Mar 19
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 19, 2008
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Mar 19
SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 19, 2008
in Search Engine Land
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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:


  • SES NY Day Three Live Coverage Recap
    The third day of SES NY is now complete. Here is the live blogging coverage I found throughout the day for the event. I’ll add any new coverage to tomorrow’s recap….

  • Search Biz: Online Marketing Will Continue To Grow Despite Slowdown, Yahoo Woos Shareholders & Alibaba Wants To “Close Sesame”
    Markets are riding rollercoasters, central banks are bailing out major financial institutions, inflation is rearing its ugly head, and consumers are apparently pulling back into their shells, but none of this gloom-and-doom is even remotely threatening the growth in online marketing and advertising spend, according to eMarketer. The market…

  • Google SafeSearch Filter Bug: Porn Found On Google Universal Search Results
    This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that users have been spotting explicit pornographic images on Google web search for a search on hot celebrities (warning: before clicking, take caution). The query triggers Google to show an image search result at the top of the web search results,…

  • Google Japan Adds Tabs In New Design
    Google Blogoscoped reports Google Japan has a new design being pushed out to their users. The new design can be seen at this IP location and contains tab links to other Google properties. Here is a screen capture of the new design:…

  • Google Sees “Watershed Moment” For Mobile Usage
    Google is now reporting that it is seeing a rapid increase in mobile Internet search and usage on several platforms. According to an interview with Reuters, Google mobile product manager Matt Waddell said, “We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage. We are seeing…

  • Why You Should Track “Soft” SEO Metrics
    As an in-house search marketer, you hold a unique position. You help manage all your company’s content with the goal to maximize the return on that content’s creation. You are the pointy end of the spear in the quest for low-cost traffic and conversions. Setting aside the growing salaries…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Microhoo

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Web Analytics

Other Items

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

Mar 19
SES NY Day Three Live Coverage Recap
in Search Engine Land
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The third day of SES NY is now complete. Here is the live blogging coverage I found throughout the day for the event. I’ll add any new coverage to tomorrow’s recap.

Click to continue reading…

Mar 19
CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
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As the web moves into its second generation, sites are making more use of CSS, AJAX and other advanced and interactive design techniques. But how are the largely Web 1.0 search engines reacting to these, from an SEO perspective. This session explores issues and solutions.
Moderator:
• Jon Myers, Head of Search, MediaVest
Speakers:
• Jonathan Ashton, VP of SEO & Web Analytics, Agency.com
• Ben D’Angelo, Software Engineer, Google
• Chris Humber, Director of SEO, 360i

Jonathan Ashton

I would like to talk about the issues of standards in web development, and ultimately presenting the right experience to all web users.

You guys remember when Flash came and brought the whole idea of life into the static environments of the web. Ren and Stimpy was one of the first automated cartoons built in Flash. When Flash emerged, it was something that gave us an added layer to bill our clients extra for! But today, we have so many amazing tools that now our clients are paying us for our ability to measure proper use of these elements.

Usability standards for optimizing in web 2.0:

AOL still has 9 million + users on dial up! You have to realize that if you are going to be a good internet citizen, you cannot leave these people behind! Now, 35% of people use Firefox to explore the web without JavaScript! If your intention is to reach every human, you will also reach every search engine bot!

If a person who is blind visits a web page, they can’t tell a picture of a horse unless it has an alt tag. So by taking yourself out of the perspective of someone who is marketing, and into the shoes of someone trying to create a good community, you will benefit.

I have met SEO’s who have not taken time to read the Google guidelines and recommendations. If you are spending any time messing with your site on trying to get more traffic, please take the time to read this stuff! Google is showing you as much of their hand as they are willing to show!

Google tells you that certain technologies are not crawlable! It also suggests you download an old school browser and look at your site in it! We need to help our clients achieve that level of interactivity.

What does index actually mean? Just because it’s indexable does not mean it’s going to win for anything meaningful. I know search engines are focusing on more content in these dynamic environments, but indexability does not mean winability! So leave semantics behind. You need the layer underneath for the non-Flash enabled user, or spider.

Information architecture is core to usability. It is also required for a usable site. Optimizers should get involved early and often. If the content needs to be indexed, don’t hide it. As optimizers we need to bring this level of rationality to the IA process.

Is dynamic content really required? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it a valid reason to do it. If there is a valid reason, go for it. But if you can accomplish everything without using the newest technology, then great, don’t use it.

So what’s the A in Ajax? It stands for asynchronous! It may look cool but it’s ultimately a challenge to index.

Validate your HTML and CSS. Careful development means good optimization, a browser is designed to interpret what it sees and is forgiving of mistakes, but what a search engine sees is a much more literal engagement.

So, how do you finish first? Develop for the highest common denominator and the lowest. Make sure your tools are still 2.0 plus, in a 1.0 environment.

Ben D’Angelo

A lot of content is already easily accessed by search engines. Blogs, wikis etc. use HTML markup. It becomes more challenging introducing other ways of interaction. The 2 main technologies I will talk about are Ajax and Flash.

