Promediacorp was contracted to do SEO training for the editorial group of a publishing company. Our challenge was to teach these editors – who have English and writing and journalism degrees, and several years experience writing for print – to learn to adapt their writing styles to the web.

We first pointed out the obvious – search engines are not human. Google does not understand metaphor, sarcasm, analogies, and cannot infer meaning from them. We all know the importance of keywords and keyword research. Unless you specifically place keywords on your web page describing your web page, Google won’t always understand what it’s about.  But – on the other hand – one of the first rules of SEO copywriting is to write for humans first, and search engines second. In other words, don’t dumb down your copy for Google’s sake.

Let’s go through an example.

We have a book called “How to Booze: Exquisite Cocktails and Unsound Advice“.  The jacket-flap copy reads like this:

There is a perfect drink for every situation. So what should you drink tonight? It depends…
Are you stalking your ex? Try a pisco sour.
Drowning out the ticking of your biological clock? A bee’s knees will do.
Spoiling for a vicious brawl with your dearest loved ones? A tipperary helps you get there.
Sinking into debauchery underneath the mistletoe at your boss’s holiday party? A presbyterian, what else?
How to Booze has all the answers on what to drink when. Armed with nearly one hundred iconic recipes, useful facts on technique and ingredients, and more than enough advice to get you into trouble, you will now know just the right drink for the occasion and how to prepare it like a professional.

It’s very cute. I get the allegories.

But what is this book about? It’s a how-to guide on mixing cocktails and alcoholic drinks. But for the search engines, there does not seem to be a clear theme to this book. What does stalking your ex have to do with a bees knees or debauchery underneath the mistletoe? A better strategy here might be to include words such as “drinking”, “cocktails”, “cocktail recipes” “bar-tending”, none of which are included in the copy. If you are looking for a book on bar-tending or mixing cocktails, you may not immediately find it on Amazon or Barnes and Nobles online because the book does not match the keyword query.

I’m absolutely not saying to stuff the important keywords throughout the copy. We always want to write first for the user experience, before writing for search engines. But it is possible to sprinkle in some of our core terms without compromising the quality and intent of this flap-jacket copy.

Here are my general tips for optimizing book jacket copy:

1. Do the keyword research. What core terms will lead people to your book?
2. Use variations of keywords where possible. Check out Promediacorp Suggester for some help.
3. Your keywords should follow a general theme so Google can infer meaning from the copy (Google can perceive a connection between keyword proximity).
4. Get the core keywords in the first few sentences.

Unfortunately, Google dictates the way we do business today which means we have no choice but to conform to Google guidelines if we want to be competitive online. And yes, a  webpage’s structure and meta data (title tag, meta description) are very important components in helping a webpage rank in the SERPs, and you could argue that sites like Amazon place reviews, comments, and tons of other keyword-rich content on a page, taking the focus away from book jacket copy. That’s true, but, with thousands of sites out there pulling content, you never know where book jacket copy is going to live. That copy could stand alone on a webpage. And if getting a few keywords in there helps make a sale, then it’s a no-brainer.

Knowing the list of suggested terms related to a particular keyword also allows you to take advantage of Google Suggest’s chicken-or-the-egg distortion of search behavior. That is, if Google suggests a term, there is a greater likelihood that people will search for that term, which then increases the probability that Google will suggest it. (Woah, that’s deep. I think I just discovered the fifth dimension.)

The problem with using Google Suggest for extensive keyword research is that it’s been slow and tedious… until now.

We’re proud to announce the debut of Promediacorp Suggester, our free keyword research tool for generating deep lists of Google Suggest keywords. Suggester goes beyond the “top ten list” of Google suggestions to reveal the terms around which Google wants your content optimized.

What’s more, since these keywords already appear in the deep Google Suggest list for your most important queries, optimizing content and links for positive terms on the list can have the effect of promoting these terms to the “top ten list” of Google Suggest terms. (Yes, what I’m saying is that Suggester can be useful if you’re trying to remove undesirable terms from Google Suggest.)

So try out Promediacorp Suggester now. Research your most valuable query and discover the keywords that Google Suggest already knows!

P.S. We’re planning on adding more features to Suggester in the future, like the ability to export keyword lists to CSV and generate even deeper lists. Please let us know what you’d like to see, and we’ll work on implementation in the next version.

It’s because real-time search represents a tantalizing confluence of hot SEO topics: social media + search = real-time search. But real-time search can also be frustrating to explain to clients, many of whom simply express a desire to dominate the real-time results… just like they want to be at the top of traditional search results pages.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet to ensure that your client’s message will be better represented in real-time search results than messages from competitors, or even worse, messages from people who really hate your brand and have an axe to grind.

We realize that the information below is by no means exhaustively comprehensive, but here’s how we explain real-time search to our clients at Promediacorp:

What is Real-time Search?

