Had a blast this past weekend in vegas, but I didn’t have very good internet access anywhere the whole week, so I’m doing my wrap-up now. I got labeled “shifty eye Dan” in the first round I played of SEOmoz’s Werewolf game, but I managed to survive a few votes before being lynched and revealed as a black hat (Matt Cutts did a a “black hats rule” dance later that night when he too was a black hat).
The best part of the week was the networking, Dave and I met a ton of great people, including Cyril, Cory, Melinda, Sugarrae, Todd, Vanessa, Rand, Justine, Tamar, Brent, Matt, Joe, Robert, John.

So thanks to everyone who came and I met, for a wonderful week, feel free to say hello and stay in touch.

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So an email just went out about a new post on the pubcon blog with links to liveblog coverage of the conference. I was excited, this blog was listed a number of times.
But ‘lo they’re not clean links, they’re all directed through ra.cgi. And how exactly are they redirected? 302s
Are you serious Brett?

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They’re probably not going to be doing a spring conference. Instead likely more of the one day type events.

Tim Mayer
Several of the search engines have announced a unified sitemap structure. MSN, Google and Yahoo. Ask is invinted too.
Yahoo search mission is to enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowlege. Find: enable people to find what they are looking for, use search not for sake of searching but to achive a purpose. Share sharing knowldge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knowledge with. Expand: yahoo answers helping expand the amount of information on the web.
Getting into the search index: Link to the url from an already indexed URL simple urls and shallow urls, 3 to 4 levels deep, good athoritative links.
Unique content, page-specific titles, page-specific metatags. Seperare pages only when there is seperate content. Multiple domains only when there are distinct businesses.
Avoid Spam:
excessive doorway pages/domaons
keyword suffing
hidden links/texts
link farms massive domain interlinking
off-topic links dilute valuable links
internal links don’t help/hurt rankins
cloaking.

Regexp in robots.txt, they support the google style format. wildcards, anchors.
if rules disagree, the more specific statement will supersceded the shorter command
no archive, they also have crawl delay.

Search Builder, customized web search, site search and customized vertical news search. strong international adoption, monetization in 2007. He’s going through how it works. 4 easy steps to create a search box, you put the code on your blog or site, then it will create a cobranded yahoo SERP with site publisher branding and it gives you keyword reporting. Topic oriented search, tweaking of organic results, popular search term cloud, query history reports for publishers.

Site explorer
you can login via yahoo id, then you can add as many sites as you’d like to add, and you can see your feeds. there is also site authentication. you can manage sitefeeds and add feeds and if you’re authenticated you can get info on its processing. You can just go to the site explorer page without the management and overhead of ID to submit a page or feed or sitemap. You put an authenticatioon key on your site and within 24 hours they’ll check it and you can get lots of useful information on processing. site explorer lets you see inlinks, indexed sites, tim says they’re one of the only search engines that provide the full back links data.
Ysearchblog will post about what is to come.

Eytan Seidman MSN
He’s going to talk about live search, he’s asking what products everyone is using. IE, firefox, xp, mac, who’s doing white hat and who’s doing spam.
live search:
web, news, local, images.
He’s showing live image search with the endless scroll bar. and a slider, there are lots of sexy ajax features. He’s talking very fast.
He’s showing that if you search for a person in image searcht they’ll show related people.
people want a tremendous amount of images. you can consume lots of images and people search for people in image search a lot.
Infinte scroll bar works well in images, not so well in web search.
local search maps.live.com 2d and 3d maps for zooming around and see what its like.
web search
core relevance their relevance is improving all the time
crawling, deeper crawls, support for new content types (eg HTTPS)
reducing spam
improving display using an example of university of arizona descriptions of sites are reading more like queries.

Better tools for searching, noodp crawl commands and robots.txt
new query commands:
linkfromdomain
ip: all the pages on a certain IP. (these two look cool)
and many others…
search macros example: macro:livelabs.msdn select. cancatenate all search commands

sitemaps, they support the new sitemap format.
They want to hear from us MSNdude, webmasterworld, forums, stickymail and the livesearch blog

Peter Linsley ask.com
They support all the noodp and robots type stuff
He’s showing some financial data. They’re the 4th biggst search engine.

differentiation
dynamic comunity clustering and expertrank
search verticals for blogs, images, news maps etc
search enhancing tools such as related search, binoculars, smart answers and a unique under interface.
He’s showing a SERP with onebox type results, instead of sponsored ads on the right there are related search, like for narrowing the search or expand it, and related names. Binoculars, you can preview the site itself.

blog search
bloglines was acquired by ask.
blog search is currently tracking millions of feeds. subcriptions in bloglines will gurantee we know about your feed, basic SEO and standard blogg specific rules apply to gain popularity, blogging frequently helps, blogging original content that is useful, “suck a little bit less than the other guy”
high popular blogs can appear as smart answers on the ask SERPs.
He’s showing a screenshot of the bloglines search for webmaster world. with subscription and opinion vs news feed blogs.

best practices for ask SEO
expertrank and related search means more opportunities for ranking
garner links from pages that are on topic, this results in higher returns than links from off topic pages generic links are not bad.
configure robots,txt to allow the ask.com crawler.

langauge and country description
search engines have to guess language and country, you can improve our accuracy
may not appear in SERP if incorrectly detected or may gain an unwanted translate this page link
improve accuracy of language with plenty of text and using unicode
no spelling mistakes
Improve accuracy of country detection with ccTLD or hosting locally.

Matt Cutts
matt is curious about the demographics of seo, lots of people are older than 30, he’s also asking about democratic or republican.

what’s new
the united sitemapes (sitemaps.org) a common format.

recap
he’s recapping what’s happened in the last year.
Google calendar, gmail, google docs, google checkout

products highlght
webmaster central, maps, custom search engine, google reader, calendar gmail, hosted services/apps, picasaweb, notebook
the webmaster central, opens up a dialog, it shows 40 different type of errors, 404’s robots.txt
it shows you what you’re showing up for and what people are clickiing on.
pretty graphs were just introduced, how many pages a day we getting crawled. how many kilobytes googlebot is using, and how long the pages are taking to load

google earths and googlemaps
google earth added 16 historical maps

custom search engine
it can index over as many sites as you want, anything from sitessearch to a list of as many sites as you want. You can apply a boost to specific sites and use regular results. and you can let people add sites. Bookmarklets.

Google Reader
it has been totally been rewritten matt has a list of blackhat sites in his reader. a few people in this audience.

infrastrucure
live everywhere by feb
deeper crawling and fresher indexing

supplimental resaults are determined by pagerank
if you get more links you will show up in the normal results.

64.233.183.104 is still old pagerank for a while.
most of the new infrastructure will be transperant.

communication updates, googleguy showed up in WMW 5 years ago.
today 25 googlers, 5 people working on communication
webmaster trends analyst just hired to look to blogosphere for problems
blogs and forums
webmaster consule (robots.txt problems penalties)
webmaster forums
spam
Matt says brian white is the best guy on spam in the world, he’s being sent to europe to crack down on european spam

he’s showing a graph of how google handles spam reports.
its in the google webmaster console, you can also report spam via this console
they recieve more weight from the webmaster central, its more trusted.

questions
is there a webmaster credit history? Matt wouldn’t “put it that way”. Matt thinks it would be cool though.
Tim Mayer says is all about trust.

there is discussion at yahoo about implimenting a big daddy type cache server.

someone is asking about scraping.
there are some tests running on different ways to spot scraping.
do you get penalized by being linked to from a scraper, matt says no inlink can hurt you.
she’s saying that adsense is the reason for scraping.
a random slice of adsense content and its mostly good.

will custom search have adsense. if you’re not a nonprofit you can get a revshare on a custom search engine.
will YPN ever go to canada, or do you hate us? Tim can’t answer that question, he’s on the websearch side.

any plans to allow a linkfromdomain command?
tim thinks its cool feature, they don’t have a launch date to annouce, but its cool
google has a IP operator, allinanchor and allintitle don’t get a ton of use from normal users, they might offer this type of stuff from webmaster console.
He’s suggesting to show where the 404s came from in the consoles.

some really specific phrases some sites may be on the fringe of having enough links to be in the crawl.

someone asked what the dilly with searchmash and matt is showing it
its a place for fun experiementing, a playground.

