SearchCamp 2009 is bringing together the best minds from the Search Engine Marketing space to talk about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. The event is scheduled for the 28th February & 1st March 2009 at Tidel Park, Chennai.

This year, the event is divided into two sections. The first day will focus on SEO and the second day on SEM.

Sessions: SearchCamp Day 1

• Keyword Research Tools & Techniques
• Copywriting for Search Success
• Technical SEO Issues For Developers
• Web Analytics – What’s next?
• Brand & Reputation Management Strategies
• Blended Search in a Mobile World
• Using Social Media for Search Engine Optimization
• DEBATE – Organic v/s Paid Search – which is more sustainable?

Sessions: SearchCamp Day 2

• Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy
• Advanced Paid Search Tactics
• Landing Pages Testing & Optimization
• Debate: Bid Management – Automated or Manual
• Using Analytics to track Paid Search Metrics
• The Future of SEM/SEO
• PANEL DISCUSSION – What's New With Search Marketing

View the details of the sessions here.

The workshops, debates and keynotes at the event are a must for all industry insiders and those who want an intense session on all things SEO/SEM. The list of speakers is quite impressive with specialists from all sections of the industry. Adam Lasnik, the well known Google Search Evangelist and Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts are there too.

I had planned to speak at the event but it’s sheer bad luck that I have to give the event a miss. However, to make up for this I assure to put up your questions at Google Searchmasters Conference. Happy questioning.

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Second Edition of SearchCamp is back in Chennai

Rate On Investment (ROI) is what every Search marketer and advertiser look for!

Of course there are certain pros and cons that are related with search trade shows (that a lot of people think are a perfect source to get ROI), but they have their connotations and implications. An interesting blog at Mediapost swerved attention towards this issue.

Years ago, the trend was to support 'search trade shows' in order to enhance the prospects of sales and marketing but now it seems that the rage is depleting with the passage of time.

“But things started to change about a year ago. The qualified leads that we had become accustomed to gathering at search shows started drying up. Even though the exhibit halls were jammed, the people rushing through them weren't prospects that we were remotely interested in talking to. Instead, it seemed that more and more we were talking to nothing but in-house search people, or people who spent so little on search that we couldn't help them.”

May be because these days the show managers look for every possible prospect to provide “something for everyone”. But one must be thinking that this step should rather work in the favor of show managers. Why is it creating negative effects?

“Because as anyone who's attended these shows will tell you, today the majority of people who actually show up on the exhibit floor are either bottom-feeders seeking to acquire free memory sticks, pens, and other goofy giveaways — or flat-out newbies seeking to pick up some "secret SEO tips" at a level-101 "search boot camp" session.”

May be, people look for those free souvenirs or free demonstration of various goods or services rather than buying them. Or they go there just to pass their time or in search of a new job. Who knows!

“The real reason that people kept going to the shows was to schmooze with their buddies. "It's all about networking," wrote one of these people. 'That's where the real action is. And it's also where I hope to get my very next job (wink, wink).'”

So the crux of the matter is that the organizers spend millions of dollars each year just to create an environment where people can socialize with their loved ones, have a time-pass session with their friends, party hard and nothing else! What kind of ROI can one expect from this?

“This isn't just crazy, folks; it's suicidal. Furthermore, you'd think that search marketing agencies, who preach all day to their clients about measurable, efficient media spending, would be the last ones to spend money on inefficient, unmeasurable junkets with negative ROI .”

And come on, in this world that is running on Internet technology, where everything is available on your fingertips, how can you expect those Internet geeks to come and visit these circus-like trade shows, just to increase their social networks? Sites like Orkut and Facebook are hundred times more popular than the former option! So why waste time in trade show?

But some people think in a different way:

“We're such special, rocket-science smart people, after all: don't we deserve to get together a couple of times a year and have a super-expensive party at our clients' expense?”

And some think that:

“Maybe it's through e-mails, or cold-calling, or virtual trade shows, or maybe even some PPC ads, but there's got to be a better way to reach the people we're trying to reach.”

Everyone has their own perceptions!

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Search Trade Shows and Their Significance!

Here is our entire coverage of the PubCon Vegas 2008:

Day 1

• Understanding The Complex Social Marketing Playing Field
• Earning Big Bucks With Social Media Traffic
• Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization
• Large Scale Bid Management

Day 2

• Local and Mobile Search
• Real-World Winning Tactics for Content Creation Location
• Competitive Intelligence : Know Thy Competitor Well
• Ground-Up SEO Content Development as Pure Business Strategy
• SEO and Big Search
• Alternative Discovery and SEO – Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO
• Reputation Monitoring and Management
• Local Search Optimization
• 26 Steps Revisited – 2008

Day 3

• Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All
• Linkfluence: How To Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk
• Top Secret Tools of The Trade
• Real-World Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies
• In-House SEO, PPC, and Campaigns
• Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters- aka: The Search Engine Smackdown

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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PubCon Vegas 2008 Coverage

Here is our coverage of Day 3 of the PubCon Vegas 2008:

• Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All
• Linkfluence: How To Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk
• Top Secret Tools of The Trade
• Real-World Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies
• In-House SEO, PPC, and Campaigns
• Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters- aka: The Search Engine Smackdown

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Day 3 at PubCon Vegas 2008

PubCon 2007's linking session session was one of the highlights of the event and this session promised to be follow up to the same. The session showcased a critical look at all the different linking strategies and included various topics, such as outbound link optimization, outsourcing link building, old-fashioned linking via directories and hiring an in-house link developer.

Moderator:

• Chris Tolles

Speakers:

• Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting
• Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant of SEOmoz
• Roger Montti, Founder and Owner of martinibuster.com
• Greg Hartnett, President of Best of The Web

The first speaker of the session is Eric Enge, who elaborated on how social media can be used in a link building strategy. Social News sites provide a huge opportunity for links.

Its important to match your content to the demographic. You have to target your audience and study on what has worked for them before. Even the title should be in accordance. Content should not just be SERPs oriented, but also authoritative for its particular target audience.

The example of Digg highlights the same. A post on the front page of the same featured some irrelevant content and many unnecessary links. It got real good rankings on Google SERPs but hardly served the purpose it was originally made for.

The main point is to maximize your success by writing content that appeals to the audience. The content should reflect well on your business and target big search terms. A particular site used Facebook to attract sports fans. This way they got a link from some massive players, such as MLB.com, ESPN, TechCrunk, Google and BattleMedia.

Some important things to keep in mind is that the content should increase your reputation, create a good image for your company and appeal to your target audience.

The next speaker was Rebecca Kelley, who highlighted that although link building is time consuming, repetitive and risky, it is essential for all webpages since they act as a vote to the website and ensure better rankings. She went on to propose some strategies to ensure positive result from your link building process.

• Strategy 1: Find your brand mentions: If a webpage is mentioning you, then they will be most likely willing to link out. You can check who all are mentioning your name without a link at the Yahoo Site Explorer.
• Strategy 2: Identifying the broken inbound links: You can use Google Webmaster Tools to spot them. Make sure you contact the site owner and ask them to fix those links.
• Strategy 3: Take advantage of the broken links of your competitors: Search for phrases, such as 'no longer available' or 'no longer offered [keyword]'. Then contact the owners of the site linked to the broken pages and tell them about your product. They might be willing to link to you instead.
• Strategy 4: Check who all are linking your competitors: You can find out the same using the Yahoo Hub Finder.
• Strategy 5: Try to take advantage of confirmation emails: Encourage people to link to you when you send them their order confirmation. Links are editorial, relevant and scalable.
• Strategy 6: You can embed links in Widgets, Banners and Badges: When you create something like a quiz, poll or any other interesting shareable content, you can include a link back to your website.
• Strategy 7: Go ahead and create link some baits: Brainstorm for content ideas and host it on your sites. Then promote the same through mediums, such as social media sites, forums, blogs, etc. Researching your sector's link worthiness can show you a lot of link bait opportunities. Once you discover the big players in your field, go on to target those sites. Be observant about trends and take advantage of what’s in and happening.

