This week’s issue thanks us for covering last week’s Search Marketing Expo. In turn, we’d like to take this opportunity to extend our graditude to the team at Search Marketing Trends for delivering such a fine quality newletter to our inboxes every week.

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!

Satya Nadella: Microsoft is working on lots of innovation in the search space, and is proud of the search team. Says much of the search technology is being developed in Silicon Valley and around the globe, including China.

DS: You’ve been at your new job for a month, what are your goals?

Satya Nadella: The industry has evolved, and its been a fantastic journey. Says there is alot of desire and fire to contribute to the domain, and his team is always thinking ahead. Taking risks and innovation are the main goals.

DS: Any big surprises?

Satya Nadella: The logic of bringing search and engineering team together is crucial. Overall, Microsoft is new to the industry and the team has been great and focusing on satisfying customer needs.

DS: What do you see as the biggest challenge of core search?

Satya Nadella: At some level, when your share is 10% in the US – that’s the challenge. Grow the share. Get more for the advertisers. Build an engine that satisfies searchers needs. If we look at the 55 million searches a month on MSN, compared to Google at around 120 million – it’s not bad. It’s a first step. We need to crack the code of engagement. We have over 5 million registered users. New people are trying live search every day. How do we get more people to use the product is key. The MSN audience wants content and getting search involved is the mission. There is a new search product called Alist. We are integrating search in Instant Messenger as an experiment. Same with Outlook – which is great for location based searches. Office is integrating with maps. Contextual search within Microsoft.com – recently got a Live search box. Getting contextual search of the ground is key.

DS: How do you distinguish between Google, Yahoo, Ask. Some would consider search a commodity. How do you shake that up?

Satya Nadella: One of the things he thinks about is all things will become commoditized over time. It takes alot to be in the search business and innovating. Think of the sofistication of search and data collecting. We are now at a level to compete. The point is innovation consistently and investment. How do you differentiate? Recognize that there is info beyond the 10 links. Integration of weather, sports, stocks, answers. Taking related search to the next level. Images is another place where we have been innovative and got good feedback. New technology in facial recognition. Take what’s going on in the industry and move forward with it. Investing in 3D web – over 140 cities in 3D models. 3D web is the future and great for navigation for local information. Mobile is big. We have a rich Windows mobile application and some rich data. Horizontal and vertical innovations being brought to the table along with the core investment in the search business and getting better.

DS: Horizontal or Vertical, what do you think will be strongest?

Satya Nadella: Mobile, local, proximity search, images, videos, are all important. We think 3D web is the most important.

DS: The biggest challenge is more traffic. What’s going on on the advertiser side?

Satya Nadella: Adcenter – we’ve made lots of progress in a year. We focus most on the feedback of this audience and usability of Adcenter. The last update had much innovation and addressed those core issues. Full text search across Adcenter, campaign uploads, better navigation, emphasis on basic usability. Contextual is just starting using Adcenter. It’s in a pilot, and slowly growing and yielding high click thrus – similar to search. That’s how we expect to get more traffic. Adlabs.Microsoft.com has many interesting features – such as keyword services platform. Using keyword intelligence using keyword forecasting and extraction and exposing it to the SEM folks. Opening up keyword intellegence helps marketers. Other places we focus on is supporting new ad types. New technology called Seadragon – and an infinite zoom capability, is another place you will see innovation.

DS: Explain why you paid so much for Aquantive, why not build it yourself?

Satya Nadella: We definately develop much in house, but this is the most complimentary with assets. They have the footprint, and tools. It’s complimentary.

DS: Many search marketers ask how you can own the agency and the engine.

Satya Nadella: Aquantive has technology and an agency. They have both. We want to take and retain the Aquantive leadership. We want to reinforce what Aquantive has done to keep the businesses separate. The idea of integrating the technology while servicing an agency is something Aquantive felt was key to their success. We want to build on it and improve it.

DS: The difference between Aquantive having the tools – it’s as if the NYT is running a PR agency. People may not trust the relationship. What do you make of that?

