Keynote

SEOs Get Social – Wappow Hawaii 
Speaker: Bruce Clay

Top Takeaways:

• The evolution of search has progressed from being 10 blue links on a search engine results page (in the beginning) to behavioral and personalized search for a better user experience. Google now tries to determine the most relevant results based on prior search history, and social search is the next wave of personalization.
• It’s becoming harder as SEOs to report rankings when behavioral search comes into play. Bruce Clay, Inc. has found the Google API to be inaccurate. Predictions are that Google is going to dominate the SERPs at an individual level, personalized to each searcher, and confuse the user to the point where he/she will not know whether it’s organic or paid results.
• In the social search world, there are many factors that remove fear, uncertainty and doubt in shoppers and make people accountable for the content they share. Review sites move shoppers to buyers; social sharing of content makes a person more careful with what they endorse – bad content does not get links, good content does. If we are socially involved, and do it right, the links will come.
• Social media communities feed people better than just “alerts”; there’s an increase in people who prefer social media for information consumption over browsing. Almost half of the people who access social media sites do so via mobile. And it’s not that people are spending more time on mobile; it’s time they wouldn’t spend on a computer that they are now spending on their phones.
• Some social media signals for ranking include: authority of the sharer, how quickly and how often the content is shared; the share text (what it says); what personas are doing what sharing; and the concept that Facebook“ likes” are the new links in search.

Video shared at the Wappow Hawaii keynote:

Understanding Audience

Top Takeaways:

• When building a social media community for a brand, listen to the community and the customers before coming up with a strategy. They might want something totally different in a community than what is being provided. It’s important to do an assessment of the brand, the industry and the conversation surrounding it first.
• For search and the U.S. Hispanic audience, blend offline efforts with online search marketing; studies show more than 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic audience searches for more information from something they saw on TV – with Google being the favorite search engine. And mobile search is big within this community. Use Google Insights to compare Spanish queries to the general market to find opportunities.
• Analytics tips for the Latino audience includes using needs-based segmentation – security, power, esteem, change, for example – which is harder and less obvious to target than language segmentation. Use psychographics profiles for online purchasing segments to figure out who the real decision makers are and reduce assumptions about the audience. Allow for Web navigation and ads in both Spanish and English to reach this market.
• Personas are an important part of the search marketing process; there’s a difference between a searcher persona and a product persona, and one person can morph into different personas throughout the cycle of a search. Personal data mixed with keyword data (how the person searches online) creates the ultimate persona. Know what your business goals are before the SEO strategy in order to best tap into personas.

Best of Conference Posts on Understanding Audience

Building Communities – Wappow Hawaii
Speaker: L.P. Neenz Faleafine
Focus Latino – SES New York
Keynote speaker: Mark Lopez
Analytics for the Latino Markets – SES New York
Panelists: Fernando Rodriguez, Paul Lima, Armando Rodriguez
Use Searcher Personas to Connect SEO to Conversion – SMX Advanced
Panelists: Tamara Adlin , Vanessa Fox, Dennis Goedegebuure

Holistic Marketing

Top Takeaways:

• Don’t chase the newest, shiny toys in search marketing. You need a mix of tactics, but content is where you need to put your efforts to be successful. Approach search, social and content with the audience’s needs and preferences in mind to secure wins. Produce content that fulfills all areas of the buy cycle that any given audience goes through so no opportunities are missed. Start thinking like a publisher to be good at content marketing.
• The evolution of Internet marketing has left us to believe that it’s not about what’s happening on websites anymore – it’s what’s happening outside of them in social networks that matters. But, not everyone has time for social media upkeep, so apply an 80/20 rule – 80 percent automation and 20 percent personalization. You can do this with the right tools and strategy.
• Facebook use spans international borders, with 70 percent of Facebook use outside the U.S. This presents a vast opportunity for marketing globally through Facebook. Other tips for sharing information and content in a social world includes creating a digital cloud around your connections, then your connections’ connections and so on, and use this to create the strategy to help decide what headlines, language and images to include, for example.
• In mobile search, trends uncover opportunities for mobile marketing, including what people are looking to accomplish when using their mobile devices to do something online. This includes marketing for the location of the user and the time of day for relevancy; allowing the user to complete a task easily; and giving the user opportunity to save money through mobile offers.

Best of Conference Posts on Holistic Marketing

The Convergence of Search, Social and Content Marketing – SES San Francisco
Speakers: Aaron Kahlow, Arnie Kuhn, Lee Odden 
Facebook, Twitter and SEO – SMX East
Speakers: Horst Joepen, Jim Yu, Michael Gray 
Global Opportunities in PR, Social Media and Mobile – SES San Francisco
Speakers: Anne F. Kennedy, Kristjan Mar Hauksson 
Mobile Apps and How They’re Revolutionizing Search – SMX West
Speakers: Andy Chu, Anil Panguluri, Angie Schottmuller

Online Reputation Management and Branding

Top Takeaways:

• Use search to protect a brand’s presence online by applying what’s called search engine reputation management. This includes using traditional search marketing tactics to create strategies that will create an online experience that’s synonymous with the brand.
• SEOs and user experience engineers now have to work more closely than ever before to survive Google’s mission to make search better for users. To figure out what metrics matter to Google, put yourself in the shoes of Google, this likely includes things like the Google G-Bounce rate (return to the search result and then the following actions as well), query behavior after a G-Bounce, average time before a G-Bounce, click-through rates and repeat visits.
• To create a social media program that works and protects the reputation for large companies, there needs to be a training and on-boarding process that starts with defining what social media is to that company and how it fits into the brand, and refresh the training annually, ensuring it goes to employees, partners, vendors and execs.
• White Hat SEO builds marketing value because it’s aimed at creating a strategy that fulfills intent. Many Black Hat SEO tactics can be transformed into White Hat tactics; it just takes some fresh perspective to eliminate the risk factor and turn it into something that provides lasting value.