Real-time search allows people and companies to hear what the Internet is talking about, right now:

• For now, most real-time search results come from Twitter tweets
• Recently published news items may appear
• Some Facebook status updates are also included (News today that MySpace updates are also now included on Google)
• Some real-time search sites also include blog posts and content from various microblogging services (Friendfeed, Identica, Jaiku (still alive!), Bleeper, Google Buzz, etc.)

What are the most popular real-time search features? (example from Scoopler.com)

• Search through the latest tweets: This is the most common, simple search feature. Search for a keyword and all the latest mentions will appear before your eyes.
• Browse popular links posted by Twitter users: Many people find this more useful than simply looking at tweets. Rather than just showing you what people are saying about Lady Gaga, this will give you a list of the hottest, most-current links to Lady Gaga-related content.
• View media being mentioned on Twitter (images & video): If people are posting tweets with links to images and videos related to your search term, you’ll find that content here.

Three of the Top Real-time Search Engines

Twitter Search

• Currently the king of real-time search
• Most people still tweet and search for tweets directly through Twitter
• Twitter has instant and complete access to all tweets
• Simply displays latest tweets related to search
• Big drawback is that search results are not ranked
• Twitter does not attempt to determine which tweets are most relevant and useful

Google’s “Updates” & “Latest” Search Results

• Results are integrated into the main search results
• Position on search results page is based on how current Google believes the topic to be
• No real-time results will show on main search page when searching for topics that aren’t being heavily discussed on social media sites (“Frank Sinatra” search won’t automatically display real-time results, but a search for “Lady Gaga” probably will)
• Google integrates news and blog posts into “Latest” real-time results, while selecting “Updates” limits results to Twitter, Buzz, MySpace, etc. (add “site:google.com” to view only Google Buzz posts; use “site:myspace.com” to view only MySpace updates)

Bing Twitter (Is that name awkward or what?)

• Deal with Twitter supposedly allows full access to real-time tweets… but tweets go through filters at Bing, so results are a few minutes older than at Twitter.com
• “Top links” feature shows popular links along with referring tweets
• Posts can be sorted by “most recent” or “best match”. “Best match” shows posts from most followed users along with heavily retweeted posts.

The Good & The Bad of Real-time Search

Good:

• Monitor what people are saying right now about your brand
• Engage your customers directly
• Respond immediately to sensational news and controversy
• Increase your brand’s Twitter/Facebook following
• Increase your brand’s official presence in search results through the use of popular keywords in social media content

Bad:

• Tweets from upset customers and detractors will also appear in real-time search results
• Real-time search is currently still very susceptible to real-time spam
• Speed required for effective tweeting means your client must give up some control over the marketing message. There is no time for a “measured response” in real-time search.

Real-time Search Strategies (suspiciously similar to social media strategies, eh?)

1.  Develop social media personalities around your brand, for example:

• The brand’s spokesperson/manager
• The “ultimate fan”
• The webmaster
• Etc., etc. according to client’s needs

2.  Listen to the conversation

• Actively monitor what people are saying about your brand through the use of various real-time search engines and monitoring tools.

3.  Engage in the conversation

• Be proactive. Provide your audience with interesting news and links to entertaining content. Tell them what’s going on with your brand.
• Be reactive. When appropriate, respond to unfounded rumors, slander, hoaxes, etc.

BOTTOM LINE: A dedicated, full-time effort is needed to engage in, monitor and respond to the real-time conversation going on about your brand. Real-time search means it’s more important than ever to devise and follow a social media strategy.

Anybody out there have any other tips for explaining real-time search to clients?

Of all Google’s tweaks to the search engine results page (SERP), perhaps nothing has generated more interest in the SEO community than SiteLinks. SiteLinks are those extra links to internal pages displayed below your SERP listing… but they only show up when your site ranks very highly for a particular search term. SiteLinks are useful links to useful content.

Google designed the SiteLinks algorithm to determine which links inside your domain are most useful to visitors, based on several key factors:

• General site credibility
• Relevance of your internal content to the overall site theme
• Google’s understanding of your site’s structure
• Likelihood that search engine users will click on the SiteLink

Those first three criteria can more or less be summed up in one statement: follow SEO best practices. If you’re running a well-designed site full of useful content, and you’re ranking at the top of the SERPs for your most important keywords, you should be all good. Likewise, it wouldn’t hurt to consider siloing your content. But let’s talk about that fourth item…

If you’ve ever done research on SiteLinks for a client, you probably noticed that links are showing up that aren’t even part of your navigation. This is because Google’s user tracking data is becoming an increasingly important – perhaps even the most important – factor in determining which sections of your site are most “useful”, thus worthy of being rewarded with SiteLinks. Google wants SiteLinks to lead directly to the most visited pages on your site.

Why are SiteLinks important?

