smxseattle08

July 3, 2008

SMX Advanced 2008: Give It Up

[Looks around, makes sure it's safe to reveal secret squirrel SEO information.]

Okay, kids, it's July 3rd. That means it has officially been a month since the Give It Up session that occurred at SMX Advanced 2008. The embargo has lifted and now I can speak about it. If only I remembered what happened... Kidding. Sort of.

Danny Sullivan kicked things off introducing panelists Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Todd Friesen (Visible Technologies), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Rob Kerry (Ayima Search Marketing), Marty Weintraub (AimClear) and Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts). As I mentioned in my initial SMX Advanced review, this year's panel looked much different than last year's Give It Up panel.

Danny started things off jokingly, noting that the Paid Search and Developer tracks were all sweet and pimped out while the Organic session was being held in the "ghetto" room where they don't even have real walls. And the air conditioning is literally freezing people to their chairs. [It really, really was.]

Danny also calls it "bullshit" that there are no women on this year's Give It Panel. It was kind of odd that with six speaking slots they couldn't find a lady to fill one. This time around, Danny mentions that he'll open the podium up for SMXers to share their own secrets. The person who offers up the best secret will win a free ticket to SMX Advanced next year. I didn't blog that part, but I promise you it happened, and two people were actually given free passes.

Stephan Spencer was the first up to present.

Despite that he's about to unleash a whole lot of black hat, he tries to take back some of his comments regarding 301 conditional redirects from the day before. You shouldn't do conditional redirects for affiliates. That's bad. Nice work, Stephan.

Stephan lists off a bunch of tools:

A Link Ninja Tool He mentions the 80/20 rule and says that there are high value links that drive a lot of link value out there. The good targets are topically relevant pages with a PR value of 8, 9. 10. He mentions that usa.gov, nsf.gov, w3.org and energy.gov all have a PageRank of 10. Adobe has nine PR 10 pages. He says finding these types of sites could be used to locate sites to buy, though I don't think Adobe is going to sell itself to you anytime soon.

Google Directory Mining Tool: The way this one works is that you spider the Google Directory, extract each site name, URL and PR from category pages and then dump it all into a database. From there you can mine this data via a Web interface to look for sites with super high PR by category, TLD, etc. You can collect supplementary information on a second pass to get the site age, the toolbar PR value, link neighborhood analysis, monetization info, etc. From there, export it all into a TSV file.

How does it work?

• Step 1: ID a category
• Step 2: Narrow by ODP category, TLD and minimum PR
• Step 3: Initial report is generated. Will email you the full report after its done with the second pass.
• Step 4: Report with 2nd pass emailed to you. Get domain, name of site, PR score, TLD, and the ODP category it's in.

Using a Proxy Server for SEO: Tired of your search engine optimization recommendations not getting implemented on your client's large scale site? Place a proxy server in between the Web server and the Net, then intercept the page and optimize it on the fly. Develop site-wide optimization rules (think scalable and automation). Implement page-specific optimization. Best done through an admin interface and/or bulk upload.

Thin Slicing: This only works if you're really expert. You have to make quick decisions, don't over think. You want to hand-optimize title tags across hundreds of pages quickly. Focus on your title tags, h1 and URLs. Don't obsess; you don't have to be perfect. Instead, iterate. If you don't have an admin interface, use a spreadsheet and do a database import.

URL Testing and Iterative Optimization: Your URL affects searcher clickthrough rates. Stephan says that short URLs get clicked on twice as often as long URLs. Even more, he says that long URLs are actually a deterrent to clicking, drawing attention away from the original listing and onto the listing below it. According to Stephen, the site listed below a long URL'd site will get clicked on 2.5x more frequently. Seriously?

Stephan ended his presentation telling folks not to get complacent with search friendly URLs. Always test and optimize. Make iterative improvements to URLs, but don't lose link juice -- 301 previous URLs and don't use chain 301s.

Following Stephan was Marty Weintraub.

Fools Gold Link Exchange: Your clients want links and understand that reciprocal link exchanges can help their site to rank, but they don't understand the nofollow. So...when you set up link partners, nofollow all your links back. They'll never know! Your linking partners don't know what link farms are, they don't know about nofollow.

Why do it?

Clients want and understand link exchanges. Search marketers want devastating 1-way link strategies. Your linking partners don't understand the basics. Their naivety is your opportunity and advantage. Marty turns my stomach saying it's "our job" to take advantage of these people.

He tries to clean his conscience by saying you should be "straight up" about what you're doing by putting in your Privacy Policy that you nofollow links. Your clients will dance the link exchange hootenanny, while trading partners perceive holistic reciprocal promotion and traffic. It's highly effective for local search engine optimization. [It's also totally unethical. Don't do it.]

Marty encourages inviting semi-direct competitors. It will cause good will and your client will get all the link juice.

Nested iFrame Community Crawler: The deal here is to automate a browser to crawl a number of targeted communities to allow you to leave "bread crumb badges" (like the ones left by MyBlogLog) and vanity bait authoritative niche communities. People will see your avatar everywhere and wonder if you sleep.

How do you do it?

Research a pre-made list of vanity bait targets using Alltop, Google Blog Search, etc. Make "a big ass list" of your friends on the social media services, Marty says he'll give you the code to do it if you email him.

Marty only advocates spamming communities that you actually participate in. Don't forget to disable your FURL header.

Why call this search engine optimization? Because things happen from repeated participation - traffic, friends, links.

Opportunity = recent participation can easily be staged (faked). Community members and site owners think you worship them by fanatical participation. If your content is worth it, you'll be rewarded with links.

Extended SEO with Powerful Social Media Profiles: The power of social media profiles is distributed interior linking. "Friending", joining groups and other participation creates links to profile and distributes link juice.

Works best for competitive mid-tail keywords, but it requires serious creative forethought.

What does it entail? Creating fake social media accounts. Oh good, more advice on spamming! Marty says in order for this tactic to work the accounts must look real. Create "real people" and give them a purpose. He builds interests for his fake people by using the categories listed on StumbleUpon. Don't forget to optimize the picture and link build from Flickr too.

Well, that's nice. Do you feel like you need a shower? Because I do.

Michael Gray was next at bat. Luckily his presentation was a lot more white hat.

Michael asks Google to stop trying to be our moral compass. Be truthful and honest and stop sidestepping the question. Amen.

Michael's presentation is about how to beat the AdWords Quality Score.

Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

He shows us his site for Sanjaya ringtones. His AdWords ad was disabled because he had a low quality score.

He shows another site. It has the same ad copy but it's going to a different domain. That ad runs for 75 cents. On the other site the ad goes for 10 dollars.

Everyone applauds and I giggle.

So what's the difference?

• All campaigns were created in one account
• Ad copy identical
• Landing page identical

The only difference was the domain age. The domain that was created in 2006 had its ad jacked up to $10.00. The domain from 2008 was just $.75. It's not just the domain age. They're looking at the number of trusted links you get over a period of time. You need a certain number of links but you have to do it over a certain period of time.

Quality Score Gets Adjusted Just Like The Sandbox

Landing Page Quality Score has nothing to do with the actual landing page. To prove this, Michael creates a third ad going to the whitehouse.gov site. Any landing page algorithm that gives whitehouse.gov a good quality score for ringtones is really not looking at the landing page.

What is the Landing Page Quality Score really looking at? The main factor Google looks at is your site's organic trust score. Trusted sites equal good low pricing. Non-trusted sites get bad pricing.

How do you beat the Landing Page Quality Score? Every few months Google updates their Landing Page score. If your Web site moves into a non-trusted price jacked category, buy a new domain, create a new ad group, and move all your keywords over.

Google is a data borg. Every piece of data that you give them is going into their borg and being used in their algorithm. Every piece of data can and will be used against you. Think twice before you give it to them.

Rob Kerry was next.

Rob starts off with a disclaimer: His techniques may be seen as black hat and upset Matt Cutts. Don't use them on your brand sites. [Well done, Rob. Hi Marty!]

Micro Site Creation: Creating many anonymous sites which appear as third party links.

Benefits: It allows you to keep control of your inbound links and anchor text, and it's often cheaper than buying links. You can also sell links to non-competing Web sites.

How To Do It:

1. Get free/cheap hosting and domain
2. Avoid .info domains and dupe Class C IPs
3. Choose a CMS
4. Roll out content
5. Link over to main site once aged

Don't:

• Use the same WHOIS info
• Register domains on the same day/week
• Get links in from the same places
• Use the same content on different blogs
• Use the same template/linking structure

Automated Content: The process of generating unique content using software.

Last year, Mikkel introduced the audience to Markov Chains. It uses a mathematical equation to create unlimited content from a single source. The downside is that it takes years to perfect and the content product doesn't pass human review.

The alternative is to use multi-source sentence arrays. The way this works is that you start off by writing an original piece of content. Then, rewrite each sentence five times. Each time must be unique but say the same thing. From there, get a programmer (look for a Russian guy, says Rob) and have that person make each sentence a new variable. Randomly pick the first sentence, the script randomly then picks the second sentence and it keeps going through. Before you know it, six articles at 25 sentences each becomes 28 quintillion articles.

Benefits:

• Passes human review.
• A fraction of the cost of copywriters.
• Distribute articles across your micro-site network.
• Submit content to every article directly with embedded links.
• Offer the unique content to other sites in exchange for links.

Rob says this is a white hat technique because it's used to create unique, valuable content. The entire audience exploded in laughter. Content is king.

Issues: Not all generated content will pass a duplicate test and full sentences can leave a footprint.

Solutions:

• Use CopyScape to check before publishing article
• Randomize words within sentences - "can't" should become "don't", "pub" can be turned into "bar".

On Topic Spamming (I love that "spamming" is in the title): Auto-post comments and trackbacks to blogs and guestbooks that relate to your site. He says he hates spam just like everyone else, but this isn't actually really spamming. It's a time saving device. [facepalm] It uses technology to do what he would do but he can't work as fast as a computer.

It's useful for getting links into your network of microsites, getting free links for your affiliate sites and ranking for long tail terms.

Targeting the term "red wine"

• Run precise searches on Google and Yahoo.
• Scrape the URLs on the SERPs.
• Create an array of comments to post.
• Get your coder to create a bot to auto post comments to the blogs that you find.
• Use your target term as your name, which will form the anchor text in your comment.

Results:

• Comment appear human.
• Much higher success rate than untargeted spam.
• Passes through pre moderation.
• Many blogs still don't put nofollow comments on them.
• Yahoo and MSN have trouble handling nofollow so you can still get value out of those links.

Todd Friesen followed.