Best of Conference Posts on Online Reputation Management and Branding

Protecting Your Brand Online – SES San Francisco
Speaker: Andy Beal 
Google Survivor Tips – SMX East
Speakers: Mark Monroe, Alan Bleiweiss, Micah Fisher-Kirshner
Socially Satisfied – Wappow Hawaii
Speaker: Becky Carroll
Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO – SMX Sydney
Speaker: Rand Fishkin 

The Cutting Edge

Top Takeaways:

• Mobile barcodes (QR codes) present an opportunity to track things we may not have been able to before, like print media, and it also gives opportunity to blend online and offline efforts. A good QR campaign serves a business objective, creates a valuable user experience and provides contextual assistance around the campaign, so users know exactly what to do and how.
• This year, Bing rolled out adaptive search, which is essentially behavioral search on crack [those are my words – Jessica]; it learns from a user’s behavior beyond just one search session. But personalized search does not mean SEO is dead. On the contrary, it makes the SEO’s job easier. See, a business doesn’t have to be the “best” at one thing; it just has to be the most relevant for the query and who is looking for it.
• The main language of the Web is HTML. With the advent of HTML5, it goes hand-in-hand with what people are doing, seeing and wanting from the Web. And search engines like Google are totally behind it. HTML5 is usable, but don’t be afraid to experiment and fail – it’s still a work in progress – but there are many benefits to implementing it.
• Daily deals companies are growing in numbers, but they aren’t as profitable as one might think. In order to make a daily deal offer work as part of the marketing plan, there are some things beyond the deal that should happen. Because the purchase is at a low margin by the customer initially, it requires high customer lifetime value to make up for that initial purchase. To help this along, offer a quality product people will want to come back for, and use aggressive social marketing to retain those customers.

Best of Conference Posts on Cutting Edge Topics

Search on Mobile Devices, QR Codes, Mobile and Social: The Next Frontier – SES San Francisco
Speakers: Terry Rodrigues, Angie Schottmuller 
The Current State of Personalize Search – SMX East
Speakers: Jack Menzel, Stefan Weitz
HTML5: A Cowpath on a Cliff – SES San Francisco
Speaker: Karl Dubost
Doing Offers Right – SMX East
Speakers: Dan Hess, Jim Moran, Prashant Puri, Benny Blum 

Live Conference Episode of SEM Synergy

Search and Social Converge – Wappow Hawaii
Host and co-host: Bruce Clay, Jessica Lee
Guests: Gillian Muessig, Ian Lurie 

Top Takeaways:

• Social media signals allow for the greater personalization of search, and the confusion surrounding ambiguous queries has been alleviated, as have many ad-targeting problems.
• Rankings in the search engine results pages are affected by social signals as well as click-through rates, with reports showing Google +1s displayed alongside results have been shown to impact it.
• Google will be using social media as part of an ever-developing way to make sure results are becoming more and more relevant to users.
• While many Web marketers have been using social media marketing for some time, the understanding and adaptation of it across big and small businesses alike still has a ways to go. The good news is, social media marketing used to be considered a soft science, but is now measured in terms of ROI with hard-number values assigned to it.
• Looking at social media as if it were something totally new and unmanageable can make it seem more intimidating than it needs to be. The truth is, social media is just an evolution of the way people have been marketing for years, but now allows a two-way conversation between a business and its audience.

The post Best of Search Conferences 2011: Day 3 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

If you missed all the coverage while it was going on, never fear, we’ve wrapped it all up below.

Day 1: Tuesday, June 7

Day 2: Wednesday, June 8

If you don’t see the session you were dying to hear about here, try aimClear’s blog or OutspokenMedia’s coverage where Lauren Litwinka and Lisa Barone both rocked out tons of unique coverage.

The post SMX Advanced 2011 Coverage Wrap up appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

In this session, we have:

Moderator: Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Bryson Meunier, Director, Content Solutions, Resolution Media
Keri Morgret, President, Strike Models
Myron Rosmarin, President, Rosmarin Search Marketing, Inc.

First up is Myron Rosmarin. Keyword importance is a metric that factors in popularity with relevance. There’s no easy way to measure relevance. Need access to a pro tool, he uses SEM Rush. Use a version of Microsoft Access that supports many rows.

This is meant to be a tutorial session, so each slide has images and steps. He said don’t worry about taking notes. I ignore him at first and quickly realize he’s right and there’s no good way to translate his steps without slides. I’m going to provide a link to his presentation deck as soon as I receive it for all of you.

Next up is Christine Churchill. She is talking about how SMX Advanced is kind of like a class reunion for all the search marketing vets. She is going to be talking tools today.

Free tools (not an exhaustive list):

• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Webamster Tools
• Google Insights
• Google Trends
• Google Content Taregting
• adCenter Labs tools
• Microsift adCenter Add-in for Excel

Google keyword tool:

Log in if you’re going to use this tool; more info available
Hit exact, not broad (which it defaults to)
Added new features in recent months; there’s an advanced option for mobile searches
Website option for URL is often overlooked, will tell you what Google thinks that site is relevant for

Google Insights

Beware, it’s addicting, she says. Gives demographic data for popular phrases.

Other tools:

• Google Instant (When people see the suggested phrases, they often use them)
• Soovle.com
• Ubersuggest
• Keyword Eye
• YouTube Keyword Suggestion
• Google’s Wonder Wheel
• Contextual Targeting
• adCenter Lab Tools – different source of data
• Ad Intelligence – build keyword lists fast
• SEOmoz keyword tool – quick and dirty feel for competitiveness of a phrase

In sum: No one tool is perfect, so use different tools. Don’t just look at popularity, there’s more to keywords than that.

Bryson Meunier is up. He is going to talk about hot dogs first. Yes, hot dogs.

There’s was a competition for cooking hot dogs. The winner won because he put mac and cheese on his hot dogs. He reminds us that we’re not at a hot dog convention. The reason why he brought it up is to add mac and cheese to your keyword tools.

