• What SEO metrics matter.
• What technical SEO metrics matter.
• Link building in a post-Penguin world.
• Introduction to schemas.
• Persona building.
• Optimizing your search career.
• Advanced keyword research tactics.

Since all of us are very busy, I thought a roundup of what you need to know from the sessions covered is in order. How about it?

What Stood Out This Year

What we can take away from conferences like SMX is not that there is an evolution occurring (that’s a given), but how the evolution is impacting the strategies, tactics and roles. We’ve been shifting away from the hyper focused tactic for some time to a more holistic view of how it impacts the bigger picture — the business goals.

It’s plain to see that it’s not just those in the industry spotlight that are preaching this. There is a shift culturally in the marketing world that you can feel amongst the attendees. And with this shift, we are seeing a continuous evolution of roles, disciplines and skill sets in Web marketing. This makes it a really fun and exciting time to be a part of it all.

The other theme I noticed was the conversations around content. In chatting with people around the conference, it’s apparent that people don’t just want to know what type of content they should create, but how to create content for their business that is not only “Panda” friendly, but connects with their audience from a marketing perspective.

Concerns I heard echoed were: How do I create engaging content around this product I have that’s not so engaging? Or, how does a B2B create a content strategy? The foundation for content strategy can be found in traditional search marketing through things like keyword research and organic link building. And once we begin to piece together those traditional tactics, we have a path for content.

What the world needs now are people who can weave all of those search marketing tactics together, and develop the quality content that users want and businesses need. Go get yourself some real writers who are strategic and understand Web marketing.

Find those who can drive content strategy using the business goals, search data, sales and marketing needs. Who understand the online channels that are available and know what content works in which place. Who can measure and tweak strategy as needed. Who sees content in the bigger picture as a part of everything a business does and how it reflects branding and the user experience. This is the content marketing role.

But that’s the end of that rant; how about we get on with the takeaways from our SMX East coverage?

Let’s start with:

What SEO Metrics Are Truly Important?

This is the question on a lot of marketers’ minds. As SEOs, what gives us the best snapshot of success? Rhea Drysdale of Outspoken Media began the conversation by saying that rankings as a form of measurement are in serious trouble. She argues that as we become more sophisticated, so do our metrics. She recommends we look at:

• Traffic
• Leads
• Conversion rate
• Qualified leads
• Cases
• Wins
• Company growth

In that same session, Vanessa Fox of Nine by Blue challenged the audience to question why we track the traditional metrics we do – something that maybe not a lot of people stop to question. She said to look at the data in context to understand why something happened, not just that it happened.

Ryan Jones of Sapient Nitro says you have to start with business goals like sales, conversion, leads and awareness, then pick metrics that help you measure that. Support your search data with business data to drive the strategy. Map your keywords to your sales funnel for insight.

Rob Bucci of STAT Search Analytics tells us that rankings actually aren’t dead if they are looked at with fresh eyes. Focusing on individual keywords can be myopic, but looking at the modern SERP offers rich data. And there are many elements on a SERP you can choose to measure. Just look at the way it’s laid out and all the elements that come together on the results page to offer a picture of that search query.

What Technical SEO Metrics Are Truly Important?

What are some of the things we should be looking at to show us we are on track? Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO reminds us to spend time in Google Webmaster Tools help section.

There are hundreds of pages in this section that often say more than we think they do. Read between the lines and continue to go back over and over again. Did you know those pages are updated regularly and without notice? This is evergreening at its finest, folks. Find the gems within to help guide your technical SEO efforts.

Link Building in a Post-Penguin World

Jon Ball of Page One Power talked quality link building tactics, and guess what? Most of it is centered on generating ideas for great content people want to consume. A couple points he drove home:

• Link building is a creative process that takes a team to brainstorm concepts.
• Look at building networks offline to benefit your online link networks – people link to people.
• “Dry” topics and keyword sets can be brought to life through content that explores semantically relevant topics related to the product/service/industry. If these topics have a community surrounding it, you can build links.

Just a sampling of his recommendations to build links includes:

• Blogging and guest blogging.
• Keyword research that includes exploring communities using: “keyword” news; “keyword” experts; “keyword” associations; “keyword” forums; “keyword” blogs; “keyword” trade shows; “keyword” events; “keyword” classifieds.
• Writing unsolicited testimonials for companies you do business with.
• Creating a “museum” online of the history of your product/service/topic to drive people to.
• Building a glossary of key terms in your industry online.

Schema 101: Why the New Meta Data Matters

Matthew Brown of AudienceWise talked five for using schema markup:

1. Follow the Schema.org page on Google Webmaster tools. It changes often without notice and offers key information.
2. Look in your vertical (whatever that may be for products and services) to see what type of markup is being shown in the SERPs to gauge what the industry is doing.
3. Set success metrics, and follow click-through rates; when those rates jump up or go way down, you can begin to measure rich snippets success.
4. Stay patient. It can take up to 30 days or more for Google to start showing the markup.
5. Learn more about the Knowledge Graph. This is an important step.

For more tips from Matthew on this topic, check out our recent interview with him.

Carrie Hill of KeyRelevance shared the many faces of schema markup, from reviews to location to recipes and much more. She reinforced that now is the best time to get in there and start experimenting with how markup can impact rankings.

Carrie shared an interesting story: She was using her blog to experiment with rich snippet data (and her blog was a smaller blog, around 60 pages). After doing a review on a coffee maker (the only review on her blog for that product) and implementing markup for it, she outranked Overstock.com for that coffee maker. This is because Google decided it was the most relevant result for that particular brand and model.

In that session, both Matthew and Carrie warned that you should choose your markup wisely and carefully, taking care not to mark up too many elements on a page or you risk slowing the site down. Use Google Page Speed tool and Structured Data Testing tool to make sure your changes are implemented well.

What’s one of the most important things you should know about schema? We are in the very beginning stages, many people predict it’s going to explode, so learn and implement now before your competition does.