Todd is up and lets everyone know that he no real presentation but he does have some notes. He jokes that he must be the only one on the panel with a real job because he didn't have time to make a PowerPoint. Heh.

Old blogs: Go out and find a really old blog on Blogspot or WordPress. Find the ones that are sitting there ranking for keywords but are dead. Check out the profile address. If it's a hotmail address and someone hasn't used their blog in four years, they may not have had used their Hotmail either. Hotmail addresses can reused. Register the old hotmail, then go back to blog and tell them you forgot your old password. They'll email it to you to the Hotmail address. [...scary. --Susan]

Hotlinking images: Years ago people would have fun with those caught stealing images because they were also stealing your bandwidth. Today, if someone is linking to one of your images, that's a link! Pop up your .htaccess file and put that link wherever you want it to go.

Digg: Todd says he doesn't use Digg but he has ideas. You have this great domain that you've had on the front page of Digg but now you're banned. The odds of getting unbanned are zero, so what do you do?

Take your list of funny things, throw it up on a new domain, submit it to Digg, call your Digg army out, and then wait for the fervor to die down. You're getting all this new traffic off of it. A few weeks or a month later when people have forgotten about it, 301 all those links to your old banned domain.

Custom 404 pages: Why use a custom 404 page? You've had a product go out of stock, an article that went down, etc. You probably had links to that page, right? Why put up a 404? Instead, 301 that page up a level. If it was a product, go to the category level. You don't want custom 404s. You don't want the engines to take your pages off the Internet.

Reputation Management: Todd says that occasionally it's possible to get things out of the Web. He comments that servers can go down for a variety of reasons. Monitor the sites in your space. The second you find out that one of their pages is down, use the Google Removal Tool to tell Google that the page isn't there anymore. If you're lucky, it'll stay down long enough for Google to remove it. If they do, it'll be gone for six months to the day. That buys you 6 months of time to push up good content.

Google Bowling: (Todd says this tip comes from Dave Naylor) Because different link brokers moved from Sponsored Links to inline linking, there's now a Google filter that looks for too many new links coming from old blogs. If you have a network of 40 aged blogs, go back into the archives, add a link to the site you want knocked down across the network; you'll knock someone down.

Rand Fishkin finished things off for us.

[I'm not going to lie. Rand had about 80 gazillion slides and 7 minutes to go through them. He sped through and I was not all that impressive in staying with him. :( My apologies. Drinks on me next time, Rand.]

Searching For Links

Rand goes through a number of search operators.

• Related: Find out who your competitors are related to. He plugs in the top ranking sites and then tries to get links from them.


• Intitle search: When you perform this you'll see that the Intitle results are very different from regular search, even though the term is often in the title. The people ranking for just intitle have earned the ability to be there, but not the trust.


• Intext: Crap. It doesn't work.


• Inanchor: Also crap.


• Wildcard searches: Excellent for when you want to figure out what is really popular. When you plug in a product search, you can see what people are using as their keywords for this "type" of thing.


• Temporal Searching: You don't have to obey the little drop down. You can modify the parameters to search for whatever you want.


• Linkfromdomain: Offered by Live Search. It shows you who is linking out from this domain. What domains are link to from a given domain.


• IP tool from MSN: You search for an IP address from Google


• Competitive Link Searches: You can append URLs


• Google BlogSearch Links - link: gives you accurate link data.


• Exalead Links - they offer the link query. He thinks Exalead orders results in order of importance.


• Alexalinks: Also shows links, as does Technorati. Yahoo's not the only one who does link research.


• [Linkdomain:example.com region:Europe]: Link searches within a specific region. . Great for geo-targegting.


• [Linkfromdomain +linkdomain]: You can see which pages are linking to someone


• [www site:seomoz.org]: Lists the pages of a domain by importance, as seen by Google.


• [SEOmoz -linkdomain:url -site:seomoz org]: Use it to find sites that mention your brand but don't give you a link. And then ask for the link!

Google Local Ranking Tips: How Google ranks local listings in importance:

• Registration with Google Local
• Perceived closeness to center of city
• Number of local reviews
• Local link popularity
• Local Phone Number
• Participation in Online Menu Services
• Quality of local reviews (the stars)
• City name inclusion in anchor text
• Local Directory Listings
• Keyword/City in Business Name
• Domain Authority
• Address Inclusion on the Web pages

Reputation Tracking Query

Google Temporal Web Search: Searches for SEOmoz every day.
Google Blog Search, Google News, Technorati Blog Search, Summize Twitter Search

Obligatory Black Hat Slide: Google Bowling - point your DNS and they fall out of the index.

And that's it? Thoughts on the material discussed?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 3/08 at 1:00 PM | Comments (20)
See more entries in Liveblog, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization, smxseattle08

June 6, 2008

SMX Advanced Goes To The Dark Side

Mere seconds after the much anticipated Give It Up session ended on Wednesday, Virginia and I jetted to the airport to meet up with the rest of the BC team. We gathered in the Alaskan Lounge at Sea-Tac to wait out our one hour flight delay while unwinding and reflecting over cheeseburgers and beer (Bruce opted for the stew).

It may sound odd, but even though my office is literally next door to Bruce, I don't get to have nearly as many face to face chats with him as I'd like. His travel schedule is among one of the most hectic I've seen and it's rare that I see him more than a few days out of the month. But the conversation I had with him Wednesday night in the middle of a busy airport restaurant bar is something that will stay with me. It reminded me why I work at Bruce Clay.

Coming back from this show feels different than the others. Normally when I return home from SEO conferencing, I'm left feeling a bit wiser and a bit more assured of the industry I work in. This time I came home wiser, but also a bit confused.

Don't get me wrong. There were a lot of great moments at SMX Advanced. The speakers, the venue, the friends, the networking, the desserts - they were all top notch. SMX Advanced is still one of the best shows around. The highlight for me was really the Developer Track. It was something I absolutely fell in love with. It was an entire track on how to build great, accessible Web sites. Those sessions gave attendees valuable insight that they could take back and use to make improvements to their site TODAY. It wasn't about developing workarounds or exploiting algorithmic loopholes, it was about doing things right and avoiding problems from the start. That's something every search marketer can get behind.

But at the same time, I couldn't help but notice that this year's Advanced show seemed to lean a whole lot more to the grey/black hat side of things. I couldn't help but wonder: When did advanced search engine optimization get confused with being a black hat?

Here are some of the "advanced search engine optimization" techniques I picked up during my time in Seattle.

• There are lots of old sites lying around on the Interwebz with great link juice. Buy them and capitalize on that. But do it carefully or Google will pick up on it and reset the score.
• Conditional redirects are teh awesome.
• Search marketers don't need ethics. They're marketers. Check the ethics at the door.
• You can never have too many .edu links.
• I need to grow some balls, stop fearing Matt Cutts and start buying links.

And though I can't even mention the Give It Up panel for another 28 days, look at the folks who spoke. No judgments; I'm just saying that it looked very different from last year's panel. You can't tell me the SMX folks weren't gunning for a certain shade of information there. When the embargo lifts for that session, SMX is going to get a lot of press.

But did attendees get what they were expecting from the show? I know I was certainly surprised by a lot of the content. I wonder who else was.

Microsoft's Nathan Buggia seemed to be. During the Search Engine Friendly Development panel he specifically noted that he had to revamp his presentation after hearing what people were talking about the day before. He also wanted to stress that advanced search engine optimization was about analytics, not being a black hat. I was right there with him.

Where were the white hat advanced search engine optimization techniques in Seattle? Why was most of the material presented pushing grey and black hat? Are we supposed to believe that that's what advanced SEO is - spamming? If so, that's a bunch of crap. Or maybe SMX just thinks there's no one qualified to teach advanced white hat techniques. I guess those folks were out drinking with all the ladies NOT on the Give It Up panel.

I don't understand.

To me, advanced search engine optimization is about analytics, it's about siloing, it's about perfecting your site architecture so that you don't have to even worry about tactics like cloaking for conditional redirects. There have to be other white hat advanced search engine optimization techniques out there. Why weren't they covered?

The Developer Track started to take a really advanced approach but there just weren't enough sessions. But that's the stance I would have expected from a conference billed as advanced and being led by Danny Sullivan. If I want to learn about black hat SEO, I'll go check out a forum or certain blogs. I don't need to have that taught to me by folks representing the man who's arguable the leader of this industry.

Sitting at the show made me realize why I like working at Bruce Clay, Inc. We don't go down that road with our clients. Some of the black hat techniques taught at the show may get you results, but you're also putting your clients in serious harm. We don't believe in that. I simply don't have any tolerance for folks publicly endorsing black hat SEO. And it's not because I think "Google is good" or that the idea of people manipulating their algorithm or aggressively hunting for loopholes bothers me. Black hats get under my skin because (a) they're not SEOs (b) they very often provide a bad experience for users and (c) they make the rest of us look bad by association. Why do I need to support that?

What was your take on the show? Did you get the information you were looking for?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 6/08 at 9:06 AM | Comments (85)
See more entries in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, smxseattle08

June 4, 2008

Amazing New PPC Tactics

Moderator Matt Van Wagner says that at this session you'll probably see a few things you've never seen before. Our speakers are Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing, CourseAdvisor; Stanislas Di Vittorio, Founder, eSearchVision; Siddarth Shah, Senior Bsiness Analyst, Efficient Frontier; David Szetela, Owner and CEO, Clix Marketing; and Natala Menezes, Product Manager, User Experience and New Product Development, Microsoft

Addie Conner is presenting on account and campaign structure theory. She says that every business is different, so these are just considerations for you. She asks the audience who runs multiple accounts. Multiple accounts give you an account quality score, keyword quality score and ad text quality score. Considerations for making such an account structure include quality score, organization, keyword types (relevancy, head vs. tail), and execution strategy.

The keyword type is another consideration, like relevancy and whether it is a head or long tail. For your launch and expansion strategy, ask yourself:

• Do you plan to expand?
• How are you expanding?
• What types of keywords will you run on? (Behavioral, long tail, etc.)

Engines care about:

• Relevancy
• Traffic
• Click through rate

Consider your account quality score at launch. If planning on going for longer tail or behavioral, launch with most-relevant terms, higher traffic-terms to first build relevancy and add less-relevant terms later or break out account structure by keyword types so as not to "taint" your most relevant keywords. Bid high to start to garner strong CTRs and establish keywords. When building the account and campaign structures, keep expansion strategy in mind.

Campaign structure considerations are your engine, the tools, and the business.

