standard definition yet.

The interesting thing, says Chris, is that we’ve always had social search. The very first guide to the Web was created in 1990. You probably know that Yahoo was originally created by a team of human editors. It was basically the first social directory. Meta tags were then created to help content owners influence search engines – and were a massive failure.

Tagging is pretty much Meta tags in a different form.

Algorithm search itself is social because fundamentally search engines reflect human bias in the form of programmer choices. They determine what’s quality and what’s spam. Search engines also observe human behavior like click paths, popular URLs, etc and use this information to modify their algorithms. As of late, we’re even seeing new personalization efforts to refine search for everyone.

So if social search has been around for years, why is it getting so much buzz right now?

Chris says it’s because algorithmic search has plateau with innovation being much harder than it used to be. We’re also realizing that humans are still better at some things than computers (like whistling). A major factor is that many, if not most, of the players in social search are leveraging the work of volunteers.

There are many different types of social search, including:

Shared Bookmarks & Web pages: Del.icio.us, Shadows, MyWeb, Furl, Diigo
Tag Engines (blogs & RSS): Technorati, Bloglines
Collaborative directories: ODP, Prefound, Simbo, Wikipedia
Personalized Verticals: Google Custom Search, Eurekster, Rollyo, Trexy
Collaborative Harvesters: Digg, Netscape, Reddit
Social Q&A Sites: Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Answerbag

The problem with social search is the scale and scope. When people go out and tag we have a problem with language. What’s orange? A fruit, the color of a shirt, a sunset? The trouble with tagging is that language is ambiguous, there’s a lack of controlled language, humans are lazy, and some of them are just plain idiots.

The other problem with social search is the spammers and people trying to game the system. Cheaters ruin everything.

What will ultimately work?

The combination of algorithm and people-mediated search will become the new format. Yahoo is doing a great job of this as of late. We’re going to see people trusting other people’s judgment – unless those people are idiots. Trust networks are going to evolve, and we’re going to see increased personalization and user control over result filtering. We’ll be able to say I don’t want results from Site X, I want them from Site Y. Social search will work best for non-text content like photos, music and video.

Seth Godin is up and says people are here because search is broken. People need more traffic. Seth built Squidoo because he saw a need for human beings to create a post search engine filter. Users can use Squidoo has a launching pad to find what they are ultimately looking for. The purpose of a Squidoo page is to make people leave it.

If you’ve got a Web site that’s not getting enough traffic the wrong thing to do is trick and engine into sending traffic you don’t deserve. The right thing to do is to open up the deep pages of your site and expose the stuff that’s not getting attention. Don’t do it yourself; have your fans, readers, and the people who buy from you to build out the content. If they built out content because they like you, they’re putting relevant and meaningful content in front of potential customers.

Apostolos is up next. I’m trying not to make eye contact in case it causes me to melt into a puddle. He says it’s his first time speaking at SES, which makes me that much cooler, I think.

Apostolos says he’s here to say that a new generation of search is going to start appearing. You need to figure out how you are going to rank in the future with this new technology.

He defines social search as a knowledge that you use to guide you into a region of what you want. I think that’s a really awesome definition. If you want to find exact, encyclopedia-like information, then a traditional engine will help you, but it’s not going to take you to the region of knowledge you’ll have in front of you through a social engine. The Web is static. If you have knowledge (education, experience, etc) you can guide and give what the user wants.

It’s about understanding who you are. If you search for Yale, social engines will give you info about other Ivy League schools like Harvard and Princeton. It’s one search for an entire knowledge region or community.

The future of search is the integration of social knowledge to guide you to the right community. Apostolos says Ask.com has been using social search for awhile but they just haven’t been talking about it and uses their Image Search as an example.

Social search is an important future area that we need to support.

Next up is Tomi Poutanen from Yahoo. All of his slides are pictures. I like Tomi.

Tomi highlights the three ways Yahoo is using social search:

Flickr: Tomi shows the difference between Google Images and Flickr by searching for golden retrievers. Who doesn’t like puppies in the morning? I know I do.

The different between Flickr and regular search is that you can take human interaction into account, which therefore makes the pictures are more engaging.

Del.icio.us: Tomi asks how many people use del.icio.us and 75 percent of the audience raised their hand – that’s pretty impressive given the geeky nature of the product. Way to go, guys! He does a search for “nyc hotel” and shows how the results that appear on del.icio.us are considerably more relevant than what you’d find from a traditional engine.

Yahoo Answers: Answers enables you to ask as question and the community will answer. It’s about people helping people (Isn’t that song?). The service is also being show on the bottom of Yahoo’s SERP to complement the search experience.

The main problem with social search is that there’s no way to track who said what. There’s an anonymity there that isn’t found on TV or in print, and it’s dangerous. People can say anything they want.

During the question and answer period, an audience member asks about potential revenue model for social search.

Tomi responds by bringing up the late Google Answers which bombed because people weren’t willing to pay for information. The motivation that drives people to share is noncommercial interest in helping each other and sharing information. Introducing a financial incentive changes that and it makes it participating solely about the financial incentive. Once this happens people will start worrying about not getting paid enough instead of producing quality content. Going down the path of paying people is a really risky path you can’t reverse and it changes the dynamic of the communities.

Seth agrees that money changes everything. There’s a long history where you work til free until you get the top of the pyramid and then you get money. The other thing money changes is that it eliminates anonymity. If there’s money on the table, you know who’s producing the content. Seth says anonymity is the worst part of the Web.