Estimate local search volume with Google keyword tool, Insights for search and census data. Can’t get this with traffic estimator. Why estimate local search? Small businesses and big business with local presence.

Use census data to find population percentage relevant to the country to estimate the local search volume. Not accounting for regional — understand the local variations in search demand.

He put a fancy equation up to figure it out. Again, will have to look at the slides to see it.

Understand organic keyword opp by building a poor man’s SEO Xray. BrightEdge or Conductor are tools to use.

He is talking mobile next. Use keyword tools and Webmaster data. Find keywords that have as much or more volume in mobile search than they have in desktop. Demonstrate that people do search on your target keywords on mobile.

Use this to create mobile-focused info architecture for mobile site; product research for app development; calculate ROI for mobile site dev.

Add macaroni: City level demand, mine competitive keywords, find mobile opps.

Next up is Keri Morgret. She is going to focus on finding more negative keywords.

Why be negative? The search query report is not going to show everything.

“Honeymoon for three” is the query she started with and she saw that there was a movie result, but wasn’t what she was looking for. She began using IMDB to compile a negative keyword list.

Don’t let your KWs battle each other, use common sense. Negative KW lists make it easy to manage and put into buckets.

• Government sites are good; great is you’re running a branding campaign.
• ESL vocabulary lists are useful.
• Wikipedia “see also” is helpful. Disambiguation pages.
• Forbes Top 100 list.
• Affiliate keyword lists.
• Using Google itself (using the minus sign in the query).
• Don’t overlook abbreviations.
• Natural language — Yahoo! Answers.
• Monitor current trends in Google and Twitter.
• Stock symbols.
• Airport codes.
• Banned list for forums.
• SEOs using advanced query operators like site: or looking for links with keyword “add URL.”

Tools:

• Table2Clipboard
• OutWit Hub

The post Advanced Keyword Research Tools — SMX Advanced appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Stefan says he can’t talk sitting down, so he’s up with a pointer and slides.

Today, he’s talking Honey Badger (updates to its Webmaster Tools), Schema.org and the “so” of social. First up is Honey Badger (my all-time fav video). Why the name Honey Badger? It’s fierce, it’s on a mission, relentless. Unlike the honey badger in the video who quote “don’t give a s***,” — Bing cares.

New tools have crawl setting management, role management, toolbox site update. These offer more control and better help, he says.

Next is Schema.org. He wants to talk why it’s important. The Web is no longer a collection of documents. Almost everything you touch is decribed in ridiculous detail, but the data is scattered. So the search engines need to gather that data and reassemble them into an object. He is talking about a stapler, and all the information about a stapler. As a search engine, they need to assemble all the bits of data on a stapler.

The number of services that exist on the Web today are innumerable. How do we expose those services to help people do things. Despite the fact they have tons of feeds, some of them are problematic. For example, “movies.” Even the same title and year has 4 percent movie spam. This is all background into why Schema.org is important.

Allows publishers to mark up entities on their page to describe the stapler, and then they use the data. You can add extension with Schema.org because there isn’t any weight attribute.

Why social? From a Bing perspective, he references a decision engine. They had a great set of logic but they didn’t infuse emotion into the decision-making process — and people are emotional. 80 percent of people delay buying online before talking to someone.

The amount of data that engines consume every day is exploding. Part of it is all the new services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. We don’t do well with data overload. There’s so many options, people are delaying their decisions. Your brain looks at number of options and thinks it must be a very important decision. How do you process it when you’re confronted with all the choices?

He is showing data that there was 25 billion tweets in 2010. For the first time ever in humanity, we are able to look at who we know on the Internet and see the traces they are leaving behind.

Bing Power of People: Bring trusted friends into search. Then collective IQ helps make search better through the wisdom of the crowd. And enable conversation inside search.

We need this because humans are “pack” creatures. We like social interaction because it helps us with the concept of “safety.” Example: the earthquake in Japan triggered a hedge fund sale in New York. The second point is that people who communicate in packs, when they worked together on a problem, they increased their profits — more successful. We are also happier in our decisions when we follow a pack.

Social is critical but it’s only one piece of search quality.

Now we have time for the “fireside” chat with Danny. You can see the candles? Danny just unveiled the table holding the candles was a shiny new Bing snowboard. Stefan asked if it was a bribe.

Danny is asking how Bing puts our direct answers and how are they scalable.

The answers are the top of the page, they do qualitative and quantitative research by common tasks people are doing when they are looking for a city. They create a framework for potential information resources to create an answer. It’s not just data — it’s services now, like an Open Table service presented to the user. These are going to evolve into more active answers directly in the results. How does Bing know how to fire an answer versus a SERP, he says there are certain triggers.

Danny is showing a video. It’s promoting their social search — he is asking how big of a shift it is to integrate with Facebook. He is referencing his points earlier. We need to figure out who the user knows and trusts. The partnership with Facebook is rounding out the social search.

Stefan is talking about the Like button. It’s hard to figure out why people “like” things. But, when someone sees that someone they know sees a particular link, it helps people focus on where they look.

Danny says Google seems to be taking Twitter data (instead of Facebook). Stefan says Bing uses Twitter and says it’s amazing for breaking news. Stefan questions if you can you be competitive without Facebook in social search? It can be tough.

Danny is talking about Facebook knowing who your real friends are, and Stefan says he doesn’t know if they can see not only friends but deeper connections.

Danny is asking about Schema.org. He is saying, aren’t the search engines supposed to do that stuff for us anyway? (people start to clap and Stefan says “no clapping!”). Stefan says the challenge is language is a complex thing. They do a lot of that today, but certain things will have more data about what it is that is on a person’s Web page.

Questions from audience:

Will Schema.org affect a site position?

Stefan: It’s one of the signals.

Does social search conflict with privacy?

