The Maine SEO Blog

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

Speakers:
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO
Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Jill Whalen, CEO and Founder, High Rankings
Mike Greban

Topic: Social Media

• Bruce Clay: site has spiked on search engines due to traffic from social media links
• Rae Hoffman: great for letting Google know that people are visiting your site and using it
• Mike Greban: Social search – people searching social networks; “new signals to search engines”; bookmarks give search engine weight

Topic: Content

• TF: become the expert in your industry – and show you are with the content you provide
• JW: are you answering people’s questions?
• MG: content is NOT just compelling copy: video, images; “Build good content and build it for the end user”
• RH: content doesn’t need to be perfect or great every time – just good content all the time, and tastes of great (example: cool content for flower shop: the funniest cards they see)

Topic: nofollow

• MG: why link to sites that you are nofollow’ing? Doesn’t think you should waste time with nofollow
• JW: thinks Google will eventually stop using nofollow tags, she doesn’t use them
• RH: thinks it’s a new fad, that it’s better to have good external links, thinks it’s a red flag
• TF: doesn’t believe in them
• BC: works for him

Topic: Blogs

• MG: how does the end user want to receive your information?
• JW: watch dead blogs and hackers
• RH: suggests to read about WordPress SEO, Feedburner for WP (“mybrand”); Google knows # of subscribers of RSS feed
• BC: add relevant blogposts faster than relevant pages; dedicated bloggers; integrate info into site

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speaker: Roger Montti (AKA martinibuster), Owner, martinibuster

• Small window for links from .edu (Spring/Fall, when schools are in session)
• Focus: two main link building initiatives – industry heavyweight backlinks, charitable opportunities
• .edu’s are generally desirable because: usually not in bad neighborhoods, in maps of link relationships, these pages are generally going to fall outside of relationships that are known for link manipulation and commerce, sometimes features original, authoritative and expert content (but not always), relevance
• .edu’s to look for: hotlinks, bookmarks, links, directory, resources

Speaker: Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, NetConcepts

• LinkedIn: three active links can be added, with modified anchor text
• Link Building campaign – encourage employees to create LinkedIn profiles w/ publicly accessible profiles, link deeper into the site – not necessarily the homepage
• Network in Meatspace (AKA the real world) – build relationships w/ bloggers, register and attend conferences who link to the attendees, real world meetups (meetup.com)
• Hunting for commonalities: tools: Ranking.thumbshots.com, Aaron Wall’s hubfinder tool
• Make donations and get links

Speaker: Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link

• Develop base links: foundational links – solid links to insulate (directories); variety of elements: blog, rss, wiki, video, photo, downloads, coupons, article, affiliate, newsletters; directory sources: Google Directory
• Benefits: increases deep linking, uses keyword anchors, descriptive text, provides diverse text
• Association links – chamber of commerce, associations, clubs and organizations, advocacy works, federations, etc. (for associations: weddle’s) – networking is key (mail/email to membership, provide incentive to link), buy ad space for association newsletters (paper and electronic, provide copy), develop contests, develop scholarships,
  optimize your listing in membership directory, issue press release
• Media Links – target key journalists, backlink competitors, mine social news and bookmarking sites, set Google Alert for news and add keywords, cyberjournalist.net, Yahoo! news directory, blogcatalog, pay for sources, topix directory
• Issue press releases – avoid free press releases, pay for distribution details and inlink reporting, highlight willingness and give interviews, look for niche distribution services (such as Biz Wiz Wire)
• Develop and promote your onsite media resource (“news”)

Speaker: Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com

• 3 killer link reclamation strategies: request 404 error log, sort 404 log data from most requested pages, look down your sorted list – but go beyond the typical ‘top 100 referrers’

Speaker: Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

• Linkscape

Q & A

• Only the first link counts!!!
• To change/kill pages, 301 redirect!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

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

Speaker: Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

• AJAX/HIJAX – Down-level experience, don’t use javascript for links, use <noscript> tags
• CSS – can improve performance better by separating formatting from content, has been abused by Spammers to hide links and keywords

Speaker: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo!

• 3 pillars of 2.0: experience (last.fm, youtube.com), participation (tagging, reviews, comments, wiki, blogs, yelp), community (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• 2.0 Tech: RSS, CSS
• External CSS is better than regular CSS – efficient crawling (makes pages light, reduces file size, etc.)
• To do w/ CSS: don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, don’t hide text using CSS (white on white, display:none, etc.)
• Are you a web site or web application? Search engines have a difficult time crawling javascript, AJAX content (Can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked, can have poor link juice and hence poor rankings, can’t be read from screen readers and text-based browsers)
• SEs can index flash
• Problems w/ flash: Most flash rendered with javascript, no deep linking → less link juice, one URL for the entire flash movie → bad user experience
• RSS  – More visibility of your content on the web (users, publishers), more links and traffic to your site → higher rankings
• Best bets: alternative navigation and content in HTML, submit sitemaps, robots.txt (don’t exclude CSS, javascript)

Speaker: Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo!

• Think about user experience
• Content controlled by javascript is not search engine friendly

Q & A

• Do SEs use h1 tags? (Live and Google: uses h1, Yahoo: doesn’t use h1)
• Submit sitemaps
• Use short, concise URLs
• Keywords in URLS!!!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

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

Speaker: Bryan Horling, Group Product Manager, Google Inc.

