SMX - SEO for Web2.0 Sites

Session Info

Moderator: Vanessa Fox (Features Editor, Search Engine Land)

Speakers:

• Nathan Buggia
  Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft
• Tom Critchlow
  Head of Search Marketing, Distilled
• Mikkel deMib Svendsen
  Creative Director, deMib
• Dave Naylor
  Owner, Bronco

Content: Let’s say SEO 1.0 is about ensuring that 1990s-era web design techniques such as tables and frames are adjusted to minimize search engine ranking issues. Well, now the Web 2.0 design world is firmly upon us, bringing with it CSS, AJAX and other dynamic design techniques that can give search engines fits. SEO 2.0 is all about ensuring that Web 2.0 sites are as search engine friendly as Web 1.0 sites.

Session Inhalt

• 10.51: case study - arbor snowboards; web2.0 fancy website, but if you look in the inside, the title is “Arbor: Home” on the whole website > not good.

• 10.52: impact on search results
  • google: #1 arbor
  • yahoo: #1
  • live search: #3

• 10.53: snowboards #49, #80, #128

• 10.54: search problems with web2.0
  • can’t read the page: ajax, flash, silverlight
  • don’t know what content is on the page
  • one url for many pages
  • customers can’t link directly to resources within your site
  • search engines can’t discover content on your site

• 10.55: a simple landing page
  • all html/css
  • login control
  • links to all your content

• 10.56: compeling content for your audience
  • content is king
  • everyone should have a blog (subfolder)
  • best sales content about your products (include UGC)
  • viral, social media
  • videos, how to, backgrounds, boarding guides
  • instrument to track conversations

• 10.58: refactor functionality & content
  • any modern developer will only put flash where it is needed, not the entire site.

• 10.59: create a down-level experience
  • provide flash and html version

• 11.00: sitemap is important
  • standardize your urls (w/ or w/o www.)

• 11.01: Tom: why does web2.0 pose challenges to traditional SEO thinking?

• 11.02: web2.0 is about content, comment, pictures > user generated content

• 11.03: you have lack of control sometimes

• 11.04: leveraging UGC for fun & Profit
  • search queries are UGC too
  • how to identify opportunities & actionalbe insights
  • advice on building an information architecture for web 2.0 sites
  • encouraging social media engagement for web 2.0 sites

• 11.05: example of embedding search queries
  • search queries is data that people put on their website
  • scribd pretty much all of it is ugc
  • they embeded a bunch of search queries “LATEST SEARCHES LEADING TO THIS DOC”
  • long tail phrases are mentioned on this page, helps ranking on those additional terms

• 11.07: use internal metrics to find missed opportunites
  • take internal ratings from website, bookmarks
  • make internal algorithm and identify hot pages and products
  • which of those pages are getting good traffic from search engines
  • merge the two information, and optimize the hot pages for the search engines

• 11.10: using data to drive internal linking
  • most listened
  • top selling
  • highest rated
  • most viewed
  • popular
  • hot right now
  • people who bought this also bought

• 11.12: 392 internal links. 120,000 listens
  • last.fm as example, the more plays a song gets, the more links
  • gives link juice
  • johnny cash page has 29 million listens and got 67,600 internal links, ranks #4 for johnny cash on search engines.

• 11.14: align internal vorting with external voting
  • two distinct group of people.
    1. who share, but don’t use the star rating
    2. star rate, but don’t fav it or share

• 11.16: Dave: i couldn’t decide so i asked my twitter followers

• 11.19: davidnaylor.co.uk it’s been hacked, this ended up with the blog not ranking for anything
  • fix hack and shout at everyone in the office for a while
  • moderate the blog

• 11.20: a petition website, often gets pages removed from google, had to re apply for adsense, lost trust on the home page

• 11.21: moved new petitions to a moderated status, set up banned words list, took control of the homepage learnt a little about french law.

• 11.22: web 2.0 it’s like the wild west
  • keep control of your website
  • look at your site like a spider would
  • because you’re web2.0 doesn’t make you bullet proof

• 11.23: keep control of everything you do!

• 11.28: Dave: I was spending more time fixing web2.0 sites than creating

• 11.30: what is important about web2.0?
  • new types of applications
    no new technologies - just new use of the old ones
    ajax - a new trend in interfacing
  • a deeper interaction with users
    turning visitors into active participants and community members
    this is where all the fun begins
  • the paradox of web 2.0
    on one hand embracing the true web and the power of user genereated content
    on the other hand isolating itself from existing standards and interactions

• 11.32: what is ajax? (AdaptivePath)

• 11.33: why AJAX sucks (most of the times)
  Jakob Nielsens, http://usabilityviews.com/ajaxsucks.html

• 11.34: AJAX breaks the standard
  • flash, frames & ajax all share a comon problem: you can only link to the application - not to the “page”
  • you can script the URL after the #-mark, but search engines do not recognize it as unique page URLs
  • you can reload the page for every click, but then what’s the point of ajax?

• 11.36: Tips about AJAX
  • so should you not be using ajax at all?
    yes, just not as much as some people will tell you to
  • ask yourself “why”?
    how will ajax improve your business?
  • let ajax be an option - not the default
    do not turn away users (and engines!) that do not support ajax
  • error trap links
    set up proper 301 reidrection of wrong linking to the ajax application
  • let the pros do the work
    do not let happy script kiddies and html-amatuers destroy user experience and jeopardize security with poor ajax applications!

• 11.39: user generated content is great for SEO
  • original content is expensive - loyal user write it for free
  • you don’t have to do keyword research - users write (just as bad) as they search
  • miss-spelling are acceptable
  • user generated content improve the freshness

• 11.40: would you like to have 20,000 SEOs?
  • turn your active users into SEOs
  • do what you can to stop spam activities!