Marketing to Your Personas

Search marketing can help us build personas of our target audience. Keyword research is a part of this by knowing who is searching for what. Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth gave us some tips for creating audience segments and personas:

• Start with grouping the products and services a company offers.
• Segment audience/persona type by those who use each product.
• Identify the keywords each of those audience segments use.

Michael Smith of Brookstone talked creative ways to help build persona:

• Use Alexa.com for some general demographic data about your site’s personas. Since you can’t aim Alexa at product pages specifically, you could aim it at sites that specialize in particular products/services like yours to get more data.
• Look at the reviews on product pages to see who is reviewing your products. Take this and see if the Alexa information matches at all.
• Check out YouTube to see what people are talking about surrounding the product/topic and who they are. Or you can compile data on commenters of blog posts surrounding the topic on the Web. Do you see a pattern for a persona?

Optimizing Your Search Career

If you’re in the search community, now is a great time for you. As Chris Taylor of Onward Search told us, the talent for search marketing is in high demand. His recruiting firm is seeing an average salary for mid-level positions with strategic and hands-on skill sets between $60,000 and $100,000 annually.

Hamid Saify of Deutsch LA talked about standing out in your search career. But one thing that stood from the session was when he spoke candidly about the fact that he encourages staff members who want to do freelance work on the side because it benefits both parties. Other panelists like Casie Gillette of KoMarketing chimed in on this topic as well, showing a growing acceptance of employees taking on work of their own outside business hours.

Oh, and Hamid showed this video that gave us all a chuckle:

Advanced Keyword Research Tactics

Keyword research is the foundation for many of our search marketing efforts. I liked the straightforward, repeatable model that Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch Marketing laid out:

In order of approach, she says to first start out with keywords that are relevant to the business, then look at search volume and conversion rate, and finally, layer the additional tactics:

1. Business relevance: Keep focused on specificity and uniqueness of keywords. You might be able to make a rating scale for this. For example, level 1 = must-have keywords; level 2 = highly relevant, unique and specific to your company; level 3 = very relevant but less precise; level 4 = everything else.
2. Search volume: Most people start here. You can sort by volume in an Excel spreadsheet, but keep color coding on there that shows those keywords that have business relevance so you can begin to pick out the interesting keywords.
3. Conversion: If you have PPC data, you can see how well these keywords convert very quickly. Analyze conversion volume, cost per conversion and conversion rate.
4. Competition: Look at the competition — how many websites are displayed for that keyword? Don’t build an unrealistic strategy. You can’t be No. 1 for everything. You can certainly get there, but it can take longer depending on your competition.
5. Searcher intent: The time that users search the most is in the beginning of the sales cycle during the awareness phase and at the end of the cycle during selection. Informational > navigational > transactional. Try to reach people in the beginning and end for more opportunities for visibility.

Where Is SEO Going in 2013?

In this panel, marketers came together in a discussion led by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land to talk about what’s coming in the next year for search marketing. Of course, the age old question asked again and again is: Is SEO dead? And of course, the answer once again is “no,” BUT …

Duane Forrester of Bing talked about how SEO is growing up to find its place in the marketing world as a discipline that can stand on its own. On order to even call yourself an SEO these days, he says you have to have a more sophisticated, strategic outlook. You need to understand the evolution of where things are going to be proactive. Know how your content interacts in different platforms and new areas of technology so you can plan for that.

To the question of: What skill sets do you need to be successful in 2013?

Alex Bennert of The Wall Street Journal reminded us to think about how search supports your brand or your product. Go beyond driving traffic. And it’s still important to know the technical part of SEO to help the search engine do their job better. Also, understand mobile and how your users are going to interact differently on different platforms.

Duane talked about the need to understand marketing at a basic level — the psychology of selling an object to a person. Also, the basics of SEO are non-negotiable. He plugged Matt Bailey for his ability to assign dollar values to everything, and reminded us that we each need to be able to do this within our disciplines. (Side note: check out this recent interview with Matt Bailey on Analytics in our August SEO Newsletter). Finally, he talked about the need to understand responsive design and why it’s important to the future of SEO.

Scott Gardner of Bank of America gave a shout out to those who have journalistic skills from a content development perspective.

Rae Hoffman of PushFire talked about how employers often expect search marketing employees to do everything, but rather than doing everything half-assed because you are trying to do it all, focus on one thing and bring ROI through that channel.

… And that’s our SMX East coverage in a nutshell. You can browse through all the session here. Hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any favorite tidbits you learned at the show, please share in the comments below. If you’re interested in peeping some pictures from the show, check out our SMX East 2012 album on Facebook!

The post The SMX East 2012 Recap appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Question: Is SEO dead?

People have been saying SEO is dead since 1997 …

Bennert: It’s been years and years and the search engines still struggle with the fundamentals of crawling and parsing. Search engines are imperfect and SEO helps them do their job when done correctly.There’s no way it’s dead. It’s needed. And search as a marketing tactics is growing up.

Forrester: Bing is inventing a button that will kill SEO, so stay tuned for that; it’s going to be the “Danny Sullivan” button [hee]. But SEO is about usability and user experience, and if you are focusing on that, you’ll be fine. Create good content.

So SEO is not dead; it’s growing up and finding its place in the marketing world as a discipline that can stand on its own. AND it’s now known that it can be used safely as a marketing tactic.

But if you don’t understand how your content interacts in different platforms and areas of technology, then you can’t call yourself an SEO. And for many people, SEO is still new to A LOT of people. At conferences, we are at the leading edge of information, and to many, this is all new info.

Hoffman: The mainstream media doesn’t understand it, people were afraid of it, like it’s voodoo. The crappy SEO might be dead, but actual SEO is alive and well. Ask everyone who was hit by Panda and Penguin if SEO is dead. Obviously not.

Sullivan: There was an awakening after Panda and Penguin of what SEO really is. It’s not about buying some software and throwing some keywords in and adding some affiliate links. Lots of people honestly thought that what SEO was. But the industry is thriving — this is the biggest SMX show they’ve had in New York to date.

Question: How do you see the role of social?

Bennert: I think search engines are dying to replace links with social. Links still do matter, so it’s taking longer than they want.

