Marshall Simmonds, Define Media Group

Rhea Drysdale, Outspoken Media

Summary

Marshall and Rhea provided cutting-edge strategies and tactics to maximize your exposure in non-traditional results like News, Images, Videos, Blogs, and Maps in this presentation at Search Fest 2012.

Marshall Simmonds

Nov. 2011 – Google releases freshness update which includes trusted resources almost immediately.

25% of queries were fresh results

Fast-forward to Feb. 2012 and 45% of queries included ‘fresh’ results

What to do about freshness?

•  Blog about a topic. Blog often (editorial calendar)
•  Include Time stamp
•  +1 probably a strong signal
•  Watch Timely queries – thinks people ARE searching for (queries, what’s hot, real time, trending) not necessarily historical data
•  Pay attention to the <lastmod> in your SML sitemap
•  RSS Feed – feedburner.com for you blog

What about video?

YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. You HAVE to be on YouTube to get into universal results

• Google looks at YouTube likes, shares, favorites, comments, embeds, title to decide relevancy
• Include the word “video” in your title
• Include transactional kw’s for eComerce
• KW rich description, can include transcription in description using transcriptionservice.com
• Use annotation and caption feature to add links (interlink if you have multiple videos)
• Pick the right category
• Tags- DON”T waste too much time but add some
• Open comments – but buyer beware (negative comments are okay too many positive comments look fishy).
• Distribute!  Tell everyone about your video – social, video sitemap, RSS

Images

• 20% of all searches on google are image-related searches, not optimizing images is a missed opportunity (alt text, caption, image name)
• Create separate SML sitemap for images (SEO friendly images – WordPress Plugin)

Google+

• The big dogs (espn, npr) are paying attention, you should too, it’s early, build your circles, post relevant content (not necessarily yours)

Rel=author tag

• Users react to search results differently when they see an image (30%-400% increases in CTR have been seen)

Sitemaps (do them)

• XML, HTML, Image, Video, News, Blogs, Product
• Sitemaps increases indexed pages

The post SearchFest 2012: Universal Search appeared first on SEMpdx.

Chris Silver Smith of Argent Media

Local and Social: Trends and Tips for Growing Your Business

Google Local Rankings 2012

• Now over 200 Ranking Factors used
• Human ratings of webpages included
• Humans perform varying levels of local listing verifications too.

Classic SEO elements still effect local rankings: Title, description meta, domain name, image alt text, keywords in text, etc.

Categories that Influence Local Ranking Factors

1. Relevance: keywords in the business name, keywords in classic onpage SEO, business category match
2. Distance: radius of distance from city centroid, City/ZIP code outline region, user’s geolocation (IP address/cellphone)
3. Prominence: relative popularity determined by pagerank, this can be effected by a business. Mentions and citations also play a factor, as well as “PlaceRank”–the popularity of a location.

Google matches business listing data with website data. Basic business listings info from data aggregators effect your local listing, aggregated from its own data as well as third party business listings. Make data matching easy for Google–use semantic markup to ensure Google interprets your local business site properly. USE BOTH:

• hCard Microformat/RDFa
• Micro Data – Schema.org

Both aren’t that difficult to implement so it’s best to use both on your local business site.

Google uses citations throughout your site and across the web to figure out your listing. Number of mentions of your business name plays a factor, mentions of your street address and telephone also play a factor. Links are also influential.

Business Data Sources for Basic Citations

Superpages.com, New York Times, Hotels.com, Yellowbook, Dex, any business directory. Register for free on as many of these as you can. This process can be done by hand or paid for via a 3rd party service.

Analyze competitors place pages to discover more citation opportunities.

Wikipedia data has been integrated by Google for quite some time. Wiki mentions can place prevalence on your local place page.

Participate in local events, street fairs, etc., and get mentions to bolster your local presence.