• 11.42: teach and support your community about SEO
  • send a regulare SEO newsletter to your community members with relevant and actionable tips
  • don’t try and teach users all about seo - just what they need to know to accomplish your goals
  • the one page - one link strategy
    - it is not that hard to get on linke to one good piece of information
    - teach users where and how to get that one link - and make it the goal to get that one link for every contribution
    - with just 1000 contributions a day - that’s 30,000 new links a month!

SMX - Blow Your Mind LInk Building Techniques

Session Info

Moderator: Rob Kerry (Head of Search, Ayima Search Marketing)

Speaker:

• Lyndon Antcliff
  Viral Content Creator, Cornwall SEO
• Tom Critchlow
  Head of Search Marketing, Distilled
• Wiep Knol
  Manager Link Marketing, Tribal Internet Marketing
• Jay Young
  Owner, Link Fish Media, Inc.

Content: Want to learn how to bild a database of high-value link acquisition targets? Want to know how to get on the radar of nonprofits, government and university departments and compel them to give you some of that sweet, authoritative link love? Want to learn the most coveted secrets to “buying” the links the engines would never consider a “paid link”? This, along with non-traditional link sources, linking strategies and nofollow PageRank “sculpting” or “siloing” are covered in the session.

Session Inhalt

• 9.07: opening

• 9.10: lyndon: pizza delivery is related with emotional things.

• 9.12: none of the motivations made the campaign viral, but it passes on the information

• 9.18: Tom: donating to charities for links - tax free; a mere acknowledgement of a donors generosity in a charitys literature … will not amount to a benefit, provided the acknowledgement does not take the form of an advertisement…”

• 9.20: Using expired pages to build links

• 9.21: don’t go to expired bbc page, but rather go to the other pages, who are linking to bbc. go to those pages and contact and ask for link, instead of the outdated link.

• 9.23: this is a white-hat tactic

• 9.24: how to find expired pages
  “intitle:no+longer+available” and others in google to find the pages

• 9.25: advanced ideas: look for companies who’ve gone out of business; works for blogs too. search for “stopped blogging” [keyphrase] to find abandoned blogs. see who’s blogroll they’re on and contact them.

• 9.26: manual linkbuilding methodology; it is important to put time and effort into link building

• 9.28: link building is not easy, but there are tips to make it more efficient

• 9.29: user generated linkbait works for instance for link building

• 9.30: –VIDEO-TO-COME–

• 9.31: link bait is pictures, a compelling headling and content

• 9.32: try forums first for testing your linkbait and get feedback there

• 9.33: take the feedback and make it better, than launch it on digg and reddit,…

• 9.34: things to avoid: don’t spam!! having an account within a forum is far more important than a linkbait - don’t spam. don’t come fresh into a forum and start with “your campaign”

• 9.34: over 3500 links for a story “how many five year olds could you take in a fight?” > landed on digg. he got the idea from a forum.

• 9.35: “hang out in some forums and get ideas”

• 9.36: bonus tips: videos are widgets - don’t let users use the youtube embed code, create your own! filter log files by referrals from any URLs never seen before - perfect opportunity to contact them to amend anchor text.

• 9.39: link building training
  • improve your skills for more efficiency
  • training the rest of your staff
  • picking the low hanging fruit
  • 404 statistics
  • internal linking structure
  • paid links
  • against the rules, but sometimes cheaper during recession

• 9.41: –VIDEO-TO-COME–

• 9.44: make news about negative or positive news and shout them

• 9.45: monitor bankruptcies in your industry
  • acquire the entire website
  • obtain a link from the home page / landing page
  • contact webmasters linking to websites that went out of business

• 9.46: don’t 301 paid sites, rather link
  • to find them keyword+intitle:
  • local websites, news papers, boards
  • insolvency.gov.uk has for instance a list of company’s

• 9.47: find others in need of content
  • guest blogging
  • “guest blogger wanted”, “want to write for”
  • unused blogs
  • <keyword> blog inttitle archive -2008
  • inposttitle:”my last post”
  • closed websites
    “website has closed”, “website no longer active”

• 9.48: develop recession related content
  • comparison tools
  • graphs, charts and other visuals of “how bad things are going”
  • highlight recession proof industries or up markets in a down economy
  • funny widgets, quizzes etc. “layoff-o-meter”

• 9.50: in summary
  • proven tactics also work during a recession
  • try to find websites that scream for content
  • develop recession related content
  • be creative and not too greedy

• 9.51: Jay: create a surrogate company
  • create a believable website
  • do not include a telephone number
  • privatize the whois of the domain
  • do not disclose your site until a deal is either negotiated or very close
  • create a profile page for each link builder and use a picture of an attractive person.

• 9.52: negotiations
  • use the telephone if possible
  • lowball the price and don’t be afraid to walk away.
  • once you have negotiated a link, ask the webmaster to introduce you to other potential link partners.
  • offer an incentive
  • trade products/content for links.

• 9.54: a lot of bloggers do reviews, when they get a product

• 9.55: .edu
  • focus on student clubs and organizations
  • pages tend to be very old and authoritative
  • maintained predominately by students
  • very loosely monitored
  • offer to sponsor a monthly club meeting

• 9.57: use cyclic organic traffic
  • use analytics, google insights and trends to determine seasonal and market fluctuations in search volume and traffic.
  • use the periods of increased activity to mask large scale link building efforts.
  • new product roll-outs, quarterly reports and big press releases are also perfect opportunites to increase link building efforts.

• 9.59: seasonal links
  • change anchor text quarterly if it makes sense to get more value from a single link.
  • negotiate the ability to change the anchor upfront with the site owner
  • creates better relevancy and more opportunity for click through traffic.

• 10.00: international link building
  • speak the language
  • don’t over do it
  • avoid placing an english link on a predominately non-english page
  • build links from local IP addresses if possible

• 10.01: on own risk
  • engange in anti-linkbuilding
  • only target the highest quality paid links
  • anti-linkbuilding is inexpensive
  • use the google webmaster guidelines to sell your point
  • sympathize with the webmaster and give examples

• 10.02: renewal season
  • use the internet archive to discover competitor links that are close to 12 months old and try to replace their link with your own.

