Conference Buddies

SMX West, Santa Clara, CA
March 2-4, 2010
Santa Clara Convention Center
http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/

Search Marketing Expo is one of the premiere Search Engine Conferences to attend.   Concepts learned in these workshops help increase your search engine marketing knowledge for SEM, SEO, PPC, Analytics, and Social Media / Networking.  With an exclusive: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s first conversation with the search engine marketing community at an industry event, and his first keynote address since the Microsoft + Yahoo! deal was blessed by regulators.

Speakers:
Vanessa Fox
Adam Audette
Derrick Wheeler
Track: SEO

Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.

Speaker: Derrick Wheeler

CIRTA:

Crawl
Index
Rank
Traffic
Action

Six Steps to Sucess:

Organic Search Engine Optimization is the process of systematically satisfying the needs of search engines and the needs of your users.

1. search engine crawls entire site
2. search engine indexes entire site
3. users perform targeted queries
4. search engine ranks appropriate pages
5. users click on ranked listings
6. users take action and/or interact with the site

You Should Track SE Ranking on a Monthly Basis:

• Your top keyword list
• Your long tail keyword list
• User paths
• Success events
• Value of user

Speaker: Adam Audette

Outrider (’97), AudetteMedia, Oversee SEO at Zappos, Lead SEO strategy at AKQA

Site Audits are extremely intensive

• Rely on experience
• Problem solving is crucial
• Basics can easily be taught
• Takes time to learn deeply

Part Art:

• Follow your nose
• Use your experience
• Requires diligence
• Requires trust

Part Science:

• Use tools to diagnose
• Undergo calculate investigation
• Check for set factors
• Document everything

Factors Investigated:

• Main navigation elements
• General navigation items
• URL

A Framework for SEO audits:

On-page:

• Domains
• Sections and categories
• Pages
• Media (Images, video, etc.)

Off-Page:

• Back-links (quantity, quality)
• Social media signals
• Cache date(s), indexed pages
• Toolbar PageRank

Big 4 Factors:

1. URLs
2. Site Architecture & Navigation
3. Product-level Pages
4. Site Latency

What about Deliverables:

• Summarize
• Keep it Prioritized
• Keep it Actionable
• Build in Follow-up
• Sizzle Matters (presentation matters, professional, visuals)

Executive Summary

Priority level = High Medium Low

Documenting Issues:

• Problem
• Impact
• Recommended Solutions

Some Cool Tools:

• Google Searches
  site: + inurl: / intitle:
• Lynx / SEO-browser.com
• Charles / ySlow (checks latency)
• Various Toolbars
  SEO Book Toolbar – compare up to 5 URLs together
• Google WAVE

Other Tools:

• Linkscape
• SEMRush
• wget
• Log Analysis

Speaker: Vanessa Fox

Tools and Tactics for Diagnostics

• webmaster.live.com
• siteexplorer.yahoo.com
• Google Analytics
• tools.seobook.com
• firefox plugins

Crawling, Indexing, Ranking

Step 1: Get the data

Benchmark the top 10 search queries that bring in the most traffic
Aaron wall’s rank checker

Crawl Log Example: Apache Log Analyzer 2 Feed
code.simonecarletti.com/wiki/apachelog2feed

For SEO: Site latency = indexing factor = if site not crawled then it’s a ranking factor

AJAX = URL needs to change (don’t keep the same URL for all content/pages)

URL structure Checklist

Crawl efficiency checklist

No Follow -> registration pages, add to cart shopping cart pages, etc.

1. Check if you are penalized
   webmaster.live.com
   google.com/webmasters
2. Review the webmaster guidelines
3. Identify the issue
4. Fix it!
5. Request re-evaluations

For SEO: site optimization, main site errors, http://www.iis.net/extensions/seotoolkit/

Speakers:
Danny Sullivan
Dr. Qi Lu
9:00 – 9:45AM on Wednesday, June 3 in International Promenade Room

Dr. Qi Lu took the helm of Microsoft’s search efforts in January. Now six months into his new role, during this keynote Q&A with Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, Lu shares in this some of the changes that have been made to Microsoft Live Search and where the company intends to head in the search space.

