Scott Hendison:

Scott began marketing in 1999

In addition to links, off-site is all about trust and credibility.

Note – Facebook EdgeRank Is a secondary ranking factor in Google.

It is important to let employees spend time on social, including new tools like Google Plus and Pinterest. It’s like having children, you should encourage them to explore new interests especially if they are going to do it anyway.

Branding IS social. You need to get socialized even if you are not active. At a bar minimum sign up and fill out Google +, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Check it all out on Knowem.com

Branding IS Social IS Credibility

Join reputable associations and organizations. Don’t only think local, but global.

Google wants to be ‘the’ trusted authority, and they want to charge us for the privilege. Their goal is to make money on every search. We are all beta testers.

It is all about trust, brute force is dead. Does Google trust you?

Microdata (schema.org) is very prevalent in search and shows positive signs in SERPs.

Get trusted with Google, as they now have a trust program.

Time to talk about LINKS!

Grade links on a academic school, A-F.

C is for crappy. D is for damn crappy. F is another bad word with “embarrassing” tagged on the end.

How do you really get A & B links.

Imagination, hard work, and creativity are not a bad start.

You are doomed to fail without paid tools.

Majestic SEO Clique Hunter is a simple way to test the top ten versus yourself, so you can target those sites.

Fix your 404 inbound links! All you have to do is use a 301 re-direct. 404 redirected is a WordPress plugin that will redirect 404’s to most relevant pages by algorithm.

Citation Labs has a good new link prospecting tool.

Because of time constraints, we are moving on to Ian Lurie. (There are rumors about a cool tool called scrape box that is in the missing slides.)

Ian Lurie –

Zero people here know what inverted index means, and the formulas of the page rank formula. That is advanced, and not many people know it.

Google: “We Do No Evil” = “We Do Know Evil”

The steps towards advanced are small. For example, who know how to change a tire?

You say advanced, you mean easy.

Be careful about advanced link development techniques. Think about link diversity, you want to build out your number of link domains, not necessarily links themselves.

Do some serious data mining in log files.

Get a bot list. A good tool for this is Fantomaster Spider Spy which gives you the IP’s for all bots that crawl your site. It can be used as a database builder. Long story short get the log files by any means necessary. This is said because people usually think it is a waste of time or hassle, it isn’t.

By running a simple Python Script you can see which links have never been seen by Google within a specific timeframe.

An example. Client X was found to have links from a prestigious university that Google couldn’t even see because it was going to a 404. REBUILD THE PAGE from scratch. All you are doing is changing the tires on this website. Being advanced.

How do we ensure Google heads back to a land that it thinks is dead? Tweet it, post it, bam! Once a link is shared (even by a Twitter bot) it will be picked up by Google again.

Once you have fixed all broken links then move on. These are the easy ones, do it first.

Other methods-

Bribery is good (take this lightly)

Social is a huge and growing ranking factor. Level of participation is equal to the link. That stands for how many people are interacting and engaging.

Mechanical Turk is your friend. You can essentially buy poll answers, tread lightly and think naturally.

250 dollars on M-Turk (from Amazon) resulted in 10% increase in organic traffic as social participation blossomed.

Talking about Google Plus now.

Google is now giving prime SERP Real Estate.

Based on a test from Ian, those who rank in the top ten for response rates (this means users responding to your content) are the ones showing up in Search Plus Your World.

Some good places to buy links-

BBB – 1000 dollars

Business Associations, Industry Associations, YouTube Annotations, Media Sharing Sites, Bookmarking Sites, Local (getlisted.org)

Overview, Get The Easy Links!

That’s it for Scott and Ian, as they gave a ton of good insights. One more presentation to go and SearchFest 2012 will be a wrap. It has been great so far, what more surprises are to come?

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What is ComScore? It is a Panel of 2 million across 150+ countries for measurement across multiple platforms. That is pretty epic if you ask me.

Current Trends in Search –

The U.S. leads the world in search, and 2/3 of those searches are taking place where else? Google!

Search is growing both in intensity and users. As users grow, so does their number of searches. Columbia leads with 240 searches per person a month. Woah!

Search is being driven by ‘heavy’ searchers who make up about 65% of all search users. Heavy in this case means a lot of use, like a lot.

In December of 2011 Bing finally grabbed the number 2 spot in search, overpassing Yahoo! This is a testament to the improved user experience and heavy ad spends (plus good strategy).

Although surface numbers won’t necessarily show it, Bing appears to be forming as legitimate competition against Google, as it shows the most improvement in search intensity (number of searches per user).

On October 18^th Google stopped sending referral data for logged in users, proclaiming an effect on 7% of users. In January 2012 42% of users were logged in to Google while searching, accounting for a large quantity of total searches (which I missed because he is moving slides at a very swift pace).

The underlying theme seems to be cash, as detailed analysis makes it seem that this strategy is a long term ploy encouraging businesses to sign up for paid search which provides much more intuitive numbers.

Time to talk about Search Plus Your World! Towards which we as a whole had a very similar reaction to the referral data announcement. Everybody freaked out, at first.

Guess what guys, personalized results are showing up for less than 1 percent of searches so far. On the other hand, +1’s are showing up in 12% which is a much bigger deal.

Google Plus had the most successful social media launch in history.

Google introduced bottom ads in November 2011. This was not about adding more ad slots. On January 23^rd Google announced a major algorithm change penalizing banner ads which happened to corresponded to the launch of bottom ads. Bottom ads appear to be attached to long tail terms and are helping Google take up a lot more real estate in SERP ad space.  This means the landscape of PPC is changing, with many more long tail opportunities.

2012 Search Predictions –

Google’s 12% social return rate in search will be noticed by Facebook and Bing, which has a much lower rate of 5%. Mr. Goodman predicts that this gap will begin to close courtesy of Facebook and Bing working together.

Search SERP’s are going to begin showing Pinterest brand pages in the top 10, similar to how you already see Facebook and Twitter accounts. This means more shelf space for brands.

Mobile search ROI is going to improve as targeting options become more clear and integrated.

That is it for the keynote! We look forward to an awesome day here at SearchFest!

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