sessanjose2007

August 24, 2007

SES San Jose 2007 Coverage Recap

And we’re back!

If you were in town for the show, I hope you had a chance to stop by the booth and say hi to Bruce, Mike and our assortment of fine analysts. And if you weren’t in town, well then, I hope you enjoyed my attempt at being useful and covering a bunch of the sessions. I apologize for only being able to hit 17 of them, but like I’ve said before, as soon as Bruce gets the cloning thing all figured out, we’ll be able to provide full session coverage.

Here’s a list of the sessions we did cover in case you weren’t sitting by your feed reader waiting for it to update. And, of course, when I say these are the sessions “we” covered, I really mean these are the sessions “I” covered. I didn’t see Susan running from session to session carrying a 20lb laptop bag, did you?

No, I didn’t think so.

Day 1
Post Search Ads
Universal & Blended Search
Personalization, User Data & Search
One Billion Searchers

Day 2
Keynote Conversation with Jim Lanzone
Podcast & Audio Search Optimization
Images & Search Engines
Video Search Engine Optimization
Are Paid Links Evil?

Day 3
Keynote Conversation with Marissa Mayer
Search APIs
So You Want To Be A Search Marketer
SEM Pricing Models
The SEO Reputation Problem

Day 4
Analyzing the Analytics Players Issues in Analytics
User Generated Content & Search
Buzz Monitoring

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/24/07 at 10:16 AM | Comments (3)

August 23, 2007

Buzz Monitoring

Chris Sherman is moderating the final session of the conference with speakers Rob Key (Converseon), Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) and Jonathan Ashton (Agency.com).

[The sound in this room is really weird. I’m sitting 4 feet away from Chris Sherman and I can’t hear a word he’s saying. That makes me feel really good.]

Rob Key is up first and starts by sharing some stats:

• 45 percent of adult users have created content online.
• 54 percent of users have watched video online.
• Social media is highly prominent in search engine results.
• 77 percent think blogs are a good way to get information about a company or product.
• MySpace gets more traffic than Google.

The decentralization of content creation and the wide availability of affordable personal publishing technology have allowed consumers to have a substantial say in your brand's reputation.

CGM content, like blogs, continues to rapidly gain visibility within top search engine results. Natural lists themselves are a form of social media.

Universal search blends listings from its news, video, and image portals and includes them in the main index. Search and social media have become fully intertwined. You can’t have one without the other.

You no longer own your brand. Your brand is a conversation.

There are different parts of the conversation - enterprise, mainstream media, and consumer generated content. Unless you're monitoring the buzz, you won't know what's there.

The first step in understanding the conversation is trying to visualize it. There are two kinds of content, content above the waterline and content below the waterline.

What is the conversation below the waterline? Buzz monitoring is conversation mining. You can scour the discussion areas to capture, understand, and report the products, issues, and opinions that consumers share between and among themselves. They can come up with ideas and concepts and companies can now listen in and engage. This includes newsgroups, blogs, podcasts, and social media sites.

The direct, unfiltered, brutally honest nature of much online discussion is a gold dust to big companies that want to spot trends or find out what customers really think of them.

Key Questions:

• How do consumers feel about my brand…right now?
• How many are talking and who’s being impacted?
• What issues are being discussed? Which issues are coming around the corner?
• Who’s talking and where. And are they influential?
• Did my marketing engage resonate or echo with consumers?
• How do we effectively engage in the conversation with a social media strategy?

What are some core business users? Reputation Management, new product launches, marketing effectiveness, customer service, brand management and sales & acquisitions.

Key mining dimensions: WOM incidences, source, sentiment, topic, subtopics, tone, influence, depth of understanding, existing versus “new” voices.

Influence: Who are the most frequent and visible voices in the brand? What are they talking about and what is their sentiment?

Trending over time provides the greatest insights.

What topics are emerging and which are becoming less popular? How are perceptions of new voices? What is your reputation within SERPs for your most popular terms? What is your visibility within the search engine results for the most important issues?

Businesses need a communication strategy that enables them to proactively and ethically engage in the proliferating consumers generated media universe to inform, educate, influence and engage.

Andy Beal is next.

Why should you track? You can get product ideas, looking for keywords, be prepared for scandals, product recalls, client opportunities, etc.

What should you track: Company name, products, customers, stocks, partners, executives, patents, press releases, services, news, etc. You’re effectively going to track your brand.

Track most recent news about your business by using Google News. Google News tracks mainstream media and second and third tier news sites. Not many blogs, though there are some. You can subscribe to the RSS feed. Anytime Google News finds a story about your brand you’ll know about it.

News buzz: Great for tracking what’s hot. Enter your search query and then subscribe to the RSS feed. Make sure your servers can handle the traffic if you hear about yourself being on Digg.

Blog Posts: Use Technorati or Google Blog Search (I personally like Ask’s blog search better than Google’s). Instant updates whenever someone blogs about your company.

Blog Comments: Sometimes the conversation has a bigger impact than the original post. A positive post about your company could have a slew of negative comments. You should know what people are saying.

Blog Conversation: Viral blogging. You blog, then someone else blogs in response to your entry, causing it to spread. Blogpulse.com/conversation

Blog Trends: Get a feel for how popular a certain phrase is. (Blogpulse.com/trends)

Bookmarks: People don’t just bookmark something and save it in their browser. Now they’re using sites like del.icio.us to share it with the entire world. You can subscribe to the RSS feed as well.

Photos: Keep track of people taking photos of your product. Get ideas for PR. Can help you avoid scandal.

Video: Track videos about your company. See what people are saying about you. Give you good ideas for viral videos.

Forum Posts: Keep an eye on the conversations that are happening on message boards. Boardtracker.com

Changing Information: Things like Wikipedia pages. Read the history of the Wiki page for your company or your products to stay abreast of the changes.

Job Listings: See who your competitors are hiring and what they’re looking for. Steal other people’s job listings if you don’t want to write your own. Oodle.com

SEC Filings: Gives you info on publicly trading companies. Get transcripts of phone calls

Patents: Google Patent Search. If you’re Apple, see if there are any other patents that mention the iPhone. Keep track of what your competirors are looking to build.

Events: See what’s going on in your industry. Are your competitors putting on an event? Who are they inviting? What are they talking about?

New Products: Great way to get an idea of what products people find really interesting.

Search Queries: Google Trends will tell you how popular a certain query is.

Keyword Referrals: searchanalytics.compete.com

Email updates. Google Alerts.

The untrackable: Copernic.com will track a page for you and tell you as soon as it has changed. It's great for monitoring a BBB report or a PR page of your competitors.

You can use services like Yahoo Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com) to set up any kind of tracking that you want.

Jonathan Ashton is next to talk about what you should do when you figure out that complaint sites are ending up in the search results.

How much do you have invested in your brand? Search engines can magnify a single voice. Search is increasingly influential over buying decisions. Brand can’t always control the message. Search + community causes lightning fast communication.

Bad buzz can have a lasting impact. Think of the Ford Pinto.

Consumers have to pay attention to the entire arc of the story. If you didn’t know that the finger in the Wendy’s chili was a hoax, then you may still be afraid to eat there.

Marketing from corporate sources is increasingly less impactful. In this era of social computing, word of mouth, customer reviews, comparison shopping, blogging, tagging and other user generated content carries more weight than Madison Avenue. Abandon the top down perspective on brand management.

There are no two ways about it; Terminix and Orkin are a deadly business. Something is bound to go wrong some of the time.

Powerful impact of consumer comment sites. Social computing thrives on comments and feedback. Brand owners should be aware of what is said on these and other sites. Brands spend big money to monitor the traditional media. Is anyone looking at these sites every day to play defense?

The blog is a soapbox. Consumers who have a problem with a brand now just blog about it. Things in your past live on in the present due to their placement in the SERPs.

Simple solutions:

Pay for more sponsor listings to push complaints below the fold. Just a few pixels could make a huge difference.

Absorb the fact that there are complaints and optimize your Contact Page or Customer Care Center Page. If you know people are complaining about you, get yourself into the conversation. If you’re Orkin, rename your Contact Page, “Comments, Questions and Complaints”. This helps you to rank for the phrase [Orkin Complaints] and gives customers something to interact with.

Get HR involved. Make sure posting titles are optimized and pass link popularity to Monster and CareerBulder.

Maximize PR. Properly optimized press releases and news stories about local events. They all deserve link popularity. Create a Wikipedia page.

Help Accidental Tourists. So many other pages end up in SERPs – send them link popularity to help them help you. If you’re Orkin, help Jeff Orkin rank higher to push your bad pages lower in the SERPs. (That’s awesome!)

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle but you can do things deliberately to help reduce the impact of negative buzz.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/23/07 at 2:43 PM | Comments (3)

User Generated Content & Search

Rebecca Lieb is moderating this morning’s User Generated Content & Search session with speakers Andrew Goodman (Page Zero Media), Matt McGee (Marchex) and Lee Odden (TopRank Online Marketing).

Up first is Lee Odden.

First some stats: 51 percent of all consumers engage in User Generated Content (UGC), with 71 percent of the “millenials” (18-25) using it.

Why should you take advantage of UGC? Because consumers trust it. Sixty-six percent of 2,000 IT pros surveyed say they trust UGC over traditional sources. Product reviews increase retail conversion, rates and satisfaction. It’s a great way to create search engine optimization-friendly site content.

There are various forms of UGC being produced by end users, as opposed to traditional media producers. There are information resource sites like Wikipeida, Mahalo, etc. There are review sites, forums, blogs, media sharing, news comments, etc.

Pros of using UGC: It’s trusted, contributors are loyal, more content for search engines, more information sources for users, critical feedback about products/services, etc.

Cons of UGC: Oversight and moderation, spam, false and outdated info, who owns the content, structure can be challenging, negation information about your brand, etc.

UGC search engine optimization = CMS search engine optimization

Make sure the URLs are crawlable, no session ids, less than 3 parameters, don’t hide the links, the typical SEO stuff.

Site architecture. Pre-define keyword rich categories, topics and tags. Logical structure and cross linking, bread crumb navigation.

Template optimization. Focus on dynamic content as the majority of on-page text. Dynamically inserted title tags, Meta description, image alt text, anchor text links.

Create Incentives. People like contests. User submitted articles, photos, videos, applications. Crowd sourcing – task community with generating ideas, content for a particular goal/purpose that benefits the community at large. Reward super users with perks, status, access, etc.

UGC creates community and benefits search visibility.

Next up is my favorite Matt of search, Matt McGee.

Why should you use user reviews?

It’s good for marketing. Users add content, often using key natural language search terms. You gain unique content on boilerplate pages or you can create new pages targeting “review” searches. May help you capture long tail queries.

It’s good for business. Reviews help to educate customers which may lead to fewer returns. Fewer returns means more saved money (Petco reported 20 percent fewer returns on items with reviews). Reviews educate the retailer by showing them what’s popular and what’s not. Reviews lead to more sales. Matt says NetShops saw a 36 percent sales increase with reviews.