The third speaker of the session was Greg Hartnett, who revealed the process of link building through directories. Greg clarified a number of misconceptions on directories. His points are summed up as follows:

• A directory is often mistaken as a paid link, but it is not the same. In the case of a paid link, a successful transaction leads to a link on the page. However, on a directory, a successful transaction is a review.
• There's a lot of difference between a directory and a link farm: Link farms are simply a collection of links on a page that have been categorized haphazardly. Link farms are simply created to manipulate search results.
• How to detect a good directory?
  
  Good directories would be showcasing features, such as history, good resources and populated categories. A good directory is designed for the user and has many added sites which are not paid submits.

One can list a website on a directory a number of times. The Yahoo Directory is good idea since it is an aged and trusted domain. Moreover, it is the primary hub for Internet mapping. Other trustworthy directories are DMOTZ, BOTW, Business.com and Librarians Internet Index.

There's no guarantee of listing but if you read the directory guidelines and give good titles and descriptions then you should get listed. There are also a number of places where you can submit your blogs, such as Search Engine Journal, Lee Odden, blogs.botw.org.

The final speaker of the session was Roger Monti, who started off by reminding what were the two main objectives of link building initiatives. Traffic and links with popularity.
.edu may not be that special but they have their own unique advantages, such as being in good neighborhood, being relevant and featuring original and authoritative content. However, if they are poorly linked to and lack authoritative content, then it's best to avoid them.

You can use the backlinks of some of your industry's heavyweights. It would be a good idea to add hotlinks, bookmarks, links and directories to your product keywords and .edu modifiers. Make a note of what sites are your targets linking to. For example, if they are linking to .govs and .edus, then you may also want to follow the same.

The last interesting point that he brought forward was that any black-hat technique could be turned into white-hat by using no follow or rendering link with JavaScript.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Real-World Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 3

The session featured a great mix of SEO experts who revealed some crucial tools in the SEO process. Over 40 tools were uncovered and laid out for all to see. A riveting session that was informative as well as interesting.

Moderator:

• Joe Laratro

Speakers:

• Todd Malicoat, Independent Marketing Consultant, Meta4creations, LLC
• Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz
• Jessie Stricchiola, Founder & CEO of Alchemist Media, Inc.

The session was initiated by Todd Mailcoat, who uncovered 30 different tools for the SEO process. The list included tools for browsers, domain servers, keywords, competitive research, rank checking, backlink checking, on page optimization, spidering and for fixing duplicate content. Here's a comprehensive list of the tools covered by him:

Browser tools:

• The User Agent Switcher for Mozilla Firefox.
• The SearchStatus Firefox Plugin. It shows backlinks and what all has been indexed. Also checks the age of domains and all the different backlinks.
• Espion for header checking. It gives check for 301s, status and other relevant information. Another one is Live header.
• You can use the free system 'Siteuptime' in order to test every few minutes whether your site is up or down.
• A number of useful paid and free tool sets are available at DomainTools bookmarklet. The tools offer historical WHOis and also give information on the IP address as well as nameservers.
• One can obtain major keyword information through tools, such as WordTracker, Keyworddiscovery.com and the SEOBook KW tool.

Tools for Competitive Information

• SEOBOOK SEO for Firefox. Make sure that you don't limit the number of queries. It is extremely suitable for obtaining competitive intelligence within the search results. You can also check the age of the site as well as the Yahoo! inbound links.
• SpyFu (spyfu.com) is undoubtedly one of the best if not the best tool for competitive information. One can get an idea of what AdWords keywords the competitors is bidding on. It also gives the cost metrics.
• You can get a subscription service at Compete.com. Get an idea on who's getting maximum search results.

Rank Checker Tools

• Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking is a good rank checking tool. It provides with simple and easy to understand automated reports.

Tools for BackLink Checking

• Link Harvester is a good free tool for Backlink checking.
• Hub Finder gives you links that you and your competitors have in common.
• Internet Marketing Ninjas tools are also very effective. The tool shows both internal as well as internal link juice on a page by page basis, hence giving you an insight into redistribute link equity.
• The SoloSEO Toolset is a project management software that costs $29.00 per month.

Some Spidering Tools

• Xenu's broken link report shows 404 and other errors on the page.
• Roboform is also a good paid tool. Costs $40.00 for 2 copies, but it logs in every single tool from whatever tool you're on, thereby saving hours and hours for you.
• The JingProjectScreenCapture tool is pretty much a free version of Cantasia.
• You can detect scrapers and copyright violations with the tool CopyScape.
• The tool DupeCop is useful in testing content.

The next speaker of the session was Rand Fishkin, who gave six more amazing tools, namely:

• SEO Automatic Tool – The tool gives a look at some of the common page optimization factors and offers some crucial recommendations.
• DaveN’s Keyword Density Tool – It analyzes keyword occurrence on a particular page and also surfs as Googlebot.
• Blogpulse – The tool tracks millions of blog feeds and provides a good insight at what are the bloggers discussing as well as the current trends of phrases.
• LinkfromDomain Command @ Live.com (linkfromdomain:toprankblog.com)- You can use the tool to seems where all is one particular site linking itself to.
• The Historical PageRank Lookup from SEOmoz tools is a good tool to detect the PageRanks
• The Linkscape SEOMoz (linkfromdomain:toprankblog.com) is a good tool that shows metrics on link as well as the score mozrank on the domain level and the URL level.

Since Jessie Stricchiola was not attending the session, Andy Beal acted as a fill in and further recommended some useful tools.

• One can get some comprehensive keyword research tools at SEOresearchLabs.com. The cost is also quite reasonable as well. ($90 for an SEO firm)
• SEO Link Analysis – The tool can provide valuable information, such as PageRank for the linking pages, anchor texts used on the link. It also checks whether the link is nofollowed.
• Google Webmaster Central
• Backlinkwatch.com – Th tool shows the URLs of the link sources, the PageRank, as well as nofollow or not.
• SEMCheck.com – A paid tool at $12 that automates some basic SEO functions as well as issues.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Top Secret Tools of The Trade: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 3

Blackhat SEO will continue to adopt more illegal methods of marketing. Thus, SEOs should decide risk tolerance. Google is and will keep communicating about its efforts and providing tools to help webmasters solve Black hat SEO problem. All these aspects were discussed on day 3 of PubCon sessions.

Moderator:

• Brett Tabke

Speakers:

• Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google Inc.
• Sean Suchter, VP, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering, Yahoo!
• Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft talked about State of Live Search and its important to publishers. Delivering best search results, simplifying key tasks and coming out with innovative business models are the themes of live search. Nathan Buggia discussed some important factors of SEO while focusing on the strategies of particular search engine:

Best search results:

It is all about relevance and we have progressed a lot in this. It has been more than 4 years, since we are tracking this and still find ourselves in the same ballpark – somehow similar to Yahoo/ Google. We are better on some queries but some are not up to the mark. Freshness and depth of content plays a foremost role in this.

Specific improvements:

Improving the crawling performance is necessary. It is always considered that servers receive less load and perform a more effective crawling job. If the resources are zipped, less bandwidth is required.

Standardization of REP rules:

REP rules are specific rules meant for robots exclusion protocol. As the rules are shared, it becomes easy for the publisher to specify his policies for search engines. MSN both has already adopted these set of rules.

Microsoft follow the policy of investing in sitemaps and they can be hosted anywhere. Where at one point, it provide maximum flexibility to users, on the other hand it helps in understanding canonicalization issues.

A significant increase in the crawling capacity has also been observed. Best search results are more about providing tools in comparison to algorithmic improvements. Microsoft provides troubleshooting tips. Once, a list of top issues faced by live search while crawling the websites was noted down. The result was dramatic with 404 errors, too many parameters, blocked by robots and unsupported content. A reporting and filtering process was carried out later and Microsoft will e launching its new feature about Malware next week.

Every page is scanned and examined for what spawns a malicious process. The critical pages are flagged and users can not click on them in the Live Search. Publishers can easily find their own links in the tool as well as avail the list of outbound links, which are equally infected. Microsoft also provide tools around ranking alongwith the information on State Rank, dynamic ranking in sites, backlinks and penalties.

AdCentre excel keyword research tool provide users an access to API, which provide you keyword date for Live Search like demographic and monetization information.

Simplify key tasks:

People come to search engines for doing navigational queries, or sometimes they do not know what they want. Richer media is provided in search engines along with blue links. It can also happen that deeper pages may be related to topic but not to the search experience. If you are a publisher, there is a wider scope on how to reach customer with a specific content that ca be a video or structured content like products, reviews and information about your website.