Satya Nadella: It all comes down to the policies of Avenue A and the flexibilities, and serving the clients neutral. Time will tell how we do it. We will make sure that Avenue A’s clients will only benefit from the acquisition.

DS: How are you and Steve Berkowitz interacting?

Satya Nadella: Steve runs the business. I run the engineering pieces. We have a good ryththm. He runs the businesss. I run the engineering. I look forward to the association. Bringing the engineering leaders together is key.

DS: There was a shift to the Windows Live brand, and now you are going back to MSN. What’s the focus?

Satya Nadella: MSN is the portal. That’s where the traffic is. There should be no confusion between the search and the portal. Windows Live is the extension and the search experience – ie. Hotmail. At the end of the day we want the MSN brand. Yes there could be more clarity and there are smarter brains working on that. Both brands reinforce eachother.

DS: Here you are with the job to make search better. How did you prepare?

Satya Nadella: The beauty of Microsoft, the last 15 years I’ve worked in every part of the business from Windows to Office to online. It’s thrilling to be with an audience like this. Come Q&A my fears will come true (laughs). While I take my morning run, I listen to a data mining class. At the end of the day my job is about enabling the great people around the globe to do great work. My job is to remove the friction. Taking the fire and enabling that.

The Q&A:

Q: I’ve been using MSN Live for the last 1.5 years. What are your plans in the next 5 years? Where are you going internationally? What are the main goals to grow the business?

Satya Nadella: On the search side, we want to show innovation. How do you take the Live search users and have them use it more. We look at abondonment rates and ask why people didn’t come back. We are scientific. Thats our core. We are experimenting. We know the audience, and we want to do things in a more contextual way. Integration with Office, Hotmail, etc. Long term – one of my dreams is the best search interface just for doing a query and having a results? Or is there more to it. Continuity – there is tons of innovation. We are in the first stages and will bring alot to the table.

Q: You offer corporate customers incentives to use search in exchange for software discounts, will there be any more of that? Also What happened to street level search photography?

A: Its a good idea and I’ll take it to my business colleagues. We definately are big on 3D. We have street level innovation of Seattle and other cities, birdseye view, all are unique aspects we want to take.

DS: With Google’s street view launch last week there are privacy issues. How do you deal with that?

Satya Nadella: We put the user in control. Users will vote. We will see how it plays out. We are expanding rapidly in this area.

DS: You are already doing aerial view, etc. Things like the Whitehouse and miliary get blocked out. Why is my house there? How do you see blocking out content from the birdseye views?

Satya Nadella: If you have the controls, ex post, or proactively. The benefit outweighs all privacy concerns. You will see us come to some equilabrium.

Q: Last month Google Universal search launched. What’s your take? Are you going in that direction?

Satya Nadella: If you look at us, and our services, we have much personalizaton like Google. We believe in the concept and are taking advantage of the full page real estate and tapping into intent. We believe in it. I believe in it. And you see us making progress.

Q: Are you commited to Firefox compatiblity?

Satya Nadella: We want to be everywhere the audience is. You are right that there are issues on Firefox, the Mac and Safari. We are taking feedback and addressing the issues.

DS: Polls audience on IE usage. Asks if you can develop a product that’s universal?

Satya Nadella: Absolutely. Demographically this audience has a different skew than the overall market.

Q: To influence Adcenter spending, will you help influence natural rankings?

Satya Nadella: That’s not what we’d like to do. We want to innovate and get the traffic. We want targetted relevant ads. It’s a give and take. It’s all about getting the end user the best results.

Q: I’m impressed with the evolution of Adcenter, and you have great customer service. My question is what do I tell my clients to get them to use MSN, why use MSN and not Google?

Satya Nadella: We have a better image search. 3D local listings that are differentiated. Product search. There is an aggregation of alot of these features. There are already alot of MSN searchers. Google has 50%. People use multiple search engines. That is the kind of reason from an advertiser perspective to be in all search engines. Cross section exposure is key.

