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.

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.