• SiteLinks increase your site’s prominence in Google search results. And when you’re occupying more SERP real estate, your site can’t help but see a healthy jump in traffic.
• Users believe listings with SiteLinks are more authoritative. There isn’t any research data that I’m aware of to support this, but I won’t let that stop me from saying it. Especially when you’re talking about the eight link, two column SiteLinks. The first thing that pops into my head when I see these SiteLinks is, “Wow, this really must be the site I’m searching for.” And Google obviously agrees if it’s going to use so much space on the page for a single listing.
• Users can quickly find the content they’re seeking. It’s simple. You want visitors to your site to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible, or you risk losing them. SiteLinks mean one less click between you and your customers.

When do SiteLinks show up?

SiteLinks are displayed for up to three top search results for any given keyword or search term. There are two types of SiteLinks:

• Long SiteLinks (usually 8 links in 2 columns) are displayed when Google is fairly sure the top listing contains what you’re searching for. Long SiteLinks only appear under the top (#1) listing, but it’s not enough just to be on top. If Google isn’t sure the top result is completely relevant to the search, long SiteLinks will not be displayed.
• Mini SiteLinks (usually 3-4 links in 1 row) are displayed when Google is less sure it has found what you’re searching for. Mini SiteLinks can appear on any of the top three listings, but again, only when Google is pretty sure of the relevance. These are less desirable than long SiteLinks because they’re much easier for the eye to skip over.

How does Google determine relevance for SiteLinks?

This is best demonstrated with an example. KFC is the top search result for a search of either the term “fried chicken” or “KFC”. But “KFC” is obviously more relevant to the KFC Corporation, whereas “fried chicken” searchers may be looking for home-style recipes, nutritional information, reheating instructions, or whatever. Google knows this, and that intelligence is reflected in the use of SiteLinks:

• Search for “fried chicken”:

• Search for “KFC” or “Kentucky Fried Chicken”:

SiteLinks: What Can You Do?

1.  Make sure you’re the #1 search result for important keywords. The top search result for a keyword will usually have SiteLinks displayed, except when:

• Google is unsure of the site’s relevance to the search term
• Keyword has low search volume
• Site has low PageRank and/or credibility
• Site is structured in a way that isn’t clear to Google

2.  Use short, easy-to-crawl HTML navigational links on the home page. This let’s Google know where you think your visitors want to go. This will not result in SiteLinks if your navigation leads to irrelevant content or to a page that is rarely visited by Google-tracked users.

3.  Use a simple site structure that mirrors the navigation. Together with HTML and XML sitemaps, this ensures that Google understands which pages are most relevant to users.

The bottom line? Following SEO best practices results in SiteLinks. Google rewards top-ranking, well-organized sites that contain useful content.

Other resources:

Google SiteLinks Come in How Many Flavors?

Google SiteLinks: Brand Domination through Keyword Ownership

How to Get Google SiteLinks

Google SiteLinks: The Ultimate FAQ

Are Paid Links Evil?
Search engines, especially Google, say don’t do ‘em. But some search marketers say paid links work. Are paid links subverting search quality? Or are they simply a fact of life, here to stay? We explore the issues, in this session.

Moderator:

• Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers:

• Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
• Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru, Google Inc.
• Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl
• Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC
• Andy Baio, Founder, Upcoming.org & Waxy.org
• Todd Friesen, Range Media

Opens up with a joke – a new tag – the make me #1 tag! Funny video clip. On the Home Rental Blog.

Matt Cutts:

Want’s to tell us if its a good strategy – not evilness. It’s the wrong question. Do paid links violate SE guidelines. Yes, they do. Clear. Background info. The FTC was asked about word of mouth marketing, and if you get paid – it should be disclosed.

It’s about disclosure. What’s the user of the web- robots, machines, people. You need to disclose links in a machine readable way. They care about this. 5 ways to do it- meta nofollow, nofollow tags, robots.txt, etc. All OK for telling the machines that its not passing PageRank. Google is OK with buying links – as long as they don’t pass PR. Companies like AdBrite are OK. Shows slide of paid link site with casinos and bad neighborhood. The text above the links are an image – labeled sponsored links. These are images that are not machine readable. This stuff is not good for the web. It’s like littering and going into the carpool lane with one person. Disclosure should be clear and machine readable. What you want to do is create good content is create a good video like the one he showed. It’s gonna get alot of links. Even if you think your doing a good job buying links – you can be dealing with a sloppy seller – in with a crappy crowd of links. Also, you can get duped by cloaking. The seller can make it look like you are seeing links, but the SE doesn’t see it.

Google’s approach: Use algorithms and humans. Have a paid link form to tattle on competition. Google and most search engines take strong action, and strong focus.