Apostolous says allowing money in social search is the same as the monetization of the Web. He also says that money almost destroyed the quality of the search engines.

I have to say, I really agree with the panelists' thoughts on introducing money to the equation of social search. If things take off the way everyone is expecting, it will likely be a necessary evil, but providers are going to have to be really careful with how they go about it. One wrong move and the entire model will be ruined.

This was a great, great session. [So. Jealous. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/12/07 at 9:27 AM | Comments (0)
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April 11, 2007

Robots.txt Summit

Danny Sullivan (my new male BFF, you know) is moderating today’s Robots.txt Summit with speakers Dan Crow (Google), Keith Hogan (Ask.com), Eytan Seldman (Live.com), and Sean Suchter (Yahoo). Good, we’re all here!

With all the copyright buzz and content producers crying that the engines are “stealing” content, I’m actually pretty excited about this session. I know, Bruce looked at me like I was crazy too, but I think this is going to be a good session.

For those in the dark, robots.txt is a standard file that allows site owners to block content from being spidered. It was created a decade ago and hasn’t evolved too much over the year, which naturally, has caused problems -- site owners still don’t know how to use it and the engines don’t know how to improve it. That’s where this session comes in.

Representatives from the engines and angry site owners are gathering for a meeting of the minds. Watch out, it’s very likely chairs are going to be thrown.

Up first is Keith Hogan from Ask.com. Be brave, Keith.

Interestingly, Keith notes that less than 35 percent of servers have a robots.txt file. See, this explains why so much off-limits content is getting spidered and appearing in the index. It’s not the engine’s fault; it’s the site owners who didn’t read their robots.txt manual.

Some more fun facts from Keith: The majority of robots.txt files are copied from others found online or are provided by a hosting site. This is a clear sign that site owners don’t know to use them. The files typically vary in size from 1 character to well over 256,000 characters, though the average robots.txt file is 23 characters.

Not that we needed him to tell us this, but Keith notes that the robots.txt format is not well understood. Yeah, I got that impression too.

Keith spoke briefly about the new SiteMaps directive that was announced this morning. (Coverage from Ask, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) The new directive will expand robots.txt to include a pointer to the Sitemap file, thereby removing the requirement to submit it to the search engines. Essentially, it allows auto discovery. Very cool.

In case you’re confused about the difference between a robots.txt file and your sitemap, your robots.txt tells the search engines what NOT to index and your sitemap is intended to control/optimize the interaction with the crawler on your site.

The similarity is that both robots.txt and SiteMaps are intend to “allow” the Webmaster page-level control to identify every page that is on the site, identify the ages of the page, etc.

He also outlined some questions and possible changes to robots.txt:

Would changing the format to XML improve the accuracy, control and understanding?
Should webmasters be able to stop/slow crawling when it will interrupt the operation of the site?
Would a more fine grain approach to crawling time and crawling speed be helpful?
Some sites have hosts/IPs that are dedicated to crawlers. Should robots include a directive to the crawler’s host?
Meta directives in HTML provide page level control for Archiving/ Caching/Link Following.
Some sites inadvertently create Spider Trips or Duplicate content for crawlers even though there are plenty of heuristics to identify these problems (session ids, affiliate ids).
Should robots add hints for this so that sites don’t end up with duplicate pages and smaller link credits?

Up next is Eytan Seldman, who has opted not to use a PowerPoint presentation. I’m not sure if this makes me like him a lot or hate him immensely.

Okay, I love him. He just pulled up the robots.txt file for Hilton which reads: “Do not visit Hilton.com during the day!” Hee! That is so awesome.

Eytan wants a way to facilitate the protocol to improve its effectiveness, saying that the vast majority of site owners don’t use robots.txt because it is too complex. The engines don’t support comments that have controls. There needs to be more commonality so a user can just ID the user agents and tell them what to do. A common protocol would make it simpler and therefore easier to use.

Dan Crow is up next and defines the Robots Exclusion Protocol as robots.txt + robots Meta tags. The exclusion protocol was originally created in June 1994 and tells the search engines what not to index. Since then it was become a de facto standard -- everyone uses it but everyone uses a different version of it.

He asks if we should standardize the protocol so that there are common core features that exist.

Lastly, he outlines longer terms goals like creating consistent syntax and semantics, and improving a common feature set.

Up next is Sean Suchter from Yahoo who reminds us that Yahoo’s crawler is named Slurp and it supports all the standard robots.txt commands. There are also some custom extensions like crawl-deal, sitemap and wildcards.

Something to keep in mind is that different Yahoo search properties use different user-agents, so if you are trying to affect one robot, make sure you’re only addressing that robot. Otherwise you could run into an 'oops'.

Next he has some questions for audience members.

Would you like to replace “crawl-delay” with a different implementation that accomplishes same goals for webmasters?
What are your goals for this setting? Bandwidth reduction? GET reduction? Database load reduction? How do you use this?
Do you pick a setting and move it up and down?
Do you want support for robots.txt-noindex html tag which you can use to help the engine not use certain areas of your page for matching? This would be used to demark useless template text, ad text, etc that causes irrelevant traffic.

Next is the question and answer period, only this time it’s the engines asking the questions and the audience answering them.

One panelist asks if it would be useful to have robots.txt in an XML format?