Forrester: Social fills in the blank of the context behind the query. Someone queries “home gym,” we don’t know much about what she wants to do with it. But, if we see her social profile, the search engine knows intent and can deliver relevant results. This is why social plays such a role and will continue to play a role. This will continue to spur the whole “SEO is dead” thing. Social is a signal of topical authority. If you become the most popular thing overnight, it can justify why there are a lot of links pointed towards you.

Hoffman: I look at social as a validation tool. If you’re a website getting a lot of inbound links, they are probably sharing your content and social validates outside of SEO signals. And as much as Google tries to blackmail the industry in using Google+, it’s hard without the data from places like Twitter. I agree with Alex, the search engines would kill to find something as important as links.

Question: As we go into 2013, seems like being social is one of the top SEO things we should be doing …

Bennert: Go where your customers are. If they are on Pinterest or Facebook, be there. Search and social support each other. And Google+ is probably the most SEO-specific social platform.

Forrester: I’ve always thought that way. It’s about getting your content shared. You have to be a savvy SEO so you understand how social and SEO work together. Combine those disciplines.

But don’t forget about rich snippets. It matters that you are using them. It goes a long way to helping search engines understand or find the content. The trust increases when we include it and it becomes the best thing to return in the search engines eyes.

I have a theory that Google+ is only used by people in our industry. Duane asks, How many people see business-related activity, raise your hands. [No one raises hands.]

Hoffman: Do not shift gears to social, just add it to your mix. It helps your link development efforts, but don’t slash your link building or content dev efforts. She asks, How many people expect you should get customer service on Twitter? [Lots of people in the audience raise hands.]

Gardner: Search is multifaceted. Don’t forsake any part of the pie. Make sure you don’t lose the market share you’ve gained in other areas. You need a balance.

Question: What skills do you need to be successful in 2013?

Bennert: Think about how search supports your brand or your product. Go beyond driving traffic and driving sales. The technical SEO part is important, again, for search engines to do their job better. And mobile — understand how your users are going to interact differently on different platforms.

Forrester: You have to understand marketing; the psychology of selling an object to a person. You have to be an excellent people manager. Be a top-notch negotiator. You need to know the basics of SEO — non-negotiable. Understand the social space and what’s coming next.

If you haven’t heard the opportunity to hear Matt Bailey do a presentation, check him out. He assigns dollar values to everything. You have to be able to do this with your discipline.

Understand responsive design and why it’s important to the future of SEO. We’re telling you to start using responsive design. So many websites depricate content when they move me to mobile.

Gardner: Journalists, from a content development perspective are huge. Engage and educate writers about how their content can get more visibility, so they can weave SEO into it naturally. Also, you need to be an evangelist to sell SEO in-house. Put on the sales hat to win people over.

Sullivan: Speaking to Duane’s point, you might not be able to do everything. You might be so busy with SEO, you can’t d social as well. So you don’t need to know everything about it, but you need to work with those teams that do.

Hoffman: Many times, your employers think you should be able to know everything. Rather than doing everything half-assed, focs on one thing and bring ROI through that channel. Then, get additional support in other areas. Technical skill sets are also still very important.

Question: What’s the most frustrating and gratify thing to you in SEO right now?

Gardner: The ability for end-to-end tracking in analytics packages is one of the most frustrating. There are still gaps. Attribution modeling in the sales funnel is challenging. But, I love the evolution of search. It’s not siloed anymore.

Bennert: It’s frustrating how much the search engines still need help. But the most gratifying thing is how much help they need, because it pays my bills.

Forrester: Most frustrating:  The people. Most rewarding: The people. The amount of misinformation is staggering. I cannot fathom how someone can get off track on a technical topic when the search engines is telling you how to do it. I swear the people are the most gratifying though. They are the most approachable group of professional-level people that can change a business in this way that you would ever meet. Knowing that I can pick up a phone and ask a colleague in the industry and ask them what works is awesome.

Hoffman: There’s so much BS in this industry and everyone talks out their rear end without research and testing. The rewarding part of it, I love playing the game; on the affiliate side, I love knowing I can make something up in my head and make it into a brand in two years. On the agency side, I love being able to double and triple the business just by giving them the basic tools.

The post Where is SEO Going in 2013? — SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

But I digress. We’re not here to talk about cockroach gangs, right? We’re here to talk about advanced keyword research. You can follow Twitter tidbits for this session on #31B.

Up first is Patricia Hursch of SmartSearch Marketing. She is going to talk about the strategy behind keyword research. Her process is:

1. Business relevance: Keep focused on specificity and uniqueness of keywords. You might be able to have a rating scale for this. Level 1 = must-have keywords; level 2 = highly relevant, unique and specific to your company; level 3 = very relevant but less precise; level 4 = everything else.
2. Search volume: Most people start here. You can sort by volume in an Excel spreadsheet, but keep color coding on there that shows those keywords that have business relevance.
3. Competition: How many websites are displayed for the keyword? Don’t build an unrealistic strategy — you can’t be No. 1 for everything; you can get there, but it will take a lot longer, depending on your competition.
4. Searcher intent: The time that users search the most is in the beginning of the cycle during awareness and at the end during selection. Informational > navigational > transactional. Try to reach people in the beginning and end for opps of visibility.
5. Conversion: If you have PPC data you can see how well these keywords convert. Analyze conversion volume, cost per conversion and conversion rate.

In order of priority, keyword research starts with business relevance, search volume and conversion, then layer the rest.

Up next is Laura Thieme (@bizwatchlaura) of Bizwatch. Keyword discovery is a monthly ongoing process. It’s not a “one and done” thing. She looks at keywords in the following way:

Keyword discovery > data mining > 13 months historical data > AdWords search > SEO vs. PPC > Wordtracker > Analytics performance — [crap, slide changed on me!].

Tools: Experian and Wordtracker are great places to find data (especially competitive data).

Lots of people are looking for more keyword volume but you should always look at how many have never converted. Take PPC data and see which keywords never convert and then the cost associated with having those keywords that don’t.