Brett wants NOODP, noarchive and stuff in robots.txt

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PromoPortal.co.uk
They’re looking to improve the URL structure of the site.
They have id= in their urls, someone on the panel says its not ideal, but its not a death sentance.
The site is a year old. They say this is a problem.
Matt Cutts says the content is duplicated by other sites that are using the same suppliers. Matt says to ask what’s your value-add.
Everyone is joking about Matt using his laptop with the secret tools.
The real problem is that the content is not unique. There are dozens and dozens of sites with the same content, they need to alter the data and make it unique. Rewriting the descriptions or adding review data. Very competative market and the backlinks are not anywhere where they need to be.

stretcher.com
Its not pretty, been online since 1996, I think matt said “ooo” to that. They own all the content. Happy with google traffic, but blacklisted by yahoo. Tim asks what they did, and says you don’t get blacklisted for not doing anything. Some of the navigation could be treated as dupe, and they get ripped off (scraped) a lot. It sounds like yahoo hasn’t figured out how to determine where the content is originally. Tim says there is 300-something pages indexed in yahoo and she says they have 5000 on their site. All of the titles are showing up lowercase in siteexplorer, but on the site they’re all upper case. Someone asks about “different delivery” ie cloaking. Matt explains that the yahoo site explorer may be trying to make everything look clean by lower casing it. Everyone laughs. Matt suggests putting keywords in the URL. The sitemap is huge, Matt Cutts suggests splitting the sitemap topically or chronologically. Some of the pages don’t have titles. On some of the pages there is not a cached page. But on the normal version of the page there are no no-cache commands. Sometimes if you have a penalty yahoo won’t show a cache. Laughs about the Yahoo lowercase penalty.

Ezra Realty
The page is loading very slowly. He’s asking about ranking. Someone suggests tweaking the titles, putting the property name at the front of the title, plus some keywords. Phrases towards the front of the title can help you. There are no real calls to action. The navigation is hidden. There are huge dropdowns. They need more links. Even internally the link structure could be better, more keywords in links. Matt says he’s a little hung up on his backlinks. Runs the risk of being viewed as “brochure ware”. The backlinks are reciprocal links and keyword stuffed domains. Matt Cutts says that he is linking back to many of these other sites. Wikipedia is a good place to start for backlinks. MSN shows over 2000 outbound links. Somone says MSN doesn’t know much about the whole internet. Anchor text stuff is a clear indicator of spaming. You don’t nessecarily have to have your keyword in your anchor text.

bodyabcs.com
They’re saying to put the target in the title tag. “san diego chiropractic”. And the exact phrase should be in the body copy. You don’t want long titles, each page should be an entry point that is focused on the topic of that page. Use each page to reinforce the key phrases, in titles and headlines and reinforced in body text. Matt suggests ditching the cartoon font, so that he can come across as more professional. They’re engaged in the reciprocal llinking stuff also. Matt says do you really need 186 links from links-exchange.net. When you’re working with the city names, there are a ton of old crusty sites that are all about your city, get those links. Matt suggests starting a blog and not to overlook the power of an article in a newspaper. Matt’s mom writes articles for the moorehead kentucky newspaper. Somebody is mentioning the one box results. And ripping the crappy local results. You should get to the 1, 2, 3 of google local. If you sign up for Google local, they’ll send you a postcard and you can then log in and change the local entry. Any business with a real local prescence should look for google local, and can all sorts of extra info. Tim mentions Yahoo too. And someone suggests spending time with your favorite blog search engine and find other chiropracters with blogs. They recommending the local area, chiropractics niches.

realestatelicense.com
Doing ok in googl, having problems with yahoo. yahoo has indexed quite a few pages. Someone says yahoo hates the real estate world, its a dirty niche. The title is good. Noscript is legitimate, but it does get abused. Someone says to ditch the Javascript menus, but noscript is a flag. They’re just not ranking very well in yahoo. The site was started in 98 or 99. There are a lot of pages using similar templates, so they look very similar. Yahoo says there is no penalty, but the content is not very unique, more unique content may help.
Matt says “lets talk frankly” and asks how many sites he has the webmasters says “a handful”. Matt lists a bunch of other domains, and keeps listing more and more domains. Matt says he has 58+ different sites, so he should look for ways to make it not just templates. The days of find and replace are long gone. Once you’re in the supplimental, you’re toast. Someone suggests blogging. Matt says to be careful about cross linking.

compuplus.com
All the direct links on the homepage are images, they should be a text link. There is also no alt attribute on the image links. The URL structure is pretty crazy, with sid stuff and duplicate content issues. It looks like keyword stuff in the URls. It would be better to have more compact URLs. The content is provided by the manufacturer and it needs to be made unique. Start at the top SKUs, the highest margins. Matt says the offpage stuff is good, but the onpage, the URLs are bad, clean up the keywords, and the session ids. Matt recommends reviews and support forum to add unique content.

HiFiSoundConnection.com
The site has been around for 5 years, and is driven by a backend provider. He’s asking what he can do to improve the site. The same unique content issue is the same here, when taking it from a supplier you have to work hard to make it unique. Someone suggests blogging. There’s a 302 redirect on the home page. Canonical issues.

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Linkerbation

Louise starts: “she’s got a great view of something, not sure what” says Todd.
She’s short she says.
Going over the big picture, how we see the trend of the word of mouth marketing.
Characteristics of WOMM, who do you trust, what is WOM, whats WOMM, and whats the difference.
what is CGM, what’s the difference between online WOMM and viral marketing, how can you make Online WOMM work for you.
and how WOMM plays into the buying cycle.

The control of the message is being passed to the consumer, not the marketer.
ad skipping, ad and pop-up, email filtering, cookie deletion, tivo, this tech is helping the consumer filter out marketing messages
the tools are available to everyone very easily,

Trust.
we trust our friends, we trust our social network more than marketers, we know marketers are biased.
she’s showing a forrester research graph about how much consumers trust recoumendations vs brand websites.

Word of Mouth is the way message travel around, offline and online.
honest recommendations, this is why people trust other people, there’s no money exchanging hands.
She’s referring to Malcolm Gladwell and the idea of influencers. WOM is driven by influencers.
organic WOM occurs naturally when people become advocates or evangalists (without you paying for it)

what can we do to accelerate WOM?

finding and empowering the influencers who are already successfully using products and services, offline WOM evolved years ago with cavemen. whats the big difference between online and offline?
online does not dissipate, UGM and content.
a blog lasts for ever but offline networking can only reach so many people.
online WOM is growing.

She’s showing a graph about what marketing tools executives are going to use executives are using email marketing the most, but WOM is next, followed by paid search, blogs.

CGM
CGM is a dialog created by people using forums and blogs and product review sites. CGM is relevant to your product or service, and how can you get them to talk about your serives (we’ll talk about that).
CGM can be influenced but not controled and does not dissipate. CGM can be monitored and measured.

The differences between WOMM and Viral.
Online WOMM is targetting influencers, good content, product or service.
friend to friend, community to community, blog to blogger.

viral tends to be created by outrageous messages, exceptional content value, very unique.

How do you make this work for you:
give influencers something to talk about, good product or service
target the right people, influecners have deep niche knowledge or are using your service, and they have a large social network.

Start by listening, monitor, react when you have and understanding of that they’re saying. CGM monitoring, listening services. CRM services. Technorati, blog search, etc, look who’s talking in your space. She mentioned buzzlogic and artificial intelligence, natural language processing. Don’t forget your customer service department.
She’s being hurried up
Choose the right channel, do some testing and improving, she’s showing a big graph, lots of lines explaining the buying cycle. and the role of WOMM in that.
WOMM is a form of marketing where consumers are in control, marketer can influence but control, you have to target, empower, and accelerate. and listen listen listen.
Todd says he really likes the point about listening.

Lawrence Coburn
He’s talking about widgets and asking how many people are using them, not many.
They really saw widgetts blow up with youtube and their use of their embedable player. There was a big spike when they announced their embedable player. widgets are a proven method for getting your site to go viral. This is a brand new space, its only been going on for a year. Users often don’t understand what widgets are. Its tough to compete against VC money for destination visitors.
organic back links should be optimized with widgets.
if you have a website you should have a widget strategy, for link dev if nothing else.
aggregators, myspace, typepage, etc.
edgefeeders, youtube, photobucket
platforms, widgetbox, snipperoo, google gadgets.
One click adds for music on myspace is huge.
accesibility
you can’t put javascript in myspace and size is important, classic accessibility
customization
can you mess with the colors, can you blend it, can you change the size
content/experience
fully interactive sites embeded in other sites
branding
sharing
you need to be able to grab the widget right from the widget, shows you the HTML so you can spread it

thisnext widget, distributed shopping service, shopcast.
the bitty browser, little embedable browser mobile version work nicely for this.
streampad
chipin, fundraising across sites, click to get the html code to plug it into your site
his favorite widget is from ilike plugs into itunes, sends and upload all your track info to your profile and it generates a widget, no effort required.
mashable just launched stats.
lots of virgin territory.
analytics is missing in the widget environment, so is monetization.
someone will build an ad network for widgets, google is afraid too.
driven my implicit data, no effort what data streams are you generating already
contextually aware widgets
fully interactive experiences in widgets.
sexywidget.com
flyingseeds.com
widgify.com
avc.blogs.com
mashable.com

Todd is talking about marketleap’s widget and their use of backlinks and rotating anchor text.