An audience remember says maybe, but if you’re going to do that, why can’t you just make it part of the SiteMaps? He says the frustrating thing is trying to control the robots. You may want to “try out” robots before you allow them to spider your site. You want to trust them first. They want to know what spiders they can trust.

Another audience member said she liked the idea of doing it in XML because it would allow her to generate it dynamically. She says it would be nice to generate some kind of process that could go out and tell her instances of duplicate content.

What about combining SiteMaps and robots.txt? The room seemed mixed on this one.

Danny asks if it would be helpful for a fast – medium – slow crawl delay? The audience basically shoots down Danny’s idea. Sorry, Danny.

One of the panelists asks if the audience would instead be interested in defining crawl frequency like megabytes per day or megabytes per month. The reaction from the audience? They growled. No, seriously. There was blatant growling and it was hilarious. Search marketers are crazy people.

Dave Naylor’s in the audience and asks if XML wouldn’t just confuse site owners more. What would happen if they put different directives in the SiteMap that they did in their robots.txt file. Dan from Google agrees it would and says that’s why the engines are wary.

He also mentions that over 75,000 robots.txt files have pictures in them. Apparently they missed the “text” part of .txt.

Danny asks how many people think some sort of standardization process would be useful?

Not surprisingly, a slew of hands were raised.

Personally, I like the idea of being able to identify the text on a page you don’t want index. For example, I think it’d be useful to be able to tell the engines that this here is the content of the article, index that, but ignore the navigation links. Follow them, but don’t index the content. Doing things this would save a lot of people duplicate content problems and wouldn’t require all those fancy table tricks site owners have to do. Just my two cents.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/11/07 at 4:13 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Ask, Google, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, sesny07

Putting Search Into The Marketing Mix

Gord Hotchkiss is moderating today’s Putting Search Into The Marketing Mix panel with speakers Bill Mungovan (Carat Fusion), Curtis Dueck (Epiar), and Misty Locke (Range Online Media).

Gord starts off saying that search can be the fundamental glue in your marketing strategy both from an execution perspective and a marketing intelligence perspective. This means that search shouldn’t be your entire marketing campaign; it should be used to connect your marketing campaign into a cohesive whole. Use it to leverage the campaigns you’re running elsewhere in order to combine their effectiveness. Make sense? I think so.

Up first is one of my favorite Canadians, Curtis Dueck (Hi, Curtis!).

Right off the bat, Curtis defines two important terms for us: search information marketing and search frequency research.

Search Information Marketing uses search data and intelligence to improve marketing. It entails using user’s own words to get a better understanding of who they are, what they’re looking for, and what’s important to them.

Search Frequency Research is, simply put, entering search terms into the search engines. More on that from Curtis later.

Curtis argues that marketing is simply connecting supply with demand. You’re offering something that hopefully your customers are interested in. In order to meet their needs most effectively, you need to see your demand clearly. Until you do this it’s hard to market at all.

To see this you need to do research and track analytics. The four prerequisites for succeeding with search information marketing are:

Willingness to embrace change
Willingness to genuinely provide what the market demands
Willingness to change your vocabulary to match what people are asking for
Comprehensive search research and insight

Time to revisit search frequency research. As stated earlier, simply put, it is how often people enter a phrase into search engines. As a savvy marketer, you should be leveraging this information. Gather the search info around a given topic, analyze large volumes of phrases and their search requests, and look for trends, patterns, oddities and ultimately meaning. By looking at things as a whole instead of individually, it enables trends to easily stand out.

Analyzing the phrases users type into their search box can help companies see areas they haven’t capitalized on yet, gather customer feedback, act as social research, or highlight problems with your branding strategy (i.e. half of your target audience is spelling your brand name wrong – Philips vs. Phillips).

This information can help anyone in the business of marketing and dealing with the concept of demand.

Next up is Bill Mungovan to offer up an agency perspective and talk about how you can take Curtis’s data, build a good search campaign, and then map that to other marketing efforts.

Bill notes that $20 billion will be spend on 2007, about half of which will be spent on search. Sounds awesome, but then Bill mentions that $150 billion will be spent offline. Kinda harsh, but it emphasizes the importance of looking offline to increase your brand and conversions.

Once again we hear that search is a function of demand. It’s the ultimate form of pull marketing. Inventory fluctuates with demand influencers and it’s vital for marketers to understand all the brand influences that impact search demand.

He then gives audience members some important takeaways to help bring search into their marketing efforts”

Allocate enough budget to capture the volume created offline – TV ads
Connect with offline media plans BEFORE client approval
Map keyword bundles to overall goals, not just lower funnel acquisition efforts
If your client doesn’t allocate enough budget to search, a competitor or an aggregator will gladly take that volume.

Next up is Misty Locke.

The first thing Misty does is comment that she’s freezing. See, I told you yesterday that it was cold in here. My poor naked toes. At least Misty feels my pain. I bet Susan is back in Cali wearing her slippers. Jerk. [No slippers but I do have the heater on. --Susan]

Anyway, Misty shares the scary statistic that only 32 percent of marketers are tracking online sales. That seems insane to me. Misty says it’s because advertisers are looking at ROI incorrectly. Currently only 15 percent of advertisers have consolidated all online and off-line consumer data. The others are allowing their competitors to take advantage of the thousands of dollars they’re spending on marketing campaigns. Sweet.