• 10.03: take advantage of mistakes
  • look for typos and coding errors in your competitions link profile
  • report the errors to the site owner but “fix the link”

• 10.04: create local listings
  • use insights to find the best locations for your phrase.
  • create a local skype telephone number
  • purchase a local mailing address

• 10.05: Tom: paid or non-paid link building should be a small portion of your whole activities.

Search Marketing Expo London - Agenda Tag 2

Nach der gestrigen Tageskonferenz gab es zum Ausklingen noch eine Networking-Party in einem Pub in der Nähe, organisiert von LondonSEO und alle Drinks gesponsort von Casino Affiliate Programs, war sehr unterhaltsam und interessant zugleich.

Leider kann ich heute nur an zwei Sessions teilnehmen, da ich im Anschluss zum Flughafen muss.

Hier nun die Agenda für Tag 2:

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques

Speakers: Lyndon Antcliff, Tom Critchlow, Wiep Knol, Jay Young

Want to learn how to build a database of high-value link acquisition targets? Want to know how to get on the radar of nonprofits, government and university departments and compel them to give you some of that sweet, authorative link love? Want to learn the most coveted secrets to “buying” the links the engines would never consider a “paid link”? This, along with non-traditional link sources, linking strategies and nofollow PageRank “sculpting” or “siloing” are covered in the session.

SEO For Web 2.0 Sites

Speakers: Nathan Buggia, Tom Critchlow, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Dave Naylor

Let’s say SEO 1.0 is about ensuring that 1990s-era web design techniques such as tables and frames are adjusted to minimize search engine ranking issues. Well, now the Web 2.0 design world is firmly upon us, bringing with it CSS, AJAX and other dynamic design techniques that can give search engines fits. SEO 2.0 is all about ensuring that Web 2.0 sites are as search engine friendly as Web 1.0 sites.

SMX - International SEO

Session Info

Moderator: Vanessa Fox (Features Editor, Search Engine Land)

Speaker:

• Andy Atkins-Kruger
  Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd
• Duncan Morris
  Directore, Distilled Ltd
• Heini van Bergen
  Operations Manager, Tribal Internet Marketing

Inhalt: In dieser Session geht es darum, wie man seine Seite und SEO-Tätigkeiten anpassen muss, wenn man international präsent in den Suchmaschinen sein möchte (oder muss).

Session Inhalt

• 16.19: Duncan: when should you worry about internationalisation, the factors used by the search engines, pros and cons of various site architectures for geo-location, the answer

• 16.20: why should you care
  • increase in traffic
  • target new markets
  • decrease in bounce rate
  • improved conversion rate
  • more business
  • more money
  • need I go on?

• 16.21: not ranking
  • generic tlds (.com, .org, .net) can cause issue for local search engines
  • if you only rank in your local index but want to be listed everywhere

• 16.21: geo location
  • redirecting based on their ip address can be a good idea.
  • search engines tend to browse with an american ip address
  • information architecture is king
  • you must have a way for the search engines to browse to every page, in every language.

• 16.22: language: “to reach 90% of the worlds 1.2 billion internet users, companies must support 20 or more languages”

• 16.23: factors to flick the swtich
  • ccTLD
  • hosting location
  • google local
  • physical address on page
  • inbound link profile
  • webmaster central

• 16.24: for some reason I’ve yet to fully understand, Yahoo! and msn don’t listen to Google Webmaster central setting.

• 16.24: if you geo-target your site to be french you will most likely miss out on french canadian traffic.

• 16.26: one powerful domain
  • www.ikea.com
    > ikea.com/fr
    > ikea.com/en
  • a better solution would be
    > www.ikea.com/us/en
    > www.ikea.com/uk/en
    > /ca/fr, /ca/en

    this would allow you (force you) to write content targeting the relevant country, not just the relevant language.

• 16.27: pros and cons of ONE powerful domain
  • PROs
    + all your links go to one domain
  • CONs
    - lower CTR / conversion rate vs ccTLD
    - what should you put on the homepage?
    - american pages often outrank british pages

• 16.28: wikipedia.com (who only care about targeting languages)
  • en.wiki
  • fr.wiki
  • de.wiki
  • if you care about targeting individuals countries, the following is better.
    uk.example.com/en or ca.example.com/fr

• 16.30: sub domains the worst of both worlds
  • + all links to one domain
  • + could host subdomains in their local country

• 16.31: local ccTLDs (amazon.com & amazon.co.uk)
  • PROs
    + geo-targeting is much easier
    + improved ctr
  • CONs
    - link building is much harder
    - can lead to duplicate content issues
    - .com often still outranks other english tlds

• 16.33: whats the answer?
  • it depends on what you want to do with the domain
  • make sure you own all the relevant domains, and either use them or 301 them to the relevant place.
  • local busines units
    use the ccTLDs and treat as separate websites
  • business managed centrally?
    put everything on the .com and treat as one website

• 16.34: if the search engines are listening….
  • how about a way of claiming multpile domains?
  • what about using sitemaps to pass the language & location of a page
  • tell us if you ignore duplicat content if the pages are geo-targeted differently (rumours this is the case)
  • make more use of on page factors within a domain

• 16.35: Andy: 10 low hanging apples of international SEO

• 16.37: 10: Use UTF-8 character encoding.
  • backwardly compatible with ASCII
  • encodes up to four-byte characters
  • copes with any language from chines to arabic with diacritics - over 100,000 individual characters

• 16.39: 9: Don’t “translate” metatags. do NOT translate or localize your keywords

• 16.41: 8: adopt a global PR strategy

• 16.42: 7: manage 301s
  typical global site has: 00s of links going to “page not found” domains around the globe incorrectly set, several meta-refreshes and is still looking for links!

