A perk I enjoy most from blogging and working in this industry is getting to meet and know smart marketers. Smart + funny just takes it to another level and you can count on Ann for plenty of both. Along with the accomplishments, contributions, influence and energy she brings to our industry, Ann is genuine and grounded, plus she’s not afraid to “tell it like it is”. I appreciate those qualities a great deal.

Read on to learn more about Ann plus her tips for marketers, brands, publishers and of course what’s hot in the future of online marketing:

Besides being the goddess of marketing and diva book author, where do you spend your time?

I spend most of my time right where I am right now: Online. In this case, I’m talking to you. But I spend a lot of time writing, connecting, emailing, creating online content, on Twitter and other social channels, and exploring new platforms, also known as “indulging my ADOS” (Attention Deficit… Ooh! Shiny!).

My latest shiny object is Instagram. I’m using it personally, but I’m always thinking about how brands can use it and other publishing tools. That kind of thing is endlessly interesting to me.

When I’m not right here, in front of the computer, I’m hanging out with my family—and trying to maintain eye contact with them even though I’m dying to check my iPhone (I keed!). At the risk of sounding like an eHarmony ad, I like walking my dogs, reading books with compelling characters, and taking walks on the beach.

What would you like to be doing in 2 years?

I have the best job in the world, so it’s hard for me to imagine doing anything different. Is “more of the same” a goal? : )

I’ve had such an amazing year: Our book is a best-seller, MarketingProfs continues to grow in interesting ways, and I feel lucky to be where I am. So I’d be thrilled to have this same level of energy for my work life in two years.

Besides smarts, writing skills and a sense of humor, what are the qualities great content marketers should have?

I love this question. And I love that you included a “sense of humor,” because I do think having a sense of humor and fun is critical. I’ve been talking for a long time about what to look for in a content hire, both 11 years ago and 11 (ish) days ago!  But I think the most important qualities include training as a journalist, writer, or similar, as well as business acumen, social DNA, and an amateur’s passion. Especially that last one: Is the person you want to hire already creating content just for the love of it, and not just because they get paid to do it? Have you heard them utter phrases like, “I am soooo blogging that…!”

Marketing has changed so much since 2000. What advice do you have for marketers to stay current and relevant?

It really has. But, at the same time, the fundamentals remain. What’s new is that we have new ways of communicating with customers or prospects… and them with us. That’s created all kinds of opportunities and helped marketing evolve in interesting ways.

The easiest way to stay current and relevant is to read MarketingProfs. I know that sounds like a pitch, but I’m quite sincere: We see our mission as educating marketers on what matters. We are constantly surveying the marketing landscape and bringing our readers information and know-how on the stuff they need to know, and not just the stuff that’s cool. In other words, we pay attention to all of it so you don’t have to… Isn’t that a relief?

Of course, there are other great sources of more in-depth and specific learning—including TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog ; )

As a publisher, what insights can you share for companies that want to shift toward “brand as publisher” content marketing in terms of strategy and organizational change? Or should they?

Brands really don’t have a choice. If they have a website, they are publishers. So the first thing is, Embrace it!

Then consider what Content can do for your business by answering that Why question: Why are we going to create what we want to create? What are our goals? What do we hope to accomplish?

That sounds obvious, right? But I’ve been speaking all around the country this past winter and early spring, and this is a critical, fundamental step that most companies completely miss. They start a blog because the CEO always wanted to be a writer, or they launch a Twitter stream because their competitors are there. And they have no sense of the strategy behind the tactics. They haven’t answered that Why question.

Organizationally, companies have to deputize a content person. Content won’t just happen unless someone owns it; unless someone is responsible for it; unless someone’s job is to create it, optimize it, share it—to make sure Content Happens.

So do what makes sense for your organization: Hire an editor, a chief content officer, an editor-in-chief, a chief blogging officer, a brand journalist, or whatever. But make sure someone has some power and authority, and the necessary smarts, to get things done.

Let’s say a new business owner asks you for startup marketing advice – a B2B technology company. What are the essential marketing steps they should consider?

Wow—big question! How much time do we have….? ; )

My short answer: Know who you are; know who you are targeting, or who you want to reach along the buying cycle (and how you are going to stand out in their mind through compelling content); and figure out how you are going to measure what works so you can rinse, repeat.

That’s at the strategic level. Then, you have to create your company’s story, and learn how to tell your story well. You then have to pick your tools and create great content, of course—especially with an eye toward search and social media, to reach your intended audience.

And since we are talking B2B, I’ll throw in one more bit of advice: Don’t forget to humanize your marketing and creating your content in an actual accessible, human voice. Even in B2B marketing, you are still talking to humans. So why is it that so many B2B companies talk like robots? I suppose they think it makes them sound more official and trustworthy if they toss around jargon, buzzwords and other Frankenspeak. But it doesn’t: It makes them sound like tools.

With MarketingProfs, how do you stay fresh with content ideas and topics?

We read TopRank’s Blog and other top-shelf publications. [From Lee: Now that's a compliment, thank you!] We see what resonates on Twitter and in other social channels. We listen to what people are talking about, what our members ask us for, especially when we ask them to identify their biggest marketing challenges. I also do a lot of “social prospecting”: I find a lot of MarketingProfs contributors or uncover hot topics by trolling social channels like SlideShare, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

At TopRank we’re big proponents of search, social and content marketing but so many companies operate these functions in silos. How do you think marketers can improve their ability to work across channels and departments and get support for a coordinated strategy?

To me, Content is the key. You can’t have an effective Search and Social strategy without first having a sound Content strategy. (Or at least, your search and social won’t be working as well as they could for you.) Content is the glue that knits everything together. Wait. I just totally mixed that metaphor. But you get the point. : )

Eric Schmidt of Google has been quoted saying every 2 days there’s as much information created as since the dawn of civilization to 2003. How do you deal with information overload both personally and in your own marketing?

That’s why the quality of your content is so critical. That’s where your story becomes so important. As Eric points out, all of us are flooded with Content on a regular basis. So the stuff that cuts through is the stuff that’s truly great! Companies that simply repost their press releases on their blogs and then wonder why they don’t get any comments aren’t the ones that are going to succeed.

A lot of time when I refer to content that “cuts through,” companies think I mean “viral.” I don’t.

Instead, I mean content that (as Len Stein says) is “packed with utility, seeded with inspiration, and is honestly empathetic.” Content that meets the needs of your customers in whatever way resonates best with them: that is, it makes them smarter, better educated, wittier, taller, and with better backhands and smarter kids! In other words: How can you help your customers and prospects with your content?

Retargeting, QR codes, social business, curation and gamification are some of the buzzing topics right now. What’s hot on your mind this year? Next?

Storytelling has emerged as a hot topic for marketers. Which makes sense, right? If you are creating content, it helps to get your story straight. ; )

Also: Mobile generally (and QR codes, gaming, social-location platforms like Foursquare).

As I said above, I like the bright and shiny new stuff, and I love to see what’s hot and new and fun.

But to tell you the truth, I think we have so many tremendous tools right now that are being sadly underused, or used in weirdly ineffective ways. I think most marketers feel overwhelmed. There are so many companies still trying to figure out the fundamentals of blogging or other social tools… and at the same time there are companies adopting other bright and shiny objects with no notion of the best way to actually use them.

Here’s an example: The other night we had takeout pizza. There was a QR code on the box that, when I scanned it with my iPhone, opened a Web page that gave me “the opportunity” to join the pizza company’s email list.

There are two problems with that: First, the page gave me no indication of why I should turn over my personal information, other than to vaguely refer to “specials.” Really? What’s in it for me?

The second problem was this: The page had about 10 fields (including my email, full name and address, etc.) Have you ever tried to fill out a form like that on an iPhone? So even if I wanted to give them my information—which I didn’t, by the way—they made it pretty difficult for me. Why make your customer work that hard?

That kind of marketing is pretty close to insane, isn’t it? Yet I see that and similar things all the time.

We’ve reviewed your excellent book with C.C., Content Rules, but what’s your most compelling reason people should buy and read it?

The naked pictures inside.

I’m kidding, of course.

(Or am I…?)

What resources do you rely on to stay current, informed and edu-tained?

I probably read all the same marketing and social media pubs you do. Also, as I said, I get a lot of information from social sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (especially LinkedIn Answers) and poking around SlideShare when I have the time.

At the same time, I’m a big fan of feeding my brain in other ways: I’m a fan of autobiographies and memoirs (currently reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants) because I’m inherently nosy about other people. It’s interesting to me to see the way life shapes people. I read a lot of fiction of all sorts.

I love The New Yorker (although it’s a constant source of guilt, because I rarely have the luxury of getting through an entire issue).

And I love smart humor: My latest “edu-tainment” online discovery is DearBlankPleaseBlank.com, for reasons like this:

Dear world,
I dream of a day where we can cross roads without having our motives questioned.
Sincerely, chickens.

Actually, I take that back. It’s pure hilarity. There’s nothing remotely educational about it.

Excellent, thank you Ann!

You can find more from Ann by following her on Twitter (@marketingprofs) as well as at MarketingProfs and her book site, Content Rules.

So now that I’ve had my chance to interview Ann, how would YOU like to ask her a question?  Better yet, how would you like a chance to win a signed copy of Content Rules?

Just post your question for Ann below and the best question (picked by TopRank Online Marketing staff) will be selected by Thursday afternoon and answered on Friday along with credit and a link to the winners blog or Twitter account.  So put your thinking cap on and get creative with a question for Ann Handley!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Wicked Smart Interview with Ann Handley of MarketingProfs | http://www.toprankblog.com

In this interview, Brent shares his experiences with how optimizing news content for search engines works as well as the challenges and results from training journalists on how to use keywords to improve traffic to news content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you work with a media company or online publisher, do you train writers, reporters, editors and journalists on how to optimize content with keywords? Have you tried and had great results? Have you tried and met strong resistance?

Check out Brent’s Blog here.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Brent D. Payne on SEO for Journalists | http://www.toprankblog.com

In this video interview, Avinash talks about the value of communicating analytics information in more meaningful ways. He gives examples of metaphors he’s used to present important analytics information that helps others better understand the meaning and implications of the data. There are lessons here for companies that report tabular data with no insight and little creativity in communicating insight.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What creative ways have you found to communicate web analytics insights? Have you had nightmare experiences with web analytics reports?

Check out Avinash’s “must-read” web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, here.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Avinash Kaushik on Storytelling & Web Analytics | http://www.toprankblog.com

Spotlight on Search Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on How Microsoft Does Social Media and the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance

If you attend Search Marketing industry conferences, you’ve no doubt run into the ever optimistic and charming Mel Carson from Microsoft.  When I was last in London, Mel connected me with an excellent Fish n Chips that the pubs around Trafalgar Square couldn’t get close to.  Mel is active as an advocate of Microsoft Advertising , especially via social media channels and at conferences to the Webmaster and search marketing community. His work is global and very interesting. With the Bing and Yahoo convergence, I thought it was time we did an interview – and he agreed.

Mel has accomplished amazing things with Microsoft’s use of social media and other large companies could learn a lot from this interview where he talks about Microsoft’s use of social media and what impact the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance will have on search and search advertising.

Welcome Mel, it’s exciting times as usual in the search engine world. Please tell us, what has changed about your job at Microsoft since you were last here?

My role at Microsoft Advertising evolved about 18 months ago as a result of the work our team had been doing in social media for adCenter. We had been building up an engaged audience on the adCenter Blog and forums for 3 years and started the adCenter Twitter account and Facebook page.  Our engagement with our customers was such a success, it made sense for someone to start using social to tell marketers about all our other digital assets. So I started the Microsoft Advertising Blog which brings our readers news and insight in what we’re up to in display, mobile, games advertising and research.

I also head up our events calendar. Last year we covered nearly 40 digital conferences all over the world, and it’s my job to ensure we have people trained to blog and tweet from @MSAdvertising at those events and really bring them alive.

Sometimes we go the full monty and come armed with a film crew and interview folks. Perhaps my highlight was Twitter founder Biz Stone at Cannes 2009 , but this year was awesome as we got backstage access to the TED@Cannes conference we’d partnered with them and the Starcom Mediavest Group on.

We featured Microsoft Advertising in a post about B2B Social Media Winners, earlier this year and I’m wondering if you can share how your group developed their approach to the social web?

In February this year we published a white paper (pdf) which outlined our story and approach. We’ve been listening to our customers since the start of 2006, way before Twitter and Facebook hit the mainstream. We got involved because it made perfect sense to use the web to communicate in a two-way dialogue with adCenter customers who were expecting best practices, tips, tricks and news to be at their fingertips.

We started slowly with a blog and forum, and built the strategy through common sense and by reacting swiftly to the needs of our advertisers. Social media isn’t the proverbial “rocket science”. It’s an awesome extension of traditional marketing and research methods which enable you to glean feedback in real-time, and help people in ways that never existed before.

What guides your social media strategy and participation?

Microsoft Advertising is an intensely customer-centric organization. It’s our advertisers, and potential advertisers, that guide us through where they go for news and information and what they tell us they need in order to be better marketers.

By investing in a team to monitor and engage with our paying customers, we hope we’re demonstrating that we’re open to feedback, want to build the best products and services we can, and are excited to provide insight through research and case studies that resonate with marketers all around the world.

What are your social media goals and how do you measure them? Or is it more accurate to say, what are your business goals that involve social media and how do you measure them?

Bit of both really. We look at growth as an indicator. Be it number of followers or fans, visitors to the site, number of answers to forum questions by other forum members, links from other blogs and news sites. The more reach we have, the more people we can tell our story to and let folks know we’re here and willing to help.

The other big ROI metric is how far we help lower support costs. It’s not cheap to have a call center, so if we can answer questions online through a carefully crafted blog post or tweeted link to the best information, we’re not incurring costs and we’re reaching more people with that information. A happy and informed advertiser is likely to spend more, so the two together increase the bottom line.

Return on In-action is another. What would people think if we weren’t operating in the social space? What would be the business implications of not having an early warning system in place?

How do you structure and manage listening and engagement?