Another scary state: 85 percent of advertisers who strive to increase brand awareness though online advertising do not measure brand metrics.

Misty also offers several case studies to prove the effectiveness of integrating all of your marketing campaigns. There are lots of good stats, but the meat of it is that by not complementing offline campaigns with online efforts (and vice versa) you’re missing out on conversions, as well as brand recognition.

This was a great session. Somehow in the marketing world offline and online have been divided, but it shouldn’t be that way. If you’re running a television ad, there should be some sort of Web presence that plays off that. What’s the point of running an ad featuring talking dogs if you don’t use that as a keyword online? By not doing that, you open the door for your competition to do that and take away your traffic. And believe me, they will.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/11/07 at 3:14 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Pay Per Click, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, sesny07

Meet the Search Ad Networks

Rebecca Lieb is moderating this afternoon’s Meet the Search Ad Networks session featuring Doug Stotland (Microsoft adCenter), Stewart Easterby (Yahoo), John Kannapell (AOL), James Speer (Ask.com) and Brian Schmidt (Google). Now that representatives from all the engines present and I have a tummy full of falafel (thanks for lunch, Tamar! [Thank you, Tamar! --Susan]), I say let’s go!

Up first is Stewart Easterby. Everyone say hi to Stewart.

Stewart gives us a quick Yahoo update and says that Panama was the worst kept code name in the entire world. Heh.

He notes that the buzz around Panama started about a year ago and assures the audience that Yahoo is on pace to successfully move all of its advertisers over to the new platform. Early feedback is very positive, with users really enjoying the geo-targeting features, shares of clicks forecasting (can see potential bids and positions), and the signup process.

Stewart talks about some recent brand advocate research. A brand advocate is a customer who really loves a specific brand, but I’m sure you could probably figure that out yourself. Anyway, Yahoo conducted a survey and found that 87 percent of brand advocates search several times a week or more, 75 percent regularly use social media, and 2 in 3 social media users are brand advocates and highly engaged. I’m not sure what that has to do with paid search, but okay! Stats are delicious.

Stewart leaves his stat talk to remind us that Reggie Davis was recently appointed to VP of Marketplace Quality. He says that Yahoo is 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality across all of their listings. And for the first time Yahoo is revealing how many clicks they remove on a regular basis before advertisers are charged. The discount rate is 12-15 percent and that’s across the entire Yahoo network.

Up next for Yahoo are quality-based pricing, domain blocking capabilities in 2007 and building on their new deal with Viacom which will help them deliver search and contextual advertising on Viacom’s 33 broadband sites. Cool.

Up next is Doug Stotland to give us our adCenter update.

Doug makes a very important and impressive announcement: Yesterday, Microsoft adCenter finished first in a head to head competition with Google and Yahoo…in a Rock 'Em Sock ‘Em death match. (I can confirm the validity of this statement; I’m proud to say I was there.) Doug hopes this will give advertisers some confidence in Microsoft. I think I love him.

We’re also reminded that since the last SES, adCenter has been live for 11 months. They’ve launched in the US, UK, and Canada and done over 5 releases. The feedback has been consistent:

Clicks are very good clicks -- The clicks people get from adCenter tend to convert higher in 4 of 5 categories, according to a recent study.
Not delivering enough clicks to advertisers – Microsoft is now running a Pilot Program to open up ads on the Microsoft Network.
Haven’t made it easy enough for advertisers to manage campaigns – If you want to play with new, not-yet-released adCenter features, you can visit http:/beta.adcenter.microsoft.com and toy around. Features include full text search, the ability to manage campaigns Costco-style, campaign import, favorites, and improved navigation and UI.

James Speer is next to talk about Ask Sponsored Listings.

The IAC Advertising Solutions was recently created to integrate all of their media and advertising solutions. It offers a one-stop-shop for media and search advertising throughout all of IAC’s properties.

James moves on to ASL and says its best feature is the standardization of its traffic. All of Ask’s publisher partners are actively monitored to ensure CPCs, conversion rates, and CPAs.

To ensure ASL advertisers get even distribution through the day, Ask calculates pacing factors which can be adjusted at the request of an advertiser. New campaigns are conservatively defaulted to a pacing factor of 50 percent. The lower the budget to spend ratio, the higher the pacing factor. The objective is to slowly move pacing up/down depending on search levels.

In Q2, 2007 Ask is introducing referrer blocking to the ASL console so that advertisers can decide where their ads are displayed. How does it work, you ask?

Advertisers review their click logs to determine whit sites are driving down campaign CPA metrics
Important data points include: date, keyword, clicks, conversions, and referrer
Log into your ASL account and add the refers to be blocked

Brian Schmidt is up next and he’s here to talk about vision. Sweet.

Google believes they’re in the connection business. They connect consumers with what they’re looking for and connect advertisers with the customers they’re looking for. They do this through the three-tiered Google platform:

Search Solutions
Content Network
Web Utilities & Other Programs

Google is working to give advertisers more control over their ad campaigns by launching tools like Google Web site Optimizer, pay per action ads (PPA) and CPC Site-Targeting.

Other things Google is working on:

Google Audio Ads: bringing efficiency, relevancy and accountability to radio advertising. Audio ads will be at scale, targeted, efficient, inclusive and measurable
Google Print Ads: Web-enabled marketplace for buyers and sellers of newspaper ads covering the top DMAs.