Michael Gray:  

Wearing Google shirt. Google is not the government. Not a They have no agenda but to make money.  Don’t listen to corporate propoganda. This is not the way the real world works. They expect you to change your site for them and their flaws. Google wants you to sacrifice profits to make them more profitable, and want you to do it for free. When nofollow was instituded it was supposed to combat blog spam. They changed the rules. Now supposed to be used for paid links. Google took advantage to keep them more profitable.

What is a paid link? Google checkout even had an ad on the page with paid links. Google buys links, we are going to blog about the Google dance. You really don’t know whats a paid link as long as your one of the 2 people involved. Google doesnt like paid links because they work. They dont want you to mess with algo. Nearly impossible without paid links. Reported paid links is shooting self if foot.

Google is trying to give false propoganda, the FTC was an opinion. Google is not the government, cannot pass laws or judge ethics. They create fear of losing rankings to create fear. Google oversteped its bounds. Mission is to organize worlds info. Not to tell you how to build site or how to sell or buy ads or run your business.

Follow up question: Would you agree Organize is subjective? Michael – Yes. Q: If you were deindexed, would you have a problem? M: Yes – it’s their index.

Todd Malicoat:

7 Reasons why hei s a link Libetarian.

1. When is a paid link paid? Direct $? Buy pizza? Buying a company? Does that constitute a paid link? Is that related to paid links? Every link has a relative value of cost. Even creating a video has a cost.

2. Blame the algorithm. The PR bar gave us a micro economy of paid links. Helps people buy links. Risky, but not illegal.

3. Economics: Sure they can fight it, but it will be balanced out by efficient market. Eventually there will be a price point where people will stop buying links.

4. Transparency and relevancy: Never been fully transparent – games, movies, have ads – no disclosure. Consumers like disclosures, as an advertiser – not your job. Bill Gross proved paying for links can be more relevant.

5. Fear buys time for the algo.

6. Adsense needs a competitor. Fuels advertisers.

7. It’s a billion dollar industry – text link ads, Google, Yahoo, text link brokers.

Design sites as if no search engines. But there are. In an ideal world buy links for traffic.

Risks vs. Rewards: There are risks – competition is looking at your backlinks – price of link goes up. Theres the invisible nofollow. May incur a penalty. Rewards: It works and converts. Size matters. Small brands – link buying.

Intent and extent. Don’t fish with dynamite. There is no black and white line.  Buy under the radar.

Never report paid links. If you think it’s OK, don’t report. Eventually we will all get tired of links and move on. Stay relevant, make it obvious. Don’t include disclosures.

Todd Friesen:

Not much more to ad. There is a middle ground. Matt shows the casinos and spammy sites. Never see him show other stuff. It’s more fun for him to show gambling sites. Are you going to go out and buy many off topic links, or buy them as media placement and buys? You have to play in the space and compete in your vertical. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. If you follow all the rules, you won’t compete and buy Adwords. Point is go in with eyes open. Worse case scenario – wasting money. As Michael pointed out, noone knows except the buyer and seller. So Google in good conscience cannot prove it. If that was the case there will be a new industry of link sabotoge. Shoemoney does free T shirt friday. Gives links in exchange of links. Is that paid? Be careful – don”t buy run of site. Just realize you need to stay in space, and follow rules that govern your vertical.

Greg Boser:

Matt mentioned pollution of the web. His examples are too extreme and off topic. You cannot apply that to everyone else. The video we started with – will get many off topic links. That’s polluting the web. Like those top 10 lists on Digg. That’s pollution. Makes fun of Neil Patel. Site owners make good editorial decisions. Review your advertisers, excersize editorial judgement – don’t have to put a link condom on a link! The Yahoo! directory – they say its not a paid link – but it is, and its filled with crap. So the notion of the impact of the web is nonsense. Makes fun of Yahoo paid listing policy. Rumors about SELand paid links. Danny has a good rep. Trust his judgment and those links should count.Site owners should make good judgment about buying links. If you select good sites, and make deals – thats your business and Google should stay out.

Andy Baio:

An outsider perspective. Agrees with Todd. If there is editorial judgment and pay attention to quality, should worry in his opinion. That doesn’t pollute the web. Upcoming.org is part of Yahoo but not representing it. Not part of SEO world, invited because of articles on his site. No self interest in the issue. Speaking on behalf of users. Everyone wants web to be easy and meaningful – everyone has a stake. Feels strongly  that it might be a form of spam and to be wary. Comes to ethics – are you improving the web or making it worse? The industry of middlemen trying to make a quick buck – brokers . Many of us would not do email spam or comment spam even though cheap and effective. But it’s unethical and can damage image. Paid link brokers – if the focus is traffic – the head is in the right place. But brokers are there too trick search engines. That’s the intent. Get’s shady – don’t use Java like legitimate ad networks  – so links pass juice.  Advertise the PR not the site. The top 10 – you should be different from competition – in reality if you are good you dont need link brokers. We are at a state where link spam is effective, but over time will backfire. Going back a few years – popups were novel and advertisers loved them. Yahoo! ran them. The more popular they got, the worse the web experience got. So browsers killed popups. Now paid links seem innoculous.

