Portland, Ore. – Nov.23, 2009 – SEMpdx is pleased to announce the launch of its fourth annual Search Engine Marketing conference, SearchFest 2010.

Joining the search engine optimization and pay-per-click tracks this year is a new category sure to be of interest to public relations, advertising, and other marketing professionals: Social media.

SearchFest 2010 takes place at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Registration is now open to the public (https://www.sempdx.org/searchfest/) and pre- agenda ticket prices are on sale at $139.

“Every year SearchFest enriches the pacific northwest’s business community by bringing together everyone from corporate executives and Web marketers, to traditional business owners and agency professionals,” said Ben Lloyd, SEMpdx president. “SearchFest is one of the best opportunities all year to learn new things and network with your peers. Attendees will not be disappointed.”

SearchFest 2010 will offer multiple informative learning tracks, workshops, and panels designed to provide insight into the most up-to-date strategies and technological advancements in online search marketing.

This year’s topics will include social media marketing, advanced search engine optimization (SEO,) local search, Web analytics, paid search marketing, future trends and more.

Past keynote speakers have included Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, and Rand Fishkin, CEO and Co-Founder of SEOmoz.

Want more information or registration?

About SEMpdx

Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, SEMpdx is a non-profit dedicated to nurturing the development of search engine marketing (SEM) in the greater northwest.

SEMpdx provides a resource for local professionals and businesses interested in leveraging SEM to enhance their career and bottom line.

SEMpdx’s mission is to improve the quality of work and life for SEM professionals as well as elevate Portland’s profile on a national scale as a hotbed of SEM talent.

The organization hosts monthly educational and networking events where local businesses can get valuable tips on how to increase awareness and revenues via SEM and meet and share best practices with like minded professionals.

The post SEMpdx Presents SearchFest 2010 appeared first on SEMpdx.

• SEMpdx board member David Mihm will be doing a presentation @ 1pm on Wednesday “Local Search Marketing Strategies“
• Past SEMpdx President Kent Lewis served as this year’s eMarketingSummit chairperson, and he’s moderating a session @ 3:30 on Wednesday “Just the Tips Please – Implementing a Successful Online Strategy“
• SEMpdx is presenting a Social Media Marketing panel on Thursday @ 2pm
• SEMpdx is doing an SEO Hot Seat @ 3:30 PM on Thursday. We still have site review spots available. If you’re interested – sign up at SEMpdx.org/Events
• SEMpdx will have a booth in the expo hall on Thursday. We’ll be talking about membership and events, and doing some sitelabs throughout the day. So stop by & say hi!

This is just what SEMpdx is doing. The eMarketingSummit also features several other great speakers and presentations including:

Keynote Presenter Rahaf Harfoush, New Media Strategist, Member of Obama’s Social Media Team & Associate Director of the Global Cooperation Initiative at the World Economic Forum. Don’t miss her presentation entitled Yes We Did: Strategic Insights and Social Media from the Campaign that Changed History

The eMarketingSummit is going to be great – if you haven’t already, sign up and we’ll see you there! And if you’re an SEMpdx member – you get a discount on your registration. Stop by the members area to get your discount code.

The post SEMpdx at the 2009 Innotech eMarketingSummit appeared first on SEMpdx.

Mike Rosenberg: What a great event! A few days removed and I cannot think of one thing that really went wrong (and being one of the organizers with an ear to the venue that is a good thing). I believe we had our “best-year-ever” in many regards…most attendees, best speakers, most sponsors, great keynote (thanks Danny and Pixelsilk), great lunch (thanks WebTrends), tremendous Hot Seat, and the Closing Reception (thanks EngineWorks) ended the day on the perfect note (although it would have been nice to keep going, I know I wasn’t ready to go to dinner yet). I had to make tough decisions all day on which presentation to go to and we even had some controversy during my Social Media Marketing panel.

Ben Lloyd: I was infinitely proud of this year’s SearchFest. Realizing our goal of bringing Danny Sullivan to Portland takes the cake for me, but I am equally proud of just how well the event came together and how great the level of content and speakers were this year. The level of buzz around SearchFest speaks for itself (https://hashtags.org/search?query=sf09&submit=Search), and I heard time and time again from attendees who come from outside the SEM industry that they were amazed at the amount of practical advice they were getting even though search isn’t necessarily their job. I think it was great that SearchFest was able to bring a broad range of topics that are relatable across marketing disciplines and to Web marketing, but are also part of our job as search marketers. I’m looking forward to seeing how SearchFest will continue to evolve in the coming years.

Hallie Janssen: Like many of us who spend our time online as a living, I can easily get overwhelmed with the amount of data being streamed in to my inbox. It’s hard to keep up on the latest and greatest tips and tricks and tools for those tips and tricks. I thought the committee for SearchFest brought in the who’s who of speakers that helped me sort through the noise and get to the ‘real’ information I need to do great work for my clients. It was great to hear what these guys thought was important.

I also walked away with some black hat tactics from several sessions and panelists. Am I going to use those black hat tactics with my clients? Um, no! But I walked away with some ‘grey hat’ ideas that could easily be used. There’s something to understanding the black hat side of marketing and tailoring to fit your comfort level. I hope others in the room got that message and could move on from the ‘scary black hat stuff’!

Scott Hendison: Having so much knowledge crammed into the zoo conference center was electrifying, and being involved in my own small way with the event was a privilege and a pleasure.

I think we’ve broadened the visibility of Portland on the search marketing scene, and raised the bar considerably for future SearchFests, and I can only hope that next year brings us something just as successful – but it’s gonna be a tough act to follow.

David Mihm: Searchfest 09 was a truly amazing event to be a part of.  When we sent out feelers to the speaker lineup, I had no idea so many were going to say yes!  Obviously once Scott Hendison had convinced Danny to attend, everyone was a little more receptive.  But hopefully their experience this year will build some goodwill for 2010. 

The attendance was also phenomenal.  I met a couple of Local SEOs who’d come from places as far away as Kamloops BC (Steve Hatcher), Fort Collins CO (Cecily Crout), and Spokane WA (Ed Reese) — wow!  So cool.  Hopefully we can develop an even more kick-ass Local panel next year (I’m open to suggestions as to whom the attendees would like to see on the panel!).

Todd Mintz: The best analogy that I can make about SearchFest 09 was that it was like seeing a great band at a club show. We were able to provide the quality of a much bigger conference condensed into one day in an environment where the “A” list speakers were closer and more accessible to the audience. It was really nice reconnecting with our guest speakers that I don’t see that often as well meeting / renewing acquaintance with our members, local business people, and Silicon Foresters.

Tracy Chapman: SearchFest 09 was the best yet! As someone who helped plan the first SearchFest, I can without a doubt say that the conference has now reached new heights, especially with Danny Sullivan as the keynote speaker. I thought all of the speakers were amazing, smart, funny & informative and approachable.

I learned some great tips for Social Media Marketing, which is one area I’ll admit I’ve been a little bit behind in. For a long time I thought that all the social networking was “fun” but would be a waste of time for many businesses and I really avoided most of it as I’m pretty protective of my time, but now it’s obvious that it is key to developing business relationships, monitoring and building your brand, and gaining new customers. It really is a necessity in the online marketing mix, so I really appreciate all the sessions that were devoted to this topic.

Heather Lloyd-Martin: I suppose the thing that impressed me most was our speaker lineup. We didn’t just showcase our great local speakers (and we have quite a few.) There were also a number of nationally-known speakers, like Danny Sullivan, Stoney deGeyter, Tony Adam and Greg Hartnett, who flew in for the event. What that indicates to me is that the search community recognizes SearchFest as a strong conference presence – and that’s a great accomplishment after just a couple years.

Thanks to everyone who put this on, and for doing so at such a reasonable price!!

Mike Nierengarten: The event was great. Full of knowledge, news, and even some controversy. I especially liked John Andrews’ presentation (who always manages to think outside the box), Bob Garcia’s (whose alternative to the GWO ties directly into a current client concern), and the combination of Derrick from Microsoft and Laura from Yahoo explaining the difficulties faced in running SEO for the big conglomerates. All in all, a major step forward, and with each year getting better and better, Searchfest has a bright future.

Rachel Andersen: I loved that there was a good mix of in depth technical information for the SEM experts as well as broader topics for the marketing folks that may be new to the field. The speakers did a fantastic job at keeping the audience engaged and providing valuable insights in such a short (10 min) time period. With Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox gracing us with their presence, SearchFest 2009 solidified Portland’s influence and role in the SEM industry.

Can’t wait until SearchFest 2010…

The post SearchFest 2009 Reflections appeared first on SEMpdx.

Moderator: ISITE Design’s Steve Kemper

Microsoft.com: Taming the MSCOM Beast
Derrick Wheeler
Senior SEO Architect

+ Microsoft’s SEO definition – the process of influencing the structure of content and authority of a site to increase the number of quality visits (Structure > Content > Authority). But always make sure you have compelling offers.
+ The Beast – 100’s of websites each having own goals and managed individually. Completely decentralized with over 1.2B URLs. Actually they have infinite muahhaa…
+ Who’s hands do you want your success to be in? Yours or the search engines? Um, I’m assuming the former.
+ MSCOM SEO Framework – create a process to attack all sites.