Innovation in the business model:

Innovation in the business models talks about Cashback/adCenter scenario of Google. Project Silk Road consolidates things to increase engagement, traffic and disclose the insights of your website’s performance.

Within this, there comes the Live Search API. A lot of API publishers were asked about what they needed in API. And the answer was, they wanted to control the results of API. Thus, new features were included where you can record the results, skin results and other ads to match your website or a particular application. It also gives you the freedom to filter out 300 ad providers who does not make any sense.

Some technical aspects of API were also changed to meet business needs like:

• The query limit is now changed to unlimited
• You can change the dynamic ranking as per freshness, accuracy and whatnot.
• Many blackened content types like web, news, images, encarte answers, spellings are now accessible.
• All standard protocol REST, JSON, RSS and SOAP were implemented. They can use API developed by people.

Sean Suchter, VP Yahoo was the second speaker who told that Yahoo is trying hard to get rid of 10 blue links. As the three players dominate the market, neither site owner nor the searchers can put forth the influence. So, Yahoo is trying to address it.

A search assist features is being studied to make the best possible search queries. Now, Yahoo is moving forward from “to do” to “done” status by reducing frustration and getting to the answers, structuring information directly from web and more.

One of the current example is music player integration, which shows “Play the web” in Yahoo search.

Yahoo is trying to create a community like PubCon around the search. It is planning to set up incentives for everyone i.e Yahoo and end users. For this, yahoo is adopting different ways like coming from outside it. Yahoo is deciding to move from a simple presentation to a more structured presentation that is more appropriate for the task, the user is trying to accomplish. This is beneficial for site owners as users will get right to the answers. For setting up incentives, Traffic should be increased in quality. No click-through method will be appreciated, which will further increase loyalty and engagement.
He shows a SERP that shows many initiatives: rich media modules (video and headlines), deep links, and news federation.

Seach Monkey ecosystem is a big hit as lot as people magazine, Wikipedia, Trulia, WebMD and other properties are utilizing it.

BOSS is another big, to-be included initiative of Yahoo. It will build an open search service. Becoming a principal search engine is not an easy task, as you need hardware, data and more. Therefore, it should be completely opened so people can interact by handling query, crawling and using it directly. The ultimate goal of this step is to have high quality search experience that will be relevant, comprehensive, fresh and well presented.

Matt Cutts was the third and the last speaker of the most awaited session. He spoke on State of the Index covering all the activities happened in 2008 and what more should be expected in 2009.

Google Chrome is a wicked fast browser and Google Android is an open source operating system, which according to Google should be improved a bit more. Other stuff like machine translation, voice recognition need to be made more personalized and universal/blended search.

There are some really cool features like 2001 search index, voice chat in Gmail and ability to track the flu in Google. But what we have done for the webmasters is not very motivating. We take PDFs, that are images and run OCR on them. We crawl flash better by pulling out text of different transitions of flash files.
Google has also improved upon keyword spam and gibberish and provide extra tools to users. Few other things done by Google include:

• Advanced segmentation of Google analytics
• Google now reindex upto 10 pages in 24 hours
• It has webmaster APIs for hosters and G data
• Google provide translation gadget for your website

When we talk about Webmaster Communication, Google have had 3 chats with 700 people dialing in on the most recent chat. It is bogging more, including more videos and blogs in different languages. The moment you register your site and you have a malware or spam, your messages will be waiting before you register. Google also came out with 30 page guide about SEO 101 yesterday.

When we talk about 2009 Blackhat trends, then it is sure that illegal hacking will become more common. Blackhat has now moved to DNS sub-domain hijacking, where you can be hacked without even using a DNS resolver update.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters- aka: The Search Engine Smackdown: PubCon Las Vegas, Day 3

Moderator:

• Melanie Mitchell

Speakers:

• Jessica Bowman
• Dan Berry
• Ana Schultz
• Allison Fabella
• Jill Sampey

The last session of day 3 was about In-house SEO, PPC and campaigns. It covered all the issues experienced by in-house search marketers, which are similar to issues faced by SEO agencies, while performing SEO and PPC campaigns.

First speaker of the session was Jessica Bowman, who talked about roadblocks to internal search marketing efforts. These blocks adds projects to man hours and are highly inconsistent with other goals, go against existing programming standards, are not so technically feasible thus adding to the project timeline and cost.

It is the fact that once you get executive buy in, you can not stop. Most of the opposition stems from lower and middle management. Thus, middle managers require upper level support.

When you plan an action, you need to consistently repeat SEM messages to all the employees. It will take time and there will be many complaints. So, prepare your executives for obstacles before they occur. For this, you need to:

• Design and plan a 24 month internal PR campaign for SEO
• Make SEO presentation that you will use internally. It should make sense and be sure that it is delivered to everyone on high priority
• Offer SEO brown bags
• Train everybody about SEO
• Organize regular SEO update meetings for all employees
• Same slides you used to get buy in should be used
• Remind everyone of timeline and progress

Allison Fabella, SEO Manager for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the second to speak. She discussed about the four sections, which should be considered for middle management in in-house SEO.

The Product Manager

Product Manager is the first and last defence for success and longitivity in your SEO efforts as he approves each phase of the project.

The Developer

He is the backbone of SEO and directly impact traffic in a positive or negative way.

The Designer

He designs the entire layout and aesthetics of your web pages and thus, educate on how search engines see the web pages.

The Content Producer

Content directly affects the ranking of your website. He must be given examples of how ironic headlines improve the ranking in comparison to literal references.

There are many ways to achieve SEO harmony. Some of them include:

• Establish credibility by making quick changes that appear instantly and show results.
• Document everyone’s success by emphasizing on how SEO will benefit them, and not your.
• Locate your SEO at the intersection of all the three aspects- Development, design and content.
• Relate success with the productivity of those working in organization and helping you implement SEO in effective way
• Make sure that SEO is included in life cycle checklists
• Train everyone in the organization about SEO

SEO in middle management does not include much about content writing, coding pages and graphic designing. It is all about leadership.

Next up was Den Perry from cars.com. He recommends you to stay at 30,000 ft and speak the language of company executives in your first meeting. It is always good to show them math and demonstrating financial opportunity for SEO implementation.

Everybody should be trained about SEO. Marketing and PR are best tools by utilizing whom, you can influence the brand perception and display brand messaging. Small changes have large impact. Business development should be more realistic. Arrange training sessions to let employees know that the company puts a lot of value in SEO.

SEO must be introduced into the process of new content development and publishing. Look for the SEO superstars, which will increase the benefits of SEO for the organization. You should always be available to employees to answer to their queries about SEO.

Fourth speaker for the session was Ana Schultz Marketing Manager, at Qwest. He talked about the pros and cons of in-house and agency PPC.

In-house pros for PPC stands for their better internal communication and high product offer knowledge. Consequences of PPC include low availability of talented people and their staffing. Technology and information sharing can also become a challenge.

Always do justice with SEO budget and quantify the results for every initiative taken by you. Always ensure that all the implementation processes are clear and when too many page owners write content, it should easily get overwritten.

Last up was Jill Sampey from Blast Radius who was earlier an in-house SEO of ThomasNet.

Using an agency or not is a question that worries most of the SEOs. Therefore, you should look at specific goals at a specific time and find out how complex they are.

What is learning curve? Is it unique to the business? Bandwidth, time and talent available? What is the learning curve and is it unique to the business? Stakeholders involved in the job? Do we have the right to access the stakeholders who will evaluate the success of a program? These are some of the questions coming to our mind.

There are some advantages attached to agency as they have an expertise that will hit the ground running and require less overhead to get started. Thus, training is not an issue with the agency. Some agencies also have proprietary tools of benefits that are not present within the company. Outside party like an agency often receives more respect than someone in-house to work on a project. Agencies act as catalyst for change and provide both outside perspective as well as involvement. By working with different companies and industries, agency can also offer another set of eyes as well as a different perspective.

Issues with Hiring an Agency

Agency is an external link and is far from core business. Engagements with agency can be expensive if objectives are not clear. Thus, finding the right agency becomes a difficult task and it should be considered as per the specific demands of your business.