Stefan: Privacy is something we look at. We look at if it’s transparent, is it controllable, is there a clear benefit to using the data?

The post Keynote: Confluence of Social Data & Search — SMX Advanced appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Danny Sullivan takes the Twitter stage expressing hopes this will be the last SMX session with this type of name. It seems by now, SEOs should have a group hug with the social media team and come to terms that the social signals of Twitter do have a direct SEO impact.

Yes, Google is picking up the social signals from Tweets and what does this all mean? For those who still think Twitter is a waste of time (and those who want to learn more SEO Tweet juice) let the SEO Tweeting begin.

Fact:

Tweets are impacting how regular search results rank. What exactly is Good “Twitter Bait” and how can it be an easily gained source of relevant links? Let’s see.

First up is Michael Hayward, @ROI_labs CEO, ROI Labs
 who shared the process of making the decision to use Twitter at a global hotel  Four Seasons. Some of the obvious (and not so obvious) challenges included developing a Twitter strategy and identifying what exactly a big brand like Four Seasons can accomplish by using Twitter.

The luxury hotel looked at Twitter for lead generation, customer service monitoring, reputation management and promotional messaging during the Twitter discovery period. All that seemed to deliver some results, but the ROI did not make sense notes Hayward.

The biggest challenge the  hotel chain faced was trying to reach customers during the buying cycle and figuring out how to accomplish this. Another challenge came from an internal fight for home page space; all the department heads wanted to promote their new content (new menus, spa announcements, concierge news) on the hotel’s home page, which resulted in home page overload.

The timing of the Four Seasons launching a new online magazine with the search for a Twitter strategy resulted in a plan combining the best of both worlds: online magazine content and Social Media.  Four Seasons created search friendly content combined with an editorial calendar of tweets to make every department happy and the ultimate bonus: increase traffic to Four Seasons’ website by 50% in volume.

SEO Twitter Tips to Follow shared by Four Seasons

• Create an online magazine designed with the search engines in mind
• Use an online magazine as part of the SEO strategy
• Develop optimized content/stories
• Use Twitter to point back to and promote these stories with links
• Create a branded eco-system of Twitter accounts that included 85 different Four Seasons’ accounts – all could follow, interact and RT each other
• Use a custom link shortener to achieve deep links into magazine content
• Create an editorial calendar planned out one year in advance that includes tweets on online magazine content, press releases, events, etc
• Focus on keyword rich words such as “concierge” to trigger interest in buying categories
• SEO Secret Sauce Tip for Twitter: ‘Did you know?’ category of Tweets generate the most RTs for the Four Seasons; Tweet example: Did you know the chef grows his own basil in our own herb garden.

The bottom line says Hayward; search came to the rescue in the form of Tweets driving social signals to Google via optimized magazine’s content. Creating an eco-system designed around search and using Twitter as part of it resulted in page one-search results for non-travel keywords. Last but not least the ROI was an increase of +50% in search volume. Not a bad number for a day in the life of an SEO.

Next up to bat is digital and social media strategist Elle Shelley @elleshelley, VP Social Media, Zog Media who underlines her agency motto: Search, powered by Social and opens the session with a reminder:

What search was in 1998, is what social is today.

Shelley is clear she may not be an SEO pro, but  makes an expert connection between search marketing and the power of social media with a splash of SEO.

Three Tips on How Twitter Triggers SEO

Tip 1: Integrate SEO and Social into a strategy

• Be organized
• Work backwards with content
• Sprinkle short and long tail keywords into tweets

Shelley refers to the social media/SEO cycles behind the marketing process:

Awareness – Consideration – Decision – Transaction – Advocacy

One word of caution: Tweets are not a silver bullet for SEO.

Tip 2: Branded Links

• Use a branded link
  • Drives to website
  • Link shorteners
  • Link juice
  • Spammers – use redirects – people are more apt to click on branded links
  • Goo.gl or bit.ly

Tip 3: Be Social! (Come out of the SEO shell)

• While yes, SEO fundamentals do translate to Twitter; marketers still need to discover their social side and BE SOCIAL.
• High clout = high rankings; studies show if you interact with authority users and those with social influence, this will translate into higher rankings.
• Contextually relevant tweets. Just like in SEO, quality content is king and so is relevant content. Keep the tweets contextual and relevant.

Things to remember about Twitter

Low barriers to entry – meaning anyone can be on Twitter

Cost effective – meaning anyone can afford it

Supplement to current strategy – meaning it is not the silver bullet.

Community Manager Calling! Jennifer Lopez, @jennita Community Manager, SEOmoz actually stopped Tweeting long enough to talk about Twitter. This accomplishment was noted by @dannysillivan so it probably was a Twitpic moment. I love the name @jennita so much that I will break AP style and refer to her as just ‘jennita’ from this point forward.

Jennita asks the audience:

Are you of the social mind or the SEO mind? Only four social minds raise their hands (Ok, I’m one of them) and the rest are SEO (or would not admit to being social).

Jennita starts with the example of how one powerful tweet resulted in gaining significant search result rankings for non-branded keywords for SEOmoz.

Ranks for ‘Beginners Guide’ – SEO Beginners Guide Tweet – #2 in search results

Simply put:

The more qualified results = the more qualified traffic.

Jennita’s Tweet SEO Tips

• SEO minds wake up, start thinking about social – optimize (need more help? See the SEO periodic table)
• Learn the Science of RT – studies show the best times and words to use in for RT. For example using the words: ‘New blog post” in a tweet garners a boost in RT.
• Show the social peeps the data- so they understand. Help them help you
• Look up hashtags
• Tweet using keywords
• Twubs is a cool tool to look up performing hashtag alternatives
  • #socialmedia or #sm
  • #seo or #SEOs

Jennita Secret SEO Sauce

1. Make sharing on the website easy

Buttons, widgets, sharing urls

2. Show them the data

Sharedcount.com – all data at glance

Postrank.com – recently bought by Google, they must be good.