Regarding the engine, you have inter-campaign considerations:

• Geotargeting
• Intra-day parting and day parting
• Campaign level budget
• Content vs. search
• Engine vs. manual or third option
• Party optimization

For tool considerations, ask yourself:

• Can the tool bid match types separately?
• Does it have clustering tools for long tail bidding?
• Does the clustering/optimization depend on the account structure?
• Can it cluster across ad groups?
• Does it attempt to build bid to position and bid to traffic models?
• Can it optimize to different goals within a campaign or account?
• Can you exclude certain keywords, ad groups or campaigns from using the tool?

Business considerations include:

• Levers (ie: inventory, caps, quotas, geos)
• Reporting
• Budgeting control
• Conversion volume

Stan Di Vittorio is going to talk about leveraging the power of APIs for SEM. All SEM campaigns have long tails. When looking at long tail you want to maximize the ad effectiveness, don't use dynamic keyword insertion. Instead, have targeted, relevant ads that will get a higher quality score; however, it is much more granular.

As for conversion rates, don't send users to your home page. Instead send them to the page with the product. It requires a very detailed URL, and again, a granular campaign which requires detailed product info.

The answer to creating this campaign is using an API - an interface used to access an application or a service from a program, like Google AdWords. Using an API allows you to do bidding, editorial, and reporting.

Pros of using APIs:

• Make granular changes to a campaign on a mass scale
• Make real-time changes
• Automate optimization
• Intgrate with other data feeds and manage your data flow

Cons of using APIs:

• You have to build it and maintain it
• It costs a lot of money

When leveraging APIs:

• Keep a product listing up-to-date. Add new products and remove obsolete or unavailable products.
• Keep prices up to date. Change creative as needed.
• Make ad pressure dependent on existing inventory.

Natala Menezes works at Microsoft adCenter and says the core values at the company are quality, transparency and efficiency. She'll be talking about keywords and bulk tools.

Keyword lists are hard to develop and there's not a lot of easily available data on keywords. Marketers need data and an Excel add-in (Beta) will give absolute numbers (data directly from Live Search query logs and adCenter impressions), demographic data, and portable data. Download the add-in for Excel 2007 at http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter.addin

Managing keywords is messy. Uploading keywords and ads takes a lot of time. It's not easy to copy and paste, and sometimes you want to change a lot of little things all at once. Yesterday, Microsoft announced the Beta release of adCenter Desktop. Register for the pilot at http://advertising.microsoft.com/adcenter.beta-pilot-signup. It allows:

• quick import
• bulk edits and research
• notifications
• and more (including better navigation, quick interface, creation wizard, keyword research)

Siddarth Shah will discuss managing risk in PPC. He defines risk as a state of uncertainty where some of the possibilities involve an undesirable outcome. He'll talk about understanding, analyzing and what to do about risk.

A histogram is a graphical version of a table that shows what proportion of cases fall into each of several categories, or bins. Make a histogram by taking your keyword data and loading the Analysis ToolPak in Excel. Categorize the revenue into bins. With a head term histogram, you typically use the top 10 keywords by spend. Keyword distribution is similar to a bell curve and you can see that keywords perform like large cap stock. You can see if something is going wrong and focus your expectations. With a tail term histogram you use low spend keywords, there is no obvious distribution pattern and it performs like a small mirror stock.

He's using a tree map to visually show how much each keyword is being given in the budget. It's a rectangle broken down into smaller rectangles that are proportionate to the percent of spend they are getting. He says that you can make such a map with an Excel add-in. For more on histograms go to http://blog.efrontier.com/

Dave Szetela is talking about best practices for content campaigns, or in his words, Content Advertising Really Doesn't Suck.

Why content advertisers lose money:

• Ads appear on irrelevant pages and get bad clicks
• Keywords must identify target sites, not advertised products/services
• The ideal ad group contains 20 or so one- and two-word keywords

Building great content keyword lists:

• Use words/phrases that appear most frequently on the target sites' pages
• Use negative keywords to block ads from appearing on irrelevant pages
• The process David uses:
  • Use the AdWords placement tool to find ten or so sites within your target categories.
  • Load the home pages of the first 10 sites displayed, and so a quick copy-and-paste to copy all the words on the page to a text document.
  • Do a Google search on a couple terms that frequently appear on target sites and add those to the text document.
  • Save the text file and load it into Textranz to produce a list of the most commonly occurring one- and two-word combos.
  • Create a short list of the most frequently-occurring words.
  • Include negative keywords to block ads from appearing on irrelevant pages.

Would you recommend putting brand terms and non-terms in different accounts?

Addie says to just keep them in their own ad group.

Any thoughts about the Google content network?

David says that he's got some posts on his blog about that.

Would Microsoft consider making tools available across all engines?

Natala says that she'd love to see more APIs available across engines. The obstacle is getting access from other engines. They do support data portability, however.

Where can we get the tree map Excel add-in?

Siddarth says to search for "tree mapper excel add in" to get the Microsoft Research tool. Natala asks if the audience would like to see that kind of thing available through adCenter, and some people nod their heads.

How much do you use Google's placement performance report?

David says he uses it quite a bit because occasionally ads are not run well and they have to exclude ads from the places they are showing up but don't really belong.

How does one determine optimal bids for long tail keywords that are lacking in historical data?

He says the issue with not having enough stats is how do you aggregate enough data to get an estimate of what to pay. One condition is how long you're willing to wait. Another is a proxy indicator, and you can cluster enough keywords together to believe that the representation is accurate. The tricky issue is how to cluster. It depends on the campaign and product. Addie says that one thing to do when looking at clustering is to identify patterns across keywords. She says that the length of keywords will show clear patterns and you can borrow that info for other keywords that are alike. Sid looks at the number of clicks it takes to convert. He says that not all tail terms are created equal - look at the bid position. Allow low bid terms to get higher bids - give them a chance. High-bid, high-position keywords are risky and are the worst type of tail term.

How long do you think you should maintain high bids at the outset of your campaign in order to help your quality score?

Addie says that some variables to consider are ad frequency and syndication. She says it takes about two weeks to get fully syndicated across the network, so the length of time to maintain high bids depends on the client because time is needed to collect data.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 4/08 at 4:41 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Liveblog, Pay Per Click, smxseattle08

Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know

I'm stepping in late after a lunchtime interview for SEM Synergy with the awesome Jeremiah Andrick. Check that out next Wednesday on WebmasterRadio.fm.

On to the session. We've got Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz, Inc., moderating. Our speakers are Brian Klais, Executive Vice President, Search, Netconcepts; Laura Lippay, Group Program Manager, Search Strategy, Yahoo!; Jonah Stein, Founder, ItsTheROI; and Richard Zwicky, President, Enquisite.

Brian Klais is up first and is going over a list of metrics that you need to know. Non-yielding pages should be identified and know the rate that each yielding page is generating. Look for inequality in page placement. Measure the engine yield rate. ROI and brand reach are critical metrics. The missed opportunity cost can be calculated, based on assumptions that all your unique pages should be yielding, and that the average number of visitors per page apply to all pages. For more on the subject, search for "natural search KPIs".

Laura Lippay is going to share how to prove the worth of SEO. She says that the Grid is the way to show what you've accomplished. It's a collection of keyword-based data, stored in an Excel file or database, which can be pulled into multiple varied reports.

What can you do with it?

• Balance SEO, PPC, and Paid Inclusion (PI)
• Find SEO referral gaps
• Find SEO content opportunities
• Make SEO traffic and value projections

What do you need?

• Keywords
• Number of Searches
• Conversion metric ($ per PV, LTV, etc.)
• PPC data
• PI
• Algo
• Search engine CTR by position

What to use it for?

1. Gather keywords (and optionally, the number of searches)
2. Add keyword data for performance comparisons
3. Or just to see performance of one channel
4. With search volume and CTR by position, make assumptions

Once you have the data, showcase your skills in the grid. Anything keyword based can be part of this grid.

Jonah Stein says he's going to talk about the five forgotten metrics:

1. Customer lifetime value
2. Crawl frequency - the new page
3. Page views to conversion
4. External links
5. Webmaster Central all query stats

To manage your customer relationships, write a permanent cookie on First Touch, write First Touch data to CRM on conversion event, and capture missing data at every touch point. With that data you get more accurate LTV & ROI.

Crawl frequency is one of the most meaningful metrics. CF is a product of search engine's score of your page. Obfuscating CF lowers index quality. Relative CF is great for diagnostics. Crawl frequency is governed by the number and quality of inbound links, the content update frequency, server performance and Sitemap settings.

Metrics for crawl frequency include:

• How often crawler visits
• Crawl depth
• Crawl saturation
• Crawl frequency rank by page (infrequent, supplemental)
• Pages that don't get crawled have issues

How to measure crawl frequency:

• Crawl rate tracker
• SEOmeter.com
• Log file analysis
• Develop a custom solution

The little-used metric of page views to conversion will illuminate that good SEO gets the user closer to conversion. Decreased page views can be good or bad. Decreased time on page can be good or bad. And decreased time on a site can be good or bad. To measure this, you need to know the funnel for each landing page and to measure success to the funnel. As for external links, measure the total number of external links and the external links per page.

Webmaster Central for all query stats should be looked at. Sometimes the content is not human readable. A converter for Google WMC stats can help you decipher the data. The keyword ranking is shown by directory. CMS developers and large site publishers should integrate into the back end by importing WMC query stats, importing external linking data, and displaying internal linking data.

Richard Zwicky is next, and will somewhat base his presentation on a recent blog post he published. Using SEOmoz as an example, he's walking through their analytics data on Enquisite software. The program allows you to look at the location queries are coming from and look at multiple keywords. Once he knows what terms are bringing people to a page, and look at what's not performing in your target markets.

Q&A

What tips or best practices do you have for measuring 2.0 data?

Jonah says that you can tag AJAX states to get a map of what's going on and create an alternate value. That way you can tag what user has completed what action.

Laura, what measure do you use to measure the lift between different search engines?

She says she bases it on models that are out there, available online. She doesn't get search data just because she's at Yahoo. She has access to what everyone else does.

When performing human evaluation of the data, is it meaningful to look at the top 200, 1,000?

Brian says that you have to position yourself implement scalable solutions. It's kind of looking at like business metrics, it's a signal to look at the health of the business. Richard says that the tail end is what needs to be focused on. Jonah says that if your site has a hierarchical structure, just look at the landing pages that delve deeper into your site. It's easier than looking at a list of 200,000 pages.

Does the panel have any recommendations for log file analysis to track spider behavior if you don't have the resources to custom build?