Overcoming Fears of Users

What if they say bad things about our product? Matt says that 85 percent of the reviews on Yelp are positive. And according to BazaarVoice, 80 percent of all reviews get 4 or 5 stars.

Shoppers want the good and the bad. Negative reviews answer the question: “Can I live with the product’s faults?” Negative reviews create trust. The reality is no product/service is perfect for everyone.

What if they’re not really my customers? Not considered a big problem, but be prepared. Be able to track IPs of reviewers & ban if certain users get out of hand.

Three ideas:

• Require account & login to submit reviews (I understand why Matt suggests this but do realize that requiring people to log in is going to discourage them from participating in the conversation. I heart Matt McGee but it took me months to comment on his blog because he requires commenters to log in. Eventually, I gave in, but that was only because I really, really like Matt.)
• Manual processing of submitted reviews
• “Was this review helpful?” - let users rate other reviews

Matt offered some best practices for implementing user reviews.

• Post a Policy
• Make sure reviews can be crawled
• Allow shoppers to sort by rating
• 41% sales increase (PETCO)
• Create a “Top Rated Products” category
• 59% higher conversion rate (Bass Pro Shops)
• Promote!

You can get review software from Bazaarvoice, Powerreviews, Amazon.com, iNods and Expo. Or, of course, you can design it in-house.

Andrew Goodman is next.

UGC 1.0 + $ + Crowdsourcing savvy = UGC 2.0

First generation UGC Examples:

Open Directory Project: Army of volunteer editors categorize content. Supposedly overcomes the scalability problem of directories. Directories fell out of favor. Issues with quality control.

Trip Advisor: Users helping each other to avoid bad travel experiences, find good ones, etc.

Now, everybody’s doing it – YouTube, Yelp, PlentyofFish.com, NowPublic, Digg, Squidoo, Mahalo (sort of).

Unique advantages of UGS:

• Search engine strategy. Really, this perfectly dovetails with that search engines want to index and rank well. Don’t compete with search engines but feed them. UGC is often just what searchers are looking for. Marginal cost of creating more content is close to $0.
• Search engine tactics. Smart tacticians will architect site properly. Content is popular, topical, PR benefit.
• Solves long tail weaknesses of editorial driven media.
• Fills a need for community and contribution among target user base.

Ask yourself if you have a search engine strategy? Are you competing with Google? Are you using search tactics? Do users have any incentive to contribute en masse? Are there any major drawbacks that will sink you?

Andrew finishes up with information about and critiques of some of the leading UGC sites.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/23/07 at 12:02 PM | Comments (1)

Issues In Analytics

Final day!

Alex Bennert (Beyond Link) is moderating this morning’s analytics session with speakers Eric Enge (Stone Temple Consulting), John Marshall (Market Motive), Avinash Kaushik (Occam’s Razor Blog) and Jonah Stein (Alchemist Media).

Alex reveals she has changed the name of the panel. It’s no longer Analyzing the Analytics Partners. Now it is Issues in Analytics. Sweet, that’s way easier to spell!

First up is John Marshall. He’s going to walk us through the anatomy of a click. He says he’s going to give us enough technical information to show us why the data we get from our tools never matches the real number of clicks. He’s also probably going to give us enough technical information to completely confuse me, but that’s okay. Whose idea is it to always put the technical session on the last day? Someone needs to rethink this.

Okay, first a few assumptions John is making about the people in this room: He assumes everyone is using PPC ads with tracking parameters, that they have a functional Web site, that they’re using modern Web analytics tools, and that at some point they’ll need to understand why the numbers don’t match.

John is not going to cover breakage in ROI, cookies and cookie deletion, or anything behind the single, solitary, lone first click – the click that gets users into the site.

Walking through the single click: You click on an ad. That click is then sent to Google so that they can record it; it’s not immediately sent to the destination URL. The server then responds to the browser and redirects to the destination URL of the site. This gives you a 1 percent error right there because the browsers would drop the redirect.

Next, the browser executes the redirect. There’s a DNS lookup because you probably haven’t been to the site before.

Some sites redirect to hide tracking URLs in order to make it look pretty to users. When you do that the browsers responds by giving users just the home page. This may work if you’re using Apache, but he doesn’t recommend it. If you’re using IE6 or JavaScript you just broke your ability to track because the URL that appears in the address bar is the thing they’re tracking against. If you strip off the query string, you get nothing. Don’t do that.

Browser request landing page. At this point the log file based solution probably has a 5 percent error because this act will sometimes be cached.

Now the browser renders the landing page. It grabs all the elements, including the JavaScript. You’ll probably fail on JavaScript about 10 percent of the time because the JavaScript has so many roundtrips it has to do across the Internet that, if any one of those fails, you’ll lose the data.

John says the reason the tracking never matches is complex. Basically the more moving parts you have, the higher the number of errors you’ll get. Don’t worry about your numbers not matching up. Logs and JavaScript are equally inaccurate. Logs are better for catching click fraud. Largest contribute to error is implementation of JavaScript. Watch for redirection. It’s not always a good thing.

Eric Enge is up next.

Eric starts by posing a hypothetical:

Company A gets $1,000/day in PPC revenue. They want to use analytics to find the best converting keywords and prune poor converting words. The analytics package reports $800 in PPC revenue. Can they trust the data?

Company A is buying Company B, who says they have 50k uniques a day. Company A earns $.25 uniques and projects they’ll earn 12.5K a day from the acquisition. The acquisition closes and A puts their analytics on B sites. A’s packages shows only 40K a day.

What do you do about this? You want to cross check and calibrate. You don’t want to use your analytics package to tell you what your total revenue is. Put a parameter on the URL for PPC visitors. And for the situation above, you want to put your analytics on their site so you know what you’re getting.

Eric walks the audience through a recent analytics report he compiled with the help of SEOmoz. Those Mozzers are everywhere.

Sources of data variance:

• Bad or ambiguous data.


• Some data is thrown out.


• Packages make judgment calls


• Session tracking timeout.


• Industry standard is 30 minutes/ some use 15 minutes


• New search engine visit starts a new session?


• Too many judgment calls.

Sources of error include implementation problems, misunderstanding the terminology (visit URL vs. Entry Page URL), and JavaScript placement. The issue there is the delay before execution – users may move on before the JavaScript has time to execute. 1.4 second delay equals 2-4%. Best practice is still to put your JavaScript at the bottom of page.

Recipe for Success:

1. Accept that analytics comes with errors. The Web is too complex.
2. Know that trend analysis works
3. Eliminate the implementation error
4. Learn the terminology of your vendor
5. Focus on the strengths
6. Pick actionable KPIs
7. Measure errors
8. Cross check and calibrate
9. Use judgment

Jonah Stein is next.

The objective of analytics is to provide a rational basis for decision making so you can maximize the ability to obtain campaign objectives.

The prices range from "zero" to "a lot" and integration, testing and deployment ranges from "hours" to "lots of hours". Analytics packages contain assumptions that affect results. You have to find the right one. You could set up all the packages on your site and compare the results. Of course, this is time consuming and it requires a lot of implementation.

Just knowing what you’re going to compare doesn’t solve the problem. How are you going to compare them? What is the baseline you are comparing against? Visits? Unique Visitors? Page Views? For most people, the only thing they want to compare is conversions.

If you’re going to compare tools make sure they are starting at the same time, otherwise you’ll be looking at different samples. IndexTools and ClickTracks still show sales with no revenue. Google has stopped doing this. ClickTracks only captures revenue for the first transaction in a session.

Auditing Conversions: Make sure you have a unique identifier for each order. Create two tables, one for each tool. Join all the invoices that match. Add all invoices unique to table one. Add all invoices with number two. Voila, you have your number.

PPC conversion auditing. Join tables at the keyword level. Invoice the invoices at the keyword level. (Note: Google analytics will not give you keyword level invoice IDs.)

• Overall results are fairly close.
• Analytics systems need to be tuned and refined to caprture ROI.
• Follow the warning level.
• Analytics vendors do too much.
• Analytics should not be relied on for ROI calculation.

Best way to measure ROI

• AdWords Conversion Track captures the most conversions with a 30 day cookie.
• Capture campaign & Keyword to your own cookie.
• Bring the data into your CRM database.
• Save marketing data at the earliest touch.
• Incentives to determine source at every touch.

All of these tools are excellent ways to bring data into your customer management system.

Avinash Kaushik is up next.

The days of “logging”. The reason people moved away from Web logs was because of the IT guy. Marketers didn’t want to look at stats so we moved to a tag world.

There are other ways to collect data – packet sniffers, for example, are a decent way to collect data but they haven’t caught on because they require a lot of IT involvement.

A lot of people like hybrid forms of collecting data. This is really hard to pull off. It’s hard to put everything together and try to get something that’s readable. On paper, hybrids sound like a good idea but they’re hard to implement.

Current players in Web analytics – Google, WebTrends, Omniture, Coremetrics, Indextools, Webside story, Unica, Microsoft, etc.

Even though we have lots of Web analytics vendors, it’s getting harder to monetize. It’s hard to make money as an analytics provider because of silos. It’s not integrated the way it should be. Most companies approach Web analytics like it is God gift and they don’t have to do anything with the data. They don’t know how to analyze the information they’re getting. It’s causing a challenge in the field.

We’re at the very early stages of Web analytics. The evolution is not yet complete. It’s like a little baby.

Avinash lists the best parts about the many Web analytics programs out there:

• Omniture: One of the big companies in the space. They’re moving beyond clickstream analysis. Automated action “taking”.
• WebTrends: Marketing optimization. Give us your search spend.
• WebSideStory/Visual Sciences: HBX plugin: Custom Excel reports. Visual Science is God’s gift to analysis.
• CoreMetrics: Got retail? Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience.
• IndexTools: Custom reporting, anything by anything. Enterprise for the cost of little.
• ClickTracks: Ease of use. Unleashing the power of segmentation.
• Microsoft: Visual, Free. Demographic Segmentation.
• Google Analytics: Data democracy. Best of breed search analytics.

The Web Analytics Association is now presenting 26 new Web analytics definitions.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/23/07 at 10:57 AM | Comments (2)

August 22, 2007

The SEO Reputation Problem

Hang in there, folks! Jeffrey K. Rohrs is moderating the last session of Day 3 with speakers Shari Thurow (Omni Marketing Interactive), Kristopher B. Jones (Pepperjam), Jennifer Laycock (Search Engine Guide), Jonathan Hochman (Hochman Consultatns) and Kathleen Fealy, (SEMPO).

[Kristopher Jones originally introduces himself as Jason Calacanis and then as Dave Pasternack. SEOs are funny.]

Shari Thurow is up first.

Shari tells a personal story about the time she was named an MSN Search Champ and someone mentioned her in a blog post and basically called her a spammer. To make things even worse, the blogger in question then wouldn’t let her post on her blog, forcing Shari to explore other avenues to educate people.

Shari says that in the academic community, search engine optimization professionals are often treated as if they have the plague. As a grad student, Shari has read a few SEO articles that contain incorrect info. There is a tremendous need for information professionals, especially librarians, to teach school children how to search well and how to discern from good search results from bad search results.

Shari is excited for the Q&A later.