Aaron Wall
you may not want to start with your own site or product, start with other people’s interest.
salary.com did a study about what mom’s would get paid.
find ideas from social networks, news and bookmarking, do keyword searches on similar ideas.
have a main channel, official company blog or give a popular channel the exclusive, like techcrunch.
create a common link point, book authors, voting. authors should make their own page to leverage the link equity.
build trust and attention before you need it
consider potential blowback ahead of time

headlines
be specific, be controversial, write story to spread, not keywords, great headlines at copyblogger.com

me me me me me
make it easy to relate to someone and they’ll talk about it
lots of bloggers do link searches, digg homepage stories about digg
community involvement rand’s search engine ranking factors, ask for feedback, call out to specific people.

seeding ideas
ask for feedback
make friends (email and IM)
pitch bloggers
social news sites (build accounts)
annoucement timing
announcement location (demo targetting) indentification
buy sponsored posts (payperpost, blogsvertise, reviewme)
Aaron Wall owns part of reviewme

launching a static site
give pleasures, paris hilton gives links, and people will link back. (chartruese)
call in favors
spread out your ideas
interview partners
announce the launch
add linkbait later

Formatting Link Bait
make it easy to indentify
make it polarizing
make it look comprehensive
cite research and link out
istockphoto

I’m about to run out of battery power

Monetizing
make your stuff easy to link at
don’t over-monetize
authority centric search algorithms
rising tide lifts all boats

bubbling up
social news
meme trackers
MSNBC

Don’t compete with yourself
SEO for Firefox, many links, Google “SEO”
he’s begging for links like guy kawaski was.

Rand Fishkin
He’s disagreeing with the youtube popularity, he says it had more to do with the lazy sunday rap.
7 steps to link bait
Find link bait portals
digg (2000 links on average), slashdot, fark, delicious, reddit, boing boing, techmeme, techcrunch, netscape, lifehacker, stumbleupon, shoutwire.

understand link bait audience driven by specific passions, dominated by a few key users who decide your fate, often compelled by headlines, descriptions and content quality. ten ways why google is better than yahoo.

brainstorm effectivly don’t loose focus on target audience, force yourself to stay on-topic with your site, invite contributions, generate 10-20 ideas. generate a bunch of ideas.

build beautiful bait, the look ad feel is important, blogs, article forma, two goals, get on the portals and attact the links second, creating some room for controvery or discussion can inspire more links unique innovative things, graphics. you need stuff that’s going to get links, that has controvery, that all these bloggers will say this is very interesting, i need to link to that.

create a reputation: a strong profile at social media sites, top100 at dig, once a site has been featured several times its easier to get listed. leverage a top digg user.

submit with style: attentoin grabbgin head lines that focuses on users, diggers are like tabloid buyers. highlight interests of the specifc portals audience, self submission is fine, in fact do it quick.

don’t shoot yourself in the foot: don’t send many diggs from the same IP address, the same users digging the same material every time can be dangerous, if you’re in a small “tech” town, be wary of sending more than 10-20 diggs, keep your servers up (most diggers are in san fran) follow your bait with several guest posts/articles. (static format, watch the DB requests)

buzz.stumbleupon.com

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Robin Liss
She runs a consumer review website. They do a lot of public releations outreach.
She going to talk about how to do an interview, she sees a lot of bad interviews. It requires quite a lot of skills.

Be Over Prepared
Get a sense of the topic the reporter wants to cover
figure out your take on the issue
put contact and name info for the reporter at the top
write out 3-5 key one line messages, integrate these with your company. (message points)
research data and facts which back up those points, properly source this data
add funny one liners that sound smart and clever which you can throw in (especially for TV)
annote the memo with boldings and highlitings so your eyes can smoothly jump to a part in the document
try to keep it to one page.
She’s using an example about an interview about apple, where she thought the media was too easy on apple.

Practice
esp for a television or in-person interview
write down a few prospective questions include hard questions
find some willing family member or staff member and practice responded
practice in front of a mirror if its for TV, they’re shots 2-3 minutes so watch too much info
a key skill is th ability to read off the memo by gracefully glancing down
learn how to fill space with “uhm” “ah” “you know” and “like”

develop a relationship with the reporter
this is easier for non-live segments
before you start talking on-message find a common subject you can connect with. Journalism ethiocs because is part of their company message and all reports can relate to
don’t spend too much time schmoozing
don’t be too-nice
for TV and radio, develop a relationship with the producer

give straight answers
if you’re well prepped you’ll have all the info
try to keep answers to 30 minutes
if you don’t know the answer, just say i’m unsure.
feel free and you should certainly correct yourself.

message, message, message
give straight answers, but get your message across
working on your message is an art
drop your message points subtly
like your messagge points, work in your URL subtly
one thing we do at camcorderinfo.com is…
what we believe at camcorderinfo.com is
like what we do at camcorderinfo.com…
camcorderinfo.com is a great resource…
don’t drop the URL more than once ever other question

Be cautious
think what info you want publically available
are you comfortable having people know your business strategy
nothing is off the record, ever
don’t say something to a reporter that you wouldn’t say comfortable to your mother, your boss your wife and a judge
reporters are experts at getting people to divulge info
stick to the rules and don’t sway as smart as you are they’re good at doing that.

David McInnis
prweb.com/pubcon
they have a direct-to-consumer PR, putting the public back in public relations
its placed in new search engines and uses RSS and social media tools.
two primary pillars,
SEO optimization and social media penetration
why direct to consumer
bypass the MSM filter which gives you more control over your message
increase online visibility, more traffic, content in context
SEO-PR
keywords, landing pages and link strategies and write your release.
use tools newsforce.com and PRWeb SEO Wizard
distribution platform, a specially designed platform for SEO distribution.
everything PRweb does is for SEO.
URL Keywords is a new feature.
they just announce businesswire’s EON, and billboard magazine, most commercial newswires offer an SEO distribution and PR web is going to be adding new partners before the end of the year

Why Social Media?: ongoing opportunity.
a nascent part of the industry. attidtudes of people change more than algorithms
tap the new social networks,
blogs are the human powered search engines, provide access to an audience, encourages online discussion.
faster and more complete response than MSM, blogs are moire timely and allow you to track reaction to your press release, MSM cannot do this.
components of social media:
distribution platform
choose a platform that has tools that allow penetration into the social media networks.
post distro network monitor the bloggers that are covering the space.

he thinks the social media rules are crap
do not seed your own content
the blogosphere rewards transperancy
monitor and know the blogosphere
participate in the online dialog long before you need it
be respectful, use living room behavior.

safe bet: adhere to womma guidelines

Gettin started
find a source for a press release, create news, new hires, tipsheets, milestons.
short heads lines are best, and link to your news to current events if possible.
abstract is more important than the body of the release, do something more than regurgitate your first few paragraphs.
lead pargraph. news images, 400×400 or smaller.
body copy, inckude multiple quotes, use the quoteable feature, anchor text, 1 link per 100 words of copy
don’t forget who, what, when, where and why
300 to 800 words
so not forget to SEO attached files, filnames, text of PDF attachments, tag audio/video files file titles and descriptions

they just announced trackbacks and pingbacks.
rss your news release, use feedburner, press-feed, rsspad.com prweb (managed and included)

all releases are editorial scored1 to 3 don’t get wide distro, 4 and 5 do
they monitor trackback spam and they have a human editor.

Lee Oden

time is right
he’s talking to social media press releases.
half of all US internet users visited news sites. yahoo news is most popular.
increasing use of social media, blog search, news search, social news, social bookmarkts, podcasts, video: RSS ties this all together.
you’re able to leverage distribution channels.
online PR is effective for both press and public relations

push and pull PR
push is stuff like press releases, pitching, (editorial new calendars)
pull is marking it easy for the media and your intended audience to find and pull the news themselves. making sure you message is available
he’s showing a spectrum graph of push and pull
wire services and pitching journalists is on the push side.
on the pull side is news search and rss.
media coverage is in the middle.

push examples:
pr, pitching, social newotrks, advertorial
pull:
news search, organic search, social news and bookmark sites and blogs and RSS search engines

blogger relations
be relevant, personalize, make it easy, schwag is good, be persistant.
bloggers are limited on time, and are fickle. look at previous posts and personalize your pitch to them.
summarize what you want them to say and include a link to the full version
free logins and free stuff.
don’t be annoying but be persistant

social media release example
there is no one social media format, there are just elements.
a lot of the same charactersitcs as as traditional release.
a bulleted list of key points, logo, contact info, photo, podcast link (glimpse of an interview)
breaking out quotes. social media links, delicious, digg, technorati tags, and subscription links.
and a link to the traditional press release.
providing a journalist extra info, make it easy to research other sources.
use delicious to archive previous coverage, and tag it and link to it.
after the release has gone out, post it on company blog/media room
bookmark the release and bookmark the pickups
create alternate formats, like a word doc, and a pdf.

measure results
wire services will provide reports, analytics, and alerts, to track pickups.

optimize keywords and links. use social media to expand distribution and use RSS to track results.

