Online Marketing Blog

SES Toronto was full of great content from the keynote from Avinash Kaushik where he took local companies to task with their search visibility and user experience to breakout sessions like the content marketing optimization panel I presented on and this one: Spy vs. Spy: Competitive Analysis. There’s a plethora of tools available online to track, monitor and uncover information that could be used to gain a competitive advantage for both organic search optimization and pay per click.

This session provided a balance of both and included speakers Jim Yu of Bright Edge (@brightedge) and Matt Van Wagner (@mvanwagner) of findmefaster. Moderation duties were handled by Mike Grehan (@mikegrehan), Global VP Content, SES, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ.

Starting things off was Jim Yu of BrightEdge, which is an enterprise SEO platform that has over 2,000 brands using their product.

The “Smart Mobile Marketing” session was a panel discussion, moderated by TopRank CEO Lee Odden. To begin the discussion, Lee opened with a question for the room of 80+, “How many people in the room have developed a mobile version of a site?” 3-4 hands slowly raise. And with that, the stage is set: There is a lot of learning to do surrounding mobile marketing.

The session panel consisted of 2 leaders and veterans of the mobile marketing industry, Deborah Hall and Michael J. O’Farrell.

Deborah Hall

Hall founded web2mobile 3 years ago, frustrated with the user experience when trying to access a site via a smart phone. One of the greatest challenges she noticed was the upload speed, or lack thereof, of sites.

WARNING: This post is based on a Marty Weintraub presentation.  If you have seen Marty present, then you understand the warning and are probably smiling.  For those of you who have not, just remember you were warned, although this text doesn’t do justice to Marty IRL.

All kidding aside, Weintraub, CEO of aimClear, is a talented presenter that has a passion for his subject matter, Facebook.  In “Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics” at SES Toronto, Weintraub focused primarily on behavioral targeting. You know, identifying the behavior of your ideal audience and target/market accordingly. Sounds simple until you consider the millions of ways a marketer can slice and dice audience segments in Facebook.

Facebook marketing is a big topic and this presentation was specifically focused on Facebook ad targeting.

Really, truly understanding the competitive landscape can help pave the way for a successful search engine marketing program.

Chris Boggs led a panel discussion at SES Toronto on Competitive Analysis – What tips and tools can get you the vital competitive information that every SEO needs. According to Boggs, “Competitive analysis is one of the most exciting and important tactics (SEOs) can do.

The session was segmented into 3 areas of focus: on site research,off site research and PPC research.

On Site Research

Marios Alexandrou, Rosetta

When conducting on site (i.e. within your competitor’s site) competitive analysis, start by:

1) Asking yourself, “what companies should I look at?”  Compete.com can come in handy here.  Enter a handful of competitors and look for companies with high traffic. These are the companies that will likely have characteristics that will help inform your SEO approach.

Moderated by Jonathen Allen, the SEO is Dead. Long live SEO! session included a number of “salty dog” SEO experts: Terry Van Horne, Jim Hedger and Garry Pryzklenk.

Essentially, the key questions discussed in this panel centered around what is it that we’re doing as marketers that could be considered as SEO vs. Marketing.  Other topics included: Google +1, personalization, evolving nature of SERPs, “Trust Rank”, analytics and other technical aspects of SEO were discussed.

Moderator: What does search engine optimization mean anymore? The thing about SEO is that there are many technical considerations. What ranking factors still matter? Should we still be considering tags, H1, Titles, etc.

Terry: Title tags are one of the biggest factors.

In my preview post for SES Toronto, I counted John Alexander’s Keyword Forensics session as one of my “Must See” presentations for the 2011 conference. The promise of really digging down into keyword discovery and keyword analysis techniques sounded far too good to pass up. After all, keyword research is an essential part of any SEO process.

The session starts with an inspiring quote on the projector “Keyword Forensics – Exploring the Hidden User Search Behavior for Keywords That Are Often Missed by Keyword Researchers.”