Marty Weintraub, sitting in the audience says that ClickTracks has an API for log file. However that still requires custom development. Someone else in the audience says ClickTracks Pro can do it. Brian says some clients use programs like Omniture or Hitwise.

Is Omniture worth the cost?

Laura says it's always worth it. Richard says some people run their whole company around it. He says that some customers fall back on privacy of data. There's more sampling and more opportunities to slice and dice your data on Omniture. Jonah says the threshold is whether or not there's a full-time analyst looking at the data all day. If so, then it's probably worth it. If it's only looked at for two hours a month, then maybe it's not worth the cost.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 4/08 at 3:10 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Analytics, Liveblog, smxseattle08

Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues

Back from lunch. Carrot cake is delicious and Vanessa Fox is now moderating the Developer's track with speakers David Golightly (Zillow), Jonathan Hochman (Hochman Consultants) and Chris Silver Smith (Netconcepts).

Vanessa says we're going to talk through the kinds of things they look for when they're going through sites and trying to locate issues. There is also a case study because case studies are delicious. Like carrot cake. Or maybe 3 mini carrot cakes. Don't judge me.

Vanessa says you have to look at the things that really matter and prioritize. You want to hit the big stuff first.

What really matters: The pages should be accessible and discoverable. You want to know whether or not you're found in the results and if users are staying on your site. Are you offering searchers something that makes users want to click through?

She's zipping through slides without ever actually stopping on one. I think she doesn't want me liveblogging. I'll be here drinking my water.

Chris Silver Smith is up to talk about basic stuff because he figured there would be a lot of newbies in the audience. He didn't get the "Advanced" memo.

Diagnosing Crawling Issues:

How Big Are You: Do a search command on your site to see how many pages are indexed in the various engines.

Query for Session Ids: [inurl:sessionid] will help you spot these in the results. The same page indexed multiple times with different session IDs can cause duplicate content.

Check the Robots.txt exclusions in Webmaster Tools. You don't want to accidentally block your site from being indexed.

If you have a redirect going on, you want to make sure the bots can hop through it. Check the headers that are returned by the server. FireFox Header Spy Extension is good for checking status codes.

Is Content Crawlable: Check in Lynx Browser like http://seebot.org. You can also use Firefox's Developer Toolbar to view your pages like a bot.

He also recommends Firefox's link counter extension. It shows you how many links are going out on a page, how many are nofollow'd, etc. Helps you analyze how much PageRank you're passing off to other sites, as compared to how much you're retaining.

Acxiom's Marketleap - Benchmarking Link Popularity: Type in your top competitors and it will tell you how many pages are linking to each competitor and the link popularity over time.

Use Google sets to identify your competitors as the search engines see it and also to see if your site is being categorized appropriately. Your competitor may not be who you think it is. You can see who Google thinks is equivalent to you.

Next up is Jonathan Hochman.

Essential Tools:

NoScript: When activated, it blocks all client side scripts like JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Silverlight. You can safely view pages with malicious code. See what pages look like to bots. See if content is accessible.

He brings up the SMX site and shows that with NoScript turned on the page doesn't render correctly. It won't affect rankings but it may affect people's impressions of the page. Only 2 percent of people surf without JavaScript turned on. It's not a high percentage, but they may be an influential percentage.

He brings up the Gillette Web site which is all in Flash. They use a JavaScript function called swfobject that switches on HTML content if Flash is off. It's good but they do it in an ugly way.

Googlebar (Not Google Toolbar): One click for Google's cached pages. Highlights search terms. You can run any Google search. Back to the Gillette site he found that the page wasn't being cached so that makes him ask why. He opens up his next tool...

Live HTTP Headers: Will expose redirects.

Optimizing Rich Internet Applications: Feed the bots something they can understand. Add (X)HTML content to pages with content generated by JavaScript, AJAX, Flash or SilverLight. (X)HTML content can be generated by server side scripts accessing the same database as the rich media application. This ensures consistency and avoids the appearance of cloaking.

Coding Options

1. Replace HTML content with rich media content by manipulating the Document Object Model. Open source solutions for Flash: SWFobject 2.0 or sIRF
2. For JavaScript/AJAX, modify DOM to replace HTML content, or use noscript tags.
3. For SilverLight, create your own search engine optimization-friendly insertion code. Better yet, nag Microsoft to provide a ready-may function.

SWFobject: Part of Google Code so it's okay to use.

Xenu Link Sleuth: A free spider that crawls a href links just like search engine bots. Generates a list of broken links and outputs a site map using each page's Title tag. Use site map to look for missing pages, bad titles and duplicate content. You can check for broken links before deployment.

FireFox Web Developer: You can disable/enable JavaScript. Report JavaScript errors. Disable CSS. Edit CSS or HTML. View alt attributes on images. Looking for missing or inaccurate Alt attributes.

Watch out for search problems with frames, iframes, Flash and SilverLight. Each object is treated as a separate thing, not as part of the host page. This may hinder external linking to deep content. Cannot add a unique title and description. Someone can navigate into a frame and there's no navigation because the menu is in a different frame. It creates orphan pages.

Up is David Golightly to talk about his experiences at Zillow. He's the case study.

Zillow's Search Interface

A front end for Zillow's powerful distributed search engine, serving a database of 80 million homes.

Goals for the interface:

• Highly configurable for different data sets (For Sales listings, Recently Sold, Most Popular, Regions...).
• Responsive to a range of user actions (Filtering, sorting, map interactions...)
• Dynamic back-button support
• Bookmarkable URLs (cross-visit state preservation)
• Offload presentation-layer processing cycles to user's machine.

Implementation: AJAX

Server provides config and initial search results as JSON text embedded in initial HTML.
Browsers builds everything - filters, map control, result list, breadcrumbs, etc -- based on server provided config using client side templating

The interface they created was very heavy and complicated JavaScript. Without JavaScript, users and bots saw nothing. No support for users without JavaScript or Flash including screen readers, text-based browsers or search engine bots. They also had really cryptic URLs.

Result as of 1/2008:

• Of 80,000,000 homes, only 200,000 were indexed in Google. Only 20 percent of search referrals did NOT contain Zillow-branded keywords.
• Of top industry keywords (real estate, homes for sale, etc), Zillow didn't rank in the top 10 pages of Google results.

They haven't rolled out their new search UI, but it was obvious what should be done.
Start by using some semantic HTML. Start with a basic, usable Web site using page refreshes, build page structure with semantic HTML. Then, use JavaScript (where available) to enhance the HTML baseline.

By doing this they would gain accessibility for non-JS-enabled user agents and decrease their page load time.

Guiding the Bots:

• Footer and site map are entry points to their search results.
• Provide a top down navigation tree
• Link each from home detail pages laterally to other
• Provide a transparent URL structure

Summary

Bots reward accessible application design with better rankings, more thorough indexing
Don't do in the browsers what you can't do on the server
Duplicating code on both browser and server is sometimes a necessary cost
SEO should work in concert with great UX
AJAX on top, not on bottom
The next generation: Microformats.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, Liveblog, SEO Tips & Tricks, SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization, smxseattle08

International SEO

Jeffrey K. Rohrs is moderating. Our speakers are Andy Atkins-Kruger, Managing Director, WebCertain; Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Director of Internet Marketing, Nordic eMarketing; Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works, Inc.; and Ian McAnerin, CEO, McAnerin International, Inc.

Ian McAnerin will present first. Internationalization revolves around domain, language, culture, and geolocation issues. Geolocation is the identification of a Web page as belonging to or being relevant for a particular country. Country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD, including .ca, .cn, .uk, .mx), IP address and link analysis are all aspects to consider in International SEO efforts.

If you have multiple domains connected to a single page, Google's only going to choose one domain to display. The way it chooses which to display is the link weight on the page, opting for the page with more links. If you want to be geolocated for a particular country and your site is .com, have your site map point to the ccTLD, but make links within the site .com. Display URL tactic: the key is to use a park and not a redirect for your multiple domains.

Language and culture issues include local terms, different types of spelling, popular culture references, translation issues and vocal culture issues (for example a Japanese company called Up the Creek). When translating copy, consider language issues and follow the Symantec Expression Equivalency Document (SEED):

Original English > English SEED > Chinese SEED > Chinese Document

The original English must be broken down into dry bullet points. This is translated into the second language. That document is turned into marketing copy by a marketer working within the second language, in this example, Chinese.

Linking issues:

• Too many links. For example, Asian sites are often full of links because there are many characters required for content.
• Nofollow, first anchor text counts
• Strategic internal linking is an excellent way to deal with multiple languages
• Language switching:
  • No surprises
  • Clear indication of target
    • Same page, different language
    • Different language site

Andy Atkins-Kruger is next and says he has a personal interest in languages. Some of the most important search engine brands outside the U.S. are Rndex, Baidu, Seznam, Naver, Najdi.si, and NetSprint. He says he's got ten important factors in international SEO to share.

1. Have your site coded in UTF-8 (Unicode). This allows your site to be translated to languages from around the globe. It is backwardly compatible with Ascii. It encodes up to four-byte characters.
2. Don't translate your Meta tags and page Titles. Make them all individually planned to adjust for plurals, prepositions, special characters, etc.
3. Adopt a global PR strategy. There are many PR portals for different languages. It generates links and helps build your global presence.
4. Manage your 301s. Some problems include: the typical global site has hundreds of links going to "page not found", domains around the globe are incorrectly set and several meta-refreshes are present.
5. Keyword URLs can be an issue.
6. Source local links.
7. Use a smart geo-selector. The bigger the site and the more countries and languages to deal with, the more likely to be issues.
8. Expert keyword research. What do you do if there's no direct translation?
9. ccTLDs (Ian covered this)
10. Language and content - content is king. It's important to have enough content on the page. The process is: Spidering > Language detection > Language dependent processes > Indexing and query response. Have good, clean language and make sure you're using the write character sets.

His closing thought is that international SEO has risks so it's always good to start with a low-cost pilot.

Jeffrey says that Kristjan Mar Hauksson went to a school that had gates to keep out polar bears. Awesome! He's up next to dazzle us with his Icelandic accent. Along with ccTLD, IP address and link analysis, he lists inbound links are the four elements to consider in the "concept of region."

Americans often think of Europe as one country, but that's obviously not the case. He says that "glocal" is localizing the global marketing. He says that it's important to understand the impact of culture, like the unlucky number four in Japan. ccTLDs can be purchased at Europeregistry.com. There are sometimes rules specific to countries. For instance, in Norway a company can only own 20 domains. He says it's good to remember that Google is growing in market share in Europe.