Gregg Jarboe
74% of search marketers are now optimizing press releases, up from 34% in 2005.
Advanced tips:
the new york times is training reporters to optimize their news.
a media company hired SEO-pr to help them optimize their stories. their expectations were very high. The CSM called them on august 7th to help with a story being release on the 11th. They want to know the agency did something the CSM could have already done.
want coverage? get visual. say 90% of journalists they’re looking for visuals, add images. 41% of journalists say visuals could dictacte their content.
Post video to youtube, add multimedia, podcasts, video.
Release to canada and the UK
journalists want to be loved, prefer revice majority of information via email. only 4% of journalists will admit to using press release.
email it to them before you put it on the wire.
pitch anchors to CNN and human editors of yahoo news. yahoo news editors are lonley people, pitch them.
Matt Cutts says main benefit is not in pagerank of links in press release. the links from sources that pick up your story do count.
who gives lines? Blogs. pitch Huffington Post and boing boing. even the a-list can be pitched (ahead of time)
over 1700 news stores and over 390 blog posts were generated.
generated record traffic to the CSM site.
the top 2 sources of traffic were cnn and yahoo news. 10% of the traffic came from canda and the UK.
the huffington post generated 3.4 times more unique visitors to the CSM site than ABC news.
beging researching key blogs in your niche.
the traffic was sticky, they were reading an 11 part series, 5 pages to each part, plus a videoo, plus a podcast. traffic that clicks.
4081 new links from 763 additional blogs to rank #12. (it was ranked 96 previously) in a week.
original and unique content
pages designed for humans
hyperlinks intented to help people find interesting related content.
Graphics.

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9:01: Waiting to get started
Brett mentioned that there is a lot of new speakers this morning. He’s talking about the day Danny announced his retirement.
9:09: Danny starts
He says he’s a little tired cause he had to do a drug deal with Vanessa of Google.
He’s telling a story about taking his kids to soccer practice, he’s driving along, thinking about how to open the keynote and he missed the exit. His kids were late, they sacrificed for us. He’s asking when people started going to webmasterworld, and the role the site has in the industry:
Google Dance, the big google party. He’s talking about the vocabulary that webmasterworld gave the industry
Googleguy
Florida webmasterworld is the place for storm warnings.
Canaries, webmasterworld is a canary in the coal mine, two groups will know something is wrong if something breaks, librarians and siteowners, webmasters.
Unification the SE’s just announced a sitemap standard and alot of that has come off of webmaster forums.
Frank a special word for brett, he’ll ban all the spiders, blogging in his robots.txt brett has a reputation, the frank sinatra of search.

Ten Years on…
Maybe this stuff has some legs. Maybe search will stick around, when he first started, who knows if it’ll all fall apart. At this point he thinks it will stick around.
Business week said this year that “lowly search ad” is slightly below classified ads and slighlight above flyers on telephone poles.
and anyone feel video hype is taking over?
How about some stats… They all go up, except yahoo (laughs)
people are spending on search, it is a fundamental marketing medium, an essential.
people are spending a lot more on search:
some due to contextual pollution, video print, adsense
some due to click prices rising due to better conversion tracking, competition, brand money flowing in
some due to increasing search volume up 55% from dec 2004 to 2005.

he’s showing a quote from time warner “we can start doing what google does — auctioning off spots”
WPP “we don’t want to miss this one”.
just because you bought it at an auction, doesn’t make it search
search marketing is what defines search, its a certain kind of marketing.

Media post on vanity fair “carter said that while he uses google, he can’t remember a single ad he’s ever seen on the seearch engine. the crowd, while it didn’t applaud this revelacion, rumbled approvinly as it mulled carter’s statement”
you don’t remember because you need to remember it. brand building is all about making think you need something search is the opposite.
time for a reminder of what search marketing is all about:
your job as an SEM is to put ads in front of people who are expressing a desire. he refers to john keynote from yesterday.
search is all about expressing desire, we as SEM’s understand how to get in front of these people.
SEO is all about influecing upaid listings, he thinks its all about Public relations of search.
search advertising is the act of doing this through paid search
SEM is the combination.

Reverse Broadcasting
search is a reverse broadcasting medium.
broadcast advertising is all about trying to build desire, most of whom aren’t interested, interrutptions, like TV ads
desire marketing
you’re listening to the people themselves broadcasting what they want to you, and they’re searching and saying what they want and you as a marketer tune into that, the audience is just as broad as broadcast, just more efficent, search has way higher return.
Yellow pages approach this.
you have to identify the key channels, the major SEs and niche players, mobile search, etc.
you’re sucessful because you have the skills to identify where the new channels are. you’re always looking for where referrals are comong from, we’re like location scouts. we should be very proud of the job we’re doing. we’re an army of marketers, but nobody;s ever seen anything like this before.
search is not an auction.
nor that it is PPC
its not print ads in an auction
or a radio marketing company
nor are contextual ads.
he shows a google search box, he expresses his desire and his desire is fufilled.

contextual pollution, when you lump other things into search it makes it hard to see what’s going on
if stuff starts slowing down it will be hard to tell if its search
search grew up at the depths of the internet downturn, search won’t be the one to go under
it will be the players who widened out.

vertical search, part of 3rd gen jump
1st was works on page, humans, on-page
2nd generation link analysis (turned out to be a miserable failure, laughs)
3rd vertical and personalized
links not abandoned trusted ones used more but also supplemented with other data.

what vertical search is and is not
he shows a spectrum of search and desire info, news, health, shopping, music, video, cars
vertical search focuses on one specific vertical, Danny likes specific search as a name better.
narrow focus/index/database means less off-topic junk
you can sort in different wars, use different display metaphors.
personal/social search
reshaping results based on what you visit or your friends visit or what people in aggregate visit.
definetly helps to solve the spam problem (he says we’ll rigg everything) by greatly multiplying “fronts” in the arms race.
everyone sees custom results.
he shows the google personalized search feature. it learns the sites you go to. he thinks google should pay more attention to this, butt they’re working with youtube.
he was searching for “children’s wagons” lots of bad results.
he talked more about getting decongestant for vanessa, where the top result for a search on the dosages waas for elephants.
now he’s using myweb2.0 as an example.
advice for surviving 3rd gen:
watch the verticals
have great content
especially great titles and descriptions.
he’s talking about his post about bad titles on the google blog

the main thing that we’re going to struggle with as SEMs google starts to go towards search, they want to pull us along with them, like google radio ads.
“are you a performance marketer or a search marketer” any marketing that you do is tied to its metrics. metrics marketing maybe a better term.
all marketing medicums will continue to shift towards accountability through solid metrics.
don’t be afraid of that.
search is a fundamental advertising medium like tv, radio, print and outdoors.
a defining media behavoir said BWeek

“when i search for recipes i don’t get martha stewart” from the apprentace.
now he’s talking about the pontiac ads, that told you to go google “pontiac”
remax has a partnership with google earth
maxim thogh it would be cool to put eva longria on google maps.

search will be part of overall campaigns
campaigns outght to be ever more and seek to drive searches
search will pull money from other mediums andoforce those to be more accountable.
More complications
more automation, non-search products will continue to be tossed at advertisers automation will remain important
remember complication is also nice job security.
He says by next year google’s ad system will be something completly different.

more vertical, more personal
more balance for paid & organic
more lawsuits
he’s showing an article about the AOL search data and the old women they found.
we tell se’s things we wouldn’t tell our closest friends, still nothing has really changed, talk of control and export of our data all this week but months now and still no control panels he says there should be a way to delete all past search data
copywrite channeles, the crazyness in belgium. they were taken totally out of google.
australia is considering a new law that could make crawling harder.
he jokes that google has a wired connected to all speakers that makes them say google.
he really likes the idea that SEs ar not having to go through and ask for permission to spider pages, its opt out.
in places where you can’t automatically request permission, maybe it needs to stop
book search, they’re not providing cached pages of books
cached pages, you can opt out.

new company purchases SEW and conferences and they didn’t reach agreement, he’s phasing himself out and will be doing some stuff on his own. He’ll keep doing searchengineland.com on dec 11th. SEW he’ll be leaving on nov 30th.

