Archives for August 2008

SES San Jose Photos – Paparazzi Style

At marketing conferences readers of Online Marketing Blog mention to me frequently about the photo roundup posts we do as favorites. We certainly like to make those posts and since readers like to see them, here is a collection of favorite candids taken during SES San Jose.

Kevin Ryan, Misty Locke, Kevin Newcomb

Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts, Kirsten Mangers

Shoe (SEO sucks) money, Brent Csutoras

Jill Whalen, Patricia Hursh, Christine Churchill

Matt Cutts, Michael Gray

John Diorio, Bryan Eisenberg

Dave Temple, Greg Jarboe, Andy Beal

Jessica Cameron-Ruud, Ashley Bruce
Thomas McMahon, Dana Larson

Todd Friesen, Brett Crosby

Chris Boggs, Rebecca Lieb

Roger Akers, Mike McDonald

Patrick Sexton, Lisa Barone

SES San Jose Photos – Paparazzi Style

SES San Jose Day Four Wrap Up

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

SES San Jose Day Four Wrap Up

Google Dance 2008 Photos

There were so many good photos taken at this year’s Google Dance that we decided to show a collage here with a link to the full set on TopRank’s SES San Jose Google Dance photos on Flickr.

A big thank you goes to the hard working TopRank blogging team at SES putting out an amazing number of posts and photos each day.

Google Dance 2008 Photos

Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Michael Brito Intel

Wow, what a conference! Search Engine Strategies is near it’s end and what better way to wrap up our series on internet marketing conference tips than with the following super-tips from super smart Michael Brito, Social Media Program Manager at Intel.

Michael worked with HP then moved on to Yahoo and is now with Intel practicing his adept social media stylings. Be sure to check out Britopian and the social media practitioner blog, Conversations Matter, for more of his insights.

Not all marketing conferences are created equal and from a content perspective, some are much better than others. Last month I attended SMX Social in Long Beach, California; and the content seemed to be more aligned with SEO than Social Media. Nonetheless, there were plenty of really good takeaways from the conference, but the true value for me was networking and meeting others who work in the same space as I do. Here are some other things to consider to prepare for conferences:

Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Michael Brito Intel

SES San Jose: Social Media Analysis and Tracking

Social Media Marketing Services from TopRank Online Marketing

Social Search can be used to drive traffic, conversions, and increase ROI by monitoring conversations happening online. This panel is a first for SES with Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst for Monster.com as the Moderator.

Industry leaders Todd Parsons, Co-founder and CPO of Buzz Logic, Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, Edmund Won, Vice President of Strategy for iCrossing along with Breanna Wigle, CRM manager for Military Advantage share insight into monitoring the conversation and best practices to track success.

Marshall kicked off the session making the case for Google to start measuring and reporting user trends in social media.

Categorizing referring traffic from social media is the first step in attributing success. Is your traffic coming from blogs, social network sites, message forums, bookmarking sites, micro media sites and photo sharing sites?

SES San Jose: Social Media Analysis and Tracking

Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Heather Lloyd-Martin DMA SEMC

SES San Jose week is nearly over one might say we’ve saved some of the best internet marketing conference tips for last with the ever enthusiastic and insightful Heather Lloyd-Martin.

Heather is Chair, DMA’s Search Engine Marketing Council and President of SuccessWorks. She also blogs about copywriting at SEO Copywriting.

Attend all the “search marketing site labs” or “search marketing clinics” you can find. During a site lab, a panel of experts review Web sites on the fly and discuss how to improve them for search positioning and conversions.

Here’s why they are so cool:

Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Heather Lloyd-Martin DMA SEMC

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

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?

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

SES San Jose Wrap Up Day Three

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

SES San Jose Wrap Up Day Three

SES San Jose: Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization

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.

SES San Jose: Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization

SES San Jose: Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is fast emerging as a must-have in search strategies. In this session, industry experts Vanina Delobelle, Global Product Director for Monster, Erik Qualman from Search Engine Watch and Global VP of EF Education, along with Brnet Csutoras, Online Marketing Consultant offered some tips to successfully integrate social media into your search marketing mix.

Vanina kicked off the session this morning discussing what social media is and how, when used correctly, it can benefit your business.

So, what is social media?
– Social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Xing
– Forums such as Phorum and phpBB
– Microblogging with twitter or pounce
– Multimedia sharing sites like YouTube, Flicker and Slideshare
– Diggs with Wikio and digg
– Blogs and live casts
– Virtual Universes like Second Life

SES San Jose: Social Media Marketing

SES San Jose: Ads in a Quality Score World

“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

SES San Jose: Ads in a Quality Score World

Internet Marketing Conference Tips: David Berkowitz Search Insider Summit

It’s hump day during SES San Jose week and it reminds us there are many avenues for interacting with marketing conferences. It’s one thing to focus on programming events like our last few tipsters, it’s another thing to have spent numerous conference hours in the shoes of an attendee, speaker and conference programmer.

David Berkowitz is Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy at 360i and Programming Chair of MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit with a short but very important tip:

Make time for the activities and dinners. The [SIS] Summit has far more shmooze time than time in sessions, and that’s for a reason. As excited as I am about the program and the speakers, the lasting relationships come during the downtime, as do the most meaningful conversations.

Internet Marketing Conference Tips: David Berkowitz Search Insider Summit