3. How can the Social and SEO minds meld

• Talk to each other
• Share data
• Exchange tools

Coming from a not-so-distant space, Sean Percival Vice President, Online Marketing
 at Myspace finishes the session strong talking about the advantages of social flow and celebrity authority.

Social Flow

• Publishing queue
• RSS publishing
• Timing optimization
• Keyword data

Percival reinforced that timing is everything, especially with Tweets. He suggested to look at timing of Tweets and adjust. Ask the question: When will you get the best results on the tweets? Take action.

Celebrity Authority

• Working with talent
• Partnership vs paid
• Results

How to work with a celebrity? Easy: Show them the money!

Percival notes that a ‘celebrity’ could be just the authority in your field does not need to be Kim Kardashian

On a Social Flow side note:  – @dannysullivan uses Social Flow for Search Engine Land and reminds us:

• If someone does not see your tweet in the first hour, it will not be seen.
• Putting out a second Tweet– gives the tweet a second chance.
• Tweeting a second time, a few hours later, 50% increase in twitter traffic.

Here’s the final SEO tweet, ending with the moderator:

Yes Virginia, Tweeting is SEO and SEO is Tweeting.

The post Yes Virginia, Tweeting is SEO – SMX Advanced appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Danny is singing a tune to Mr. Rogers about Matt — I think you had to be here to get the full experience. He and Danny are putting on custom Google Vans shoes now a la Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

Danny just unveiled the third guest in the other chair — a giant stuffed panda. And now panda foot stools. Wow, this is a whole skit. Danny just said “Panda does what panda wants” — a honeybadger reference (if you haven’t seen that video on YouTube, go there).

Danny is asking about who is affected by Panda. Saying some people that scraped panda are making it and the original authors are hit by Panda. And Matt says there are people who are working to make the scraper update more refined.

Matt is talking about search quality and Web spam. Web spam was easy to ID for a long time. There’s a mass perception that there is too much low quality stuff in the results. That’s what Panda aims to take care of.

Matt said they just approved another iteration of Panda. There will be several more.

Danny asks if the next update will be called “honeybadger.”

Matt is debunking the myth that they make manual exceptions for Panda.

Danny wants to know if the algorithm has changed enough for those to recover. How to you get redeemed?

Matt references the Florida update in 2003. Push stuff out, find signals to differentiate that spectrum. He hears the pain from the search industry, but he also hears complaints about sites polluting the search results. For the time being, they are looking for more ways to find low-quality sites.

Matt says people look their approach to Panda as a checklist, for example, high-quality content and authority — but users have different feedback on why a site may not be great.

Panda questions from the audience:

Site usability a key factor for ranking and what are the top metrics?

Matt: Panda is trying to encode whether a user will find it helpful or not. It’s not targeted directly at usability. That’s good to do anyway. It’s the same as site speed. It’s a good thing to optimize for anyway, it’s a good practice. Don’t chase after Google’s algo, chase after what you feel users are going to love, because that’s what Google is after.

Google announced a thing called rel=author to show authorship of articles. This can help the original content creators potentially rank higher. That was announced today. He is saying to look at the +1 button and schema.org in addition to the new announcement as something you might want to revamp you site with. Rel=author can help the authorship from one site to another site by cross-linking.

Danny is talking schema.org — the controversy of three search engines coming together. Matt thinks people want to see the development out in the open. Matt says start with rel=author there.

More audience Qs:

Talking about the site-blocking feature. How do publishers know the affect of site blocking and +1?

Matt: The opposite of +1 is the site-blocking functionality. Google will show stats on +1, but is leaning away from showing stats on blogs with the +1. But you won’t be able to expect to see that a site has been blocked an X amount of times.

Matt says it’s not spam if you get to the bottom of the page and the article asks you, “Do you want to see more?” for example, and you utilize Ajax to make more content appear. But if you’re keyword stuffing or doing anything spammy in that content, then yes.

Matt just said there might be Google spies in the audience that will come to your booth at the conference and ask how to buy links — everyone is cracking up.

Missed the question, but Matt said if Google thinks your page is really good — even if you’re affected by Panda you can still rank if no one else has good content.

“Debunking Corner”

SEOmoz said Facebook shares in an earlier session helps ranking. Matt says Google doesn’t get Facebook shares. If someone blocks them from crawling, they can’t call that content. Google can see Fan pages but that’s it. The most correlated thing (Facebook shares) is not a signal Facebook uses. If you have great content, it may get a lot of links and that’s no surprise.

Also the data about JC Penney and .edu links from another session. Matt says what helped them was correcting the fundamental issues, not the .edu links. Matt does not give a boost for .edu or .gov links directly.

Danny is asking if Matt is going to go back on Facebook (personal question) — he has been off it for a year and a half and he doesn’t see a need to go back on it.

Lightning Round

Q: Companies that do rank-checking reports — what’s your feeling?

Matt: It’s the wrong thing to concentrate on; look at conversions and ROI and other things.

Q:How do you handle multivariate testing?

Matt: Everyone should do A/B testing — there are ways to do it without cloaking. If you treat Google as any others desktop browser, we’re happy.

Missed a question; but here’s an answer:

Matt: The healthiest thing for the long-term health of the Internet is helping great businesses thrive. If you’re bored writing it, people are going to be bored reading it. Don’t just write 101 articles.

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Q&A Moderator: Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (Hi, Jonathon!)

Speakers:
Tamara Adlin, President, Adlin, Inc.
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Dennis Goedegebuure, Director SEO, eBay, Inc.

Vanessa is saying this is going to be the best session at SMX Advanced. She tells the people in the back to come closer, but she understands if they don’t want to be too close to the crazy people aka speakers. She’s telling everyone she began speaking about this persona topic while tipsy at a party with some of the speakers. Two out of the three people up there have written a book (just a little nugget for you).