Unorthodox Citation Sources

• Wikipedia Articles (your business, it’s historic building, shopping center, founder page, etc., if they’re noteworthy enough.)
• Wifi Hotspots–add your free hotspot to hotspot directories for citations
• Geo Cache Locations
• National Register & State Historical Marker Locations–is your business in a historic building or location?
• Chamber of Commerce Websites (and other member organizations)
• Pressed Penny Machines, pinball, classic video games, ATM locations
• Weather reporting stations
• Specialty directories–spanish speaking business, asian-owned business directories, etc.

Rapidly Developing Location Popularity Signal: Check-In Services

Google may be starting to use check-in data to rank business. There has been some correlation between check-ins and relevance of local search results. Encourage employees, customers to check in on sites on 4Square, Facebook, etc. Google Latitude has implemented Leaderboard to gamify check ins in the Google social scape. It’s only a matter of time until we’re able to find proof of check ins effecting local search results. Google+ and Hotpot Data is being incorporated into local search results.

Mobile Ranking & Optimization Factors

Web pages that have been optimized for mobile may be getting a bump in local SERPs. The user’s geolocation can effect SERPs. Make sure your Google Map page is optimized. Hours of operation is particularly important on Bing, so having hours of operation may be an important factor in appearing in the local search result.

Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence

If You’re Not Doing Mobile . . . You’re Committing Marketing Malpractice

Google in Q3 2011: 79% of its top advertisers didn’t have a mobile-optimized site.

In Q4 2011, only 37% of Internet Retailer 500 had mobile sites.

Mobile Web vs. Mobile Apps

Perennial debate; both will co-exist (mobile web won’t “win”). Mobile sites are a must for all search marketers. Mobile HTML sites have 100% reach.

• Smartphone penetration: 48% (over 50% for younger, affluents)
• 120 Million us mobile internet users
• Mobile first: 25% of smartphone owners say they mostly go online using their phone
• iPads/Tablets: 45M in US (doubling by 2014)
• Android has a larger user base; Apple OS drives more traffic.
• Mobile is still only 9-10% of web traffic–but growing.
• For women, Facebook is the top Android app after Android Market (Nielsen 7/11)

Mobile Advertising

Time Spent vs. Ad Dollars: 1% ad spend per mobile media vs. 23% time spent on mobile media.

US Mobile Advertising 2012: $2B+

The mobile ecosystem consists of:

• Search (Google PPC, Click2Call)
• Display (Publishers/Developers, networks, ad exchanges, mediators, banners, rich media, video)
• Networks (Google, Apple, Millennial Media, Jumptap, Microsoft, others)

Mobile Display Ad Unit Standards have been winnowed down from 60 formats to 6.

Both Google and Yahoo are pursuing cross platform targeting in search and display.

Mobile Search

The top categories searched in mobile are news, restaurants, maps, shopping, entertainment, sports.

Mobile search is stimulated by a response to a traditional media/ad, word of mouth, seeing something in a store, responding to a mobile ad, or responding to an online ad.

Google reports 29% of restaurants search queries are coming from mobile. Hotels 19%, Autos 16%, Consumer Electronics 15%.

Mobile Optimization Required by Google

Mobile optimization is now part of AdWords quality score for mobile and will be for organic as well.

Mobile-only campaigns drive 11.5 percent more CTRs than campaigns simply imported from PC AdWords. Why? Possible reasons: use of location, phone extensions, greater relevance and more precise targeting of mobile.

Mobile Bidding Advice from Google

You must be in the top 2 slots. Nobody’s going to scroll. Ensure are you are bidding for positions 1 or 2. Try bidding 2x as much as desktop ad campaigns.

Use click to call. Conversion metric is easy to track ROI.

Local numbers in search ads have a higher CTRs. Have one.

Location is a ranking factor. Optimize your geolocation.

Local content boosts CTR.

The post Searchfest 2012: Local and Mobile Strategies and Tactics with Chris Silver Smith and Greg Sterling appeared first on SEMpdx.

Susan Delz of LiveBall

Conversion rates are  the same today as they were in the 1990’s.