What is 2.0 about? It’s about richer and more complex systems relating to the management and interdependence of content, presentation and navigation.

Ajax maybe content and navigation. Flash – all 3 of these are tightly coupled.

Most people have Flash enabled. Why should I worry about the tiny of fraction of those who don’t have Flash enabled? You can say a similar argument about images back in the day! Of course now we know, images are great but at the same time, have alt texts, etc it’s much more accessible. So it’s similar argument to Flash.

When you think about accessibility for all users, it will become much more available for search engines. If it’s viewable for the blind reader, great. Some tech savvy people have plug-ins to disable Flash. Cell phones and low-bandwidth devices also don’t support Flash and is a market you likely want to target. Bookmarking is something you might not think about, but it’s important. It’s good for your site to attract links but can they link to your site if you have Flash – can I link to this cool game I played if the entire site is in Ajax? If a user can bookmark it, it will be accessible to search engines.

A simple thing – make static links and they will automatically be recognizable by search engines.

CSS – it allows you to isolate the content from the presentation. You can try turning off CSS to see if your site still looks reasonable. Avoid abusing techniques like hiding text in CSS.

Start with traditional HTML, add a little embellishments like rich media elements. You Tube is a good example.

From an Ajax perspective: URL parameters vs. fragments. Googlebot can ignore fragments in a URL. If you want to use some Ajax, use together with HTML.

Flash – Google does try to read some of it in URLs but not all, so use regular HTML for primary content and navigation and then compliment it with Flash elements.

A little more advanced technique – SIFR – takes content in HTML elements and will replace t with a little Flash – primary use is for different fonts. If a user does have things installed and enabled they will see it, if not, they will see regular HTML.

Useful links: Google webmaster central blog, webmaster help center, webmaster discussion group.

Chris Humber

Flash is a restrictive technology. Why, because the content is invisible to the spider and spiders can’t navigate it. I personally am waiting for the day where I can see a great article when Google can incorporate Flash! Unfortunately, the engines operate in a 1.0 space.

TheBar.com – great website where the bartender will respond to your questions. They have a great margarita recipe. This site is built entirely in Flash. This is great info that would be extremely useful in the search engines, unfortunately when you search for a margarita recipe, it cannot be found. The user perspective gets a rich interface, but the spiders get nothing.

Some best practices to incorporate if you must use Flash:

Adobe Search Engine SDK – extracts texts and links from a SWF file. It’s a direct sort of output of a Flash file, never use alone, can’t be indexed.

SWF address is a code library that allows you to create URLS in a Flash environment.

An SWF object is a great way to embed Flash into your HTML code, it’s compatible. Plenty of sites use it. Allows for content integration. A DIV layer allows you to provide static text in a Flash environment.

You have to privde the navigation if you use a SWF address or SWF object. The spiders need enough navigation to find the content. Also think about inbound linking. Otherwise you wont rank very well.

sIFR – short text vlocks, page editors, carousels – ensures content is accessible. Uses combo if CSS, java, Flash. ABC News uses it for their website. Very useful if you have a dynamic lead on the website.

If you apply the above best practices, you should see an improvement in search visibility and increase traffic via natural search in a Flash-based environment.

This session is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

Mar 19
The New Face of In-House Search
in Search Engine Roundtable
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As Search Engine Marketing (SEM) grows in popularity, many companies are attempting to handle the SEM function in-house despite the inherent complexity and challenges. Join us for a spirited discussion and get a chance to meet some of these intrepid do-it yourselfers behind the in-house movement as we debate the pros and cons of developing and training a dedicated in-house team. Laying the foundation for in-house SEO success, long-term cost savings, gaining project support at the executive level, leveraging innate knowledge and creating accountability are just some of the topics to be discussed.

Moderator:

• Ron Belanger, Vice President of Agency Development, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Speakers:

• Bill Hunt, CEO, Global Strategies International
• Olivier Lemaignen, Group Manager, Global Search Marketing, Intuit
• Marshall D. Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist, New York Times / About.com
• Bill Macaitis, VP of Online Marketing & SEO/SEM, Fox Interactive Media
• Brendan Hart, Vice President - Marketing & Business Intelligence, National Geographic Digital Media

We are going to be spending the next hour talking about the rising tide of folks bringing, or thinking about bringing search in-house, and the fundamental issues involved. We have a great panel joining us, everyone is bringing a unique twist to this. It’s really good stuff.

The first panelist is Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International.

So Global Strategies doesn’t sound like an agency but we are. We help companies migrate search internally, we do it for a lot of big brands.

The SEMPO/Did-It in-house search marketer study is great, interesting data. According to the data,

26.4% have a manager title, while 10% have a director title.
51.7% have a team size of 1-10 and 46.5% have a team size of 0.
33.1% have 0-3 years experience.

How should you approach outsource vs. in-source vs. hybrid?

Many use the hybrid, the agencies for some things.

The hard questions you should ask:

- What are the objectives, what are we trying to achieve?
- Can we achieve them given the resources we have?
- What is the level of management support?
- Can we measure a program to show the benefit?
- What is our bench strength?
- Can our program scale? (for those with multiple brands, multiple countries)
- What is the total cost for each approach?
- Am I willing to endure the pain and suffering necessary to succeed? Is the organization willing to put forth the activities necessary?