Instead of solely depending upon industry, you must make your own ROI goals. Always emphasize on the value and importance of analytics and be sure that you have an access to all the data and reports.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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In-house SEO, PPC and CAMPAIGNS, PubCon, Las Vegas, Day 3

One of the most important questions faced by the webmasters today is whether to buy links. Moreover, what are the risks when you do so and are there any substitutes available for the same. The session provided answers to some of these crucial questions and gave more information on the idea of linkfluence.

Moderator:

• Todd Malicoat

Speakers:

• Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz
• John Lessnau, Founder of LinkAdage
• Aaron Wall, Author of SEO Book

The first speaker of the session was John Lessnau, who explained how he believed in effective link buying rather than link building. John provided answers to some critical questions, as shown below:

• Why should one buy links at all?
  
  There are a number of reasons for the same. First of all, one can get the anchor text he/she wants. Moreover, one can also get on the page that he wants to as well as the exact location. But the main objective will always continue to be the fact that these links can help you get a better ranking.
• Why do some people prefer to not buy links:
  
  Many people don't understand the process of link buying and are afraid that it could cause them a drop in Google or PageRank. Moreover, the upfront costs of link buying is high and intelligent link buying takes time, salesmanship and a lot of effort.
• What exactly is a safe paid link?
  
  Your links ought to be in a relevant text. It makes sense to be paid link on a page that doesn’t have any other ones (links). Ensure that you have some variation in your anchor text. The link ought to be in the inside pages of a website. Remember, link buying is a moderate process.
• What’s a powerful link?
  
  It is important that the host Web site has a good ranking. Go for a website that has a lot of natural links and is not a major link seller. Ensure that the link is dofollowed.

John went on to showcase his own link buying system. The process involved the following processes:

• Googling the different keyword phrases that you want to rank for.
• Go through the resulting Web site and Web pages. Narrow down to the ones where your link would fit in.
• Check up if the potential link partner links to numerous major link buyers.
• Get in touch with the webmaster and offer a quote for the text link you want to have.
• Ensure that your links passes a handcheck in order to avoid getting reported by competitors.

Even after you have made the purchase, it's crucial to ensure that the link you bought is giving you the requisite gains. You can do this by ensuring the following:

• Monitoring the links and making sure that they stay up and the host sites stays clean.
• Using your new rankings as a launchpad to get natural links.
• Keep enhancing the quality and content of your site
• Know when to stop the process of buying links.

Another important thing is to avoid going through a link broker is finance is a criterion. Going through a link broker can double the costs.

The second speaker of the session was Rand Fishkins, who elaborated about the process of 'buying links without buying links'.

Event sponsorships is a good opportunity to get good and profitable links. While doing so, one should follow a process. Follow these steps will help immensely:

• Locate the event. The more the event is related to your product, the more sense it makes to give links.
• Get in touch with them as soon as possible. Quote a fair price (ranging from $1 to $500 for a permanent link a page).

The other ways are purchasing websites, as was done by CondeNet who bought some Web sites and presently links to them, buying content, as was the case when BuddyTV bough Wentworth Miller’s Web site, or even traffic buying. To do so you could put your website content before people who might be interested in linking to them. SEOmoz had itself done the same while dealing with FareCast and StumbleUpon. The process is simple, create smart content and find relevant viral traffic sources. Follow it up by buying traffic/advertisements.

Other options available to buy links are through blogger product reviews, content partnerships and blog incubation.

The first was followed by SEOmoz itself when it blogged about a free book and they had got and linked to their website. The important thing while doing so is to focus on the review and not on the link. Content partnerships is a common phenomena and there are many visible cases, such as that of the partnership of VenturaBeat and Read Write Web with the New York Times.

The last speaker of the session was Aaron Wall who spoke on some of the present alternatives to the process of link buying. Some of the present alternatives to link buying are stated as follows:

• Building syndicate content: This would provide not only some authority and reputation, but also substantial traffic as well as PageRank.
• Indulge in Barter: Give some stuff away to get something in return. You could offer major discounts for specific sectors.
• Buying competing Web sites
• Indulge in Social Interaction
• Indulge in Public Interaction & follow up publicity

Organic links offer a lot of unique advantages. First is the cumulative advantage. If your material would be popular, then more and more people would read the same in order to feel better about themselves. Other advantages of organic links are that they can encourage community participation, show social proof and also act as a sign of credibility.

Try to get yourself featured in Yahoo Directory in the category of your interest. Try to get featured in the top 20 of your category. The same for Google's Directory, but keep in mind factors, such as PageRank, cache dates and listing quality.

Other important points that he mentioned were:

• You could blog on the new Google products and someone might just start bloggin on your blog post.
• Ensure you have valid link location. For ex, Yahoo! Search doesn't count the links on bottom of the page.
• Keep in mind that no matter how discreet you are someone will eventually see it. There are some SEOs present who like to just oust site in order to create attention and get some attention.

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Linkfluence: How to Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 3

Duplicate content is becoming a major issue not only for all the search engines, but also for Webmasters from all around the world. In the session, the representatives of the big three, namely Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Live, explain some of their strategies with regard to duplicate content.

Moderator:

• Rand Fishkin

Speakers:

• Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer of Google
• Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optmization Architect of Microsoft
• Priyank Garg, Director Product Management of Yahoo! Search

The session was initiated by Ben D'Angelo, who started of by pointing out the crucial duplicate content issue of multiple URLs pointing to the same page or quite similar pages. Duplicate content is also found across other websites as syndicated or scraped content. The perfect situation is when one URL would be simply leading to one piece of content.

There are a number of examples of duplicates, such as www & no www, session IDs, URL parameters, print version pages, CNAMEs, etc. Then there are also similar content on different URLs as well as sites in different countries with same content.

Ben want on to explain how Google handles duplicate content. They basically cluster pages together and choose the page that best represents the search. Google employs different kinds of filters for the different kinds of duplicate content. But this is simply a filter and not any kind of penalty

So how to prevent this from happening with you. You can take some of the following measures:

• To prevent exact duplicates, one could use a 301 redirect.
• To prevent near duplicates, one could use robots.txt.
• A different language us not a duplicate. One could use unique content specific to the countries.
• Don't put extraneous parameters in the URLs.

But there is a chance that other sites would cause duplicate content. In case you are syndicating your content out then ensure that there is a link back to your original article or content. One could also give a short summary about the same. In case you are syndicating another's content then you could do the reverse.

It would be an extremely rare case that scrapers would be impacting you or your content. However, one can't rule out the possiblity and in case the same happens, then one should file a DMCA and/or Spam Report.

Ben was followed by Priyank Garg, who explained how Yahoo! Search deals with the same. Yahoo! uses duplicate filters through all the steps in the pipeline. He went on to showcase some examples and stated that most duplicate content is accidental. A large number of duplicates come from soft 404, not the real 404s. Many of them are also abusive forms just as scrapers.

The final speaker of the session was Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft. Derrick made no bones in making it clear that duplicate content was Microsoft's worse nightmare. Microsoft follow the methodology of CIRTS, which goes as:

• C= Crawl
• I= Index
• R= Rank
• T= Traffic
• A= Action

He offered the following tips on how to handle the problem of duplicate content:

• Try to detect when an engine comes to your site.
• Sometimes, such as in the case of session Ids, it can also be helpful.
• Be fully aware of your parameters.
• Make sure that you link to your parameters in a consistent order.
• Exclude any form of duplicates using robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, etc.
• Never assume that search engines can't find JavaScript.
• Try to get hold of a tool that can crawl your site. This will enable you to see how an engine will be looking at your site.
• Always focus on the strong URLs of your website first

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Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 3

Here is our coverage of Day 2 of the PubCon Vegas 2008:

• Local and Mobile Search
• Real-World Winning Tactics for Content Creation Location
• Competitive Intelligence : Know Thy Competitor Well
• Ground-Up SEO Content Development as Pure Business Strategy
• SEO and Big Search
• Alternative Discovery and SEO – Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO
• Reputation Monitoring and Management
• Local Search Optimization
• 26 Steps Revisited – 2008

As we head towards finale, the PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 3 promises to be more interesting than ever. Keep reading!