Kristopher Jones is up next. He doesn’t have a PowerPoint present. All hail, Kristopher. [My hero! --Susan]

Kris says he doesn’t have a PowerPoint because he thinks the crux of this debate lies in question and answers. This is an important issue. There are some really bad actors that are ruining it for those of us that are good. Unfortunately, search engine optimization professionals have a portion of the profession that seems to define the rest. And that fundamental attribution cause illogical conclusions and put business professionals in the position of having to explain themselves. The reality is that Kristopher is a CEO of a full service marketing agency. When a client approaches them about improving their business he recommends an integrated approach to find out where opportunities exist. Be care of that small percentage of SEO professionals who will try and sell you guarantees.

The idea that you’ll get cold-called or that you’ll receive an email that guarantees top placement for the keywords of your choice is ludicrous. There is a global consensus that this is something you should stay away from.

He admits that he’s not in the business of trying to highlight other people’s practices, but he pulls up a query for [guaranteed search engine placement] to look at the companies using these terms anyway.

The most important conversation you have to have with a client as an SEO is one about expectations. If that discussion doesn’t take place, the client will come in with expectations that are unreasonable and that just propagates the idea that SEOs are unreasonable.

Jonathan Hochman is up.

Jonathan goes to eBay and shows people selling Wikipedia home page placement and links. There’s a name for people who sell things that aren’t theirs to sell, they’re called frauds.

Search engine optimization contests = a public nuisance. This hurts the public perception of the optimization industry. Jonathan says that Wikipedia implemented its nofollow policy because of all the search engine optimization contests that were taking place. Then they took away the link juice and the SEO bloggers began crying that they deserve their links. He points to Andy Beal’s post about reducing Wikipedia’s PageRank to zero by nofollow’ing all of their links.

The Internet is a shared resource. There used to be this thing called “netiquette”. We don’t have that anymore. Show good faith by calling out spammers. Get involved with online communities. Walk a mile or two in their boots.

Kathleen Fealy is next.

She comments that she’s seeing a lot of request coming from small business asking for services under $5,000. Small and medium sized businesses do have legs, but they also have concerns.

How do people know if they’re hiring someone qualified? If you’re going to a doctor, you can see the diploma on the wall. Most SEOs got in the business and learned from the ground up. There still aren’t any meaningful degrees or certificates. The Internet is changing so much and so quickly, how do I know if the SEO company I’m hiring keeps up? If I do hire a company, how do I know if they did what they were supposed to do?

How should they fix my site? What do I ask?

Small businesses are victims of malicious intent and scams because they fall for “too good to be true” offers. There’s no such thing as a “free lunch” but businesses often don’t know any better.

A little knowledge can be dangerous. Web designers don’t know how to design for the search engines. Traditional print/PR firms add the service because their clients asked for it and they have experts in Photoshop on staff. Marketing professionals figure how hard can it be – it’s just an extension of their current work, right?

Wrong.

The SEO reputation problem lies in the fact that perceptions = reality.

SEOs need to become evangelists. Explain what needs to be done and why it needs to be done. Write articles. Speak to organizations. Join professional organizations. Continue learning. Don’t forget about ethics. Educate businesses.

Jennifer Laycock is up.

Social Media from the user perspective: It connects people of similar interests and allows them to form a community.

From the marketing perspective, people look at social media as the one stop marketing extravaganza. Marketers have seen the power of social media but they’ve neglected the social. We’ve become the insurance agent at the class reunion. We don’t care about people; we just want to sell them something.

Jennifer talks about her connection with Bento Yum. Jennifer is a fan of the product and launched a blog as a sort of hobby blog. She partnered with SAHM, and created a lot of great informational content. She engaged without trying to sell.

A competitor spotted the series and “outed” her as a marketer and said it was just a scam. It didn’t matter what she had done, that she was providing information, etc., because someone who was already part of the space, pained this picture of Jennifer as a spammer, that was the perception so people believed it.

How do we stop this? Let's hear your ideas in the comments.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/22/07 at 6:08 PM | Comments (3)

SEM Pricing Models

We’re nearly the ending of the day, folks! This time Misty Locke is moderating the session with panelists Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Lance Loveday (Closed Loop Marketing), Ken Jurina (Epiar Inc) and Mike Murray (Fathom SEO). Misty is very excited. She’s making us clap for all the speaker introductions. I think Misty was recently caffeinated.

Up first is Rand Fishkin who asked that I be mean to him. How can you be mean to Rand? He’s got those cute yellow shoes!

Rand starts off listing off the various types of search engine optimization services, things like site auditing reports, standard consulting, keyword research, content creation & copywriting, link building, strategic planning design/reports, viral content creation/promotion, social media marketing, reputation management/control, brand tracking & reporting and webdev/Web design.

Rand lists off some of the different types of pricing models:

• Hourly Consulting: Hourly rates range widely. Rand reveals that three months ago SEOmoz was charging $400 an hour, now they charge $1000 an hour. He also notes later that he won’t do onsite training for less than $8,000 a day.
• Monthly Retainers: You struggle quite a bit to set that a retainer includes how much work exactly and how many people.
• By-the-project Pricing: One set price for the entire project.
• Pay-for-Performance: Rand says that Greg Boser does a good job with this. A lot of the time, you’re getting yourself into a bad situation. You’re trying to do the counting for your client.
• Profit Sharing: You build the product, you do the marketing and then you say you’re taking 5 percent of the net.

And, of course, there are hybrid models that intermix all of the models above.

A look at some sample contracts from SEOmoz:

Travel industry Website: The company needed keyword targeting, link building, measuring/ROI calculation systems. The project was basically consulting. Rand charged $24,000.

Large, Media Web Property: Company needed search engine optimization training and search strategy consulting. There was on site meeting/training and ongoing consultation by phone and email. They charged $25,000. It was $10,000 down, $10,000 upon training, $5,000 the following month.

Classifieds Website: They needed a search engine optimization audit of 2 Web sites, recommendations for link building and on-page strategies. It was done via remote consultation. Cost $16,000 for 40 days.

Personal Reputation Management: Needed two listings pushed to page 3+ results. It was done via remote link building and optimization. Cost $20,000.

Rand talks a bit about the consulting business model/scalability and rattles off some equations that I think are self explanatory:

Clients = hours= people
More clients = more income = more people.
High Costs + High demand for people = Hard to Scale

Services = Time/Contract
Products = One Time Investment + Continued Return
Services – Scale With People
Products – Scale with marking + Development

Lance Loveday is next.

As a search engine company, you have the following pricing goals. You want to minimize risk, maximize upside, keep your prices rational/justifiable, competitive, in line with client expectations, as well as what works best for the client

Lance notes that he has tried all sorts of different pricing models including flat fee, hourly, cost plus, CPA, percent of spend and the retainer method. The only models he has kept are the flat fee, percent of spend and retainer (rare).

Lance says he charges a fixed cost for set up ($7k+) that includes discovery, keyword themes, strategy, campaign structure, writing ads, keyword research, and tracking and campaign setup. The fee is determined by scale of campaign, news vs. existing client, international, geo-targeting, the PITA (pain in the ass) factor, size of the client, and estimated time.

On the management fee side, they go primarily with percentage of spend, using a tiered model.

In terms of some general guidelines, Lance says your setup fee will usually equal 2-3x what the monthly management fee is. The number of keywords is less important than the number of campaigns/ad groups. He charges additional one-time fees for major campaign expansions/reworking. Ad hoc consulting on Landing Pages, Analytics and other online marketing best practices is included – Design & Configuration is extra.

Ken Jurina is up.

Ken says the big question everyone wants to know is how much you should charge for your search engine marketing work? Answer: The way that is going to make you the most amount of profit and deliver the highest value for your idea client. Ken is a genius.

Four Industry Pricing Models

1. Retainer-based (2K-50K month)
1. Monthly feeds
2. Search and Peck
2. Pay for performance
1. Delta difference
2. Skin in the game, commission structure
3. Fee for service model ($2500 to $1+ million)
1. Project based with finite scope
4. Hourly consultation

Know thyself and get niched. Ask yourself what are your strengths and weaknesses? Do a SWOT analysis. Choose your service offering – organic search engine optimization or PPC or both? Are you established in SEM? This will affect how much you are able to charge.

Importance of Customer Profiting: Find the right bowl of porridge. Not every prospect is your ideal client. You’re a magnet, some clients are wool.

Small companies = low pricing, high volume, quick sale.
Big companies = high price, low volume, long sale cycle. (Note: as prices to up, pettiness goes down.)

Midsize clients are just right. Owner or C-level executive approval. Pricing is reasonable to their budget.

Ken’s company (Epiar) does 90 percent fee-for-service, 7 percent pay-for-performance and 3 percent customized services. Stick to your profitable business model. Don’t compromise yourself for your clients.

Not every client's needs are the same. There are different levels of services available, including site audits, Web analytics, monthly maintenance plans, hourly consultation, etc.

Epiar’s initial pricing model was fixed. This caused some sticker shock to occur. No opportunity for clients to taste the goods before buying. But pricing models change over time. Phases and variable pricing. Clients comprehend cost/phase and accept the price.

Location, location, location. Pricing based on what market can bear geographically. Outside the major markets premium pricing can be a hard sell. More difficult to justify high pricing for no good reason. In Canada people think he works for beer.

Have proper detailed proposals. Make sure the client signs it. That’s why it’s there.

Mike Murray is up next.

Beware of bizarre price factors. Some people will promise you the world. Below are some actual lines found in contracts:

• 20 placements, 8 engines
• Refund admin fee
• 900 directions – no SPAM
• 10 top 10 ranking… one or more popular top 10 search engines
• If cow jumps over the moon…

I have a feeling that last one wasn’t real.

Pricing Options: Hourly
Pros: Only pay when you need help, rates based on availability, expertise.
Cons: Experts may be overbooked. Short term approach may not account for iterative process. May be expensive.

Pricing Options: Custom Fit Model
Pro: Tailored to clients specific needs, comprehensive.
Cons: Could be expensive, practitioner-centric, hard to be consistent as a SEM company grows.

Pricing Options: Performance based Model
Pro: Only pay for what you get, may generate significant revenue, could work with established brands.
Con: Could be neglected if not producing revenue, focus on leads may not ensure quality, issues involving trust, tracking and pricing.

Pricing Options: Retainer
Pros: Ability to plan resources, continuous process improvement, easier to measure iterative proactive effort, allows for relationship development, mutual trust.
Cons: Longer duration could involve larger client investment. If quality of work is an issue contract continues.

Pricing models should be easy accessible for small and mid-sized business; time tested; comprehensive; easy to train consistently; accommodate teams with diverse skill sets; simple, short, easy to understand and scalable.

Mike outlines a few of the pricing models his company uses:

Search Engine Optimization Model: Annual with monthly payments based on the number of keywords and pages. Clients can add extra keywords or extra pages. They post updates to move program along, which is convenient for the client. Follow strict process. Long-term fits ongoing optimization. $800 to $1,800 monthly plus options.