Basic predictive modeling for revenue: Clicks x CTR x CVR x Avg. Order = Sales

Next is Sean Livengood (@slivengood) at BuildaSign.com. He is going to be talking about keyword research for different languages.

1. You can use Google images to get a visual of what the keywords mean.
2. Look at search query reports to find keywords to add and negative keywords.
3. Ask a real foreigner. You need to understand cultural differences in meaning. Odesk and Elance might be able to help with translation but he prefers speaking directly with someone for better results.

Pitfalls:

• Google translate is good for a general idea of the word but not good for looking at the intent behind the literal translation.
• Cultural differences in meaning is difficult with literal translations.

The post Advanced Keyword Research Tactics – SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Up first is Chris Taylor of Onward Search. First, the recession is long over in digital marketing. We are in a supply-restrained market. Digital marketers have the upper hand.

Between $60 and $100,000 is the mid-level position salary: SEM managers, SEO managers, Web analytics managers – these roles have hands-on plus strategic skill sets. SEO directors in New York are making top end $120,000 to $140,000.

He is suggesting that employers move very quickly, because we are in a talent-constrained market. One to two interviews should suffice. Don’t leave an offer out on the table for more than two weeks.

Negotiation tactics for salary:

• Consider multiple opportunities.
• Play hard to get.
• Know your market value and be realistic.
• It’s not just about the money. Negotiate other things you want if the salary is not as much as you want – working from home, additional vaca time, etc.
• It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Hamid Saify (@HamidSaify) of Deutsch LA is up next. He is talking about hitting that goal in your career and then thinking, what’s next? He is going to talk about why certain people advance and the psychology of it all.

He says one-third of people are thinking about leaving their job by the end of the year and shows this video:

• Be likeable. Don’t rub people the wrong way. Don’t be abrasive.
• Be confident. A lot of people have to work at this. The way you own your subject matter, the way you carry yourself. Show that you have interests in things outside search.
• Become a better communicator. This is key in terms of progression.
• Be political but don’t be obvious (AKA kiss up). Rub elbows with the right people. Do something for your boss. Not superficially, but get to know them.
• Dump search for a while. He looks for smart people, not the best search marketers. Search is still a young industry; most CEOs and CMOs have a broad background outside of search. It will be a dangerous time when the CEOs and CMOs only have a search marketing background.
• Do things unrelated to your job. Help out when and where you can. Go above and beyond.
• Move around as appropriate. Those who are fresh out of college usually only stay for a year or so, and he encourages it. You don’t always want to be the “new college grad.”
• Have ambassadors who will be saying great things about you internally or in your network.
• When it comes down to reviews, about a month before, make sure you do something awesome. Recency wins.
• Think big picture. Spread yourself out and think about how search plays into the bigger picture.
• Disconnect. You need it to have balance and to the best you can.

Casie Gillette (@CasieG) of KoMarketing is up. Optimize yourself. Be a brand, remind your boss what you do, be a team player and know where you’re going. If you’re not, you’re last – so when someone searches your name, it should be about your brand.

She looked at all the speakers for SMX and found attributes that were similar:

• Ninety-two percent on Twitter.
• Eighty-seven percent on Google+.
• Eighty-six percent are bloggers.
• Forty-eight percent have personal blogs.
• One hundred percent are on LinkedIn.
• Forty-two percent are doing all of the above.

Go out there and do something! Find your niche. Write for search blogs. Leave comments. Participate in social networks. Get you and your company press. Check out and get involved in:

• SEOmoz
• KoMarketing
• Search Engine Land
• HARO

Participate offline! Meet the people. This is important. Find meetups and go. Check out your local AMA. Take advantage of the networking at the conferences. Beer makes friends!

How do you get into speaking? Just do it. It can help you as a person, as a brand, it’s attractive to companies. Go to BarCamp. It’s a one or two day event. You go and pitch sessions. The audience votes and you break out and go and speak. This is a good opportunity to get your feet wet in speaking. PubCon just started an “open mic” track. Try it if you’re there.

Does your boss know what you do? Sometimes they don’t. It’s up to you to make sure that happens. Keep them apprised. Don’t be afraid to brag. Ask for time with them so that you can talk about progress, goals and obstacles.

Informal reviews every three months helps you remember what is happening throughout the year. It’s too hard to remember what you did in a whole year. And keep your job description up to date. Know what you’re doing now that’s different than what you were hired for.

And it’s more than just you. Make sure you are helping your company and those around you. Be a joiner, take on news tasks, create new initiatives.

Last, know where you wanna go. Start thinking about it. Most of us “fell” into search marketing. Sart aligning yourself with your future goals.

Some tidbits form the Q&A:

• A lot of employees do freelance work in search and some employers are cool with that. In fact, one of the panelists, Casie, asked if she could continue the freelance work on the side before she accepted her position. Hamid says they encourage it so that people stay passionate and diverse. Chris from Onward Search says there are sometimes conflicts with NDAs and other legalities.

The post Is Your Search Marketing Career Optimized? – SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

That’s a great segue into personas, right? Who are the people in your community and how can you market to them? You can follow the Twitter chatter on this session at #22b.

Bill Hunt (@BillHunt) of Back Azimuth is up first. Why care about personas as searchers? There is personalized search results based on history. We need to be sure our marketing reaches people at every stage.

Personas can tell us:

• How to match content and searcher interest.
• If you are providing the best content I can for their problems/needs?

Use data you already have for content mapping. Segment keywords by features, function, types – anything that allows you to better understand the searcher. Then, by looking at the search query volume and social media, you can see what people are talking about surrounding a product and begin to bucket those ideas.

You can begin to understand who people are/what positions they might hold in a company by the key terms they use when they are searching. One tip is to take the data that people use to come to a page that trigger a lead gen form or live person event and start to understand who your audience is that way.

Product audience segments and personas:

• Start with product groupings.
• Segment those who use the products by product.
• Identify the keywords those people use.

Mark Munroe (@MarkeMunroe) of Inflection is up next. Google wants relevancy and quality in the content. SEO wants more traffic and more conversions. Personas in traditional marketing are based on interviews of real customers and is time consuming to do it to be statistically significant.