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Day 2 at PubCon Vegas 2008

There's no need to introduce Brett Tabke's '26 Steps To 15k a Day'. The page, that was posted almost seven years ago, has had nearly 29 million page views and 15 million unique visitors. It has also been used as a training manual by numerous Fortune 100 companies. In this interactive session, Brett gives an insight at the controversial issues that the post had raised and how the relevance of this webpage posted in 2002 transcends to present times.
Moderator:

• Brett Tabke

Speakers:

• Brett Tabke,
• CEO,
• WebmasterWorld.com

Brett started out with some stats on the famous '26 Steps' Webpage. Some of his Webpage's achievements:

• 29 million page views.
• 5 million uniques.
• 200 copies over the web.
• 290 cease and desists have been issued so far.
• It is the first chapter in Google Hacks. The post is owned by O'reily now.
• Total income generated is $500 paid by O'reily for Google Hacks Book.
• The webpage features 10,000 thousands back links.

One by one, Brett went over all of the points he wrote in the webpage back in 2002 and discussed over the same with the audience. Back then, Brett had written that it was enough for the initial document to have 100 pages. However, he said, now the number should be around 500.

The posts are not really supposed to be about SEO, but more about content, traffic and building a sustainable website. On asking the audience regarding their experience with website having less that 100 pages, most say that they (the experiences) haven't been satisfactory.
Regarding the domain name, Brett said that the domain name game is now much more complicated than ever and one can have a TLD (Top Level Domain) of his own.

About Site design, Brett stated that the criteria was and still is that the simpler the better. The advent of the iPhone has further confirmed on the notion. It is imperative that now every website is designed keeping the compatibility with mobile devices in mind. One has to adapt all current designs to iPhones.
Static sites are seemingly going extinct and there's simply no point in building up sites in HTML. But the most important thing was, is and will continue to be content. Content should have its purpose and not be there just for the sake of existence. Quality content cannot be substituted.

Matt Tuens added here that content was the main reason that Search Engines were created. One should ensure a certain degree of stickiness in their websites since people are too busy to go to twenty different sites. You can do the same by simply creating one site that could be the 'go to' site.

Brett moved on to the topic of user generated content. The reliance on UCG is a thing of past now. Back in 2002, outbound links were considered a delicate issue since each site was as good as to the ones they were linked to. Even now, Search Engines judge on the same criterion. One could practice cross linking to boost up PageRank on lesser value pages.
Shared hosting is unthinkable now for the simple fact that costs have dropped drastically and everyone can have a server of their own. About regular log tracking softwares, Brett stated that his team uses one they have created on their own and displayed the wide variation it shows from the results of other packages.

Many CMS (Content Management Systems) are still not spider friendly and this can be a major bottleneck in your SEO objectives. Ensuring that you are in the right directories is still a good way to enhance traffic. With the users becoming more web savvy than ever, gimmicks are still a hit. People tend to negate the importance of options, such as 'e-mail a friend'. These are still as valuable as they were earlier.

Targeted content is the key now. Smart content can get your business places. Matt Tuens goes on to elaborate on 'smart content'. You have to understand that everyone is trying to criticize and judge your content. Give information that your demography is looking for instead of irrelevant garbage just to get a good ranking, otherwise you will incur losses on sales, credibility and overall business in spite of a good ranking.

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26 Steps Revisited – 2008: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

This session mainly focused on various optimization tools like Feeds, PDFs, and SEO Blog which, finally go on to improve a site ranking.

Moderators:

• Joe Laratro

Speakers:

• George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision, LLC
• Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder, SEO-PR
• Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
• Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development, Google

Mr. George Aspland initiated the session by talking on various optimization techniques for PDFs in search engines. He suggested that to increase site's ranking and maximum click-throughs for pdfs, one needs to create active links within a pdf document. This method helps readers, going through the document, to visit your website and contact you online. The process also helps search engines to track-down your content and use them for further internal inking.

One needs to use a formatable text since, search engines like google can't read text from images. The content of a pdf document needs to be optimized as per the SEO best practices. Headline of the pdf document should be given special attention, as search engines create a list from the entire pdf document that are in bold. In the session, it was also suggested to rebuild old pdfs and update document titles. In case your document doesn't have a title, then google tries to extract text from the pdf and create the list. This method however isn't that helpful, as it won't attract user to click-through. At present, there are many applications available which help in creating titles for pdf documents. For instance, MS Word 2003 generally adds "Microsoft Word" to all untitled documents. This title then acts as a headline during the organic Google listing.

To improve click-through for your site which consists of pdf document, all their links need to be indexed and active hyperlinks should be added. To create active hyperlinks all you need to do is click on the Advanced option in the Acrobat document and then select Link option to Create Link. This procedure will convert any text or image into an active link. This technique helps search engines locate your site and think of ways to get other websites to link you.

The second speaker of the session was Greg Jarboe, who discussed various tips, tools, and techniques on non-traditional optimization, which can be applied for both indexing and ranking purposes. We all are aware of the fact that, GoogleNews often removes a month old content, at times, even corporate news gets dispersed as a Word Doc. In the session, he explained various ways for optimizing a Word Doc. Older the ranking of a website, the lesser would be its relevance. To avoid such situation try SEOSamba, which helps optimize website and create RSS feeds. This procedure would definitely help improve site's ranking.

Social networking sites like YouTube examine dozens of aspects, which also include hits and rating. Even YouTube videos counts is comparable to Yahoo! search count, they also shed light on the popularity of video search and YouTube. When we talk of Google's Universal search, it generally means the presence of blog posts, videos and other channels in the SERPs. The entire search process takes around 30% of the organic search results. Therefore, it becomes necessary to optimize even for that percentage.

Stephan Spencer was the nest speaker in the session. He mainly talked about his daughter's [famous] Neopets site. He also discussed some of the common SEO mistakes that bloggers make:

• Title tags left to be auto-generated from the post name.
• Undeserved pages being indexed by squander crawl equity.
• Multiple homes for blogs (for example: http and http://www.)
• Not applying WordPress feature like "optional excerpt" to minimize duplicate content.
• Non-utilization of rel-nofollow to direct PageRank flow.
• Over dependency on date base archives.
• Unstable keyword focus especially on category and tag pages.
• Sub-optimal URLs
• Un-optimized RSS feed
• Hosting blog/feed URLs on another's domain.
• Usage of internal linking for suboptimal anchor text.

To override a title tag with a customized tag Plugin like SEO Title Tag can be used. It also permits "thin slicing," which refers to making quick decisions, without much thinking. If you are an SEO expert, the same concept can be applied by using the mass edit capabilities. To make a site keyword rich one can also use "Crank through".

The most common tactic is to use keywords as a title. One also needs to optimize URLs, as it has been proved that short URLs get twice clicked than the longer ones. One should also use sub domains, subdirectories, new domains as you tend to benefit from their domain authority. You should also optimize anchor text, create post's title linked to the permalink page. Mold your PageRank to decide where you want to send them. Do remember to minimize the duplicate content. Make sure to include optional excerpts" code in all your main index template except the permalink page. While writing content for any post make sure, they are unique. Try improving the keyword by focusing on heading tags, bold, strong, and sticky posts.

On following points an RSS feed can be optimized:

• Complete text and not on summaries
• Use 20 or more items instead of 10
• Title need to be keyword rich
• Use your brand name as a title
• Apply the most crucial keyword in the title
• Attractive site description

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Alternative Discovery and SEO: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

Moderator:

• Gillian Muessig

Speakers:

• Heather Lloyd-Martin, President of North American Division of SuccessWorks
• Matt Tuens, Founder & CEO of AcuVox

The first speaker of the session was Heather-Loyd Martin, who started out by asking some vital questions, such as why do we actually build content, why are we supposed to focus on content and should we inhouse or outsource?

Content is the most important part of SEO and it's simply not enough to throw up articles on the website. The text and its quality has a direct effect on search positions and conversions. Quality content is even more important for the process of link building, for no good brand will ever link to useless content.

The case of AmsterdamEscape.com can teach us a thing or two. The company was even banned from Google earlier but then it showed tremendous improvement by hiring a new SEO team and churning out some great content. The company now ranks well for many different key phrases. The case of BusinessWeek further establishes the importance of content without doubt.

One has to understand that copywriting is all about connecting with the customers. The language should be keeping them, their needs and their demands in mind. Many companies have erred by simply writing some 250 words and stuffing keywords within the same.