DS: Thanks for the great party last night MSN. Poll – how many are Adcenter customers? Audience laughs. Why do people search on Microsoft for Microsoft (chuckles).

Satya Nadella: At the end of the day, the data is the platform. We are frequently releasing new products. I’m super glad to be here and in this space.

DS: Thank you Satya Nadella, and that you all for attending.

Tags: Danny Sullivan,Satya Nadella, SMX Seattle, SMX Advanced

Dan Sundgren – Efficient Frontier

Understanding the quality score mentality. Google is successful because they are obsessed with user experience. It’s Google’s way of assigning a value to an advertiser’s user experience. We need to understand this from a marketer prospective. It’s designed to reward the adveriser for a quality experience. He believes there will be less advertising on the Google SERPs in the future to do this. Challenge for Google is that CTR is the biggest piece of quality score. Sometimes the best CTR ad is not the best performer. Landing page relevance is a big piece of the quality score.

Adrank: The forumula Google uses to figure out where an ad should be placed on a page. Google want’s a diverse ecosystem. They mix large advertisers with local players. Google wants users to get what they are looking for the very first time.

We need to put on our marketing hats and pay more attention to the user experience to succeed in PPC.

Joshua Stylman of Reprise Media

Talks about the other two big guys – Yahoo! and MSN. Google launched QS in 8/05. MSN launched 10/05, and Yahoo 3/07. They all followed the Google model. All three engines have the goal of defining relevancy. Google uses a “guilty until proven innocent model”. If you do not have a good QS, you pay a premium. If your ad is irrelevant, your ad will be deactivated. Doesn’t happen as much on MSN and Yahoo!

Takes the example query of “running shoes”. Compares all the Paid landscapes. Google $1+. Yahoo about $.10, and MSN.$08. It all boils down to market share. Google is a must have, whereas the others are not. They take a hard stance, and you will pay a premium to pay. The other engines have a catch 22. Want penetration to the masses so less likely to deactivate ads because marketers may get worn out. The more advertiser penetration they garner, the more distribution partners they will partner with.

With Yahoo, and MSN – its CPC only. Google uses CPA. Makes it easier to manage bids on Yahoo and MSN.

MSN was the first to offer dayparting and demographic targeting. Speaks the language of large marketers. Great way for advertisers to integrate search and other media. If the demographic targeting is valuable, advertisers will pay for it. It’s a compelling marketers to participate in the auction.

One of his clients is Martha Stewart. The KW “martha stewart living” (the company’s official name) got deactivated by Google. Is it really irrelvant he asks? Shows other examples where keywords that were relevent get disabled. Doesn’t seem to be a logical pattern to what gets rejected and what get approved.

What defines relevancy? Marketers often define relevance as best converting keyword terms. Engines define it as what makes them the most profit.

Jonah Stein of Alchemist Media

Asks if anyone is using CPA yet? Not many hands up. Pay per action – is it the future?

CPA is an experiment by Google as being your superaffiliate. Only available through the content network. Only pay for results – download, subscription, lead or sale. Less risk for advertiser. I’m willing to pay $X for the action. If it doesn’t convert – you don’t pay. Many would say it addresses the issue of click fraud. If only paying for actions, you are not paying for clicks.

There is danger behind that curtain of CPA. Do we want to share the value of our customer with anyone? Do we want to throw it into the black box? Distorts the web. Everyone is a marketer – with conversion as the goal. Increased costs on advertiser side. Not a good impact on the web overall. Because CPA is so simple, increases the amount of advertisers and makes it more competitive. You are turning Adsense publishers into affiliate channels. Many people don’t like ads on certain publishers sites. Makes it hard to control. CPA turns Google into everyone’s “silent partner”.

Quotes Aaron Wall referrering to Google’s invisible hand.

• Google Adsense
• Google Analytics
• Google Conversion tracker
• Google Checkout
• Google Website optimizer
• Now Doubleclick

Gives Google complete transparency. We might get bitten by the hand that feeds us.

