Online Marketing Blog

What a great conference for SES at San Jose and the many new people to the event in attendance. Below are the TopRank team blog posts for the final day. Another big thank you goes to (L to R) Jessica, Ashley, Thomas and Dana for a great job covering sessions. If you saw these happy faces at the conference, be sure to comment and say hello.  Thanks to SES too, for having us.

• Google Dance 2008 Photos – TopRank Team
• Blog SEO Tips from SES San Jose – Lee
• Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Michael Brito Intel – Lee
• Social Media Analysis and Tracking – Jessica
• Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Heather Lloyd-Martin DMA SEMC – Lee
• Black Hat vs White Hat Playing Dirty with SEO – Ashley

Blogs have been abuzz for at least 4 years in the tech space and in the past 2-3 years in the business marketing world. Like many new marketing/communication channels, there continues to be a need to demystify shiny new objects and what they mean for businesses. Blogs and search engine optimization are no different.

One point I would make is that companies are wasting their long term time when setting up blogs purely for SEO purposes. It’s short term thinking and over time, results in difficulties with keeping momentum, new ideas and content. How do I know? Been there and done that, many times.

It’s far more realistic to implement blogs for specific purposes such as product communications, online newsroom, thought leader/strategy, customer support/communications, news, branding, advice/tips, aggregation of content in specific topics and many more. Regardless of the purpose, each blog implementation and ongoing management should have an intentional SEO effort.

People love controversy, and that was clearly in evidence at this SES session covering the most controversial of SEO debates, White Hat versus Black Hat. Moderator Matthew Baily of SiteLogic and his crew of experts from both sides spoke to a standing-room only crowd. Panelists included:

• Greg Boser of 3 Dog Media
• Todd Friesen, Director of SEO at Range Online
• Bruce Clay, President of Bruce Clay, Inc.
• David Naylor, SEO of Bronco
• Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings

The speakers were, for the most part, vague about what color their hats were, but each expert drew upon their own professional experience, techniques and observations when responding to questions posed by Matthew and the audience.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Another fine day of blogging is under the collective belt of the TopRank team. Google Dance offered a very nice distraction last night and you can see by a quick search on Flickr the fun that was had. Thank you Google.

Here’s a wrap up of posts from the TopRank Blogging team for day three of Search Engine Strategies in San Jose:

• Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization – Ashley
• News Search SEO – Jessica
• SEO Rehab & Intervention – Thomas
• Social Media Marketing – Jessica
• Ads in a Quality Score World – Ashley
• Search Behavior Update – Thomas
• Internet Marketing Conference Tips: David Berkowitz Search Insider Summit – Lee
• Getting Vertical Search Right – Thomas

Entering the realm of social media can be a bit like trying to enter an exclusive club. There are barriers to entry, codes of conduct, and unwelcome outsiders are quickly identified and ostracized. Yet, like an exclusive club, the benefits of membership can be great. Marketers looking to benefit from social media would do well to heed the advice of the three presenters in this SES session, moderated by Pauline Ore of IBM Corporation.

As Kendall Allen, digital marketing and convergence media consultant, pointed out, social media has come a long way since the advent of the Internet. Listservs, user groups and chat rooms have given way to the networking giants of Facebook and Myspace.

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.

“Quality over quantity” applies to almost everything we encounter, from the foods we eat to the people we interact with. It certainly applies to pay-per-click ads, in which the quality of your campaigns, from keywords to ads to landing pages, takes precedence over the quantity of money you bid. Your keyword quality scores can be either a barrier of entry to ad rankings or your free pass to the head of the line. This session explores everything quality score, from what affects your score to how to improve it.

Dana Todd, CMO of Newsforce, directed a panel of four industry leaders in quality score, who take the discussion from the basics to detailed, actionable advice.

The Basics of Quality Score

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.

Continuing the day’s trend, I attended another landing page-related session to round out Day Two of SES San Jose. The Expert Roundtable brought together four ‘knights’ of landing page optimization, armed with their tips and tricks to achieving the ‘holy grail’ of pay per click ads: Landing Page Utopia.

Moderator Ron Belanger, Vice President of Agency Development at Yahoo! Search Marketing, helmed this team of experts. Each speaker had their own unique ideas as to what achieves the most effective landing pages, and I’ve highlighted some of their original ideas and basic tips.

Scott Brinker, President and Chief Technology Officer at Ion Interactive, began the session with a challenge to the typical landing page format. “Landing pages look the same today as they did five years ago,” he observed. Scott offered three ways marketers can move beyond the standard with their landing pages:

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?

Google is the Wizard of search marketing’s Oz. The all-powerful being around which our universe orbits, and the all-knowing guru to whom we turn for website advice. While Google, like the wizard, may guard its own secrets, it lifts the curtain and lets us look at the inner workings of websites. In this session, two of Google’s own, Avinash Kaushik and Tom Leung, gave us an insider’s tour of changes in Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, two tools of incredible value to search marketers and webmasters alike.

Google Analytics

Avinash, author of Analytics Evangelist, outlined a few key uses of Google Analytics that can make a huge impact on the success of your website.

Bounce Rate