I research keywords!  What am I missing?

Here are some good nuggets from the presentation:

Understand the Difference Between Keyword Research vs. Keyword Forensics

Keyword Research: Researching identified keywords to determine which phrases will provide the most search traffic.

If you’re wondering, “Who’s Brian Larson?”, you’re not alone. Before I jump into the details of some of the can’t miss sessions at the upcoming SES Toronto conference, I’ll borrow a line from Austin Powers: “Please allow myself to introduce…myself.”

I’m a SEO Account Manager at TopRank Online Marketing – which means I have the enviable job of developing and managing SEO programs for several TopRank clients. One of the many benefits of my job is that I have the opportunity to work daily with some of the most intelligent and forward thinking companies around (you know who you are).  As I head to SES Toronto, I go with my clients’ goals and needs at the front of my mind.

The disciplines of search, social media, content marketing and online PR continue to intersect and often combine to create a powerful mix. Besides leveling the playing field, companies and individuals are creating competitive advantages as they adapt to shifts in technology and consumer behavior. Learning and mastering the ability to integrate should be top of the personal development list for marketing and communications professionals.

Here are the details for four upcoming events to do a deep dive into Optimized Online Marketing and PR. I hope to see you there:

Event: Blogworld Expo New York – Social Media Business Summit
Date: May 24-26, 2011
TopRank Presentation: Dominate Your Niche with Social Media, SEO & Blogging

With so many “Web 2.0″ technologies coming in to play with web design and online application development, the effect on the search engines’ ability to find, crawl and index content becomes an issue. As such, this session moderated by Kevin Ryan included deep dive advice from Chris “Silver” Smith, Lead Strategist from Netconcepts and Ambles Kwok, a Senior Engineering Manager from Yahoo Canada.

Chris Silver Smith was first up and gave examples of Web 2.0 technologies including the idea of folksonomy and tagging by showing a tag cloud from Delicious. It’s an alternative method of navigation based on user defined keywords assigned to a piece of content.

If you’ve been in the search marketing industry for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly encountered a wide variety of conflicting or outdated advice. Since “how to” information in so many other industries is often presented as an absolute, many people look for the same kinds of static and perpetual rules with search engine optimization. The problem comes from not discerning SEO myth and speculation from fact which can be a very costly mistake.

Moderated by Matt Van Wagner, this session (SEO Don’ts, Myths and Scams) included some of the most experienced SEO practitioners in the business with Jill Whalen of High Rankings, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit and Lyndsay Walker from WestJet.

My first time in Toronto did not disappoint. It was brief but very busy with plenty of sessions to choose from during the day. Here is a collection of my favorite photos taken during SES Toronto this week:

Matt McGowan, Joe Dolson and Todd Malicoat enjoying some pre-conference conversation

Kevin Ryan getting the most out of Google’s Bill Tighe during the Advanced Paid Search Panel

Chris Silver Smith really gave up the goods during the Web 2.0 and Search Engines Panel.

SEO myth-buster Jill Whalen tells it like it is as Matt Van Wagner thinks, “Damn, she’s giving away my secrets!”

Jeff Quipp, Jennifer Osborne, Emily Spence and Richard Zwicky working the exhibit hall

Yahoo’s booth complete with Wii and a big push for SearchMonkey

I’m back from SES Toronto and wanted to share the presentation on Twitter with readers that weren’t at the show. Fellow presenters @davesnyder and @chriswinfield did a great job and the audience received a deep drill down into many aspects of Twitter.

In the end, Twitter on it’s own and with it’s uptime issues isn’t anywhere near as productive as it is in combination with third party tools like Twhirl, Summize and Twitturly. Return on effort from using Twitter really depends on how you use it. The mileage will vary based on your goals, how much you give and to what extent you use Twitter in combination with other socnets like Facebook, LinkedIn and offline networking.

Here’s my presentation hosted on Slideshare:

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