Sitewide SEO initiatives which included many “audits” to find biggest issues for biggest bang for the buck…
1. narrowed down to duplicate content
2. excessive use of redirect
3. improper error handling

Site Specific SEO Program
Page level guidance
+ Common page level scenario – keyword usage, free tagcrowd.com to visualize most important keywords for optimization strategy.
+ Biggest challenge from agency to in house – now actually accountable to getting things implemented. If you are going to budget for SEO, be sure to include budgets for implementation.

Investments to help ID top 5 issues. Easily helps to clean up millions of non valuable pages.

Beyond Theory
Marshall Simmonds
NYTimes.com
Chief Search Strategist

+ Goal is to lessen the load that marketing budget may have.
+ Build foundation for lesser competitive keywords – looking for long term benefits to eventually lessen PPC costs down the road.
+ Where does SEO department fit? At About.com and The Times – dedicated department.
+ Evangelize the service and best practices.
+ Rocky movie: underdog, trained relentlessly, he LOST. Much to be learned from this.
+ NYT challenges: 11 million docs, email registration wall, paid subscription wall, jounalists/editors to train, marketing hates IT and IT hates marketing, company ego, resistance to change, interdepartmentlal issues.
+ Crawl barriers, content moves/expires, limited CMS, massive duplicate content, lots of URL parameters.
+ About balancing editorial integrity – never say the word “change”. Enhance. Maximum SEO with all other integrity points.
+ Basic Training – keyword research, basics of on page SEO, title tags and headers
+ HTML and XML Sitemaps
+ Annotated links = Awesome.
+ Ability to divorce headline from the title. Gives more freedom to writers.
+ Measure as much as possible. SEO progress, ID potential problems, targeting new opportunities, etc.
+ Developed proprietary network diagnostic tool to go back to the team to help real time issues. (SearchClu)
+ Mistakes to avoid: undercommunicate success, don’t wall off content, not checking in with IT, lack of editorial insight, excessive expectations and timeframes.

SEO Tactics for the Job
Jeff Quipp
Search Engine People

+ Agency perspective
+ What is SEO? process of getting desired results from organic search using whatever tactics you feel comfortable using.
+ 5 main levers to affect desired results: the defined objective, site structure, amount/quality of content, power of site (authority), anchor text utilized.
+ What does Google say? Increase number of quality links.
+ Implications of interest: site structure can be an impediment, link power potential infinite?, quality content buils links but takes time and resources, the less competitive the industry is online the less need for content and vice versa. A serious committment to achieve desired results.

Tip #1: Make sure site and pages are well optimized and not an impediment.Utlize key areas of placement.
Tip #2: To improve overall site ranking/performance – build quality content routinely, build a reward system for quality content ideas and production from in house staff or agency, promote content online.
Tip #3: Ranking for specific uncompetitive keywords – submit to quality directories, syndicate articles, get links from suppliers and clients, ensure targeted keywords are in anchor text.
Tip #4: Getting business from more competitive keywords – guest blog on other (relevant) sites and link back to your site, hold a topic specific contest, build content to answer questions about the topic, SEM PR to promote new content, optimized anchor text, widgets, publish unique research, do something remarkable…sausage marketer? create the biggest sausage ever…

Conclusion: Wikipedia and NYT are powerful because of quality content; links are crucial; the more competitive the goal the more quality content is needed.

SEo Tips and Real Life Examples
Laura Lappay
Yahoo
Director of Technical Marketing

+ What does the in house SEO look like? Most of audience here reports into marketing over development or product.
+ Report into marketing – challenges are that there is no engineering accountability. Must make friends within the department, build relationships and execute training.
+ Report into engineering – typically works well especially in terms of the CMS.
+ Reporting into product – accountability is good but search marketing disconnects are more obvious.
+ Split into marketing and engineering – strategic.
+ When Laura first started they reported into business intelligence for SEO reporting. Then search moved under marketing which was advantageous because much closer to paid search. Now split SEO into strategy and technical subgroups.
+ Risks and the Hard Times. In house risks – retaining talent (slower pace, tough to influence), no accountability (many teams responsible), not producing results (set expecations and make small wins first), not broadcasting results.