But do personas improve the overall search experience? Google wants to have great content for all the queries people have. You have two primary sources of data: 1) what users say and 2) what users do.

What users say:

• Start with traffic segmentation. Go where the traffic is on your site augmented by where the money is.
• Survey your SEO visits. Use SurveyMonkey that surveys your organic search visitors by section of the site. Ask what drove them to the site – what problems were they having? It can affect conversion on a page, so only use it as much as you need to collect the data, then turn it off.
• Create micropersonas from the survey responses.

What users do:

• Compare analytics data collected with the surveys.
• Are there micropersonas that you haven’t satisfied? Optimize.

He says to check out this book: “The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web.”

Michael Smith (@MikeSmithWeb) from Brookstone is up. He is going to talk about guerilla marketing personas for products.

Reasons to do marketing personas for SEO and paid search:

• No site personas at all.
• Getting large traditional sample difficult.
• Establish that marketing personas increase revenue.
• Website persona not product persona.

Some tips for building personas:

• Use Alexa for some general data about your personas, but you can’t aim it at a product page (this is a problem if you have several products). You can, however, aim Alexa at a site that is oriented at a product like yours.
• Look at the reviews on the product pages to see who is reviewing your products. Take this and see if the Alexa information matches at all.
• Check out YouTube to see what people are talking about around the product. Or look at comments in the blog posts on the Web. Who are these people and what are they saying?

Using persona in search:

• In SEO in Title and Description tags.
• In conversion with A/B tests of AdWords ads.

Guerilla marketing persona building can be:

• Done before the companywide marketing personas are finalized.
• Can be different than companywide personas.

The post What’s Your Personas-ality? – SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Barbara Starr (@BarbaraStarr) of Ontologica INC is up first. She is presenting this from a search engine perspective and is going to talk a bit about what this new Meta data can do.

Search engines use Schema.org for their own purposes:

• They can directly extract information to enhance SERPs.
• You can search directly on consumed Meta data. One example of this is the Google Knowledge Graph.
• It also helps with user intent.
• It can help with what content to show to what audience.
• It exposes the long tail of content – makes things findable.

It’s worth looking at the correlation between the new Meta data and vertical search engines. Do you want your site to be relevant for those?

She says there are so many things you can do with Meta data that she can’t address all of them. The problem was the vocabulary on the Web was disjointed. The search engines wanted to start defining the vocabulary to streamline it.

Don’t stuff your pages with RDFa that doesn’t match the information on the Web pages. This is cloaking.

Schema.rdfs.org – there is a lot of useful stuff in there. Check it out.

Matthew Brown (@MatthewJBrown) of AudienceWise is up next. He is going to talk about how to get a strategy going if you’re doing publishing.

5 steps to Schema:

• Check out Schema.org page on Google Webmaster tools. It changes and is updated without notice.
• Look in your vertical of which SERPs have rich snippet data to see what others are doing.
• Set success metrics. Look at when click-through rates jump up or go way down; that’s when you know you’ve done well with rich snippets.
• Stay patient. It can take up to 30 days or more for Google to start showing it.
• Learn more about the Knowledge Graph. This is an important step.

If you’re considering marking up products in Schema, you might also consider marking them up in Open Graph for Facebook.

Be choosy about what you mark up; he’s seen too much markup slow sites down. Pick a markup type and start there and see if it slows it down.

Tools:

• Webmaster Tools: shows if Google is picking up your data types.
• Structured Data Testing Tool
• The Bing tool. Shows you different data types on the page like Open Graph as well. The tool is just hard to find.
• Schema Creator from RavenTools.
• MicrodataGenerator.org
• WordLift: Extended semantic markup for WordPress. In beta.

Open Graph tools:

• Facebook Object Debugger: Shows what might be missing, how it’s working, etc.
• Facebook Open Graph plugin.

Structured data tools:

• Sindice.com: Semantic Web search engine. Great for competitive analysis. See what sites are doing with the data.
• SIG.MA: See how semantic info is searched and aggregated.

Reading material:

• Raven blog: “An SEO’s guide to schema” post.
• Open Graph info at Facebook.
• W3C schema page.
• SemanticWeb.com

Carrie Hill (@CarrieHill) of KeyRelevance is up. What schema markup should you use?

The problems you face:

• Competing with a large-name website.
• A lot of local competition.
• Everyone else has the same style search result.

She is talking about how her small blog outranked Overstock for a coffee maker review – the only review she had on her site because she implemented rich snippet data. Reviews are a great way to take advantage of schema markup but a lot of people don’t do them. You can review anything on your site that you want to — restaurants and more.

Other things you can do:

• Recipes with ZipList.
• Marking up events.
• Products – you can only put markup on one product on a page. But you can markup multiple offers on a page. Ebay does this well.
• Locations – if you have an address on a page, have markup.

Run all your changes through Google’s Page Speed tool to make sure you’re not slowing the site down too bad. And every time you make a change, go to the Structured Data Testing tool to se that it’s working.

Some topics that came up from the Q&A:

• Once you spam with rich snippets and get caught, there is no reinclusion for schema.
• You have to have a good site first, and then use markup — it’s not a shortcut.
• If you have content creators that are also technical and marketing savvy, they are the people that should ideally be doing markup. Otherwise, the tech person can implement with help of the marketing person.
• We are in the very beginning stages. You need to be doing it before your competition does. It’s going to blow up.

The post Schema 101: Why the New Meta Data Matters – SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Today we have Jon Ball (@LinkBuildingJon) of Page One Power. Wow, full house. He is starting down on the floor with the people. I love it when speakers do that. He starts off by saying you can be as relevant as you can be in your topical theme on your site, but if no one links to you, then you aren’t going to get anywhere.

If Google did not exist but the Internet did, where would you get links? This is “relevancy first” link building. Does it make sense for you to place your link there? Next question: If Matt Cutts was standing over your shoulder when you were link building, would you feel comfortable?

If you can answer “yes” to both, you are probably Penguin-proof.

