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.

“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.

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