Keyword research tools offer us a massive opportunity to find topics and keyword phrases to write on. Make it a point to use these keywords in headlines, sub-headlines as well as in hyperlinks. You can employ site search to create new pages for unrepresented search terms. Content of certain pages can be based on seasonal trends.

One cannot forget that good content would cost some money and getting it could be the most expensive part of SEO campaign. For in house content creation, you would have to impart a substantial amount of training. Never settle for low quality content and make sure you get a content worth your money.

Think about what you are looking for- sales related or informational copy. If you have no writing staff, no time, no editorial calendar, then you'd rather outsource.

The second speaker of the session was Matt Tuens, who showcased how the content side of online industry has evolved over the last ten years. He explained how the perspective towards content has changed substantially over the years. The objective now is to build a helpful website that generates traffic and get maximum returns on investment.

It's important to understand that Content is original SEO. Getting quality content was the reason search engines were built.

It is wrong to believe that people don't think before making their purchasing decisions. Success would come if you believe the exact opposite. Be willing to answer their each and every question. Remember, your content is not all about selling and promoting yourself. If your content language is outrightly marketing oriented then people are intelligent enough to figure out the intentions. Your content should provide solutions, give the readers what they want to know.

It is important that you understand your target audience better. Try to identify the segments in your demographic on the basis of different criteria, such as marital status, age, working or retired, etc. Then write for your particular segment. When you do so, have a clear picture of what your customer would want. Asking yourself some questions might help. Ask yourself the following

• Why will people be buying what you are selling?
• What exact needs of your customers is your product filling?
• Which are the main decision points for your campaign?
• What will help to inform them?
• What will make them move to action?

The deeper people go in research, the more they will look for someone whom they can trust. Try to identify what will help them come to your product. Carry out your keyword research after you have finished your demographic segmentation. To get quality content, it is important that you don't just run after terms, but go for their meaning.

In your keyword research, the following suggestions might help:

• Keep your primary terms broad and strong.
• Add a term to each of the secondary, tertiary and long tail keywords. Ensure that you add content topics at each level.

Understand what type of content are you creating. Are they articles, blog posts, news articles, video ones or forums. Keep in mind the structure of your content. Some of these tips will help:

• Stacking like pages together and keeping them in the same directories
• Ensure a high degree of structural categorization
• Try to incorporate virtual categorization

Structure is quite important for your content to ensure maximum effectiveness for your content. An intelligent structure should have a general theming, theme sculpting, internal linking and PageRank sculpting.

Decide on your budget as per your resources. You can have a mid budget or less budget and work on them accordingly. The in-housing or outsourcing decision should also be taken keeping in mind the same.

One critical aspect is to measure the ROI and business organizations often falter since they have no clue as to how to manage the same. Some tips regarding the same

• Set standard goals in terms of sales, downloads or page views as per your business model.
• Note the indirect metrics, such as page views, time on site, time on page, repeat visits, etc
• Watch out for increase in your direct and indirect goals. Check indicative factors, such as the entry pages, most viewed pages.

Only thorough planning, perspective and execution will ensure the fulfillment of your SEO objectives.

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Ground-Up SEO Content Development as Pure Business Strategy: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

Gone are the days, when optimization was done while targeting all the market segments. It is the era of local search optimization, where SEO processes are more flexible and you have the power of optimizing website as per geographical locations. Many websites have discovered the power of local targeting. The local search optimization session on day 2 highlighted all the marketing aspects of local search.

Moderator:

• Larry Mersman

Speakers:

• David Klein, Electron Wrangler & SEO, Purpose Inc
• Joe Laratro, President, Tandem Interactive
• William Leake, CEO, Apogee Search
• Justin Sanger, Founder & President,LocalLaunch!

First speaker of the session was William Leake, who believes that most of the searches are based on local target. Where online search has influenced $471 billion in offline sales, it has on the other hand influenced only 1/3 in online purchases. It is true that more than 80% of the purchases happen within 50 miles of the customer’s home.

It is not essential that Google will show local results even after the location is specified in the search string. This leads to the creation of a unique keyword research issue, which might not show local search results.

In this case, what is essential is getting all your addresses registered. Websites owners must customize for their largest geo city centre, as Google has special liking for such centers. All the information about your business must be added to yellow page type websites like yellow pages, super pages, local.com and more, as these sites act as information aggregators.

Customer reviews also play crucial role in increasing local search visibility. You should figure out from where Google is getting all the reviews and then ask your customers to provide real reviews. Tagging a video for local searches will give you surprisingly increased results. There are many online profiles, which also accept videos. Search for them.

Next to speak was Joe Laratro. According to him local keyword research is critical. Do not only focus on obvious state and local phrases, but include some local slang like “tri-city”, “Triad” or “valley”. Combine them with your vertical market or the specialty area. You will receive large list of phrases and will need to create content around them.

Some of the valuable Geo-centric content creation ideas include client testimonials, blog and work logs, pictures with caption, client case studies and stories, local resources and information pages. Do not ever prefer using form pages, which are easily caught by search engines. While writing a copy, you should primarily focus on GEO and do remember to optimize it.

For optimizing the content, come out with areas of specialty and incorporate local keywords. Once Joe Laratro hired writers and asked them to come up with local content in 30 different locations. They combined all the keywords in their content and it was 1 year later, the website received 7x more traffic than the last year.

Although, the local terms generate small amount of traffic, but it is all quality traffic that results in adding up lots of site visitors.

Next up was Justin Sanger, who truly believes that local search is only meant for brick and mortar companies and not for pure web players. It is $1 Trillion dollar market and people will do online search for local purchase without even clicking the company’s website.

Google and Yahoo have now incorporated proximity, content accuracy, user generated content and a local score in their search algorithms. Most of the searchers now take mobile search as a major service. There are numerous ways for a consumer to find a business as every piece of content is a new opportunity to be found.

To be a winner at local search, you must have your core business data online with big aggregators. After this, you should submit your profiles to every possible place. Get references for your website by looking at Google and finding out who is pulling maximum reviews. All the social media and other sites must be linked with ratings and reviews. Also build links with your local associations, trade partners and other authorized local links.

Last speaker of the session David Klein said that if you want your website to be #1 in organic search, it must have a highly optimized content and some of the best links.

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LOCAL SEARCH OPTIMIZATION : PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

This session had the various speakers highlighting the SEO/SEM strategy their companies have employed, the challenges they have faced in the field as well as the areas that need to be worked upon.

Moderator:

• Joseph Morin

Speakers:

• Melanie Mitchell, Vice President of Marketing, Foliofn Investments, Inc
• Dave Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc
• Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Engine Optmization Architect, Microsoft
• Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer, Google

Melanie Mitchell, who worked first at AOL sometime earlier this year, was the first speaker. Search, she said was good, because it made the consumer in control of content. She emphasized that search is only one part of SEO. A few case studies were presented to show how offline marketing may affect online sales.

Dave Roth spoke next. He started out by asserting that Yahoo is involved in marketing because of its tremendous marketing potential. They do paid search, organic search and affiliate search. He pointed out that while working with SEO, they interact with search product managers but are hampered by the fact that do not speak to the engineers. As a result, they are not knowledgeable about the algorithms used, particularly CTR by position algorithms.

SEM in Yahoo has a lot of properties which makes it challenging. First of all there is the sheer variety of businesses- subscriptions, downloads, some are e-commerce, some are lead gens and some are display ad revenue.

He spoke about Life Time Value metric, which helps them measure these businesses. It enables them to calculate the value of a conversion for a subscription, referral, CPC/CPM, etc. and to determine the net present value of their lifetime revenue stream.

To figure out what opportunity Yahoo has in SEM, the company created a predictive model, based on click and search data. This enabled Yahoo to determine its position vis-a-vis the competition. The model told the company how much a click was worth for it. Yahoo was able to clearly see the competitive gap and thus direct its SEO/SEM strategy.

Instead of adopting a fix-it strategy, Yahoo decided to make SEO part of the product/website development process. They came up with 6 different check points for the process.
He however commented that Paid Search Execution is easier. The decisions involve choosing between house versus outsource, build or buy, etc. Usually, Yahoo wants a slice of each pie.