See about making connections with people outside of the online world. Can you do something for someone in the community that has a cause or business that is relevant to yours – that makes sense for you to get links? This can give you a smart platform to increase your link earning potential and you might also get more business out of it.

Every niche is different. Some people have great and exciting businesses/topics. You might have a very dry keyword set/topic by nature of your business. What do you do then?

Look at semantically relevant topics that are related to your industry/product/service. Then take that list and cross of any topics that does not have a community around it and cannot get you links.

If it’s an instant link, probably not what you want to do. People link to people. Pick up the phone. It’s like 20 times more effective to make a phone call than any other type of contact.

The best link-building tool is your brain. They are creative concepts that make sense. Link building is a team sport. Doing it alone os very hard. It’s about coming up with great ideas.

Forget viral. Build great content and ask for links in the right places. Write good stuff and links will happen. You can’t promise viral, even though there are some companies that focus on viral content.

Relevancy first. Seek PageRank if you can get it. Google is trying to find out who is authoritative.

Next up is making a plan:

• List assets: What content assets are good on your site? Text, images, video, etc. What are your offline assets? Friends, colleagues, etc., who can help you with links.
• Research: Compile a concise list of your competitor links. You can use Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer. Pull out the duplicates and throw out the 404s, etc. Only about a third of what’s left is good links.
• Strategy: Brainstorm. This is best done as a team.
• Schedule: Pick your three favorite strategies and put them on the calendar. Be reasonable about it. Don’t do too much too fast.
• Adapt: Don’t be afraid to abandon a strategy if it’s not working.

Penguin introduced a new interest in anchor text. Exact anchor text with your keywords is dangerous. In a natural link-building world, not everyone is going to use your keyword in anchor text. So when Google sees too much anchor text with keywords pointing to your site, it’s a red flag.

Which page should you build links to? Of all your keywords, which one are you on the hunt for? Make a list of those. You can’t build links for a million keywords. You can build links to your home page, and then the entire site eventually benefits. But most of us have a set of keywords that are very important to our business.

Link-Building Strategies

Get a blog:

• Decide who the audience is
• Determine categories in your blog
• Get keyword lists
• Brainstorm topics. If you get stumped, look at your related topics
• Give links instead of just taking links

Research your “local keyword universe”:

• “keyword” news
• “keyword” experts
• “keyword” associations
• “keyword” forums
• “keyword” blogs
• “keyword” trade shows
• “keyword” events
• “keyword” classifieds

Find out who/what these are and start building links in those places. These are relevant places!

Guest posting:

Find your target sites – blogs that are relevant to your topic; search: “[keyword] write for us” to help identify. Find authoritative blogs – those sites that are passionate about the topic.

Write a good, quality, interesting post — you have to be a good writer.

Then, write an email to the person that sounds like a person talking to a person. Make it worthy of a guest post. Send a finished article with a title and pictures if you really want it.

Promote it socially! The person you are writing for does not want you to just disappear into the night. Help them. Buy PPC for it even! Then let them know. Then, next time you pitch, tell the peole about your previous success with other blogs.

Write testimonials:

Use your blog to write a post about the products/services that you do business with. Then send it unsolicited to your customer.

Build a museum:

Every industry has a history, what is it? How can you tell that story?

Build a glossary:

Every industry has terms. Create a glossary for yours. These can be very popular.

Give stuff away:

Like run contests, do giveaways, scholarships. It does take a lot of engagement for contest, so giveaways are a lot easier.

[Great session! Awesome job, Jon, and thanks SMX for offering this at no cost to the people!]

The post Link Building in a Post-Penguin World — SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Vanessa Fox (@VanessaFox) is moderating, and she is starting things off. It’s easy to look at rankings and traffic. It’s much harder to see how a search engine sees your site. Google and Bing now offer tools to do this. So look at this level before rankings become a problem.

Look at server log analysis. How many URLs is the search engine crawling? How many unique pages are being crawled? If you are doing a site migration, for example, this can help you set up expectations.

Another thing you can get out of server logs is whether anyone is scraping you. You can also see if the redirects have been done properly — as in 301 redirects, not 302s.

You should take all of these technical SEO issues and ask: How much is this really impacting the site? Some of them you might just have to let go.

Google Webmaster Tools alerts in your email are sometimes vague. Sometimes they are just trying to let you know of something. Instead of freaking out, take all the pieces of tech data you have to discern if you have a problem.

Dixon Jones (@Dixon_Jones) of Majestic SEO is up. The search metrics that matter are hidden in plain sight. There are more than 500 pages in Google Webmaster help. Read between the lines there, even though it seems vague. They do change/update it regularly, too.

Crawling issues are important.

Avoid shared hosting. If you do though, then check the IP of the other sites on your server. They will be stealing your share of Googlebot’s attention. Minimize the number of URLs Googlebot sees – it’s more efficient for it.

Within the back end of server logs for a site, you can mine a lot of information, as Vanessa was pointing out. See if there is enough bandwidth for your site. Check 500 server errors. Track soft 404s; these aren’t really 404s, but are sending error pages.

Know what great content is. Google tries to explain what that is and they do a pretty good job. He is referring to the leaked quality rating manual. The problem is, great content is hard to measure. But you need to have quality content on your site.

David Burgess (@DavidBurgess00) from Ayima is next. He is going to be talking about how to identify early warning signs before they become a big problem. This is about being prepared.

There are always reasons for drops in traffic. Look at on-page factors and then look at the off-page factors.

First, make friends with people who can help in your organization, AKA “hug a techie” within your company. Set up auto email alerts with your techie to monitor what’s going on with the site if you can.

Then ramp up the types of alerts you are receiving from the tools available to you, and quantity of alerts. Have these coming twice per day.

If your site has more authority, then you tend to have more problems. Google is continually looking to discover URLs. If you have problems, then create a “disaster timeline” to see how the problems usually come about and how you deal with it.

Once you have all the alerts, it’s about response; your production environment needs to be able to “live patch” problems. You can reduce the crawl rate manually in Webmaster Tools while you fix problems.