Q&A Session
1. Category Killer Comment – ideas and strategies?
2. Multiple title tag strategy for NYT – much for internal search, no thoughts on whether or not symantic web has anything to do with that. Hasn’t really hit their radar yet.
3. SEO gaming the system? NO. Engines want you to organize content in a way that they can access it.
4. Keyword research process? At site level for Microsoft because of range. Jeff uses paid search for data.
5. Web 3.0 and symantic search – what’s in the future? Day to day outlook… let’s master the basics. Yahoo is taking on social media…being able to measure brand in other places and connect to traffic.
6. How do you measure a page against another that has identical content? Just focus on main body of the page, can typically ignore navigation and boiler plate info. Big variance between 90 and 95% similarity.

Rachel Andersen is an Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.

The post SearchFest 2009: Beyond Theory, SEO Tips from the Trenches appeared first on SEMpdx.

3pm in the Vista room

Speakers

Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz
Adam Audette – Audette Media
Anne Kennedy – Beyond Ink

Moderator

Lisa Williams – Media Forte Marketing

Session Details

Anne is the first speaker for this session. Her presentation’s title is A Proust Questionnaire… for Business.

A perfect business happiness, to Anne, is a great team, contended customers and profits. Anne specifically places the team aspect before all.

What is the greatest depth of misery? A cube farm with a punch clock.

Anne’s mentors / heroes / role models are her partners.

What is the trait she appreciates most in others? Relentless resourcefulness.

What is Anne’s principal talent? It’s networking – she loves to connect people to others who “belong” together.

Where does she most like to run a business? Her answer: in the cloud. You need to be everywhere; have operations centers everywhere.

What does she value most in business associates? Opportunity.

What does she consider the most overrated business virtue? Thrift. You need to spend money to earn money. You can’t save your way to prosperity.

What is Anne’s greatest regret? Having to let people go. If you’re going to have employees, you need to remember: you are working for them. You’re helping them with benefits, professional development, etc.

What’s her greatest extravagance? Travel.

What’s the trait she most deplores in herself? Frittering away time on useless stuff.

What is Anne’s motto? Follow the money.

Adam was the next speaker. He is going to talk about growing your SEM business.

Adam started it off with: Search is up… but there’s never been so much crap. The market is saturated, more and more people are getting in the industry for “easy money”, the industry as a whole is immature…

What you need to do is differentiate; set yourself apart as a business. Who you are, what you bring, what you provide, etc.

How to differentiate yourself:

• Have real SEM skills. If you don’t have them, keep learning!
• Contribute to the industry. Start authoring great blogposts, volunteer at great forums, go out there and socialize.
• Put yourself out there. Network, give people business cards, etc.
• Ignore the “stardom” trap. Instead of focusing about yourself, think about how you can provide more and more value.

Differentiate your services. Focus on some core competencies and refine them time and time again. Make those core services pop. Do this by exhibiting your expertise. Show you know your stuff about the topic, the ins and the outs. If you have the expertise, then you’ll be able to walk the talk. Focus on the client – “the client is hiring you but you need the client.”

Differentiate your marketing. Firstly, get on twitter. Even if no one follows you back, @reply to individuals because they’ll see this. Also be willing to ask for help – ask colleagues or even competing sites. Blog about your company and focus on that core services.

You have to know about your values. Your business should have a set of core values that you wholly believe in. These will be pillars to your company. You build what you practice.

“Your team is absolutely everything.” Focus your team on their strengths. Your team is your company. Build a smart team by leading by example. Build upward mobility that fosters and rewards growth.

Rand was the last speaker for this session. He will be speaking about SEOmoz and using his company as an example of how to build and grow an SEM business.

His historic timeline:

• 2002 – Stay Alive
• 2005 – Build a Brand in SEO
• 2007 – Find the Right Path
• 2009 – Scale

Who does Rand hire and how do they find them? He hires people he knows, trusts and likes. He also hires those who are passionate about their work. And they also “fit” into the company culture. It’s people that you already somewhat know they’re going to be a fit before you even interview them.

Rand believes SEOmoz’s competitive advantage lies in its history and profile, the boutique level of service, its technology and the company’s rigorous process.

How does SEOmoz decide what products / service to offer? They decide by:

• Competence with deliverables
• Passion for the work
• Scalability of the deliverable
• Educational or promotional value to the company

SEOmoz isn’t differentiated by its consulting but by its product.

What has been most effective for Rand to grow his business? Speaking and networking.

What hasn’t worked for Rand? Search rankings. He has friends who rank quite highly for competitive terms like SEO company and SEO consultant but networking brings in the best clients and work.