Online Public Relations Model: Annual but with monthly payments. Hourly focus provides campaign direction. Vast offerings (links, guides, news releases). Campaigns crafter quarterly, measured. Follow strict process. Long-term reflects sound plan.

Pay Per Click Model: Three month commitment in monthly payments. Management fee and 5% percent of media spend reflects efficiencies, limits investment.

Conditions: Mike admits they used to have a money back guarantee if clients weren’t satisfied within the first 6 months. It doesn’t necessarily drive more sales from serious prospect. They also tried a right-to-cancel model. They didn’t like it because it creates a premature focus on rankings and traffic. You can’t demonstrate the full program merits in a short period.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/22/07 at 5:17 PM | Comments (3)

So You Want To Be A Search Marketer!

Speed talker Misty Locke is moderating this session with panelists Dan Perry (Cars.com), Pradeep Chopra (OMLogic), Jessica Bowman (Business.com), David Wallace (SearchRank) and Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service and giant troublemaker).

Up first is Pradeep Chopra.

The Internet has changed the way business is done today by creating a level playing field that is independent of time, distance and capital. The result is that being online is not a choice. You have to be there to survive. Search engine marketing is considered the best option and is growing at an incredible place. Today is the best time to be an SEM professional.

Why a career in SEM? Being online gives you flexibility. The skills you gain are portable and local. Search engine optimization is listed as one of the four cutting edge jobs. Innovation and adventure. You don’t need a professional degree and salaries are attractive (so are the bloggers!).

To be a search marketer you need to be really effective in your communication. You must be passionate about the Internet. You need to know how to network and you need to be a quick learner.

Some differentiators between search engine optimization and pay per click is that in optimization you need to be a lot more technical. For PPC you need to be more creative and analytical.

What lies in the future? Emerging areas include Web 2.0, rich media advertising, behavioral advertising, and conversions. The hot verticals are retail, travel, finance, education, social networking and search engine marketing.

To be successful in search marketing you must use it in everything you do, even finding a new job. Participate in continuous learning and take on a leadership role.

Dan Perry is next and he’s going to talk about interviews.

Preparation: “By failing to prepare you, you are preparing to fail” – Ben Franklin.

When you go in for an interview, expect to meet with at least three people. The first person you’ll meet is the HR person. They’re trying to find out one key thing – Did you lie on your resume. Heh. Your prospective boss wants to know if you can do the job. The boss’s boss wants to know if you’ll fit in. Basically, do you have the personality to not drive people crazy? Based on this, I don’t know how Susan was ever hired. [Same reason you were, I faked being pleasant for an hour. --Susan]

Expect to be asked the following questions:

• Where do you want to be in five years?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• Biggest accomplishment/failure?
• What’s the best decision you’ve ever made?
• How would a friend/coworker describe you?

Dan recommends going over these questions with a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend. I guess single people don’t deserve jobs.

Never bring up money, says Dan, because you don’t want people to think you’re only in it for the money and not for the experience/job/learning process. Don’t say you have offers elsewhere. Don’t ask for more vacation (drat). Know your number and stick to it. Consider the entire package (insurance options, relocation details, 401k match).

Interview process: Always have a question. Be specific. Ask your employer the one thing they do better than their competitor. Be prepared to compromise.

David Wallace is up next.

Today we have many ways to learn about search marketing. There are free resources (blogs, forums), eBooks, online courses, conferences and seminars. The best thing to do is take that knowledge and apply it to an actual site.

Establish a site to learn from. Choose your niche. Something that interests you but not highly competitive. Something that may help you establish your business. Secure a domain. Establish a Web site.

After all that, apply a search marketing strategy. Conduct keyword research, apply organic search techniques, set up paid search campaign, and track your progress.

Whether working for an agency or establishing your own SEM firm, it is important to network not only with partners but also with other search marketers.

• Develop business partnerships – traditional ad agencies, Web design firms, etc.
• Network online with search marketers – forums, blogs, social media, etc.
• Network in “real life” with everyone – This can include this conference for example but even things like local business organization or trade shows.

Brand yourself as an expert by writing information-rich articles, participate in forums, participate in social media, and start an informative blog.

Word of caution: In doing all these things, make sure you are being unique. Do not spam forums or blog comments, don’t steal other people’s content or sales copy, don’t come off as a know-it-all, and don’t promise what you can’t deliver.

The world of search engine marketing is fast paced and always changing. Keep on top of this exciting industry by staying active in forums, subscribing to quality blogs, never being afraid to experiment and buying savvy search marketers drinks at SES. Huzzah! Searchbash tonight!

Michael Gray is next at bat to talk about how to avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

Manage client expectations. Like David said earlier, only promise what you can deliver. Set reasonable time/date expectations. Under promise and over deliver.

Set Reasonable Limits. How much time will you be spending on the project? How much time will you be spending on phone calls, email, IM, etc? Avoid the temptation to become the equivalent of an in house SEO.

Avoid conflicts of interest. Disclose any conflicts before you close a deal. Decide if you are going to limit yourself to only one client for a particular area. Avoid competing with your client.

Manage your risks. Don’t let your business depend on one client or just one Web site. Don’t expose your client’s sites to unnecessary risks.

Keep learning and growing. Pick and follow some of your favorite blogs and limit yourself to a handful. Use recap or roundup bloggers. Experiment with your own sites and build your own test labs. If you don’t know where the line is you can’t prevent your clients from crossing it.

Use sub contractors to scale up/down quickly. Use them to compensate for areas aren’t your core. But be careful using sub-contractors for mission critical functions.

Contracts. Know when you need and don’t need a contract. Large companies especially Fortune 500 companies won’t work without a contract. Understand “word for hire” and copyright.

Accounting. Get a good accountant. Learn how to use accounting to your benefit. A good accountant will save you more money than you are paying them each year.

Jessica Bowman is up next. She spends the first few minutes taking a survey of who’s in the room.

Jessica says we’re now all students. Read everything you can to learn about search engine optimization. Read Google Hacks, Jennifer Laycock’s Small Business Guide to SEM, Shari Thurow’s new book, etc. Find the speakers you admire and read their blogs. Attend conferences. Consider training programs.

Most of your training is going to come from hands on experience. Get some side projects going. Find out where your weaknesses are and outsource portions of a project to more advanced search marketers.

Search marketing is constantly changing. You need to keep up with the marketplace, particularly if you are charging for this service. Jessica says Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable and Sphinn are all Must Reads.

Big changes in search marketing do occur. Cloaking was once accepted and now can get you banned. Link exchanges once worked very well and now they aren’t nearly as successful. Link buying was once accepted (Michael snickers) but now Google penalizes you if they know you’re buying. Expect to spend at least 2 hours a day reading and catching up with market.

As you work, systemize and document your process for consistency and productivity. Also, create clear documentation so that you can easily outsource the work to others – like your high school sister who doesn’t know search engine optimization but wants to make $6 an hour. Jessica has documented gathering rankings, keyword data gathering, directory submission, portions of a site audit, etc.

Build industry camaraderie. You need others to talk to about questions challenges and challenges in the SERPs.

Know what you don’t know. Remember the human side of search marketing.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/22/07 at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)

Search APIs

There have been a lot of search engine optimization-related session recaps in the past few days, but this time we get a pay per click one. Look excited. Or at least awake.

Anne Kennedy is moderating this morning’s Search APIs session with panelists David Flesh (SEMDirector), Dan Boberg (Yahoo!), Julienne Thompson Hood (Advertising.com) and Jon Diorio (Google).

First up is Jon Diorio to talk about the AdWords API.

The AdWords API enables four main areas of functionality: Account management, campaign management, reporting, and traffic estimation.

By using the AdWords API, users are able to manage more accounts and campaigns faster with fewer people, and can more accurately manage the processes that require frequent and/or massive changes.

Other benefits include being able to automate the regular generation and retrieval of custom reports, automate cumbersome bid management processes, automate complex inventory control processes that pause campaigns, as well as the generation and expansion of keyword lists.

The AdWords API was launched in 2005 and was designed to be a do-it-yourself program. There are plenty of readily available resources like a developer’s guide, developer’s sandbox, AdWords API blog/forum/email notification list, FAQ, sample code and SOAP Toolkits.

They offer 9 different services including campaign service, AdGroup service, Traffic estimation, report service, criterion service, ad service, info service, keyword tool service and one more that I missed. Sorry.

Batches of new information are released every few months. They balance the need for new functions with the overhead of frequent release, meaning they stagger releases so they’re not coming out every week. The goal is to reach feature parity with the Web front-end. Older versions of the API are maintained for four months after the latest version is released. Version “diff” information is available via Release Notes.

The AdWords API utilizes a unit-based system. Each operation performed on an AdWords account consumes a certain number of API units.

While some types of operations may consume a single unit, others may consume more. On a regular basis, each developer will be billed $.25 per thousand API units consumed. Note that some advertisers who develop proprietary applications to promote their own businesses may be eligible for limited free quote allocations.

To get started, head to google.com/apis/adwords. You’ll need a My Client Center login and password.

Next is Dan Boberg from Yahoo.

He starts off talking about the Yahoo Developer Network, which includes a host of services for users to take advantage of. You can find REST-based services, desktop-based environments, RSS feeds, presentation libraries, developer centers, applications gallery and events.

Current YSM API Programs:

Advertiser Program: Supports advertisers in integrating their system with YSM marketplace.

Developer Program: Open access and online support to encourage creation of innovation new applications.

Commercial Program: Enterprise Class support for 3rd parties that have built a business on the Yahoo platform.

New YSM Commercial Program: Completely rebuilt to be robust, reliable and scaleable. It’s designed to meet the needs for developers, agencies, and technologies companies at any stage in their life cycle. There are no fees for API access. It’s an open and transparent program with commercial-grade technical and marketing support and a massively scalable production platform.

Programs goals include innovation, accelerating commercial success and building an ecosystem of mutually beneficial commercial partnerships. The program addresses the specific needs of reliability, scalability and support.

David Flesh is next.

David lists of all the engines that have a claim to APIs, including Ask, Google, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, Ingenio, Business.com, Yahoo, SortPrice, Miva and others I can’t make out.

The lifecycle of an API is 6-9 months at most. If you want to stay current then you’re looking at a pretty rapid development cycle. If you’re going to adopt an API program, there is a cost involved.

Other challenges:

• Upgrade deadlines to new version are too aggressive. Legacy version support doesn’t late long enough.
• There is no common data schema standard across search engines.
• Organic API data is either non-existent or offers little value to sophisticated SEO/SEM companies.
• Occasional inconsistencies between cost data reported through the APIs and what is billed to the client.
• Challenges to metrics that are reported are not called out in the API, therefore it comes necessary to implement checksums to make sure historical values are consistent from week to week.
• Large clients = large polling efforts = quota usage
• Ability to increase quota limits is cumbersome and reactive.
• Lack of special character support from some APIs strip out meaningful data required by clients.
• Deleted campaigns are not always noted. Matching performance metrics with account structure is difficult.

In terms of documentation and support, it exists but unique needs are slow to be addressed. Inquiries to reps are ignored, passed off.

[All the lights just went off. Heh.

Okay, they’re back on now.]