How supportive is my management: they want it done but are not willing to pay. How to bring this forward, what needs to change? This is hard for companies to acknowledge, what needs to change in order for the company to be successful.

You need to have written stats and a business plan in order to get management support. Search engines have things like this to help convince companies.

Can we measure performance: I flag this as “outsource” because analytics software is used for this. In many cases, 8 out of 10 applications are not configured correctly. If you can do it yourself great, but track it.

How scalable can we be? This is a “hybrid” - it makes sense for most companies to integrate SEO in house, optimizing press releases, etc. It’s amazing the economies of scale if you think about it. It cannot be matched. That’s why some companies with one or two people blow away the big companies.

What is bench strength? This is flagged as “hybrid” - say you do everything in the company in marketing and you are frazzled, if you were out sick everything will come to a halt. Use that as a way to get more people. Show you can’t always do everything and what you could do if you had more labor available.

Next up is Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit.

A year and a half ago at Intuit we did not have an in-house SEO team. Just a couple of guys who ran search part time. SEO was a mythical thing they weren’t sure if it was going to work. So I will take you through the journey we have gone through. We are definitely hybrid, in house, but for paid-search we use agencies for bid management.

First thing to do when take in house is hire a team. And you need to get budget approval with executive support. You need to then define the scope of the team, what skills you need on that team, to help you hire the right team. If you hire someone with the wrong skills you will waste a lot getting them up to speed.

Then you engage with internal clients. In order to do that you need to define and measure the success metrics to improve the profitability of the program. With a central team, you need to then develop clear service levels – what are you going to do and for who. You need tools and processes that are scalable. If they are not scalable they will not work because you won’t get good results. You realize from this that not all businesses are created equal. Define service level agreements.

What’s absolutely critical if you want your program to endure is to evangelize and educate.

The Keys to Success:

-Budget autonomy
-Executive support
-Team structure and coverage – having the right team organized the right way is key
-Tools and metrics
-Evangelization and education
-Results

Building the in-house team:

• Understand your business dimensions – business type, site, product.
• If you think about success metrics, a service vs. web apps are going to be very different.
• Combine the SEO expertise.
• PPC Specialization. Holistic thinking is key. Note that PPC is a piece of the puzzle.

Be able to do all the stuff in house that an agency can do, and have the tools and support to scale what you are trying to manage.

Scope: 6 main objectives:

1. Develop consistent and repeatable processes.
2. Implementing scalable tools and reporting.
3. Enduring coverage for the right businesses.
4. Coordinating with agencies, web engineers, teams, analytics teams, copywriters (if your efforts are not coordinated with the folks who touch the site every day – it won’t work).
5. Defining and deploying best practices and standards. If you won’t share with the organization, who will?
6. Evangelizing and educating SEM across business units, web teams, and engineers.

Get the team to wrap their minds about how they are going to accomplish, not just what they are going to accomplish.

Next up is Marshall Simmonds from the New York Times.

I think the processes are pretty straight forward. The NY Times oversees a lot of different properties, like Boston Globe, About.com, etc. So it gives us a unique experience because a lot of what we do is in-house. But the best-practices are going to stay the same. But how you do it?

• Organize
• Analyze
• Educate
• Execute
• Track your results

This is always the same, but the differences are where they are in the lifecycle. So how those 5 elements react to where the vertical is, is definitely influenced by how we address certain people. We have a lot of turnover, and millions of documents that we deal with. Communication is imperative across the verticals.

Organize the teams. Not only should the SEO person have a strong understanding, but also good communication. Find one point person in the department. Have an engaged team of marketing, technology, research, editorial, sales.

Analyze, break down into buckets. Where can we monetize something immediately? Depends were you are in the cycle. Educate based on where you are in the lifecycle. Where can the smallest change have the biggest result?

Education: no matter who it is, it has to be done. We currently train thousands on SEO. It needs to be ingrained in the root level. Educating from the bottom is imperative, but you need to approach each department differently, like IT and editorial.

The execution portion is fairly clear. You need to communicate because if you are not following up on a monthly basis on what’s working and what’s not, you are not measuring your successes carefully. Metrics allows you to communicate the success. Give feedback to the workers and to upper management.

Mistakes we’ve had for you to learn from:

-Don’t wall off content. Don’t have hundreds of versions of a registration page.
-Don’t under communicate success. You need to let people know. It can be a great motivation device.
-Not checking in. IT will screw something up. Constantly check in. Weigh it at every level.
-Meta keywords tags. Don’t forget.
-Talk to those who are implementing the changes. Make a lot of checklists.
-Managing expectations. It is a long-term process. Not for the quick blast of traffic, that’s what buying ads and clicks are for.
-Lack of editorial oversight. Make sure headlines and title tags are looked at or the content won’t go live. Things should be automated where they can be.

Next is Bill Macaitis who does SEO for My Space and Rotten Tomatoes (Fox Interactive Media - FIM).