• 16.43: 6: keyword URLs

• 16.43: 5: source local links

• 16.44: 4: use a smart geo-selector

• 16.45: 3: expert keyword research, let it translate by natives. there are sometime no direct translations for a given word.

• 16.47: 2: ccTLDs or local hosting, absolute convinced that ccTLDs is the way to go, people expect to link to a local domain (even if the site does not exist!)

• 16.48: 1: language & content presentation. present the language well on the site.

• 16.55: Heini: Google is King. But not everywhere in the world.

• 16.56: in Russia is mail.ru the most used search engine. china is mainly using Baidu

• 17.00: in china baidu dominates the market by 29%

• 17.01: baidu serves up to 7.5 billion searches a month

• 17.01: baidus web index contain sover 740 million web pages. “Fact”: baidu gets paid to remove negative listings on formula

• 17.02: baidu is moving towards b2b, competing alibaba

• 17.03: baidu has on the paid placement a fixed pricing model, they also “mix” the traditional organic search with paid inclusions
  • russia Yandex dominates the market there by 48% to 31% on google., third Rambler Media with 10%
  • yandex largest russian search engine and web portal
  • yandex serves around 1.5 billion searches a month
  • yandex schedules IPO for 2009

• 17.04: around 80 billion searches monthly, 6 out of 10 searches conducted on google sites, so 32 billion are on non-google websites.

SMX - SEO & Social Media Marketing

Session Info

Moderator: Rob Kerry (Head of Search, Ayima Search Marketing)

Speaker:

• Andrew Girdwood
  Head of Search, bigmouthmedia
• Ciaran Norris
  SEO & Social Media Director, Altogether Digital
• Jane Copland
  Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz Inc.

Inhalt: Mehr und mehr Leute finden, dass Social Media Marketing (SMM) den großen Bruder SEO auch hilft. Wenn man seine Inhalte in möglichst großen Social Media Plattformen publiziert, führt das oft zu Links auf die eigene Seite und daher auch zu positiven Rankings. Wie das nun genau aussehen kann, erfährt man in dieser Session.

Session Inhalt

• 14.45: The year the linkbait became too good

• 14.49: Jane: a lot has changed in the last twelve months when it comes to viral and link-worthy content

• 14.51: we talked about relevant linkbait because it was a good idea — one year ago in november 2007. now, it’s a necessarity

• 14.52: JustSayHi: through widgets and quizes you can manage to rank high for popular keywords.

• 14.54: they cross-promoted other websites within badges code (now all alt information and links must point at the source of the content).

• 14.55: attempted to file a successful reconsideration request without being totally honest. Ethics or intuition aside, the “rules” surroinding tactics like this were uncertain.

• 14.56: google penalized all pages from this badges by removing them from the index. this is a extreme case.

• 14.57: off topic linkbait can cause anything from a discounting of links to a banned domain or domain network. which wasn’t the case in august 2007.
  • alt information must be 100% indicative of the source’s topic. (”free online dating” was apparently unacceptable.)
  • as always, reconsidertaion request are letters to Google God, so be honest. No, be really, really honest!

• 14.58: also avoid 301 redirecting a legitimate badge’s URL (example: “Awesome quiz” > source site > 301 redirect to debt-consolidation.info)

• 14.59: also avoid: cleverly disguising links in widgets and badges (make links as obvious as possible to negate any accusation that they are hidden from regular users.)

• 15.03: the grey area: made-up stories that declare their fictional nature.
  • microsites that are later redirected after a viral campaign.
  • “hidden” links, such as those within a facebook fan page.

• 15.06: google can always change the rules and you should adopt, not the other way around.

• 15.07: in real life: off-topic content was never a good link building tactic, but it’s now a dangerous tactic as well.
  • webmaster guideline failings
  • out-dated information
  • despite what google says, having a good imagination does not guarantee safety.
  • a vast majority of webmasters don’t read SEO blogs.

• 15.08: the three main rules can be summed up as: be creative, not tricky; if the words aren’t on the page, don’t include them in the link. stay on topic; if a site is penalised, clean up completely before submitting for reinclusion.

• 15.10: Ciaran: agenda planning a social media strategy, social media in action (who’s getting it right? how can it go wrong?)

• 15.11: Forrester methodology: POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technologies), what sex, gender, why do you want to be on youtube, open yourself up for conversations. the last point should be the technology! build everything up first and then think about the technology how to deliver!

• 15.14: Altogether digital.
  • Audience: asseses target audience, attitudes & activities
  • Objectives: decide what it is you are trying to archive
  • channels: select which channels to use
  • creative: define the creative message
  • delivery: design, build & roll-out the solution

• 15.15: types of people
  
  • creators: publish web page, publish or maintain blog
  • critics: comment on blogs
  • collectors: use rss, tag web pages
  • joiners: use social networking sites
  • spectators: read blogs, wathc peer-generated video listen to podcasts
  • inactive: none of these activities

• 15.17: (forrester groundswell tool) http://forrester.com/Groundsweel/profile_tool.html

• 15.18: who’s getting it right?
  • twitter: andy_murray is making it wrong, is not really engaged in conversation, he never responds to twits.
  • twitter: kanyewest followed by 2771 people. he is only following one person, and doesn’t respond either. his blog is fantastic, though twitter is not great
  • twitter: stephenry followed by 12,193 he is following most of the people as well.. he responds to twits and follows conversation

• 15.24: usa today redesigned the site, brought social parts like “reader comment”, top stories,…. pages per visits increased from 2.x to 7.x

• 15.27: you could personalize the video and send it to facebook. create thought-through campaign

• 15.28: who is getting it wrong?
  • scobleizer > blog post “I am not an American”, he is flamming a commenter and says he should unsubscribe.

• 15.30: Reasons for getting it wrong?
  • profile mismatches
  • lack of defined objectives
  • strategic timidity
  • flawed technology implementation

• 15.32: if you are not prepared to do it properly, don’t do it at all.