Tamara Adlin is up first. She says neither her nor Vanessa don’t actually do what they are hired to do — they are hired for SEO, but they come in to “uncluster F” the business. They ask them about business goals and brand; they always want to skip that, but then realize that they need to examine it.

Personas are great because it allows companies to ID that one persona may be more important than another. There’s a difference between a searcher persona and a product persona are different in some cases. A user persona like “Marlene” and “Phil” might be at the site and we want them to do something. A searcher persona is about getting those eyeballs to the site. How are they thinking when they are first starting to look for this thing? They may be Phil or Marlene once they arrive.

“We are not sending people to the moon, we are selling shoes” — creating personas doesn’t have to be difficult to serve a purpose.

Dennis Goedegebuure from eBay is up. Vanessa is asking if anyone can pronounce his last name, and says she’ll never pronounce his last name when introducing him. Dennis starts off by introducing himself and gives an inaudible pronunciation of his last name.

He’s is from Amsterdam. He’s showing pictures of a giant plate of meat and vodka saying that’s what he likes — but he also is trying to make a point. He is saying this is data that makes up who he is as a persona: eBay, BBQ, travel, vodka, Amsterdam and photography. He is giving stats about a category of people who are passionate about photography. Says most people can fall into this. He then goes into stats about how this type of person buys online — lots of research, price is key, brand loyalty is a factor and so on.

Says you can now connect the dots — person data and keyword data to build an ultimate persona. Keep a network of keywords. Cluster the keyword networks together. At eBay, they came up with seven unique clusters of user persona. And then they did testing. They tested headlines for two of the three personas.

How does this relate to SEO? Different user segments will react differently to things like snippets on the SERP.

Keyword persona data gives a timely measurement of user intent. Keyword persona is different from but complementary to user demographic persona. Segmenting keyword personas gives opportunities to optimize further.

Vanessa is up to talk. She says SEO goes beyond how we think about SEO. It’s a larger process, finding who your audience is and engaging with them. SEO and UX overlap often and they both have conversion. She finds that a lot of people don’t know what their business goals are aside from traffic.

She asks:

• What’s the project goal?
• What’s the brand objective?
• What’s you value proposition?
• What do you want people to do? Engage? Convert?

She says do a Post-It note exercise — use one persona per sticky note; include the person and the goal for that person. Come up with categories of what it is that personas want. Stop thinking about the users and start thinking like them. Put your skeletons of users in a persona list next, her example has “Becky Busy,” “Pete Purposeful” and “Olivia Ohm” (yoga client).

Throw all the data that you have on keywords and assign them to the personas. Then start asking questions like:

• How likely is this searcher to convert?
• How difficult/easy would it be to add features to the site to address this searcher need?

In Tamara’s book, she gives tips on prioritizing personas.

Roadmap for SEO:

• For every keyword cluster and persona, what is the task that the user wants to accomplish?
• Sample search queries.
• How can you help someone accomplish the task?
• What can you do the persona might not ask for?
• Business goals related to the task.
• Motivation to do what will help achieve business goals
• Figure out success metrics

For keyword clusters, she would set a category in analytic of this category to track it.

Now there are time for questions. Tamara jumps in for a final thought and says you can BS Google anymore — you have to have real value. And this is what this process is all about.

Q: Do you find a problem with clustering that certain keywords apply to many personas?

Vanessa: She approaches it to map content. She decides to have a landing page for certain keywords with high volume, and then uses supporting pages to speak to specific personas for the more targeted keyword strains. She might say, these are the four personas that might land on this particular page. Two may be important and two might not be; give call-to-action for those two that are important.

Dennis chimes in to say to make the personas that bring in revenue as the most important.

Q: How do you use data to refine personas?

Vanessa: Once she has all the sticky notes and thinks the audience is interested in one thing, and then finds that no one searches for that thing. Once you have the clusters, look at analytics data by cluster to see if any are converting.

Tamara: Use the personas to structure your research as well.

Q: How much time do you allow in the project (a redesign for example) if you find the client has no idea about personas, goals, etc.?

Vanessa: Always do the research before you approach the project – must understand the audience and goals to do the type of SEO she believes in. She gives questions to the clients and then based on the answers she gets back, she knows how much more time they need to spend on the project. She says it can be a couple days for this process.

Dennis says it’s based on a lot of factors like knowledge level of the client, site scope, size of team, etc.

The post Use Searcher Personas to Connect SEO to Conversion — SMX Advanced appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

I expect this to be a popular session since everyone is obsessed with links. And because Ross Hudgens is adorable.

Moderator: Elisabeth Osmeloski, Managing Editor, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Bob Tripathi, Founder & Chief Marketer, Instant E-Training, Inc.

Speakers:

Justin Briggs, SEO Consultant, Distilled @justinrbriggs
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting @stonetemple
Ross Hudgens, SEO Manager, Full Beaker, Inc. @rosshudgens
Roger Montti, Owner, MartiniBuster @martinibuster
Conrad Saam, Director of Marketing, Avvo @conradsaam

That’s a good looking panel, right?

Justin Briggs starts us off by talking about link building effectiveness.

Infographics aren’t dead. They feel outdated but they’re still great for earning links. Do it.

Get your content out — use stumbleupon which is a great way of spurring Facebook and Twitter sharing.

Skip the social

• do manual outreach
• incentivize the embed
• guest post
  • -the embed is the post
  • chop up the image and repurpose
  • additional research and write a great post

Use branded high value link to increase blue of high leverage lower value link building tactics. [I missed a giant chunk there. Check Lisa’s post.]

Ross Hudgens is the next up.

He’s talking about building links with location relevance.

Each website has several nearby locations that can attract links: country, state, home city, nearest big city, districts of nearby city, etc.

Three best type of links for these searches are blog links, directory links and forum/comment links.

Location often requires additional hustle to obtain links.