The impact of languages and culture should not be underestimated. By understanding culture and languages you can adapt better, succeed in your efforts to localize, get more sales and respect. Showing an interest in communicating in the native language boosts interest in your company. Inbound links are also very important. If you are targeting Germany and you have no German inbound links, this takes away a big part of your regional credibility.

The engines are getting better at localizing and understanding the impact of culture. At the end of the day, though, it's a question of ROI. All of his company's studies have shown that taking seriously all four elements of the "concept of region" has had significant returns.

Cindy Krum is talking about the challenges to multinational brands and how they can be addressed with site architecture. Different languages, currencies, measurements, seasonality, search engines, e-commerce laws and marketing aesthetics are all issues.

Three architecture options:

• One site - sub-domains and subdirectories
• Multiple sites - a site for every country
• Blended

The one site approach can be grouped by language or keyword.

Benefits:

• Easy to set up
• Links and traffic point to one domain
• More pages in the index
• Flexibility with messaging
• Grouping by language prevents duplicate content
• Country specific hosting option

Disadvantages:

• Home page in wrong language = confusing
• Home page only ranks in one language
• Grouping by country risks duplicate content

If you take this approach:

• Specify target country for each in Google Webmaster Tools
• Redirect country specific domains to appropriate sub-domain or subdirectory
• Internal and external links should be language appropriate and with country specific domains
• Language Meta tag, HTML language and local address

The multiple site approach means you have a separate domain for each country.

Pros:

• Low start up costs
• Add sites one at a time
• Rank well in multiple country specific search engines
• Country specific hosting

Cons:

• More sites = more sites to update
• Multiple sites = multiple SEO efforts = harder to rank in .com
• Forced to target countries instead of languages

Some tips for this approach include:

• Target country in Google Webmaster tools
• External links should have appropriate anchor text and country specific domains
• Link your multiple country sites carefully and logically
• Language Meta tag, HTML language and local address

If you have an international site on the .com, you can use a blended approach.

Advantages:

• Most realistic for world wide presence
• Can start with .com and build country specific sites as needed

Disadvantage:

• Most costly to create, maintain and update

Tips for implementing the blended approach:

• Specify countries in Google Webmaster Tools but not the international site
• Link your multiple country sites carefully and logically
• External links should be logical. Keep the international on the international site and country specific on country specific sites
• Let users know you are taking them to another site
• Use Java translation and IP sniffing on the home page

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 4/08 at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in International, Liveblog, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, smxseattle08

What You Should Be Measuring -- But Aren't

Time for some more paid search! Chris Sherman is moderating with speakers Akin Arikan (Unica Corporation), Christine Churchill (KeyRelevance), Rich Devine (ZAAZ), and Ryan Gibson (Rimm-Kaufman Group).

No witty banter this time as Chris gets right into things. Christine Churchill is up.

"Sixty-three percent of consumers who conducted online searches for various product categories convert offline" - Google, comScore study March 2006

Many companies push prospects to a phone call or other offline channel because it allows marketers to use the power of voice to convert prospects. This tactic is appropriate for businesses requiring "high tough". It works for B2B and companies with long complicated sales processes, and is common for local service companies.

Methods to Track Offline Conversions

Simple:

• Make an assumption based on their sales
• Anecdotal data: Ask the salesperson or call center people to ask customers how they learned where to buy the item.
• In Store surveys: Surveys ask customers how they found the product.

Intermediate:

• SWAG it from limited pilot tests
• Use a unique phone number in ads from pilot campaign
• Determine an online-offline ratio
• Extrapolate future sales
• Offer coupons or special offer codes
• Unique pricing: Place unique online pricing on a search landing page. If people quote the special rate then you know they started online.

Advanced:

• Customer tagging: Tie the online cookie with the offline customer number or credit card data of offline purchases.
• Use of Unique Phone Numbers: Users from different referrers provided a unique landing page with a unique 800#. The Customer is with a cookie so the phone number is used consistently.
• JavaScript overrides different number based on referrer.
• Phone per campaign
• Track via phone logs
• Pay Per Call - Track calls on separate ad networks

Points to Remember:

Many people do research online and buy offline
Normal online analytics don't count offline conversions
Offline conversions can be considerable depending on your business
Offline conversion information is vital to making informed online marketing decisions.

You need the whole picture to make good business decisions.

Ryan Gibson is up.

Ryan says you have to start off by making some assumptions: That you're managing at least to keyword level-preferably ad level, that the ultimate program goal is to drive profit, and that there's a difference between brand and non-branded terms.

Typical Measurements:

• A/S: Ad Spend to sales
• ROAS: Return on Ad Spend
• ROI: Return on Investment
• CPO/CPA: Cost per Order/Acquisition

You want to look at these metrics on the keyword level and look for real actions happening on the Web site. When you're looking at some of these metrics, the proxies are all based on margins. Typically you see that the folks with the largest margin are going to have the highest spend targets.

Ryan throws out a really gross looking formula:

A/S = (1 - COGS [cost of goods sold]- Variable Costs)/2
ROAS = 1/(A/S)

That equal typically targets roughly ½ of the margin, so why not use the margin directly?

Why is margin so essential?

There are different margins on different product categories in your marketing mix. Accessories will have a higher margin value than the main product.

Existing Tracking: Data can be passed to your bidding system in addition to the sales of dollars.
Post Sales Data Feed: Nightly process to match up orders to the margins.
The Best: Feeding the margin data on the fly coupled with a nightly process to knock out frauds and cancels.

You still need an understanding of the lifetime value. What other actions are of value on the site: email sign up, request a catalog, other downloads, etc.

Well, that was confusing. Mostly for me. I'm sure the other, smarter people got it.

Up now is Rich Devine. My toes are cold.

Conversions don't tell the whole story. When that's all you're focusing on money is left on the table and you miss the big picture. Not assigning full credit to marketing efforts.

This is related to hot topics like engagement, attribution, keyword stacking, etc.

He talks about building a custom-built performance model that assigns dollar values to key site behaviors in order to understand express the value of your Web channel at large. It's really useful for lead generation. Key site behavior include: locating an online dealer, viewing a product showcase, orders through a call center, etc.

Building a Monetization Model

• Confirm business goals
• Identify and align site goals to business goals
• Establish an accurate, key site metrics
• Id key site behaviors or micro conversions
• Assign value to key site behaviors
• Then...have a beer (or a Sprite).
• Go to town with monetization.

Tips for Building a Monetization Model

Discover and use all available data sources. Stuff like Web analytics, CRM data, financial data, etc. Anything you think that will contribute to the model.

[He's zipping through these slides like he's hungry for a Sprite. My attempt at keeping up = teh fail.]

Prioritization of optimization activities: Conversion is not the primary decision driver. Are you assigning too much value to the converting keywords? Are you undervaluing non conversion keywords?

[Missing. Everything]

Tips on Getting Starting with a Monetization Model: It's a model - don't freak; It's not perfect. It's okay to have a wild ass guess as long as it's a scientific wild ass guess. Be comprehensive in your data sources. Get quantitative and qualitative. Be accurate but don't get too strict.

Akin Arikan is next.

Is paid search happening in a vacuum? What about the blogosphere? Do they impact your search? What about everything else?

Search is not alone. There are online ads, offline ads, direct marketing, social media, and relationship marketing.

Case Study From Covario

They did time sequence testing where online ads that were running in parallel to search were turn off. The results:

• Click through rates when down 363 percent
• Conversion rates when down 33 percent
• Had to pay 16 percent more per click to maintain the same business volume

Do control groups by geographic targeting. This applies to offline as well. If you plaster ads all over the streets of Seattle, do you get a surge in traffic?

Search vs Web 2.0 Participation

He talks about UPS Whiteboard viral campaign. I haven't heard of it but maybe you have. If you're UPS, you own this microsite so you can set a cookie for users that visit to see what they're doing afterwards. For that to work, when they go to coolwhiteboards.com it should redirect them to whiteboards.ups.com.

He brings up an engagement funnel that records how many participated, referred a friend, etc.

What about the power of the blogosphere?

People who heard about a bad shopping experience are less likely than the people who actually had the bad experience to ever set foot in the store. [Most. Awesome. Stat. Evar.]

There is blog monitoring technology that does text mining to get to a sentiment of what's happening. They also do trends to look at chatter and effects.

Relationship Marketing: Mary receives a catalog. Two weeks later she visits the Web site via the search. Did the catalog cause the visit? You can do Matchback. You know who you sent the catalog and if Mary is a registered user on your Web site than you can 'match it back'.

It's time to take off the blinders. Talk to the guys on the online/offline/brand marketing site. We have a lot to learn from each other. It's not just technology.

Question and Answer

What method do you use to find the value of your micro conversions?

Rich: The first thing is to get what you can out of the analytics. Identify 4 or 5 core site behaviors and focus on what your core business objective is.

Christine: Identify what your measurement of success is. She takes the micro conversions as some of those measurements of success. They're going to be different for everyone.

Ryan: Ask if those micro conversions are happening offline. What are they costing you offline? What's the value online? Compare them?

What keyword should get the credit for the sale, the first or the last?

Akin: You want to make specific studies at some point to get a real answer. Set up some control groups. You can't do that at all time. At some point you need to reach a conclusion and then create a rule. The details of what you pick may result on your bus model and case study.

Ryan: They've found that a lot of multiple clicks that occur in paid search happen on the same keyword.

Christine: It's going to vary on who your company is. If you're a big brand you don't show up for [movie], you have a problem. But if you're an independent film maker, a long tail term may be more appropriate.

How would you a handle a sit where clients set conflicting metrics to evaluate success?

Rich: They try and address that before they execute. Sometimes it takes a long time, especially with bigger enterprise client. But before they begin to execute they come to some sort of agreement and make sure that everyone signs off. It helps to relieve a lot of the headache.

Christine: One of the first conversions you want to have with a client is about what they're measurements of success are. You want to set that up upfront. Managing expectations is key. Clients aren't stupid. They may be seeing things from a different viewpoint so keeping the communication open is vital.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Liveblog, Pay Per Click, smxseattle08

Search Friendly Development

Good morning, Friends. It's time for Day 2 and I'm coming to you live from the brand new Developer Track. The Developer Track is awesome because it comes complete with a fancy waterfront view. I'd also mention the yummy bagel I'm eating but I think Michael VanDeMar is going to come and kick me if I do. He's over my bagel stories.

Vanessa Fox will moderate as speakers Nathan Buggia (Microsoft), Maile Ohye (Google) and Sharad Verma (Yahoo) get us started.

Up first is Nathan Buggia. He says he rewrote his entire presentation last night based on what people were talking about on Day 1.