The company standardizes a seemingly complicated workflow document. Subsequently, they come up with a marketing scorecard for all their businesses. This provides them with the information needed to decide where to move money. Done weekly, this process enables them to keep an eye on all businesses. Further, they make use of an SEO dashboard track workings at the VP level.

Derrick Wheeler was the next speaker. He mentioned that although he is lower down in the SEO hierarchy, he is involved in and familiar with the entire process.
Microsoft, he said is not a single site but comprises of hundreds of individual web sites. Besides Windows, Microsoft has to look after micro sites and directories such as microsoft.com/australia. Optimization is carried out on a site by site basis, which however brings problems. They currently have 9 CMSs.

While they have been consistently working to make their sites search engine friendly, the work is made challenging by the fact that they have 100 billion plus URLs to deal with. The fact that Google and Yahoo have fewer pages than Microsoft, has structural issues they need to fix.

Three levels of SEO:

1. Sitewide SEO initiative
2. SEO at the level of individual web sites
3. Page level SEO.

Surprisingly, Microsoft does not know how much traffic it owes to organic and paid search separately. Besides determining this, the company is attempting to make the metrics they use uniform for all sites. Besides carrying out training worldwide, Microsoft has had to build internal tools as some standard SEO tools aren't compatible with Microsoft.

Microsoft's SEO strategy has focused on :

• Reduction of undesirable pages (big issue for Microsoft)
• Minimizing use of redirects
• Incorrect error handling
• Unorganized structure of subsidiary content
• Inferior quality page titles and meta tags

The speaker vehemently asserted that SEO should focus on structure, content and authority. Microsoft has made its own spider which is being used to crawl its website in order to zero in on the problems their search engine is currently facing.

He went on to throw light on the 6 Site Level SEO steps Microsoft has taken:

1. Business Outcomes and Metrics.
2. Keyword Research.
3. Carrying out a structural and technical audit.
4. Content editing for keyword incorporation.
5. Link building tactics.
6. Focusing on outgoing optimization.

Maile Ohye from Google was the last speaker. He praised YouTube for its SEO, bringing out the fact that gives each video a unique URL, a different title and a relevant description. Ohye also commented on its excellent navigation features and search effectiveness.
Subsequently, he spoke about an SEO starter guide, Google had come up with. This is the guide internally used by the company, and it has recently been made available to the world at large.

Ohye concluded the speech and the session by advising SEO sites to act responsibly and concentrate on value.

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SEO and Big Search: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

The Internet allows every marketer to have an unprecedented amount of insight on the competitors' plans and strategies. The session is about the how one can gain a lot of competitive intelligence using different tools and tactics.

Moderater:

• Bruce Clay

Speakers:

• Jake Baillie, Managing Director of STN Labs
• Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant of Marketing Pilgrim LLC
• Larry Mersman, Vice President of Trellian
• William Atchison, Founder of Crawl Wall

The session was initiated by Andy Beal, who revealed his own tool kit to keep a watch on the competitors. Here are some of the tools he specified:

• Domaintool.com: Can take your regular WHOIS information to a new level of detail. One can obtain information on who owns a specific site, what else does he own, which directories are they in, etc.
• ranks.nl/tools/spider.htm: Can give information regarding keyword densities of your competitors. Makes combinations as per the number of words. (For ex, 2-word, 3-word or 3-word)
• sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com: Gives you backlinks for your competitors. This is the most ideal one-stop tool for all backlinks.
• seomoz.org/tools: One can use a number of free or paid tools from this website.
• soloseo.com/tools/indexrank.html: Changes Google's data in an easy to comprehend dashboard which enables you to compare your site to that of your competitors.
• copernic.com: One can monitor everything about the competitor here. It is a paid site. A free substitute of the same is Watchthatpage.com.

Other tools he proposed were Technorati.com, google.com/alerts, searchanalytics.compete.com, touchgraph.com, google.brand.edgar-online.com, seekingalpha.com/transcripts, google.com/patents and oodle.com

The next speaker was Larry Mersman, who started of by stressing how the definition of competitive intelligence can significantly alter depending on the channel being dealt. He offered some organizations that offer competitive solutions, namely HitWise, Trellian and ComScore.
Before you target particular keywords you should check who is optimizing it. Check through tools, who is sending traffic to your competitors.

The penultimate speaker of the session was William Atchison, who pointed out the crucial fact that your competitors are as interested in monitoring your movement. There is no point in letting your competitors use your hard work and research. There are some crucial techniques that can protect your SEO investment from competitors.

There might be competitors who are gathering data from Google, Yahoo! and MSN's cache pages. You can eliminate search engine cacheing in order to prevent researchers from gathering data on essential indicators, such as meta tags, internal anchor text and outbound links. One can also use the NOARCHIVE BANS Cache.

It is important to remove any sort of clues about your presence, be it your administrative and technical contacts or how many domains you have. You can easily block the whois data by using proxy commands. You can use robots.txt to prevent bad crawlers. You can use full trip reverse DNS checking, spoofing to make sure that the search engines are who they claim they are.

You can remove competitive vulnerabilities by opting out of archive .org. Ensure tighter controls on copyrighted content and improve on SERs after getting free from unwanted competition.

Jake Baillie was the final speaker of the session. His speech was all about how Google is still one of the best tools for competitive information. One should be aware of their ISP and be sure of their authenticity. Moreover ISPs can be feigned making it even more important for you to check up the IP lookups to monitor who owns what.

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Competitive Intelligence: Know Thy Competitor Well, PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

The session focused on how important it is for web sites to create relevant content. It stressed how achieving this one objective could ensure success to your Internet Marketing objectives.
Moderator:

• Derrick Wheeler

Speakers:

• Ted Ulle, Partner of The MEWS Group
• Robin Liss, Founder and President of Camcorderinfo.com
• Rupali Shah, Organic Search Manager of GroupM

The session was initiated by Ted Ulle who started off by cautioning companies to not follow the process of overloading their sites with irrelevant content. The primary thing to keep in mind is that the business process or workflow must support the SEO process. Your content team should be trained in SEO.

Using some examples he showcased how the final product must be in coherence with the business goal and the the training should be in accordance. The following are some points that you should ensure writing your content:

• Rough out your content at a conceptual level as per your strategy
• In case you are starting a new web site, you should be looking at the CMS, server, back-end, analytics, etc.
• The market strategy should precede the keyword research. Next, you should structure the information architecture (IA). This is extremely important since it ensures that your content gets found well.
• Then come your graphic designers and template building. The idea is to set your business goal and penetrate the process. Each process, team change and decision made should be documented.

There's no point in chasing trophy keywords. You don't want to just feature on top of SERPs for particular keywords but get clients. So keywords should be ones those that your target audience is searching for. Keep in mind whether you are following B2B or B2C system.
The relevance of IA is unquestionable. Your content should be held at the right place and not be featuring loosely all over your website. A bad layout can negate the effects of good content. Therefor, you should prevent the same by studying print typography.

The idea is to keep simple and seamless goals, as well as prevent individual from showing off. Individual programmers or content writers showing off can have a bad affect on the overall business. When a problem occurs, don't be reluctant to fix it.

The session's second speaker was Robin Liss who stressed on producing high value content. Robin Liss is regarded as one of the experts in the field of quality content and her network of review sites get about a million visitors every month.

Just as a car maker manufactures cars, you manufacture content, and it is just as important for you to ensure efficiency as it is in the former industry. Form your content pipeline that answers the following questions:

• Who takes responsibility for what?
• How much time is needed for a process?
• What steps are essential or absolutely unnecessary?
• What all can you outsource?
• What can you bring in house?

You should first create a draft for your content and then supplement it with multimedia. Before you make your content live, it should go for copy editing, SEO editing and then final editing.
As per your requirement and resources, your pipeline might just be a writer and an editor or even a 6 member team comprising of an editor-in-chief, an editor, a writer, a photographer, a product tester and a copy editor. Some good tools can save a lot of money for you, such as WSIWYG tools (FCK Editor) and Dreamweaver, MT. Other crucial factors can also improve your organization's efficiency. Chose the right writer for the right task. You can also outsource jobs by finding online copy editors, whom you can pay per words. Remember, even the best writer needs an editor and every single thing should be edited.