Dr. Qi Lu

Bing.com

• To understand user intent – organized in a better way to meet the user intent
• Paradigm shift from web links to web groups
• Make more informed decisions faster
• Have semantic meaning

Be objective, be brutally honest, look at the obstacles, and be clear where are you heading to. Be dedicated, determined and committed.

Bing = in Chinese bee-ying – being certain to respond or responsive

Quality of the search experience, the Internet is a viral media, it will become popular in itself if you do it right

Search engine technology

Some search queries tend to need fresh content to be relevant

Speakers
Danny Sullivan
Matt Cutts
5:00 – 5:45PM on Tuesday, June 2 in International Promenade Room

What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.

How do you know if your website is in the penalty box?

• Look for a sustained drop in rankings
• Hidden Text, maybe hacked
• You can find some data in the Webmaster console
• Can contact them through the Google Forum

PageRank sculpting less effective

• No penalty for “no follow” to change how page rank flows in your website, but less effective to do.
• You can try, but it will not be as useful as before.
• Spend your time in building new content.

Google Bowl?

Google tries to prevent competitors from buying bad links – bad links can’t hurt you.

AJAX

To be SEO safe, use common mouse over code when using AJAX.

Duplicate content

Private label their content
i.e. Job listings to multiple websites

To avoid duplicate content penalty for co-branded sites, ask yourself what is the value being added? If it doesn’t provide a good user experience, it may be penalized.

Javascript

Javascript is more likely to be crawled and executed now a days by search engines

Speakers:
Chris Silver Smith
Danny Sullivan
Hamlet Batista

3:30 – 4:45PM on Tuesday, June 2 in Bay Auditorium

Links still rule as a major factor in helping pages rank well. You know all the obvious link building tips such as directories and forums. This session goes off-the-beaten path with ideas on how to find important, trusted, and relevant linking opportunities you might be overlooking.

Some Good Link Sources:

• Audience Targeted Content
• Useful Widgets/Tools
• RSS/Atom/Feeds
• SERP Listing Optimization

1. Audience Targeted Content:

Useful information for .EDU (i.e. businesses near schools)

Public Domain Content:

• U.S. Gov
• State Gov
• Wikimedia Commons
• Project Gutenberg (i.e. Wedding etiquette)

Private Domain Content:

• Brief quote as fair use
• Permitted partner content
• Open APIs
• Flickr, other media repositories

2. Useful Widgets/Tools:

• i.e. Weather, Sayings of Confucius (silvery.com) for MySpace, etc.
• Keep branding minimal
• Provide easy to install code
• Also see Patrick Sexton: SEOish.com

3. RSS

4. SERP Optimization

• Search Monkey /cli.gs/searchmonkey
• Google rich Snippets, embrace strutured Data: Micorformats & RDF to be prepared to integrate

Speaker: Hamlet Batista

4 Tactics for High Quality Links

Tactic #1: Goodbye pagerank, welcome google cache (when your website last crawled)

• High page rank vs. real visitors
• Google has to prioritize their time when crawling websites

Link value:
Discoverability
Frequency (if search engine crawl you freq. your website must be popular)

Tactic #2: Piggy back on current use

• People write about what they see.
  In Twitter: #3wordsaftersex (in search, articles, etc.)

Tactic #3: Inform your subscribers

Tactic #4: Share interesting video

• Video ranked, people link to your video, people link to your website

Bonus Tip:

• Search engines can index links inside of different type of contents (PDF, Flash, etc.)

25% link building outsourced from Arnie Kuenn

4 different link building techniques

1. Video
2. Content or Profile Links
3. Clients & Suppliers
4. Contests & Promotions

1. Video

• PPT
• Moyea’s PPT to Video Converter
• Voiceover
• Get link

2. Content or profile links

Example:

• Google’s Knol (knol.google.com)
• Hubpages
• Bule.com
• American Chronicle
• Squidoo, scribd, rateitall, spoke, abouus.org, hotfrog, linkedin

3. Your Clients & Suppliers

• Offer shirts, gift cards, discounts, etc.
• Send letters (US Mail)
• Include an offer or request in your invoices
• Use the phone! Set aside some tie for a telemarketing campaign
• Also: your local & national associations – become a sponsor or make a donation

4. Contests & Promotions

• What makes a good contest?
• A great offer or prize, valuable to people you want to attract- Something reasonably innovative, not a “me too” contest
• Proper time frame, enough time to enter but not so long they lose interest
• Create a buzz, who will help you promote it and how?
• Your panel of judges, PR, linkedin, twitter, facebook, etc.
• Optimize every page!