Next up is John Kannapell from AOL who says AOL’s Advertising Network is thriving.

AOL Search keeps users engaged, brings them back and enables high quality ad opportunities. (No, don’t laugh; he said that with a straight face). Their goal is to be accurate, more complete and more convenient.

AOL Search Marketplace allows advertisers to really focus their message to AOL users and give them more control. It also helps to increase ROI. What this does for AOL is bring an end to end solution. Users get:

AOL-branded version of relevant components of the Google AdWords system
Sponsored Links specifically on select AOL properties to select advertisers
AOL’s new system offers advertisers the best of breed functionality, features and reporting that is used in Google’s AdWords system for text-based ads.

AOL Search Trademark Layer is the most prominent placement on the AOL search page. It appears above both the sponsored links and Web search results. There are four clickable elements.

Next came Q&A with was by far the most amusing part of the sessions thanks to some quirky mics and Brian’s (Google) inability to hear anyone in the audience. Heh, good times, good times.

The best question was posed by Rebecca Lieb, who dared the networks to answer one important question: Why should we spend with your network? The engines went round-robin to answer.

Microsoft adCenter: Two reasons: These are the highest quality converting clicks and there are things you can learn and do on adCenter in terms of understanding your audience that you can take to apply to all your campaigns.

Yahoo: The reach of the network, the quality of traffic, ease of use of our interface and the quality of support.

AOL: Sends consistent message. Building a comprehensive solution to build your brand.

Ask: We can deliver incremental conversions for the same CPAs. It’s an incremental buy. We have lower spend points established. Take the heavy lifting off your plate.

Google: Reach, innovation and options, support and usability.

One advertiser asked the engines’ representatives how they can incorporate search ads in video.

Brian of Google responded that there are existing opportunities to use or leverage Google’s video marketplace. Obviously, Google believes that online video is a growing market, but they’re not sure about the right way to do it right now. They’ve been careful to put the user first and have been cautious not to damage the brand of YouTube.

I can’t help but think Googler’s answer questions far better than any other search engine rep. Maybe because they admit that they don’t know everything and that they’re okay with that. Googler’s are awesome.

And that’s it. Consider yourself updated on all the search marketing networks.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/11/07 at 12:17 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in AOL, Ask, Branding, Google, Live Search, Pay Per Click, SEM Events, Search Engines, Yahoo, sesny07

Web Analytics & Measuring Success

Allan Dick is moderating this morning’s Web Analytics & Measuring Success panel with speakers Laura Thieme (Bizresearch) and Stacy Williams (Prominent Placement, Inc.) Let’s hear it for the ladies. Huzzah!

Up first is Laura Thieme.

With Web Analytics, says Laura, the conversation becomes so much more interesting. Yes, I know I find analytics stimulating, especially in the morning and on only one cup of coffee. I’m kidding, Web analytics is great and it’s worth your time to pay attention to, so do it.

Why is analytics so important? Because it tells you what your search marketing campaign is getting you. Is it delivering leads and sales? Yes, probably, but is it doing it at a profit? Is that gross profit or net profit? Do you even know? Analytics gives you the answers to these questions.

Ask yourself:

Can you track to the campaign, ad group, keyword level, to the product, to the service?
Can you track organic versus paid?

And more important than can you, are you? What does your matrix look like?

The basic KPIs include impressions, CTR, average CPC, average position, ROI/ROAS and ad costs by campaign, ad group or keyword.

Advanced KPIs are when marketers really start to dissect this and understand things like the average cost per order, cost per acquisition or cost per action, gross profit vs. net profit and ROI vs ROAS.

You should be tracking organic versus paid search so you know where traffic is coming from and how users found you. Without tracking strings that are updated and accurate, your Web analytics reports won’t be accurate. Ask your Web analytics vendor look at your tracking strings to confirm they’re right.

Tracking return on ad spent (ROAS) gives marketers more information than visibility reports and traffic reports. You’ll learn what your acceptable customer acquisition cost is. You’ll see that speed and quantity of customer acquisitions does not always equate to acceptable profit margins for each customer. Find analytics tools to determine customer acquisition costs. ROAS tracking is where add value lies.

Use search engine visibility tools like WebPositionGold to track things like spider activity, traffic sales, latency , KPIs and ROAS. Laura recommended against using search engine APIs since they’ll often limit the number of queries you can make per day.

Ranking reports are important because they can highlight issues you’re facing due to a recent redesign, changes in keywords, etc. Basically they’ll help you see which pages are ranked, which will help you identify and improve areas for search engine optimization.

Ranking reports should be run on the 1st and 15th of the month.

Something else you should be tracking is spider and robot activity. This is really important because it allows you to predict how many days it will take for your pages to get indexed. Spider reports allow you to get a glimpse as to how often the bots are coming into each page and how much time they spent there.

Examine conversion funnels to see which pages are persuading people to fill out the important forms on your Web site and which ones are leading them off your site. You want to know what is persuading people to buy, the top pages on your site and how visitors are finding you. Do your organic visitors travel your site the same way users do who found you through your pay per click ads? Probably not.

Something else mentioned was Google’s Visitor Network Location report which lets users cross section by 50 or more keywords. When you do this you’ll likely see a very high conversation rates on select keyword phrases. This will give you valuable insight on where you want to allocate budgets.