Roadmap requests: Organic search APIs, increased quota limits, provide percentage of clicks seen at varying average position, provide the number of queries for keyword, more detailed demographic data, improve Sandbox capabilities.

Going forward with APIs in the future we need industry driven and vendor agnostic standards with common metrics. There should be common ontology or schema to present a unified approach to describing the data.

Last but not least is Julienne Thompson Hood.

The API provides access 24/7 to information. Campaigns are managed across multiple engines on a portfolio basis. Manual bidding is generally impossible due to a large number of terms. Frequent bid challenges required because of strong TOD, DOW or season trends. Intelligent bidding is necessary to improve ROI.

Julienne listed some best practices for using APIs including designing a multi-tiered architecture for engine integration systems to allow for scale and introduction of new applications; developing core applications that can translate your data into the appropriate format for each search engine; identifying the most important business needs to help you decide which API feature to take advantage of; writing applications to compile and provide meaningful reports on data elements like cost, bid updates, etc; testing new features before implementation and use sandboxes and monitor backward compatibility. Last but not least, utilize user forums to obtain information and answer questions from peers and engine resources.

Search Engine APIs Tips and Tricks:

• Feature parity among engines
• Yearly release among products
• Development lead team
• Data visibility
• API usage costs

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/22/07 at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

SES San Jose Keynote with Marissa Mayer

Welcome to Day 3 of SES. It’s time for Marissa Mayer’s keynote. Let’s do it.

[Okay, bear with me. It’s taking a little while for the Incisive folks to get things set up this morning. I’m just realizing that this is the first session I’m covering with Danny present. I’ve missed the Sullivan banter.

Vanessa Fox is stalking Tamar. She should leave. Vanessa, I mean. Hi, Vanessa.]

Danny starts off asking about Google Universal Search. It was a radical change for Google. He asks what the impact has been like.

Marissa says Google has been really happy with the way Universal Search has turned out. They changed the entire infrastructure of how things worked. The users seem to really like clicking through the new results. They have a long way to go and lots more changes to make.

The idea for Universal Search was to move away from ten blue links and give users richer answers. They want it to feel like an encyclopedia. Like Wikipedia. Today Google is only integrating maps, news, images, video, and books into the results. Eventually, they’ll put blogs and scholar info and some of the other searches in as well.

Danny talks about the attractiveness of the Ask3D feature and asks if Universal needs to be prettier.

Marissa says Google really tries to focus on function before form (zing!). They need to make sure it works really well and then worry about what it looks like. They’ve found that searchers want to be able to get to a result quickly. Ask’s approach takes more time because users have to search for the information on the page (zing!). She thinks a list of ordered results makes more sense for users.

Danny says that it’s been interesting to see how the SERPs are evolving with AJAX. Marissa agrees and says they have a few bells and whistles.

Google Universal Search opens up a new playground for Google. They can go and gather all the results and then decide what to display. It gives them a large degree of freedom in how to order results.

Danny starts talking about the recent changes made to Google Video. Marissa repeats that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and that they mean that. They realize that not every content creator is using YouTube. It’s Google’s job to be able to find it.

The next topic at hand is Personalized Search. What’s been the update with that?

Marissa looks at the future of search and says there are a number of things that will change. Google itself gets better every single day. In 10-15 years, the search engines will understand more about the users that use them. We’ll see more relevance for users. Personalized search is just in its infancy. It's been one of the biggest advances in search quality and there are still a lot of things they’re experimenting with. There are tens of millions of personalized search users. She comment that it’s fun to see what signals matter.

One signal that seems to really matter in personalized search is previous searches. If you do a search for “travel” and then later do a search for “deals”, Google will give you results for “travel deals”. They want there to be parity in the way they do ads and the way they do organic.

What other things will affect personalized search?

Google is just getting started so it’s hard to know what variables are going to influence relevancy. They’re looking at things like location, address books, etc. They’re asking users to opt in to the signals they use. As they get the data, they’re trying to see what turns the dial the most.

Danny compares Personalized Search to Amazon and how bad “personalized suggestions” can be. You can’t predict what users want in the future.

Marissa says that for those items, Google focuses on the issues of transparency and control. They’ve made search history available so users can look at the information Google has collected about them to see what factors they are using to personalize the results. If you see something (a weird search) that is skewing your results, you can remove it from your history.

Marissa has spent a lot of time talking to people about whether they should mark the personalized results so users know what they’re looking at. She says there’s a spectrum of how much those personalized results are being affected by the profile. She doesn’t think marking the results is the right model as we become more and more sophisticated. They’re looking at marking some of the results but there is a gray area in how far they can go.

Danny asks if there shouldn’t be a button or some way to toggle personalized results on and off. Search marketers would like that.

Marissa’s response to that is that you can sign in and out. Her view is that personalized results will become the default in the future. [Do not want! --Susan] Google wants users using personalized results and doesn’t want them thinking about whether they’re using personalized or not. They should just know these are the right results for them.

Danny starts talking about privacy. Google said they would anonymous log data and now everyone is doing it. Google is anonymizing the search data but then they’re building services that collect data about users. How do you balance that?

Marissa says if you’re not logged in then Google is using the anonymization features. If you are logged in, then you’ve already signed up for a product and agreed to additional privacy policies. This may give Google a longer history for users because you opted into it, but the information is being put into a safer system.

Danny touches on the personalized experience and talks a bit about iGoogle. Google has had a growth in gadgets and at the same time things like Facebook have opened up. How does Google view Facebook? Do you think its hype or do you think the platform is valuable?

Marissa thinks the strength of iGoogle and Facebook apps is that they’re open platforms. It’s not necessarily a walled garden. The power of these programs is that anyone can create a gadget or a FB application. For webmasters, both gadgets and FB apps provide an opportunity to form a deeper connection with users. Some people have pointed out that gadgets and FB platforms are a new kind of advertising. And it’s not just an ad or a small piece of content, you can use them to actually interact with users. Better distribution. It’s a compelling opportunity.

Marissa admits she has profiles on all the social networking sites. Go friend her! I’m kidding. Leave the woman alone.

Danny makes a Jason Calacanis crack. Heh.

Google is often painted as the algorithm purist. That they believe in all algorithm, all the time and they don’t get humans involved. That’s not true. The algorithm is important because it’s the only way to ensure comprehensiveness. But once you have that base of algorithm, you can layer that human input into it. Now Google is starting to look at things like Google Co-op where users are layering results or Google Notebook where users are pulling information themselves. The best answer is to layer both the algorithm and humans together.

Danny talks about the comment feature that was added to Google News. (The LA times did a big editorial about it this weekend.) Where is that going?

Google News has always been a different kind of news site. They’ve been focused on providing clusters because they wanted to provide multiple viewpoints. The founder really wanted people to not only see one story, but to see what everyone else was saying about that topic. Marissa thinks the comments are about adding that and taking it to the next level. News readers become even more informed because not only can they read the published viewpoints, they can also read commentary from the people involved. They thought it would be compelling. (I think it’s retarded.)

Danny switches over to Google Local and asks Marissa about the usability of it.

Danny: Talk about the usability in terms of fun of voyeurism. Do we need street level viewing?

Marissa says street viewing is about finding information faster. If you’re meeting someone for coffee, it’s nice to know what the building looks like before you get there. It helps you get an idea of where you’re going. Yes, when they take these pictures, there are people in the world and there are licenses plates, but that’s not what the feature is about. When they find out that faces are being captured or that there’s something there that shouldn’t be, they take steps to blur it.

Mobile search: People are saying it’s finally going to take off. Google has rolled out the 411 service. Talk about the integration with mobile.

Google is seeing more and more mobile activity. Marissa gives a weather report every week at Google to talk about what’s going on. She says that mobile has seen a big increase this summer as users are switching off computers and logging on via their phones while they’re on the go. She talks about the iPhone and actually fires hers up to show the audience some Google integrated features. She shows how you can do a search for “pizza” and find all the pizza places in San Jose.

Great. Now it’s 10:00am and I want pizza. Thanks, Marissa.

Closing thoughts:

Favorite non-Google product: Facebook.
Most interesting Google products according to Marissa: Book Search, iGoogle, Desktop.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/22/07 at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Are Paid Links Evil?

I’m giggling. I don’t know why. It’s probably the combination of lack of food and because someone was crazy enough to put Michael Gray, Matt Cutts, and Greg Boser on the same panel to discuss buying links. This is going to be so totally good that I can’t even take it!

Seriously though, the entire search community is represented in this audience. I’m talking about Shoemoney, Matt McGee, Neil Patel, Bill Slawski, Dave Wallace, Jim Boykin, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Andy Beal, Chris Boggs, Rhea Drysdale, everyone! My heart goes out to Matt Cutts. We’re really all just here to watch him squirm. (Hi, Matt!)

Okay, Jeffrey Rohrs is moderating the session with speakers Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Matt Cutts (Google), Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl), Greg Boser (WebGuerrilla), Todd Friesen (Range Online Media) and Andy Baio (Upcoming & Waxy.org). Have I mentioned that this is going to be good?

Jeffrey starts the session with the following video from Dave at Rentvine:

Heh.

Okay, up first is Matt. He says it’s kind of funny because he tried to put some jokes in the presentation and his wife veto’d them (hee!), so he’s sorry if it’s boring.

Matt says that asking if paid links are evil or not is the wrong question. He says the right question is, “Do paid links that pass PageRank violate search engines’ quality guidelines?” The answer to that is yes.

He adds that the FTC has said that word of mouth marketing is like any other kind of marketing, and if you’re being paid to say something you should disclose that. Adequate disclosure means it is understood by both people and the machines.

How do you disclose a paid link to the search engines?

• Redirect through URL locked by robots.txt
• Redirect through URL t hat does a 302
• JavaScript
• Nofollow the link

Google says you can buy links within search engine guidelines – meaning they can’t pass PR. Google doesn’t care about those links. However, you cannot buy links that pass PageRank.

Examples of PPP links – fundraisers, donate cars, online, credit, super slots, providers, junk yards, online casino, bypass pill, dating advice, USA online poker, etc.

Matt says paid links are like littering – it makes the Web a dirty place. Heh. (If only you could have seen the look on Greg Boser’s face when Matt said that. It summed my thoughts up pretty well. ;) )

Link buying obstacles:

• It can be difficult to buy PPP links
• Buy for a limited time?
• Buy “run of site” links
• Buying links from slopping sellers
• Checking if a link seller cloaks
• Can a competitor spot your paid links?

Google’s approach: Google uses both algorithmic and human detection. They are more than willing to take strong action against PPP links and this is an area Google is focusing on. He talks about Rand’s recent post about paid links and how if you buy them to help you rank that you’re not a white hat.

Next up is Michael Gray. This should be good.

Michael says Matt paid him 100 dollars to wear his Google shirt.

Michael argues that Google is not the government. They have no authority to dictate policy to you. They are a for-profit company. He compares Matt saying Don’t Buy Links to Ronald McDonald saying Don’t Buy A Whopper. Hee!