PPA is here to stay. It’s a model that makes too much sense to abandon. Can’t turn away the money. Too soon to know if the ROI makes sense. PPA is the biggest threat to the affiliate marketing business.

Speakers are Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, Todd Malicoat – independent consultant, Neil Patel of ACS, and Cindy Krum of Blue Moon.

What does it have to do with SEO? Danny asks.

Rand Fishkin is up.

This is advanced material he says. It’s the lifeblood of acquiring links and getting traffic.

Social media marketing vs. viral marketing. It’s all about the link bait. SMM is all about going out to Web 2.0 style sites with the mentality of contributing.

Viral marketing is creating content and leveraging it for content, traffic, ranking and search success.

Tip: What can SMM do for you? Can control your brand. Great way to own your SERPs is to create al ot of social media profiles. Gives some link love when creating accounts.

Which sites provide the most value?

Youtube is #1. Potential for millions of visitors. Shows his marriage proposal video on YouTube. 22 million views to date! -

#2 best site in his opinion is Wikipedia for SMM.

#3 Yahoo Answers – creeps into Google, Yahoo and MSN SERPs. Phenomenal resource he says. Some people he knows get all their business from Yahoo Answers.

#4 Yelp – powerful on West Coast for local review/directory.

#5 Linked in

#5 Flickr – comments on Flickr dont have nofollow! That’s hot, he says. Opportunity for link building.

#6 Craigslist has great penetration on the web, but all content is temporary. Get on the Best of Craigslist page is like gold. Get there by community votes.
#7 Facebook
#8 Myspace
#9 Amazon social media – drives targeted traffic. Get to influence buyers.
#10 Technorati – not so social, but taggin content can be powerful. Great tags send great referrels, also nofollow links.
#11 Judy’s book – an emerging localize social network.
#12 Newsvine, contributing and seeding. Lots of traffic. More mature audience.
#13 Twittr – hates it, can’t find a good community. Danny says he gets alot of traffick from Twittr.
#14 – CitySearch – great for local businesses.
#15 WikiHow – great for getting links and traffic.

Before submitting, read and get to know the network. Understand the community!

Viral media is great for branding. Apple commercials are the perfect example. Viral media = search rankings through links. Find a topic you want to rank for, and write great content about it. Viral media = growing fanbase. Everytime SEOmoz creates linkbait, gets a growing RSS subscriber base.

Where should you do viral marketing – Digg, Reddit (more political). StubleUpon – 2.5 million users. Great for traffic and great links.

Delicious, Netscape – less valuable, but more serious news.

Techcrunch – amazing traffic if can get in. SEOmoz got an average of 400-500 links from a Techcrunch mention.

Newsvine – if you get to the top, get lots of traffic and links.

Boingboing – similar to Techcrunch.

Fark – not a very serious community.

Engadget, Techmeme, Lifehacker – great traffic.

Yahoo Picks- like site of the day. Tough to get in, but powerful.

Search Engine Land is the perfect viral example. Got hundreds of thousands of links and a PR7 in just months!

Neil Patel – SMM Whiz Kid, is up next.

Defines the rules of social media.

1. No paying for votes.

2. No creating multiple accounts.

3. No illegal content such as porn or hacking cable TV, etc.

He ran experiment and broke all the rules. Submitted article on how to get free pay-per-view TV. Created 30 accounts from same IP. Also paid for votes. Got banned for two hours. Cost money to pay for votes. Not a great strategy.

Says the audience of the SMM networks is a bunch of arragent babies. You mess with them, they spit in your face. They are young and immature. The older audience is high twenties, the audience laughs (Neil is a young’n). The social media network audience hates self promotion. They hate SEOs. Hate bias information. People will flame you if break rules.

If content is great will succeeed automatically. Don’t want to mess with the users.

Neil’s golden rules:
Rule #1: Add tons of friends. Don’t have to be real friends. Add people who have similar interests.