10 Landing Pages Conversion Optimization Tips and Best Practices

1. Relevant–You have to be relevant with each landing experience. Create optimized landing pages for keyword groups. Sometimes you can create individualized pages by search engine. Create localized versions of landing pages. If you don’t know where someone is coming from, ask them.
2. Interactive–Create cool creative for your landing pages. Try HTML 5 for landing pages across platforms. Light boxes are a good option to support your conversion. Accordion content is a great way to bucket content for users to engage with, tabbed content also for interactivity above the fold to support conversions.
3. Dynamic–Use technology to make your page more relevant. Dynamic keyword insertion can add relevance to your landing pages by adding language your customers are actually using and searching. Geo location targeting is another way to add dynamic elements to your pages.
4. Progressive–Progressive profiling can funnel people through the buying process using cookies across different sessions. Use different pages as they cycle through the buying process. Multi step forms are great if you have submission abandonment. Tailor second pages based on first form submission field if they leave part way through the form submission process.
5. Mobile ready–Almost 7% of US web traffic comes through mobile. Dedicated mobile pages create relevance, increase conversions, and help build your brand. Make it easy to convert on a mobile site. Automatically optimized mobile sites change the landing page to be site specific.
6. Social–Embrace social. Social beacons can provide assurances. Fans and videos provide “social proof”, which is huge for ecommerce and lead generation. Social engagement can be a form of conversion or a secondary conversion metric. Landing pages can also be a great way to start a conversation. Create dedicated Facebook landing pages, even for B2B.
7. Social Sign In–Social sign in gives people an easy way to convert. Its accurate data and makes conversions easy. 25% of online publishers and ecommerce companies have implemented social sign in. This is not limited to B2C.
8. Disposable–Make landing pages quickly, efficiently. You have to be able to move through different message pages quickly for quick experimentation.
9. Data-mined–Use analytics to find the greatest opportunities.
10. Integrated–Get out of your offices and go talk to people. Try everything.
11. TEST!!

Brian Jones of Dealer.com

Mobile Landing Page Conversion Optimization Tips: Increasing Conversions in the Mobile Space

Mobile is Big

• 75 million US adults access the internet daily via mobile.
• Mobile web adoption rate is 8x greater than desktop was in the 1990’s
• Mobile ad spend is expected to be $6 billion in 2014

More than half of smartphone searchers purchase. 67% of mobile users continue research. 68% visit a business. 59% of mobile users discuss mobile searches.

Do you have a mobile strategy?

Have you implemented a mobile strategy?

How often do you test mobile?

If it is so big, why are the majority of people not doing anything about it?

Why test ad copy between mobile and desktop?

Because mobile users are trying to do different things than someone on a desktop. People at home are researching something; mobile users are trying to do something. “Visit now” vs. “Call us now”.

Mobile Ad Copy Best Practices

1. Highlight click to call functionality
2. Mention the fact the user and site is on a mobile device
3. Add local specific ad text
4. Include immediate calls to action: find directions or store nearby, call, find coupons.

Mobile Ad Formats

Google has 4 mobile ad formats. Click to call, click to call phone extension, click to download for apps, and call only.

Why increase bids on mobile?

Because there’s much less real estate. Be more aggressive with your bids.

Mobile Bidding Best Practices

1. Bid separately on mobile
2. Max of five ad spots on mobile vs 10 on desktop
3. Consider bidding 2x your desktop bids.

Mobile Budget Best Practices

• Internet and mobile media consumption are growing, investment lags.
• Determine your website’s percentage of traffic on mobile using analytics.

Mobile landing page strategy

1. Ease of use/simplicity is key.
2. Users want video for mobile.
3. Mobile call tracking is key for mobile campaigns.
4. Reduce navigation.
5. Get mobile specific analytics.
6. Create mobile specific design.

Best Practices

• Keep it simple.
• Don’t use flash.
• Put the most important information at the top.
• If you must scroll, scroll down not across.
• Minimize content.
• Minimize load time.
• Provide a link to the desktop version.