Keep in mind that Web analytics is extremely time consuming. In order to benefit from it, you must be willing to spend time discussing the findings. If you’re not going to read over the reports your tools offer, there’s no point in creating them. You must be willing to invest in analytics as a stand alone service, job, or resources.

So what do you look for in Web analytics tools?

Ability to track paid vs organic
Interface ease of use
Detailed robot analysts
Ability to aggregate traffic
Ability to analyze user sessions for dynamic sites
Analyze customer latency
Lots more!

With Web analytics you can influence what clients think, but it’s like solving a crossword puzzle -- time is money and not everyone is good at it.

Know that no one tracking tool will do everything. You may need two or three to make sure you’re accurately collecting data.

Stacy Williams is up next.

Stacy says that anyone can do Web analytics. Ha, clearly she has never met me. I can’t even count past 15 when I have my shoes on, which is why I never wear shoes.

Regardless of my inabilities, it’s important to track your campaigns. Search engine marketing is about strategy and planning. Web analytics is your tool to know that your SEM is working or not working.

What you’ll want to measure depends on what you’re looking for. Are you a B2C or a B2B? Are you a publisher or a retailer? It’s all relative. It also depends on your business goals. Are you a big company or a start up? Is the Web your only source of revenue?

Ask yourself what you want to know. Identify metrics that have a significant impact on the viability of your business. What will you do with it? Only measure and report on things you’re going to act on.

When you do start tracking data, start small. Do a little, learn a lot. Rather than wasting lots of time doing huge amounts of analysis, start with a simple package and grow with it. Set a time to look at your reports. Avoid analysis paralysis, focus on actionable data, maintain a diary and create a checklist of the KPIs of when you want to check them. This will make sure you’re on track and keep you looking at the data. Correlate the data to see trends.

Web analytics allows you to take your information and turn it into insight. Stacy says it actually minimizes your spaz factor. (Really? Will it make me less likely to walk into doors? Success!)

Don’t be afraid to test things. Improve what’s working and eliminate what’s not.

Akin Arikan (Unica Corporation), John Marshall (ClickTracks), Chris Knoch (Omniture), Brett Crosby (Google), Barry Parshall (WebTrends) and Warren Raisch (WebSideStory) were available for the Q & A session.

Susan, are you reading? I don’t have to be a spaz anymore! Huzzah! [I think it's going to take more than analytics for that one, Lisa. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/11/07 at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Pay Per Click, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, sesny07

Keynote Conversation With Steve Berkowitz

[So far this morning I have chatted with Kim Krause-Berg and her hubby Eric, been taunted by Tamar and Barry, and got to buddy up with Danny Sullivan (major thanks to Paul Mooney!) for a bit (He sat next to me. I’m stealing the chair and hanging it in the office.). Oh yes, the official Danny meeting has happened. I can die a happy blogger. Hi Danny!] [So. Jealous. --Susan]

Oh, Microsoft’s Steve Berkowitz is speaking. Apparently, the session has started while I was daydreaming about what a rock star I am.

Steve explains to a packed room that he does product management at Microsoft, which means he helps drive the priorities for what they’re going to be working on. It’s about understanding what the customers want. He says that everyone at Microsoft has a very customer-focused attitude, studying customer research to learn and define what users want. Steve has never seen the organization want to drive towards critical mass more than it has right now. He’s very excited about the company itself and where they’re going to go. Aw, that’s nice. I’m excited about Bruce Clay, too. We’re all pretty cool people.

Danny opens up an important topic and asks Steve how Microsoft will handle the double branding of MSN and Live.com

The easy answer is that Microsoft is trying to extend that affiliation.

According to Steve, software and services are where the world is going. It’s about bringing the PC onto the Web. Microsoft is trying to figure out how to extend the Windows presence, the idea of what Window is, and the value proposition of Windows.

The value of Microsoft will come from user’s ability to take their identity with them using Live ID. As things evolve and new properties emerge, users will able to take who they are where they go, similar to how you can take your cell phone number wherever you go. Windows will become an extension onto the Internet.

One of Microsoft’s focuses right now is getting the products right. If they perfect the products users will be able to mix and match the properties in a way that makes sense for them. You’re going to see Microsoft take Live and integrate more social content. They’re brining lots more current events and UGC into the experience.

Danny asks Steve how Microsoft will win with search. Are they going to do anything to make it pop or are they okay with being number three?

The goal of search is to first reach critical mass in an advertiser’s perspective. And, no, Steve says, it’s not ever satisfactory to not be number 1.

Search will continue to evolve and we’re going to see it evolve in many different ways. There are two different kinds of searches – destination searches and convenient searches. The latter means that users search because they’re there. They’re surfing MySpace and there just happens to be a search box. Steve predicts search is going to evolve to be about where you take the experience of search and that’s what Microsoft is working on. They want to create innovative ways to deliver search where users are. Users want to know what their friends searched on.

He says the search war is not over. It’s about getting the basics right, focusing on that and then moving towards innovating – which is what Microsoft is doing in the Labs.

Danny says that one of the advantages Microsoft has is that they control the OS and the browser. We’ve had these deals where competitors are challenging that. Comments?

Steve calls these deals the “deal of the day”. They’re important today, but won’t be over the long term. That will happen because the product still needs to improve and get better.

