Online Marketing Blog

The SEO Rehab & Intervention was a great session oh how we are all addicted to something in our industry. Granted it was a bit of an un-structed session, but that’s what made it entertaining. The discussion flowed from chocolate cake to Twitter and SEO.

Here are a few good tips:

• Spend your time on what your doing next. Things change, so should you.
• Why check your page rank daily when it changes quarterly?
• When page rank does change, and if yours goes down, check the sites in your industry. Did they all go down? If so, stop panicking.
• Other time wasters include checking rankings, backlinks and pages indexed constantly.
• Feed your addition with tools that will do the checking for you. Then you can get a quick overview.

The famous eye tracking heat maps are just the start of understanding search behavior. What about what happens before they get to your site? Or while they are on your site? Search behavior is something a site needs to understand to get more users to their site.

Here are a few of the thoughts shared:

John Marshall

• It’s hard to get good search behavior update unless you have access to a search engine or HitsLinks.
• Lots of people look at the keywords area in analytics. This shows a narrow view of activity.
• We should be using site search data from your website to get visiter intent. This is very valuable.
• Often times, free data like this is often ignored and it shouldn’t be.

Google may be the giant in the search industry, but they may have to much data to get you want you want to find. A previous session talked about semantic search and how it’s being worked on, but if you can’t wait, vertical search is something you can use today.

Philip James from Snooth was the first presenter. He said that back when the web was smaller, regular search engines worked better as they had fewer pages to work with. Now, with trillions of pages, it’s getting harder and harder to get good results. This is where vertical search comes into play. They have a smaller index and can provide a higher quality result. As an example, if you are on a food vertical search site and search for ’spicey’ it already knows it has to do with cooking.

What is it about web analytics that that intrigues and yet scares companies at the same time? Everyone want to understand analytics, yet once one starts digging in, it can get complicated. In Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers, they gave tips on what you should be looking at and what you should be paying attention to.

Here are a few of the tips & thoughts that were shared:

Craig Danuloff

• Invisibility; what can’t we see?
• Every search is a question, every ad is an answer. Keywords simply connectors.
• ROAS is a ‘feel good’ metric. don’t take it seriously.
• Deception - Can you trust what you see?
• Accuracy - What’s the margin of error. Is there statistical significance?

This sponsored session was an entry level overview of what websites should be doing on their website to get visibility and rankings in search engines.

Here are the 7 Proven Ways to get Your Website on Page 1 Organically & then Convert as stated by the presenter Shawn Moore.

1. Content is King
   What your content says, what your images and video show not only give users a first impression, but those items are also important to how a search engine is going to interpret your website.
2. Navigation and Architecture
   Looking into the way that your menus and internal linking structure are important. Can the web crawlers see and index your navigation? Or is it in JavaScript or Flash that may not be as search friendly?

Every brand has a story and every story has a purpose.  But what does your story say about you? 

The Storyteller Marketing session was fantastic.  It’s a different way at looking at marking.  Some presenters didn’t even consider themselves marketers, instead, storytellers.  It’s all about finding or creating a story that will spread, in a positive way, around the web, from mouth to mouth and be more than just some advertising campaign.

A few good examples that they provided included Dove’s Pro-Aging, Kleenex stories and Apple’s recent Mac & PC.  Sometimes the stories are true, sometimes their created, but they are never fake.  You can’t pay someone to pretend to have a story as it doesn’t work.  It’s got to be real.

Where is search headed?  We’ve heard of semantic search for a few years now, but what’s going on with it?  Each major search engine is taking the next steps but some are closer than others.  

Actually, what we are beginning to see is semantic and universal search merging together.  Yahoo, Ask, Powerset and Hakia showed screenshots that included images, videos, ratings and other media.  Are universal and semantic search the same?  Possibly. 

- Sorry for the bad pictures. I haven’t got down the art of taking pictures of PowerPoint slides.

What is the long tail in search? It’s all the smaller keyword phrases that refer traffic to your site. There may be only a few referrals, but all the long tail keywords can bring in more traffic and revenue than the larger, more popular keyword phrases.

Long-Tail Example: Head, or larger keyword phrases, could be printers. The long tail contains all the individual makes, models, sizes and types of printers.

What made this session good was that each presenter had a different perspective. Local, ad network, eCommerce and organic search.

You’ve probably picked up that this week is about SES San Jose from Dana and Ashley’s “15 Things Not to Miss at SES San Jose” followed by Jessica’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” post.  I am also headed out to sunny California next month. There’s plenty to take in on a trip to the Golden State including the beautiful weather, celebrities, good wine, and, of course the Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Here are a few of the sessions I’m planning on covering:

More Customers, Fewer Costs - Why Marketing to the ‘Long Tail’ Makes Sense
Who doesn’t want more customers and fewer costs? Isn’t that a business’ dream? This session will be interesting as there have been recent stories on how the long tail is not as effective as we once thought. I still believe in the long tail though.

Editor’s Note: Wednesday this week was the annual MIMA Summit held downtown Minneapolis. With our current workloads and schedules, I wasn’t planning on having TopRank staff attend, but received some last minute encouragement so I had Thomas and Dana attend the whole day and was able to slip in for the last 3-4 hours myself. The attendance nearly doubled over last year to 700+ attendees (an estimate I heard at the event). Hats off to MIMA members for a great job spreading the good interactive marketing word.

The following are wrap-ups from MIMA Summit veteran attendee Thomas McMahon and first-timer Dana Larson.

Thomas McMahon

Going to the MIMA Summit is always a treat. It’s amazing to see how many local people are in the industry and take the time to come out and enjoy a day of great food, networking and great presentations.