Jordan LeBaron of REI

Conversion Optimization Tips

Example: Slack line guy in Superbowl halftime drove a lot of slack line searches and purchases.

Where do you start your testing?

Most people will go and look at competitors first, and the stimulus can get overwhelming and distracting.

Learnings:

1. Don’t try to go big, you can get way in over your head. Minimize the process to streamline your efforts.
2. Start with baby steps. Outline your competencies and your gaps that remain and make decisions accordingly. Competencies: executive sponsorship, thought leadership, established process, technology, agency partners. Gaps: HIPPO (Highest paid persons opinion: “vanity keywords”), no expertise, no testing framework, IT roadblocks, limited budget.
3. Start with money drivers.
4. Identify a testing element.
5. Iterate, iterate, iterate!!! Test and learn, test and learn, test and learn.
6. Document and share your learnings. Create a formal template for proposals and testing so you can sell it across your organization. Don’t hog your learnings, share them across your organization.

The post Searchfest 2012: Conversion Optimization Tips with Susan Delz, Brian Jones, Jordan LeBaron appeared first on SEMpdx.

Speakers:

Justin Kistner – Webtrends

Kelly Feller – Citrix

Moderator:

Jessica Ward Amplify Interactive

Summary:

You’re a social marketing genius. Your Twitter Followers are up 900%. Your Facebook Fans are pushing 40,000. You have thousands of people subscribing to your RSS feed. Your efforts are successful right? Learn how to set goals and have your social strategy help to achieve those goals from our leading panel of experts.

Speaker: Kelly Feller

Social Media for Business

• Executives agree that social media is important, but priorities don’t reflect that. Why?
  • ROI is hard to calculate
  • Results are not often immediate
  • Focus on too many tools dilutes efforts
  • Infrastructure investments (hiring in-house) is often required
  • Marketers and Finance are accustomed to managing and funding short term campaigns, not long term programs
• Misaligned strategic model
  • Campaign approach; transactional, occasional, impersonal, short-term
  • Programmatic approach; interaction, constant, relationship, sustained
    • Metrics are measured different for each
  • Social campaign…
    • Awareness, can often be outsourced, finite time periods, specific budgets, specific success metrics, ROI easier to calculate, less head-count, often B2C, less risk, agency expertise
  • VS. Social program
    • Engagement, in-house, ongoing, various budgets, diverse success metrics, ROI difficult to calculate, head-count investment, often B2B, greater risk, consultant expertise
  • Campaign approach is good for..
    • Awareness building, elections, product or campaign launches, pledge drives, event/trade shows, social advertising, social contests, facebook fan builder
  • Program approach is good for..
    • Relationship building, communities, blogs, customer support, corporate facebook page
  • Social media proliferation is bad for companies, and leads to a fragmented brand experience
  • Focus on doing a couple things well;
    • Determine objectives; share messages, join conversations, learn from audience, acquire new fans
    • Choose one or two; listening, blog (when in doubt) twitter, LinkedIn
    • Test and Measure; set specific goals, engage at least daily, don’t give up, report results regularly
  • LinkedIn
    • People don’t mind talking about businesses on LinkedIn

Speaker: Justin Kistner        

Paid Social Campaigns

General

• Still at the infancy stage of social analytics
• Facebook’s ad network is growing 125% faster than Google’s did during same age in company
• The older Facebook users are, the more they click on Facebook ads

Building Facebook fans

• Engagement earns fans
• Built through friends
• Brand posts are not seen by the majority of fans; if a company has 1 million fans and posts something on their wall, this will only show up in about 3% of fan news feeds
• Edgerank – this is to Facebook as page rank is to Google
• Use content that is socially relevant for Facebook to build engagement; blog posts generally do poorly

Business purpose

• Facebook is more about customer loyalty than customer acquisition
• Give fans a reason to be fans (special offers)
• Fans of brands will spend more on those brands
• CTR is 7X higher for ads targeted to fans, rather than non fans

Measure and Optimize

• Use apps to create landing pages
• Track Facebook campaigns like a website

The post Searchfest 2012: Social Analytics appeared first on SEMpdx.