Questions
someone is asking about contextual pollution. danny can’t track contexual advertising. trying to get on sites that come up top for target phrases if you can’t get in the organic results.

wants to hear more about some watershed privacy lawsuit, what’s going to happen if google accidentally drops everyone’s spreadsheets in the gov’s hands. danny thinks the AOl lawsuit was the watershed. he sees laws that will be enacted whewn politicos think that you can get their search results, he suggess filing an FOIA to get a senator’s search data and then you’ll see a law protecting that privacy.

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I’ve been rocking these all conference:

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Brett’s wife is pregnant.

Tom Hughes
He’s going to talk about brand positioning research. He starts off by taking a high level view. Putting aside CTRs and conversion. While we’re develivering website performance, we’re delivering brand experience. The website is the front line for delivering brand experience. Are we delivering the intended experience for the brand? Optimal brand performance increases thbe efficiency and consistency of communications, it gets everyone on the same page, drives strategry for search optimization, connects website efforts to sustainable business performance. Where do we have strengthgs over our competitors beware of “green fees” (if airlines started talking abtou safety, beward of things that everyone has to have to be in the game, things that ever brand has, look for advatanges that are unique to the brand) issues. What the customer’s ideal looksl ike and how can we close the gaps.
Secondary research: Syndicated studies, market data and industry reports.
Primary research: focus groups, individual interviews, surveys.
DIY: talk to customers, talk to employees gather secondary resarch information.
Get help with: questionaire design and analysis of data., leave these to the pros
He’s using jaguar as an example, every employee knew that “style” was the brand.

takeaway: a positioning and messaging template
start with position, essecnce of how you are compellingly different.
then idenfity who you are and what you do
differentiation how are you better
Siginificance why customer should care
messaging support key messages that deliver the brand (point-at-ables, what can we point at that will reinforce this)
emotional support, key motivational needs delivered by the brand

deliver optimal brand experience on the home page
incorporate pictures or taglines on sitepages that resonate positioning
define and audit search terms
launch banner ad campaigns that resonate the brand positioning
brand leve
product level
customer segment level

dell was at a crossroads for large vertical segments, use generic or vertical positioning? they conducted research to find pain points for the federal gov and they built a positioning to answer that and launched flash based ad. the browser he was trying to demo the ad on didn’t have flash installed. the first banner led you to a tour. there was a DC and a bagdad area to click, each led to seperate tours, the bagdad one to a defense oriented tour. They hit every pain point they discovered. increased click trough by over 200% and it drove buy rates over 15%. the campain was not rocket science, its about emrging web optimization and customer intelligence.
line of site on position + use it to guide web optimization.

Gord Hotchkiss
Keynotes at the show: guy kawasaki, gord bumped all the font sizes up on his powerpoint.
he also liked john battelle, he didn’t see alot of people writing his important point down, the notion of intent and how search is the navigation of web 2.0. gord says that really really really important.
Why is research important?
Search Marketing:

1. Right message
2. right person
3. right place
4. right time
5. right experience

accept the path that the customer is in control. He’s usinig HP as an example of how not to do this, he’s showing a google SERP for digital cameras, HP is showing an ad for desktops and notebooks, the ad sends you to the main page, and there’s no cameras on that page. Gord says “what the hell”. He’s offering two hours of free consulting so he doesn’t have to keep pointing it out.
Now he’s showing a brilliant study of eyetracking that he made. Guy Kawasaki has his own entry on “how did you hear about this” on istockphoto.
Intent is key
get inside your customer’s mind
can’t do it based on query
you need to research, start simple, just do it, ask your customers, when you bought from us talk me through the process.
personas, stuff all that info into one framework.
how intent imacts searching
say your forgot to buy your brotherinlaw a brithday present, you don’t really like him
you know he likes john irving.
he lives out of town
want to spend $20 $25
you’ll likely start in the sponsored results the amazon ad matches the intent exactly.
as opposed to
you have lunch with someone who talks about the book, you read two irving books, you liked one, you didn’t like the other.
most people will look in the organic results with this intent, the second result has a good scent, its about a review.
Intent should impact scanning behavior for research type queries we would tend to “thin slice” sponsored content our of the way
for the purchase typ queriues we should focus more on the sponsored ads.
80 searchers on an eye tracking station.
a research scenario looking for info about the bellagio, another purchase scenario about making reservations.
people tend to take the top 3 and they break them off into a consideration set. sponsored ads are included. we like to have at least one organic result in the consideration set. When you’re doing a purchase the consideration set is more top heavy the reserch intent is more bottom heavy. much heavier CTR for the research queries on organic results, 100% of the clicks were in organic, in the purchase group it was split about 50/50.
The purchase group focused on the area needed to make a reservation, but ignored the text, the research group scanned the entire site. the user has control, don’t try to fool around with that. You can’t force them scan parts of the page they don’t want to scan, the user is in control.
intent is important, understand the target, udnerstand the intent, get the message in the right place, get the message right, get it there at the right time. deliver the right experience.

Glenn Alsup
he’s talking about malcolm gladwell’s book blink. and how the psychologist can thin slice the newly weds who can stay together.
the area between the user and the object casinos knnow the stats, but can’t know how the user will interact with the games.
qualitative vs quantitative
qualitative reject the idea that social science cans be measured like natural scinces, they feel that human behavoir is always bound to context
quantiative belive that human behavoir is measurable.
User research: understand situation and background, goals and objectives, use cases
tactics: strategic focus groups
model observation
case study agilent, low cost, technically complex products.
the goal of the research was ways to improve the search.
surveys show engineers prefer to do their own resarch
metholodgy:
heuristics study, qualifying questionaire, usability lab testing.
Test plan: 1st pass 27% success rate (he’s showing a video of the testing, the users are frustrated
2nd pass 53% success rate. by using cascading menus on the new design, the engineers enjoy the experience more.
the participant, the facililtaro and observer(s).
there are labs that can recomend participants for your test
the facilitator is the most important, they are the people who conduct the study. they’ve used PHDS and people with common sense.
the observers are outside the lab two way mirrors or cameras.
the denver election commisioner was recently fired, they do lots of testing on machines. there is a testing doc that has to be followed before it can be approved.
remote usability: it doesn’t have to take place in a traditional lab. they’re using the resturant at aureole at mandalay bay. they use tablet PCs for the wine list. You can actually see and here the interactions with the menus from denver. remote testing is much cheaper.
he’s talking about branding and showing the airplane tales. There are pictures of animals on frontier airline planes, when they were doing testing, people were asking where are the animals they were concerned with which animal they were flying on.

Dana Todd SEMPO
sempo does lots of research, tracking baseline data, they track and trend over 100 data points.
sizing the marketing, pricing shifts, resource allocation, click pricing, click fraud, product demand.
SEO still has strong demand as an SEM tactic.
migration of SEO and PPC is towards inhouse.
click price elasticity is nearly capped out
awareness and concern about click fraud is growing.
percent of advertisers engage in:
80% engage in SEO
78% in SEM
40% paid inclusion
more people than ever before offering SEO, the dollar value going into SEO is lower than PPC.
There is a migration of SEO and SEM inhouse, dissatisfaction with agencies is high
huge influx of training resources. a whole new big product markets.
21% say they’re tapped out on PPC budgets. 4 out of 5 could tolerate increases.
agencies are more concerned about click fraud a ful 33% its a problem they’re tracking, another 33% think its a problem but aren’t tracking it. See Gord to donate click data for fraud study
www.sempo.org 2006 survey is up, one respondent gets a prize, it runs untill nov 29th. If you take the survey you get a copy of the results.

Brett Tabke
They’re doing a follow up survey to their older customer satisfaction survey, there were a lot of surprises last time.
“The Big Question” a book:
customer satisfaction survey’s suck.
WMW is looking for a new one to do this, how likely are you to recommend product X to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10
1-6 are detractors, 9-10 are promoters.
promotors-detractors = NPS net promotor score.
he asks that question about pubcon. about 80% are promoters.

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Amanda Watlington
She says its an exciting topic, because she’s seeing a lot of it. (She’s talking very loud and enunciating powerfully).
Typical causes of duplicate content

• Multiple domains
• Re-designs
• cms
• subdomains
• landing page
• syndicated, scraped or shared content

Tools for detection, your ability to search is your best tool, use a 10 word unique snippet, she lists a few tools.
Multiplte domains
they can occur when ownership of domains changes, when domains are purchased, when there is an IT and marketing disconnect or lots of changes in personell.
She’s using the example of www.monkbiz.com vs www.monkeybuisness.com the second domain was purchased later .
Use the unique snippet and check the content, check for redirections, 200 vs 301, and change them to 301. Remember when there is one there may be more.

site redesign
When a site is redisggned and the urls are changed without an seo plan in place. no type of site is immune. Platform changes (html to php) site with good search traction will simply have a bigger footprint to fix.
she’s using ferretfashioon.com as an example.
Check for more pages in the engines than the site has.
depending on how the site is built this can be done via series of rules, 404 trapping
301 redirects
make sure any actions give the results you want
forward planning beats follow up.
make sure you have a custom 404.