• Do a personal tour
• supply free products/samples
• use location as a selling point
• create a “best website in [location]” widget
• do guest blogs
• create a local outreach program
• Host/support a philanthropic event
• sponsor local events (search for sponsorships and use Google alerts for future notifications – once a week is his suggestion)

Utilize price anchoring for local sponsorships. Offer something dramatically lower than suggested sponsorship and they will often counter with a lowered cost because of the psychological fear of losing your support otherwise.

Roger Montti is the next up. He’s going to talk about email link requests. No one is going to open an email with the subject line “Link Request”. That’s totally the homeless guy of emails.

Pre-campaign prep

1. Content!

-author credentials, author bios, author accomplishments

– authoritative sites/peers where content has been syndicated or guest posted. In order to guest post, you need to already have guest posts.

2. Media

– news – as seen on TV, use press releases. Use the positive feelings

3. Awards and certifications

– demonstrates industry recognitions

4. Associations

not just for links

tells potential link partner you’re one of them

5. About Us

Site validation – BBB, Linked in, etc

Use email scripts that allow you to scale up.

• Advertise template
• Sponsor template
• Broken link, etc
• Website feedback

Put it all together.

Conrad Saam is next up. He suggests using your journalism buddies who are dying for stories, any stories.

Interest level of your story: Update- monthly, Minor Events-quarterly, Major Events-annually, Rare – once in a lifetime.

Give them an exclusive.

Or do an embargo.

For Update level – connect to small bloggers

Minor – High profile exclusive

Major – Widespread, use an embargo

PR Story Ideas

• Mine your data (TripAdvisor’s most disgusting hotels)
• Write stories for the press (Do all the work, give them the credit)
• Embrace controversy
• Annoy people who hate you
• No bad PR in SEO

Eric Enge wraps it up for us.

Credibility is everything. Build trust and leverage relationships. Produce content that is the best result for them.

Establish authority and sell it.

It really depends on producing kickass content.

You are an authority: Assume it, sell it, then deliver.

Stop believing in your limitations

Find the golden links

be willing to invest big to win big

Establish and sell your authority

Stop thinking manipulation and start thinking excellence.

The post Tough Love: Link Building For The Real World appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

The panel:

Moderator: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Q&A Moderator: Joseph Kerschbaum, Client Services Director, Clix Marketing

Speakers:

Alex Cohen, Senior Marketing Manager, ClickEquations @digitalalex
Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing @AdamSGoldberg
Frank Kochenash, VP Client Services, Mercent
Wister Walcott, co-founder and EVP of products, Marin Software @t_wister

I’ll be honest and say that I’m probably going to understand this one even less than I usually would. I like feeling challenged by sessions but PPC is another language entirely and on top of that I’m still sick. So if this reads like gibberish, I’m very sorry.

Matt says that we’re not going to dive into the nitty gritty today. Which I appreciate.

Wister is up first. He’s very very tall.

Paid search forecasting – how they do it

• predict clicks, conversions & profit for CPA/margin targets
• bid to an overall spendting target (beug based bidding)
• find optimal CPA to balance conversion volume cost
• maximize profit
• target specific positions
• maximize revenue for a CPA target

How do you approach this?

I’m going to just leave that slide here because I don’t know what it all means.

How many keywords per group

Test for CTR and QS differences by number of keywords per group. They discovered that high volume keywords should probably get their own group.

For a CTR of 5%, no group had a QS of less than 4. Conversely for .5% CTR, no keyword had a QS above 3.

1. Above-average keyword count

2. Below average CTR/QS

3. Start with high click-volume groups first.

other useful analyses

Best practices: Any broad match terms getting more traffic than their exact and phrase siblings? Any groups with just one active ad? Are you identifying loser ads on CTR or conversions? Any budget-constrained campaigns? Adjusting bids for Day of Week and Time of Day? (Requires the time of click) Are you deleting keywords with no impressions for 13 months?

Next up is Alex Cohen.

His friend Adrienne lost a bunch of weight. How? Because the system took all the information and turned it into points that made the excess of data much clearer.

An excess of data leads to a shortage of optimization.

Slim down your CPCs with compound metrics

Look at impression, clicks, CTW, Avg CPC, conversions, conversion rate, CPA, Revenue and Net Profit.

Normalize your date by looking at Profit Per Impression (Profit/Impressions) = PPI

clck.it/ppi-links leads to great articles on this topic.

clck.it/halvarianbidding – great video on incremental cost per click.

There are 2 Fundamental drivers of prioritization – fear of loss or hope of gain.

Example: Search Query Mining – If a query is a question, the ad is the answer. PPCers job is to align those questions and answers. Not every alignment has the same value.

QueryMiner Ad Relevance Tool – useful for figuring out where you should be focusing your time.

Impression Share Run Rate: Throw money at your IS problem.

Impression share is a campaign only metric

clck.it/43tools – PPC tools galore

Next up is a battle! Adam and Frank are going to fight about attribution! Adam goes first.

There are three types of actors – introducers, influencers and closers. There can be many influencers but only one introducer and closer per conversion cycle.

All you need to do is be more accurate than you were yesterday.

The least accurate is “last click wins”.  Next is the “even attribution” – everyone gets the same credit.  Most vendors start with the even + exclusion attribution.  (There are three more “path position”, “attribution pattern” and “algorithmic modeling” but they’re not out of the box and he’s not covering them in this presentation. Algorithmic involves Ph.D.s)

Even with Exclusions

• Ability to set maximum days in path
• Ability to aggregate ad network impressions
• Ability to set hours between views
• Ability to apply “exclusions”
  • by ad type
  • by ad position
  • by time factors

They tell people that if a conversion comes from a branded search, exclude that and apply to previous steps because that’s just a re-finding search.

You may want to time out impressions — does someone really remember an ad from 30 days ago?

PPC often gets slighted by the last click model.

Use exclusions to zero in on the terms that are actually bringing you traffic so you can ignore the navigational searches and bring traffic to the terms that actually drive leads.

Frank is up last.

He’s going with a nuanced metaphor about snake oil. Okay then. Snake oil originally was Chinese medicine and it’s still used. The problem is not the oil, it’s the misinformation that surrounds it.

Today’s takeaway: Measure the algorithm.

Advanced ROI attribution is about predicting probability of conversion.  How is it used? Providing weights used in calculation of ROI.

Viewing the customer journey as an evolution of conversion

In a perfect world it looks like this:

Realistically it looks like this:

Some pitfalls:

• assume the influencers are static
• assume every exposure or user interaction deserves credit
• assume every cookie/consumer is the same
• don’t adequately handle external influences
• assume creative and placement don’t matter
• assume…something else. And more as well.

You need to measure the difference between predicted and measured to find the model error (and the model error of time. You want your model error to get less over time and you want it to be adaptive.)

Buying ROI attritibution algos

1. Request model error rates prior to launch and over time
2. Ask how does the algo adapt to disturbances or changes
3. Ask how it adapts.

How do you use product-keyword algorithms for a particular targeted case?

Take ads out of circulation when a product is out of stock, put them back in when it comes back into stock. Use it to drive ads by SKU. Look at how correlated the SKU is to the keyword. (There may be variations like sizes and colors.)

[There’s a chunk missing here while I swapped my battery. My apologies.]

This is not an 80/20 situation: most of the value requires most of the work.

When buying product-keyword attributions algorithms:

1. Request correlation statistics (i.e., how do you know it’s working?)
2. Ask how do you establish correlations between things I can control (like keywords and LP) and things I can measure (like product inventory)?
3. Ask what data is being collected to enable these calculations?

Above all, measure the algorithm.

The Q&A is most very specific so I’m skipping it.

The post Advanced PPC Analytics – SMX Advanced appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

This session promises to show us how to implement and profit from a comprehensive competitive intelligence campaign. The moderator is Matt McGee, executive news editor of Search Engine Land. And the speakers are:

Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor
Mitul Gandhi, Chief Architect, seoClarity
John Straw, Founder, Linkdex

First up, moderator Matt McGee. Matt says we are going to learn how to use what your competitor is doing against them. (Mwuahahahaha.)

First speaker up is Mitul Gandhi of seoClarity. He is talking about how to build a competitive intelligence (CI) practice. He said the most common use of competitive intelligence is by finding keywords and links the competition is using. But he wants to answer questions like, how active are the competitors in SEO? And more — the less obvious questions.

Tracking CI is tough. Too much of too little; there are too many things to track. Too much noise in the data. The data is tool late. How does it help to know the data of your competitors las month. Also, too dependent on researcher and tool. Causes us to focus on the effect vs. the cause.

He’s talking the typical approach. Pick a competitor, research keywords, backlinks and implement. But it’s full of flaws. Proposed framework:

• Research true competitors: Competitors online is actually different than offline. Competitors at domain level may be different at category, product or service level.
• Eliminating noise: Avoid the urge to go to keywords as the next step. Researching a single competitor is misleading. Too much data, little context. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd. That means, take each of your true competitors, compile them, then you should see an intersection of keywords that are common across competitors.
• Tracking causes: What is the competitor doing on and off page? Rankings may have changed due to your own actions or something your competitors did.
• Track effects: Track KPIs closely — not just rankings, but traffic patterns as well. Set up thresholds. Very simple high school stats, he says.
• Learning, testing, implementing and repeat: Timing is important; can lose out on a lot by waiting. CI gives us a starting point for ideas to test.

Be careful using this data. CI without human review can lead to insanity.

Next is John Straw of Linkdex. He has an accent; this makes me happy.

He says we like to talk a lot of CI, but as an industry, we don’t do much with it. We are going to talk about the data that we can use. He is using JC Penney as a case study (with his apologies to JC Penney for always being the case study). They looked at fresh links — recently appeared and recently dropped. He used Majestic SEO database, says it’s free-ish.

He is looking at the SEO strategy of JC Penney versus Bloomingdales versus Macy’s. He sees that everyone grew their link structure, with Macy’s growing it in blogs. Wants to know how JC Penney found love after the Google disaster. They have had a very specific campaign to get links from .edu. Shows hundreds of links acquired by .edu in the past four months.

This is his plan of attack for CI is defining influence, identifying classification signals. When classifying a blog, you might look for:

• Comments
• RSS feeds
• Post archive
• Labels and tags on posts
• WordPress-based
• Hosted on a blogging platform

K, he went really fast and was talking math stuff. I don’t know that anything I just blogged made sense. Here’s hoping …

Last but not least is Seth Besmertnik of Conductor. How do you discover who your competitors are? How can you spot trends? What do you focus on?

You can do the following internally:

• Start with your keyword set
• SERP extraction — not just rank data, ID domains
• Saturation (frequency in which domains are showing up for your keywords)
• Competitor categorization within organization
• New competitor alerts

How to understand who your competitors are (example):

800 keywords times 1oo positions. Top 50 percent by saturation. Top 50 percent by average rank. This can start to build out your initial competitor set.

How do you typecast your competitors?

Direct competitor: Traditional business, SEO driven, affiliates, retailers, manufacturers, family sites (parent company with family of sites)

Indirect competitor: Review sites, newspaper and magazines, Wikipedia, user groups

Universal results is a big opportunity to see who your competitors are (direct and indirect). Metrics change when images, for example, push rankings down.

Understand competitors’ momentum. Follow ranking shifts to ID aggressive movement positively or negatively. You can learn something from those that are doing poorly as well.

New competitor alerts: Look at top three pages and ID new competitors that did not exist in previous time.

As the industry gets more advanced, metrics need to be more advanced. Modify data sets.

Use CI to build a business case to get more investment in SEO. He says this is a better case-building tactic than anything else. Show how competitors are performing against the same set of keywords as yours. Go to LinkedIn put in competitor’s name and the word “SEO” and you can see how many SEOs are there, if they are hiring SEOs and such.

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