SMX - Landing Page Testing & Optimization

Session Info

Moderator: Andy Atkins-Kruger (Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd)

Speakers:

• Graham Cooke
  eCommerce Project Manager, Google Inc.
• Anders Hjorth
  Independent Consultant, Innovell
• Jon Myers
  Head of Search / Associate Director, MediaVest
• Mark Simpson
  Managing Director, Maxymiser

Inhalt: Landing Pages - die Seiten, die ein Webseitenbesucher zuerst zu Gesicht bekommt, wenn er von einer Suchmaschine (oder anderes Medium) kommt - sind mit Abstand einer der größten Faktoren einer erfolgreichen Webseite. Daher ist das testen und optimieren von Landing Pages von hoher Bedeutsamkeit. In dieser Session werden Tools gezeigt, wie man Landing Pages optimiert, als auch worauf man Acht geben muss bei der Optimierung selbst.

Session Inhalt

• 13.00: Andy: volunteered to moderate this session. today is a mixture of search engine agencys and product owner. it starts of with the google view.

• 13.00: Graham: Why improving conversion shouldn’t cost the earth. we take a realistic view of landing page optimization.

• 13.01: Q: Who does landing page optimization? 10% of people in the audience

• 13.02: there is a missing link in optimization.

• 13.02: optimising for conversion is about understanding basic human nature, technology and business goals. focus on driving conversion within a framework.

• 13.03: analytics can derrive the problems on your site.

• 13.03: use a web usability framework and analytics to prioritize the areas to fix first.
  • Find (Find product category, Find product within category),
  • choose (category proposition, product proposition),
  • buy (sales proposition, checkout utility).
    it is important to optimize your landing pages. dual approach to optimize landing page and web journey

• 13.04: monitor your optimization! and set actions KPIs.

• 13.05: google tested their own products (google adwords) using google analytics. they did multivariate experiement. they wrote the possible variations down. (WRITE IT DOWN ON NOTEPAD).

• 13.06: created different headings, blurbs, buttons.

• 13.06: using detailed graphical reporting make it possible to identify opportunitie

• 13.07: making small changes can attract +56% to buy the product or not.

• 13.08: you can test every aspect of your website. identify, using analytics and optimize with optimizer.

• 13.08: use analytics to measure where the biggest opportunities to test are, build out simple a multivariate test using a tool such as website optimizer, use the results to determine scale plan, scale successful results across the site

• 13.09: Andy: we move to an agency view

• 13.09: Anders: Do it yourself guide

• 13.10: why do landing pages work? most of us don’t have the same amount of traffic like google to test website

• 13.11: Designer are taught consistency and repetition.

• 13.12: level 1 personalisation: with landing page optimization you know the visitor. Lading page design should make use of the information that you get from search engines (language, demography,…). in Site design people don’t think about this data and the availability

• 13.13: #1 secret of landing page design: eliminate every other element that is not needed

• 13.15: Conversion cues: colour scheme; everything the user needs is on the page; price, distribution, packaging, promotional, offers; simple wording, persuasive efficient, call-to-action, hero image

• 13.17: why do landing page projects fail?
  landing pages are the responsibility of marketing but participation or sign off is requered from:
  1. communication dept: brand
  2. chief technical officer
  3. web developtment team / hosting
  4. sometimes even legal

• 13.18: too many chefs. “You can do anything you like as long as you repsect corporate brand identity”, “Feel free to suggest any changes in the editorial just don’t touch the layout”.

• 13.19: Development cycle of a landing page is just too long. Objectives, Brief, Design, Validation,…

• 13.20: Off-page factors: All clicks are not equal!
  • Free domain name != cheap domain name != domain name
  • Premium position click != side bar click != page 2 click
  • clicks from content networks != clicks from search
  • most landing page testing assumes all clicks are equal
  • differences in the click are more significatn than difference in the color or the page.

• 13.21: landing page projects fail: because it takes too long, too many people and opinions. because the project leader does not have a veto right

• 13.21: recipe for a successful LP project: build af ramework of brand contsants design,…

• 13.21: 123 it’s done: Establish goals and subgoals, benchmark existing pages and competition, build a “best alternative” approcah, get validation for alternative page, A/B/B test against existing page, establish sufficient volumes (link) of homogeneous traffic (brand or gen keyword), run your first test cycle

• 13.22: Jon: 13.2 seconds to proove that the visitor is on the right site after search

• 13.23: is the market for pages? the market is getting more competitive. they is a need to stand out, more than ever a need to optimize, ppc is utilising the “Relevancy Principles” of SEO, The Home page is genereally not a good landing page.

• 13.24: Reason 1: SEO and PPC become “One”?
  advertising relevancy, google rewards your advertising placement and cost with landing page as part of quality score.

• 13.25: sales optimized: it is important that basic optimization principles are followed: deep linking, offer driven (make the reason to stay compelling), easy navigation, sales focus >test and test again.

• 13.26: Cross selling? - are you cross selling other goods? The amazon way! test
  • messaging- how much copy do you have and is it compelling?
  • navigation - keep the searcher on track and navigating to sale not away

• 13.27: once you have the fundamentals of a good page optmized, test the hot spots with eye tracking or click tracking.

• 13.28: 1.8 seconds & 1 glance to connvince a searcher to click through. consumers are less likely to purchase from a brand that doesnt appear on page 1 on google.

• 13.33: the SERPs become more “sticky”, more interaction occurs at the search engine stage. the 1.8 seconds increases with the opportunity to view websites and offers “without click”

• 13.35: “technology only gives you the tools to test out your theories.”

• 13.36: Mark: Stop driving traffic, start selling

• 13.37: case: seatwave ticketing website, selling tickets online. two different buttons online: “buy” or “select”; new button - 27% increase in clicktroughs. and 3% decrease in sales!

• 13.38: what is conversion management? the more traffic driven the lower conversion rates get; traffic is being managed, conversion is being reported on

• 13.39: A/B testing takes one element from a web page and trials it against a second variation.

