The Best Kept Secrets to Search

Secrets of paid and organic search? Sure, they're out there. Join us for a no-holds-barred interactive session in which veteran search engine marketers disclose some of their favorite search engine optimization and marketing tips, tricks, and secrets. While there's no replacement for old-fashioned hard work, getting the inside scoop and shortcuts to search success never hurt. Moderator: · Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce Speakers: · Katee Crawford, Online & E-mail Marketing Specialist, California Chamber of Commerce · Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting · Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite Q&A Panelist: · Jamie Smith, CEO, Engine Ready Dana: I am so psyched about this panel. We are going to take about red hat – revenge SEO! First up is Katee Crawford, with her is Jamie Smith, they work hand in hand so Jamie may pop in with some comments. Please welcome Katee Crawford to the stage. Katee: I am going to be speaking to you about what we do at the California Chamber of Commerce. We are NOT tourism, everyone thinks we are. We are large business advocates and we also provide affordable and easy to use services. We provide labor law compliance info, books and software. For marketing we use PPC campaigns and started SEO as well. We do catalogs, direct mails and email campaigns – about 30 in the past year. I am going to give you some tips in how to improve your ROI. Educate your SEM company on all your marketing materials and products. Joint efforts produce better results so work together. Rethink the norm: Integrate marketing with promotional offers. The "I deserve it" tactic works. We gave away free Starbucks cards. Track often and evaluate honestly. Jamie: PPC Insider Tips: - Don't change your bid more than once every couple of days – when you run the reports, it skews your conclusions when you change your bids, and it defeats the purpose of testing - Test special characters in your ad creative, such as TM - Exact match all combinations of exact matched terms - Test no spaces between words in a multiple word phrase - Test placing phone number in ad – we found that local numbers vs. 800 numbers improve the call in rate - Test placing .com at the end of some keywords. Katee: We are looking forward to 2009 to improve our marketing plan. Thank you! Eric Enge: I have 5 quick tips for you. Syndicating content is a great way to get links, lots of websites are starved for quality content, so it solves the problem for them, and you in turn can get links with good anchor text. The bad part is that when you do syndicate content, the engines see duplicate content, and they will almost always recognize the original author – but not always. But the solution is simple. Take the article, get a writer to work with it, and give it a spin – and you might get a different result. Local Search: Search engine challenge: obtaining accurate data. So they use many sources, such as yellow page sites, syndicators such as LocalEze and local news sites. Give them the data directly. All 3 major search engines give you a way to give them authenticated data directly. Give them accurate data. Google Local: They will allow you to submit locations individually or by feed. The feed is useful for large numbers of locations. Individual submissions are verified by Google. More on KML – "Keyhole Markup Language" – language for geographical annotation. Search engines find the location of your KML using your sitemap file. It's good to be listed in many places. It increases the data accuracy problem. Invest the time and effort to get this data right. Services help with this but cost money. In summary: Quality data drives rankings!!! Getting free links from Google Webmaster Tools: - If you don't have an account, get one! - Add to your .htaccess file a 301 redirect from the incorrect to the right one. - Look for malformed URLs. - Look for the Not Found Report in the Web Crawl Errors section. Make sure you find lost links! Sometimes sites list URLs but don't like them. Media especially is bad at this. If you can discover these situations and ask people to fix them it would be very good. MSN Search Funnels – shows what the users intent was when they do a search term, what they search on next. You can go the other way, and see also what they search on before. You can also use search funnels to isolate problems on your website. Dana: Next up is Richard Zwicky, Richard: I work at Enquisite. If you don't know what we do, look it up. I will share with you today some basics about what you should know and then go a little deeper. If you don't know this, you are missing a huge opportunity: only 1.8% of traffic comes from page 2 of the search results. Everything else comes from page 1. So spend a little of time on the pages that are on page 2 and you will increase your traffic. Build out what the customers are actually trying to get from your site. Don't just focus on getting the traffic, but what do to with that traffic. Links are probably the most relevant, non-page factor you can build into your SEO. You need to understand what's coming to your own site and what's coming to your competition. Also, identify sites that are citing you but not linking to you. MSN has some great linking tools. Use linkfromdomains:www.yoursite.com. Regional links – they matter. Think of links geographically. Learn, learn and learn some more. There is no magic. You're competitors are probably lazier than you are. Take an active interest in continuing education. So – when to consider going black? I have found that anyone doing SEO properly knows how black hat works, so they don't cross the line and do anything bad. What do you do? Someone is slandering you or your business. They do it anonymously so you don't know who it is. So if you want to get rid of a bad site, do it at your own risk. Be very careful. I don't do this, but I know how to do it. Here are the steps. Go buy a domain. Don't touch your own. Don't use your own name! Get a UPS mailbox near your opponent's address. Go buy another domain. Don't use your own name! Put your opponent's address on your site. Go buy another domain name with your opponents address. Go to the post office and pay for a mail redirect to your mailbox!! Lather, rinse, repeat. Do it again, host your sites all over the place. Never use your name. Make sure none of your sites link to each other. Start optimizing these sites and get good links. Link out to the same sites as your opponent. Get yourself in the same neighborhood as far as the search engines are concerned. Link to your opponent, ask them for a link. Get indexed. Do some SEO work. Start showing up in the SERPs. Add more content, however you can. Reprint PR from within the industry. Have a bunch of orphaned pages in your sitemap. Submit the site map. Now go out and start messing with all of these sites. Do everything bad you can think of. Go copy your opponent's content! Do it as fast as possible as soon as the content is posted and submit it as fast as possible! Start messing up. Start copying their sitemap into your own. Remember, you look like them according to your registration info. You kind of look them as a website. It's confusing to the engines. Keep doing more black hat and work really hard to get your site banned. Just after you have pulled every stunt you can, and you know these sites are going to get banned, redirect to your opponent!!!!!!!!!! [This gets a lot of laughs] Now your opponent will get thrown out. Everything you have done looks like them and now everything bad will happen to them. But of course they bashed your site in the first place so they deserve it. Now all of what they did is going to get looked at. And if they happened to do something wrong along the way, now they are facing review. And if they get resubmitted, and they mess up in the future, the threshold for error is really low. So what have you done? You have forced the competition to clean up their act!!!!!!!!! Session coverage provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp.