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SEO Strategies from San Jose SES 2008 - Day 4

August 28, 2008 by Erik Cunningham

Session Photo from SES 2008 San Jose Day 4My fourth and final day at San Jose SES 2008 included a mixture of topics including local search, free SEO tools, and strategies that many SEO’s don’t consider when optimizing and marketing their websites.

These particular sessions covered a lot of information so I’ll display my notes and observations in bullet form. Okay, the truth is that I’m just plain lazy today but bullets is bullets.

Day 4 Agenda

Local & More – Special Kelsey Group Presentation: Local 2.0 – The Evolution of Local Search

10:15am-11:15am

  • Major players are using maps, videos, ratings and reviews and marketing to Google
  • 72% of consumers research online but 95% purchase offline
  • Link to your local listings from your website
  • Link to online citations from your Google Maps listing
  • Make your local listings stand out through upgrades and recommendations/ratings (+80% conversions)
  • Videos on results page attract 220% more clicks in SERPs
  • Post a video on YouTube, embed it in a dedicated page on your website with text and tags similar to the YouTube page, and link to the YouTube video from the dedicated page
  • Google AdWords offers print, radio and TV ads at http://www.google.com/adwords/traditionalmedia/

Just the Basics – Fast, Free and Easy Tools to Get You Going

11:30am-12:30pm

The Best Kept Secrets to Search

1:30pm-2:30pm

  • Combine PPC with traditional marketing strategies for higher conversion rates
  • Use special characters and local phone numbers in PPC ad copy to attract more attention
  • Syndicate rewritten versions of articles for backlinks
  • Local search is dominating SERPs above the fold
  • Search the web for your URL citations that aren’t hyperlinked and request edit

Searching For Jobs in Search: Starting and Advancing Your Career in the Industry

2:45pm-3:45pm

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Tips from Day 2 - Search Engine Strategies 2008 San Jose

August 20, 2008 by Erik Cunningham

Day 2 San Jose Convention CenterOn Tuesday, Day 2 of Search Engine Strategies 2008 in San Jose, I was able to mix things up a little bit. At the conference, I attended sessions related to PPC and web analytics. Between sessions, I had lunch with an old friend from college. In the evening I rounded out my day at the Google Dance.

All in all, it was a great day - very social and very educational. Here is a summary of my experiences.

Day 2 Agenda

Measuring Success - Measuring Success in a 2.0 World

11:00am - 12:15pm

Avinash Kaushik, an author, blogger, and analytics evangelist from Google, opened the morning’s session by describing Web 2.0’s effect on the creation, distribution and consumption of content on the internet. In the world of Web 1.0, publishers distributed their content to web users through controlled channels which made the consumption of that content easy to moderate and easy to track.

The emergence of RSS feeds and content syndication in Web 2.0 broke this model and took the control of content distribution and consumption out of publishers’ hands and put it into the hands of the web community. Avinash describes this transfer of power as, “different but better”.

In a Web 2.0 world, content monitoring and tracking have become far more difficult. Unique visitor and page load statistics no longer carry the same significance. Avinash recommends that publishers find new ways of measuring success. He uses tools such as Feedburner, Google Analytics and Technorati to monitor the results of his publishing efforts and focuses on data that reveals customer loyalty and subscriber base.

Sponsored Session: Omniture - 5 Things No One Will Tell You About SEM

2:45pm - 3:45pm

Although sponsored, my second session of the day was high on content and surprisingly low on salesmanship. Kudos to Omniture for providing us with useful, non-proprietary search marketing information. Here are the five topics the presenters discussed:

  1. Direct navigation and one and two keyword searches are on the rise. Are these factors related?
  2. Small advertisers should focus their PPC campaign efforts on the top two or three search engines with the largest marketshare in their geographic area. Choosing good keywords and building relevant landing pages are a must!
  3. SEM doesn’t work for everything. Creating PPC campaigns for products with latent demand can be a waste of time. When marketing new technologies with descriptive words and acronyms that public is unfamiliar with, display and vertical advertising is a better strategy for success.
  4. Traffic from search engine “content network” PPC advertising is about 30% lower quality than normal PPC search traffic. Google and Yahoo! use it as an upsell, but it may not be in the best interest of the advertiser.
  5. Some of competitors’ search engine marketing activities are easily researched. Simple keyword searches can reveal what terms competitors are buying and following the paid links will show you their landing page strategies.

Measuring Success - Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers

4:00pm - 5:15pm

The last session of the day was a bit dry, but I did manage to pick up some pointers about search analytics.

In addition to the standard bounce rate, average time on site, and page views statistics present in most analytics packages, Michael Stebbins from Market Motive, recommended that you find a program or means to measure conversion rates, cost per visitor and revenue per visitor. The resulting data doesn’t have to be completely accurate, as long as it reveals “trends” related to PPC campaigns so you can identify which ad groups perform the best, and which perform the worst. Once you can determine this, you should cut the top 10% of your poor performing ads.

Brett Crosby from Google recommended that to best track and analyze your Adwords campaigns you should configure goals and funnels in Google Analytics, create custom dashboards to organize your data, and set up custom email reports that relate to the job functions at your organization.