Once you have early warning signs, then you have a “new” disaster timeline. You know about issues as they come up and can work to fix them efficiently, more proactively.

Closing thoughts by Vanessa: Always look at the context. For example, if you have a ton of 404s, Google won’t back off crawling, but look to see if you have broken links on the site. Just because you have 404s isn’t important within itself, it’s how it’s impacting it.

Want more Technical SEO tips?
See our 11 Essential Technical SEO Elements to Help Your Site Win a SERP Rank Gold Medal!

The post What Technical SEO Metrics Are Important? — SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Rhea Drysdale (@Rhea) from Outspoken Media is up first. She is talking about rankings being the metric that’s been tracked traditionally for SEO. One portion of SEO is seriously in trouble, and that’s rankings.

It’s hard to let go of rankings. It’s what we have shown clients to define success. We are becoming a more legitimate industry, and we have more legitimate metrics. Track business goals and performance. Look at:

• Traffic
• Leads
• Conversion rate
• Qualified leads
• Cases
• Wins
• Company growth

Next up is Vanessa Fox (@VanessaFox) from Nine by Blue. Vanessa is talking about her days at Google and how she helped launch Webmaster Tools. She talked to a lot of engineers while she was there about rankings. Her challenge to day is taking that information plus the experiences with her own clients over the past five years. She wants to take about metrics that matter.

We often don’t step back to ask “why” – why are you tracking the metrics you do?

Look at everything in context. When rankings drop, we jump to a lot of conclusions and have a long list of things that may have happened.

First thing you want to do is look closely at your data. Perhaps it’s a seasonal thing. Perhaps it’s not a penalty, like many people jump to.

Use real click-through rate. We often think about higher ranking = better. Do some small calculations to forecast what the change in traffic might be if you increase your ranking by one. Sometimes there’s not much difference.

Look at the technical details. As marketers, we often shy away from the technical and try to leave that to the technical people. You have to find a way to bridge the gap.

Next is Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) of SapientNitro. How do you measure your SEO recommendations? This is one of hos favorite interview questions. He doesn’t get a lot of good answers. If your main metrics are PageRank, Alexa Rank or anything similar, these are not the metrics you want.

First question is: What’s your goal? What’s your business goal? If your goal is to increase traffic by 10 percent, that’s not going to help you. Valid goals are:

• Sales
• Conversion
• Leads
• Awareness

Then, pick metrics that can help you measure that.

Use sales data not search data on something. For example, looking for search volume on Macbook pro vs. Macbook air and targeting a newsletter towards Mac users. If you look at which one has the highest search volume to determine the subject matter, this isn’t fruitful. Ask which one has more sales.

The context makes things worthwhile. The difference between reporting and analysis is a huge difference. Reporting tells you what a number is, analytics tell you what to do with it.

Map keywords to your sales funnel to see how they are trending. Ideally, visits and lower-funnel trends should mirror each other. Bucket keywords into user intents as well to get a big picture.

Some closing thoughts:

Finally, Rob Bucci of STAT Search Analytics (@STATrob) is up. Despite the subject matter in this session, he says rankings are still very valid. Personalization, local and social has baselines – rankings can help you get a baseline. They might jump, but it gives a good picture.

People say obsessing over individual keywords is myopic. Focusing on individual keywords can be myopic, he admits.

The modern SERP is very data rich. So we need good tools. And we need to look at SERP analytics. You can look at all the elements on a SERP, and choose which element you want to measure.

Bucket your keywords, for example: research, ready to purchase and unhappy customers. Measure your keywords in aggregate for each bucket. What percentage of Page 1 is yours for those keywords? Who is competing with you on research versus sales terms? How many Page 1 rankings do you have in Colorado versus New York?

Rank trackings is dead. SERP analytics is what works.

The post What SEO Metrics Are Truly Important? — SMX East 2012 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

I’m practically transported to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. My hand is interlocked with my preteen heartthrob Wesley Crusher. We’re .2 light years away from the Galatian moon where we’re headed for our honeymoon. I command Computer to calculate the weather forecast when we arrive. :D

Back in reality, Google has gotten really good at parsing structured data to deliver answers directly in search. Marketers have massive opportunity to stand out in search and provide extremely valuable info to web users. Whether you’ve been following the growth of the semantic web over the years or are just getting into it, you should know Matthew Brown.

Matthew’s got a background in structured data from the large publishing side. He was Search Strategy director at New York Times and co-founded the media company’s SEO consulting company Define Search Strategies. At his company AudienceWise, he coordinates search strategy and audience development at Fortune 500 publishers, large e-commerce companies and emerging startups.

At conferences like SMX East (our liveblog schedule here!), Matthew’s the go-to guy for structured data sessions. He’s got a rare gentle touch for explaining the super technical. That’s why, if you have any interest in understanding the opportunity of structured markup in your marketing and you’re attending SMX East, you’ll want to make it to his sessions:

• Schema 101: Why The New Meta Data Matters (#smx #21C)
• Direct Answers & The Knowledge Graph: Friend Or Foe? (#smx #24C)

In advance of the show next week, I asked Matthew to answer some questions to the heart of any hesitance a business might have in approaching structured data opportunities so that we marketers can best educate our clients about this exciting next frontier.

1. Schema.org, Open Graph, structured data – these make up the next frontier in search marketing. However, a new frontier is always a little intimidating to broach, and words like “semantic” are especially scary for the less-advanced tech crowd. What tips can you offer to marketers who want to introduce businesses to the opportunities of structured data?

Marketers now have a strong group of introductory articles that they can reference when the situation applies. For instance, if you’re consulting with a publisher about AuthorRank or how to implement rel=author, AJ Kohn has you covered. Mike Arnesen just wrote a great article about AuthorRank over on the SEOMoz blog. Need to get up to speed on implementing Schema.org and how Google treats the markup? Google’s got a great FAQ that they update based on their current view of the vocabulary. I think reading a couple hours worth of basics on what structured data markup is, how Schema.org is just one markup vocabulary, and an introduction the Open Graph Protocol that Facebook is using is a great primer for any marketer trying to get familiar with the basics.