According to Steve (slightly paraphrased. I’m not a robo typer):

One of the interesting things about being with Microsoft is that when you look at Windows in its purest form it’s a really nice interface. But by the time you get it it’s a completely different interface. You’re getting pop-ups from Symantec, from Google, from everyone. You look at Microsoft and say “why did you do this to me?” But we didn’t do anything to you. At the end of the day the customer is the final decision maker. It’s customer choice to set defaults.

Only not, because Microsoft and Google and working hard to change that. Danny asks if Microsoft will ever not set the default.

Steve laughs. I’m pretty sure that means no. It's part of the development cycle.

Danny asks if Microsoft will ever partner with Yahoo or Ask.com.

Oh, no.

Ms. Dewey has come to life and is now annoying all of us with her presence. No, seriously, she’s here and I hate her. Kim and Eric are both laughing. I am so not amused. Why are they doing this to me?

Make it stop.

She’s still here and Danny asks Steve about the future of Ms. Dewey. Great, now we’re talking about her. Maybe if no one looks at her she’ll just go away!

More talk from Ms. Dewey.

[I’m ignoring all the ridiculous banter thrown out by Ms. Dewey. Trust me, she didn’t say anything important. Only things to make your ears bleed. The guy next to me is totally confused. He keeps asking me who she is and why she’s here. I’m asking myself that second question.]

Steve says that Ms. Dewey represents that search is very much about the UI. It’s a way to deliver information in a different way. (If by different, you mean horribly annoying, then yes.)

Oh, thank goodness. The grand annoyance leaves and now it’s back to the original question -- does it make sense to partner with Yahoo or Ask?

Steve can’t answer that.

My goal is to concentrate on organic search. Searchers are using the products, they just don’t use them enough. We want to increase engagement. We want them to use not just Mail or Messenger but all of Microsoft’s properties together. We want to touch consumers in different ways and crack open the vault of stuff Microsoft creates. We’re going to build an amazing business, just by getting our stuff together. I feel so liberated about getting into all these different areas. You’ve got all these people building these great products and now it’s about connecting them.

Danny asks Steve to compare and contrast Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. What puts Microsoft ahead of them and where are there strengths?

Naturally, Steve says it’s not a question about who’s ahead and who’s behind. (*giggle*) We all have great audiences. Where people do better than Microsoft is depth of engagement. The way Yahoo has built across Yahoo traffic. Users are going to see great things from Microsoft in the future. They’re going to see them integrating things in a much smoother way.

Steve things their advantage is its scale and its reach. It’s going to be the things Microsoft surrounds search with that are going to make it that much more enticing and that much better. Microsoft is more than search. (Uh, let’s hope so.)

And now my favorite part of Danny’s interviews – the word association game. Yay!

Ready, go!

Google – Amazing
Yahoo – Working hard
AOL – Trying to hold its own
Ask – I love it.
Microsoft – Potential
Steve Berkowitz – Having fun

Such a great keynote and a very excellent way to start a Wednesday morning. Did I mention I got to sit next to Danny and pretend I was important? I did? Oh.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/11/07 at 9:08 AM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Live Search, Microsoft, Rumors, SEM Events, sesny07

April 10, 2007

Advanced Paid Search Techniques

Jessie Stricchiola is moderating this afternoon’s Advanced Paid Search Techniques session that features Jon Kelly (SureHits), Sharon Crost (Red Brucks Media) and Eduardo Llach (SearchRev).

[Just a note while I wait for things to get going: To the people in control of “heating” the session rooms, can we make the rooms a tad warmer tomorrow? Like 30 degrees maybe? I’m typing a mile a minute and I’m pretty sure I can make out a blue tinge to my poor fingers. Also, I don’t think I’m supposed to be able to see my breath. I’m just saying; it’s cold.]

Okay, okay, we’re going. The goal of today’s session is to teach marketers how to tap into the long tail and highlight some pay per click targeting techniques you may have been overlooking. You want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your paid search campaigns.

Eduardo Llach is up first. Bring on, Eduardo! (I think my toes are turning blue.)

Eduardo will focus on the kind of techniques you want to use during a campaign's “early term” (i.e. how to get the most out of your more popular keywords).

To get the most out of your campaigns you have to expand on the traditional variables you’re using in your campaign. Yes, you’re creating keyword lists, you’re tweaking ad copy and your landing page, and you’ve decided on which network you’re going to run your ads on. But are you taking advantaging of the advanced techniques?

The search marketers who are getting the most out of their pay per click campaigns are utilizing syndication, geo-targeting, keyword match type and day parting.

Eduardo uses the keyword phrase “online dating” to show the benefits of multi-variable targeting. (I’m taking this as a personal attack on my single status.) Okay, so say you’re running an online dating site and you want to see how well that term performs in various cities. You can go ahead and do all the traditional testing but that’s not going to help you drill down your campaign. You need to know how well that term does in various cities because the bid rates and conversation rates may be drastically different.

Once you have the city information identified, you’ll want to segment based what engine you’re using for that city (Google in New York, Yahoo in San Francisco, MSN in Boston), and then by what time of day offers the best conversion rate. Are lonely people searching for dates on Friday night in New York using Google or at work on Monday morning on Yahoo after a sad, lonely weekend? I don’t know but I don’t run an online dating site.