We cover about 16 hours a day as I’m based in London and we have a team in Seattle. I’ll look after things from 9am GMT until about 6pm when it’s 10am PST and the US team takes over. We have various alerts set up on Twitter clients and monitoring tools and pretty much know within minutes if we have a problem or someone needs help.

We have rules of engagement which are pretty straightforward. We ask for actionable insight if an advertiser has an issue and have escalation paths internally to get things fixed.

Again, it’s common sense. You need a plan, you need outcomes and you need a team that can be flexible and personable.

A virtual smile goes a long way in this industry!

What listening or social media management tools do you recommend?

We recommend using lots. We trial, test and use a number of platforms, widgets and gizmos that all do different things with varying degrees of accuracy and success. The important thing is to find tools that are enablers and build a picture from the data they expose.

What challenges have you had gaining buy-in to social media projects and how did you overcome them?

To be honest, we’ve not had too much difficulty getting buy-in because we’ve always kept a step ahead by demonstrating the value of what we’re doing. I think many businesses dive into social media marketing with no plan around measurements of success.

Because we set out with the commitment to measure everything and tell compelling stories as we went, the business knows and relies on our data and successes now to be successful in itself.

Microsoft was called out recently as being one of the most, if not THE most social brands out there.  We get it and will continue to invest because it works well for us.

What is one great example of a social media success that like to share the most? It can be Microsoft or anyone else.

My favorite story that I’ve used in countless presentations is about how my old headmaster, who is a Benedictine monk, called me up many years ago to advise him on a search campaign to promote his website through which he wanted to recruit monks.

We set it up and 3 years later he actually did sign up one chap who found his site while searching for inspiration on the web. You can read the full story here.

Just goes to show how search and social are intertwined.

A story more close to home is obviously the Windows 7 Launch where Marty Collins and her team managed to garner 221 million impression of earned media running up to and post launch of the biggest selling piece of software ever. Check out the case study here.

If you were to give advice to a friend starting a small business on how they should get involved with social media, what would that checklist look like? What would the essentials be?

Figure out some goals and work back. Don’t think “social media” as in the tools. Think “social media marketing” as in the discipline. Research your market, find out who’s using what platform and build your value exchange around it. Make sure there are social elements in all your marketing endeavors. Have everything built for discovery and sharing. Measure as much as you can and use the data to inform decisions in other part of the business.

Oh….and don’t ever stop. Getting off the social train is not an option now it’s gathered so much pace under so much steam.

Enough of this social media, let’s talk about Microsoft and Yahoo. I know there’s the Search Alliance website and this clever little video, but can you sum up a few things for our readers who might not read Search Marketing publications?  Without any corporatePRspeak, what does the integration of Microsoft and Yahoo search mean to marketers?

It’s all on the www.searchalliance.com website. More volume with less effort. Now you’re optimizing for two marketplaces instead of three so you should see a return on time investment. More volume means we can make quicker decisions on which innovations will work best for marketers in the future.

What will it mean to consumers?

Having scale will mean speedier innovating of search results, which means those decisions consumers are looking to make get made quicker. More satisfied customers means a more loyal fan base, and as a result, we could increase share making our advertisers happy too!

What innovations in search technology (from a user perspective) are you excited about?

Bing Maps without a doubt – check out this Ted Talk with Blaise on some of the incredible innovation going on in his team.

How important is social media to the future of traditional search?

What’s traditional search these days? Ten blue links? It’s all moving so quickly but there’s no doubt that social media marketing is having an effect on search results. When you have algos associated with consumers liking content – YouTube, Facebook and others – when they’re added into the traditional mix, it makes for interesting times with optimization.

If you just take a look at what Bing has released lately in terms of social it’s obvious we feel it’ll be an integral part of how we all interact and make decisions going forward.

How do you stay current with search and social media and all the marketing, technology and communication channels that follow?

I subscribe to loads of newsletters, watch my Twitter feed and travel to many conferences around the world. We have a great ecosystem of learning and notifying here at Microsoft as well, so I pick up a lot of knowledge here internally.

Thanks Mel!

Post Script: Both Mel and I will be speaking at a new Search Engine Strategies conference being held in Hong Kong next week. Mel will be on a keynote panel, “Keynote Panel: Increasing ROI through B2B Lead Generation” and I will be on a panel about “The Business Value of Social Media”.  Here’s a video on this new event from Matt McGowan and Mike Grehan of Incisive Media.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on Social Media | http://www.toprankblog.com

I caught up with Chris to talk about his take on SEO and social media.  He had pretty strong opinions about people who are too aggressive and not always relevant in the social connections they’re making.  This is what he had to say:

You can find Chris online by Googling “chris“. How’s that for the effect of links on search engine visibility?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Chris Pirillo on SEO & Social Media @ OpenCa.mp | http://www.toprankblog.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, we couldn’t talk to someone like Dave at Yahoo without mentioning the transition of search results to Bing over on the Yahoo site. What does this mean for SEO? What does it mean for Paid Search?  What’s the fate of Site Explorer and where does it fit within Bing Webmaster Tools? Is SEO good or bad for search engines? How much of a signal does social media provide search engines? We discuss these topics and more.

Thanks Dave!

Blog: Industrial Strength SEM
Twitter: DaveRothSays

The video is available in 480 and 780 formats as well, just click on the size drop down.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Video Interview: Dave Roth of Yahoo | http://www.toprankblog.com

The search engine marketing industry changes often, so it’s pretty interesting to see some of the predictions made in some of those older interviews. Below are 10 more recent SEO interviews from client side practitioners or search engine employees that you can get a lot of value from in terms of understanding how facilitating SEO works in organizations, SEO and social media, resources, tools and specific SEO tips.

Vanessa Fox – Ex Googler, now at Nine by Blue on Marketing in the Age of Google

Matt Evans of Monster.com on Agency vs. In-House SEO

Michael Nguyen of Shopzilla & Bizrate.com on Huge Ecommerce Website SEO

Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com on Enterprise SEO

Dan Perry, SEO Director at Turner Broadcasting on Big Brand Publisher SEO

Tim Ash of SiteTuners on Landing Page Optimization

Alex Bennert, Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal on Very Large Website & Publisher SEO

Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google on Google Webmaster Central

Laura Lippay – Recently left Yahoo for Nine by Blue on SEO at a Search Engine

Todd Malicoat – Consultant and Faculty at Market Motive on the Search Marketing Industry

Other interviews worth mentioning, albeit a bit older, include: Danny Sullivan, Tim Mayer, Mike Grehan, Matt Cutts, Andy Beal, Melanie Mitchell, Adam Lasnik, Jill Whalen, Eric Ward, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Andy Atkins-Kruger, Adam Audette, Neil Patel.

Be sure to watch TopRank’s YouTube channel for video interviews with search and internet marketers that we’ll capture during the SES San Francisco conference this week.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 10 Essential SEO Interviews | http://www.toprankblog.com

Photo credit hayzlett.com

Jeffrey Hayzlett is the former CMO at Kodak and author of “The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?”. You might have seen him on Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump or speaking at a variety of industry conferences. He hails from South Dakota and considers himself a cowboy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any photos of him online with a cowboy hat.

I connected with Jeff yesterday morning to talk about his success with social media, corporate change, Kodak, ROI and his upcoming keynote presentation at SES San Francisco.

Jeff, it was great to finally “meet you” on the Beancast recently and thank you for inspiring the idea behind a pretty popular blog post “Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media” which has had well over 1,100 retweets and multiples of that in page views.

Why do you think companies are having a hard time with social media?

I think most companies just don’t understand it. There are some fundamental conflicts that they have. The biggest piece about social media is listening. That’s it. It’s listening to customers. A lot of companies just don’t get it.

Companies have outsourced everything. They’re outsourcing their contacts with their customers, which quite frankly, I don’t get. My own company that I worked for had done the same thing. I didn’t appreciate that, didn’t like that and didn’t like the way in which we did it. Those decisions weren’t necessarily mine, but I tried to impact those decisions.

I think a lot of companies really suck at this social media stuff because they don’t get the listening part. They’re afraid. Therefore, when they become afraid, they’re a little worried about giving up control. That’s what they think they’re doing with social media.

The thing is, they never had control to begin with. The customers always had control. That’s the way it’s always been. As these companies start to enter into this, they’re just not very good at listening and you have to get good at listening first.

It’s a mind shift isn’t it?

It is a mind shift. Either you’ve “got it or you don’t”. Eventually I think they can get it. I think one third of the companies will get it right away, about one third will eventually get it and about one third will never get it.

It sounds similar to leadership. Some people have it, some people can learn it and some people never will.

I think confidence is another word to use. Are you confident in what you do and how you do it?.

Photo credit: hayzlett.com

You’ve been called a Celebrity CMO by Forbes Magazine and I think it’s fair to say you’re a great example of a senior marketing leader that “walks the talk” when it comes to social media: personally, what you’ve done at Kodak and in promoting your book, “The Mirror Test”. What advice do you have for other business and marketing leaders who are deciding their own level of engagement on the social web?

I think the most important thing is just to be genuine, be real. Social media is a very transparent thing, so you can’t fake it. I am who I am and I don’t try to be anything else. I don’t try to change my tweets or do things diferently than what you see on Facebook. It’s me, it’s who I am.

Yesterday I was talking to some folks from Kareem Abdul Jabbar about an upcoming project and I said, how cool is this? My job: I’m talking to Kareem Abdul Jabbar! I grew up watching this guy and the Lakers.

I think about things like that and who I am. I think most people who are in this game, who are really good, besides the “celebrity” portion of it, a lot of folks are and that helps them to gain notoriety. But the guys who are really good at it are the people who share, who are open and genuine. You get a good sense of who they are and I think that’s very helpful. That’s who I am.

My team members will tell you, you’ll never have to second guess me when it comes to something, because I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m thinking whether it’s right or wrong. Sometimes I even say things that are incorrect, politically or just downright wrong, because I don’t know what I don’t know. But I’m also willing to say, “I don’t know. Or wow, let’s go back and change that.”

How much of a change agent do large corporate marketers need to be in order to get their companies to see the value of social web participation?

Regardless of the social web, I think marketing’s job, and the head of marketing more than anybody, is to cause tension in the organization. My former CEO said that was my main job. When he explained that to me, it made a lot of sense and I’ve really taken up that mantra. That was my job at Kodak and it led me to be the big change agent in the company, which is what I was hired to do.

Everybody else had to be change agents as well. A big part of what I was supposed to do was cause that change and tension. I think for leaders reading this, you’re job is not unlike that of a marketer, to put a little tension in between organizations, between old ideas and new ideas. Because from that tension you get a lot of good things.

There’s an old saying in sports, “No pain, no gain.” I think the same thing holds true here in business. You don’t want the pain, but you want the tension. That’s what brings about better decisions and better actions.

The blogging done by Kodak with Jenny Cisney and team has been cited as a best practice by numerous publications, bloggers and as an example at conferences. Do you think most companies should blog?

Yes, absolutely. I think they should blog. The key thing is, “who” should blog? We named the very first Chief Blogger ever. We also named the first Chief Listener as part of our social media team.

A lot of people thought I had a lot of input into the blog, what we did, how we said it and direction, but I didn’t. I setup a Blog Communications Council. My head of communications headed it up as the publisher, pretty much like a newspaper model. Jenny as chief blogger became the chief editor and she coordinated all the other bloggers that worked for her kind of like reporters.

That’s the only structure I wanted to see happen around it, plus the mood and theme. Outside of that, I never saw a blog post until after it was published. I allowed my teams to go with the way they wanted to go, except for a few times when linking out to something risque. We still referenced it, but took the link down. We did things like that to respect the values of our employees.

A lot of companies make big mistakes and say, “I think the CEO is the one that should blog for us”. I think that’s the last person I’d want to talk to mostly in the company, because they’re usually not that exciting.

You want to think about who you want to have blogging and they way you want to do it. In fact, Kodak has a great social media policy book that’s out on how to get into all this. It’s free on their website at: Kodak Social Media Tips (pdf).

How do you define success with social activities like blogging?

You can talk about how many people refer back, visitors and so on. I’m not so interested in the eyeballs and ears. I’m more concerned about participating with hearts and minds. So building out a community that really likes you.

You can syndicate out blog content and drive more attention because ultimately you want more people to take a look at you and get a sense of who you are.

We wanted to be uplifting and helpful to our customers with hints, tips and things like that. Reflect our culture and the mood of our company and also represent our product very well. We also wanted to blog for our employees which is a big part of our community. I think employees look at your blog as much as anybody else.

There’s a lot of companies looking at social activities, blogging included. They’re considering measures of success and it makes sense, you had a goal of better engaging with customers, telling your story and connecting with employees. Obviously metrics would follow along those goals.

I think blogs should be an extension of you, not necessarily the official mouthpiece. I think blogs should reflect your personality more than the corporate position on this or that. People will appreciate that more.

The acronym ROI means something different for you (Return on Ignore) can you elaborate on that? How do you answer the Return on Investment question with large company social media efforts?

There are three types of Return on Investment I’m measuring all the time:

• Increase in sales
• Increase in margin
• Increase in customer satisfaction

Those are the three most important ROI things I’ve got to deliver and concentrate on the most. The rest of it’s just keeping track of stuff.

I said the “Return on Ignore” statement in a way to cause tension, which is what I’m known for. We spend so much time trying to measure the things we’re doing rather than the real things which is about listening to our customers.

I can’t say enough how important it is to listen to your customers because its about capturing customer behaviors that drives your sales, margins and satisfaction.

Those are the things that are the most important. How about paying attention to your customers more and less about what percentage of the customers we’re reaching at any particular time and micromanaging down to the nit on every single email campaign or whatever. People spend a lot more time than they need to on trying to figure out ROI. They want to put a dollar amount on everything you do to measure it and you can’t do it. You’ll spend your entire career and never get it done.

Your book, the Mirror Test is doing well and has the endorsement of people like Donald Trump and Christie Hefner. Can you share more about the 3 tests you talk about in the book?

There are a lot of tests in the book , but the three main themes of tests are:

Look in the mirror – Are you breathing? Does the dog eat the dog food? Does the idea that you have warrant merit? Will it breathe? Will it fog the mirror? There’s that piece of it we have to ask ourselves because passion alone is not a substitute for good planning and proper steps in terms of marketing and having a great business idea.