CMS
ussually drive directly from the platform, sometimes the results of how products are merchandized, look for the problem at the product level page. she’s using a lightiing store as an example.
This is a very disjointed, badly organized session and the loudness of her speaking is harsh.
check product-level pages.
typically this problem requires a complete URL re-archetecture. The goal is to have a single url associated with a product page, no matter where it is linked to from the categories. this is not easy and the fix depends on the site’s system.

Subdomains
multinationals and coprorate sites often have this problem.
an example is vermin.com which also have information on rats and mice, so they have made rats.vermin.com and they have mice.vermin.com
its not hard to detect if you know the reasons behind it.
to repair this treat them as seperate sites, content strategy should be used to make sure that the same content does not appear more than once.

landing pages
When a webmaster is testing multiple creatives and landings.
look at the search results, this is not a repair issue, this is a prevention issue.
use 301’s if this happens, but use a robots.txt before it happens prevent it before it happens

syndication and scraping
large sites are targets, some are the result of contractual agreements
there are legal issues.
vermins.com makes their content available to rodents.com, this happens often with manufacturers.
normally you can just ask where the content comes from
to fix it you must try to ad value and uniquify the content.
discuss scrapers with your legal department.

Bill Slawski SEObyTheSea
The main problem with duplicate content is that SEs don’t want to show the same content over and over, but which version do they show? are there crawling issues related to having lots of the same page?
Large commercial site with 3500 pages, but google showed 95k pages, and he started seeing some patterns, one page showed up in ggoogle 15k times with different URLs, it was a lotus site. there were little widgets that expanded pieces of data, some pages had 21 of the widgets and each click produced a new URL which was getting indexed. Internal link pop was suffering and not all the pages on the site were being indexed, the widget was changed to javascript that didn’t create new URLs, the rankings went up and the number of pages in google went down.
Sites that practice ecomerce, but take prod descriptions right from manuf. when lots of other people do the same thing you’re hurting yourself. you should get unique content
alternate print pages, you can use alternate styles instead of alternate styles, or use robots or no-index meta tags on the print pages
syndicated feeds, most people like to use full feeds, but bloglines sometimes ranks better than your blog, how do you become the authority
cannonical domain name issues, 301 the non-www urls. it is a flaw with MSN’s algo that redirected pages may be classified as duplicate.
session ids, multiple data variables, keep stuff simple, risk mitigation, keep it simple as possible and don’t let the SEs decide.
pages with content that is too similar, title, meta, navigation are all the same, don’t just change little bits of pages.
copyright infringement some pages get copied so much its not possible to run to the legal dept everytime, the key is to make your page the authority.
subdomains, a site sells subdomains as a premier service, each one had a lot of the same pages on each one.
article syndication is it worth doing article synidation, they bring in pages, if the pages are different enough they might get indexed.
mirror’d sites may get ignored at the time crawling, which mirror’d site shows up.

Don’t Crawll the DUST Different URLs Same Content
there is a white paper and a google tech talk. it looks at some of the basic ways an SE can handle duplicate issues, like trailing slashes, http or www vs non-http, non-www pages.
Shingles are hash based was of comparing pages.
Dustbuster looks at rules for the page how the urls are formed and how there maybe dupes, and decide what it should ignore and what it shouldn’t. like google.com/news news.google.com and www.nytimes.com nytimes.com one is a pr10, one is a pr7
the dust paper does not detail which pages are kept which are discarded.
Try to avoid duplicate content as much as possible, you can’t control the people outside of the site so much, but you can control your own site.

Collapsing Equivalent Results.
MSN paper, it tries to go into which pages should be show out of dupes. example
ymca.net
ymca.net/index.jsp
and there are .com mirrors.
how should the SE handle these?
results storage, it keeps all the results, it uses a query independant rank factor, like a PR or page quality, navigational context.
it selects .com because “users prefer .com” users prefer shorter version of the url, prettier URLs. it might also include navigational version, whatever has the less redircts, less latency. you could be clicking on ymca.com but actually being sent to ymca.com/index.jsp. You should look at white papers and stuff a insite into what engineers think may be important. don’t take all of this as gospel. keywords in the URL may also indicate which url will be shown.
Some sites have lots of different TLDs and the local TLD may be the one you’re shown by an SE. which page is more popular like link popularity, which page gets more clickthroughs.
lots of potential ways content can be duplicated, it can negativly influence your site
you should plan carefully, SEs are likely working on solutions, and some descisons on which page to display may surprise you.

Tim Converse Yahoo
He says all the suggestions so far are right on.
A lot of what he does are anti-black hat measures, and he says that might make him talk adversarially.
He uses “dupes” as an abbreiviation.
There are two bad examples of user experience, showing the same content 10 times and only showing one result.
they use crawl filtering, index-time filtering, query time filtering. They only show 2 results from one site.
they often want to retain some results instead of just not crawling them, because They use local preference for searchers, if there is a slight variaiton, and redunancy.
Alternate document forms, legitimat syndication, multiple regional markets, partial-dup pages from boiler plate, and accidental duplication are all legit reasons why people may duplicate content.
accidental duplication maybe due to session ids and soft 404s.
Now he’s switching to blackhat issues.
Dodgy duplication issues
duplication across multiple domains unnessecarily
aggregation can range from useful to abusive.
indentical content with minmal added value
repeated statements
scraper spammers, they attempt to combat this stuff and they do their best to have the orignal content, and they won’t say much about how. this problem is becoming worse.

Brian White Google
He’s going over the different types of dups.
duplicate detection happens at different places in the pipeline. different types of filters are used for different types of duplicated content. The goal is to serve one version of the content.
He says to pick a specific URL and block the non-preferable version, like with robots.txt. use 301s block printable versions.
Do you call the fragments or named anchors? Most people like to call them named anchors. these may cause issues, the whole page ill be used, anything after the # will be ignored.
Boilerplates can cause isssues, lots of boilerplate=lots of simmilarity
the same content in different languages is not duplicate
the same content on local TLDs is not duplicate
multiple domains with the same content should be 301′d.
Syndication: if you syndicate your stuff, include an absolute link to the original issue, if you use syndicated articles, just being aware they may not rank.
there are several ways to handle scrapers, SEs are working on it, google.com/dmca.html and blog bots spoofing googlebot.
make your pages unique and valuable.

Google just said: NoFollow should really be “untrusted”, they will follow no follow links for discovery but the link with the nofollow tag won’t affect rankings.

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Tim Converse Yahoo
He doesn’t work for the crawler group, but he knows that they find annoying. Crawlers are simple minded. Visit URL, store contents. Extract all links, decide when to crawl those links and decide when to refresh that page. Their crawlers runs continuously. External links and domain registration is how they find new domains. Crawlers are behind a few years from modern browsers, as in javascript, flash, css. your links should be in vanilla html, don’t rely on fancy other things being or not-being processed.
The perfect site for crawlers:
all pages reachable from root page, tree structure. Link to a sitemap.
links should be extractable in plain html, view source, or use old school webbrowser.
if every distinct URL matches up with distinct content, multple URLs to same cotnetn looks like dupe
limit dynamic paraments,
sessions and cookies should not determind content.
they won’t crawl stuff that is blocked in robots.
they do pay attention to internal anchor text.
Dynamic sites
constructed on the fly, almost an obsolete meaning. the url has arguments after the question mark. SE’s look at the URL if there is lots of parameters, its likely to be duplicated.
stay away from sessid urls.
map non-? urls to dymamic content
or provide session id free way to navigate the site.
soft-404 traps are bad. if the URL is bogus, send a 404.
worst case is a status 200 on a bad URL with a link that doesn’t exist, soft-404 trap makes it hard to get real content.

robots.txt
evil bots may not obey, but all major SEs will.
don’t accidentally screen good bots out, often robots will screan every bot but a single one.
yahoo added extensions to robots.txt: regexp syntax. google also supports the same syntax, use to screen out dupes.
when the rules disagree, the longest pattern wins.

moving sites
301 to new site and hang on to old domain as long as possible, as much as they can they will migrate ranking to a new site (this is being reworked). Map old paths to the new paths rather than just redirect to the root.

site explorer
links, when the last crawl was, what the representation in the index.
authenticate site at siteexplorer and specific a feed of URls to crawl.

He’s now showing a list of resources and help pages.

Brett says there will be a big annoucement from the SEs tomorrow at the super session about this stuff!