Rule #2: Participate in community. Not just submitting and voting. Leave comments and AIM/IM friends. Message them. Goal is to be a top user. Takes a lot of time.

Rule #3: Use features against them. Use the tools provided such as a feature he shows on the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Rule #4: Create a social brand. Create a memorable brand / screen name with nice icon – branding your user name. People will show you love and recognition across the different networks.

Experimented by spamming his friends including Danny. There is a great feature on StumbleUpon called “Send To” – which will force your friends to come to the site of your choice and is an opportunity to get tons of traffic.

Neil says one should care more about links from community members than from the network domains themselves. A good piece of content can have a Slashdot effect.

Conclusion:

Do what’s ethical. Don’t jeapordize your brand. Think long term. Think big picture. Just like SEO. All about long term strategies. Slides at http://www.acsseo.com/slides/.

Todd Malicoat takes the mic:

Says even the panel is still new to the whole social media concept.

For him, Social Media for Strategic Linking. It’s all about the link baiting.

Benefits for strategic linking with social media: Control over anchor text, body copy, theme, and from trusted sites. Great links. Increases traffic.

Using Squidoo, can link out heavily. Shows his Squidoo page.

With Digg, sometimes you don’t’ get links. Asks what Ron Jeremy and Greg from BOTW have in common – size matters! The size of your brand he means.

Small brand = doorway pages, Large brand = landing pages.

Size matters. Strategize based on how large your brand is. Don’t go fishing with dynamite.

Building reputation neighborhoods – great for reputation management. Build hubs with social media links. Tells everonye to read Graywolf’s tips for controlling the top 10. Sign up for all social networks with your keyword as username. Push a couple links – build a neighborhood. Lots of applications if you experiment.

Recommends Squidoo, Nasymz, Netscape, LinkedIn, Tagalag.

Also recommends everyone look at Bill Hartzer’s list of the top 130 social media sites as a very valuable resource.

Todd brings up a case study of the movie “John Tucker Must Die”. The markerters decided to advertise the Myspace URL vs. the domain because of time issue. Easier to rank a Myspace page than a new domain. Also easier for people to remember it as opposed to the johntuckermustdie.com domain.

Todd recommends we search for “Google Dorks” to see how people find sites using the different query operators, to find treasures.

Testing SMM sites for link value. Is the site indexed? Is the page indexed? Do the pages rank – search for titles – do they come up? Is the theme on topic? Test if it passes link juice by seeing if its indexed and use case studies. Build a nonsense keyword page and see if it ranks and passes juice.

Conclusions: SMM is another tool for linking. Be strategic. Use the strategies and continue to experiment!

Cindy Krum from Blue Moon Works:

Theme – using social media for brand awareness.

Customers demand a higher level of interaction with brand. Social media is fastest way to move brand forward and change image.

Companies need to view this as the new PR due, to the transparency. SMM will triple in 2011 and cost in participating is free. Take advantage of free stuff, SMM is free.

People are influenced by peers when making decisions. Secure your social presense. Research relevant social networks.

Look at the majors, and the niche and vertical social sites. It gets easier every day to create social sites. Many deep niches out there to take advantage of. Social local sites, blogs, forums, and wikis. Identify existing networks, leverage whats already there.

How many profiles do we want to create? How do we decide to drive traffic. Create profile for brands, and products. Starbucks has profiles for Frappacinos.

Secure your social presense. Make people want to be a part of your network and come back. Spend time on design and updated profiles weekly. Goal is to make people return often. Use remote photo hosting to make things easier. There are new services that are central control panels for editing profiles on multiple social sites.

Leverage social site functionality. Use traditional SEO strategies and copywriting. Focus on brand keywords. Interlink brand profiles on main site. Initiate friending campaigns. Go out and make as many friends as possible and show love. Drive traffic to profile using natural search, PPC, PPP, banners, offline, and from your main site. Can pay Myspace to have a featured profile. Send traffic to all your positive press. Participate in forums and groups.