Rand Fiskin, SEOmoz

Justin Briggs, Big Fish Games

Summary:

Rand and Justin faced off for this presentation.  The challenge?  Which marketing pro could show off the best tools to address today’s challenges and opportunities.

What a wonderful job Rand and Justin did summarizing internet marketer’s biggest challenges and providing tools to solve them.  In the end, the presentation attendees decided Rand was the winner.  I’m not going to away all the tools they discussed but rather highlight some of my favorite new ones I discovered today.

Rand Fishkin

Problem: Keeping your twitter account organized – to get more followers you have to follow more users, but how do you weed through all the junk on you twitter dashboard?

Solution: ManageFlitter – a powerful tool to clean up your twitter account

Problem: Choosing when to post to twitter- we all know the standard best practices, but what will actually be the most effect time to post when your followers are engaged?

Solution: Tweriod – Tweriod gives you the best times to tweet by analyzing both your tweets and your followers’ tweets.  So you can start tweeting when it makes most sense to reach others.

Problem: Finding a good and available domain name

Solution: LeanDomainSearch – Find available domain names by keyword

Justing Briggs

Problem: Finding link sources – Justin admitted he misses Yahoo! Site Explorer for this purpose

Solution: YoLink – searches content behind links.  You can also use Google Alerts for link building and tie it in with YoLink

Problem: Visualizing data for marketing insights

Solution: Gephi – open source network graph visualization.  A really cool tool you MUST check this out!

Problem: Finding data for link bait.

Solution: Zanran – a data and statistic search engine.  Good to use for infographic data.  It’s still in beta and free so use it before they start charging for it.

Any new tools you have found that you would like to share?

The post SearchFest 2012: Marketing Challenges and the Tools to Solve Them appeared first on SEMpdx.

Joanna Lord of SEOmoz: 

The search and info discovery process has become so fragmented (every morning you’re inundated with facebook links, twitter links, spread across multiple sites) so marketing has changed. Re-targeting is the answer to the new way people search and discover information.

Display advertising of yesteryear: less was expected (old model):

• Acquisition: generate traffic and improve brand awareness
• Conversion: produce conversions, increase revenue of each conversion
• Retention: set expectations that will be met at this point and establish trust  (Here’s where retargeting shines.)

What is retargeting?  

Someone comes to your site, they are marked with a cookie, and then my ads are shown across ad networks on other sites. Goal is to bring them back to our site further along in the buying process–hopefully trust has been built through ads–so that they’re further down the purchase process.

Stats:

• More than 90% of retailers do not complete a transaction in their first visit.
• Retargeted consumers are nearly 70% more likely to complete a purchase as compared to non-retargeted consumers.
• Retargeted consumers spend, on average 50% more than those served with non-retargeted banner ads.

10 Retargeting Tips:

1. Go after the 90%: Optimize beyond the desired action. Retargeting ads should be optimized to each user’s site use patterns, if they visit the blog most, retargeting ads should be tailored towards the blog.
2. Capitalize visually on what makes your brand memorable: Because you have multiple impressions with retargeting, you can tailor your images and branding and be much, much more creative than display.
3. Sequence retargeting: Tell a brand story using sequential ads over time. Segment what you’re showing people based upon how long they’ve had your cookie without a conversion.
4. Expect more from the data: Know what to expect and then micro manage your way there.
5. Choose your triggers wisely with retargeting (& sequence them): Time sensitive promos are more powerful. You can only show a promo to someone who’s already seen your site, so a retargeted ad is a much more powerful ad.
6. Test any and every truth you operate under.
7. Get social: Engaging with strangers is nice, engaging with qualified leads is better. Use retargeting to start social conversations. PROTIP: CUSTOMIZE THE FB AND TWITTER LOGOS TO STICK OUT.
8. Correlation & Causation: Subliminal messaging FTW! Go to partners, stick your ads next to partners that will lend brand equity to each other.
9. Go beyond your site: Use search retargeting to target users that searched organically for related terms and target users that visited similar sites to your own, target users that visited partner sites to yours, target users that you correspond to in emails.
10. Think outside the box: Stop trying to use the time honored “build trust” and use retargeting to take what’s unique about your brand and leverage it in a creative way. You can be really creative with retargeting; leverage that to create a persuasive media message.