Looking in the mirror at yourself - Do I have what it takes? Do my people have what it takes? Looking around the business itself and does it look like a winner. Because sometimes we get caught in a rut and you need to walk into HQ once in a while and change it up.

Bottome line: Am I making money? – This is the most important one. Because in the end, it’s about generating profit. Ultimately that’s what businesses are supposed to be doing so you can do everything else you want to do in your life whether it’s personally or invest back into the business.

My conditions for satisfaction and success are: Grow wealth for my family, grow professionally and have fun doing it.

It was time for me to leave at Kodak because I had done what I was supposed to do and completed it. Now it’s time for me to go on to the next chapter and do something else. I stayed at Kodak for 4 years and 1 month. That’s the longest I’ve ever stayed anywhere and a lot longer than most CMOs out there. It was time for me to move on. Those are my personal tests myself, that I must be able to live up to.

A lot of people have said, “Why would you leave Kodak?”. You’ve got corporate jets, you’ve got this you’ve got that, and it was a great kind of a gig. I’m so grateful and I love the company. It was time for Jeff Hayzlett to do something different.

“Adapt or die” is a strong theme of the book. Those words are easier said than implemented. What advice do you have for tradition-rich organizations to see the value of change?

I think that should be part of their mantra and part of their DNA. A company like Kodak forgot that it was an innovative company. It forgot that it had 25,000 patents in the world. It forgot that it was inventing things. It forgot it took materials science and imaging science and put them together and created unbelieveable products. It started thinking of itself only as a film company.

What that did is contain itself in a little yellow box. And it was much bigger than the yellow box. What they needed was some people from the outside to remind them, no you’re really about creating the box, creating new boxes and creating things that go inside the box. That’s what you’re about.

You create emotional technology that helps people to make, manage and move images and information. That’s what you do. You’re not a film company, not a camera company and not commercial printing company. You’re an innovative company that creates emotional technology.

So, now what does that open up for you? It opens your horizons to a whole different way of thinking.

You’ll be keynoting at SES San Francisco in a few weeks. Can you give us a little preview of what you’ll be talking about?

Well, it’s going to be exciting, first of all! There’s no telling what I’m going to be talking about at this particular event because I’m always different everywhere I go.

I will be talking about transformation and change and how search engine optimization and search engine strategies fit in to that. And how you’ve got to be thinking about that as you put together everything you do.

I don’t think it’s always at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts. For marketers, for the most part it’s an afterthought, not a forethought. So imagine redesigning your sites in different ways to make sure your optimization and being searchable is better as you put things together.

So it’s going to be talking about strategy. It’s about the use of strategy and how you come up with products and services and offer them up on the web to get you noticed more. That’s going to be key, especially as we move more into video. Beyond that, is, what is this industry going to be doing around mobile?

Lee: We’re really looking forward to it.

It’s going to be a blast, it’s a great crowd, a great conference. It’s one that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and they finally got around to calling me

At SES I’m moderating a panel called “Selling Search Marketing to the C-Suite”. Can you share a tip that I might include in the presentation that helps internal marketers do a better job of communicating the value of search marketing to business leaders?

Two things. One, I write about this in my book The Mirror Test, ways how to reach C-Level executives. I always find it interesting, people say, “I’d really like to meet with you” and so I say, “OK, so call me”.

I will tell you that the higher you get up in the organization, the lonelier it is. Even though you’re busy busy busy. Before 8 and after 5, I answer my own phones and it’s amazing who calls and who doesn’t call. And that there are people who want to reach you, but never reach out to you.

The biggest thing I’d tell you is what’s your elevator pitch? I redefine the elevator pitch in the book, The Mirror Test. It’s probably one of the biggest concepts that’s come out of the book, called the 118. And what I mean by that is 8 seconds is the average attention span of an adult. I know it to be true because I looked it up on the internet .

And then 110 seconds is the average elevator ride in New York City from the time you press the button, step on the elevator, ride up or ride down and get off. So that’s what you have to pitch me.

You have 8 seconds to hook me to get that lean-in factor, so that I want to pay attention to you. And then 110 seconds to close me.

In that 110 seconds, don’t tell me who you work with, because I could care less. Talk to me about the value you’re going to create for me, the pain points you’re going to solve. What is your unique selling proposition that stands out above everybody else. Otherwise, don’t talk to me, don’t waste my time.

I want to hear in 118 seconds or less, what you’re specifically going to do for my company. And don’t give me some generic crap that you would give to somebody else. I want you to do your homework. I want you to look at my company, find out about me and show me.

Imagine if you walked up to me and said, “I did a profile on your company and I can show you 3 ways that will add $X to your bottom line if you implement one tool. Would you be interested?”

Well, man if I head a pitch like that, it’s going to make me pay attention. It means you’ve done your homework, you’ve researched me. You’ve invested in me and gone out of your way to prepare a presentation that shows I’m not doing it as good as I could. And if I used you, I could gain. You gain, I gain. That’s a pretty good deal. I’ll guarantee you most people will not come up with that kind of approach.

Thanks Jeff!

You can see Jeff give a keynote presentation at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, August 17th at 9am. You can find out more about Jeff’s book The Mirror Test and his CEO Network on his website. You can also find him on Twitter.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | CMO Cowboy: Jeffrey Hayzlett on Social Media, ROI & SES San Francisco | http://www.toprankblog.com

A longtime fan of the Dead, David co-wrote the book with HubSpot co-founder and fellow deadhead, Brian Halligan to share the brilliant innovations the Dead brought to the business of marketing music and building an incredibly passionate community of brand enthusiasts.

While we were both speaking at the Vocus User’s conference in Washington D.C. last month, David took a few minutes with me to do the following video interview on his new book:

Here’s a summary of the book and the lessons we can all learn about marketing, social media principles and thinking outside the “rules” of business as usual:

“The Grateful Dead broke almost every rule in the music industry book. They encouraged their fans to record shows and trade tapes; they built a mailing list and sold concert tickets directly to fans; and they built their business model on live concerts, not album sales. By cultivating a dedicated, active community, collaborating with their audience to co-create the Deadhead lifestyle, and giving away “freemium” content, the Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts successfully used by businesses across all industries today.”

The book can be ordered on Amazon.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Video: Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead | http://www.toprankblog.com

The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions and answers from the session.

How did you get to Google?

I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on, I went into information retrieval and then joined the department of defense.  Then I took some time off, and eventually joined Google.  I’ve now been at Google for 5 years.

After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking).  The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update.  What exactly is that it?

We tweak little things in our algorithm all the time.  Mayday was a significant update that really impacted long tail terms.  A lot of people were leveraging long tail phrases for lots of traffic but it was frequently done via automated methods.  We’ve looked to eliminate spam, and that’s been a big priority for us.  At the same time, there were people developing not quality content (not a violation of guidelines, but also not providing value).  What it does is for long tail queries, is we now just consider them queries like anything else.  We are going to put as much value in those search results as all search results.

So, you can’t just add a bunch of keywords on a page and expect results just on that.  This type of update is continuing and it’s a focus we have.  We have other projects too to help continue making long tail traffic highly relevant.

Are you saying with long tail terms, are queries getting longer?

Yes, people have evolved as searchers.  With Google when you search for over 3 terms, the snippet link increases in importance as people expect to find long queries and we want to deliver a better experience.

What’s the difference between Mayday and Caffeine?

Mayday is a pure ranking change – just looking to make the results more relevant.  Caffeine is a huge infrastructure change.  It’s the idea that we can now take our entire index and update it a document at a time.  It gives us the scalability we didn’t have before – now we have the ability to grow even bigger and better.  On top of which, caffeine is really cool because we can attach more meta data to each document.  We have all these ways to push a document out faster and get it to users quicker.

Can you talk about snippets for a second?  How do I decide what comes up in a snippet?

For most people, when you design a document you’re not thinking about what a snippet is going to look like in your document.  What we take for the snippet is the context of the keyword in the snippet.  The other place we look is in your meta description.  If you put your keyword in your meta description it’s a good idea as then you have control over your snippet.  The reason we used the meta description is it’s one of the few areas that people weren’t spamming.  We do want to give webmasters an option.

Is there a specific way people should think about creating a document?

Overall there is a strategy you need to have with your site.  What type of users do you want to attract, and what is your call to action?  And so your pages should be designed with that intention.  Think about your content and lay it out in a way that converts.  Titles are important for search engines and semantic markup is still good.  Mayday took out information that was auto-generated or not relevant.  Design each page with an intention of what you want from users.

So there’s a big shift in the SEO world.  Everyone was always focused on keywords/ranking algorithms.  Now everyone thinks about social.  Where does social fit within search?

There’s a way search is evolving, and when it comes to personalization we want to deliver results that are more and more unique.  That’s where social search comes in for us – it’s expanding a theme we really want to pursue.  For social search it comes from the social graph of the web layered on top of the link graph.  But prioritize by having a great website first, then get involved in social media.

What are your thoughts on getting better links to your website?

When you create a site, unique and compelling products or services content is what matters most.  How can you make yours different from all the other sites on the web?  Your customers will link to you when they think it’s great and that will happen naturally.  But, you can also look for opportunities for links too – not just by emailing a webmaster asking for links but expanding in the same way you’d expand your business.  I.E., forging partnerships and adding value to others.

Links are a big part of our PageRank algorithm which is a major component on the 100’s of items in it.  Links are not just based on quantity but more so on quality.  We know on a link by link basis what is valuable to what and we value them all differently.  It is done algorithmically and we also have a manual spam-fighting team.  Just because you have a lot of links doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting value.  Look for quality links not quantity.

Am I better off looking in webmaster tools for data than a third party tool?

Our mission with webmaster tools is to support webmasters within the Google ecosystem.  Our data is only relevant to Google, not all the search engines.  Our goal is to keep the ecosystem thriving.  It’s about helping webmasters regardless of the size of their pocketbook.  It’s at no cost to you.   There are other tools out there, which you should explore too if you like since our tool is just relevant to Google.

Why was site speed recently highlighted as important?

The site speed update was purely from our user metrics – we know people like faster performance.  We find that even when slowing results by half a second, they were actually searching less.  When we removed the delay, they went back up but never to the same level (this was actually a costly experiment).  This was just due to latency.  We also found in tests that conversions will increase with sites that load quicker – it’s a very important aspect of your website.  Faster sites can potentially outrank you.

Talk to us about Flash – is it really search friendly?

If you have a flash site, don’t expect Google to crawl it perfectly – or other search engines too.  It’s just not as accessible.  We’re working actively on Flash but it’s not perfect yet.

What about microsites?  Are they a good idea?

Microsites were originally created to dominate search results.  It was originally kind of a spammy technique.  I normally don’t suggest it, Mayday and future updates are only looking for quality sites.  If you want to dominate search results, you can do things like add videos/images and other data.  Microsites confuse users, there are links coming in to another site that isn’t your main site, and they are hard to maintain as now you have multiple sites.  It’s a jarring user experience; I don’t think they are going to work in search results in the future as they did in the past.

What about for e-commerce sites that are extremely large with lots of products?  We’ve seen sites with fewer items and more information on each product outranking us.

That’s what we would expect from Mayday.  Users don’t care if your site has many items, they care about descriptive content.  They don’t want to see content that is just a title and an image.  It comes down to creating unique content on each page.  We crawl what we want to keep in the index and we keep in the index what users want to see in the search results.  The drop off you are noticing is because we are focusing on content-rich pages and less on sites that are just tons of pages without value.  If you link content up and bring the link structure up, we’ll crawl that more often.  But at the end of the day, more content matters.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Tell All Q&A With Google’s Maile Ohye – SES Toronto Keynote | http://www.toprankblog.com

Helping companies with very, very large web sites increase sales through improved search engine performance takes a unique type of person. Think equally strong left and right brain lateral thinking.  Heavy doeses of technical savvy plus creative problem solving are essential.

Shopzilla and Bizrate market millions of products and Michael Nguyen’s SEO responsibilities for those sites are substantial. In this interview Michael talks about Google’s recent MayDay update, a SEO checklist, his top resources for staying current in the field and the unique challenges (including duplicate content) that come with optimizing huge web sites.

There’s a bit of a trend as we’ve interviewed lead SEO practitioners for well known brands. They seem to have the combined experience of independent consultant, agency and having worked in-house. Please tell us about how you got into search marketing and how your past experience in these roles has contributed to your current position. Also, what’s the most interesting thing about working with Shopzilla?

Sounds like I’ve had a very similar path as your other interviewees. I started my career as a web developer for Aerospace Corporation, mainly building dynamic web sites and internal search engines. I spent a good amount of time testing and understanding search engine optimization on my own during that time – partly out of interest and applicability to my work. From there I did some independent consulting for a couple years and eventually joined an agency (SEO Inc). Spent a few years there working for a variety of clients, small and large. I had a chance to move in-house with Shopzilla about 4 years back and I took it. Been with Shopzilla ever since.

I do a lot of technical SEO on our large and complex sites, so it’s required that I understand the technical detail behind the scenes. It’s much easier to communicate with the development team if you understand what’s going on in the backend.

The greatest thing about working in the comparison shopping / product reviews space is the challenge. Our market is extremely competitive and there are many large players. You really don’t have time to rest, but it keeps me interested. With Shopzilla specifically, I’m given all the tools I need to do my job – it’s a simple concept, but in reality not many SEOs can say the same. I have access to large amounts of data, analytical resources, development teams, specialized tools, etc all tailored towards SEO. At the highest level, Shopzilla is a company that really understands search and user behavior. It’s the perfect environment for an SEO because we work at the intersection of search and users.

Working with large organizations and also companies with large web sites is unique for a variety of reasons. What have you found to be the best advice for getting quality SEO recommendations implemented with large web sites (or companies)?

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but the best way to get things implemented within a large company is through education. Things get done faster when everyone is on board. So that requires constant educating and training. The more people that understand SEO the better. You want advocates for SEO in every area of the business – from engineering to upper management.

What are some of the unique SEO challenges that you encounter with a business like Shopzilla with its own network of sites and so much data being published?