Vanessa Fox Google
What ever will work out well for the visitors will work our well for the SEs, how well can a visitor navigate your site, are all the pages crawlable via links, how accessible is your site, ie with extras turned off or a mobile browser.
Take an objective look using a text browser, have someone look at your site and see how easily they can find things.
Use technology wisely: have alternate ways to access stuff. Don’t use splash pages, minimize flash, use alt tags, don’t put text in images, don’t use frames, minimize javascript. Use transcripts for videos.
Get the most out of your links: use anchor text links, minimize redirects, make sure every page on your site is accesible by static text links. make sure you have an HTML site map and link to it from your main page.
Webmaster Central: crawl errors, bot activity, robots.txt problems, use a sitemap file.
Check your site in the SERPs: she’s using an example where a site’s site: command shows redirect pages, bad title tags, incorrectly optimzed flash pages.
Is only the URL in the SERPs that means you may be blocking acces to a crawl
if all titles and descriptions are the same that is bad, have unique description and title tag.
if your description is loadin.. loading… loading, you’ve got problems.
She’s showing webmaster central.

Mark Jackson
Don’t haphazrdly jump into a redesign. he’s showing a picture of micheal jackson young and old it says “Be Careful”.
think about SEO early in the process, begining to end. Make sure you have the content. Use keyword research for Information Archecture. Balance cool design with strategic, no flash sites. assign keywords to each page and each URL, 3 phrases per page. validate the site, make it section 508 compliant. copy should compliment keywords. Use 301s.
Information architecture
Authority sites are very deep. write good content for each product, put keywords in descriptions. keep old content, like archives newsletters. Study analytics, current pages could be ranking.
Size matters. wikipedia is a very very deep site, its an authority site.
SE friendly doesn’t have to be ugly (he shows and ugly site)
He’s using an exmaple of a site with a flash popup on the homepage. you should keywords on your homepage and have navigation.
avoid image, flash or javascrip navigation. it is better to use css/text navigation. use keywords in anchor text, name pages using keywords.
validate all pages on the site, esp the homepage and sitemap. limit use of javascript, put it in a includes file, use CSS. watch page load and times. host on apach or IIS and use URL rewriting.
he’s using an example of cookies by design where they cut the page size from 120k to 26k and put keywords in left-hand navigation.
Don’t use spacer.gif The site ranks pretty well. (#19 on gifft baskets?)
250 words of content for interior pages, 400 on homepage, no keyword stuff, make it readable, link to relevant pages, internal linking is very important. Don’t use “Click Here”.
He’s using an example (conferencecall.com) they use web conference in internal links and they rank at 25 now.
watch URL structure, and canonical domain, pick www or non-www and stick to it.
Use URL rewriting.
Use 301s.
Hypens or underscores? very unimportant, use either.
Unique title, description, and keywords, put the most important words first.
don’t stuff keywords tag, but use a call to action in your description tag.
now he’s using an example palmharbor.com they put modular homes/manufactured homes/mobile home in the title tag and they rank well now. Wikipedia beats them in some places (size matters).
use good IA, use keywords, keep URLs static and use 301s.

Brett Tabke
He’s talking about webmasterworld. They have about 2.5 million pages. The content can be rolled a lot of different ways. They also have a mobile version of the entire site, and a printer friendly version. something like 20 million pages the SEs could possibly see. About two years ago the rankings totally dissapeared because a bot got into the printer friendly version and caused duplicate content problems.
They just reworked the entire site’s URL structure. The most challenging programming he’s ever done. they didn’t want to redirect the old URL, they just used the new URL for new content. The new keyword urls worked better for SEs, they’re turning up for more keywords. User’s bookmarks were a big cause of confusion. They’re using a dozen different variations. The SE’s haven’t hassled them, they’re indexed better than ever before.
The site is all custom software brett wrote. He setup a big network of sites for john deere. they got a lot of questions about how to structure a site. try to find the sweet spot between SEs and users. The SEs are digital and the users are analog. Just before infoseek was sold they were working on a theme engine, where a site would be indexed as a whole for 20-50 keywords. He brings up the theme pyramid table, and the webmaster world table. The structure is simple and based on keywords. They callit the “longer tail”.

Questions:
someone suggests making your site so that a blind person can use it.

someone is asking about hidden divs and saying google traffic has tailed off
vanessa says if the javascript is turned off, the divs should be viewable, and hide the divs via javascript

if you use a google sitemap, the sitemap only augments the natural links. In addition to the “free crawl” says yahoo.
google seems to be case sensative, vanessa suggests redirect to the chosen uppercase or lowercase situation, yahoo agrees.

Someone is asking about page load time.
Yahoo says page load time and page size don’t matter for the crawler, but its not a good idea for a user. Yahoo doesn’t penalize pages that take a long time to load or that are large. Google agrees, there is a timeout, and they’ll only use up a certrain amount of bandwidth on the site. Google won’t penalize for long times or large size, matt did a post about. Its about sales, not traffic.

Someone is asking about multiple urls pointing to the same site.
There will be a session about duplicate content after lunch.

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Wow, the exhibit hall just opened and the Google guys were taking 100 beta testers for their website optimizer and it was mobbed, pushing and shoving. Brutal.
Christine Churchill is asking how many people are doing international marketing, quite a few hands went up.

Dixon jones:
He says he only speaks english, but europe is his home turf. He’s expressing to MSN spaces for speeches and things that he does.
Receptional is an international marketing agency, they have two top 10 ranks for “internet markting”.
Europe has 90mm more internet users than the US right now and there is another half billion that aree coming online soon. There are 40mm who speak english in the UK. In UK and Sweeden 10% of all ad spend is online, that’s bigger than the US.
This should tell you that your market is 5 times larger than you previously thought.
The US is only the 7th richest place via GDP, but via population its the richest county. Real GDP growth rate shows “weath of the future”: China #10, India 24. The US is 139th. (between namibia and guatemala).
Attack is the best form of defence (unless you are guy kawasaki, in which case military metaphors are banned).
Language differences can be a boon for SEO’s, in the english langague “london” has 50 million results, but in spanish it only has 4million results, but in a few years there will be as many people speaking spanish as english on the web. in greek its 700k.
He says there is no easy way to do international SEO. You will need a website in the local language from top to bottom.
You can do the SEO yourself in the language, or you can find a local SEO.
If you do try to do SEO yourself:
Buy a TLD for the country
or host the site in the target country
regionally theme your links
use native translators
minimize legal issues and “troops on the ground” untill you are confident.

Jessica Bowman business.com
This is her second day on the job with business.com.
She asks how many people have optimized or are going to for a language you don’t speak.
Keyword research
you need a seed list, brain storm with a native speaker and go to the competition.
Often other country SEOs aren’t up to snuff so sometimes keyword lists won’t be good on competitor sites.
keyword tools are a challenge, wordtracker and overture is not good, she recommends trellian’s keyworddiscovery.
The volum of search results in english tends to correspond to the volume of searches. Like competition numbers.

Page Optimization
find a native copy writer, but its not always an option.
Translation companies, not many know SEO.
learn the translation process inside and out, breakdown is inevitable.
They use automate tools, not good for SEO. Get a demo of these tools.
Sometimes translations are out of sync.
Consider SEO and non-SEO version of the translation data. Sometimes certain words need to be translated a certain way, but they won’t want to do the whole site like that.
Check the translated copy. examples of problems:
“you are not allowed to login” for an incorrect password error
wrong words.
different words referencing the same things on the same page.
Make sure that your validators check against the english version. otherwise they’ll miss inaccuracies.
sometimes it comes back very long and doesn’t fit in the allocated space.
content added to expand on the meeting (legal issues) sometimes the translation services add stuff that was purposesly left out
train the translator on SEO give examples of good and bad.
Send useful info, screenshots, is it a button, link etc character limits.
send corrections back to translation company.
“car rental” vs “car hire” the company could not translate UK english.
germans have high expectations, translation needed to be accurate,
german tends to come back 3 times longer than the english.
german grammar is a killer for SEO, like cancatenation.
There are two forms of the german language. formal vs informal
treat UK vs american as a different language.
the british are more verbose
you need a native speaker to review copy.
if you are translating into spanish you must consider which region you’re targetting.
use North American spanish for US spanish speakers
spain spanish is very different.

Micheal Bonfils SEMInternational.com
10 steps to crack Southeast asia, about 300 million internet users, the majority is coming from chinese speakers (118MM), japan (86m) south korea (34m). China on 9% of the population is online. if china had the same penetration rate as taiwan they’d have (784m) users, it would almost double the total internet usage.

1. undertand your audience
2. understand domainnames
3. hosting
4. SEs
5. translations
6. keywords
7. paid search
8. organic search
9. analytics
10. red tape

Understanding your audience what is funny and creative over there may not be funny and creative here. (he’s showing some corny cartoons) the internet is used for researching, but the buying is often done downstairs. products are cheaper, branding and research is great, direct marketing may not work as well. In china about 50% of all usage comes from a cafe.