I head up the online department. We work with about 20+ FIM sites out there. We look at social media, email, but we focus on search. We do utilize some 3rd party technology, some web analytics and bid management – but all our SEO and SEM people and researchers are in-house. We are at a staff of 22.

We are ROI driven. You gotta position your department as a revenue department. If every piece of messaging you put out there is generated by revenue, it’s very helpful. You will get more successful this way.

Some questions to think about:

How do we expand? Do we organize pal by content vertical, or specialization?

Here’s how we did it. We split it up into the paid side (SEM), SEO, and within each one we split it by vertical, we have a research and reporting team who handle all keyword research and new studies, and then we have a small tool-building team.

My section: training your in-house team. It will take time and money, it’s an investment. We use about 10-15% of our compensation towards conferences, travel, etc. I let my team go to 3 conferences a year and they can choose. You want to empower them. We give our people a few weeks of training, let them shadow others. You need time for them to develop. Our field changes a lot so the education is ongoing. Spend an hour or two a day to educate yourselves. Give them the tools to do their jobs, and if you invest time in your group they will develop loyalty.

Here are some ways to train your staff:

- Sessions
- Industry sites
- Podcasts
- Conferences
- Course, certifications. SEMPO has a great course, Bruce Clay has one, the search engines have them.
- Magazines
- 3rd party research, Marketing Sherpa, Hitwise.

Last is Brendan Hart of National Geographic.

For national geographic, it’s a changing landscape on a daily basis. I deal with marketing intelligence, from blogs, to widgets, to media. My team is responsible for building the online promotion for our new movies.

Our industry has evolved pretty significantly over the past years. Each page now is important, not just the home page, and every day is a challenge. Thinking about an evolving landscape, what is it that we need to do?

Search Strategy:

- Build content with consumer demand to create category ownership
- Follow best practice
- Optimize strategy based on changing trends
- Rich media feeds
- Include a search marketing component to all content
- Engage SE consultants to review whorl flow am best practice analysis

It is important for us to find our inner search voice. Look at the current situation. Who is going to do what? Who is going to own this? What skill sets do we have? Let’s define our goals.

Then you have a decision process. You must make it work cross-functionally because everyone has a different skill set and will bring something different to the table. When we think about the team, what are the core actions to building the team? How do we build consensus among people who will actually have to implement actions?

De-mystify the process. It puts a human face on it that makes it interesting to work on. Then we think about, well how do we train people to keep them interested? So we came up with a search program.

We defined a mission which inspires people. By creating a program we developed innovation. In terms of creating a team, I think scalability is key to any in-house program. You also need to think about success, are we aligned to where the industry is going. Assign tactical responsibility based on function. Prioritize implementations based on business objectives. Continually revise. Optimize the process to drive great results.

To get there, we bring in an expert point of view. So we can maintain these programs in house, but we are constantly seeking ways to innovate.

We are focusing on growth. We set our benchmarks of analysis, then operationalize which allows everyone to contribute, and success is a great KPI, so don’t shy away from that.

This session is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promedia Corp.

Mar 19
Social Search - The Next Step
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Moderated by Kevin Heisler the Executive Editor of Search Engine Watch.

First speaker will be Simon Heseltine from Serengeti. He is wearing a quite awful tie with zebras on it. (Just kidding Simon). What is social search? It is search with human involvement. It can be delivered using an Algo + humans or just humans. The whole concept is wisdom of the crowds/masses. Others have called this folksonomy.

Common search topic for use to examine these will be the local “Eliot Sptitzer.” He shows the varied results at Anoo, Sproose, ChaCha, Malhalo and briefly describes each of these. Also shows: irazoo, which is run by iwon.com. Everyday they give away gift certificate to a lucky searcher. He shows LinkedIn Q&A search. yoname is a name-based search engine. Then he shows social media site searches: mixx, Digg, StumbleUpon. He says that StumbleUpon is a favorite of his as well asd the other panelists. he likes it because they also show who talked about a person, so you can then follow that trail. he then shows Facebook and that “Eliot Spitzer has no friends.”

Social search aggregators: twing, zudos, friendfeed. Social web browser: Flock, which is mozilla based and similar to Firefox.

What are some of the issues in social search? many sites are slow due to lack of expensive hardware. Sourcing of data challenges. Low volume of active users – if humans are not using them then all you have is a crappy search engine. They need the humans to succeed. Being found amongst the chatter is an issue as well. A group with an agenda to hijack a results page can still do so fairly easily due to lack of a lot of users. This leads to potential reputation management issues.

Getting into reputation management: there are a lot of possible problem sources: disgruntled ex-employees; etc. The first thing to do is look at what is being said, how it is said, and where it is said. If someone is saying something bad about you on a blog that is only read by the guy’s mother and two dogs, probably not an issue. However if she writes for another blog, there may be problems. Damage mitigation should be SERP based. Legal threats: “even if it works it never works.” This may cause more issues that it resolves.