Microsoft is working on lots of big, hard problems. Stuff like:

• Affiliate tracking
• Session management
• Rich Internet application
• Duplicate content
• Geo-location
• Understanding analytics
• Redirection
• Error Management

Advanced search engine optimization is analytics. That's what differentiates it from regular search engine optimization. It means you're at a larger company with more resources (um, not necessarily). Implement things in a logical order. See what the impact is on your customers and the engines and decide if that's the right thing to go forward with. Do not implement something because you heard someone on a panel say it was a good idea. PageRank sculpting is a good example of that. Everything on the Web is an opportunity cost.

Nathan says to watch out for complexity. If you build cloaking or situational redirects into your Web site, you can add a lot of complexity to your site. It becomes hard to notice if you have problems on your site because stuff is hidden from even you. You want the simplest architecture you can have. Microsoft says cloaking isn't all bad, but it's never the first, second or third solution they recommend.

All Web sites have the same first problems. The first problem is accessibility. That's where people should start. Can a crawler get to your Web site? Are they hitting 404s? Do you use Flash or Silverlight and are they monopolizing the user experience? Take a look at canonicalization. Are you dividing all your PageRank and reputation?

Search engines are always changing. Someone can come up on the stage and claim they have the big new tactic for search engine optimization and then that may change in a year. What is consistent are the Webmaster Guidelines. Those are things that in spirit all the search engines agree with. If you go to Google's Webmaster Guidelines and adhere to the spirit of them, then you're working with the search engines instead of against them.

Nathan gives us an example and uses Nike.com. Nike is a brilliant company. There are few companies that can do the type of branding that they did with Just Do It.

When you go to Nike.com you see the Flash loading. Then you select language, region, etc. Then you get another loading screen because they're going to play a full minute video. It takes eight seconds to get to that video. Maybe people don't have eight seconds. Maybe they only have one second. The second run experience is 3 seconds because of the cookie Nike puts on your computer. The cookie resets every day. If you are blind or ADHD, you have a really bad experience on that site.

The site also isn't great for search. He shows us the HTML behind the page. There's no Title tag. There's nothing. It's just a Flash application. Basically they're cloaking. The site is also really complicated. Nike has over 2 million pages on their Web site and they're cloaking for a lot of them. He shows what the Nike SERP description was for a few days after their cloaking broke. It was a user error.

Every investment you make is another investment that you can't make. If you're investing all in cloaking, there are other people out there NOT investing in those things. If you type in [Lebron James shoes], Nike doesn't come up.

Alternate Implementation

Throw your rich object at the top of the page and then use JavaScript at the bottom to detect what the div does. (If I mangled that, please feel free to correct me in the comments. As awesome as Nathan is, I don't speak tech geek.)

Advanced search engine optimization is not spam.
Search engine optimization does equal good Web design.
Design for your customers, be smart about robots and you'll enjoy long-lasting success.

Sharad Verma is up.

Sharad says he loves his job. This is an opportunity to serve his customers. When he's not working he loves to travel. Last week he was in Machu Picchu, Peru. He's giving us a bit of a history lesson and telling us how he took trains and buses on his journey. I'm not sure where this I going but it will tie together soon. Oh, I get it. The moral of the story is that Machu Picchu is accessible and easily discovered. I see what he did there.

As a site owner you're serving both your users and robots. You need to design your site so you're not alienating either of them. There are three cranks behind the box - crawling, indexing and ranking. You have control over all three, but more control over crawling.

How do Spiders Crawl Your Web site?

They start with the URL, download the Web page, extract links from the Web page and then follow more links. Sometimes they find invisible links or sometimes they see links but decide not to crawl the content. That could be because the links are excluded in your robots.txt or because they're duplicate links.

Search engines find your contact via the organic inclusion from crawling. All you have to do as a site owner is put up your site, get links, and let the crawlers in. They'll do the magic. If you're not satisfied with what they're crawling, then you can supplement that with feeds.

Roadblocks of Organic Crawl

Search engines do not understand JavaScript. They're starting to understand it but they're far away from being able to full crawl it. He recommends turning off your JavaScript and seeing if you can navigate your Web site. Is all the content reachable?

Flash: Make sure your site can be read by a robot. If you're using Flash, make sure you're offering up alternative navigation.

Dynamic URLs: Difficult to read, lead to duplicate content, waste crawl bandwidth, split the link juice and are less likely to be crawled and indexed.

Best Practices:

• Create user friendly, human readable URLs
• 301 redirect dynamic URLs to static versions
• Limit the number of parameters
• Rewrite dynamic URLs through Yahoo! Site Explorer

He asks how many people use Site Explorer and their Dynamic URL Feature. Log in and authenticate your Web site. It allows you to remove parameters from URLs.

Duplicate Content

Consequences of duplicate content: Less effective crawl, less likely to attract links from duplicate pages.
Solutions to duplicate content: 301 duplicate content to the canonical version, disallow duplicate content in Robots.txt

Other Best Practices:

• Flatten your folder structure
• Redirect old pages to the corresponding new pages with 301/302
• Use keywords in URLs
• Use sub-domains ONLY when appropriate
• Remove the file extension from the URL if you can
• Consistently use canonical URLS for internal linking
• Promote your critical content close to the home page

You can also get your content included through feed based crawling. You can provide feeds through their Sitemaps Protocol to tell the crawler were to find all the pages on your site, especially your deep content. Sharad recommends using all the Meta data supported by Sitemaps Protocol.

Do not exclude your CSS content in the Robots Exclusion Protocol because the engines want to see the layout of your page.

Search engines want your content. Break down those accessibility barriers and let them do their job.

Maile Ohye is up last.

Google wants to help users create better sites. If you have better sites, we all have a better Internet. Aw. She's going to tell us how to enhance your site at every stage of the pipeline. Maile talks like an infomercial.

Crawlable Architecture

Consider progressive enhancement. This means you don't just begin with Flash. You start with static HTML and then add the "fancy bonuses" like Flash and AJAX later. Then the fancy stuff becomes a complement to your Web site instead of your entire site.

She looks at a page/site that's rich in media with HTML content and navigation - the Dramatic Chipmunk video on YouTube. The video is in Flash, but there's descriptive content on the page (title, description, user generated content in the comments) and HTML navigation.

Consider sIFR for Flash

JavaScript detects if Flash is in installed.
With No Flash, it displays the regular text. With Flash on, you get the Flash.

If you do that the text must match the content viewed by enabled users. It must be accessible to screen readers and search engines.

Consider Hijax for AjAX

Format JavaScript with a static URL as well as a JavaScript function. She gives us a long URL and says that the search engines often ignore fragment (#f00=32) but respect parameter (?foo=32). I'm hoping that makes sense without you having to see the long URL.

Google Webmaster Central

Webmaster Tools: They give crawl errors if you verify your site. In crawl errors, be sure that what you see is what you expect. They'll show URLs blocked by robots.txt, make sure that's what you want. They'll also tell you about time out errors and unreachable links. Use it to verify your link structure and that all your links are findable.

Promote your quality content. Set preferred domain to www or non-www. You don't want to run two versions of your Web site. [As a note, this doesn't always fix the problem. Be consistent in your linking and don't rely on Google to do your work for you.--Susan]

To reduce duplicate content, keep URLs as clean as possible, internally link to your preferred version and store visitor information in cookies then 301 to canonical version.

Use a cookie to set the affiliate ID and trackingID values.

Proper Use of Response Codes

Use 301s for permanent redirects.
Signals search engines to transfer the properties like link popularity to the target URL. This applies to situations like moving a site to a new domain and modifying the URL structure.

Anatomy of a Search Result

Create a unique, informative title. It acts as informative signal of the URLs contents to a search engine and user. You don't want your title to say "Untitled". She talks about how Webmaster Tool can help you locate Title tag issues.

Snippets: Provide the user more content about each search results. The quality of your snippet can impact your click-through.

Influence snippets with Meta Description. Meta Descriptions can be utilized by Google in search results. Meta keywords are of low priority.

Final thoughts from Maile:

• Verify Crawl errors as expected
• Creative descriptive titles, consider adding useful meta descriptions
• Submit site maps for your canonical URL
• View Webmaster Central blog posts

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, Google, Liveblog, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, smxseattle08

Search Marketing & Surviving a Recession

It's a brand new morning and a new day of sessions. We're starting off on such a cheerful note: Search Marketing and Surviving A Recession. Jeffrey K. Rohrs is moderating this discussion-based session. Our speakers are Andrew Beckman, President, Location3 Media; Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning; Russ Mann, CEO, Covario; and Jon Miller, Vice President, Marketing, Marketo.

As an introduction each speaker gives their take on the state of the recession. Andrew says that the recession has been mild thus far, but is trending in the wrong direction. He says that search marketing is a pretty safe industry; however, success comes at a higher cost. Dave is based out of Canada and so says that his view of the impact of the recession is different. He says the biggest effect is due to the value of the dollar. Russ says that rather than half empty or half full, the glass is overflowing. He says that marketing spend is significantly shifting online. Jon is optimistic about the economy, but as a realist, recognizes that some people are struggling.

Are we in a recession?

Dave thinks yes, as evidenced by the decreasing value of the dollar. Russ says that we've been skirting a recession as well as stagflation, more recently. He says that some sectors are doing well while others are doing better. Jon says that the catch is how you define a recession. If defined as 2 consecutive quarters of GDP downturn, we haven't seen that - things have been flat. He says that it's the worst possible non-recession.

Andrew says that the recession is industry specific. Consumers have mismanaged their budgets and are now feeling the squeeze. He says they're seeing a pullback, and so his company is analyzing where the few buys are coming from in order to hone in on where purchases are being made.

What worries you?

Russ says that CFOs are tightening up, scrutinizing purchases and media spend. As an analytics software company, he says that marketing is the least provable and least automated part of the business and so it's often the part that loses budget. However analytics is a good measurement for marketers to be able to argue for keeping their budget.

Jon says that companies with deep pockets realize that times of downturn are actually opportunities to double the spending, whereas small companies cut their spending. He thinks that branding will be cut back. Andrew says that companies need to find the new opportunities and is facing a challenge of convincing clients that marketing should not be cut out. Dave says that organic search is provable. His concern is that the success of his clients is declining, due to no fault of their own.

In this environment, where do you put your first marketing dollar?

Andrew says that optimizing for the correct terms and analyzing with the right metrics are the fundamental mainstays. Dave says that he fully agrees. People need to take a good look at their site, watch what users are doing, and provide what they're looking for. Russ says that the first thing is customer research and strategy. He says that no technology or system is the silver bullet unless you get really strategic with the client first. Jon says that when budgets are tight and clicks are fewer, testing and conversion optimization should be the primary focus and customer relationships should be built.