With a business like Shopzilla, I’m always challenged with the sheer size of our sites. We have millions of products and various different business lines. So keeping everything indexed and ranking is a constant battle. I spend a lot of time thinking about optimal site architecture and site performance. For large sites, even small changes in indexing can equate to significant revenue shifts.

The comparison shopping and consumer review market is pretty interesting. Shopzilla not only competes with other shopping engines, but we also compete for organic traffic against informational portals, niche review sites, review aggregators, and blogs. We’re both a head and long tail business. All of us (Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Nextag, etc) start off with the same basic data from merchants. We all aggregate products and provide comparison shopping features on our sites.

So in order to drive traffic to our sites, we need to improve our product and provide value on top of that data. In the end it comes back to the user – what does the user find valuable and what is the user searching for?

Users want to easily compare a variety of products and make a confident buying decision. So at Shopzilla, we devote a lot of resources to ensure those two things happen on our site. We take millions of products and organize them around what users tell us is the most usable categorization. We allow users to refine by a variety of useful attributes. We help them understand the products they are interested in with user reviews, buying guides, and comments from the point of sale. We assist with merchant selection through our merchant reviews. So while we start with essentially commoditized data, we add a ton of content and value on top of that starting data. Increasing product value results in increased organic traffic.

In a sense, SEO is the product and the product is SEO.

What advice can you offer about dealing with content syndication and duplication? What are some common situations you’ve encountered and their solution?

301 Redirects and rel canonical are your friends when dealing with any sort of duplication/content syndication issue. It’s pretty common for sorting features (for example a “sort by price” feature) to create duplicate content. Rel canonical is perfect for getting rid of that type of duplication.

For content syndication, I recommend placing a variety of signals within the content that helps Google understand the true source of the content. Depending on the type of content this could be: links within the content pointing back to your page, a rel canonical, a URL, or your domain.

Can you offer some of your experience and insight regarding Google’s recent Mayday update? What can companies with large sites that rely on long tail traffic do about Mayday?

It’s even more important now with Mayday that large sites reconsider the signals they are sending to Google regarding their deeper pages (long tail). Obviously not every single page on a large site deserves to be equally promoted, so craft your navigation around the fact that different pages have varying value. Spend some time building links to deeper pages to support sections with weak indexing.

While it’s a little overdramatic, imagine how your site would perform if domain authority did not exist. Start tailoring your SEO strategy with that in mind.

If you were to provide a friend a checklist for marketing their new B2C website online, what would you be sure to include”

Guess my checklist would be pretty simple:

1. Build something people want
2. Make it extremely easy for search engines to crawl/index your site
3. Get people talking about your site online
4. Keep improving the site

Google’s guidelines are really helpful for a new site.

What web based SEO or social media marketing tools would you recommend for that new web site? Any tools we’ve probably never heard of?

These tools are more tech heavy than your typical SEO tools, but I figured some of these might be new to your readers:

1. 80legs – Crawl your own site (or a competitors) and extract whatever data you want
2. SEOmoz API – Mashup all that juicy SEOmoz data
3. Solr – Great for understanding the basics behind a search engine
4. nutch – Similar to SOLR, this one is great for understanding crawling/indexing

Monitoring tools are useful too, setting up a Google Alerts and Twitter RSS feed is helpful for keeping up with what others are saying about your brand online. Once you know what your users are talking about, you can join in on the conversation.

You’ve received kudos from people like the GM of your current company for “staying on top of what’s going on in the search marketplace”. How do you stay current? What are your favorite information sources? (Conferences, Blogs, Newsletters, Books, Forums)

I used to monitor a ton of different blogs/sites/sources, but I’ve paired it down to handful of sources recently. Here’s what I check regularly:

1. Hacker News
2. SEO Book
3. SMX/Search Engine Land
4. SEOmoz
5. SEO by the Sea

If it’s important, it will eventually make it to one of those sites. I’d also love to attend a WWW Conference someday.

Thank you Michael!

Michael Nguyen is the SEO Strategist for Shopzilla & Bizrate.com. Bizrate enables shoppers to quickly and easily find, compare and buy anything, sold by virtually anyone, anywhere on the Internet.  Find Michael on his blog, Social Patterns or on Twitter.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Shopzilla SEO Interview with Michael Nguyen | http://www.toprankblog.com

There simply is no substitute for well rounded experience over a period of time to give a search marketer perspective and the skills to handle a variety of problems. Add to that “sink or swim” SEO training and you have a guy like Matt Evans, SEO Manager at Monster.com. In this interview, Matt is generous with sharing his experiences working agency side and in-house, insights toward code SEO, the new Google design, social media, advice for marketers that want to enter the Search Engine Marketing field and how SEO is a lot like Rugby.

You’ve worked both on the agency side and now as an in-house SEO Manager for Monster.com. Can you share a bit about that journey and what are some of the big differences between working on the client side vs. agency? What do you like most about working in Search?

Previous to Monster I was with a search agency for 6 years. In those 6 years I saw both the organization and the industry grow tremendously despite the bubble burst of the early 2000s. At a time when friends were jumping from job to job it was very easy to stick around because I believed in the services we provided and the future of the search marketing industry. I believed whole-heartedly (and still do) that search is the best way to build an audience, connect with customers, and drive business online. I think the best part of working in Search is the vibrancy of the industry, the smart people, and the value that we can bring to our organizations.

One of the biggest differences in client side versus agency is being very involved in the software development life cycle. On the agency side of things you typically provide recommendations to clients, they take them off to their Product people or Engineers and most work happens behind the curtain. Being an in-house SEO means being involved in a project from concept to release – and all the “fun” in between. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s tedious, but it’s all a very good learning experience. If I was ever to go back agency side it’s the type of experience which would give me a huge advantage in dealing with clients.

Another major difference between agency and in-house is the feeling of ownership you have over your site/s. Because you’re completely invested in one site, you feel so much more accomplished when SEO enhancements are released.

What in your past work and education experience best prepared you for your journey as a Search Engine Marketer? What advice do you have for budding SEMs to make themselves more valuable and empowered to motivate change?

My initial year or so at the agency was by far the best experience in terms of preparing me for the diverse journey as an SEM. In 2000-2001 SEM was still the wild, wild west. For some perspective, we were still submitting pages to Lycos and HotBot, doorway pages were a legitimate and successful tactic, and GoTo.com was the only paid search engine of note. The company was still small and resources were non-existent, so account managers did EVERYTHING for their clients – from keyword research, to copywriting, to directory submissions, to project management. You learned real quick that you needed to focus your energy on the tasks that were going to get you results fast. Getting results fast was even more important back then because your clients were less likely to understand the nature of search, the fluctuations, and how long it takes for content to be indexed and ranked. As a result, much of our time was spent educating the client, which forced me to learn on the fly.

I would urge budding SEMs to think less about tactics and think more about strategies. The tactics will flow from those strategies naturally and you’ll have a much easier time selling executives a strategy rather than trying to explain to them why 301 redirects, XML sitemaps, and verification meta tags are necessary. They don’t care! The strategy should take into account how search traffic will drive bottom line results, because that’s what they care about. It’s also essential for SEMs to understand the value of a search referral to their business. For instance, at Monster we measure the value of organic referrals by equating them to the cost savings driving the equivalent qualified traffic through paid search or online media buys.

Ultimately, SEMs should be trying to get away from the perception that we’re one trick ponies. Aim to create a perception in your organization that you’re a well-rounded business person rather than an niche expert in the “dark arts of SEO.” Understand the parts of the business that intersect with search – PR, offline marketing, usability, etc. Too many times SEO experts are pigeonholed and viewed as only a small part of the business when many time the impact they can have on a business is much greater than any other person in the organization. Just ask the businesses who have had their site banned from Google to understand how important SEMs are!

What tips do you have for reporting SEO performance within an organization? What KPIs do you pay attention to? What overall performance goals are most important? Any tips on reporting that agencies give their clients?

The key to reporting in an organization is to provide tiered reporting based on your audience. The reporting that me and my SEO team review is far more detailed than the dashboard that the SVPs see. Also, we provide more specific reporting for our ecommerce team, Content team, and Product Managers. It’s important to get feedback from all these groups too so that you’re providing data that is interesting and actionable and you’re not wasting your time reporting on useless data.

At Monster the KPIs we pay attention to around SEO are pretty typical: visits, UVs, page views per visit, time on site, referrals by engine, and referrals by keyword phrase. The SEO team is mainly measured on the amount of overall traffic we drive, however, in order to prove our traffic is valuable and targeted we also track the number of job searches, job views, applies, new accounts, and new resume uploads that result from SEO traffic.

Agencies need to focus less on month to month comparisons and look at year over year. Seasonality is usually a large factor in search trends, so comparing MoM trends provides little insight into actual performance. For Monster, January is our biggest month for search traffic due to New Year’s resolutions to find a new job. December tends to be one of our lowest months due to the holidays. Comparing December to January may look great in the chart, but to get a real understanding on SEO success you need to look at year over year most of the time.

How important is ongoing & proactive SEO vs triage? What do you think companies should be paying attention to on an ongoing basis to achieve, maintain and improve their SEO performance?

I need to balance between both triage and proactive strategic planning due to the speed at which the industry changes and the size of a company like Monster. Try as I might to be aware of all changes that happen to the site in a given release, it’s just not humanly possible to know everything. Also, since our site is so large it takes a while to figure out how search engine algorithm changes affect us. Much of my time is spent understanding how these changes might have affected our SEO performance. Monster is a global organization and has many, many priorities and a very competitive development roadmap. As a result I need to also be proactive and be thinking about what we need to launch 6-12 months down the line in order to hit our goals. It makes it busy, but very interesting.

Companies need to leverage the webmaster tools offered by Google, Yahoo, and Bing in order to maintain and improve their SEO performance. Beyond SEO, these tools give a company valuable information about how your site performs for users (which includes search engine spiders). Google especially has been adding a lot of great tools to their console to improve SEO performance and we’ve been trying to spread the word throughout our organization about the kinds of information that can be mined. As a result we have Product Managers in all the countries reaching out to the SEO team with problems they’ve found and it really creates a great sense of teamwork.

There’s some debate about the future interplay between code level SEO, structured data and sitemaps versus page content and social media. How do you see SEO evolving technically in the next 2-3 years?

Ultimately, because links are still so important to search engine algorithms I think that content and social media will continue to be king when it comes to SEO. Great content will always lead to more links and social is just the latest channel to distribute those links. However, I believe the number of technical levers search engines will provide to SEOs in order to improve and tweak how their site appears in search results will continue to grow. I think search engines need all the help they can get in crawling, indexing, and presenting the best results to searchers and giving more control to webmasters is one way to go about it. I predict we’ll see many more announcements from the engines supporting new technical innovations like we’ve seen in the past with canonical tags, XML sitemaps, rel=”nofollow”, and RDFa tags.

What are your thoughts on the new third column Google design? Do you see any SEO opportunities that weren’t there before? Are you planning on or doing anything differently? What are your top 3 signals of SEO influence?

As a power searcher I don’t find the third column design nearly as offensive as some users do. I see it as redundant navigation that’s aimed at luring the average searcher into exploring Google’s different engines before going back up to the search box and modifying their query, which they tend to do. I’ve found it useful when I’m trying to understand what type of content exist out there on a given topic.

I wouldn’t say there are new opportunities, but I think the opportunities that have always been there are magnified. If blended search results didn’t convince you that a universal search strategy is important, the new left hand navigation should.

There are new plans to change our strategy. We’re already on a path to improve our PR SEO and our Social Media presence to correspond with the emphasis the engines have put on real time search. We’ve built out a strong team in those areas and the SEO team regularly partners with them on initiatives.

What SEO (and/or PPC) tools would you recommend to an in-house marketer that wears a SEO hat among others? Do you have any SEO project management tools that you like?

They absolutely need to use Google Webmaster Tools if nothing at all. The data provided is just too valuable. I also am a big fan of the SEO Book toolbar for Firefox. It’s a great tool for a quick snapshot of what’s going on with a page.

What resources do you use to stay current? (Blogs, conferences, newsletters, books) What role do direct observation, testing and networking play for you in staying current?

I find Search Engine Land’s SearchCap newsletter the best source of news for the industry. It compiles all the best blogs and forum threads in one daily email. As for books, Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is my bible.  It sits on my bookshelf and I pull it down from time to time to refresh my memory on certain topics. The forecasting/modeling information is invaluable for those SEOs who are continuously asked to quantify the opportunity of an enhancement or new content.

If you were to compare SEO to a sport, which would you pick and why?

There is no question on this one – Rugby. I’ve played many team sports in my life – baseball, soccer, basketball, dodge ball – but none of them comes close to the ultimate team sport of Rugby. I played for 4 years in college and 5 years after and you learn pretty quickly that a team’s success is completely dependent on execution by all 15 players on the pitch (that’s a field for the uninitiated!). The backs can’t score tries if they don’t receive the ball from the scrum half, and the scrum half can distribute the ball unless the forwards ruck and secure the ball.

Everyone depends on each other to do their job. SEO is much the same way. The SEO can’t drive traffic to the site if the UX folks don’t design the architecture of the site right, or if the developers don’t code the page correctly, or the copywriters don’t use the proper keyword phrases in the copy. You are dependent on others within your organization to execute properly, and with a large, global organization like Monster, this is what makes the job difficult. It’s also what makes projects that much sweeter when we are successful!

Thanks Matt!

Matt Evans is SEO Manager for Monster.com, the premier global employment solution for job seekers with a presence in over 50 countries.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Monster SEO: Interview with Matt Evans of Monster.com | http://www.toprankblog.com

For every SEO guru speaking at a conference, there are 10 or 20 more SEO experts you might not have heard of, making things happen in amazing ways. Scott Skurnick has worked in the Search Marketing industry as long as anyone I know on the conference speaking circuit and has a tremendous amount of experience and expertise to share.

In this interview, Scott shares his journey to become Executive Director of Search Engine Optimization and User Insights at Edmunds.com, his take on social media and SEO, scalability of SEO, tips on audits, best practices, tools and more.

You’re a long time consumer products search marketer, having worked at companies like Circuit City, OfficeMax and currently with Edmunds.com. What made you decide to work in the search marketing industry and what do you like best about it?