• 13.39: alliance leicester landing page variation; landing page as list elements is preferred (google introduced that very well). 95% of the audience was thinking the wrong version converts better.

• 13.40: testing method: manual (traditional) or automatic (continious optimization). key areas for MVT:
  • testing header banners
  • testing size of pictures
  • various different type of texts
  • different type of buttons and colors
  • converting “sidebars”

• 13.42: sometimes (during registration process) it is better to have 2 page registration, rather than 1 big page

• 13.44: different form designs need to be tested. even though the same things asked, with a different form you can make an increase in terms of registration.

• 13.47: through testing and targeting and making proper changes, you will gain an uplift in terms of conversion.

• 13.48: what can conversion management solutions do for you? it makes your web site perform better
  • it lowers CPAs
  • increases ROI

Q&A

• 13.49:
  • Anders: stop thinking, start testing! sometimes we get high performing page elements just by testing, leave the gut feeling.
  • mark: have done a lot of tests in the checkout process and up- / crossselling pages. it doesn’t work on all sites though.
  • graham: “one never fits all” - testing checkouts will ALWAYS have influence on the conversion rate.
  • mark: first party cookie is going set for tracking purposes,
  • graham: volume and traffic is a must. 93 days to get significant data, it takes time to evaluate.

• 13.56: anders: you don’t get solid results if you don’t let the test run long enough

SMX - Pump Up Your Paid Search

Session Info

Moderator: Anders Hjorth (Independent Consultant, Innovell)

Speakers:

• Richard Gregory
  COO, Latitude
• Anneli Ritari
  Senior Strategist, Travel, bigmouthmedia
• Nick Seckold
  Head of Search, MindShared Media UK Ltd
• Pete Walles
  MD Searchlight Digital, Searchlight Digital

Inhalt: Google begeistert mit der Aussage, eine erfolgreiche Werbekampagne mittels einer Kreditkarte und 5 Minuten Zeit online zu schalten. Dies ist nur bedingt richtig. Um eine wirklich erfolgreiche Kampagne zu schalten, muss man taktisch denken und vor allem Werbetexte und Zielseiten erstellen, die die Benutzer ansprechen. In dieser Session werden Tipps und Techniken für bereits professionelle Suchmaschinen-Marketers gezeigt um noch mehr aus den Suchmaschinen-Kampagnen raus zu holen.

Session Inhalt

• 10.30: Why is this topic important? We heard of financial crisis, with budget pressure a couple of things are going to happen. Overall there will be a shift of budget from paid marketing to SEO for a lot of companies.

• 10.33: there will be no more dump budgets, which means accounts takes the money, spends it and does *something* with it. there is going to happen something in the paid search. this means reducing costs, improving conversion. this is what the session is about

• 10.34:
  • Pete: how to pump up your CTR?
  • Nick: focussing on pumping up your ROI
  • Richard: focussing on quality score of keywords
  • Andrew: who is focussing on obstacles which prevent you from getting the best out of SEM.

• 10.35: Pete: Making the most of PPC, Introducing PAM-VAR

• 10.36: Pareto Anaysis of Multi-Variate Array Results “The pareto Principle: 20% of any system will generate 80% of that systems results”
  “You can test a fraction of the possible premutations and still generate useful and reliable data.” Sample size increases exponentially > 5 elements with 5 vatiations gives 3,125 permutations that you can test. We can test these a sample of 25

• 10.37: Taguchi testing. The key elements of his quality philoshophy are:
  1. taguchi loss function, used to measure areas of poor performance,
  2. Designing tests so that they are insensitive to parameters outside the testers control, and
  3. the use of an outer array of factors that are uncontrollable in real life, but are systematically varied in the experiment.

• 10.38: using a excel spreadsheet for testing the areas. CTR * Conversion Rate * 10,000 > show all versions of the array test evenly is very important for getting the right results.

• 10.40: Campaign had 4 variations of title, description and URL > Normal testing would take 64 adverts. With PAM-VAR testing it only takes 16 adverts. The results were great, within 10 weeks, 170k impression, 7.6 k clicks.
  original cost was $20 per conversion, afterwards it lowered to $5.

• 10.41: this doesnt just apply to ad copy, you can apply the same principles to landing pages too.

• 10.42: Watch the Searchlight Digital blog for news

• 10.42: Nick: Do bid management tools have an “achilles heel”? - Should I use a Bid Management-Tool?

• 10.44: Humans do: Keyword List creation, ad copy generationn, match type strategy, reporting insight, negative keyword strategy, landing page optimization, roi modelling, …

• 10.45: before you start you have to think about the campaign and it’s settings. how to deliver, where to deliver your ads, by which keywords.

• 10.47: Limitations: Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Purchase > Top Funnel Keywords, Brand Building keywords, Biding for placenemt.

• 10.48: case study, he suggests managing it manually you have more control than using a bid management tool.

• 10.50: the CTR and the CPC improved by managing the campaigns themself.

• 10.53: Andrew: if you don’t have the $$ volume that you are spending, forget it in paid search

• 10.54: Richard: Pump your quality score, Buy deep (Lower cost, better conversion, more work!), Group keywords (by product type, by conversion rate, by stage in the buying cycle), long tail changed with Google from 2004 to today.

• 10.56: PPC in 2008 From “Max Bid” to Quality Score. Broad Match is no longer evil, Landing Pages are twice as important, Importance of Account structure, CTR is almost as important as price, and sometimes you have to just buy it! Account history does affect as well.

• 10.57: Broad Match is back, but don’t foget the negatives! Tail terms take time to build QS, Gradually build out using Search Query reports. Use cheap terms to match to expensives ones (e.g. “capital one credit card”)

• 10.59: –VIDEO-TO-COME–

• 11.02: Account Structure,
  1. Break out more campaigns and ad groups,
  2. give brand its own campaign,
  3. create a “top terms” account for high volumes genereics;1. keep mis-spells separate - (and don’t use DKI),
  2. Negatives at ad group level,
  3. transition gradually

• 11.03: don’t change everything at once! You will kill your history when you do fundamental changes.