Socialize:

Tweet = 1 entry
Blog about it = 5 entries

Age of links definitely have relevancy

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz
Laura Lippay, Dir. Technical Marketing, Yahoo
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

• How much does that H1 tag really matter, versus the number of links pointing at a domain?
• Do “authority” sites always have an advantage over other sites with less reputation?
• Is brand recognition now a bigger issue?

This session looks at on-the-page and off-the-page factors that influence web search, to understand what remains useful and what new signals are growing in importance.

Speaker: Rand Fiskin

Rand presented data based on 70 top SEO survey respondents plus data correlations based on several hundred real search results (Feb-May 2009).

Keywords used in the title tag and root domain had the highest impact on SEO ranking

On page factors:

• Header Tags (has a low correlation) – H1, H2, H3 less than 1% impact
• Alt Text (higher correlation)
• Keyword in URL (very high correlation)
• Keyword Location (closer the better)

Top Factors:

1. URL
2. Title Tag
3. Domain, path, query, sub-domain

Other Factors:

• Number of linking domains
• Link popularity
• Page content

Speaker: Marty Weintraub

Is my page strength comparable for a specific keyword query in light of keywords, page, or domain attributes?

Page Strength & SERP competitiveness in charts takes hours

Brands are now ranking higher due to Google cranking up authority score

We’ve all heard them. Domain traffic is awful, DKI ads are great, DKI ads are horrible. Bid high at the beginning of your campaigns to juice your quality score, and so on and so forth. In this session, we take a look at the common perceptions and misperceptions about paid search advertising. So what really is true?

Moderator:
Jeffrey K. Rohrs, Vice President, Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:
Scott Brinker, President & Chief Technology Officer, ion interactive, inc.
Reid Spice, Director of Search Media Strategy, iCrossing
Frederick Vallaeys, AdWords Evangelist, Google Inc.

Myth#1: A landing page is a single page

• A landing page is a bridge between ad and conversions.
• Don’t use a short bridge for a long jump.
• Other times a 2 or 3 page “path” is better
• Segmentation landing page (40% lift)

When you want to segment respondents:

• Ease someone into a process, lead them down a path.
• Don’t think of it as a landing page, think of it as post-click marketing

Myth #2: Flash on landing pages is evil

Loading delays, lengthy, design over clarity, expensive to build
iRobot (43K in size, loads < 1 sec), writing is text not image, Google can index, images load asynchronously, sharp text rending

Why climb the flash mountain:

• Higher conversion rate
• Better branding
• Easier engagement
• Creative differentiation

Myth #3: MVT is better than A/B Testing?

Multivariable Testing vs. A/B Testing = Apples and oranges

MVT limited to one page, A/B can have multi page paths

Speaker: Frederick Vallaeys
Google Adwords Evangelist
fredrick@google.com

Myth: No value in the Google Content Network?

• Is there any value in the Google Content Network?
• 5% of people’s time is doing searching
• 95% multiple touch points
• 20% of conversions came from content network, CPA of content network is 2% cheaper than search on average.

Best Practices:

• Separate campaigns for content vs. search
• Use enhanced online campaigns
• Use Placement Performance Reports to discover opportunity
• Use Conversion Optimizer
• Review Conversion rate/ position report

Myth: Should I lower my bid so I won’t be first? (Curious clicks?)

CTR drops as the position decreases

Total sales = Impression x CTR x Conversion Rate

Finding the sweet spot

Step 1: Determine your value per click

Conversion rate x Profit margin per product sold

5% conversion rate x $7 per item sold = $0.35 value per click

Step 2: Experience with different bids determine incremental cost per click

CPC = Cost/Clicks
ICC* = Difference in cost/Difference in clicks

*INCREMENTAL COST PER CLICK

Myth: Is Broad Match Worthless?