Actually I got my start with Search Marketing in Mexico City when I was working in the Tequila industry. I had worked for Jose Cuervo for a number of years and then went to work for their main competitor at the time which was Tequila Sauza. When I launched the first brand websites back in 1995 I became obsessed with Tequila Sauza being the number one result in Yahoo and Alta Vista for the query “tequila”. Of course that wasn’t a very hard task because there weren’t a lot of tequila related sites but the whole concept of search engines intrigued me.

The thing that I like the most about our industry is the fact that it is ever-changing and there are no “absolute” answers. The end goal is the same for everyone in SEO in that we want to generate both traffic and some kind of conversion. What differs is how we reach that goal. Everyone’s SEO recipe is a little different and who’s to say that their approach is any better than someone else’s. What’s not to like about this?

What job skills and career advice can you offer to Search Marketers that want to work in-house vs working at an agency? Do you think it’s reasonable for companies to expect SEMs to be advanced at both SEO & PPC? And Social?

There are a couple of necessary skills that most people don’t speak of. I won’t get into the debate of whether or not we should be able to write code because I think it depends on the situation. The list of skills and qualities I feel are necessary for a successful in-house SEO are:

• Must be highly analytical
• Understand how the different parts of an organization work
• Have Great negotiating skills
• Be likeable and never bite the hand that feeds you (developers and writers)
• Be curious and never think you know everything
• Be humble. You have to be able to admit your mistakes, we all make them especially working in SEO
• Most importantly, you have to have thick skin. You will always have your doubters and people who want to see you fail because they don’t believe in SEO.

While I feel it is vital that an in-house SEO understand both Paid Search and Social, depending on the size of the company it may not be realistic for one person to manage all 3 areas. All 3 are highly specialized and changing very quickly. More importantly, you can easily ruin a company by committing errors in any of these 3 and errors usually occur when there is a lack of understanding or knowledge. At my current company we have separate teams handling PPC, SEO and Social and this seems to work the best. Of course we all interact and share information but at the end of the day we have an expert for each channel.

Speaking of social, what are some of the ways you’ve made SEO content more social at Edmunds.com? What are some of the immediate opportunities within the social web to advance SEO goals?

When we talk about Social Media at Edmunds, we are really talking about Forums, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Edmunds has been running an online automotive community (forums) since 1996 which is, for the most part, based on SEO best practices. As far as Facebook and Twitter are concerned, our editorial and PR teams are directly involved. While we do engage in some auto-tweets, the majority of what we put out there has an original voice to it. We also actively engage with people who are discussing our brand or the automotive market in general.

The biggest Social Media opportunity for us is brand promotion and audience engagement. Our content travels very well. Not only do we review almost every vehicle imaginable, but we also have a data department that is responsible for coming up with industry sales forecasts and results. When we issue a sales forecast or summary, this information is immediately picked up and re-tweeted or shared via Facebook.

Many agency marketers say quality SEO cannot scale because working with many different types of web sites and companies is unpredictable. Do you think that’s true for in-house SEO?

I couldn’t disagree more. Since 1995 I’ve worked as an in-house online marketer with tequila, office supplies, consumer electronics and automobiles. I view myself as product agnostic. For me it is all about the marketing channel. Of course every industry and website presents a different set of challenges but I’ve always followed the same SEO blueprint. The SEO blueprint changes due to the elastic nature of our industry but I’m going to apply pretty much the same strategy regardless of the product I’m trying to promote. Some sites may require more effort when it comes to link building while others may need better editorial content but at the end of the day the basic SEO infrastructure is very similar.

What are some of the common obstacles with large retailer web sites when it comes to SEO? What makes a successful large site SEO program so successful?

Enemy #1 is the CMS. Most large retail sites use shiny and expensive out of the box systems which are great for everything but SEO. From dynamic parameters in url strings (no not just 1 or 2) to duplicate title and description tags across hundreds or thousands of pages, most CMS’s just don’t know how to handle SEO. Add in code bloat and duplicate pages across multiple categories and there is enough to keep any SEO busy for years. The other big issue is unique content. Too many large retail sites don’t put in the effort to write unique and appealing product descriptions so their Sony Plasma TV description is the same as hundreds of others across the web.

As far as what makes a large site SEO program a success, this is very cliché but I dare any in-house SEO to disagree. It comes down to education and compromise. Until everyone in the organization has a very basic understanding of SEO, you will have a hard time getting a SEO project to succeed. The developers need to understand why you are asking them to change the code and the writers need to understand why you are asking them to change their titles. You never ever want to mandate change because this will only make you enemies. You also have to understand that sometimes SEO has to take a backseat to a more important goal. There are few instances where SEO and usability or SEO and development conflict with each other but when they do, you need to choose what’s best for the company. Never ever let your ego get in the way.

Let’s say a friend shows you his new retail product web site and asks you to do a SEO audit. What are 4-5 things you would look for?

Any audit starts with a simple question; are you willing to go under the hood and make potentially large scale changes…If the answer is yes then:

1. Need to understand the CMS / Shopping Cart solution and see if it’s flexible.
2. I’m checking urls, most retail web sites use too many dynamic parameters
3. I’m making sure a product only lives in one department / category. If it doesn’t I’m using the canonical tag (worst case scenario) or convincing him to change his categorization.
4. Making sure his product descriptions are unique and in-depth. Too many ecommerce sites use canned descriptions.
5. Making sure he is letting his customers review the products. You can say what you want about the now defunct Circuit City on the store side, but the web site had by far the most comprehensive customer product reviews on the web and these generated considerable SE traffic.

What are your favorite web based SEO and social media marketing tools?

For SEO:  Bruce Clay Toolset, SEOmoz Pro Tools, Xenu, Majestic SEO, Ranking Manager and Wordtracker. For Social Media: Co-tweet, Klout and wefollow. I also set up a really nice reputation management dashboard based on a post from aimClear a while back.

What role does social media optimization play in an overall SEO program? Do you think it’s worth optimizing content for search within social media sites like Facebook or MySpace?

Social media is important in that we want to let people consume our content wherever they feel comfortable. We try and optimize the content for the channel but not necessarily for search engines. We don’t create special content hoping to create a temporary lift from social media and we definitely don’t promote all our content via social channels. The worst thing a brand can do is abuse Twitter or Facebook. Our users can smell a “hyped” story from a mile away.

Staying on top of best practices in general and specifically for what’s most important to the web sites you’re working on can be a challenge. What do you do to stay current? What blogs do you read? Do you have favorite conferences, books, forums or newsletters?

I easily spend the first hour of every morning going over my analytics and reading up on the latest SEO news. As far as the sites I visit, they include: Search Engine Land, Michael Gray’s Blog, WebmasterWorld, WebProNews, MediaPost, paidContent.org and the IAB. I also love 1938media.com, it keeps me grounded. I don’t really go to a lot of conferences but I have been attending PubCon since 2005 and SMX Advanced since it started. PubCon is great because there is something for everyone and SMX Advanced is one of the few conferences where experienced SEO’s can learn something. The one conference I would love to attend but haven’t been able to yet is the Search & Social Spring Summit.

Thank you Scott!

Scott has been working in online marketing since 1995 in industries ranging from Tequila to Automobiles. He’s an avid Packers and Soccer fan and live in Redondo Beach, CA with his wife and two girls. You can find him on Twitter, LinkedIn and working hard on SEO at Edmunds.

Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools. We do not take PR firm pitch suggestions or solicitations for these interviews. They are by request from TopRank Online Marketing Blog editorial staff only.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Enterprise SEO Interview with Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com | http://www.toprankblog.com

Working with Enterprise SEO projects is compared to smaller company sites is as different as marketing to BtoC vs. BtoB customers. This interview with Dan Perry, the SEO Director for Turner Broadcasting covers his SEO dream job, in-house SEO career advice and skills, enterprise SEO, the future of outsourcing to agencies, being persuasive inside organizations and of course, Golf!

We met while you were with Cars.com and now you’re with Turner Broadcasting. (Congrats) How did you get into the SEO world and what is it that keeps you there?

I started building very basic websites in 1998, but didn’t get into SEO until the summer of 2000. I built a site for a local golf course and a few months later, typed “Michigan golf” into a search engine. The site I built was on the first page! The light bulb went off immediately, and I’ve been promoting sites online ever since. The satisfaction of success is what keeps me in the industry. I’ve done enough SEO on sites of all sizes to know that it clearly works. Watching it work and seeing the baseline numbers for a site consistently increase over time is extremely satisfying.

What do you like best about your current position and company?

I’ll answer that with an example of a semi-typical day for me: Have an early conference call with London to discuss international SEO for Cartoon Network, have a meeting with PGA.com to discuss ongoing SEO Initiatives, meet with Topher Kohan (SEO Coordinator at CNN) to discuss strategy, have a call with NBA.com and TNT.tv to discuss the playoffs, and end the day by providing some Editorial SEO training to the team at Adult Swim. To have the opportunity to move the SEO needle on properties like these is truly a blessing. From an in-house SEO perspective, this job is as good as it gets.

You’ve spent a lot of time working on the client side with SEO. What advice do you have for individuals that would like to break into that kind of career path?

Doing in-house SEO in a large company is much different than doing it for yourself, or at a small company. I haven’t “done” SEO in years. My job is training others how to do it, and having them keep SEO top-of-mind. It requires an even temperament, the ability to explain why SEO should be prioritized to developers, executives, and everyone in-between, and a love of PowerPoint and Excel.

What skills should a corporate marketer develop in order to be capable of handling in-house SEO duties?

The ability to sell SEO internally. You may have to convince a developer to change the way they’ve always done things. You may have to convince an executive that SEO is a good business decision, and be able to back it up with numbers. I don’t believe that SEO starts at the top and works its way down, or vice versa. It has to happen at both ends (and in the middle) and then you need to keep it top-of-mind throughout the organization. To sum it up, a strong ability to sell internally, a logical approach, and an understanding of the SEO potential and the ability to put that potential into realistic forecasts.

Do you look for specific backgrounds, experience or skills when you hire in-house SEOs?

First of all, there has to be a base SEO skill-set; this cannot be overstated. There needs to be a level of SEO confidence that one can only gain with years of trial and error, dealing with algorithm changes, etc. Also, the ability to take a complex SEO element and describe it in a simple and easy-to-understand way is an under-rated skill. Finally, a diplomatic personality is key.

With enterprise SEO, you don’t get to roll up your sleeves and jump in with a program in most cases. What do you see as some of the more common challenges with achieving end-goal results from search engine optimization in a large or complex organization?

Prioritization. You and I both know that SEO is valuable, and can produce impressive results. My job is to convince an executive that SEO should be prioritized above the dozens of other possible projects. I need to pull together an SEO plan, forecast potential gains in traffic, and explain why this should be prioritized over other projects. The funny thing is that once that happens and you get approval, THEN the real work starts.

I’ve seen you present many times on in-house SEO panels, which btw, have been priceless for SEO agencies that work for large companies. Will companies still need to outsource SEO in the next 2-3 years?

I think so. There’s a lot of value an agency can add, even when there’s an internal team. For example, agency folks can see how an algorithm change affects many different companies and industries. Over time, the lessons learned from this broad collection of sites are invaluable.

What role do you see outside agencies playing?

Depends on the level of need within a given organization and the size/bandwidth of the internal employees.

Where are SEO agencies usually the most helpful?

Every property’s needs are different, so it needs to be property-specific and driven by the unique goals and needs of each. It can vary from assisting with major initiatives like a redesign to keyword research to spillover work.

What’s your best tip for getting other departments in an organization on “your side” when it comes to content creation, approval and promotion for advancing search marketing goals? Any examples?

Showing the opportunity lost in terms of traffic and revenue. For example, if one of our sites is on the second page of Google for a set of keyterms, and I can provide data that shows the potential gains they should receive (traffic gains, and revenue gains) by getting on page one, it makes the selling process much easier.

What are some of the common “low hanging fruit” SEO suggestions you see the most often with large site SEO? The classic of course, is updating one robots.txt file to stop blocking all bots.

The SEO maximization of publishing templates is a great place to start. Relatively small changes at the template level can have a big impact. Secondly, finding inbound links that produce 404 errors and converting them to 301 redirects.

Please share some of the SEO and Social Media tools that you like most:

Working with such big brands, a lot of the tools aren’t as important as they used to be. Because of that, I spend more times in our analytics package then I ever have before.

How do you stay current with SEO and all the marketing, technology and communication channels that come with it? What are your favorite conferences, blogs, newsletters, organizations, books or networks that you rely on?

I’m a big fan of David Meerman Scott’s book on the New Rules. He took a relatively complex subject and boiled it down into easy-to-understand language. My favorite book of all-time is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. One of the few books that made me look at a website in a completely different way. When I attend conferences, I usually choose the sessions I’ll attend by speaker name rather than session description. Finally, the Planet Ocean SEO newsletter is one of the most consistent, well-written newsletters I’ve ever seen.

Since you’re a huge golf fan, do you have any interesting golf metaphors for SEO?

Love them both; here’s my top 10 list of similarities between golf and SEO:

1. Accept that you don’t know everything.
2. Learn by doing.
3. Measure often and pay attention to the numbers.
4. Be prepared for the worst-case scenario.
5. Learn from your mistakes.
6. Stick with it, even during the bad times.
7. Seek out good advice.
8. Luck is just that.
9. Use the right tools.
10. Be patient and think long term.

Thanks Dan!

You can find Dan online on his Blog, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools. We do not take PR firm pitch suggestions or or solicitations for these interviews. They are by request from TopRank Online Marketing Blog editorial staff only.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | SEO at Turner Broadcasting: Dan Perry Interview | http://www.toprankblog.com

Spotlight on Search Interview with Alex Bennert, Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal

Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools.

This interview with Alex Bennert, a longtime SEO professional with experience working on very large web sites such as Zillow and now with the Wall Street Journal, offers SEO career advice, explores the difference between in-house, agency and solo SEO practitioner, her experiences providing SEO services for a large publisher and the inevitable obsolescence of technical SEO. Oh yeah, we hit the obligatory social media topic too. Enjoy:

You’ve provided your SEO expertise for quite a while with some very large web sites. What is it that keeps you motivated about search?