What behaivors has Rand had to change to become SEOmoz’s leader? His personal scalability and task list. He also has had to scale down his sensitivity to criticism. Also has to accept the fact that he can’t answer all of his email.

Questions that were asked after the session were:

1. How do you get clients to know what they need? Also, what are Rand’s thoughts about having friends as clients? He answered that he has had only positive experiences with friends for clients. Anne replied that it was rare to have a friend as a client. Anne said that it all comes down to having the customer understand the value. Adam said that he never has had a friend as a client.
2. One thing you wish you knew when having those “growing pains” when growing your company? Anne replied with “it’s not personal; it’s just business.” Rand’s response was two things: you’re not the customer and needing to making sure everything is accessible.
3. Do you train specialists? Anne’s motivation to hire was to hire individuals who knew more than she did. Focus on your core service set – “it’s very hard to know everything now.” Adam hasn’t clearly defined specialists within his company. Rand said that when they were small, generalists were the ideal hire. When you get bigger, hiring should be based on specialisation.

This session’s details were compiled by Senior Account Executive Christian Bullock of Amplify Interactive.

The post Building and Growing Your SEM Biz session at SearchFest 2009 appeared first on SEMpdx.

Officially titled ‘Site Analytics: How to get the most out of your site without increasing your budget’ the session includes 3 analytics experts: Eric T. Peterson, Ian Lurie and Bob Garcia.

Eric T. Peterson resides in Portland, OR and is the author of book and blog, Web Analytics Demystified, https://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/. He is also known for several other resources on web analytics including The Big Book of KPI’s and Website Measurement Hacks.

Ian Laurie is the president of Portent Interactive, a full-service Internet marketing agency. Laurie also acts as the firms chief Internet marketing strategist and tactician. He publishes a blog entitled, Conversation Marketing where you can see his latest articles, https://www.conversationmarketing.com/.

Bob Garcia acts as VP of Business Development at Widemile. He brings over 15 years of experience to the panel specializing in “deep analytics and search marketing insight as well as experience in developing and executing new solution and partner go-to-market strategies, and building and managing cross-functional teams.”

Eric Peterson kicked things off with a “Top Down Perspective” , taking a look at how the web has changed over the last few years. Web 2.0, mobile content and syndicated content (RSS) has made measuring the web very difficult. He laid out the top 3 things that companies need to focus on to maneuver the shifting landscape:

• Understand and use your data
• People – Need the talent to analyze the data
• Process – Need a plan to implement changes based on actionable data

Peterson suggested companies employ the 50/50 rule when hiring talent and implementing technology. Spend half of your resources on technology and half of your resources on people. This a shift away from the prior ratio of 90/10, 90% on talent and only 10% on technology. He argued this rule wasn’t realistic and so favored a more balanced ratio.

Ian Laurie got down to some specifics with his equation for generating a positive ROI. He advised companies focus on Value, Growth and Pipeline when contemplating website ROI. These principles apply not just to ecommerce websites but lead generation sites and even non-profits. “This equation works for everybody unless you want to build a website and lose lots of money”. He followed with a precise metric that companies MUST use to determine how to build the value of their website:

Value of a website click = lifetime value of a customer x lead to conversion rate x click conversion rate

By determining the value of a click to your website you can then make smart decisions surrounding marketing tactics to ensure they are returning a positive ROI.

The session was concluded with Bob Garcia who focused on optimizing your website and conversion funnel using testing. He outlined the different types of testing used including A/B testing and multi-variate testing. He explained “testing can help eliminate the guesswork and allow you to make data-driven decisions.” There are many tools available to help marketers perform these types of tests including Website Optimizer by Google and Widemile.

The post SearchFest 2009: Site Analytics Session with Eric T. Peterson appeared first on SEMpdx.

Utah SEO – Jordan Kasteler

Use a robots.txt file to ensure that your site is crawled and the pages that you don’t want crawled wont be crawled.
Evaluate your template for usability and clean the code up. Rename images, rename the directories and file names if needed. Also delete any extra code that doesn’t do what you’re looking for.

Code Optimization – Rearrange the Title of your blog post structure and ad in H1 tags if they currently don’t exist.

Duplicate Content – Use the new canonical URL tag for your blog posts.

Permalinks – Change your permalinks for each blog post, a good structure is to use your title as the URL or use a category.

Pagination – Moving from one page to another, there are some plugins that you can use to establish a clean pagination structure.

Cleaning up your categories – it’s easy to add descriptions within a category, by adding some PHP code.

No-Following blog posts – Using the “more” feature (use the “Add link attribute” plugin) you can ensure that you have a good anchor text structure.