Eduardo offered some information on the various types of targeting:

Geo Targeting: Works using the user’s IP address which is included in the HTML header for Google, Yahoo, and MSN servers to see. Country mapping is very accurate, while state mapping is accurate up to 50 percent of the time and city mapping is accurate approximately 30 percent of the time. Users can also do location mapping using Latitude & Longitude coordinates and a radius. There is some Geo targeting that is based on cookies.
Syndication Targeting: You can split the traffic that comes to you from Google. For example, you can elect to have ads only show up on Google’s SERP, syndication sites (like AOL search) or on content sites (AdSense).
Day Parting: Track the results for each day. Focus on the conversion rate. You can look not only by day, but by time as well. Do customers search in the morning, afternoon or at night? Once you track the conversion rates, you can tell Google to only run your ad on certain days and/or times. You can also change the bid price up or down per day.

Jon Kelly is up next to talk about managing tail phrases.

A tail phrase is a keyword that doesn’t get a lot of volume. Why are they important, you ask?

If you aggregate up all the small phrases you get a big number. For serious.
Clear intention/Long winded keywords (ie “new york manhattan kid friendly yoga studio) = more targeted = better conversion rate
Less competition = lower bids

What do you do when users have entered in those long-winded keywords and shared their intent? Use the information to calculate what that click is worth to you (probability of conversion (x) the likelihood of conversion). Reward their choices, but watch out for long tail dangers. When you wrongly assume that you know what your customer wants you can do more harm than good. Ask any guy who’s ever given his girlfriend a gym membership for her birthday. Ouch.

Also be cautious of dumping all your long tail phrases into one bucket. By doing so you’ll lose the detail of your info by putting them into arbitrary groups. Instead, think of your phrases as a series of tags. Tag keywords as you’re going through them. Is it a city phrase? Is it a car phrase? Is it a company phrase? You can then use that information to estimate what the conversion rate is going to be and the value of the conversion.

(Jon reveals when he was doing his research for this presentation he clicked on the top 30 ads for a particular query. The audience laughed. I hope the advertisers who had to pay for those clicks are laughing. Good, God.)

Up next is Sharon Crost, which is pretty lucky for Jon. I had my shoe off and was ready to fire. (Thirty ads? Really?)

Sharon instructs the audience on avoiding the pitfalls of PPC aka how to get more ROI by dragging your tail. (Rimshot. Sharon’s killing the audience.)

The allure of PPC is that it generates conversion, customer information and sales. However, there are also some pitfalls.

The Poor Shoppers Effect:

Symptom: Paying too much for what you can get cheaper.
Cure: Move expensive terms to SEO. This will reduce what you have to pay for CPC and increase ROI

The Laryngitis Effect:

Symptom: Losing your share of voice. (Share of voice means you want to get your voice out there at least equal, if not more, than your competitors.)
Cure: Even if you’re smaller than your competitors, you can still find ways to be the “bigger” voice, especially using both head and tail terms.

The Coin Toss Effect:

Symptom: Having to choose between focusing on heads or tails
Cure: Realizing you don’t have to choose. You can target both broad and long tail keywords. Fear not; you can have your cake and enjoy all the yummy frosting. (I’m hungry) Strategically it often makes sense to look at both sets of terms to analyze the keywords.

The Rudolph Effect:

Symptom: Isolating PPC from the rest of the marketing mix
Cure: Don’t forget about all of your other marketing campaigns because you got caught up in the allure of PPC. Your search engine optimization campaign is equally important. Use PPC as a way to light the way for the other marketing disciplines.

The Beginning Golfers effect:

Symptom: Selecting the wrong driver by focusing only on traffic, on revenue, on user interaction, or some other pre-defined driver.
Cure: Don’t assume you know what’s driving your campaign. Conduct testing and let the results speak for themselves.

The New Love Effect:

Symptom: A click doesn’t always last forever
Cure: Refresh, renew and reinvigorate your campaigns. Don’t let the passion fade. When was the last time you checked your conversion peak? When was the last time you tried out new keywords? Pay attention to your campaigns; don’t make your PPC campaign a bitter ex-wife. She’ll take half your stuff. And your dog.

(Note to Self: Hire Sharon whenever I need to name something. She has much knowledge and awesomeness.).

And that’s it. I’m going to go pester Bruce to feed me. Or at least caffeinate me. Oops, I think my nose fell off. Frostbite must have finally set in. [You're this punchy and it's only the first day? Oh dear.--Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/10/07 at 3:04 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Pay Per Click, SEM Events, sesny07

Search Engine Friendly Design

[From Marie Howell, Bruce Clay UK & Europe SEO. Marie joins us from Bruce Clay's London office for SES NY and will be adding her session recaps to Lisa's this week.]

Introduced and moderated by Andrew Goodman, designer and usability professional, Shari Thurow (Search Engine Visibility) was the main speaker of this fundamentals track looking at designing a website in a way that is easy for the user and for the search engines to spider and understand the content of your site.

Looking at Search Engine Friendly Design

Search engine friendly design is NOT a web design for the search engines. It is a design for the user, with the search engines in mind. User friendly web site design allows your product or service to be found on the crawler based search engines, human based search, web directories and internal search. You must design for your visitors and you must consider the target audience including how they interact with the site, eye tracking etc. You must consider how you arrange words, graphic images and multi media files, all of which show the search engines what you think is important on your web site.

Shari said to remember the 5 basic rules of web design:

making it easy to read for the target audience (including images, HTML, CSS). If it is not easy to read people will hit the back button and you have lost a potential customer.
The user must have a sense of place on your pages: your site must be easy to navigate. They may be going directly to a category or product