There are some jobs where the skill set you need is reasonably finite. There is a knowable amount of information you need to learn and eventually master. But SEO is a moving target and that makes it more interesting. Boredom never sets in because I never feel as though I’ve mastered it.

How did that motivation influence your journey to become the Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal?

After the Journal contacted me, I was invited down to NYC for a casual “meet and greet.” As my husband dropped me at the airport I remember telling him that it was highly unlikely that I would take a corporate job at someplace like the Wall Street Journal. I pictured buttoned-downed suits and a restrictive 9-5 culture.

So I get there and the first person I meet is Kevin Delaney who used to cover the search industry for the Journal. I was immediately impressed by the breadth of his knowledge of search and his enthusiasm for embracing the Web at the Journal. Within 20 minutes of meeting him, I realized that I really wanted this job. That day I met with five other Journal people and my first impression was confirmed over and over again. These were not stuffy old-school folks looking back, this was a group of some of the smartest people I’ve ever met who were savvy about what was happening online and passionate about moving the Journal forward into it. And they were asking me to help! I’ve been with the Journal almost 2 years now and still to this day it’s the most fascinating and compelling job I’ve ever had.

What new insights about SEO have you learned after working for the WSJ?

Before working at WSJ I had assumed that Google Web search and Google News search would be minor variations on the algorithm.. Bad assumption! Google News uses a very different set of signals than Google Web and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of having a new algorithm to untangle.

Career advice: For people who’ve worked in corporate marketing, PR, web development or advertising that are looking to start a new career in search marketing, what advice would you give?

Many SEOs are evolving with the market and expanding their services into social media. I definitely see the value in expanding your skill set and your potential client base but personally I’ve had great luck going the opposite direction… specialization. I focus strictly on organic SEO with a strong emphasis on the technical. The list of what I don’t do is bigger than what I do… no paid search, no link building, no social media, no commerce sites. I know what I do well and I try to stick to it.

What are the most important skills for an in-house SEO vs a SEO working for an agency?

As an agency SEO you’re often juggling multiple projects that are in different phases and have different goals and frequently different resources. On any given day you could doing keyword research for a on a broad category (like autos), working with a junior web developer to launch a site redesign, deploying a search strategy for a small local gardening center, diving into analytics for a monthly report, or writing protocols to optimize title tags for an online hardware retailer with thousands of products. The upside is that you learn a lot because you get real experience in a little bit of everything. But you also have to be very organized and centered because you get pulled in a lot of directions.

Working in-house I’m still juggling multiple projects and working with different departments but in the end these goals have to ultimately be harmonious….everything has to fit together and support the site as a whole.

You have a lot of experience implementing search engine optimization from a technology perspective. What are some of the most common issues with content management systems and/or publishing systems that get in the way of optimal search visibility?

Common things I see are title tags that can’t be edited after the page is published or title tags that can’t be different from the article headline or title tags on paginated URLs that can’t be customized.

Do you have any headsmacking examples of simple fixes that resulted in large scale benefits?

Invest in a really good chair.

You have the unique perspective of having worked for an agency, for yourself and as an in-house SEO. Do you think companies will be able wean themselves from outsourcing any SEO work? Or do you see SEO as being like other professional services where companies will employ a combination of in-house and specialized or strategic outside expertise?

It’s important to know what you don’t know! When WSJ wanted to publish their international editions online my first recommendation was to bring in a consultant with a solid track record of executing successful SEO strategies in multiple countries. I’ve attended conference sessions on international search and read lots of information on it, but I had never developed, implemented and monitored an international search strategy for a client so my knowledge on the subject was academic.

Outside experts are the best way to learn what you don’t know.

What role does social media and networking play in today’s SEO for publishers?

In terms of SEO, social media offers a much more viable and authentic way to develop links to your site rather than link acquisition campaigns which were generally designed to get links for search engines. Now you can connect with your market, network, create buzz and really increase the exposure of your brand. And a happy by-product of that is links for SEO.
Also, social media provides another distinct source of traffic. A few years ago, you had email, search, referred traffic from editorial or advertising links and direct traffic from offline marketing. It makes me nervous when I see someone rely too much on a single source of traffic. If your business runs on a website and you’re getting 60% of your site traffic from organic search, you need to diversify. One little algorithm shrug and whammo… you could be feeling a lot of pain.

How do you see the influence of search innovations changing how you “do SEO” in the next year? In the next 2-3 years?

I have a hunch that the kind of technical SEO that I do will phase into obsolescence in the next few years. Google and Bing are aggressively expanding their Webmaster toolsets to put much of this information right into the hands of anyone that needs it. I think technical SEO will become a standard part of web development and other forms of SEO will be assimilated into social media, PR and analytics (except for paid search which isn’t going away). Obviously this begs the question, what will I do? I’m still thinking about that!

How is SEO for a large publisher (like Marketwatch or WSJ) different than some of the other large content sites (like Zillow) that you’ve worked on?

The great thing about doing SEO for a publisher is never having to worry about editorial content! Zillow, Avvo and DriverSide all started with a database of useful information. That database of content can be optimized so that it’ll rank for thousands of relevant queries (san diego homes for sale) but if you want to rank for queries like “best elementary schools in san diego” or “safest neighborhoods in san diego” you’ll need editorial content. Lots of it. On a zillion topics. Oh and make it high quality please? Yeh. We got that.

How much of a role do you see structured data and microformats playing in the future of search engine optimization?

I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte who writes about the visual communication of information through display. From a user perspective, I love the addition of structured data and microformats. From an SEO perspective, I firmly believe the more relevant information you can intelligently convey in a search result, the more qualified your visitors will be.

What about sitemaps and feeds? Essential or only necessary in certain situations?

For large sites, feeds and sitemaps are the most efficient method of discovery for new content. Far more efficient than getting crawled. But crawling is also important because you don’t get anchor text factored into a feed.

What tools would you recommend to an in-house marketer that’s newly acquired SEO responsibilities? Any advanced tools for more experienced marketers that you like? SEO or Social?
Most standalone SEO tools are geared towards linking and that’s something I stay away from. If you don’t have a viable PR strategy or a product that people will want to talk about our content that folks want to read and link to, then you’re not my ideal client. I’m not a PR person and to me, that is the essence of link building. So I don’t use too many tools. Xenu has been a workhorse for me over the years and I’m a big believer in having 2 sets of analytics. Besides that, using the engine’s toolsets as well as syntax queries provides the bulk of the data that I need.

How do you stay current with SEO and all the marketing, technology and communication channels that come with it? What are your favorite conferences, blogs, newsletters, organizations, books or networks that you rely on?

My favorite conference is coming up next month. SMX Advanced in Seattle is one of the few SEO conferences I attend where I always learn something to make it worthwhile. PubCon is another one. As for reading… I try not to spread myself to thin during the week because I could easily end up spending all day every day reading blogs. Generally I hit searchengineland.com because if there’s something I need to know, it’s there. On Fridays I try to make the round of blogs and catch up.

Is there a question I should be asking you?

You may not know that although I am “full-time” and “in-house” I’m actually a consultant for WSJ, not an employee. The difference for me (besides longer-than-usual vacations) is that I don’t *do* SEO for them…my goal is embed it as a process into their standard procedures and work-flow systems. I believe that a really good consultant works to make herself unnecessary. It may seem counter-intuitive to remaining employed but I’ve found that this philosophy makes me more valuable to my clients.

Thanks Alex!

Alex Bennert is the in-house SEO at the Wall Street Journal. Specializing in algorithmic search, she’s worked with clients such as Zillow, Philips, SFGate, JibJab and other enterprise level sites with millions of pages. A search geek since 1999, Alex analyzes bot behavior, ponders crawl barriers and conjures friendly URLs while waiting in line at the grocery store.

You can find Alex on Twitter as SEOsylph

UPDATE:
If you’re in Minneapolis  May 25th, check out the Integrated Marketing Summit where Alex is participating on a panel on SEO with Findlaw, International Dairy Queen, Apogee and TopRank Online Marketing.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | SEO at Wall Street Journal: Interview with Alex Bennert | http://www.toprankblog.com

Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools.

Maile Ohye has become a well known public figure from Google that works with webmasters and web marketers coordinating Google Webmaster Central outreach efforts, including the Webmaster Central Blog. She has been speaking at search conferences for several years and has done many interviews like the one at the bottom of this post with Greg Jarboe on real-time search. Her involvement with Google’s Webmaster Central has been instrumental in helping many web site owners find solutions to their Google problems.

In this interview, Maile shares her experience working with Google, Webmaster Central, offers tips on improving page speed, shares unusual SEO problems, offers her perspective on SEO and Social Media as well a hint at her upcoming keynote presentation at SES Toronto.

Please tell us about your career at Google and what’s the most exciting thing about your work?

I’ve worked at Google for over four years. One of my responsibilities is to manage the Webmaster Central Blog. I love the internet, love Search, and it’s all exciting. Monday through Friday I’m able to eat these great lunches (food is another love of mine), collaborate with the coolest people, and work toward a cause I totally believe in: a better web. In my current role, I assist webmasters to implement open standards and best practices that allow search engines to crawl/index their site. Because in the end, better sites make a better web which better facilitates users finding relevant information. Yay!

So dorky, I know. Can’t help it. I really dig this stuff.

Google Webmaster Central has been a great resource for many webmasters. What tips can you share with web site owners to make the most out of Google Webmaster Tools?

Awww, Webmaster Central a “great resource” for many webmasters? That’s wonderful to hear. As for tips, I’d say verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools, sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools’ Message Center, and then check out all the specific data for your site: our Top Search Queries feature was just revamped. Crawl Errors is cool for making sure your site is accessed as you’d expect (many people find unknown 404s, or realize they have server downtime because of noticing the “Unreachable” errors), HTML Suggestions shows you the URLs with duplicate titles or meta descriptions. I think once you start poking around in Webmaster Tools you’ll learn more and more. It’s addictive.

How does one become a Bionic Poster?

Lee, Bionic Posters aren’t born, they’re made. They’re the most active, helpful, accurate, friendly webmasters in the discussion forum. Many of them were bionic posters before we ever had recognition for bionic posters — they just went about their day helping others in the webmaster community. It was an honor for me to meet Richard Hearne and dine with webado while I was on holiday in Montreal. They’ve both individually written thousands (thousands!) of posts to help webmasters.

This thread still brings tears to my eyes.

The disclosure about page speed being a ranking factor will certainly have an impact on user experience. What’s the impact for Google?

Speed is now a factor in rankings because we’re trying to best serve users, and studies show that users are happier with faster sites and less satisfied with slow sites. More satisfied users are shown to spend more time on the internet. More time on the internet means more time spent learning new things, becoming a better informed citizen, surfing the web and, of course, checking out your website. Speed can be a win for all parties involved.

Please share a few tips and/or tools for improving page load speed:

First, I’d get a gauge of your site in Webmaster Tools Site Performance. Then, I’d download the Page Speed plugin. Simple implementations to improve performance are compressing/gzip-ping as many file types as possible, using an expires header, and ordering stylesheets the top of the page/scripts at the bottom. More information in my blog post/video from last week, You and site performance, sitting in a tree…”.

In your work with Google Webmaster Central, what are some of the most common mis-conceptions about SEO? Common problems? Really unique or unusual problems?

A more complex problem we’ve discussed recently is what to do with a page that has its (boilerplate) template translated into different language, causing different URLs, but where the actual (non-template) content remains the same. In other words, only the navigation can switch languages, the content itself is unchanged. This configuration is common in user-generated sites. For example, a discussion forum may have it’s template available in 20 languages, however the individual user posts are written in any language and are not translated.

Because the actual/main content is the same, rel=”canonical” makes theoretical sense. So should the webmaster use rel=”canonical” from the different languages to one preferred version? Let’s say the webmaster uses rel=”canonical” on her entire site. She points the French/Spanish/German versions to her canonical English-template version. Now, however, French-speaking users only see the English-template version in search results. Is this a desirable user search experience?

It’s a tough call. At this point, we can’t give a best practice recommendation across the board. It’s a decision left to the individual webmaster as they know their audience best.

If a web site owner was deciding how much effort to focus on standard SEO (keywords in content & links, crawling, external link acquisition) compared to social media (creating profiles, growing a network, sharing content) what tips would you give to help them decide where to spend their time? How do you see SEO and social media working together?

I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.

Congratulations on the keynote presentation at SES Toronto. What will you be speaking about?

Thanks! I’m super excited. I expect to talk about Search, Real Time Search, Webmaster Tools, cool new projects on the web. And hopefully I’ll hear feedback/concerns from the web community in Toronto, too.

Thanks so much for the interview, Lee. Hope to talk again soon.

Thank you Maile!

Find Maile at:
Twitter: @maileohye
Blog: SEO category

Update: I’ve added a recent video interview with Maile from Search Engine Strategies in New York. As noted in the interview above, she will be presenting a keynote presentation at the upcoming SES Toronto, so be sure to get more information on that event and get signed up.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | SEO Google Style: Interview with Maile Ohye | http://www.toprankblog.com

Content and link based SEO relies on the search engine crawlers to find web pages and digital assets on their own. Search engines are far from perfect at this, so the opportunity to provide search engines with structured lists of content via feed, can provide some companies with a competitive advantage.

At SES New York I moderated a session on Pushing Feeds and XML with Brian Ussery, Amanda Watlington and Daron Babin. Much of what we share on SEO is focused on content and links so I thought I’d share some of the rich insights offered in this very useful session by asking the panel a few follow up questions:

How much of an advantage can supplying a XML feed offer a site for indexing and search visibility?

Brian: It’s really difficult to quantify in terms of a percentage but, I’d say the larger your site and more images you have the better it is to provide an XML Sitemap.

How important is it for a new site to supply (or make available) a XML sitemap for search engines?

Brian: Sitemaps are one of the best ways I can think of to let engines know about your new pages and images.

Amanda: A new site has no inbound links hence there is no way for a search engine to find the site. A Sitemap not only provide a point of departure for the crawling of a new site, by putting one together a site owner can include the most important pages. This is particularly useful if the site is quite large. The Sitemap can cue to spider to pages that in fact link much deeper into the site. This jump starts the indexing process.