Google developed an algorithm that is based on links. Now they expect you to change your business model to compensate for their flaws. Google made 1.12 billion profit last quarter. Did you? Google expects you to sacrifice income and profitability to help them make money.

Nofollow was originally developed to combat blog spam, then, three months after it was widely adopted, Google changed the rules. Now it is used for paid advertising. They took advantage of the rules.

What constitutes a paid link? If you link to Google tomorrow about the Google Dance does that count as a paid link?

With a paid link, unless you’re one of the two people involved, you have absolutely no way to know for certain if that was a paid link or not. Paid links work, that’s why Google doesn’t want people using them. They don’t want to have to change their algorithm.

Google’s campaign is about creating fear and uncertainty and doubt. They’re trying to convince you that by buying or selling paid links you are breaking the law or being unethical. Google is not the government. They can not change your ethics. (About three people just said “yet…” Ha, I love this session.)

Google has overstepped its bounds. Google’s mission statement is not to tell you how to build your Web site. It’s not to tell you how to buy or sell ads. It’s not to tell you how to run your business.

Michael is finished and pretty much gets a standing ovation.

Todd Malicoat is up next to give 7 reasons why he is a link libertarian.

1. Semantics: “Paid” is ambiguous. Every link has a relative value and cost.
2. Incentive – blame the algorithm: Google put PR in the toolbar to give site owners a reason to download it. Top rankings are worth money. The algorithm encourages linking
3. Economics: The indifference principle. Efficient market hypothesis. Eventually people will become sick of paying for links and they’ll stop.
4. Transparency and Relevancy: Advertising has never been fully transparent. As a consumer, he likes it. As a marketer, he loves it. As an SEO, it’s not his responsibility. Paid links help with traffic. That’s all he knows and cares about.
5. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt Vs. Transparency
6. Competition is Good: It advances the Web.
7. There IS such a thing as search engines. We can’t design our sites like there are no search engines because there are search engines. If there weren’t search engines, we wouldn’t have to use nofollow to begin with.

Risks: The invisible nofollow (you think you’re getting PR that you’re not), may incur manual review, may incur penalty.

Rewards: higher traffic, rankings and sales.

Why Todd won’t report paid links:

• My competitors have taught me a whole lot with paid linking
• I doubt much would get done
• I buy links too and it’s okay.

Todd Friesen is next. He says he thinks there’s much more of a middle ground that what is being presented. Obviously, Google has to say it’s bad. And the examples everyone is showing are really egregious. He shows the gambling and casino sites.

Are you going to buy 10 thousand off-topic links? Or are you going to go out and actually researching it? Todd views it as two separate things. You have to go out there and do what you need to do in order to compete in your vertical. You have to be able to compete and sometimes if you follow the rules you can’t do that.

If you’re going to get into link buying, you have to go into it with your eyes open. In the worst case scenario of link buying, you’re flushing your money down the toilet. Google cannot ever come out in good conscience and ban you from buying paid links because they can’t prove it. Only the buyer and the seller know for sure.

If you’re going to do it, be careful. You have to stay in your space and follow the rules governing your vertical.

Greg Boser is next. He admits to sometimes driving in the carpool lane when he’s late because the value of getting to the meeting on time outweighs the ticket.

Greg says if you want to clean up the Web, stop polluting the Web with stupid videos like the RentVine video we just saw. That’s the stuff polluting the Web, not paying for a link on a relevant site.

Site owners should be held accountable for making good editorial decisions. He talks about the Yahoo Directory and how they take your money to “evaluate” your site to see if it’s worthy enough to add to their directory. Is that not a paid link?

He talks about the rumors that Danny’s old blogroll on SEW didn’t pass PR and how Greg thinks that’s basically crap. We trust Danny to select good sites. Those links should have counted. Google should have nothing to do with your personal business. Stop rewarding anchor text the way that you do and it will go away on its own.

Last but not least is Andy Baio. He’s the lamb to the slaughter. Or something.

He agrees with Greg and the two Todds. If you’re reviewing a site and there is editorial judgment than he doesn’t think those are the links that people are worried about. That’s not polluting the Web.

Andy says he has no commercial interest in this issue and he’s here to speak on the behalf of everyday users. Everyone wants the Web to be valuable and easy to use. The only reason he agreed to the panel was because he felt so strongly about the issues. He says that, in many cases, buying links is not acceptable and it should be looked at with the same disdain as other spammy tactics.

Ask yourself, are you making the Web better or are you making it worse? Andy says he has a background in journalism and in journalism school, they teach you the value of being objective.

By buying paid links, you’re trying to trick search engines and alter the results users get when they search for things.

And then when the links finally are detected, they get purged from the index, and people are really upset. Google is not purging these sites because they hate competition to their own ad products. They’re doing it because the sites that are being advertised are not as good. And in extremely competitive categories, they’re not doing enough to beat out their current competition in the SERPs. If the company was better than its competitors, it wouldn’t need paid links to rank higher.

Andy says that we’re currently at the stage where paid links still work. But over time that will backfire. You don’t want to be on that side. Don’t buy links; it will hurt your reputation.

He talks about popups and how they were a novelty back in the day. And the more they got popular, the more it impacted the quality of life online. That’s where we are right now. Paid links seem innocuous. Until everyone understands how it impacts them online, it will still be seen as legitimate, instead of one step away from Viagra ads.

Matt’s rebuttal: He thinks most people understand Google’s response. He compares it to guestbook links. If you want a long term success in search you have to look at the white hat ways to get those editorial types of links.

Greg: To put buying links in the same category as push button marketing is such a skewing of the argument. The idea that I find a blog that matches my demographic and pay to link there, that is so not comment spam. To frame it in that argument is absurd. The other argument that gets thrown out is that it will hurt your brand. How many people changed their impression of BMW when they got caught for spamming? Are we all driving Mercedes now?

It’s not search marketers' problem that there are flaws in the engine’s index. The big brands get special treatment and are able to survive because Google can’t not bring up Wordpress.com if someone does a search for it. However, the little guys get blasted from the engine and are never heard from again. That’s not right.

Greg says he’s all about playing by the rules but he’s not about instilling fear. At some point you just have to roll up your sleeves and compete and that’s the reality of it.

And on that note, bid farewell to day two of SES San Jose.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/07 at 6:15 PM | Comments (22)

Video Search Optimization

Sapna Satagopan is moderating this afternoon’s panel with speakers Gregory Markel (Infuse Creative, LLC), Jeremy Clem (Performics), Sherwood Stranieri (Catalyst Online) and Stephen Baker (Everyzing). Zing!

Sorry. Blogging responsibly now.

Up first is Sherwood Stranieri.

Sherwood says we’re here to look at online video and its impact on search. Lots of people are looking into and playing with it. Marketers are looking at as a new a channel they can dive into. Video is not only an opportunity; it’s also a responsibility now that video is showing up in the SERPs.

Sherwood presents just one slide of statistics and tells us that us that according to Hitwise, in July 2007, YouTube’s market share exceeded the other 64 video portal sites combined. No wonder Google bought them.

Video is a compelling search engine optimization channel. Video in 2007 is still mostly an entertainment play. Social/viral can transfer value to your search engine optimization efforts through video:

• Digg, etc >> blogs >> thousands of links.
• Those links result in a sugar rush of traffic.
• But those links also contribute to your site’s rankings – and that pus you in front of your target audience.

Thanks to viral, a video Web page can outperform a conventional Webpage in standard search results.

Sherwood presents a series of video strategies for different industries and applications.

Video for Content Providers: From bloggers to television networks, video can be used to bring visitors to your site. Teaser strategy: Upload a few select videos to portals like YouTube; provide links back to related videos on your site.

The goal is to get them back to your Web site to view ads and explore your other content. Video search engine optimization is a key element in establishing “video.yoursite.com” and viral-driven linking helps that. And remember, videos now appear in Google’s Universal Search. Video search engine optimization is now mainstream search engine optimization.

Video for Pharmaceutical Companies: Yes, it’s less fun, but it’s not totally uninteresting (or at least it doesn’t have to be). It’s kind of like the stuff you watch on the Discovery Channel (ooo, low blow!). On-site strategy doesn’t have to dovetail with portal strategy. You can do interviews with patients to make the drugs seem more real and more trustworthy. You can do videos on newsworthy topics like AIDS, flu, outbreaks, fad diets, etc.

Video for E-Commerce: Follow the buzz and promote your hottest products. Showcase anticipated uses – demo high-tech products, build a deck if you sell high power tools, show test drives for cars. Sherwood talks about the infamous iPhone Will It Blend video.

Video for Consumer Packaged Goods: Who wants to see a video about laundry detergent? He doesn’t know either, but some products can create tremendous buzz. Be choosey and get creative. He says so far when videos get famous it’s been by accident – videos like the Diet Coke/Mentos videos. Videos with millions of views start to rival your TV advertising.

Popular videos become a positive and permanent addition to brand equity. The Mentos commercial is still ranking number one in the search engines for its keywords.

As noted above, most of today’s video search “success stories” are happy accidents. Be imaginative and find ways to demonstrate the value of your products in an entertaining way.

Sherwood ends by telling the audience to add him on LinkedIn. Nice.

Next up is Jeremy Clem.

There is a huge opportunity in video. Seventy-five percent of US internet users watched an average of 158 minutes in May. They viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams, 72 percent watched news online and 76 percent helped drive The Viral Chain.

Video consumption is no longer isolated to TV. It now includes video sites and search. Video is on the rise.

Users are watching videos on YouTube (49 percent), MySpace (12 percent), and Google Video (5 percent). But they’re not going directly to the sites to do it. They’re finding them through the engines.

The roadblocks to video are that search is still very dependant on the text from video’s corresponding Web page. There’s a lack of simple and consistent taxonomy for site producers to use. Video technology is unfriendly to search engine crawlers.

Think like the video searcher. When you’re optimizing your video, use the terms users are likely to be searching for. He talks about the Michael Richards and David Hasseloff videos.

If you want videos to rank you have to surround them with HTML. CNBC.com does a nice job of surrounding videos with text content. Include social bookmarking tools that facilitate easier distribution.

Make it easy for crawlers to find your video content by putting your video directly right off your root. Create a video site map with the H1 tag reading “video site map”. Repeat news and video keywords. Provide RSS feeds. Link in the global header. Put a video search on your site. Use primary keywords in text links.

Tag your video files with relevant scenes. Split up your video into multiple scenes and tag those individually. Do you want to site through a 10 minute debate video or do you want to just listen to the question you’re interested in? Probably the latter.

Make video embeddable and imprint your brand logo. It creates brand awareness and visibility. Search marketers should target generic video search terms like “news video” to build online awareness.

Best Practices for video optimization

• Train editors to think like video searchers
• Encode for the ride keywords
• Use keywords in filename
• One video per URL
• Add tagging
• Keep video files in one directly
• Surround video with on page relevant text
• Crosslink to videos using keywords in anchor text
• Create an optimized video site map
• Upload videos to search engines
• Add informative Meta data
• Allow video files to be embedded and include a logo

Gregory Markel is next at bat.

Gregory is super excited about his presentation because he’s going to show us everything. He starts off by showing us a number of stats but flips through so fast that I can’t write them down. I think there was a 7 somewhere. Maybe it was a 70?