Where to start?  Start building out your first audience.

Challenges with Retargeting

1. Tracking can be difficult. Dial your segment code, burn code, and conversion code.
2. Settling expectations and handling haters: Send an email out to your company and let them know you’re testing the program. Be honest with people who email you about stalking them across the web: “we’re testing. please be patient”
3. Optimization is required. You have to optimize research, landing pages, negative sites, managing backlash, banner ads, reporting uphill, etc. It’s a lot of work and a lot of testing, but exceptionally effective once dialed.

Adam Berke of AdRoll:

Retarget Like a Rockstar with Adroll!

AdRoll is the most widely used retargeting platform in the world, used by Fortune 500 companies–over 3500 companies using it today.

The Evolution of the Display Ecosystem 

• Direct Buy
• Ad Networks
• Ad Exchanges
• Intent Data (98%* of carts are abandoned)

Leveraging Your Intent Data: Segmentation. 

• Look at time statistics to segment your retargeting.
• Time counts: time might be the most effective stat to segment.

Retargeting is great for retention.

It’s a fantastic CRM channel for cross selling, up-selling. Use reminders to get them convert after some time. “The cookie is the new email.” Nurture relationships using triggers and time stats.

Demand Control & Transparency

Demand transparency in your retargeting. Get the data and use it to your advantage.

Utilize the Display Canvas

Example, display different tshirts on a particular model the customer lingered on. Personalize your retargeting creative based on user behavior.

TAKE AWAYS:

• Leverage your intent data
• Segment and consider timing
• Make your marketing message useful
• Don’t obsess about pricing model, everyone has to buy it on a CPM

The post Searchfest 2012: Display Advertising and Remarketing w/Joanna Lord and Adam Berke appeared first on SEMpdx.

The post SearchFest 2012 Preview – Amplify Interactive appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?

Hi there – I’m Jonathon Colman. As the in-house SEO for REI, I’ve got one of the best jobs in the world: awesome co-workers, lots of fun challenges (both in and out of the office), a leadership that encourages intrapreneurship and work/life balance, and the ability to grow awareness for a co-op that takes sustainability and stewardship seriously.

The environment and conservation mean a lot to me. I came to REI after many years doing front-end production, content creation, social media, and Internet marketing strategy for several non-profits, most notably The Nature Conservancy. I was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso, West Africa in 1999-2000, facilitating sustainable solutions for rural public health issues.

These experiences helped me understand that our content and activities online – the way we reach out to people and connect with their interests and the places where they live – can have a strong (and positive!) off-line impact. Internet marketing shouldn’t be just about driving traffic, increasing conversions, or hitting some sales goal; it’s also about curating passion while generating action for the things we care about most.

That’s part of the reason why I’ve recently started graduate school, studying  Information Management at the University of Washington. My personal goal is to help organizations and companies take their data, content, systems, and marketing to the next level by eliminating the "pain points" between Leadership, IT/e-commerce, and marketing groups. Working together, we can become a true knowledge organization with a singular focus: our customers.

TL;DR? I’m a coffee addict, I tweet at @jcolman, and I’m active on all the usual places. I live in Seattle with my wife, the glass artist Marja Huhta.

2) What are some good enterprise-level techniques to insure crawl equity?