How do you respond to issues in this world of social search? You have to get involved in the community, and not be overly defensive. If what is said is true, then maybe you should go there and say “OK you are right, and this is what we are going to do to fix it.” This may lead to positive response, and in fact it often does. If you put out great content, that will hopefully drown out the other stuff. Remember that social media sites constantly appear and disappear: each requires a unique profile and individual management.

Steve Marder of Eurekster will speak next. He will speak about Distributed Social Search. He calls his company a “Social Search Pioneer.” he shows a slide titled “trends in social media/social search - then.” It shows Web 1.0 feeding to media 1.0. In the “now,” the bubbles are blended and media 2.0 and search 2.0 are connected. He describes social media as being about many-to-many, collaboration, “wisdom of the crowds.”

Why should you care? Because your brand is being mentioned. What can you leverage? Power of community and collaboration. Leverage your expertise and passion but also leverage the passion that people in your community have. He describes that this is what Eureskter does, which combines a Wikipedia platform with a social community. They built a widget called the “Social Search Widget.” He then talks about the video “buzz clouds” that they created for people to share video. He walks through an actual example of a Swicki, which he left an “subliminal” message under the example with a strong call to action to build your own and get started. He essentially spends 3 minutes walking through his specific product’s details. Make that 8 now…

Finally, some challenges and opportunities ahead: the need for a trusted relationship with you search platform, or an expert source/guide. How to effectively apply the social graph to search? How to create/surface additional high quality content (user generated)? His conclusions: social search from an SEO perspective is that it is all about content. It is hard to game the system. Next generation search is comprised of quality of content plus human interaction/rating.

Next speaker is Marty Weintraub of AimClear. He will be doing a very unique presentation. 48 slides in 15 minutes. I will try to get as much as possible. Potential customers are congregating…wherever they go we are here to sell them things. Now that social media has shown up, we can measure chatter. He says that social pay per click is the 800 pound gorilla that will take over. Google wants money, mainstream social media sites need money too…PPC helps both.

“Buzz pocket mining” is the new keyword research tool. Congregation point for millions. Tools are available in most to measure the chatter patterns. he will look at Facebook (FB) to see how it is measured there. He feels that FB is the millennial harbinger of what PPC will be in the future. He walks though the way you can find out info about advertising at FB through the small link in the bottom navigation. You can ask the system to choose the audience, then you create the ad, and lastly set your budget.

Don’t “piss off Facebook.” They are jagged…the traffic goes in waves. There are interesting patterns, and it can drive a tremendous amount of traffic in paid search. His studies show: Leads convert to sales +11%, 80% reduction in cost of leads. 14-18% on-page conversion boost from AdWords. Landing page segmentation increased conversion rates by +8%.

Conclusion: The “Tao of keyword research/buzz pocket mining.” Use free tools to measure buzz. Stay abreast of Facebook, open social, and other emerging social PPC platforms. Recognize the inevitable future is here. Look around, everything is personalized.

Last up is Eric Qualman, and he only has two slides. (laughs). he wants to go over the some of the top things heard recently about social networks. First thing: “social communities are just for kids, and it’s just a fad”. typically agencies will just ignore it, or will say they are developing a strategy for it. He would not recommend creating a community for all your clients to congregate in, for competitors to find them all together.

He then shows the results for a search for “John Deere” at Facebook and it has many non-official John Deere groups, all using the logo. One of the funnier ones is a misspelled group called “Country Girl’s Who Aint Afriad to Dip n Drive a *John Deere*” This group has 595 members! (Eric gave no details as to how many different family trees are represented).

Eric talks about how CBS is actually driving sports fans to Facebook.com/brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament. It takes guts to do this.

Why is everyone ramped up about social networks? Takes an example of needing a new car since you now have two kids. You have to go to a bunch of sites to find out about options, etc. In the future, you can type in a search at Facebook and search “SUV” and FB will then provide information about the people in your list of friends that somehow are related to an SUV, such as if they purchased within last year, etc. This will save lots of research time.

You have to pay attention to what is out there and react. The fourth thing that should be really hot in the short term are the Facebook applications. Right now the craze is games, but he feels that the functional applications will continue to grow in value. They looked at the status updates section, and they will be creating a way (called Beacon I believe) for the system to automatically update where you are…”Suzie is at the Louvre…Suzie at the Eifel Tower…etc.”

He advises if you create a Facebook page, don’t use “John Deere” as the first word in your title but instead a more commonly searched keyword like “lawnmower.” What are the applications that people really want right now? The top things are ways to be able to brag, or ways to seem smarter than other people by winnign trivia or other knowledge-based games.

This is live blogging coverage of SES New York 2208, so some typos or grammatical errors exist. Panelists or other attendees are encouraged to comment below to share any inaccuracies, and to help fill out the rest of the story.

Mar 19
Dealing with Affiliates
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Jeff Rohrs of ExactTarget is moderating, and he introduces the first speaker Kris Jones from Pepperjam. Dealing with affiliates from an affiliate network perspective. Your Affiliate (aff) Network should stand as a resource to help you with understanding who your affiliates are (transparency) and how to identify and address channel conflict.

