Online Marketing Blog

A common problem throughout time is the proclivity for the dregs of our society to capitalize on any new product or type of business in a dishonest, or flat out crooked, fashion.

Before attending “The SEO Reputation Problem” to cap off Day 3 at SES, I was blissfully unaware of the level of this problem in our industry.

The session, moderated by Exact Target’s VP of Agency & Search Marketing Jeffrey Rohrs included on its panel:

• Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
• Kristopher B. Jones, President & CEO, Pepperjam

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It can be incredibly laborious when deploying search engine optimization for an enterprise company with tens of divisions, thousands of products, and tens of thousands of web pages. Bill Macaitis, Marshall D. Simmonds, Melanie Mitchell, and Bill Hunt led the “In House: Big SEO” discussion providing insight into how to effectively manage SEO campaigns of tremendous magnitude.

Simmonds of the New York Times shared 5 items to ensure the success of a huge SEO campaign:

• Organization - The development and time frame of an SEO project plan
• Analysis - The collection of data describing a program’s current situation

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Are Paid Links Evil? Optimus Prime versus Megatron.

As I attended “Are Paid Links Evil?” as my last session of Day 2 at SES San Jose 2007, I was glad to see that everyone there was still in high spirits after the long day of learning, blogging, networking and preparing for the Google Dance. However, I didn’t expect to see a battle of the Autobots against the Decepticons.

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A trap I fell into early in my career as an SEM specialist was to ensure clients we would do our best to drive all the traffic we could to their site. Looking back, I’m glad I learned the obvious error of this statement before becoming involved in a client’s burgeoning PPC campaign.

The session “Creating Compelling Ads”, moderated by Allan Dick of Vintage Tub & Bath had at its core the powerfully obvious notion (in hindsight) that driving all traffic to your site is not only a fool’s mission, but in the realm of PPC, a costly mistake.

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Day two of SES San Jose found me fighting for an outlet as I prepared to impart details to you on the session “Putting Search Into the Marketing Mix”.

The session, moderated by Free Agent Consultant Sara Holoubek included on its panel:

• Misty Locke, President & co-Founder, Range Online Media
• Curtis Dueck, Senior Account Manager, Epiar Inc.
• Bill Mungovan, Director of Search, Carat Fusion
• Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International

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“Writing for Search Engines” is a long standing session by Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen. It’s a great session covering the basics of SEO friendly copywriting and a good primer for those new to SEO.

Search Engines are constantly improving their ability to sniff out the spam and de-value irrelevant links such as those from link farms. They are making the same kinds of improvements to the indexing, categorization and sorting of web pages in the search results.
In order to make it easier for search engines to do their job, it’s important to incorporate the keywords for which you wish to be found in your site content, title tags and meta descriptions. Now when people search for those keywords, there’s a greater likelihood that search engines will rank the web site higher than a competitor site who doesn’t have relevant keywords in the content and links of their site.

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Analytics is a big part of a website’s success, However, even though analytics software is getting better and cheaper, website owners still don’t really know what to do with it.

Matt Bailey with Site Logic is an excellent speaker on this topic. He talks about how analytics is more than just hits, it’s about segmenting and tracking and learning how your visitors are using the site. Tracking things like page views, top 10 entry pages, keywords and hits are just scraping the surface. There is so much more that should be happening. What are the KPIs? Analytics numbers are just numbers with no action and figuring out what they mean is the key to success.

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Tuesday’s SES’s keynote was with Jim Lanzone of Ask. He talked briefly about the past, present and future of Ask.com.

Jim stated that they’ve seen great growth since launching Ask 3D. They feel that they are the fastest growing in their category. Ask is not as concerned with beating the others at market share, they are more concerned with getting satisfying results back to the searchers. After launching ask 3D they are finding that about 50% of their users are not clicking on the web results but rather on of the other offerings on the page. Jim also pointed out that they are trying to get as much information above the fold as possible. To do this theyare putting content where other search sites are putting ads.

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Day Two coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose:  The Popular Kids Have Good Content 

Tuesday morning was the morning to learn about link building. As a linking specialist at TopRank, I knew I would learn a lot, and review what I already know, in this session by listening to Mike Grehan and Christine Churchill.

The topics we focused on this morning were ways to increase a website’s ranking, such as link requests, paid links and reputable links from authority sites.

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If you see these smiling faces at SES, be sure to say hello!

Here is a summary of the coverage by the TopRank blogging team for day one of Search Engine Strategies, San Jose 2007:

• SES San Jose Day Minus One
• The Search Landscape
• SES Videos: Dan Perry Cars.com
• SES Videos: Conversation with Michael Gray and Bryan Eisenberg
• Universal & Blended Search
• Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz
• SES Video Tim Mayer of Yahoo Interview
• Ads in A Quality Score World
• Winning the Search Engine Lottery

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The success of an entire Search Marketing Campaign is rooted in the selection of keyword phrases and contrary to popular belief; the selection of these phrases is not contingent upon popularity and competitiveness alone.

Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance led part of the discussion on search term targeting at this year’s SES.

Perhaps the most important message of this session, one often overlooked by clients and SEOs alike is the idea not to choose solely what you would like to be found for, but also to select phrase for which you are being found by your target audience.

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Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies Expo in San Jose got off to a really fruitful start with Danny Sullivan giving us a lottery tip. His session, Introduction to Search Marketing, gave us good examples on how to buy tickets and win big in the search engine lottery.

Emphasizing the importance of title tags, meta tags, meta keywords, Danny explains many ways to optimize a site to be found more easily by all visitors, human or otherwise. He discussed how to research the best keywords to place in the content for your site, stating that if you don’t have enough time to do a huge amount of keyword research, “go with your gut”. You know your users. You know your site. What would you search for to get to your site?

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