Ooh, I got one: 8 percent of males and 66 percent of females watch online video. Video search is influencing regular search results due to Google Universal Search. [8 percent, really? Are you sure you're not missing a 0? --Susan]

Three basic approaches to video optimization types

1. Video Files Metadata Optimization: Talking the source video file and infusing it with your keyword triggers in the Title, Description, and Keywords tags. Make sure your content is feature on its own page with relevant surrounding text and properly embedded link elements.
2. Upload Optimization: Most popular. These type of video search engines required that your upload your video search files. Add a social flair by getting your “friends” to submit or vote for you on the social media sites.
3. RSS Optimization: Submit your video to RSS.

[Gregory talks too fast.]

There’s a startup company called tubemogul.com that is FREE and has put together the first standardized upload system. They’re currently uploading to 9 video search engines and is really a one-stop universal upload shop. They are reporting views, which engines are most popular, comments, and ratings.

Some Tips: Again, keyword-infuse and target all of your video metadata. And also, know that some video search engines are beginning to use search recognition and optical character recognition, therefore, make sure your audio files is targeted and audible!

Okay, Gregory is done. Thank goodness. Someone take away his coffee.

Stephen Baker is up next.

Core online media problem: Search engines have historically had very little to work with in terms of properly discovering and indexing multimedia content.

Audience Reach: Transcripts yields crawler friendly content rich pages. Metadata analysis provides a broader spectrum of relevant terms for optimization. Content behind inbound links and anchor text in more visible to crawlers. Site level optimization is improved with more opportunities for outbound links.

Content Access: EveryZing indexes the full content of Fox Sports Multimedia files and as a result is able to significantly increase the number of keyword results. Greater discovery lends to increased consumption and enhanced monetization opportunities.

From a consumer standpoint, automatic extraction of key terms and concepts for tagging, categorization.

Context Monetization: Tags improve ad targeting. Full text output creates contextual adverting opportunity. Sponsored video inventory.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/07 at 5:16 PM | Comments (2)

Images & Search Engines

Mmm, back from a yummy lunch. Hopefully you guys are still with me. Yeah? Okay, good.

Anne Kennedy is moderating this morning’s afternoon’s Images & Search Engines session with speakers Liana Evans (Commerce360), Chris Smith (Netconcepts), Shari Thurow (Omni Marketing Interactive), Cris Pierry (Yahoo! Search) and James Jeude (Ask.com).

First up is Shari Thurow who adds a disclaimer that she is injured due to a racquetball injury. Okay then.

Shari starts with a search engine optimization review. She says that successful optimization depends on:

• Keyword-rich text. Web pages should contain the words and phrases that your target audience types into the search engines.
• Information architecture and interface. Giving search engines spiders and visitors access to keyword-rich content via information architecture, page layout and URL structure.
• Link development. Number and quality of objective, 3rd party links pointing to a URL.

Because graphic images are made up of bits instead of text the search engines are currently not able to extract keywords out of the images. Therefore, search engines rely on a number of indirect factors to determine the content of a graphic image. They look at primary and secondary text to put the images into context.

• Primary text = Title tags, visible body content, text at the top of a We page, in and around hyperlink links.
• Second Test = Meta-tag content, ALTernative text.

Think about the file names. Files name are rarely used to determine the content of an HTML page because search engine spiders are able to extract text from the actual page. File names are more important for graphic-image optimization than text-file optimization.

In other words:

• Logo.gif is probably a logo image.
• Atm-matchine.jpg is probably an image of an ATM machine.
• Cir1233.gif does not communicate anything. Don’t use it.

Search engines use the text surrounding the image to put it into context and help identify what it is.

Make sure your graphics images are formatted correctly. Name your graphic images in a way that makes sense to your audience. Do not let software (such as Photoshop) name files for you. Use captions or labels to provide contextual clues to images search engines. If you are unable to create captions, make sure the page is optimized for targeted keyword phrase.

Usability counts!

Li Evans is up next to talk about image search as the next frontier for retailers.

Why should you care about image search? Because it’s the fastest growing vertical search, that’s why. Li says that Google’s Universal Search has changed the entire thinking on search engine optimization for images.

Also, searchers and shoppers are visually-oriented. They wanted to “see it” before they “but it”. Let them print out your images and take it with them to the store.

How can image search help you?

• Hot Toys: When users search for images the majority of images showing up in the SERPs are coming from manufacturer sites – sites where users can’t buy from. As a retailer, having your image appear for popular product searchers puts you at an advantage over your competition and leads targeted customers to your site.
• Comparison Shopping Engines: Ensure images match products and keywords. Give descriptions of pictures in feed.
• Niche markets: Image Search provides small retailers with another way to increase traffic, better conversion rates, and puts them in a category with less competition from major retailers.
• Contextual Search Engines: Three out of the four major engines incorporate images in with their regular searches (one box, smart answers, etc).

Universal and blended search has changed the rules. Images are now showing up intermixed with the search results. And they’re timely. Google is already showing images of Hurricane Dean in its results.

Eventually more media and images are going to be blended in with your searches. Results can change rapidly. Make sure images are included and named correctly. Send out images with a press release. Place content around images on your site. Create a site map feed of your images for Google and Yahoo.

Images and Reputation management: Search can form an impression of a brand, product or service by the images they view. What does an image say about you? Are your images representing you the right way? Li uses an example for the RIAA. Check out the third image. Methinks they don’t want that showing up for their name.

What matters when optimizing images? The image name, ALT text, content around the images, etc.

Up next is Chris Smith to talk about sharing images to perform search engine optimization for your Web site.

Chris talks about Flickr, saying it has a high PageRank (PR8), and allows users to customize titles, Tags, H1. Links are also allowed.

Chris says that the design of Flickr is advantageous for search engine optimization because each photo has its own Web page with customizable elements like Title tags, Heading tags, captions, tagging, cross-grouping, comments, sharing, ALT text, optimal linking hierarchies and date taken with page views displayed.

Step one for optimizing images is to have good quality pictures to use. Chris says that photos with good contrast tend to work better. Search marketers should also be broad in experimenting with subject matter for pictures intended to drive traffic and conversions. You never know which image will drive the most traffic and conversions to your site. For example, bed and breakfasts could show furniture & decorative art in addition to details on their rooms. Think creatively.

Chris offers up some tips for optimizing through Flickr:

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

True image search is revolving. Google is trying to understand images beyond just looking at Meta tags.

Cris Pierry is up next to say a few words.

The search engines are getting better at understanding images but they’re still doing a poor job. The more you can help them with Meta data and contextual information, the better. Ultimately, you also want to use good quality images. If you produce high quality images that the users want, the search engines will find them.

Participate on social networks. Yahoo is using the popularity of the images on that site to help it rank because it calls attention to it.

You’re going to see more and more multimedia inside the normal Web search.

Up next is James Jeude.

How do users search for images and why? Make yourself Image Search Friendly by doing the following:

• Build images to fit your audience’s expected behavior.
• Don’t expect to appeal to multiple image search scenarios simultaneously but you can do so sequentially and separately.
• If your site is fast-moving (tech advice, consumer news, celebrity gossip), try to get inserted and highly ranked as a News/Blog source in the major aggregators.
• If your site is an organization or hobby site, be sure to have iconic images clearly labeled and attractive enough to get links from others.

If appealing to popular terms:

• Make your site “Web search friendly” as a co-requisite to “image search friendly”.
• Be clear and direct in the popular terms but add qualifiers if possible (Britney Spears Hair, Paris Hilton Jail) to reward the skilled searcher.
• For your OWN brand name, label your logos and images with your brand name to attract home page traffic.

If appealing to rare terms:

• Make your words clearly labeled on or near the image.
• Filename text is really helpful but not mandatory.
• Alt Text is helpful. For example, if you use “Image Cannot Be Displayed” as Alt Text you’ve missed a text-scoring opportunity.
• Example: caption individual images rather than having a title like “Celebrity Party” with images numbered “IMG0029” or “DSC0047”; name the individual images with the participants in text surrounding the image.

If you are geographically anchored, put your product in geo context. Use addresses in surround text, ALT text of a map image, and give other geo locators such as directions that pass through neighboring towns.

• Consider keeping your misspellings and synonyms in the meta tags.
  I recommend not having them in visible text or it will show in Description and make your site look bad. But do use them, if your customers will likely have trouble with proper spelling.
• Use descriptive file names if possible.
• If you embed words in an image, try to also have the words as ALT text (“Sale on JVC Everio!”)
• If using JavaScript to set up slide shows, you may want to consider also having a page with thumbnails and text around every thumb.

Holy information overload! While you go slip into a knowledge coma, I’m going to grab some water and head to the next section. Stay tuned!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/07 at 3:27 PM | Comments (2)

Podcast & Audio Search Optimization

Okay, fun people, it’s time for this morning’s Podcast & Audio Search Optimization panel with moderator Detlev Johnson and speakers Daron Babin (WebmasterRadio), Amanda Watlington (Searching for Profit) and Rick Klau (Google). You ready?

Detlev starts things off saying that, through the years, audio has been very difficult for the search engines to index and make accessible to users. HTML is simple but trying to decipher what is in an audio file is difficult. There are some speech recognition software programs out there, but even those aren’t very good.

To be fair, he also adds that audio files themselves can be marked up with things the search engines could use to return relevant audio search but for the most part, search marketers have failed to do that. Bad, search marketers, bad. Detlev says that now is the time to start doing that.

First up is Daron Babin.

Is anyone out there listening to podcasts? Daron says you better believe it. They’re listening in droves. There are a lot of people listening. If you’re creating compelling content you’re going to find that people are going to listen. Basically, I think what he’s trying to tell us is that people are listening to podcasts. :)

Before you jump into podcasting, here are some things to consider before you decide if this is a good investment for you:

• Production time – It’s costly. Don’t think it’s not. It’s human manpower.
• Cost of Production
• Equipment (recording, compression)
• Encoding is a pain in the proverbial…
• Analytics – Whose come close?
• Bandwidth

People are listening (I think Daron gets a cookie each time he says that) so make sure the content is compelling. Don’t ramble into a microphone. You need to talk about real specifics. Listeners do not want to know your dietary strengths or weaknesses. They don’t need to know about the dog needing to be neutered. They want to be educated or entertained. Engage listeners but get to the content. That’s why they are there.

Prepare for growth. Think about the expenses you’ll incur when you go popular. Daron recommends securing a sound host or Content Delivery Network and working a deal. He says that without someone who can handle load, distribution will be an issue and there will be unhappy users. Unhappy users aren’t users for long.

You must establish a complete understanding with your host or DND what type of reporting you’ll be able to see.

Transcribe everything. It’s the equity in your organic fortuitous display of originality. Originality with passion = downloads.

To optimize content, look at how you write and deploy your text for your media files. Ensure proper on-the-page criteria, as no engine can complain about finding new, original, and very relevant content. Give thought to categories before you create the content. Optimize your ID3 tags.