Bottlenecks can harm your organization more than anything. It is important to have a consistent pattern to maximize your workflow. Reviews can substantially fasten the entire by spotting the bottlenecks. Her final tip was to ensure that you own rights in the contracts.

Rupali Shah was the third and final speaker of the session and she conveyed some vital information about mobile content. The advent of iPhones and Blackberries has changed things around substantially. It is important to present your enterprise on these devices. Statistics show how iPhones are taking the world by storm. For you this would mean that a presence on the device will give you millions of potential viewers. With technological barriers being solved every passing day, this market is expanding a lot. Have a look at your website on an iPhone or iPhone emulator and check if it looks good and its loading speed.

For Mobile SEO there are many unique criteria, such as valid XHTML code, W3C compliance, linking and site maps. Try to make your site more accessible by giving it an uncluttered look.

The following may help:

• Make the page size small.
• Serve a tailored content.
• Give a simple design that is rich in text.
• Use mobile style sheets in your website
• Use DIV tags instead of tables.
• Optimize your images with ALT tags.
• Image formats should be in GIFs and JPEGs.
• Ensure that your total page weight is not beyond 20kb.
• Limit your colors to 256.
• Limit the scripting in your website. A lot of devices cannot comprehend heavy scripting.
• Avoid too much scrolling options and ensure comfortable navigating options.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Real-World Winning Tactics for Content Creation, PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

As a result of a huge growth in local targeting and mobile device usage, local search is coming up fast and this provides a good avenue to all Internet Marketers. The session was meant to discuss the various perspectives on local search engines with regard to Search Engines, Wireless Audiences and SEO/SEM marketeers.

Moderator:

• Andy Beal

Speakers:

• Shailesh Bhat, Senior Product Manager of Yahoo! Local, Yahoo
• Alex Porter, Vice President of Location3 Media
• Bill Mongovan, VP SearchCenter of OmnitureGregory Markel and Owner of InfuseCreative

The session was initiated by Shailesh Bhatt. Shailesh stressed how Yahoo! is trying its best to cater to the needs of the local search audience. The important thing is to monitor listing information in a proactive fashion, in order to prevent them from getting inaccurate. When getting vendor description to feature on result, the information criteria should be more than just name and address.

Local searches are increasing phenomenally every single day and searches are now educated enough to add locality in their search queries. As a result, search strings are also getting longer. Vendors need to adapt their profiles accordingly.

Local search is evolving as much as web search. And in accordance with the trend Yahoo! has come up with Search Monkey, that allows a publisher to structure the presented information, enabling a more relevant search experience.

From the year 2007 to the year 2008, the demand of local information and maps on mobile devices grew up by 80%. One has to understand that mobile searchers are looking for quick answers and not redundant web links. Mobile search features a high degree of intent and provide a good opportunity to marketeers.

The next speaker of the session was Alex Porter. He stressed how crucial it is for companies to take advantage of map listings. As per statistics, about 50% of the searchers who are able to find local vendors, will reach out to interact with them. Map listings is an important factor that can distinguish your local search website.

Accuracy is a must in the listing data and for that it is imperative that one should be proactive. Make your updates right from the sources. It is important to keep in mind that the main search engines often pull information from local search engines, such as CitySearch, and this can substantially help with your organic listings.

Some features, such as call tracking, coupon tracking, in-store surveys and video views can help you greatly in getting your business in local searches. Implementing a KML sitemap may also be a good idea.

The penultimate of the session was Bill Mongovan, who heavily recommended creating individual landing URLs for your local search results. He pointed out that mobile search is evolving at an unprecedented rate and more and more number of people are buying with their devices. More so in the case of iPhone users. Sooner or later, one would have to start creating application for the mobile market.

The session was conclude by Gregory Markel who stressed on the relevance of the industry presently and how is it likely to increase in future. The 3G generation of mobile phones is changing the whole face of mobile search. Applications such as GPS are furthering local search options like never before. iPhone uses three different methods to come up with the location of the user.

The fact that search engines have started treating these devices differently does not come as much of a surprise. Mobile Search is also witnessing a growth in the PPC factor. It is very much possible that mobile search will not feature the same traditional SEO keywords method. Smart applications and location detectors are likely to be more crucial factors.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Local and Mobile Search: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2

The concept of online reputation management is reaching new dimensions and it is important that one should understand its significance as well as its uniqueness. The session cleared a lot of doubts on the same and brought forward some crucial tips for effective reputation management.

Moderator:

• Joe Laratro

Speakers:

• Jessica L. Bowman, Founder and President of SEOinhouse.com
• Lauren Vaccarello, Director of Publishing of Forex Capital Markets LLC
• Brian Combs, Senior VP & Chief Futurist of Apogee Search
• Tony Wright, CEO/Founder of WrightIMC

The first speaker of the session was Jessica Bowman. She stressed how in accordance with the halo effect, it is imperative that you create a consistent customer experience. This consistency is to be exhibited not only in your customer service line, new cycle and the real world locations, but also in the SERPs and social media. With traditional media, one can obtain a maximum of 50 percent halo but online interactions can cause large scale impacts.

With the advent of machines, such as iPhones, it has become even easier to surf, post and review content on the move. Employers commenting about their company on social sites can damage the reputation of the enterprise substantially. One needs to ensure that good customer service is in the company culture. More attention needs to be paid to those customers who might go and post online. Twitter, Facebook and iPhone have all made it easier to complain simultaneously to thousands of people.

It is advisable for companies to establish boundaries/guidelines regarding online commenting and blogging in the employee handbook. One should however, keep in mind, the opportunity provided by these media is also phenomenal and a significant amount of buzz can be created by allowing employees access to social media sites while monitoring what is being written.
There are many opportunities present to create a positive buzz. You can comment at Yahoo or Google Local, blog or post Twitter updates.

Next up is Lauren Vaccarello, who will be sharing crucial tips for maintaining and, if need arises, defending your brand image. You can start of with buying some important and relevant domains and keywords, such as your CEOname.com and MyBrandSucks.com. In today's world it would be a crime to overlook social media and one has to register his brand name on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Naymz.

Awareness is the key and one has to be fully aware of what the competitors are doing, especially the key players. One can monitor this with SpyFu, Google Alerts and Trackur.

However, monitoring is not the sole objective, taking necessary actions is. You can use Twitter to maintain your reputation. Their paid product Tweet Pro can substantially help you achieve the same.

Monitoring your reputation on Twitter can have surprisingly positive results for your brand image. One should not only try to empower the brand loyalists, but be equally alert to respond to negative publicity.

The next speaker of the session was Brian Combs, who again shared some essential information on the process of reputation management. Handling a problem should be a secondary affair. First, it is important to ensure the following:

• Dedicate enough resources for online customer servicing
• Monitoring online conversations
• Employing consistent naming conventions
• Creating and propagating multiple sites
• Trying to engage your customer as much as possible

It is important to spot the problem a soon as possible. Once you do so, it is imperative that you attempt to diffuse the same. Diffusing a problem does not mean getting defensive or attempting to strong arm, this might just make matters worse. Try to take the matter offline or block with robots.txt. If all attempts fail, then resort to scubbing the list. One can do this by:

• Taking up more and more shelf space.
• Do this through various sub-domains, product sites, international domains, social media profiles, miscellaneous articles on third-party sites, micro-sites that address specific concerns.
• Remember the main objective of doing so, blend the search results.
• The most important thing is that the content be unique. Moreover, link building may help.

One can also employ risky techniques, such as using Wikipedia, Pay-Per-Post, Review Me, Google Bowling or even deceptive practices to handle th problems. However, it is better to pursue reputation management without getting into risky behavior. But always keep in mind that reputation problems are far easier to prevent than to fix.

The last speaker of the day is Tony Wright, who took the innovative way of putting his point with an illustrative example. Wright put down the following important points about reputation management:

• Strong emotions can go on to ruin an online reputation.
• One has to respond with some caution. In some cases, responding can make it worse.
• Employers could come up with policies to prevent employees from responding in an inappropriate fashion.
• Threatening violence over the Internet will mostly make you look like an idiot.

Reputation branding is not the same as influencing. One should first work on reputation and then follow it up with the other criteria. Monitoring your logo should not go beyond control. For example, if a fan/supporter is using your logo, there is absolutely no need to freak out.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

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Reputation Management: PubCon Las Vegas 2008, Day 2