Custom 404 pages – creating custom 404 pages can mean that you will capture “dead” traffic.

User Generated Content – very important for your blog. Enticing comments by using a “DoFollow” link is good, but you may be spammed.

Internal Linking – very important! Add internal links for blog posts that have received many external links. The “Most
Popular” blog post plug is a great way to build internal linking.

Security – Use your HTACCESS file to add more security.

David Wallace – Co-Founder at SearchRank – WordPress Plugins

Title Tags & META Tags – Allin One SEO Pack: automatically creates META description tags. Creates meta tags from the excerpts section. This plugin will solve the duplicate content issues.

Social Bookmarking – ShareThis: Great tool for social bookmarking and allowing people to email your content. This is highly customizable and you can choose which networks to include.

Twitter – Twitter Tools: automatically broadcasts content to your Twitter account. Easily sharable content on different Twitter accounts.

Mobile – WordPress Mobile Edition: really clean content rewriter for mobile phones.

Comments – By default WP adds a No-Follow, but it makes sense to add a “Do Follow” plugin because it creates a community. The plugin SubscribeToComments is a great tool to entice people to come back to your website. Comment Spam Protection plugins are excellent in cutting down blog spam – the “Math Sum” plugins work well!

Sitemaps – Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress: Categoy page excluding and multiple page level functionality, comment counts, and permalinks tools. Google XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress: Great plugin to ping google with new pages, and calculates priority, then pings the different search engines.

Slugs – SEO Slugs: Removes “stop words” such as “a” or “the” – this plugin gives you a great keyword rich URL.

Additional Plugins – Avatars, Category Order, Meta Robots.

Rick Turoczy – Silicon Florist – Barebones SEO for WordPress

Get involved with a “Word Camp” in your local area to learn about some of the new WordPress tools and offerings. Dont just think about WordPress as a blogging platform, start to think about it as a Content Management System (CMS) – your site can have the benefit for the WordPress optimization.

Q& A –

Why should I block my Archive Categories?

David: If your category pages show pages in entirety, then you would need to block category pages. If you use Excepts as blog posts on the category pages, then you have nothing to worry about.

Tactics that bring more spam to your website – what about Akismet?

David: I don’t use Akismet because it doesn’t catch most of the spam. Adding the Math Captcha will take care of the problem.

Changing your “Submit” to javascript will defeat most comment spam bots.

How can you use all of the plugins without slowing down your blog?

David: Using plugins that are essential to your blog will keep things cleaned up, don’t over do it.

Rick: From a client perspective, reduce “plugin bloat” by keeping administrative rights to yourself so that plugins don’t overtake your blog.

For the SEO Pluin – how do you choose keywords?

David: Adding excerpts will do fine and accomplish what you’re looking to do.

For the ShareThis Plugin – is that more effective than targeting specific sites?

Josh – It depends on your content, if digg is your community, then a digg button should be placed.

Using WordPress as a CMS – when should you move into a real CMS?

Rick – if you begin to string several solutions together – move to something like Drupal or Expression Engine.
Scott Fish is the Director of SEO at EngineWorks, located in Portland, Oregon.

The post SEO For WordPress – Blog Optimization appeared first on SEMpdx.

“Auditing Sleazy Linkbait, a Social Media Marketing Discussion”

1pm in the Vista room

Speakers

Dawn Foster – Fast Wonder
Neil Patel – ACS
Matt Inman – Next Dating LLC

Moderator

Mike Rosenberg – EngineWorks

Session Details

The first presenter was Dawn Foster. She’s going to talk about how brands are using social media.

Why companies should participate in social media:

• People – gives people a place to engage with your company
• Product Innovation – get product feedback (good AND / OR bad)
• Evangelism – help you grow evangelists for your products from outside of your company
• Brand Loyalty – engagement can drive a tremendous amount of loyalty for your products

“Social media is all about the people.”

Be careful when you’re participating on social media sites – be sincere. You don’t want to be seen as being fake or have ORM (online reputation management) issues.

Focus on the individuals. Participate as a person, not a corporate identity. Look at Sleep Number Sara on Twitter as an example of how a company isn’t seen as a company but as someone who is part of a community. Also remember it isn’t all about you.

Participation guidelines:

• Do quietly monitor competitor’s communities and learn from them (do not participate, though)
• Do participate as a person with diverse interests
• Do talk about the industry first and your products second

You should look into participating in industry communities (PC World, etc.) that are relevant to your business.

Don’t think you have to be serious all the time; lighten things up a bit sometimes. It’s not always serious business.