Matt: People understand why SE’s are against it. Brave of Andy to come up and take SE’s sides. For the most part, it comes down to whether it’s worth money. 5 years ago, guestbook links made alot of money, and SE’s took care of it. Want to look at long term. Want the links that will last. Looking for the white hat ways, will be a better long term strategies.

Michael: Casino links are not deceptive – your getting what you click on.

Greg: Buying links that are on target is so not comment spam, and rediculous to say this. Brand damage? BMW – how many people bought Mercedes because of this? WordPress – got banned for 8 hours because of Hot Nacho. And now WordPress is a great product. The google algo is flawed and its not our problem. Many big brands play both sides of the fence. Believes in long term strategy, but when people are playing hard you got to play hard too. Fixing this problem is dedicated resources is equal enforcement. Google doesn’t treat big brands equally across the board. At some point need to go out and compete – even if might drive you out of business. Would like to see this issue fixed, but the reality is that this is the world we live in.

Matt: So many options for ranking well. Just starting a blog can have a tremendous effect. So many white hat ways.

Q: Does Google want to ban big brands permanently that behave poorly – not the BMW’s?

Matt: BMW was out for a week. And you dont hear about the other sites  – like one guy who got banned for 43 days. People need to be aware of risks.

The Search King case – The trial courts ruled that Google can remove you from index, and they don’t owe you anything.

Todd F: Expected sites to get burned, and churned. But that was the game.

Michael: Google created the monster and looking for us to fix it.

Todd F: If go to broker and buy lots of links, and look at indivudual sites and it makes sense to be there – you shouldn’t have to worry – even if it’s relevant.

Matt: Response: Are they labeled as paid? Do people know they were bought?

Greg: Most are labeled paid, but  for us its temporary. Takes sometimes a flow of juice in the site – and then earns reputation. People find sites to link to from search engine. Now need links to get in to get the natural links. Sometimes you just need 3 – 5 links to get in. Job is to get results.

Rand: Building a viral video like in the intro. Gets into it! Wouldnt google prefer to find links without nofollow? many people dont know about nofollow. What’s the point of nofollow?

Matt: First line of defense is algorithmic.  Supposed we have a Japanese job board -  that noone at Google’s manual team can look at. Let’s them take control. If there are two software packages – one has nofollow built in, one has none – the nofollow will sell because it will get links. The idea is that all search engines look for paid links – nofollow is a self service mechanism.

Q: AdSense is not as good user experience as text links sometimes. Less attractive.

A: A directory that looks for things to add – and do editorial review – puts you at the high end spectrum of a directory. Become a good resource.

Q: Define excessive?

Matt:  Use common sense. Off topics,  automated exchange.

There is no substitute for creativity. A video was made saying “Google” over and over again.  On one hand – it may be easy to buy the links. The creativity is missing.  If you are in a place where links are bought, comes down to who has the pocket book. Good example is after Katrina – Red Cross was $50 a bid. Don’t wan’t to get into that.

Michael: Sometimes creativity is expensive. People need to outsource it because not creative.

Matt:  Lets talk about non commercial. Some guy asked why he wasn’t #1 for english to japanese translation. The #1 site was a better resource. Did the same thing, but the #1 was a better resource. There was no depth. Don’t have to shell out money to get creativity. Everyone knows there are white hat ways that work. Content cost vs. link cost.

Q: XML, Perl.com etc. had voting power taken away – do you penalize sitewide, or individual.

Matt: We can hit sites, directories, individual links, etc.

[tags]SES, Search Engine Strategies, Paid Links, Matt Cutts, Text Links, Text Link Ads, Paid Links, Blackhat SEO [/tags]

According to the about section of the website, “a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.”  Given the significant number of people using Google as a homepage, the site suggests that such a small difference in our day to day use of Google will have a far reaching impact.  As of today at 12:27am, it as has saved 137,193.129 Watt hours.

Is Blackle just a fad riding the green wave?  It bothers me that Blackle doesn’t integrate Google Universal and I don’t have the option to use the tabs myself to use image, news, or video search.  They deserve props for trying, but are there enough hippies out there to monetize from AdSense revenue? Just another example of the endless opportunities involved with Google Co-ops.

Just googling “sexy apartments” came up with 2 paid search results. But neither ad used the search term “sexy apartment/s” in their ad space like all good Adwords ads should. I am going to assume this is because their attempts were shut down by Google as ours were.

We just googled “sexy” and all of the paid search results showed up without once using the term “sexy.” And when we googled “sex” absolutely no paid search results come up at all! Funny enough, when I type in “porn” all paid results come up with the bolded search term “porn” in every couple of lines.