Would you ever advise a company NOT to use sitemaps?

Amanda: There are very rare occasions where I would not use a Sitemap. Those instances are when the contents of the site are very problematic. When there are lots of duplicate content issues that are in the process of being resolved, it makes little sense to urge the search engines to grab a Sitemap that will only bring them to the site’s woes even faster. Once the issues are settled then the Sitemap becomes an important weapon in the SEO’s arsenal.

Brian: If you have pages that you don’t want indexed, it’s probably best not to include those URLs in your XML Sitemap. Other than those kinds of situations though, I’d say Sitemaps are the way to go. I would suggest however, not including XML meta data in Sitemaps unless it’s accurate, correct and up to date.

It was interesting to learn during our session, the variety of feed types that could be used from those associated with web pages to news to video and I recall one for NASA? Do you have any examples that have called for unusual solutions or use of feeds?

Amanda: Structured data such as the Sitemap is fascinating in that it provides so many opportunities to communicate data information in a machine-readable format.

There are two feed types that we did not discuss during the session. First, there are product feeds, such as those used by Google Base and other comparative shopping search engines. These allow merchants to draw product information quickly and efficiently from their databases and submit it to a shopping engine. Once formatted, a site owner can submit thousands of products with little or no intervention.

The second type of feed was just announced this past week. It is now possible to submit image information (to Google). This has been long awaited. I’ve not yet had a chance to use this, but I have been eagerly awaiting image Sitemaps.

Either way, it’s kind of interesting to see! You can find out more at NASA.

How important is the protocol Pubsubhubbub being promoted by Google? Does it replace the need for autodiscovery?

Brian: Great question Lee, Pubsubhubbub, PuSH or hubbub for short, in case you haven’t heard is an open protocol for turning atom or RSS feeds into streams. Because it requires real feed URLs, autodiscovery isn’t really necessary. So, I don’t see Pubsubhubbub as a replacement for autodiscovery per se, but rather as a more efficient method. Some folks I’m sure will continue to use autodiscovery for their feeds but I think PuSH provides additional advantages that will be favored by most.

Is there a threshold for how many pages/items should be included in a sitemap feed or how often data is updated to determine whether providing a sitemap is worth it?

Amanda: It is difficult to give an across the board threshold for when and how much to include. With retailers, we clearly must look at their seasonality and time the Sitemap submissions to be sure that any new products or category level pages have been spidered and indexed prior to the season’s start. How much to submit is really tied to how complete is the site’s current indexing.

I personally believe that it is possible to strategically manage the process making sure that key pages which direct to deeper pages are included. As I mentioned in the session, Sitemaps are not a blunt object, a club, to be used to batter one’s way into the index, rather they provide a method for strategically informing the search engines of what you want found. I love to fish, salt or fresh water, and I think of Sitemaps with a fishing metaphor. They are bait.

Whether you submit a Sitemap or not, it is important to have a Webmaster Tools account. The Google team that is responsible for developing this resource continues to make it a much richer and more informative. Today, I consider it a powerful resource for knowing just what the most powerful engine is seeing in a site.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | SEO with Feeds & XML | http://www.toprankblog.com

One of the most insightful voices in the online marketing industry when it comes to advertising is Max Kalehoff of Clickable. I was introduced to Max at a Search Insider Summit conference several years ago with very high regard by David Berkowitz, another intelligent voice in the industry, so I knew immediately he was someone to pay attention to.

Max’s company recently announced the addition of Facebook Advertising to their PPC management platform and he was very kind to take the time to answer several detailed questions about social media advertising on the Clickable platform, the future of the online advertising industry, slimy SEO middlemen, how he stays current and blogging about his Weber grill.

1. You have impressive credentials in the interactive marketing industry with your experience working at Jupiter, comScore and Nielsen. How did you come to work with Clickable?

It’s mostly luck. I’ve been fortunate to work with a series of successful startup teams and entrepreneurs that played a key role in shaping the Internet. I came to Clickable from Nielsen, which bought our last startup, BuzzMetrics, the pioneer in social media measurement and research. I admire Nielsen and have many close friends there, but I wanted to build things and innovate again in a startup environment. Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, a Clickable investor, introduced me to David Kidder and Munish Gandhi, Clickable’s co-founders. I shared their vision for helping businesses succeed by simplifying online advertising. We quickly became friends and colleagues and the rest is history.

What’s behind your passion for building early stage companies?

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been passionate about building things, solving creative problems and exploring new territory. I’ve always tried to live out those passions through education, work, hobbies and family life. With work, entrepreneurial ventures are the best outlets for those passions.

When I was in college, I started two summer businesses. The first was sailboat charter business, and the second was a Web development consultancy. Post college, I spent a few years in the marketing agency business but soon threw myself into technology and Web startup life. There’s nothing more invigorating than working closely with a group of like-minded, passionate people trying to change the world. Big companies have their purpose, but nimble upstarts attract smart people who crave abstract problems, peer-to-peer learning, mastery, self-imposed discipline and persistence. Upstarts also require a lot of risk-taking, serendipity and authentic discovery.

To me, that’s the only way to live. And given the mess our world is in, we need more of these minds and ventures to invent our way to a better future.

For the uninitiated, what is Clickable and what types of companies should be using it?

Clickable is a software-as-a-service platform that makes online advertising simple, instant and profitable. Our tools empower beginners to professionals, and companies of all sizes, to maximize their advertising investment. We have three core products: Our flagship Pro tool is a simple dashboard that empowers marketers to manage online advertising with transformational return on investment. Clickable Pro activates instantly with an intuitive experience that makes it easy to manage performance across all major advertising networks, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and, now, Facebook.

Clickable Pro is complemented by Clickable Assist, a managed service that delivers agile assistance to maximize online advertising success. Finally, Clickable Platform is a white-label solution for big services companies to rapidly deploy large-scale online advertising programs to their local business customers under their own brands.

We have a simple purpose that ties everything together: to help businesses survive and thrive by simplifying online advertising success. We pursue that purpose by living up to three core values that comprise our DNA:

• 7:1 – The 7:1 ratio of good to bad acknowledges we’re not perfect. This is a powerful admission that enables us to listen better and constantly improve. This underlies transparency, trust and collaboration with each other and our customers.
• Simplicity – Our complex world is desperate for simplicity. Simplicity is difficult, yet it creates value, differentiation and opportunity. That’s why we make everything simple and beautiful.
• And – We are multidimensional. We innovate constantly to perfect our product-to-market fit … And we are a competitive sales culture that closes business. We celebrate both.

Recently the Clickable ad management platform announced the incorporation of Facebook ads.  Being able to track Facebook and search marketing PPC programs side by side seems a significant opportunity for all.  What should advertisers, especially small and medium sized businesses that you serve, expect from social media advertising? What kind of advice do you give to temper expectations? Or do you even need to?

We first removed the complexity that prevented marketers from expanding into search networks besides Google AdWords, by introducing a simple interface that marketers could use to manage all of their search marketing campaigns. It’s become clear that the next place where marketers want a simple, effective solution is on the world’s largest social network: Facebook.

With over 400 million members, Facebook introduces a new way to advertise that complements search marketing. Using extensive demographic targeting criteria, advertisers on Facebook can get out ahead of their customers and create demand that they can later capture with their search campaigns. Marketers can also use Facebook to promote their brands and drive direct sales. Indeed, this is new territory for everyone. We look forward to experimenting with our advertisers to surface best practices and customer profiles that achieve success.

In the course of doing business with many SMBs in conjunction with TopRankSMB, a surprising number of marketers mention having “tried PPC and it didn’t work”.  In most cases it’s due to a lack of knowledge, tools and time to gain the knowledge to run a successful search marketing ad campaign. What advice do you find yourself or your company giving SMBs most often in regard to online advertising? What tips can you give to those just starting out?

Indeed, we found that up to 50% of SMBs that try online advertising don’t succeed, primarily because of complexity. Similarly, a recent study we conducted on SMBs indicated that roughly half don’t properly track conversions. Knowing conversions is the first step in how an advertiser defines success, whether it’s generating a lead, having someone fill in a form or making a sale. Tracking conversions is important in directing your ad investment to the keywords that will drive the greatest return on investment. There’s a lot of talk about efficiency of click-throughs and cost-per-click, but in the end what really matters is the return on your ad spend, and the profitability of your business.

Our most common advice? First, make sure you are tracking your results, and don’t do anything until your analytics are effectively in place. Second, embrace “goal-based advertising” — that is, make investments only toward very specific and realistic business goals. That requires determining the monetary value of your goals, and figuring out which of your services and products have enough potential to justify spend. Finally, invest the time to get educated in PPC and do it right, or hire sometime to do it for you. Otherwise, you will quickly become another statistic in the “tried PPC and it didn’t work” category. That’s a disadvantageous outcome for most businesses.

You really hit a nerve with, Brands: Beware Of Slimy SEO Middlemen Meddling Through Social Media.  The behavior of the SEO account exec you interacted with is strikingly similar to how many media relations people and start-up business owners behave when they pitch us to write about them on Online Marketing Blog. It’s often a bucket of fake suck-uppiness wrapped around a pitch for a single, short term outcome. It’s sad because something far more significant could be achieved if they looked past the one “placement”. Client demands drive a lot of this behavior and agencies of all types (SEO and PR) often comply. What’s your advice on creating a more meaningful connection with bloggers?

My advice for creating a more meaningful connection with bloggers is the same as my advice for success in life: Give more value than you take. If you provide unselfish value, then people will  become attracted to you and they will advocate you. Advocacy may result in links, testimonials, business referrals, constructive feedback, partnership, loyalty and friendship. But calculating relationships purely based on SEO objectives can quickly become a risk to your brand. It’s that simple.

I like that you can switch from “My New Weber Grill” to “Social and Search Advertising“.  As an accomplished and long time blogger, what advice do you have for other interactive and marketing types for blogging over the long haul? How has your own blog affected your career and work?  How satisfied are you with your corporate blogging efforts?

It’s important to acknowledge that despite all the experts and gurus, the Social Media and Interactive bible is far from completion. We’re only in the beginning of the first chapter, and we’re all students. With that in mind, I think more successful blogging and social media efforts have a defined purpose, goals and room for lots of experimentation.

My personal blog is very much me, reflecting the perpetual blur between my professional and home life. They are impossible to separate, and the tension between the two is what makes life interesting. My blog has created an online presence that’s delivered myriad opportunities. It’s led to new business, new friendships, introspection and (in some cases) breaktrhough ideas. I also believe a personal blog is the best laboratory to become fluent and personally vested in interactive technologies. The learning I gained from my personal blogging endeavors directly contributed to some of our more successful interactive marketing strategies at Clickable.

I know we’re already into Q2 but what predictions can you offer on the future of paid search for the rest of 2010?  What are your thoughts on: Microsoft and Yahoo, Mobile PPC, sponsored social content or what’s next for Google and it’s array of advertising opportunities?

Our Q1 2010 analysis of search spending among advertisers on the Clickable Platform reveals that budgets are significantly higher in Q1 versus year-ago, suggesting an economic and advertising rebound. We have seen 75% of our advertisers increase their budgets versus year-ago, while 25% maintained flat or slightly decreased budgets. Based on Q1, we forecast that 2010 full-year search budgets will increase anywhere between 10% and 30% versus 2009. Meanwhile, search budgets are diversifying in terms of network distribution. Microsoft/Bing seems to be gaining ground on Yahoo and Google. Last year, only 5% of customers were using Microsoft/Bing, while currently this percentage is at 9%.

We believe one of the big stories in 2010 will be gains in social-network advertising, particularly Facebook. Inefficiencies and behavioral friction have prevented serious experimental dollars to shift, especially among PPC marketers.  Social advertising will grow dramatically in 2010 as the major social networks surface in third-party management tools, as well as improve their own self-serve dashboards. A lot of advertisers are highly interested in seizing new opportunities to connect with customers. Mobile advertising is picking up speed, but won’t be terribly relevant for most advertisers in 2010.

You blog and write for MediaPost which I recommend people read. How do you stay current yourself? Do you have a short list of industry conferences, blogs, newsletters, Twitter handles or books that you’d recommend?

I read a mix of news aggregators and thinkers in strategy, venture capital, tech and media, including: TechMeme, John Hagel, Fred Wilson, Umaire Haque, Jeff Jarvis, All Things Digital, TechCrunch, BusinessInsider, NYTimes Bits and (of course) TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog. While I write a weekly opinion column for MediaPost, I believe it’s one of the most thorough and ubiquitous sources of hard news in the interactive advertising industry.

I’m also blessed with a quirky list of friends whom I pay close attention to on Twitter, and they reward me with serendipity, personal tips and reading recommendations. I’ve not read any good business books in years, so I’ve abandoned them for fiction, history and poetry. The market is saturated with conferences and good ones are becoming rare; the best ones tend to be grass roots, niche and local, like many Meetups. We co-founded the New York SEMPO Search Meetup, which now has a passionate following of more than 1,000 members. We also founded and run Interesting Cafe, a discussion series that features some of the greatest living innovators in tech, media, culture and science. Small, passionate gatherings like these have the most profound and positive impact.

Thanks Max!

Max Kalehoff is vice president of marketing for Clickable, a platform that makes online advertising simple, instant and profitable. He also authors AttentionMax.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Max Kalehoff on Social Media Advertising, Blogging & the Future of Paid Search | http://www.toprankblog.com

The buzz on geolocation marketing is hot. Recently Lawrence Coburn from RateItAll released the beta version of a new project: DoubleDutch, a platform for creating your own geolocation check-in app, ala Foursquare. I connected with Lawrence to ask more questions about DoubleDutch and to get tips for marketers that want to incorporate geolocation and review services into their online marketing.

First, can you share a bit about yourself and your company RateItAll? We spoke on a panel several years ago at Pubcon and I remember that you have a great story about how your company started and really exploded with media attention.