Google Dance

7:00pm - 11:00pm

The Google Dance was great as always. Lots of food, free t-shirts and free drinks, and plenty of entertainment. Thanks again Google for being such a generous host!

That about wraps up Day 2 at SES 2008 San Jose. Two down, but two more on the way so stay tuned!

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Search Marketing Tips from SES 2008 San Jose - Day 1

August 18, 2008 by Erik Cunningham

Day 1 View From San Jose MarriottThis week, I’ll be attending my fourth Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA. I’ve been blessed to attend the conference every two years since 2002 and have enjoyed it every time. I’m staying at the Marriott which shares a wall with the San Jose Convention Center. The close proximity allows me to run up to my room between conference sessions (and blog) if I want to, which is great.

I passed on the SES Conference Welcome & Orientation this year. I figured, “If I don’t know what’s going on here by my fourth trip, I have bigger problems to worry about”.

Speaking of problems, I noticed there weren’t any free conference t-shirts in the goody bags this year. I better hang on to my old ones from previous years. They might be collector’s items!

I did receive two free books however which more than makes up for the missing shirt. “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath & Dan Heath and “Against the Machine, Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” by Lee Siegel were both included with our conference materials. I look forward to reading them both in the weeks to come.

Day 1 Keynote PresentationThe conference this week offers five different search engine strategies related tracks that attendees can follow - World View, Search 2.5, Search Industry Track, What’s Next? and ClickZ Track. After looking at the conference schedule, I plan on attending sessions from at least four of the five tracks offered.

Here’s a quick overview of my experiences on Monday (day 1) of SES 2008 San Jose and some tips from the sessions I attended.

Day 1 Agenda

What’s Next? - More Customers, Fewer Costs - Why Marketing to the ‘Long Tail’ Makes Sense

9:45am - 11:00am

I was surprisingly wide awake for this first session. Here’s what I took away from the presenters:

  • At least 30-40% of all internet searches are made with “local” intent
  • Long tail search terms are cheap options for paid placement and easy to rank well for in SERPs because of limited competition
  • Many websites (especially ecommerce sites) receive the majority of their traffic from long tail search terms
  • Conversion rates are higher for long tail search terms than generic search terms because they are more specific to the user’s intent
  • SEOs can optimize for the long tail search terms through dedicated content pages combined with internal link anchor text and by including the terms near back-links in blogs, local business listings and Google Maps

What’s Next? - Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives?

11:15am - 12:30pm

I’m new to the topic of semantic search but I left the session with a better understanding of the general concept behind it. Semantic search is intended to be an improvement upon today’s standard of keyword search. I thought Erik Collier from Ask summed up the philosophy behind semantic search best when he said that users shouldn’t have to rephrase or reorder their query to get the results they’re looking for.

Semantic search will one day allow searchers to use natural language in their search queries rather than “caveman talk” as Kevan Ryan, the session moderator so eloquently described it. In the next few years, queries like, “Bruce Willis Movies” will be replaced by, “What movies has Bruce Willis starred in?”.

From an SEO perspective, semantic search may shift the focus of code and content from keywords to context. Dust off your thesaurus boys and girls. It looks like SEOs will be using a lot more synonyms over the next 5-10 years.

Another important element of semantic search, according to Amit Kumar from Yahoo! Search is the delivery of structured data content from website publishers to the search engines in the form of Microformats and RDF(a) Markup. RD… what? I’m not familiar with either of these formats but I hope to publish a post on the subject after I’ve done some research.

Keynote Panel - How Much Search is Enough?

1:30pm - 2:30pm

Day 1 Keynote SEO Funding SourcesUnfortunately, this panel discussion on locating and securing funding sources for search marketing didn’t afford me much more than a couple of good photo opportunities.

The session did feature an all-star panel. But listening to a group of SEOs discuss financial issues on the first day of the conference wasn’t enough to maintain my interest. Sitting in a low lit room right after lunch didn’t help matters either.

What’s Next? - Everything But Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options

2:45pm - 4:00pm

I really enjoyed this session on advertising alternatives to Google AdWords. I was most impressed by Sage Lewis’ entertaining, practical and straight-forward presentation of what alternatives for paid advertising exist and which offer the lowest CPC (cost-per-conversion).

From the study results that Sage showed us, the three best advertising solutions from a CPC perspective were Looksmart, Ask, and SuperPages. The “Big 3″, Google, Yahoo! and MSN offered more traffic, but at a much higher cost per conversion.

Sage wrapped up his presentation by recommending that advertisers run tests of their own with different providers and seek referrals from colleagues that have done the same.

Keynote Presentation - Lee Siegel, Author of “Against the Machine”

4:30pm - 5:30pm

I skipped this last presentation so I could organize the day’s information while it was still clear in my head. And as I mentioned earlier in this post, we received this book as part of our conference materials and I was afraid that the author might give away the ending.

That’s it for Day 1 at SES 2008 San Jose. I hope to post my experiences from Day 2 tomorrow or the day after.

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