The next speaker was Neil. He talked about unusual social media tactics.

Gave a couple of examples of Zappos and Woot’s bag of crap (this happens during Woot’s bimonthly or so Woot-off). Woot’s tactic is great becase:

• Limited quantity
• Cost should be low
• Make it like a lottery
• Spread it through the blogosphere
• Leverage Twitter and FriendFeed to get the word out

Take advantage of holiday sales. Holiday sales help you promote products. You can select items that are on sale (1 or 2 that are limited quantity). Up sell it like crazy – create frothing demand. Promote this holiday sale through social coupon sites such as deals.com.

Also take advantage of exclusive channel offers. So offer deals exclusively through different channels. Make them unique, offer one at a time, make them in a limited quantity and spread them out over time.

Create branding gimmicks for service-type sites. Have fun with them too – make them entertaining. Don’t sell people during this, though. Have your company logo on there as well and embed capabilities for users to share on their WordPress blog or otherwise.

Widgets are great ways to get embedded content on other sites. In order to make them work well, they:

1. Need to be useful, not just neat (i.e. MyBlogLog)
2. Community orientated
3. Easy to embed

Create embargoes to generate excitement. The embargo needs to be something news worthy. Send it out to bloggers and watch the traffic and links roll in.

Spam the social web. Submit affiliate links to social sites. Link build to those paes. Add comments to high ranking social sites.

Leverage your readers. Don’t make it all “Nascar” – select only a couple of social media chicklets. Test out which ones you’re showing to see if the CTR is higher or lower. Encourage your readers to particpate in the social web. Buy StumbleUpon traffic.

Matt was the last speaker. He’s going to be talking about linkbait and will be talking about his successes with it.

He created Mingle2, a free online dating site. Within six months of launch, he had over 100,000 links built, it ranked for every major dating keyword and had over 2 million page views.

How did he do it? Linkbait. Linkbait is content you create that gets people to link to you. The primary benefit of this is elevating your search rankings.

He created a “How Geek Are You” quiz that worked very well. He created HTML badges that are able to be embedded into your blog. He included anchor text and a link to hsi dating site that showed up on each badge.

Widgetbait gone wild – keep it relevant. If your site sells toasters, only make quizzes about toasters. Also be careful with what keyword you link back with. Don’t get your widgit in the news and don’t get too greedy.

Also did “how to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you” – created 14k links in a week!

Matt also created Zombie Harmony – a zombie dating site. It has had millions of pageviews and thousand of links.

Juicy Linkbait Tips:

• Take a commercial topic and attach something geeky, fun, or weird to it.
• Keep the linkbait simple; it’s a gimmick, not a product. Don’t invest tons of time and energy into it. Don’t over-engineer it.
• Getting on Digg.com used to be 90% creativity and 10% promotion. It’s not 60 / 40.
• Don’t IM for stumbles, diggs, or reddit upvotes.
• Take some data and present it in an interesting way.
• Create a simple game and reward the user.
• Don’t write just blogbait.
• Find a linkbaiter – find those who have designs on threadless.com shirts or those who have written best-of Craiglist posts.
• Keep your content benign. Make your linkbait appear non-commercial at first to avoid getting buried and encourage linking. However, if you’re getting page views, swap some things out to then include a share button and the like

Questions were on the following topics:

• Where to start for social media marketing? Dawn said she would pick something you would be comfortable with. Do something you would participate personally before doing it professionally.
• Measurement techniques. Matt uses “Mint” as well as Google Analytics. Look at analytics to see real-time how your linkbait is working. Dawn looks at “conversations” that are happening or @replying on Twitter.
• How can a B2B site can utilize social media? Matt feels like there’s always a spin to everything; always an angle to market your site. Neil saw a dental site that shows how to whiten your teeth at home which helped it rank for dental keywords.
• Favorite tactic that you were really pleased with the results and content? Matt said he has a furniture website that had a quiz about how long you can survive chained to a bunkbed with a velociraptor and it has showed tremendous gains. Dawn focuses on content; something that the audience would find interesting to read.
• What didn’t work for the panelists? And what tends to make ideas successful? Neil says sophisticated stuff just doesn’t work very well; simple it down.

This session’s details were compiled by Senior Account Executive Christian Bullock of Amplify Interactive.

The post Social Media session at SearchFest 2009 appeared first on SEMpdx.

11:05am in the Vista room

Speakers

Doug Hay – Expansion Plus
Dustin Woodard – Wetpaint
Todd Freisen – PositionTech

Moderator

Todd Mintz – S.R. Clarke

Session Details

Doug was the first speaker. Notes follow below:

Keywords: you need to choose one main keyword or phrase and one or two minor keywords to optimize your press release around. Include them in the title of your press release.