Start off by looking at the big picture to gain an understanding of who your internal stakeholders are, what they value, how they’re incentivized, and how they work together (or don’t!). Buy these folks coffee, take them out for lunch, spend some time sitting with them and gaining an appreciation for their work and interests. This period of data-gathering, listening, and relationship-building forms the basis for the hard work that comes next.

As the enterprise SEO – an army of one, in my case – you can’t (and shouldn’t!) do everything. Instead, find ways to help your internal partners understand the value of your work and incentivize and reward them for their support. Some positive ways of doing this are to work with management to create shared goals, communicate SEO success using language that other parties find valuable. For example, a comparison to PPC costs – what you could expect to have to spend in order to drive the "free" organic search traffic – always turns heads. Another helpful tool is to record the baselines and set targets for the internal rate of return for your SEO work; essentially, this is a goal you want to hit to pay for staff time several times over.

Then we move into tactics. In terms of crawl equity, here are three of the most valuable things we’ve done:

• Give the crawler what it wants: high-quality, original, creative, branded content. One of the differentiators between REI and our competitors is that we place a high value on creating original product information rather than relying just on manufacturer specs and descriptions. We employ an in-house crack team of product information writers who start off with manufacturer information, but then actually look at, work with, and sometimes use the products we sell in order to write about them from an REI brand perspective. This means that our copy is going to be newer, more creative, and simply more informative that most of what’s out there. And since the algorithms are now placing a greater value on both freshness and the original publisher of information, we don’t have to worry about copycats and scraper sites out-ranking us. So when the crawler visits our site, it knows that it will find deep, rich content – a good experience for both the search engines and our users. That’s what SEO is all about.

• Improve web site speed/performance. Ever since Google announced that site performance would be considered an organic search ranking factor, we’ve been trying to squeeze the most performance out of our front-end code and back-end systems. The results, which I’ll talk about in my session with Dennis Goedegebuure, have been startling. Each time we’ve optimized for site speed, we’ve seen large increases in crawling from both search engines. While it may sound like site speed optimization is hard work (and it is!), there are lots of simple things that you can do that have a positive impact. Even if you’re not doing the coding directly, I’ll be showing data that can help you formulate a business case that gets the work done.

• Minimize duplicate content. There was a time in the not-so-recent past when our site had over 2 million known URLs containing duplicate content. Most of this was in the dynamic, site-search portion of our hierarchy. But with strong internal partnerships between teams and by taking action on technical infrastructure opportunities like rel=canonical, rel=next/prev, and the URL parameter tools in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, we were able to reduce our duplicate content by over 98%. And since duplicate content is one of the warning signals for Panda, this work had the additional impact of safe-guarding our site from negative impacts.

TL;DR? Create original and branded content, make it fast, and ensure there’s just one version of it.

3) How do you ensure that the IT department doesn’t undo all your hard work?

Luckily, that’s not really an issue for us. IT isn’t our enemy and they shouldn’t be yours, either – if something gets left out or undone, then it’s ultimately your fault and no one else’s. By building relationships and working hand-in-hand with folks, you’ll eventually be able to work SEO considerations and requirements into everything from the QA process for a particular project to the checklist for the release of all new content and site features.

So the bottom line here is to make SEO everyone’s job and everyone’s success. Whenever things go wrong, be both accountable and passionate about taking all the blame. And whenever things go right, praise the work of others and document their successes and teamwork for your leaders. You’ll know that you’re doing it right when your colleagues start walking up to you and volunteer new ideas and opportunities that they’ve come up with on their own. For an in-house SEO, those are the moments that really make it all worthwhile.

TL;DR? Be a good partner; follow the Golden Rule.

The post SearchFest 2012 Mini-Interview: Jonathon Colman appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?

I make people happy — as happy as I can. Where I focus that energy most is with my clients, my team and my family. It’s why I co-founded Outspoken Media with my business partner. We wanted to provide a better quality, boutique Internet marketing company after we’d spent years in in-house and agency positions. It’s been three years and we’ve got a team we’re exceptionally proud of and we’re excited about the future of seo consulting, link development, online reputation management and social media services.