• 11.04: miss-spells are great, use them! you dont want DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in your Ad text!

• 11.05: buying “quality score”, see it as a long term investment, start high and manage it down, try a burst strategy, combine with offline ad schedule … if you have one, “normalization”

• 11.06: you have to put money behind that testing!

• 11.07: you have to make sure that your CTR is better than those of your competitors!

• 11.08: But QS (Quality Score) isn’t everything! Great CTR doesn’t mean great conversion, ROI matters most, Track individual ad creatives through to conversion. Think conversion FIRST!

• 11.10:
  • Andrew: when you work with clients, in what range would you be improving the campaigns (in %)?
  • Pete: 10 - 20% on CTR, impact on ROI 8 - 20%.
  • Nick: main goal safe technology fee’s.
  • Richard: redo the account strucutre: 10 - 20% of improvement on CTR. but also depends on landing pages.
• 11.13: Andrew Girdwood: you need to have native speakers for advertisement if you advertise internationally.

• 11.15: You need structure to identify good campaigns

• 11.18: Tracking: Who has the tracking account? The client, many different clients, the search agency, the media planning agency, where is the biggest discount to be found (do you want to pay)

• 11.19: Will the tracking system determine any elements of the set up? Portfolio management systems.

• 11.19: Can the tracking system cope with more than one currency? On a single account. Change campaign strategies based on currency

• 11.20: Billing, Single bill or many bills. Is your finance team large enough to cope?

SMX - Opening Session

Opening Session started at 9 AM in the Edinburgh Room of the New Connought Room Hotel. Chris Sherman, host of the event started the session:

• 9.02: Chris Sherman opening the day; Online Marketing is a new era, new tools enable us search marketers to manage our job much more effectively.

• 9.03: Zhaohui Tang: Microsoft adcenter programmer Keyword related technologies and campaign optimizers. Today talks about future of keyword technology. Microsoft is going to offer new API to connect to platform.

• 9.06: Excel presentation; Ad Intelligence ad-on on the ASP platform, Website autos.msn.com > Keyword Extraction Tool, querying keywords for the website and gives a confidence rate for the keyword. With this you can optimize your keyword list and extend it. API provides a keyword expansion - live.

• 9.08: demonstration of keyword suggestion of the keyword “car” - shows relevant keywords live within excel.

• 9.09: show monthly traffic of the given keywords. It will show you the past 24 months and 3 months forecast of a give keyword. it can predict the keywords searches for the next months. Live demonstration of elections with the keywords Barack Obama and John McCain. Shows the monhtly traffic of the both. Obama is in front in terms of searches, over a year period. “You can find out who will win today the election”

• 9.11: 3 days latency of keywords, they try to bring it down to 1 day. It will show you the DAILY overview of keyword searches. The API can also give you the geographic location of the keywords for any given keyword. for example: “sports cars” #1 London, 478 Impression; #2 Boise, 111 Impressions

• 9.12: You can also find out the demographic of the keyword. sports cars Male 58,97%; Female 41,03% of searches also gives you the age of the searcher.

• 9.13: Another API option is the monetization of the keywords. It will give you a chart of possible Fields (keyword, clicks, impressions, position, ctr,cpc, match type, date range) it will return the number of a given keyword. You can narrow it down within Excel to any give date or date range. It will tell you which type it is ie. exact, phrase or broad match

• 9.16: powerpoint presentation - product classifications you enter “Thinkpad x60″ will show you predicted category “Computing”

• 9.18: Microsoft will create ad text automatically for you based on your website (example autos.msn.com)

• 9.20: Nathan Buggia (Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager); how many people have been in search marketing for longer than 2 yrs? > 40%, how many longer than 4 yrs? > 15% “those are the experts”

• 9.21: Webmaster Center - “everyone is invited to sign up”, one year ago they launched webmaster center, worked a long time with publishers to find out how to support them.

• 9.22: microsoft to deliver more structured data to the publisher. Building up a portfolio for SaaS (as Ad Text).

• 9.23: microsoft to give you raw data what they found about your website that could be better. they use similar techniques as yahoo and google to verify your website. they support up to 125 accounts.

• 9.25: technical issues: they take a look of their index and made a list of most common erros, they have 5 issues. File not Found, Blocked by REP (robots exclusion protocol), Long Dynamic URL, Unsopported Content-Type, Malware Infected, they will show results below with the pages that have issues. Take this list as an audit and solve this issues.

• 9.26: the give you filters to narrow down on subdomains or folders.
• –VIDEO-TO-COME– Malware outgoing links

• 9.30: you are able to enter keywords in the tool and they find the pages on your site which are ranked the highest for the given keyword. you can find out if the right page is on tope by the page scroe. you can optimize by that number the conversion rate. Page scroe is the Microsoft version of Google PageRank.

• 9.32: Micorsoft will also show if you are blocked or not (spammers). will show if you whether or not you are flagged as spam, if msn thinks you are violating their rules. you can review their guidelines and it will give you a form, where you can ask for reevaluation of your website.

• 9.33: Webmaster Wishlist:
  1. Data about customers needs 25%,
  2. Improve placement / traffic from search 22%,
  3. information to help with SEO 9%,
  4. Tools to enhance website (analytics, site search) 16%,
  5. Roi data about my SEM efforts 19%,
  6. data about my competition 13%

• 9.34: Microsoft will not talk about their roadmap, but they make decisions based on this list.

Q&A

• 9.35: Relevance is the number 1 investment at Microsoft. they have a huge gain in relevance already.

• 9.38: Microsoft is looking for something more than just Cost Per Click. They experience i.e. now on Cost per Action.

• 9.40: Tang: want to offer more data to the people who want to advertise. They want to open their platform to other people.