Empower brand evangelists – people who already care about your brand and give them cool stuff like widgets, desktop themes, podcasts, surveys, games, promo codes, and special deals. Profile layouts – many bad ones. Create nice profiles and people will associate with that brand. The dating site True has a profile page where you can create faces, mix music, etc. Can write inside of fotune cookies to post on blogs. TV show lost also has a great theme and page.

Embrace convergence. Leverage exiting marketing efforts. Use profiles to leverage that. Send TV, radio and print traffic to profile pages. Link to profile pages. Use profiles to get feedback – find out how customers feel about you. Encourage them to leave comments. Direct social traffic. Host local meetups, offer coupons, host contents, scavenger hunts. Let people assemble offline communities about your brand. Create a social media section on your site. Promote all the cool stuff giving away on profile.

Visit the SERoundtable’s coverage of this session.

It’s 2:15am in Las Vegas, with another 7 hours till the next flight out. Perhaps I’ll hit the strip to pass the time. But first I must get some work done while I have peace and quiet. And I need to book a hotel room – I will be staying an extra night in Seattle due to the delay.

They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Unfortunately, I’ll be staying here longer than anticipated.

This is the inaugral conference lead by Danny Sullivan, formely of Search Engine Watch. This conference is advertised as being designed for the experienced search marketer – the first of its kind. The conversation and sessions are designed to cater to the “advanced” search marketer.

The speaker roster is incredible, with the brightest and best in the online advertising industry. Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray, Gord Hotchkiss, Brad Geddes, Aaron Wall, Cameron Olthuis, Mike Grehan, Todd Friesen and many more. The cream of the crop. Nowhere on earth will there be a finer collection of search marketers in the same room sharing their words of wisdom.

The conference will have two sessions simultaneous, unlike other conferences where it is not uncommon for 5 great sessions being held at the same time. The topics of the sessions include:

• You&A with Matt Cutts – a Q&A session where the SEO’s will try to grill the famous Google engineer, in an effort to gather insight into the elusive and top secret Google algorithm, hoping to make sense out of complicated issues.
• Paid Search Roundtable – a roundable of representatives from all the major engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
• SEO, Meet SMM - focusing on driving traffic and garnering links via the social markeing sites – such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc.
  
• Paid Search & Tricky Issues – making sense of the complicated issues always popping up in the world of PPC.
• Personalized Search: Fear Or Not? -always a hot topic; how the engines are evolving as they move towards a more personalized search experience – and what that means for search marketers in the future.
  
• Inside The Auction Black Box – PPC experts share insight on the ever evolving state of paid search.
• Keynote Conversation with Satya Nadella – Satya is the new VP of Search at Microsoft AdCenter, the underdog in the search world.
  
• Debate: Is Bid Management Dead? – A question always on my mind! Are the engines starting to build in their own bid management software? What does Microsoft’s acquisition of Atlas – the most popular bid management software (and the one we use at Promediacorp) mean for the future of bid management?
  
• Penalty Box Summit - This is for the ultra agressive SEO’s that have to deal with being banned, and reincluded for breaking rules. None of that stuff going on at Promediacorp!
• Pump Up Your Paid Search! - Paid search tips and techniques from the world’s top experts.
  
• Better Ways – A refresher course focusing on keyword research, link building and the basics.
• Paid Search: The Giant Focus Group - search marketers give the engine representatives feedback on how to improve the systems, feature requests, and bugs to fix.
• Give It Up! -The world’s best SEO’s spilling the beans on their favorite secrets, tips and tricks. The engine representatives are banned from this session! This is one I will surely not miss.
• Beyond The Majors -Taking a look at second tier paid search opportunities. When does it make sense to use the Looksmarts, Kanoodles, and FindWhats? Exploring potential revenue and profit from these overlooked engines.
  

Well, I’m about to board my flight to Las Vegas enroute Seattle. Stay tuned for continued live coverage.