Know the major SEs the big SE in china is baidu (62.1% of the market) google has 25% and yahoo has 10%. Baidu’s growth is huge. in taiwan 90% use yahoo, 5% google, in japan 55% use yahoo, 35% use google and 5% use msn, in south korea, 63% use naver, 14% use daum and 11% yahoo korea. He’s showing a “bruce lee search relationship chart”.

Get an asian domain name make sure your domain name is pronouceable, google is not pronoucable in china, they call it googoo, they can’t make the “gle” sound. the TLDs are .cn/.com.cn, .kr/ .co.kr .jp/.co.jp .tw/.com.tw .hk/.com.hk look at competitor TLDs. www.cnnames.net you can ussually easily purchase asian TLDs.

get hosting you can host here, the access is very slow, but economical and easy to pay for. Hosting in asia can be very expensive. Chinese hosting is very fast for chinese users, they are politically regulated (the bigger the more regulated) online payment systems can be hard to find, you oftne have to wire. www.net.cn, xinnet (he showed some hosting companies).

Translate Well don’t make mistakes:
pepsi: meant to say brings you back to life it really said pepsi brings you ancestors back from the grave.
coca-cola: they found a word that sounded like coca-cola, but the word means “bite the wax tadpole”
ad:tech: Cost per lead translated badly to cost per leadership.

develop your keywords the same expression in english may be expanded to 15 variations. simplified chinese, traditional chinese (hong kong) and taiwaneese.

Impliment Paid Search: Start with paid search, SEO is a “tough nut to crack”. Local paid search “baidu” paid listings are sometimes in the center of the listings in baidu.

Organic Search similar SEO to the US. link pop is not as strong a factor (in google it is still). think asian (webcrawler and infoseek) think local, local company favoritism, local hosting, local domain. (He shows a list of submission links).

Understanding reporting: daily spending reporting, he shows a baidu keyword report. its hard to find cost-per-impression in china as much. Yahoo is similar, Impliment google analytics.

Understand the Red Tape: in china: customer service is very limited, not as friendly as the US, they’ll hang up on you etc. No APIs yet. ebay is one of the only companies that has an API from baidu. CPM reporting is missing. Kickbacks and discounts are very commonplace there. bribery for favoritism is commonplace. SEs often give discounts to agencies sometimes. Poor payment methods, you’ll probably have to wire funds. political favoritism, chinese competitors are partnered with the gov, money flow goes in they don’t like money flow out. High speed access is limited, most people are 56k, except for hong kong and taiwan.

Barry Lloyd is in china so:
Andy Atkins-Kruger:
He says brits are verbose, heh. Multilingual search blog.
He’s showing a sort of venn diagram of SEO, PPC, pr and something else (I missed it).
Now a graph of how the internet grew, africa asia and europe are on top.
Research is key. he uses “football boots” in british, with would be “soccer cleats”. but spain swould be the biggest market for that. You can chose central control or an in-country agency.
trans-optimization:
keyword list,
glossary,
translation,
optimization
You do need a local domain, its not always possible but if you can get it, you should, local links are also important, but beware of duplicate content issues.
Most of the time the SERP result numbers are corrrelated to the amount of searches.
plurals and singulars are often very different in languages. football boots vs scarpe da calciao/scarpa da calcio. Football boots are never searched for as a singular, but in italian they’ll search for both. prepositions and particles, people search both with and without prepositions. Accents, people will also search both with and without. 50% of search done by french people don’t include accents where they’re suposed to. Alternate characters: germany had a spelling reform in 2000, people might search both with the correct characters, some won’t. aggregation/concatenation keywords often run together. people tend to split terms commonly when they search. (less competition on the less-correct terms). declensions, SE”s often don’t do well with non-romain languages. local algos are written to handle these better. free online mistranslation, don’t use them.
There are many markets where google isn’t first, go local.

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John said that New Orleans pubcon was the first time he talked about federated media and if this audience didn’t boo him off the stage he felt it could be a good idea.
He’s talking about digitizing the back-office and showing a graph of people who were involved in technology, a little over 10 million in 1970. Now digitizing the front-office with over 100 million people who were touched by technology in the 90s. His mac just showed a blue screen and he said its an intel mac and its “totally screwing with him”. He says its bi-polar, it doesn’t have any idea what it wants to be. (He asked somebody to blog it, and I just did). Now the graph shows the digitization of the customers (web 2.0) with lots of people touched by technology. He says he wishes he made a bigger deal about search as interface in his book “Search”.
He’s showing the DOS interface with dir. Now the desktop GUI with “hunt and poke” interface. He’s saying there is still a list inside the window.
He says we’re in the 1.0 of search, the command line of the search as an interface, with a list of results, like dir. The big difference is that we’re using natural language now, instead of some arcane computer code. Natural language as a way of navigating computing is a huge jump, but we’re just getting started, we’re still at the command line. search as steering wheel.
He’s talking about using a handheld device to search for a wine label while you’re shopping. Price comparison, reviews, collaborative filtering, company info, merchants that are selling it, buy now, get it shipped. He says roduct inventory information has to become open an available.
Search is the driver of web 2.0 businesses, and it is a turning point for all forms of marketing.
Intent over content old marketing was content driven, but with search it is intent driven. Intent becomes a proxy for audience. It is non-innteruption marketing.
Search drives social media. You expect every community to know the rules of social media and the community expects businesses to know how to deal with it. Marketing becomes dialog.
it uses to be all about distribution, print media distribution channels charge extortion type rates, but now its all about attention.
Conversation over dictation new marketing is driven by permission not interupption.
how do you do brand marketing where people are already talking to eachother and the site? Turn over control to the consumer. The best businesses on the web let their customers help build their business. amazon, ebay, myspace. can we do that in marketing?
He’s using the thinkpad as an example, they were about to go with a chinese manufacturer and consumers were concerened about the brand being tarnished. He suggested that IBM take customer input but the company freaked out. “our customers buy the stuff we make”. They ran a poll about titanium vs black thinkpads. Titanium won, they’re going to make both.
Microsoft was running one creative across all FM properties and the authors were not happy. One suggested context-specific “author copy” and they ran both. The author-copy improved performance 60%.
Symantec started a blog and wrote a story about zero viruses on mac and it was dug, now symantec only runs RSS ads across FM properties.
Cisco wanted to drive discussion of “The Human Network”. They were going to put up a wikipedia with all the FM authors writing what they though the human network was. they were suggested to move over to the commercial wikipedia and people voted on which definition they liked. later a wikipedia entry just happened on its own.
Dice is an IT jobs board. They ran a rant banner, it allows you to type in a little box a rant about how you hate your job and every rant is shown across all properties. Almost an IM chatroom. Conversation through marketing. The average interaction time with this ad was 8 minutes.
There are 2 ways to work with FM. self service or the sale department. Reader surveys across properties are inputted into the self service system. He logged into the self service system (with a 3 character password!). He’s showing the demographic targetting properties, it shows relevance data for properties that match your demo search.
He noticed that his search blog was getting into the tens of thousands of readers. Boing boing had a 500$ bandwidth bill for having half a million visitors and they came to John with this “problem”. So they bundled this into FM and built some reporting and analytics software. Their mission is to cultivate relationships with authors by focusing on quality and engagement. All advertising is approved by authors.
FM Mores:
voice and POV
accuracy
community
responsibility
transperency
FM has almost 100 sites, more than 750mm impression/month. great demos, doing over a mil in month in revenue, sales force of 15 engineering staff of 4, author services staff of 4, almost 1500 advertisers on the self-service platform.
Questions:
Church and state, editorial and advertising.
the thing that blogging allows that old media doesn’t is transperancy and trust. He says that you shouldn’t “sell your words on your editorial site”. The blogger has a conversational relationship with the audience.
Google’s radio, print and tv ads.
He called his conference “web two oh” (no point). You have to have a conversation with your audience. FM is in the “cream” business, and google is in the “milk business” they’re partnering with google.
whats the most unique thing he’s seen a blogger do to increase his readership?
Lists do really well, but there is no replacement for having a high quality conversation and author passion. There are two ways to publish, write about what you’re passionate about or look where the market is. The most passionate and high integrity voices always win in blogging.
Somebody is asking about the “legacy business of hosting” saying he’s one of the original hosts, that nearly everyone used to be on. He’s asking how to take customer input.
John suggests to open a forum or site where you can ask people what they want, listen to mass feedback and engage in a conversation.
someone is asking about pricing models for “cream” vs “milk” is cream always going to be CPM? why not CPC or CPA? And what percentage of advertising is rejected by FM authors?
Cream pricing will generally always be CPM. Becuase it is difficult to measure when the “loop is closed” for brand advertising. When an author can say no, it means a yes is an affirmative vote, its about 98% yes.