• 9.43: Chris: Pro: Microsoft - unlike Google - gives more transparency. He thinks it is a risk for Microsoft, but it is a good risk and the right decission.

• 9.44: Tang: there is a gap, we know which features are missing and we have also innovation. We have a lot of innovative people at microsoft. Paid search model is changing every day, you can’t just copy your competitors, you have to think of the future.

• 9.45: Nathan: microsoft has a long history of partner. MSN to go through partner and find out which data they need. Angst to hurt the ego-system by asking, worst case you have to go back. Main goal: make publishers become most successful

• 9.46: Chris: You have a little bit more freedom. How do you know when yo go too far?

• 9.47: Nathan: we are not too far, we haven’t hit the boundaries yet

• 9.47: Chris: A lot of people want to try a multiple country campaign, any suggestions that can help? multinational campaign

• 9.47: Tang: they are about to release a UK version (he will give a UK private beta). They started with US market and they are going corss-country

• 9.48: Nathan: multinational campaign is very important. There are also cultural “borders”. If you have an article in english, people all over the world can understand it worldwide. there are a lot of pockets in US that speak french also in the United States. Point: the geographic region does not tell you what your customer speaks! there are hard parts that they still have to find out

• 9.50: Chris: Mobile. We keep on hearing mobile is almost here.

• 9.50: Nathan: How many people have done mobile search today? 30%; A mobile version of website is necessary but not possible, full-featured mobile browser are getting built. we are not yet there.

• 9.51: Chris: A best practical tip, gold nugget tip

• 9.51: Tang: Use Adcenter Excel Tool *laughs* Dig inside data! AdCenter is a free tool with great resources if you use the data for other search engines

• 9.53: Nathan: best piece of advices: build something people want. Find a unique niche and build something good. Build good stuff and we will find it. The only metric that matters is your shopping metric. Figure out YOUR critical metric and build everything else around that.

• 9.55: Chris: we are going through an economical problem right now. Business is slowing down. Are we seeing a slow-down or a pause?

• 9.55: Tang: we don’t see a chop on CPC, or on search. This is performance based marketing and we are lucky in this industry.

• 9.56: Nathan: agrees on Tang. Search is the first measurable (ROI,..) marketing technique. We don’t have drops in organic or paid search.

• 9.56: Chris: where are we in 5 years from now, what are we talking then about?

• 9.57: Tang: Most offline media spending going to move online. our platforms will be more and more connected. the media places will be auction based, everything will be more transparent, more data available. The tools can talk to different platforms - interconnected. No one can really predict the future.

Search Marketing Expo London - Agenda für Tag 1

Die Briten scheinen ja nicht wirklich die Pünktlichkeit zu lieben. Nun sitze ich in der Lobby des Hotels New Connought Room pünktlich um 8 zur Registrierung und ich scheine der erste zu sein.

Macht auch nichts, gibt mir umso mehr Zeit mich auf die Session vorzubereiten.
Wie ich soeben gesehen habe, ist ein guter bekannter - Mark Simpson (Managing Director von Maxymiser) heute auch auf der SMX in London als Guest Speaker. Da wird definitiv ein Gespräch fällig werden. :)

Hier vorab die Agenda für Tag 1. Der Fokus liegt klar bei den Advanced Sessions:

Pump Up Your Paid Search

Speakers: Richard Gregory, Anneli Ritari, Nick Seckold, Pete Wailes

Google has famously claimed that launching a paid search campaign takes just “five minutes and a credit card”. That’s true, but to be really successful you need to think tactically and create ads and landing pages that ruly engage users. In this session, tips and techniques designed to help pros get even more out of their search advertising campaigns.

Landing Pages Testing and Optimisation

Speakers: Graham Cooke, Anders Hjorth, Jon Myers, Mark Simpson

Landing pages - the pages visitors first see when arriving from a search engine result - are arguably the most important element of a successful website. The design, testing and optimisation of landing pages is crucial. This session looks at tools and techniques for comparing and testing landing page elements for optimal results.

SEO & Social Media Marketing

Speakers: Jane Copland, Andrew Girdwood, Ciaran Norris

More and more, people are finding that social media marketing - SMM - can help with SEO efforts. Getting your content into the major social media sites can generate links or provide rankings you might not be able to tap into with your own site. In this session, SMM essentials that SEOs need to know.

International SEO

Speakers: Andy Atkins-Kruger, Duncan Morris, Heini van Bergen

Do you - or can you - sell worldwide? If so, there might be some low-hanging fruit you can pick up by considering SEO for searches outside your home market, even if your site is in English. This session looks at how to make some simple changes to please alternative search engines along with some of the challenges you’ll need to consider.

Was mir nicht logisch erschien, war die Tatsache, dass es im ganzen Hotel kein WLAN oder Internetzugang gab, was ein starkes Manko ist bei einer Search Marketing Expo.

Führen Sie uns durch die SMX in London! Jedes Jahr findet im November die Search Marketing Expo in London statt.

An 2 Tagen treffen sich das Who is Who im Bereich Suchmaschinen-Marketing europaweit. Natürlich kann sich Netural das nicht entgehen lassen und wird bei der Veranstaltung teilnehmen.

Da nun einige unter Ihnen nicht in der Lage sein werden, sich die Expo auch anzusehen, haben wir uns zwei Möglichkeiten überlegt, wie Sie trotzdem an die wichtigsten Informationen bekommen.

1) Wir werden von der Veranstaltung Live Bloggen.
Das heißt, die gesammelten Informationen einer jeweiligen Session wandern direkt in diesen Blog.

2) Sie bestimmen die Sessions
Wir möchten wissen, was Sie interessiert! Sie haben die Möglichkeit zu bestimmen, wo Sie virtuell dabei sein möchten.

Hier finden Sie die Agenda von der SMX 2008 in London: Agenda

Notieren Sie sich die Sessions, die Sie interessieren und mailen Sie sie direkt an smx@netural.com. Die meist gewählten werden dann auch besucht.