Me personally, I love managing client strategies, training our team and building the business. It’s my favorite hobby as unhealthy as that may be and I’ll talk to anyone about the process. When I’m not obsessing over industry trends, project management or business development, I do take time to relax with my husband and our ferocious new kitten.

2) When talking to clients about SEO, how do you explain to them the necessity for diverse content in order to generate universal search traffic?

The best way to explain something is to show it. I always like to start by grabbing competitive data. Whether it comes from a direct competitor or maybe a related industry, I want them to see the potential because it’s likely that someone else is already doing a decent job, intentionally or not. When they can see what’s possible, it’s easier to verbalize what universal search is and how it might apply to their business.

From there we’ll discuss content opportunities. We find areas that exist on and off-site that lend themselves well to universal. This might be a product description with opportunities for online reviews (individual and aggregate), user profiles, complex how-to’s that would be much more effective as videos, customer testimonials, or industry data that would make a fantastic infographic or visual resource. Sometimes an opportunity isn’t immediately apparent and in those cases we have to deep dive into their industry looking for questions from users, interesting trends in their analytics, search insights and offline marketing. We always find something though that will bring a return.

3) How do you see universal search evolving in the next couple years?

It’s tough to predict the future, so let’s talk about today’s trends and hope they’re still applicable in a year, which I believe they will be.

Google is getting really pushy with their search results and the promotion of personalized and Google+ content. I would personally like to see that wane, but with Page at the helm, I think the proliferation of SERPs with Google properties is going to increase. Just recently I saw personalized images appearing before my regular universal search images! Personalization of universal search — that’s the big idea for the immediate future.

I would also look more closely at schema.org. Universal search is getting more advanced and has schema.org and other forms of markup to thank for that. It’s not necessarily universal search in the true sense of blended indices, but each result has more capability with its SERP real estate if webmasters are accurately implementing markup for everything from sports scores to movie times and locations. We’ll cover much more of this during my SEMpdx panel with Marshall Simmonds, you’ll just have to come to hear the rest!

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1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?
After leaving my role at Intel, where I was a senior strategist & founding member of the Intel Social Media Center of Excellence in May, I joined Citrix as their Corporate Director of Social Media. In this role I am responsible for operationalizing social media at the corporate level which includes guidelines, training, risk mitigation, crisis management, corporate-wide social tools, social metrics, and corporate social media strategy. I also manage a team responsible for managing key corporate social media sites including the Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube, & LinkedIn.

2) How do you teach employees to be “social media responsible” in a corporate setting when many are used to “anything goes” away from work?
When an employee engages in social media for a brand, they take on a new level of responsibility. It’s important to have clear guidelines and training; training that allows for tracking of individuals who have taken it. Then there must be some level of random audits to ensure employees are following the guidelines. My team also hosts monthly best practice sessions where we teach others at the company how to leverage social media to accomplish their business objectives. For example, our next training is on the topic of using social media for events.

3) What steps would you take to handle a corporate social media response to a “crisis” situation?

We have developed a comprehensive crisis management process that categorizes issues into two buckets: issues and crises.

a. Step 1: Determine if it’s an issue or a crisis.
b. Step 2: If it’s an issue, we simply log it & continue to monitor to ensure it doesn’t turn into a crisis.
c. Step 2: If there is an actual crisis we activate a crisis response team who works to determine the severity of the crisis.
d. Step 3: Define response strategy, if there is one. The severity of the crisis helps guide our response, whether it’s by one spokesperson or we call on all our social media practitioners.
e. Step 4: Issue a social media alert internally guiding employees on what you want them to do. If level 1 crisis, they are directed to stand down & not comment on the issue at hand. If it’s a level 2 crisis we provide messaging that helps them communicate with their networks about the issue.
f. Step 5: Severity of the issue also determines how frequently the crisis response team meets to stay on top of issue. It also directs which executives to inform.
g. Step 6: Ongoing monitoring—a MUST for any issue or crisis.

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