Four primary potential channel conflicts: direct linking, Trademark (TM) bidding; bidding on same keywords as you; promoting conflicting marketing messages. Direct linking occurs when an aff uses an aff tracking URL as the destination URL for PPC purposes instead of sending traffic through their own unique URL and landing page. Unfortunately for you, Google does not provide protection from this, so you must learn the rules to minimize. There is at least an easy way to determine if direct linking is occurring. How do you know how to see this? 3 step process. find advertisement, right click it, and observe properties.

Direct linking: learn the rules. Google only delivers one advertisement per unique destination URL per search result. This means that if your aff is direct linking, they may be the only one shown. Second conflict is TM Bidding. For many of you this is a serious concern, and you therefore include it in contracts as being not allowed. For those not preventing this, you may want to do so.

Third conflict is competing for the same keyword. Many advertisers complain that SEM affs run up the pricing for the same keywords the advertiser is trying to bid on. This is only true if the advertiser doesn’t have specific rules in place. Before you put a no PPC policy in place, realize that the search engine result pages represent available real estate for you and your competitors.

Final conflict is if your message is inconsistent with the one that affs present. Conflicting messages can occur with inaccurate products info, non-authorized banners/text links being used, etc,. He finishes off with a quick summary and repeats the 4 major factors.

Minimizing channel conflict methods: send a request to Google to disallow use of TM’d terms in ad copy. Amend your affiliate contract with a “no direct linking” or “no TM bidding” policy. Be very specific about what search affs can and cannot do.

He believes that one of the keys to decreasing overall conflicts is to increase transparency. Less is more, quality is better than quantity. Having insight into the exact sites you will be working with is much better. He finishes with some hints on how to make the aff channel work, which I unfortunately missed but maybe he will come in and post in the comments.

Next speaker is Jeff Molander from the Partner Maker. He apologizes that he will speak very quickly but he has a lot of info to cover. His argument is that “Yes, you should integrate affiliate and Internal SEM” and “No, TM usage rules are not the answer.” Everyone can win: think strategic and not tactical. There is too much focus on the TM issue he feels. Why are we even still debating it? There has been a failure to talk honestly about some of the strategic issues involved. The answer is a strategic realignment, and there is no gain without a little pain.

What marketers want: increasing incremental sales, decreasing double counting and wasteful spending. Less competition for customers in spaces they understand. The path to success is first audits, then new rules, then a strategic realignment.

What is an incremental sale? Simple answer is one that the advertiser would have had “no shot at” w/o help of third party media. Happy to pay for $$. More specific answer is that it relies on aff spending with mostly native traffic.

What is forcing the issue? The big guys that use TV, catalog, advertising, etc. Hence the Trademark issue has been pursued. The cause is not TM infringement. The cause is that marketers are measuring referrals beyond referrals.

55% marketers making 25%+ of sales from PPC and SEO. 29% make 50%+ of sales w/SEM. Forcing new questions…what do I want from affs? What have I been getting lately? Is this acquisition, retention, or both? he had spoken just before I tried to catch the stats above about how there is a difference between new customer acquisition (new to file) and a past customer coming back to the site through an aff link.

He talks about the strategic realignment need and defined it. Marketers need to firmly grasp what “good affiliate” means: using strategic goals and targets to find out what is new-to-file customer ratio; what order volumes; cost per order or lead. Assess this information and optimize your campaigns.

Tactics for marketers – need to make trench level change and perform routine transaction/action level reconciliation as needed. Get dirty, but get smart! Use a business analyst for this. State goals clearly up front in writing. state them clearly, repeatedly, and make them easily accessible. Show respect to affs and publishers.

What is needed? Strategic realignment. Affs/publishers should convert from a “traffic-shuttler” to a “traffic-seller.” You need as an aff to realize that you need to build a relationship. You have to go to conferences. Know what you are selling and sell it well. You are in business now, so marketers expect you to act like one. He also states that arbitrage is all but dead.

He had to rush through his last few slides because he ran out of time. He advocates getting flexible with payments, for example on a repeat sale from an existing customer versus a new sale.

The last speaker will be Jeff Ferguson from Napster. He gives and overview of Napster, and then introduces that he will be presenting some information of affiliate marketing from the client side. What better way to show how to make nice with your affiliates than using “politics and war.” He will be using analogies along these to help illustrate. In the beginning it was regimented management of affiliates in the “Dictatorship Era.” Very little growth came out of aff during this era.

Next was the “Highland Charge” which was when a bunch of unruly Scots would line up and look crazy to try to psyche out the competition. Napster got tired of competitors and other music entities buying up “Napster” and other branded keywords. They allowed the aff to start doing that and it was an interesting era in terms of results.

Next was the “Laisser-faire” era when aff and search “came home.” It was Napster’s brave move of shutting everything down and rebuilding it piece by piece. They stopped using search agencies and bought aff in-house as well. They hired people that would work well together and help to improve their system. They essentially allowed affiliates to do what they wanted. The results where that the aff program tripled in size. the SEM program eroded AP results, slightly, but the sum of the two programs was greater than its parts.

