TopRank Online Marketing

Lee Odden

SES San Jose Day Four Wrap Up

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Aug 22nd, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies |

TopRank Team @ Google Dance 2008

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.

Lee Odden

Blog SEO Tips from SES San Jose

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Aug 21st, 2008 in Blog Marketing, Blogging, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, SEO, SEO Tips, Search Engine Strategies |

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.

TopRank Online Marketing

SES San Jose: Black Hat vs White Hat Playing Dirty with SEO

Comments | Posted by TopRank Online Marketing on Aug 20th, 2008 in Dark Side of SEO, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Strategies |

Black Hat White Hat SEO Panel

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?

Lee Odden

SES San Jose Wrap Up Day Three

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Aug 20th, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies |

IMG_1922

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:

TopRank Online Marketing

SES San Jose: Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization

Comments | Posted by TopRank Online Marketing on Aug 20th, 2008 in Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies, Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Social Networking |

SMO Reputation Management

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.

Thomas McMahon

SES San Jose: SEO Rehab & Intervention

Comments | Posted by Thomas McMahon on Aug 20th, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Strategies |

SEO Rehab & Intervention Panel

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.
TopRank Online Marketing

SES San Jose: Ads in a Quality Score World

Comments | Posted by TopRank Online Marketing on Aug 20th, 2008 in Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Strategies |

quality score image

“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

Thomas McMahon

SES San Jose: Search Behavior Update

Comments | Posted by Thomas McMahon on Aug 20th, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Strategies |

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.

Search Behavior Update Panel

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.
Thomas McMahon

SES San Jose: Getting Vertical Search Right

Comments | Posted by Thomas McMahon on Aug 20th, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, SEO, SEO Tips, Search Engine Strategies |

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.

Getting Vertical Search Right Panel Vertical Search Growth

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.

TopRank Online Marketing

SES San Jose: Landing Page Utopia Expert Roundtable

Comments | Posted by TopRank Online Marketing on Aug 20th, 2008 in Pay Per Click, SEO, Search Engine Strategies |

Segmented Landing Page: Landing Page Utopia

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:

Thomas McMahon

SES San Jose: Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers

Comments | Posted by Thomas McMahon on Aug 19th, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, Search Engine Strategies, Web Analytics |

SES Analytics Session : PowerWhat 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?
TopRank Online Marketing

SES San Jose: What’s New with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer?

Comments | Posted by TopRank Online Marketing on Aug 19th, 2008 in Google, Search Engine Strategies, Web Analytics |

What's New with Google Analytics

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

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