So Google, what’s in the game? Sexy can’t be incorporated into my Adwords ad, but “porn” is fine? Who knows, perhaps “pornographic apartments” will help the CTR of our real estate clients.

As the industry continues to grow exponentially, it’s becoming harder to stand out of the crowd. Nick Stamoulis has figured out a smart and inexpensive way to do so using Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

So how does Nick Stamoulis brand himself and make his company known within the space?  Simple. He buys almost every search marketing firm’s name as a keyword, which are mostly “tail keywords”. Tail keywords are keywords that are infrequently searched and priced at about a nickel per click. The keyword set most likely comes from the SEMPO directory or any other site which aggregates search firms. In addition to buying my company name, (Promediacorp), queries for “iCrossing“, “iProspect“, “Acronym Media“, “Bruce Clay“, and other well known firms will all trigger Nick Stamoulis‘s pay-per-click ads.

Now let’s recall the trademark findings of the courts here in the US.  It is legal to bid on any trademarked term, (you can even bid on the keyword “Google” on Adwords). However, organizations can serve the search engines to prevent you from using their trademarked terms in the ads.

What Nick is doing, is perfectly fair game and good strategy.  Let the competitive spirit of the good ‘ole USA live on.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker:

Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink

Greg Boser, Search Engine Marketing Consultant, WebGuerrilla

Jim Boykin, CEO, We Build Pages

Christine Churchill, President, Key Relevance

Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online

Cameron Olthuis, Director of Marketing and Design, ACS

Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book

Better ways to do boring SEO stuff. This will be an audience participation session. There are no presentations, just discussion.

What are we stumped with? What puzzles us? What do we need help with?

Panel introduces themselves.

Q: We see great results with SMM with smaller clients. Bigger clients are hesitant. We went through six months with a big client to show there is value. Do you have any ideas how to convince clients to get into the social media space?

Cameron: We run into the same things. Many big companies are slow to understand. Lots of education and reinforcement. Reputation management will be watched closely. Run into the same problems.

Aaron: Find a brand evangelist talking positively, ask for feedback. Less of corporate infrusture.

Greg: It’s slow and takes alot of meetings. One client has so many meetings, he doesn’t know how they get work done.

Christine: Once client is a subsidiary of a big company. Couldn’t get it through legal. Tough to launch the corporate blog. It’s a community of caregivers, and don’t have to worry about legal stuff because just sponsoring it.

Q: How do you scale linkbait or backlinks. Time consuming. Tricks or tactics to get it on a mass scale or regularly without doing much? Audience laughts.

Aaron: I found effective key ideas in the related search areas. Find the non commercial areas. Write about those. The lazy way to is to buy expensive high quality content. Run ad campaign on Google to get it spread.

Christine: If you are an authority in an industry, can give out awards which are great and have longevity. Try to look at long term link building.

Todd: Different approach. Lots of interns to do what they are told. Great way to do directory submissions. Go out and buy them! Does alot of link buying. Think of it as relevant media buying. Another thing is widget building. Embedd keywords in the widgets.

Jim: No pain no gain approach. Do it by hand. Send personalized emails. Needs the human personalized touch. Need to offer value – link bait, good content, cash, its a manually process.

Alex: Build it into a different part of the business. Incentives to give links – pay less referrel fees.

Cameron: Empower brand evangelists. Give them content and have them take the ball and create viral link bait for you.

Danny: File a copywrite suit, get it on Digg. Has negative aspects.

Alex: Client is going to get sued. Spending all the budget on PR to manage that. Will get lots of links that way.

Q: Has anyone have a way of lobbying to lots of social network groups quickly. It takes a long time.

Danny: Just to log into them?

Cameron: Doesn’t know away. Anything worth doing needs time.

Todd: Roboform works well.

Danny: Firefox session manager works well.

Aaron: It’s now built into Firefox.

Danny: Can set up all the pages you want to load when opening browser. I thought you meant how to get 2000 friends in Twittr.

Christine: Put login scripts on Toolbar.

Q: Developing an accurate keyword research tool. They all suck.

Todd: Microsoft has an incredible keyword research tool. Launched in past couple weeks. Fantstic tool. Called Adlabs.

Christine: Source – meta search engines and ISPs. Throw out many wierd queries. Keyword discovery used to take data from ISPs. Now they take from toolbars.

Alex: It’s all about how relativite, not about the search numbers.

Greg: The relationships of words pan out accurately, even though numbers are off. Relationship between phrase A and B is accurate.

Alex: Once you rank for something, your referall data is as real as it gets.

Christine: PPC is a good way to measure.

Danny: Are the predictions off, that the problem? Polls audience on tools.

Christine: I use all of them.

Danny: Google sandbox tool? Overture tool?

Christine: Good for brainstorming.

Danny: I tried to get the engines to provide all the data for free, they did and then shut it down. But it is paying off for Adcenter. Adlabs.MSN.com.