Jeffrey polls the audience: Do you think it's more important to focus on acquisition or retention? A few more people raise their hand for retention than for acquisition.

Do you expect prevailing macroeconomic conditions to lead to increased consolidation?

He says that first you'll see big companies gobble up tech companies. You'll also see lots of fragmentation on the small end and new companies popping up in the search industry. Dave says that we'll see some consolidation in the industry, but not because of recession. That's just where we're at in the evolution of the industry. The money is there and consistent, so companies are now ready to acquire. Jon says that he's seen an increase spending in offer development, specifically offers targeted at people in the later stages in buying.

What SEM-related strategies or tactics help minimize marketer stress?

Russ says that lifetime value modeling is something he tells clients to do. He says that search can be used effectively for retention and lifetime value and expansion. Again, he says it goes back to understanding your client's business and who they are targeting. Jon is constantly surprised by how small business owners don't understand the benefit of SEO. To minimize your stress, he says you have to find a way to tie what you're doing as a marketer to the impact on growth and activity.

Andrew recommends that when your acquisition strategies are in place, look at the conversion percentage. Multivariate landing page tools are critical and will help you increase your lead or sales value. Nothing will help you increase you leads better than what the numbers actually show. Also, he believes that there is a way for affiliate search is a strategy to consider when moving forward in the recession.

Dave ways that providing analytics information and being able to explain it to a client is good for marketers. He said that before you could build it and they will buy. The recession has forced marketers to take a look at what they're doing, and looking hard at analytics and conversions has helped develop the industry.

How do you deal with prospective clients hesitant to jump into SEM, in part due to the fact that you can't guarantee rankings?

Dave says he does guarantee rankings. Andrew says it depends on the term. However, he would help them see that focusing on the content of the site will be of great benefit. Russ says that test and invest is a proven strategy, seen in previous case studies, that he proposes to new potential clients. Rather than guaranteeing first-page-results, he says that it's a process of working toward success.

Some areas have been more heavily affected by the recession. How does this affect SEM and how can marketers leverage the right areas?

Andrew says geotargeting is the answer. Find the stronger local economies. Russ says to look to Asia, where the economy is booming. More clients are asking about how to market and promote their products and services abroad. They're helping clients be included on Baidu.

What areas of the budget are clients moving their budget from in order to redirect it to search?

Dave says that one of the first actions will have to be analyzing yourself and what are you doing. Find the things that are lease effective, trim those and test. Jon says the biggest area where money is wasted is push marketing, advertising that just shouts at the market. Andrew says that search has the opportunity to be both a direct marketing and branding vehicle at the same time. The foundation of search marketing needs to be placed now because fine tuning is a long term program. Russ says that the most money is wasted on short term activity rather than long term value.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 4/08 at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
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June 3, 2008

SMX Advanced Keynote: You&A With Matt Cutts

Danny and Matt have a cute repartee. I guess Danny lent Matt a pair of Vans. Nice. By way of introduction, Danny explains that Matt leads the Web spam team at Google. They're matching in red cotton shirts and jeans, plus their Vans. Hey, that's cute.

Danny starts off the Q&A asking about the link bait/fake news story about a 13-year-old using his dad's credit card for hookers. The story showed up in major news outlets. Danny wants to know what does Matt thinks about this? Matt's not the truth police, now, right?

Matt says that the big difference between this situation and a joke is that it was presented as truth and readers had an expectation of news. As far as Google policing the Web, he says that was not the case. This situation landed on Google's lap and was forced to address it. People are happy when they're prevented from getting malware, people are happy when they've been protected from spam. Matt thinks this issue was along the same line, although not a typical situation. Don't look for Google to be policing the Web in the future.

Danny asks Matt about the link building debate and what Google's current stance is.

Matt replies by asking the audience who here is an in-house SEO or looking for long term gains. Ninety percent of the audience raises their hand. With that in mind, it's safe to say that you don't want to burn your sites to the ground. You want to do what's good in the long term and what's good for your site. Your trust and your credibility within the industry is a limited commodity, so it's probably better for the industry to recognize if something's been taken too far.

Danny says that earlier they were talking about a funny story about PageRank.

There was a person that was scraping Google PageRank. When Google saw it they messed with him by tweaking the PageRank so that all his scraped info was useless. This just shows you not to obsess about any one element.

Danny wants to bring up Matt's blog to show a post from an hour ago.

The key parts of the post are a brief statement about Google's take on nofollow. Also, a small addition to Webmaster Guidelines is worth noting. "Make Web sites primarily for users, not search engines." It's been changed because people were saying, well, why submit an XML Sitemap when you say not to do anything for search engines.

What do you think of widgets as a link building tool?

Is the widget relevant to the sponsor? Is the anchor text stuffed? These are things to keep in mind.

Google's made conflicting statements about whether or not to have forms on sites.

There are limited situations where Google can crawl into a form. The rule of thumb is would a user be annoyed when they come to the page. There are two parts to the Google guidelines: technical and quality. "Don't have search results in search results" (like Mahalo) is a quality guideline.

Cloaking?

It's not a good idea. We've punished very large sites for it. In almost all the cases where you might use cloaking there's usually a bigger architecture issue to solve instead.

We've had a number of penalties. The minus 6, minus 650. What's going on?

If you think you have an algorithmic penalty look at what might need to be changed. But sometimes people are looking too hard for a penalty, so of course they think they've found one. There are degrees of penalties. Over the years Google has seen a lot of spam and has a nuanced view of spam, and a nuanced system for penalizing as well.

What are the guidelines for re-inclusion?

For manual penalties, there is a timeline. We try not to be overly harsh because there has to be room for mistakes. If it's an algorithmic penalty, then you've got to adjust the site to address those issues. We also look at reconsideration requests. A lot of times people complain of being hacked, and if they fix it and file reconsideration, they are back in the index within days.

Wall Street Journal has different headlines on Google News than their own site. Isn't that deceptive?

Matt says he's not familiar with that particular issue, but he wants to mention First Click Free. With that program users can see the news story they click on without having to register or pay and cross the wall. That's fair as far as Google sees it because that page is presented as the same for both users and engines.

Can you explain your policy on paid links?

We've been studying the different ways people are buying links. Every action leaves a footprint. Google is willing to take both manual and algorithmic action to improve results. Paid links is definitely an advanced technique and high risk.

Can I knock someone out by buying links and pointing them to their site?

We try very hard to make it impossible to hurt others' sites. If you make a great site that's compelling and has good ideas, you'll attract a lot of good links naturally. I'm not sure we want to be in an industry where people try to make them selves look better by making people look worse.

The next question is about PR sculpting - Danny calls out BCI and says siloing. Sites are doing this now. YouTube is doing a bit of it. Is this something people need to do?

If your architecture is right, then it's not something you should really worry about. He says Michael Gray also made a good point that there are more important irons in the fire to worry about. Rather than playing around with the PR flow on your site, it's better to plan it out from the beginning. If you're really advanced and want to play with PR, go ahead and do it. There's no penalty for nofollow.

[I'm going to jump in and note that siloing encompasses a lot more than just PR sculpting. It's an architecture/theming issue. --Susan]

What's it like being the moral compass for SEO?

He says he doesn't feel like he's a moral compass. The vast majority of the time people know what Google's answer is because it's the common sense, right thing to do. People know there are a lot of great ways to get links. People don't really need him, he says. They already know how to do SEO really well.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 3/08 at 6:05 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, Search Engine Optimization, smxseattle08

Buying Sites For SEO

Stephan Spencer is moderating our panel with speakers Gab Goldenberg (SEO ROI), Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl), Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney Media Group) and Jeremy Wright (B5 Media). Jeremy Schoemaker couldn't make it in person because his wife is about to have a baby so he sent a video presentation. Sweet!

In 2004 during a conference, Jeremy heard that there were all these domains out there that were expired but were linked to by government, military and .edu Web sites. People listened and laughed it off, but Shoemoney asked how many sites like that were out there. He then went home and started doing some research. Him and a partner talked about how they could find these expired domains with all these high trusted links. They built a spider that used GYM to seek them out and check how many backlinks it had and if the site was listed in any of the major directories. In a month and a half they found more than 1500 domains that were out in the wild. They used them to dominate a lot of niche markets.

What did it tell them?

People thought that when a domain expired that it "reset" to Google. Not true. The test showed them that Google gave weight to the links, not to the domain. What's not bread and butter search engine optimization has a very limited shelf life. The link age still works today.

Fast forward two or three years, they're slowly starting to die off. He found Joe Lieberman's 2004 Presidential campaign domain. He registered it, made a blog about Joe Lieberman and instantly it was a first page Google results and ranked fourth for [Joe Lieberman] then he switched it over to a niche site. Within 3 or 4 days it was completely delisted in Google. That told them there's something going on where you have to stay in the same niche zone. It's not as easy as it used to be. You can't just register a site and throw whatever you want on it. There's some kind of human element at play.

Fast forward to now and he says it's probably not worth your time to do the domain thing.

Be careful when 301ing. If you buy domains that are expired or parked, you want to slowly 301 the links. You'll set off alarms if you do it overnight. There are many domains out there that are expired to this day that have great links to them. You may not get the keyword value, but you'll get the PR value.

Now they buy domains for branding, not for search engine optimization. He thinks the value of search engine optimization is falling a little more each year. He paid $9,000 for the Auction Ads domain. They're for branding, not for SEO. If you can get the keyword domain for what you're doing, that's almost priceless.

And that's it from Shoemoney. Most awesome video presentation ever!

Jeremy Wright is up.

Jeremy lets us know he's not a search engine optimization guy. He runs a media company. It's not quite as sexy as SEO.

They buy sites for eventual revenue purposes. Potential, specifically unrealized potential, is what they're looking for. They're not an SEO company!

Core metrics: Existing traffic, uniques, revenue, feed subscribers, Google PageRank.
Secondary Metrics: age of a site, stability, age of domain, amount of content, existing search engine optimization metrics, stableness, etc.

Tertiary questions: Is it/can it be a blog/ Does it cover a unique area? Does it add non-core value we can put a number to? Does it have a real brand name in its industry?

Tools they use to valuate blogs: Blog Valuation Calculator (an internal tool), Compete.com, ComScore, Search Depth Calculator (another internal tool).