My general recommendations for marketers is to pay close attention to what specific markups are generating rich snippets in their specific niches, and to base their recommendations or implementation strategy on that data. You can gain a lot of insight by running a spreadsheet of these observations. At AudienceWise, we’re spending more of our consulting time in helping publishers sort out a coherent strategy for structured data and the semantic web. As always, development resources are finite, and you should address the best opportunities first.

Many of the search conferences are now dedicating at least one or two sessions to structured data and Schema.org. If you’re attending SMX East, come to these sessions and you’ll have a much better idea of how structured data works and the latest on how the search engines and social media networks are incorporating it into their results.

2. You come from a publishing industry background. Structured data like authorship markup is especially useful for publishers. I believe that all businesses and brands these days can be publishers. When does it make sense for a business to implement authorship markup?

I think it’s an idea worth considering even if you’re just launching a single person blog on your Ecommerce site. Right now, we tend to measure the success of authorship by the metric of ‘Do I get an author thumbnail in the search results’? That’s obviously the biggest payoff right now, but as suggested in the articles I linked to above, Google is trying to establish AuthorRank over the long term. This means that tying what you publish to established connections of who you are and what you contribute should increase your trust with Google, Bing, and Facebook.

From a bigger picture, this is one way Google is trying to hedge against their dependency on ranking sites and content based solely on links and keyword relevancy. Like it or not, you’ll increasingly need to ‘show your ID’ to rank content in the coming years.

3. Everyone wants to leverage Facebook for their business these days. Facebook Open Graph: who needs to be looking at this opportunity?

If you’re running a single person blog on Blogger, maybe you can skip this answer. Everyone else should definitely at least be considering how to leverage social integration into their website or application. The light bulb for me went off when I heard Mat Clayton of Mixcloud speak at Mozcon in 2011. Here’s his deck on social integration. It’s a bit confusing without hearing him speak, but the essence of it is that by connecting your site or application to people using Facebook, you can capture a very nice stream of traffic. Here’s a compelling case study illustrating Tumblr’s connection with the Open Graph. By tapping into Facebook’s timeline and ticker, you are pushing to a very strong channel.

The optimization part comes into play by making sure Open Graph tags are used on your site for titles, descriptions, and images. Think of this as conversion optimization for your content within Facebook, or something similar to how we’ve been using META titles and description for SEO. The next level is to determine whether or not there’s a Facebook strategy around actions for your site. Do you have something that users can ‘listen to’ or ‘cook’ or ‘watch’? Think about how services like SocialCam exploded on Facebook by allowing Android users to share and watch videos and push that activity to be posted on Facebook.

As for the possibility of Facebook search and Open Graph, Ian Lurie writes a smart article on why it may be best to ignore Facebook search for right now. Ian’s probably right, but I’m a marketing speculator and I like to get first mover advantage on big growth marketing areas rather than waiting for our industry to validate. That means getting a jump on Open Graph tag implementation, building authority in the Social Graph ecosystem, and gauging how search and advertising differs in social versus search. If you want to get in on this category, paying attention to Social PPC and everything Marty Weintraub says about psychographics is key.

4. You’ve recommended that online marketers pay attention to new data sources and schemas as they become available so you can be the first to offer useful applications and presentation of data. Where should we look for this kind of thing becoming available? Can you give any tips for brainstorming creative new presentations of data for your audience?

For Schema.org, you’ll want to bookmark the W3C Schema.org Proposals page. Occasionally, something makes it to the blog page of the Schema.org website, but it’s rare. This is also the way to give feedback to the organizers prior to a specific vocabulary extension being launched. For many verticals, you’ll want to jump on a specific new markup as soon as it is launched. The theory obviously being ‘first to rich snippets’ means ‘better CTR’ means ‘more links’. Another good source to follow is http://www.semanticweb.com – that’s the de factor news blog for the semantic tech sector.

If you’re jumping into the data presentation game, a good first resource is the Content Marketer’s Guide to Data Visualizations, by Jon Cooper. This is a good framework for developing data presentations and finding data sources. The W3C also has a good page on publicly available Linked Open Data. Getting up and running with these data sources is a bit of a steep climb, but acquiring data skills will be increasingly essential for good marketers going forward. There’s a lot of open data becoming available every day that forms the concept of the semantic web, and I’m very interested in the technology stack behind it.

5. When I was at SES San Francisco earlier this year, I took these notes during a keynote with Matt Cutts:

“Knowledge Graph is Google’s attempt to make search faster. They’ve added results for queries like [California lighthouses] and [Tom Cruise movies]. Matt’s group used to be ‘search quality’ and now it’s ‘search knowledge’ because that’s what they’re trying to deliver.”

Google’s relatively new Knowledge Graph is the topic of a session of yours. As a technologist and a marketer what do Matt’s comments mean to you? How do foresee direct answers in search affect how business is conducted online?

Google has clearly been moving in this direction for years now, starting with the inclusion of things like distance and measurement conversions at the top of the search results. Knowledge Graph is another step forward in including semantic data they’ve accumulated into the search results rather than sending users to websites. It’s definitely a step away from the true definition of ‘search engine’ and more towards a content portal. Although this is another challenge Google is putting in front of web publishers and marketers, I imagine a lot of users will view this as a positive development.

I believe days are numbered for page view strategies around queries that are easily displayed in places like Knowledge Graph. For example, the annual competition around What time is the Super Bowl? is likely to be an opportunity easily squashed by semantic results. Google will know exactly what searches mean by the entity ‘Super Bowl’ and they’ve seen a ton of traffic around that specific query. Game over.

On the positive side, I think Google will be opening up the sources for what appears in Knowledge Graph results. I’m keenly watching what sources they currently include, and which data markup types those sources are using. It’s interesting that I’m observing lots of Open Graph markup included in Knowledge Graph results, where you might think that Schema.org would dominate. There’s really no substitute for accumulating your own data specific to the verticals you’re competing in.

The post Interview with Matthew Brown: SMX East Sneak Peak and Structured Data Primer appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..