Google indexes 65 characters; Yahoo indexes 85 for PR titles.

Social media press releases (Marketwire provides this service) allows you to add video, “share this page”-type content, etc.

Syndicating your content should be used as a PR marketing tool. Send out your content and take advantage of RSS. Put your content in an RSS feed before actually sending it out to the wires. Make it easy for search engines to collect your content by putting it into an RSS feed.

Use resources like Digg that offer different categories. Don’t think that the typical audience for these social media sites will make or break how successful your content will be on the site.

Video is popular these days. President Obama successfully used YouTube and social media in general to really help his cause.

Dustin was the next speaker. Notes follow below:

Dustin’s presentation is centered around building relationships for SEO success.

It’s easier now than ever to reach out to specific press individuals via social media. Twitter and LinkedIn were two examples. But don’t count out using email; lots of press folks do respond to emails if the email is created in good intentions.

When you do start a discussion, don’t push your own agenda. Lead them down the path that will lead them to the message you wish to convey. For example, if you have an SEO tool, don’t contact Danny Sullivan and say, “Hey, check out our cool new tool.” Perhaps write a message about the newest search engine update and ask what his thoughts are.

Don’t overlook bloggers. TechCrunch, for example, can bring you a lot of traffic.

Summarizing the benefits:

• You’ll get repeat coverage
• Ensure SEO by fixing links (i.e. press release doesn’t include link when mentioning your brand; email them and let them know about it)
• Relationship extends beyond current publication

Build relationships wih the public as well. 2/3rds of internet population visits social networking sites. So build a presence, connect with people and respond to any inquiries or comments quickly.

You can also build your own community that embraces fans and supports user-driven content. One example being a FOX Terminator community where users can change page content (like Wikipedia) and share stories.

Social media benefits for being the top resource and “hangout” around your topic:

• More press = more traffic to your resource
• SEO benefits – more links going to your community which helps your search rankings get higher in the SERPs
• Crafting content – you don’t have to write it all. Users can create it for you.
• Community – drive adoption, engagement and visit frequency

Todd was the last speaker. His notes are below:

Todd’s presentation was M.I.A. so he took some time to get it downloaded from his email. Filler included some questions:

1. Wiki development. What does Dustin use? His business actually just hosts that functionality.
2. ShareThis functionality. Would you use this plugin or would you rather just include links? The answer was to provide a simple tool for users to use. ShareThis is easy to insert into RSS as well as a press release.
3. Submitting articles and press releases to article directories do have great benefits. “Article sites have come back to life.” Create content, syndicate it via RSS feed, and select some article sites and add to there.

After some time, Todd’s presentation was good to go.

“Everybody is trying to get involved” with online PR. Meaning: there’s a lot of volume there. 91% of people use standard search (i.e. Google query) to find articles or research in the middle of a sales cycle. You want to be found.

There are a lot of channels that are behind press release resources. Push it out everywhere you can. Get out on Delicious and other bookmarking services and bookmark your press releases.

“The first instance of a bookmark on Delicious is a followed link. All other are a nofollow.”

Don’t forget paid search. When you’re pushing out specific news, it’s “hyper-long tail.” So go buy those keywords for super cheap per click. Yahoo! Search Submit Pro is 25 / 30% of cost of Adwords. It’s a Yahoo organic solution.

Questions included:

• Delicious. There are do-follow links on Delicious. Raven Tools’ blog has an article about this.
• Put out the press release content on the RSS feed first so you can get credit as the “original” source
• Effectiveness of PR Newswire and other release services. Doug said Marketwire “is the best internet distribution in my mind.”
• An example of a PR initiative. Doug said that blogging is great and the result of that was to be invited to speak at conferences and the result of that was that they got bigger clients.
• Success stories about universal search. Google universal search can index several different media. “For one client, we ended up with four page one results by using multimedia.”
• Attendee wants to know how they can provide snippets and guidelines how to discuss our products. How do you get that out to traditional / online press? The answer was – writers don’t want to be told how to write. Look into how press members would like to be contacted as well as whether or not they write about your industry. Don’t waste your time – do some research.
• How do you approach an editor online compared to traditional PR? Sharing stories and such that’s not about you is the safest way to start a relationship.

This session’s details were compiled by Senior Account Executive Christian Bullock of Amplify Interactive.

The post SEM PR session at SearchFest 2009 appeared first on SEMpdx.