Q: Question is about linkbait. In the beginning you put an icon to Digg. Tried Addthis.com. Social networks are too many. How many icons to put on a page?

Cameron: Prefers not to include them, except for exceptions. Alot of times you’ll get bad stories submitted to Digg and see poor content, they may associate it will spam. No more than two or 3. Digg, Delicious or the relevant to user base.

Q: How do you explain to a corporate client that you will get lots of links from social media sites – that are irrelevant – how do you explain it to those that dont get it.

Cameron: Many times the links are relevant. Topics generally stay pretty focused. Most likely you will get relevant traffic. The irrelevant wont hurt you.

Aaron: If your piece is targetted, you’ll get the right links.

Todd: Definition of viral marketing is that it will spread thru your group of interested. Ultimately the vast majority of links will be targetted. It’s different than buying many irrelevant links.

Christine: Balance link building. Don’t want all from SMM networks. Want variety – PR, directories, content development, business relationship links, professional organizations.

Greg: They are seperate activities. Linkbaiting is good but wont help you rank for targetted terms many times. No control of anchor text and how people link to you. Still need to go out and get focused targeted links.

Cameron: Agrees. Cant control anchor text off community. Can influence it by coming up with proper titles and descriptions.

Q: How many targetted links would you go after a month and not get in trouble?

Aaron: All relative to the size of your site and the field your playing in. The footprint is important. A good PR campaign won’t hurt. Its about risk and reward.

Q: Lets say they are under control.

Greg: We look at who is dominant in the space. If they are 12 years old and have 250 links – the rate of growth must be consistent not to stand out like a sore thumb. Level of trust is important. Can get lots of crappy links for old site. New sites won’t be the same.

Jim: Many are concerned with a number. I found through my experience it’s not a numbers game, its a quality game as well. If a link from a subpage has 1000 backlinks its worth alot more than a links page. Good links.

Todd: Backs up Greg. Back in the day he worked for Dental Plans. Didn’t research competitive landscape. Got 65,000 links one week. Got booted quickly, because the top player had 3000 links. Matt emailed him!

Q: Topic of getting large companies to make the shift to SMM. I want to go under the hood into a couple areas of challenges I’m finding in a large company. Editorial writing they are locked into an old AP style of writing and not SEO friendly, and graphics designers want to build cool flash sites that are not friendly. Do you have any success stories changed the ship?

Todd: We have lots of fortune 500 luxury brands that are brand conscious. Without the pictures it would be hard to understand. WE have to explain how search engines work and that they need to understand what the pages are about. Once they compute that, and it clicks, the key is not to rewrite everything. Make it simple and low maintenance and as simple as possible. They are looking at the how and who is going to do it. Many times companies will ignore SEO recommendations because of lack of resources.

Greg: If they give you grief, fire them. Somebody else will get it and I rather work for them. Lawyers ruin everything, send contracts back with red ink. I don’t do fortune 500′s because I wont work with clients unless I can win. I like the challenge of performing. Say thanks, but no.

Alex: Danny once wrote an article about designers and cross platform compatibility. Treat the bot like a browser. Must work across platforms.

Christine: Clients often have to learn by being burned. Pleaded with president with a flash redesign. Make sure you have lots of PPC money so you can get traffic otherwise the site will go away. Document, so you can say “told you so”. Many clients are more flexible on the landing pages and let me tweak text there. Prove quantitaviely and show numbers.

Todd: We have clients will 100% flash, even shopping carts. There is no way they will change it. They spend millions and conveys the brand image. We step in and build an HTML version, and useragent deliver it. Cloak it, but dont over optimize – the same page but the user experience is preserved. Doesn’t look the same but same content. Good use of user agent detecting.

Greg: We used cloaking to prove our case with big clients. We cant always tell cleint to scrap a multi million dollar page. I come in say and build a bot version of the model, cloak it, and when it kicks ass in search results – they believe in it. Same content but better flow and more optimized. Easier to sell that as the initial step, for alot less. When it came time for annual redesign – I got to sit down and show how well it worked.

Danny: Wrote an article called “This boring headline was built for Google”. The journalists called the Tsuananmi “giant wave”. Simmonds at the NYT told them people search for Tsuanami, not giant wave! Also, people will content behind wall. 25% of newspaper visits come from search engines. Newspapers are suing Google, and also getting lots of free traffic. Really learning how to change writing for search. When someone doesn’t get it. Everyone uses a search engine. 99.9% of web users use search engines. They see websites in a different manner. You are losing 100% visibility. They are the biggest browser – bigger than IE, Firefox, and Safari designed. Todd wrote an article about the hard things done as an SEO to make things visible. Talks about Flash, and search engines won’t get it. They still haven’t supported flash after 10 years. Nothing to support. Even if they can extract the text, meaningless. Imagine you created a great TV commercial. No sound. All you see is a car zooming. Take that television commercial and try to put it on the radio.