Last era is “fiscal conservatism,” or “last man in,” which came along with some new bosses at Napster. They were getting tired of paying for branded visits as they let the brand was strong enough to stand on its own. So they kicked out a bunch of affs and let people who would play by the new rules stay. They wanted to make sure that if people came in through those terms that they were identified. They don’t have results yet.

In the end, a balanced plan exists. They liked a lot about each of the eras, and have found the right mix to run their program.

This is live blogging coverage of SES New York 2208, so some typos or grammatical errors exist. Panelists or other attendees are encouraged to comment below to share any inaccuracies, and to help fill out the rest of the story.

Mar 19
SEM Small Business Blitz
in Search Engine Roundtable
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This session will provide a rapid fire take on how to tackle the most popular SEM tactics with a small staff and an even smaller budget. Would feature practical, affordable ideas and real world examples on PPC, SEO, Viral, Blogging and Social Media.

This isn’t a “how to do this” session so much as a “how to do it cheap and effectively” session.
Moderator:

* Carrie Hill, Search Engine Watch Expert and Certified Search Engine Marketing and Promotion Account Manager, Blizzard Internet Marketing

Speakers:

* Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Guide
* Stoney deGeyter, President, Pole Position Marketing
* Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex

Strategies that Don’t Suck - presented by Stoney.

* keyword organization: once you have your keyword list, you want to know where to apply them to your site. Drive searchers to pages that best represents the intnet of the query. There are 3 types of searchers - researchers (info gathering), shoppers (comparisons), buyers (looking for best options). For researchers - they may or may not be a buyer. They are in the early stages of the process and are in the learning process. They don’t know what they want necessarily. Shoppers are looking just for different sites to perform comparisons and are closer to a buying decision. They have a general idea of what they want. Buyers (best option) - they know what they want, they are ready to buy, and they know where to buy. You need to target your keywords to different types of the phases. Check your different keyword phrases - better conversions for longer terms but not as much traffic. Look at your budget and look at where to spend your money.

* website architecture: Title tags are really important but not many people seem to get it. Create unique titles throughout the site. Set up default titles for products. Site content: build unique content for each page. Don’t rely on default product descriptions - unique content stands out. Also, have interlinking pages - link to related content whenever possible. Related products is a great way to do it (or related info) .

* getting attention: create a unique valuable resources. Know your unique value proposition. What can you do differently from others? Build information with blogs and articles. It’s not what you do, it’s how you go about doing it. Develop contributor products - engage known experts (e.g. Link Building Secrets Revealed - 11 experts provided a secret from their link building arsenal). Write authoritative articles, papers, and ebooks, and submit to magazines, blogs, and industry directories.

* PPC strategies: use the Google AdWords editor - export keyword lists, add comments to changes, and more. You want to look at measurements as well - cost/conversion is most important. Know your profit margin! Add your negative keyword list in there - perform keyword reseqarch to see what people type in. Avoid job seekers, researchers, education, bargain hunters, price shoppers, freebies, legal

* CodeMonitor Spy Tool: Stoney uses it for his clients. You can monitor your own pages and see when people make changes. You can see SEO efforts of competitors. You can get information on sites that don’t have RSS feeds. You can also see Wiki site changes.
- Once you monitor a page, it highlights the difference - compare text, HTML, and browser view

Jennifer Laycock is up and she has no voice. :( She’s talking about social media - you are your most effective online marketing tactic.
SMM isn’t about how much money you have to spend. It’s really about who you are as a company or individual. Look at who you are - that’s the key.

Passion + knowledge = credibility
- Bento Yum - blocked search engines but saw community involvement.
- Traffic through Flickr - Take a little time and view community involvement as marketing time.
- It has to be ongoing
- Rule: despise no search traffic (even bad traffic)

Business + Blog = personality
- Try to educate your community. An example is the tinbasher, a blog for a metal company. It turned mundane into fascinating stories. Their gross revenues tripled after they put themselves out there. 30-40% of their sales are attributed to this blog. They had 3 employees, now 5. 50k uniques a month.

Video + Creative = Viral Love
Blendtec blender = Will it Blend? campaign
- First 5 videos cost roughly $100
- Crazy coverage and press - iVillage, Newsweek, Playboy, NYTimes
- Online sales quadrupled
- This shows pricewise that creativity can really covert.

Comments + Blogs = Exposure
Find other blogs and add quality comments to them.
- Comment early to grab readers’ attention

Compassion + Freedom = PR Heaven
- I heart Zappos: someone bought shoes for her mother and her mother passed away. When Zappos emailed her about the shoes, she told them that her mother died. They ended up arranging pickup and even sent her a sympathy bouquet. She was touched and blogged about it. (For the record, I am wearing shoes I bought from Zappos.)

Takeaways: it’s not about the budget. It’s about the attitude.

The last person up is Matt McGee who talks about Guerrilla Marketing for small businesses - the problem with SEO and PPC. You create your campaign and you hope that the person types the right keywords. You hope that the searcher likes your product. You hope that he/she is finding what he/she is looking for.

HOPE is not a marketing strategy. (MATT SAYS THAT SEO AND PPC IS A BAD IDEA! OK, I’m kidding. He specifically addressed me to say that I shouldn’t blog that. Too bad.)

Solution is Guerrilla Marketing. There are several places to do that -

What he means: it’s not sabotage or illegal or anything spammy. It’s unconventional, unexpected. It’s marketing without making it look like it’s marketing. The rules are - don’t spam, avoid the hard sell, participate (connect, don’t alienate), and contribute (put the community first).

Flickr - Matt loves this and he has great photos so I can’t blame him. The heart of Flickr is the groups - enables discussion, shares photos, etc. Think about this - if you own a music store, you can join groups that are related to music (guitar world is one that he illustrates with thousands of members). Flickr also has place-oriented groups which works if you provide services to specific geographic areas.

Yahoo! Answers is another tool for information sharing and questions and answers. There are also groups that are targeted to specific geographic areas here as well. Yahoo answers says that it’s okay to link drop as long as it benefits the user. He has the highest percentage of new visits and the lowest % of bounce rates among the top 5 referring sites (illustrated).

Other options: forums and mailing lists - newspaper forums are really big because their subscriptions are dropping. Yahoo Groups is a great mailing list platform as is Google Groups.

One of his personal favorites is freecycle.org. It operates on the Yahoo Groups platform. The idea is that my junk is your treasure - your junk is my treasure. I don’t want something, you can have it. It also helps people get awareness of your services.

Does it work? YES. Cookie company had Flickr photostream and was found by CNN. They got profiled by CNN. freecycle.org - my wife is a real estate agent. We like getting rid of junk in our house - we have 3000 VHS videos. He told his wife, “you send out email to freecycle and add your company information to the signature.” One lady came over and did business with his wife for buying a new house. COOL.

Mar 19
Social Media Research: Informing Search Strategies
in Search Engine Roundtable
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Moderator:
Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board and Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, General Business, IBM Corporation

Andrew C. Frank, Research VP, Gartner Media Industry Advisory Services is first up.

Marketing in the Spotlight:
- Losing:
– Faith in the power of the mass media communication forms
– Ability to control the terms of the marketing dialog
- Gaining:
– Unprecedented quantities of data
– Visibility into the public psyche
– Scalable direct consumer dialogs, at marginal media costs
- Net:
– As it masters the data, marketing will adopt a more strategic corporate role as customer proxy in consumer-facing organizations
– New voice in product design, investment priorities, partnerships
– New emphasis on transparency and responsiveness.

Are Brand Advertisers Ready to Take the Plunge?
- Shows a chart showing both answers

How Do We Use Social Media Info to Optimize our Media Mix, to influence our targeting models? A lot of this is to automate the advertising and agency model.

One of the key problems is that new media marketing organization is that they have too much information from very diverse sources.

Lots of people will supply new marketing intelligence platforms.

The landscape for social media metrics players include Nielsen BuzzMetrics (big player), other players include umbria, cymfony, buzzlogic, verisign, and many more…

Simplify and Test with a Phased Integration Approach:
- Portal integration: Leverage intranet portal deployment for rapid service testing and feedback
- Reporting integration: develop data dictionaries and tagging schemes
- Model integration: custom ETL and regression platforms
- Platform integration: process automation, cost and risk reduction

Jonathan Ashton, VP of SEO & Web Analytics, Agency.com is next up.

Social content gives you good linkage. You can see trends and react faster. Tagging already influencing your strategies. Certain types of search have moved off the SEs and into the social networks.

27 Social Network Tools:

(1) RSS
- Yahoo Pipes helps you filter

(2) News
- Yahoo News
- Google News
- PRNewswire Feed
- Reddit
- Newsvine
- Reuters
- Google Alerts

(3) Blogs
- Google Blog Search
- BlogMarks.net
- Technorati
- Blogpulse
- Conversation Tracker
- Blog Trends
- Blogger Profiles
- Co.Mments.com
- TalkDigger.com
- IceRocket

(4) Tags
- Simpy.com
- Keotag.com
- Ma.Gnolia.com
- Del.icio.us

(5) Images
- Flickr
- YouTube

(6) Bigger Tools
- Trackur.com
- Copernic.com
- Site Analytics from Compete
- Search Analytics from Compete

Rob Key, CEO, Converseon is last up.

The community is becoming the center of the web experience. 12 - 24 year old want a community experience. Within these communities, brands have not been invited.

As communities diversify, new cultures and language emerge. Key drivers of culture and language speciation
- isolation
- group membership
- time
- migration
- technological discovery

Words Die out and New Words Emerge

Principles of Effective Social Media Engagement:
- Listen First
- PArticipate and Learn
- Make friends with community elders
- Understand and respect community mores
- Lead with altruism, come bearing gifts
- Discover a community need
- Learn the linguistics
- Value and cultivate the relationships
- Leverage appropriately … over time

If you don’t do that, you may be “busted”… or taken hostage (shows second life hostage take over).

Free Tools:
- Yahoo Buzz
- Technorati
- IceRocket

Conversation Mining Tools also…
He shows some tools but doesnt name them.

Wait, it is a product he sells.. Ah…

Got to run…

Mar 19
Social Media Research: I