While Barry and I are in our offices in New York, Dave Rohrer and Carolyn Shelby are doing SES Latino Conference reporting for us, which is happening right now in Miami, FL. Here are Dave's liveblogged notes for the first session:
Fundamentals Track Introduction To Search Engine Marketing Who are the major search engines? How can their editorial listings send you "natural" or "organic" traffic for free through search engine public relations or search engine optimization efforts? How can you purchase top rankings or placement through search engine advertising opportunities? This must-attend session for beginners provides an overview of key concepts.
Moderator: * Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.
Speaker: * Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Jesse does the introduction, I (daver) am the only person that was here the first year.
Jessie Stricchiloa, Founder, Alchemist Media, Inc. Mike Grehan, VP of International Business Development for Bruce Clay starts:
Has been around since 1995 and looked to SEO for his business.
4Ps of online marketing – Positioning, Permission, Partnership and Performance. Search is not a cure for all. It works best when in a Mix.
Positioning – using paid and organic search to drive traffic Permission – opening a dialogue with potential new customers. Customer relation management. References Seth Godin and his books. Partnership – Affiliate marketing, co-promotion and joint venture. Everything you do offline you can do online. Ex: coupons, charity Performance – Measuring the success of your web site and online marketing strategies. Use of analytics.
Growth of Online Marketing - Newer channels such as search engine marketing are changing the marketing landscape. - CPA – Direct mail is near 10$ and search is .29$
Plotted History of Search: Brian Pinkerton – Web Crawler, Daivd and Jerry – Yahoo, Louis Monier – Alta Vista, Larry and Sergei – Google, Apostolos Gerasoulis – Ask (Teoma), Bill Gates – MSN
Two Types: Organic and Sponsored Listings
Ways to get indexed – Organic, Pay per click, Cost per click, Pay for consideration – back in 1999 Yahoo started as a directory and you had to pay i.e. pay for consideration, Pay for inclusion, Trusted feed – XML feeds that Yahoo only uses.
Taxonomy of Search
Navigational – I want to be somewhere. At Google a navigational search example is “bbc” where its hard to sell. Informational – classic information retrieval. An example is “history of cookies”, no ads, its non commercial. 70-80% of searches are non commercial. Transactional – beginning of the buying cycle. Search for “ipod 80 gig black” and paid results and organic results both show up. Froogle has listings at the top as well.
Whos number one? Local/Vertical/General/ Paid Searches can show all, so which one is #1.
Google Universal
Google Base – ways to feed Google information. Go to Google Maps and update the info and you can increase the information that Google displays about your company.
Ask.com 2 weeks ago Ask rolled out their new search. They can move faster then Google and take risks so expect more.
Marketing Analogy Organic results are a bit like doing PR i.e. free editorial coverage in press, radio and tv.
Major Players Google , Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com
How search engines work Search engines look at the world as a graph. There are two sides to organic: getting indexed and then ranking.
Preparing a Campaign - Who are we? - What do we do? - What are we known for? - What’s our message?
Then list the top 10 phrases which cover the content of your website. Each phrase should be two words ore more. Talk to people OUTSIDE of the organization.
You have to think about what people are actually looking for. Why optimize for digital camera? Does the user want to buy, sell, repair, shop? Go for longer keywords.
Keyword Analyzer – interesting tool that runs on your desktop.
Its non linear. Search engines don’t start at the home page, it comes in from every direction. Don’t build your site in that way, build it thinking that search engines grab and show a page, not your entire site.
Inverted Index – words point at pages. Think of it as an index in the back of the book. In a medical book you look up Hemoglobin, and look it up in the back of the book. Each term will have a listing of all the pages that a word appears on.
The goal: write a page that the search engines like and that makes sense to a user. Write a page in a Newspaper style. Have the keyword in the title, in the headline, in the copy, in the alt tags of the image, and then text links and/or link to the sitemap.
Meta tags – came from library science but are very poor for heterogeneous corpus/collection with no standard/control. Search engines don’t even believe your metatags or your content. Why should they? Links are what they believe. Social network analysis = link popularity. Not all links are equal. A link to your website from me, is a vote for you. It means that I think my visitors should look at your site.
The Dark Side: Cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, keyword stuffing, fake links, over submitting and so on. See Google’s webmaster guidelines for a list of things not to do.
Paid Search: Goto.com – started paid search. Paid is about conversion, its not about eyeballs. Web Analytics – measure ROI, A/B Testing, Google Optimizer.
Demographic Targeting: Google has the larger user base but not the larger subscriber base. MSN and Yahoo both have about 150 million users that login and use services.
Excellent Resource: Bill Hunt – Search Engine Marketing, Inc Bryan Eisenberg – Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark
Q&A
Q: Once you get #1 in Organic and in Paid, which one is worth more? A: Mike: people tend to click on the left, they don’t know why but studies say they just tend to click on the left. Jesse: some studies do show if you are #1 in organic and paid it creates a better sense of brand.
Q: Ranking without being crawled? A: It is possible, and Ive seen it frequently. The reason for that is it will crawl the billions and billions of links and lots are on the frontier of the crawl. Google looks at the links to a new page and you become #1. If the page is new and it’s a new term it can happen. You can tell as just the bare URL is shown.
Q: The perfect page, don’t you get banned for extensive use of a keyword? A: You would expect to see it in the title, headline and body. There are people that user keyword density tools and set every page to a certain %. Don’t do this, search engines will figure out what you are doing.
Q: The frequency that you change your content, does it effect the frequency the visits of a Google bot and of your ranking. A: Google and others have News Bots, Fresh Bots, and so on. Bigger sites get crawled sometimes every 5 minutes. Blogs get crawled more often as they get updated and if they have the linkage data. If your link data is normal, you could update all day long and not see a difference in the # of crawls. If you are writing lots of content and not seeing an up tick in crawling take a look at Google’s Webmaster Central. You can get a lot of data about your site.