• Broad Match is Very Useful
• People can’t spell
• Queries are getting longer (3 word to 8 words are gaining share)
• Broad match accounts to 33% of conversions
• Does not affect quality score

Tips:

Run search query reports on a regular basis
Lower your bid on broad match vs. exact match

Myth: Can I Juice My Quality Score by Bidding High?

Normalize for position (Top position must have high CTR may lower Quality Score if you don’t meet it and vice versa)

PPC GEO Targeting Myths

Myth: IP Addresses can reliably locate you

i.e. Reston VA = AOL servers
VPN server, ISP server, Legacy ISPs, etc.

The smaller the target, the less accurate it will be

i.e. Virginia Beach = 425,000 people

Search Engines could supplement IP data with other info like weather queries, news, movies, signed-in info, but they don’t. Most use IP data to geo-target PPC Ads.

Best approach for GEO targeting:
Hybrid approach: States & cities

General PPC Tips:

• 7 to 15 keywords per Ad text / Ad group
• Content Network: Figure a theme, but is difficult with less keywords
• DKI = Dynamic Keyword Insertion (Be careful what keywords you use, not a great experience).
• Use DKI for landing pages (Keyword inserted, bolded, etc.)
• Broad match doesn’t impact Quality Score

Moderator:
Rae Hoffman

Speakers:
Brent Csutoras, Social Media Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc
Jen Miller, Manager, Delta.com Onsite Marketing & Content, iProspect
Dave Snyder, Co-Founder, Search & Social

Think social media has nothing to do with search? Think again.

QDF = Query Deserved Freshness

Social Signals (What are the signals?)

• Engagement
• Methods and systems for personalized network searching
• Relevancy Feedback Indicators
• Upstream and Downstream data (where you go)
• User Reviews (how people rate things)

Drive Early Traffic from Twitter

• Plan out your campaign
• Utilize well crafted DMs
• Engage Top Users
• Track via Query String Paramenters
• Add Retweet Capabilities to the page (add retweet badges)
• Control the bookmarking of your site (Delicious)
• Increase use of site (javascript)
• Add Engagement Points (i.e. video, voting, widgets, quizzes, review)

Speaker: Brent Csutoras

Using Stumble Upon!

Stumble Upon is a social aggregation site, showing users popular content based on votes.
Stumble Upon will only show a page once per person (category with 30 people, only 30 visits)

2 Ways To Add:

• Browser Tool Bar
• StumbleUpon.com/submit

Tagging:

• StumbleUpon.com/ads
• Be targeted, pick the right category or you will get negative reviews
• Cross tagging
• Look at what other people are tagging, edit yours

Add and make friends:

• Subscribers, testimonials, votes
• Post to your blog
• Vote videos and photos
• Tag and Review
• Choose a niche

Tips:

• Don’t review the same site multiple times, this looks like spam (by promoting yourself)
• Avoid patterns in voting, discoveries, shares (i.e. It looks like spam if you only stumble friends, click on the same button too many times in a row, or discover too much from one section)
• Choose and Use the Right Tags
• Most importantly…Make Your Profile Rock!

Speaker: Dave Snyder

Creative Commons license:

• Find pictures
• Use their picture in your article (we liked your picture, featured in our article and gave you credit) – they may link to you. They are pro amateurs (but not pros – top professionals won’t let you use their photos).
• Join flickr, start contributing, creative commons commercial reuse picture work the best

Speaker: Jen Miller, Delta.com

Integration is key to success

Interlinking tactics:

• Target keyword list & link to main site
• Blog links to YouTube & Flickr
• Links back to specific blog post

Tracking & Listening Tactics:

• Measure with a dashboard
• Action on key metrics
• Give ‘em more! They’ll talk and link

Other tactics:

• Be flexible
• Specify Goals
• Cross promote
• Give customers what they want

SMX Advanced 2009 – Seattle
June 2-3, 2009

Attend SMX Advanced for:

• Exceptional content so compelling, you’ll want to implement what you’ve learned before leaving the conference. Super-charged sessions on PPC, SEO, social media marketing and other hot button topics will help you flourish today, tomorrow and in the future.
• Invaluable connections made possible by the ultimate mix of structured networking opportunities and social events. Meet new contacts, reconnect with colleagues – SMX makes it easy to interact and exchange ideas with other industry thought leaders.
• Essential conveniences to help you juggle your every-day responsibilities while maximizing your conference time. Always available and free Wi-Fi; hot lunches, snacks and beverages all day; access to all presentations and tools to pre-plan your custom itinerary – SMX has got you covered.