Mistakes You Can Avoid

• Always verify traffic (Google Analytics, SiteMeter, Omniture)
• Don't believe the potential someone else pitches you on, arrive at your own.
• Don't deviate from your playbook (though your playbook should include some flexibility for lager purchases).
• Don't be afraid to buy partners early if you see early success
• Avoid properties that depend on specific personalities being bought in for the site to retain its value to you
• Watch out for "inflationary schemes".
• Buy early, buy often, admit failure quickly.

Gab Goldenberg is next.

Buying sites for search engine optimization is like climbing Mt. Everest. You want to do your research, protect yourself from changing conditions along the way and have a good base camp to start from. As far as search engine optimization goes, that means having a good domain to work from.

Content is extremely undervalued. You want to look for indices of high quality Web sites. Google is doing "submarine crawling" where they'll query a search form or they'll execute JavaScript to find deep Web content that isn't linked to from the site itself. If you can find out that Google is doing this kind of crawling, you know that this site is well trusted by Google.

How do you find those sites?

Do a [site:] search. That will work for one site, but what if you're looking at an entire industry? You can look for a footprint.

What's a footprint? A footprint is an identifying characteristic that many Web sites share. If you look at a CMS, there will be various footprints that are attached to it. He shows us the footprint for a high quality WordPress blog.

You've done your research and found the site, but if you change the WHOIS and the hosting, you can get the value reset. How do you protect your investment? You use a trust.

A trust is legal mechanism whereby one person holds legal title and the other person gets to be the beneficiary of the site. This allows you to get away with not changing the WHOIS while still taking over the site.

How do you get one? Go to a lawyer specializing in trusts. Make sure the contract includes the intent to create a trust, that there's certainty over the property and that you consider other specifications like including that the hosting is part of what you're buying.

The single greatest value you're buying when you get a site is the domain. Realize that.

Todd Malicoat is up.

Todd doesn't have an intro because he was fearful of even speaking on this panel. To make up for it he starts off with a joke: What's orange and looks really, really good on a hippie?

Fire.

Oh Jesus. Back to buying old sites, eh?

Finding Old Sites

Think like an old site: If you were an old site, where would you be? That's how you come up with the creative queries. And beyond that, you want to automate that process.

When you're contacting the site owner, it's tough. Be Credible, be brief, be lucky.

When you're valuating a site, look at the domain, age, links, theme, traffic and revenue.

Negotiating and Closing a Site Purchase

1. Lowball, but don't offend.
2. Get a price.
3. Counter.
4. Agree.
5. Sign Agreement,
6. Escrow Service
7. Transfers - files and WHOIS

Todd ends with more jokes!

How do you starve a hippie?

Hide his father's credit card under a bar of soap.

Oh, brother...

Question and Answer

Aside form domaintools.com, can you recommend any other tools to use?

Todd: Premium Drops.
Jeremy: A couple of the URL shortening services will let you buy data from them.
Stephan: Get good with your advanced query operators.

Are there things you can do to crash, reset a competing site that sold?

Todd: Same as you can do in the search results. He's sure you can, but he doesn't know anything specific.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 4:40 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Google, Liveblog, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, smxseattle08

Closing the Loop: Are You Tracking Every Lead?

Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land, is moderating. Our speakers are Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing; Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Paid Search Services, Apogee Search; John Tawadros, Chief Operating Officer, iProspect; and Lauren Vaccarello, Director of SEM and Analytics, FXCM.

John Tawadros starts off. What if you could tell what your leads are doing throughout the day? He's talking about tracking leads and how much you should track.

What can be done with the information? Search converts 21 percent better if a user is exposed to a banner ad first. 37 percent of the time users look in at least two engines at any given time. There is no impact to conversion beyond 6 touch points. Print ads improve CTR by 33 percent. He's giving us a lot of stats.

Does it make sense? Is data size statistically significant? Expectations - What if you learn nothing monumental? Cal you live with the imperfections? Can you drive every channel through one tracking system? Can you support the investment?

Chris asks if there is a rule of thumb: Is there too much you can track. He says it depends on how much you want to spend, but for him, there's never too much because you just don't know what you don't know.

Alissa Ruehl is talking about tracking past the lead and into the sales funnel. What does your company really want out of your marketing efforts? Is it sales? Top line revenue? Bottom line revenue? ROI? What metrics are you currently using to measure your success?

All leads are not created equal, so how can you separate the good ones from the bad? Integrate your paid search system with CRM. Pull paid search info into your CRM system. Report on sales instead of just leads.

She's got three case studies.

1. Client 1: ROAS by keyword
   • They found that keywords could generate leads, but not sales or revenue, and it went the other way around, too. Hidden treasures and shallow successes were outed.
2. Client 2: ROAS by engine
   • Yahoo was not generating leads as well as Google. Looking at the CRM system, they found that the cost per sale in Google was over $750, while for Yahoo was under $350. This changed the client's first intention to cut back on Yahoo spend.
3. Client 3: ROAS by Web site
   • The new design had a slightly higher click to lead conversion rate. However, the new design actually had nearly double the cost per sale.

Research of data was needed to uncover what superficially looked like a success but was really a loss, and vice versa.

How is this done?

1. Create custom fields in your CRM system for the info you want to capture, for example, keyword, engine, campaign, referring URL.
2. Update tracking URLs. If you're already capturing this info in your analytics system, you can use the same variables.
3. Set cookies to capture these variables. Put it on all pages, not just landing pages.
4. Add hidden fields for each of these variables to all of your forms. These should pull values from the cookie rather than user input.
5. Test and report. Make sure the process is working. You should see leads coming through with paid search tracking info, as well as basic contact info from the form. Set up reports in your CRM system to list sales or opportunities.
6. Compare this data to your paid search spend, just as you do with your lead data.

Caveats to remember:

• Pay attention to statistical significance.
• Take your sales cycle length into account.
• Look at junk leads as well as sales.
• Consider an intermediate step of looking at cost per opportunity.

Adam Goldberg agrees that all leads are not created equal. In fact, that's what he'll be talking about. He says that if the cost per lead is too high, it's considered bad. If it's too low, then it may be because of high leads per sale. But this thinking can be very misleading because the high costing lead could be the highest profit generator.

Next he's using a basketball metaphor. This will be interesting. Points = sales and shooting percentage = conversion rate. If you take out the player with less points, you may be taking out the person who's providing valuable assists.

Stages of the customer buying cycle:

1. Problem recognition: banner recognition and emails
2. Information search: your paid search ad
3. Evaluation of alternatives: they look at your competitors or other options
4. Purchase decisions: they go back to the search engine with the specific brand
5. Purchase: cha-ching

You could think of allocating your profit equally among all the steps OR you could put more money into the steps that put the product into the customer's mind, not step 4 where they already know what they're going to get.

He has a slide of an advertising ecosystem. At the top is Advertising Sources, pointing down to Capture Advertising Analytics. This points down to four options: No Sale, Call, Submit Lead Form, and Purchase. Both Call and Submit Lead Form point to CRM Software.

Lauren Vaccarello is up to the podium next. She says that people working in e-commerce don't really need to listen because they get the data from shopping carts, whereas lead gen people should listen.

The benefits of integration:

• Bridging the gap between sales and marketing
• Remedy the size fits all conversion tracking
• True conversion tracking

You have several options for integration:

• Omniture
• HBX (Visual Sciences via Omniture)
• Clicktracks via Hotbanana
• WebTrends
• Google Adwords
• Custom programming with your solution or Google Analytics

One potential obstacle is sales objections. The solution is bribery. Give the better lead lists to those who are on board.

Another potential issue is poor planning. The solution is do your research first, set your goals before you start, and define and add fields before integration.

Strategies to increase ROI:

• Go after the low hanging fruit. Build campaigns with highest conversion rate reports.
• Build Time to Sale reports.
• Create marketing campaigns geared toward long sales cycle leads.
• Get your highest ROI by campaign report.
• Stop wasting money.

Takeaways:

• CRM integration is not for everyone.
• With integration you can garner true conversion tracking.
• You have a variety of integrating options.
• Do your homework first.
• Prioritize your leads.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 06/ 3/08 at 4:33 PM | Comments (0)
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Creating Value In Your SEM Business

It's time for our first session in the brand-new Business Track. Moderating this next one is Chris Elwell, President of Third Door Media, Inc. Sean McMahon, President, EngineWorks; Matt Naeger, Executive Vice President, Operations, Impaqt; and our very own Bruce Clay, Bruce Clay, Inc. are speaking.

Before officially beginning, Bruce takes a straw poll of the audience. He wants to know who owns their own business, who's been around for more than three years, who's got more than 10 employees. It's all the same six or so people. Then he asks who's making more than $2 million revenue a year. It drops to like 2. I guess he wants to know who he's speaking to.

Sean McMahon kicks off the presentations. He says that he hopes to give the audience value by seeing what he's done to be successful.

What is value? "Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep." -Ayn Rand. He says this means value requires actions. He'll be giving us insight on the actions he took to build value in his companies.

At his former SEM company, TrafficLeader, the challenge was getting clients' indexed. They decided to go to the search engines and pitch the creation of paid inclusion listings. They met with Inktomi, who was obviously skeptical. Sean proposed to them that paid inclusion could monetize their business. TrafficLeader became the first paid inclusion partner with a search engine, and they followed through with a number of other search engines. By building value for the search engine, they brought value back to their client.

Several years ago, Sean patented a product he invented. It was a water bottle with an attachment for fitness machines. He first went to fitness centers and told them that they could give out the bottles to new customers, and could say, "By the way, the bottles only fit in our machines." This would keep customers coming back to their gym. This was valuable to the fitness businesses.

A client of his current SEM company, Lisa Kline, came to him for search marketing services. They found that the original keyword focus was a little off. Instead of Hollywood fashion, it should have been celebrity fashion. With this change there was a 59 percent increase in search revenue through a 12-month organic campaign. This new model of marketing is now driving all channels of Lisa Kline's marketing mix.

Focus everyday on building value in your client engagements and the value in the marketplace will take care of itself. You can't make someone buy you, but you can position yourself as highly valuable so that someone will want to buy you.

Bruce Clay is up next. Go Bruce! Bruce is going to use the history of BCI to help illustrate the valuation timeline. He started in '96 as a one man show. At 5 people, he had people do things for you. At 10, he had to delegate. At 20, he was able to specialize. At 50, an employer is federally regulated. Over the last five years there has been 40 to 70 percent growth in revenue.

The high-value assets are staff, tools, and training. The philosophy of the company is knowledge transfer. Clients are required to undergo training because an educated client won't fight recommendations and the project goes faster and smoother. The result of high-quality service is consistent growth, a solid r