Comment: Follow up on the question. Tried training journalists. Never mention SEO. Writing for people that use search engines, not the search engines themselves.

Q: I was wondering how relevant is Page freshness. We optimize pages, and see crappy content pages ranking above. Is there a fomula how often to reoptimize a page? What do we do when we have to refresh pages?

Aaron: What happens is that new pages are featured prominentantly in the navigation structure. With your site, you need to focus on link equity. If you have seasonal products, put more link weight on it. See how often Google puts news in organic results. They see it as fresh.

Jim: Google will often try to feed in a fresh page to test it. Many not last through time. Many hear that content needs to be fresh. If you wrote a great page in 1996, and many have been linking over the years, and you decide to change the content. SE will see those old links as less valuable, and new links will have more value. Alot of good pages that stayed the same for years and don’t need to change.

So your saying that if you optimized it, leave it alone?

Christine: What makes you think its freshness. Are you checking backlinks?

Yes on Google.

Todd: We did a site audit, Google said 8, Yaho said a couple hundred thousand. Danny was talking about Calacanis and SEO saying bullshit and that its a one time deal and should be expensive. Not the case. Google is constantly refining the algo, and it could be the that thats the day things changed.

Greg: Check header responses. Most dynamic sites – Google supports last modified. They dont want to recrawl content. We used to forge the modified date because they are big on freshness. We dont know if that ever heald. Might not be a freshness issue.

Christine: I have pages ranking for 8 years on competitive terms and haven’t touched them.

Danny: A recent article in the NYT about the Google algo. They new they would have some queries they want a fresh page for. So put together a query on what should serve a fresh page – like off a blog. It might be interesting to try a backlink check on Google blog search. I usually see fresh news come up. Check out those articles.

Q: Do you have tips for retialers for Google base results to put above spot one?

Todd: We do alot of feeds, but that dude didn’t come to the conference.

Danny: Anyone solidly using Google base?

Audience: Real estate. Froogle doesnt do much.

Danny: I dont use base much. I can tell you that they are eliminating data. But if you have database information feed it to base because they’ll take it. They are not subsitituting base for organic, but crawling base and mix up results. Lots of ways to take content – sitemaps, base, etc. They just took in alot of real estate data. You know there will be Google real estate soon, or classifieds soon down the line.

Q: Google base. We have a realtor. If you use the MLS to update the feed. We see competitors who scrape the MLS. Do you have recommendations for playing on an even playing field.

Greg: The playing field is never even. Google gets lot of duplication from MLS. Everyone submitting same content. I heard they are only taking it from brokerages. Might clean up the spamming and jamming.

We should just wait for them to address it?

Greg: In a perfect world the guidelines will be enforced and policed. Guidelines say dont do it but dont have the manpower to go after the cheaters to clean it up. Those that understand that push the envelope, and you have to see if you want to compete or whine. The reaon estate space is spammy. Lots of stuff going on there.

Todd: A year ago, Tim Mayer from Yahoo talked about spam. The pills, mortgages, real estate. Don’t take a sword to a gun fight.

Cameron: I mentioned to my programmer and he build a database for 200 properties in Aspen. They are going in the one box.

Danny: Are you up on Universal search? Searches Madonna. The music one box comes up. Then you get Wikipedia, then a news box. Now the news box can be put anywhere they want. Mixing things together. Queries – “new york dental schools”. Counts . Local replaces the first 3 search results. If you just focused on organic and ignored local, and had the #1 ranking -you got wiped out. This dramatic. Personized and Universal are huge. If just doing web search, life is changing. Ask has a different approach. The story to take away, is to pay attention to Google news, Google local – so easy, just send a postcard. Google book search. Product search, base. You got to watch the verticals. Video optimzation is like meta data. It’s like 1997.

Q: Do you have a favorite tool to share?

Jim: Project mayhem is.

Todd: We use lots of external tools – Search Status is an awesome firefox extention. Fantastic. And the web dev toolbar. One click away from viewing everything. When we do a site audit, the toolbar helps us grabs the screen shot.

Cameron: We developed a cool tool SERPH.com. A reputation management tool. A social media meta search engine.

Jim: Top 10 Analyis tool. Type in phrase, and shows top tool. On Webuildpages.com.

Todd: Aaron’s SEO for firefox is a great extention. Get tons of info under each search result, in the page. See all the factors on the SERPs. An old school tool we use is Xenu Linkslueth. Maps out directory and titles.

Alex: Xenu is cool for exporting the entire crawl and gives you levels deep, page sizes, errors.

Todd: Can crawl 100 sites at once – competitors.

Danny: I love firefox because you can go through many search engines and not be stuck in many. Another great tool is Grew for searching multiple search engines. Thanks for coming!