The following is a summary of a session at SMX West 2009 on Search Engine Friendly Web Design presented by Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

5 Basic Rules of Web Design

When centered on the user, there are specific rules that form the foundation of successful web design. These are:

1. Easy to Read

The code and text should be written in a way where it is easy to read. It should continue the “scent of information” (contain relevant keywords from acquisition source) so that a user can easily discern that they are in the right place.

2. Easy to Navigate

The web site should be, first and foremost, designed for users and searchers, not for search engines. All elements that appear to be clickable should be and users should have a sense of where they are at when navigating the site.

3. Easy to Find

Being easy to find refers to both the before and after of users arriving on a page. The web site should be found/linked from major search engines/relevant sites. Important elements and contents should be found above the fold (portion of the site that is shown upon initial loading without scrolling). Contact information should be easy to find, usually in the header, footer, about us, or contact area.

4. Consistent layout, design & labeling

Consistency communicates a sense of trust, security, reliably, and branding. Consistency is based on many factors, such as, use of space, color scheme, logo usage, placement of content, etc.

5. Quick to download

Speed is determined by both actual and perceived download. If what users want is hard to see at first, then the download appears to be slower. Larger downloads can be applicable if the important elements can be found easily.

3 Building Blocks to SEO

The build blocks to SEO are centered on how crawlers/robots can index your site. These are:

1. Text Indexing

If the content of a site does not have any text or “indexable” content, it won’t rank well, which in turn, makes it difficult to find.

Some other important factors:

• A site should make use of Primary Text, which includes title tags, visible copy, text within the header, and anchor tags/links as all search engines index these and use them in determining rankings.
• If time allows, a site should make use of Secondary Text, which includes meta tags, filenames/domain names, and alt text, as only some search engines index these.
• Breadcrumbs can help a lot, giving a sense of organization to users, as well as provide relevant keywords to links.
• If applicable, try to use captions for images because visible copy weighs more heavily than alt text.

2. Follow Links

The link component refers to internal liking within the site. These should factor in site navigation scheme, as well as other page interlinking.

Some other factors include:

Navigation menu

From most search engine friendly to least friendly:

Text Links > Nav buttons > Image Maps > Form/DHTML Menus > Flash

If using non-text links, always provide 2 forms of navigation. 1 for target audience and 1 for search engines. The search engine friendly one can be a navigation placed within the footer.

Embedded Text Links

Text links placed within visible copy can help to enhance usability and search engine friendliness. However, it is important to not overdo it. Too many embedded text links can decrease usability and legibility.

Site Maps

Site maps do not refer to the URL list that can be submitted to search engines. In this case, a site map refers to a page that provides users a hierarchy to your site structure. When creating a site map, it should not just be a list of URLs or links. Having annotations great helps with legibility.

Others

There a number of other helpful ways to improve usability and search engine friendliness. Some involved linking to related pages, upselling, and having a horizontal navigation vs. a vertical navigation.

3. Site Popularity (Link Development)

Popularity is based on number of external links, the quality of external links, and click popularity.

Some other factors that influence popularity include:

• Having substantial and unique content
• How other sites link to your site (What is the anchor text being used? What are the annotations?)
• Having keyword rich text on homepage
• Having at least one crawl-friendly navigation (even if it’s the footer)
• Having links to relevant information/sites
• Having a visible site map

Miscellaneous

Some other factors to think about in regard to search engine optimization and web design:

• Always design for searchers, not search engines
• When redesigning a site, SEO should be put into consideration in the initial phases and not after the site is built
• Test the usability of a site to determine the effectiveness of a site. If users can’t find the information, most likely, it’s not good for SEO either