Sure, RateItAll is a story of endurance. I ran it out of a coffee shop for years (along with a number of other niche sites). By 2007 it had started to grow to a point that I couldn’t handle it by myself. It was making decent money, but I was struggling to keep the servers up. Mathew Spolin, our CTO joined us in 2008 and we were able to go out get a little funding for it. We now have a team of seven based in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Congratulations on launching your new project, the iPhone App: DoubleDutch. I appreciate getting a pre pre alpha view of it and now you’ve really added some great features – especially the ability to white label it. What prompted you to create DoubleDutch and how is it different than Foursquare and Gowalla?

Lee, you were actually one of the first people to see DoubleDutch in the wild. We’re really excited about it – it has been called “Foursquare for the Enterprise” and “Ning for Mobile Social Networks.” We’re OK with both of those descriptions.

We had been eying location based services for a long time. I was an obsessive user of Dodgeball (the SMS precursor to Foursquare). By the time 2009 SXSW rolled around, Mathew and I were determined to do something with location. We approached Foursquare to team up on a reviews + check-ins combo, but weren’t able to get their attention.

So we set out to build the thing ourselves, leveraging RateItAll’s massive database of geo tagged data. Over the years we had signed a number of geo data partnerships, giving us a big advantage in entering the location fray.

Our goal was to put together a collection of mobile, social components that could be remixed and customized by white label partners. In addition to the check-in functionality, some of our features include game dynamics (leaderboards, achievement stickers, and “Rockstardom,”), ratings and reviews, photo uploads, Facebook / Twitter integration, and many more. This app was in development for more than 6 months and we’re quite happy with how it turned out.

Our big difference from Foursquare and Gowalla is in our emphasis on reviews. We think there is an endemic relationship between a social check-in and a review of a local business. Just as Amazon has been able to leverage sales data to convert more reviews than anyone else, we think that check-ins are the first step towards posting a review.

We also believe strongly in the concept of “The community IS the social graph.” What I mean by this is that on public networks like Foursquare or Gowalla, you need to recreate your social graph for the apps to get any value from the service. Not so on a private network like DoubleDutch. You can imagine an app white labeled for a conference like Pubcon, in which every attendee could see the check in activity of other attendees. Think about what a boon this would be for networking – no more just heading to the lobby bar and hoping for the best. And because everyone was there for Pubcon, no friending would be required.

Are widgets still sexy?

Of course! Just not as sexy as geo at the moment. In fact, I’m not posting much on Sexy Widget any more. I started a blog called Location Meme a few months ago with a friend. The folks at The Next Web took notice, and invited me to be an editor at that network’s Location blog, and that’s where I’m doing most of my writing now.

Back to DoubleDutch. Not only is this a (another) geolocation iPhone app, but you’re offering companies or organizations the opportunity white label the DoubleDutch platform to create their own location-based iPhone app. Who is your target and how do you see them using it? What are your plans to make it competitive with the other apps out there that are already well entrenched?

Our three target verticals right now are Conferences, Hotels, and Universities. We think that almost any community that is tied to a location could benefit from a location and knowledge sharing service, but we needed to narrow the universe down a bit. Conferences and Hotels are interesting because they typically are communities of people who are converging on a new city looking for recommendations and interaction. DoubleDutch helps on both counts. Universities are interesting because of their tie to a specific geography, and the demographic. You can check out some sample use cases on DoubleDutch.me.

How does the Double Dutch app tie in to your main business, RateItAll?

Great question. We are seeing signs that DoubleDutch has the potential to become our main business, with RateItAll taking a supporting role. RateItAll provides a tremendous foundation for the service, with its massive amount of geo tagged data, and its 4M+ reviews. Our server infrastructure is key as well as it allows us offer SLAs to our clients. Also, all check in, ratings, reviews, and photo activity is aggregated on RateItAll.com, making DoubleDutch another content collection channel.

You were at SXSW, who won the geolocation prize there? Gowalla or Foursquare? I guess that’s a loaded question. What did they do right? Did you see any big mistakes?

I think geolocation won the geolocation prize. Both those services got a big boost, but I think the whole space benefited from all the attention. At DoubleDutch, we are huge fanboys / fangirls of both services and wish them only the best. If you believe that Enterprise trails Consumer by two years (which we do), the faster that those services blaze the trail, the faster that DoubleDutch will grow.

Please share 3-4 best practices and tips for companies that want to use geolocation based mobile apps to market their businesses?

I think it really depends what kind of business you are. If you are a local business, you don’t really have to do much other than ensure that your address info is up to date on the mobile services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and of course, RateItAll. If you are a bit more savvy / experimental, you can try offering discounts / giveaways to Foursquare Mayors, and try and incentivize your customers to check-in and push to Twitter / FB.

If you are a big brand, perhaps it makes sense to try and cut a deal with Foursquare or Gowalla to sponsor some Badges. Lots of companies are cutting these sorts of deals, and it’s a good way to drop your brand into the experience of those apps in the context of the location game.

But if you are a big community, it might make sense to use a service like DoubleDutch to create a more pervasive connection with your customers / members / employees and extend your community out into the real world. Social check in apps are not only fun, but they can be productive. We’re talking to companies with some pretty innovative ideas for putting geo to work – for example, a real estate company wants to put this app in the hands of their agents to encourage more property visits, and help those agents capture photos and thoughts about each property. We have been amazed at how creative some of these companies are.

What about tips for marketing within the consumer reviews marketplace overall? How important is it for companies to be active, whether it’s editorially, through advertising or offline promotion with services like Yelp, Epinions or even RateItAll?

I strongly recommend that businesses be active on the big review properties. Being active does not mean being confrontational and bullying – it means engaging thoughtfully with customers, even the insane and / or angry ones. If you suspect cheating, don’t call out the customer – go to the host site. Most of these services allow commenting and messaging – on RateItAll, which is the 9th biggest review site, we see a number of big brands on the site every day making use of the free tools like commenting and messaging to engage their customers. Some of those folks pay us for access to a few more tools, but you don’t need to have a budget engage your customers.

One question I like to ask smart and busy entrepreneurs like yourself is: How do you stay current with technology and marketing? Do you have favorite events, books, blogs, networks or some kind of crystal RateItAll ball to keep you on top of what’s important for the future of your business?

I read and write as much as I possibly can. Writing makes me smarter about a topic, because I don’t want to come off as a moron. It takes a lot of research to write a post. Sexy Widget was born out of my desire to get smart about widgets, and my role as Editor at the Next Web was born out my desire to get smart about geo. In terms of reading, I hit Techmeme and Hacker News all the time, and also get a lot of good links from Twitter. My two favorite blogs are AVC and CDixon.org.

Living in San Francisco, I have access to a number of technology meetup type events – I try and hit a couple per month. There’s nothing better than talking to entrepreneurs, because for them, predicting the next big wave is life or death. I tend to listen to folks running companies more than I listen to journalists.

Thanks Lawrence.

You can download the Double Dutch app here. RWW did a great overview with screenshots here.

Lawrence Coburn is the founder and CEO of RateItAll and co-founder of the white label geolocation app,DoubleDutch. In his spare time, he is an editor of The Next Web’s Location blog. Lawrence is also a mentor at Ventures.io, a San Francisco based technology incubator.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | DoubleDutch: Foursquare for the Enterprise | http://www.toprankblog.com

Tim Ash is a marketing machine. He writes a blog, contributes to Search Engine Watch, hosts a weekly show on WebmasterRadio.fm, is author of the book “Landing Page Optimization”, speaks at numerous conferences and is the chair of the upcoming Conversion Conference in May.

Oh, and he also runs SiteTuners, a successful landing page optimization consulting business and has launched a new tool called AttentionWizard that offers eye tracking “without the eyes”.

Tim has worked with American Express, Sony Music, American Honda, Coach, COMP USA and many other major brands.

“Landing page testing is the best accelerator of your business that you have available.”

Tim is a very smart and very nice guy who took a few rare moments of time to answer a few questions about measuring social media ROI, budgets for testing, common mistakes, tips, tools and how he stays current in such a fast paced and changing field.

Please tell us about your background, your business, and the book?

I am a recovering technologist. I almost got my PhD in computer science, but dropped out to start my first Internet consulting business. Over the years we have focused on driving traffic. But after a while it became clear that the bigger problem (and business opportunity for us) was to improve the efficiency of that traffic once it landed on the website or landing page. That’s how SiteTuners was born. We offer a range of consulting services to improve conversion, full-service landing page tests in which we guarantee performance improvement, and software such as out cutting-edge TuningEngine testing software, and the AttentionWizard visual attention prediction tool. We work with some of the biggest companies in the Internet universe, as well as scrappy smaller companies.

I wrote the Landing Page Optimization book a couple of years ago and it has been very well received. Wiley Press has asked me to write a second edition that I am co-authoring with Rich Page and Maura Ginty. It will be out early next year and will have over 150 pages of completely new content.

There’s a lot of speculation about social media and measuring ROI. Do you have examples where conversions were improved from content on a social network or other social media site as a result of a/b or multivariate testing? What is significantly different about measuring social media marketing efforts versus search marketing where the goals are conversions?

The fundamental principles are the same – you should be trying to increase the efficiency of conversion actions that have a measurable impact on your business. The only difference is that the conversion actions might not be sales, but rather “micro conversions” such as re-tweets, fan page sign-ups, or visits to blog or content pages that you are trying to promote. So if you can lower your cost-per-acquisition for any of those actions, that is good. What makes testing a bit more tricky to conduct in a social media setting is that you need steady traffic sources over an extended period of time. Unfortunately much of social media happens very quickly and results in one-time traffic spikes that go away.

The type of social media marketing executed by many SEOs does seem to behave according to the “go hot” principle where content gets voted on and attracts spikes in traffic. However, many companies are building networks on social channels and community participation often drives more steady streams of traffic according to the content publishing schedule of the brand. When it comes to measuring social ROI, are you seeing more social media marketing efforts fall in the first situation versus the second?

Many social media programs are based on “go hot” kinds of activities. The content is often “perishable” and time-sensitive. But there is also long-term “content farming” activities which continue to add to a pool of general company awareness through creation of new content pages on the website, whitepapers, blog posts, and media placements. This takes a more disciplined approach and a long-term commitment of resources, so in our experience is more rare.

This is one of those “it depends” questions but let’s give it a shot. Is it your experience that most marketers allocate budget for testing as part of overall web analytics? What percentage of that budget should go towards ongoing testing for say, an ecommerce site? What advice do you have for getting more approved?

Landing page or conversion rate optimization is not a part of Web analytics. It is a top-line revenue-growing activity. How much would you pay for a 5% increase in volume? 10%? 50%? Landing page testing is the best accelerator of your business that you have available. It should not have a fixed budget. The economically rational thing to do with any marketing activity is to keep spending money on it as long as it produces a positive ROI. Setting fixed budgets is the same kind of silly logic that some companies use when driving traffic. If you have a fixed pay-per-click budget and you could buy more profitable traffic above that threshold, you are just throwing profits away.

It’s interesting that you say that when it comes to budget allocation, since both concern measuring and improving web site performance. Of course there are many things that make sense to a consultant or service provider that don’t necessarily fit with the reality of how companies forecast their marketing budgets. Have you been successful at winning more budget with the “keep spending money on it as long as it produces a positive ROI” argument or do you only work with companies that have more flexibility with where they spend?

Technically landing page testing is part of measurement and Web analytics should always be actionable. Unfortunately often it is just looking in the rear-view mirror at things that have happened in the past. My friend Jim Sterne insists that all Web analytics should be forward looking and actionable, otherwise it is useless. But in practice most analysts spend more time on data mining and not on landing page testing. If you have a testing mindset, then the question you continually ask is “Where can I make the biggest impact on our business by tweaking a mission-critical step in our value creation chain?” If you do that, the resulting improvements should make the business a big pile of money and will create psychological momentum inside of your company for further testing and experimentation. Once an organization gets excited and buys into this continual-improvement mentality, the testing budget question often goes away.

What are some of the most common mistakes experienced search marketers make when it comes to landing pages? Top 5?

That’s easy – I can give you more than 5. If you have heard my “Seven Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design” presentation, you know that there are seven common types of mistakes on all landing pages: unclear calls-to-action, too many choices, asking for too much information early in the process, too much text, not maintaining continuity with the expectations that were set upstream of the actual landing page, visual clutter and distraction, and lack of trust and credibility.

What tools do you recommend (in addition to Google Website Optimizer and those at SiteTuners like AttentionWizard) for corporate marketers that are still fairly new to conversion rate improvement? Advanced tools?

There are a number of tools that have come out in just the last couple of years that make it much easier to diagnose and correct conversion issues. These include ClickTale.com, CrazyEgg.com, UserTesting.com, and CrossBrowserTesting.com.

How do you stay current with practices? Do you have favorite conferences, books, blogs, newsletters or other resources that you rely on?

Wow – that’s tough. There is an explosion of resources around landing page optimization. I pay attention to Bryan Eisenberg, Avinash Kaushik, Anne Holland, and try to look for interesting resources through Twitter tags like #lpo, #cro, and #measure. Conferences like Search Engine Strategies, eMetrics, and PubCon always feature solid content on the topic.

Conversion Conference is coming up soon (May 4-5 in San Jose) with some big names in the conversion and testing space including Bryan Eisenberg, Jakob Nielsen, and yourself. Who is the conference for and why should they come? What prompted you to start it?

I created the new ConversionConference.com series to give conversion improvement it’s own home. Until now, conversion has been a side topic at conferences that focused on driving traffic. The first event will be in San Jose next month, and then in Washington DC in the fall. There is also a German show in Hamburg, and other international shows on the drawing boards. The San Jose show will feature three dynamic keynotes that you mentioned. There will also be twenty six fast-paced sessions over two days covering all aspects of conversion. The presenters are all top notch. The show is held in parallel with eMetrics and will share the expo hall, lunches, networking events and the Conversion Bash party put on by WebmasterRadio.fm. The top conversion tools and services companies will also be there. If you want to turbocharge your online marketing you should be there.

By the way, your readers can use an exclusive promo-code “CCW562” for an additional $100 off of the early bird rate if they register by April 15th.

Thanks Tim. You can connect with Tim Ash on the social web at:

Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Blog

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Landing Page Optimization Deep Dive: Interview with Tim Ash | http://www.toprankblog.com