Get to your numbers. As a podcaster with prospects for investors, advertising dollars and the potential to drive feed revenue, you should make every effort to make sure your analytics is as dead on as possible. He recommends using Feedburner and using their system to quickly go in and optimize your feed and get an idea of your number.
Break up large media files into targeted, small bites.

There are a lot of people exploring podcasting. The people in this room are not on the bleeding edge (drat). If you want to make a dent against any of the big boys, then you have to get out there and think smart now. Optimize for what you’re building.

Next is Amanda Watlington.

Why should marketers podcast?

• Creates direct communication channel with prospects and customers.
• Extends reach through emotional connection with target market.
• Adds new media outlets to extend reach. Podcasts offer marketers audiences unavailable via regulated broadcast radio.
• Use short sponsorships to integrate advertising for broad-based content.
• Facilitates marketing communications.
• Humanize relations with the public.

The negatives of podcasting: Podcasting requires a level of transparency (that’s a negative?). The content is less formal with shorter turnaround than traditional communications. There are less controls and ownership. It requires an ongoing commitment and content development. There’s a loss of control associated with distribution and use.

There is an absolutely compelling reason for search marketers to start podcasting – Universal Search. Google is working podcasts into its main index. Your results in the SERP should lead to a targeted, keyword-rich landing page.

Questions to ask yourself before you begin podcasting:

• Is it going to be a one of or a podshow with multiple episodes?
• What is going to be the name of your show?
• Make sure the show name is not already in use.
• Show name and episodes names.
• Each will need its own Title and Description.
• Carefully write your titles and descriptions for your show and episode before you launch
• To transcribe or just abstract the show contents.
• Develop a keyword list for the show and determine how you will brand it – by the host or the show name.
• Write the audio tag information carefully in advance.
• Get album art ready.
• Review iTunes categories to find the right fit.
• Be prepared to edit the audio tags yourself for each episode.
• Download and test tag editors .
• Build your infrastructure in advance of creating the audio so that you can rapidly mount your show.

ID3 tags are metadata for MP3, 4, WMA, etc. The maximum tag size is 256 megabytes and maximum frame size is 16 megabytes. There are 39 predefined frames including copyright, content type, dates, and content information, and space for files such as pictures. They can also carry lyrics and the complete transcription of text.

The fields that you MUST optimize for are the title, the album (name of your podcast), the artist (not of the host), the year, the track, genre and comments.

When you optimize the sound file give it a unique name. Try using a shortened name + a date or episode number. This is important for users and for directories.

Optimize your Web pages. If you’re pushing it into a blog have a separate feed for your podcast. Be prepared to have a separate page for every episode. Amanda says she looks at them as tickets in the search engine lottery. Make sure the page has subscription information.

Also optimize your landing pages. Use a separate landing page for audio content to limit the possibility of broken links. Include a play for those who want to listen online. Include an abstract. Use basic search engine optimization methodologies.

Create and validate your feeds. Use Podifer, Feedburner, etc. Once created, submit your feeds. Track and monitor submissions. Amanda users a spreadsheet to keep track of where she’s submitted her podcasts.

Promote online audio beyond the search engines.

• In summary, five types
• Optimize the audio file
• Building landing pages
• Build accurate, effective RSS feeds
• Submit and promote broadly
• Watch the space

Last up is Rich Klau.

Rich works with Feedburner, which in case you don’t remember was acquired by Google in June.

The podcast aggregator market is changing quickly. Web-based aggregators are capturing a lot of market share. Social networks are also becoming a place to consume and distribute podcasts. Like Amanda said, Meta data is essential for discovery.

Consumption of podcasts feeds happens over a dizzying array of applications. He looked at just one podcast that runs through Feedburner and the top four services consuming this podcast were iTunes, Google Reader, My Yahoo! and Miro, which make up 75 percent of the audience. The rest of the share is amazingly fragmented. People are using many, many different aggregators. As a marketer you have to know what services users are using to find your content.

Syndication is embedded everywhere. Directories drive a lot of attention to podcasts. Publishers who do podcasts typically have Web sites. Don’t think of them as separate products.

Podcasts on social network: Last week NPR launched a Facebook application that allows users to embed the NPR player onto their FB page. It’s exposing people to podcasts who didn’t know what they were before.

Avoid exposing code and using acronyms. People don’t know what it means and it's scary. Present simple pages that make your content easily digestible. Add iTunes/Meida RSS extensions. If you are using iTunes, read Apple’s technical specifications. It will tell you important things like paying attention to the feed metadata, not abusing keywords (they’ll only pay attention to the first 12), properly categorizing your podcasts and using the iTunes summary tag.

Submit your podcast to all services and directories. Enable “pingshot” to ensure timely content updates. Ping Yaho, iTunes, Odeo, Bloglines, etc. Enable Feedburner’s Awareness API (eh, I don’t know about that last one).

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/21/07 at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

SES San Jose Keynote with Jim Lanzone

I am surprising alert for today’s second day of Search Engine Strategies San Jose. Perhaps it’s because I’m such a good girl and I went to bed super early last night or maybe it’s because I’m super psyched for this morning’s keynote with Ask.com’s Jim Lanzone. I heart Ask.

[Okay, total star struck moment. Gary Price (!) just introduced me to Jim Lanzone (!), and when I said my name, he recognized it and commented, “Attaboy, Ask.” Dude, I’m famous!]

Okay, now to the real action.

Jim starts off the keynote by alerting us that Danny has started a drinking game. Every time Jim says “3D”, someone has to have a drink. Hee!

I missed Chris’s question in all my giggles (sorry!), but Jim tells us that Ask.com is all about trying to find a balance between art and science. He says when they started Ask3D, they hit on this idea that touched on the three elements of search. They found through their tests of AskX that users seemed like to like this approach. User metrics for engagement and retention soared so they knew they were onto something. Search has always been about the ten blue links and then leaving users for dead. What Ask started to see was the need for original context. Giving users the right thing at the right place at the right time. Give them more content, more options, more tools. The reaction to that has just been phenomenal.

Chris asks if Ask.com is seeing an increase in marketshare. Or if maybe it’s too early to tell.

Jim comments that market share is always something to look at it, especially at an annual basis. He comments though that too much gets put on market share relative to a company’s own growth. He wants to know how Ask itself is growing. He laughs that when Ask first launched 3D, it was touted as their attempt to topple Google or their way to gain market share, it was never portrayed as Ask’s effort to improve search or push the category ahead. Jim says he wants to improve things for users. Ask truly wants to help you get what you’re looking for. Market share will take care of itself.

Aw.

Chris questions Jim about Ask’s partnership with Google. When is it time to look at them as a partner and when is it time to look at them as a competitor?

Ask.com is Google’s largest global partner. They’ve been partners since 2002 and it was controversial then because Ask was the first of Google’s big competitors to choose them over Overture. He says that this year if Ask chooses to renew with Google (or even if they opt to go somewhere else) it’s going to be a multibillion dollar deal. He says that when Ask looks at search they’re not just competing for users. They have their own point of view on search and that creates some co-competition – where they partner on ads and compete on search.

Chris comments that Ask had a near death experience in the dot com bomb. What kind of changes did Ask make?

The first thing Ask did was narrow the focus. They bought a 7 person search engine named Teoma and integrated it into the site. From there, it was all about product. By the time they were sold to IAC, all of their gains had come from product usage.

Chris asks if Jim is worried that Ask is going to become “the IAC search engine”.

Jim doesn’t seem that concerned. He says on the one hand, they prioritize and actually give IAC less favoritism. In fact, AskCity ranks higher on Google. Ask looks at the IAC companies as sources of data.

What kind of approach does Jim take with the leadership within Ask?

They put a lot of emphasis on bringing the right brain and the left brain together. Seventy-five percent of their employees are engineers or technology people of some kind, but they don’t just hire from Stanford (unlike some people). Each project has a lead and the leads come from all different Ask.com teams.

Interesting to note is that most of Ask’s employees still hail from the Edison, NJ offices. Because they’re still sort of in the backwaters, they put a lot of emphasis on the combination of art and science and making sure things really hangs together as a product. They pay a lot of attention to the forum factors.

Chris comments that it seems like this year, we’ve had another outbreak of concern regarding privacy. What Ask has done with AskEraser is one of the most aggressive approaches. How does Ask see the whole privacy issue?

Jim quips that it’s been a slow news summer based on how much publicity AskEraser has received. Jim says (somewhat paraphrased):

Privacy is important for some people, but most people aren’t going to go crazy to make sure that nothing happens. For people for who [privacy] is that important, we’re going to take the whole thing off the table. You tell us you don’t want us to track anything and in a couple of hours all that stuff will be gone. That’s the approach we took. It may be an issue but let’s not get into all the nuances of it. If it’s important to you, let’s just take it off the plate.

Nice.

Chris talks a bit about social media and how people forget that Ask was personalizing things long before anyone else.

Jim comments that just because it’s new to you doesn’t make it new in general. StumbleUpon took what Ask was doing to a whole new level by adding video. He says Ask just got Darwin’d out. This is what the next generation of search is. The first ten years were about creating a giant bookmark list, then it was about finding the needle in the haystack, this is where we are now.

What implications will Ask3D have on search engine optimization?

Jim (again paraphrased):

I think a lot. What surprises me is that 50 percent of usage [for Ask3D] isn’t in the Web results. If we were worried about market share we certainly wouldn’t have done 3D. Our image search channel usage has gone way down because people are finding what they’re looking for on that page. One in 10 searches comes through the Search Suggestion box. It’s changing the way users interact with the page. Some of the emphasis needs to go to the content coming into the page. There’s good news too, of course. We put content where our competitors put ads. There’s more content on that front page. It gives the editorial part a chance to grow.

3D is just the start for Ask. They have things in the works that just take everything further. It’s not just about tweaking the results, they’re thinking about the entire experience. When you start thinking that way it takes you in a new direction.

When would a search advertiser want to go with you and your networking rather than Google? Jim says:

1. Results are placed on the page when the yield would be higher. The ads are placed when they’re likely to make more money.
2. You have direct access to the data. If you combine our Web site and our network and our syndication network you’re probably talking about 10 percent of all the searches in the US. There’s a lot of money to be made in tuning specifically for ask.
3. A new reason to come with our Ask is that our contextual network is seen by 71 mill users.

Contextual is another good advertising solution. I think the people who do it is for the ROI.

Chris: How sophisticated do you think the big brands are with their search marketing? Where are the big players?

Jim says it hasn’t been great. They’re buying a lot of the SEM firms and bringing them in house. He says they still have a lot to learn. The larger ad agencies, specifically, still have a lot to learn about online. It’s not just about search.

Chris: You mentioned AskCity earlier. You’re doing a lot of interesting things in the vertical areas. How do you see these vertical areas as being important separately and also combined into 3D?

Users are still finding images through the main search, not by going into the Image channel. That’s why Ask focuses on verticals, it’s not because they want to compete with verticals, it’s because every day they break out the channels users are searching for and it’s travel or health, etc. It’s more than just ten blue links. They don’t want to leave people for dead.

What kinds of things is Ask going to do with mobile?

Ask wants to bring the Web