• Web History – saves web history within google account
• Localization – Using the searcher’s geolocation to affect search, different levels of granularity, both explicit and implicit information
• Localization by: country, region, city
• Personalization – Using searcher’s personal context to rank results, recent search (short term), web history (long term)
• Universal search (mixed results) affected by localization
• Recent searches: Disambiguation (Example: search for “ethan allen” then “jordans” – Jordan’s furniture #1, 2; search for “jordans” – Air Jordan’s #1, 2)
• Web history: disambiguation – skew results based on history, website preference, refinding (shows visits)
• What’s this mean for SEM? Half empty: collecting metrics is difficult, seeing how your pages rank
• What’s this mean for SEM? Half full: easier for people looking for your service to find you, easier to retain customers who prefer your business
• What’s this mean for SEM? Top position is not winner-take-all, create compelling and interesting content, appeal to users, not search engines, you can control personalization for your searches (use search details, disable it by appending &pws=0 to searches, sign out, firefox extension: greasemonkey script, edit or turn off web history)

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speaker: Leslie Rohde, Founder, Windrose Software

• Why internal linking? you control your own pages, you control your own links, focuses the effects of external linking
• “Good ranking starts at home”
• Ranking is simple (On-page factors, link reputation, PageRank)
• Link Reputation (links speak louder than pages – Google bombing, aka “miserable failure”; click here, privacy policy, home, etc.)
• Fragmented reputation (“partial truth” – cooking link should be cooking appliances)
• Choose focus and force ranking/PR to “follow the money” (home page push, mid tier push, long tail push)

Speaker: Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting Corporation

• Syntax (nofollow – attribute/meta-tag, noindex, nofollow and noindex)
• Robots.txt (/test/, /cgi-bin/)
• noindex CAN pass PR
• nofollow meta-tag – will index but won’t pass link juice to ALL links on page
• nofollow attribute – won’t pass link juice to a specific link
• robots.txt – can’t crawl page, see links, or pass link juice
• For duplicate content: noindex pages, once removed: nofollow links to pages, DON’T use robots.txt page: lose ability to pass link juice)
• Content Syndication – syndicate tens of thousands of pages to a PR 8 site, noindex syndicated pages, prevents duplicate content problem, still passes link juice
• Ecommerce site – hard to get links for, solution: build a rich content tree (such as a BLOG), get links to that site, incorporate in the content tree: links to key parts of the site, nofollow all other links
• Basic Sculpting, remove: About us, Advertise with us, Contact us, Press center, List your biz on citysearch, Job opportunities, Partner sites (some)
• Duplicate content w/ http and https

Speaker: Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc

• Text links are good – Beware of image links, have text links options, image replacement is an alternative
• Contextual links rule – images have no semantic meaning, images have emotion and context, text has semantic meaning
• Anchor text? – not golden key, be aware of context of pages, watch surrounding pages, influence increases w/ scale, on large sites: anchor text is influential
• Speak to Users – anchor text = calls to action, think about your site’s visitors
• Vary anchor text, keep it natural
• Standardize linking to all pages
• Link/page relations – Link text should match targets – again, telling the truth, keywords should surround the link and be in the link text
• Are your pages impt.? – Check internal link counts; pages w/out many internal links, give signal to bots and people = page isn’t important
• Link Thresholds – No more than 100-150 links/page BUT depends on case – Zappos has over 1500 on their brand page
• Related link structure – use related linking to flatten link structure, encourages crawling, breadcrumbs are good
• Tag pages – Have users tag pages/manually build; create popular pages, categorize, product, RSS Feeds

Speaker: Anton Konikoff, Founder/CEO, Acronym Media

• Keywords in navigation need to be ACCURATE
• Difficult to isolate net impact on rankings
• Potential success metrics: indexing levels, crawl frequency, crawl patterns, click-through rate on links
• BEFORE CHANGING links, link audit: click distribution, page abandon rates, user click paths, path to conversion
• Anchor text still has to be understood by users in order to have an optimal experience, SO balance SEO and user experience
• Business case for internal link changes: consult w/ user experience teams, sift through historical data, collect intel on competitors’ tactics, test suggestions

Q & A

• To pass juice, both Page A and Page B must be indexed
• Other search engines (not Google) follow nofollow tags
• How often is page indexed? – may show importance
• Nofollow affiliates – increase internal PR
• “Internal link currency” – spend wisely within site

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, CEO, SearchReturn

Speaker: Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

• PPC and SEO are complementary
• Focus on 2-3 word terms; use one word keyword only very rarely if ever
• Watch conversion rates/web logs
• Hone in on important high-traffic terms
• Negative match – excluding keywords
• Reduce ad impressions on non-productive searches

Speaker: Karon Thackston, President, Marketing Words

• How to create a PPC ad: use keywords in headlines whenever possible, know what your customers are looking for, write a long paragraph and narrow it down, include negative/filtering language when applicable, test, tweak, track…

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Speaker: Mike Blummental, Partner, Blumenthals

• Huge growth for Google Maps – catching up to MapQuest
• Google maps is seen over a wide variety of devices (SMS, Smartphones, etc.)
• Check for your site in Google Local, Yahoo Local, niche local sites
• The “new” PageRank: location prominent score: explicit anchor text, score of website, number of links referring to the business, highest rank of linking site, NOT PR score)

Speaker: Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, Wright IMC

• Consumer reviews/local business links: Yelp, Angie’s List, Zillow, ServiceMagic, CitySearch
• Local reviews can make/break business
• Set up alerts: Google, Twitter

Speaker: Craig Greenfield, Director, Local Search, Performics

• Businesses with multiple locations: each location should have its own page, with main URL having sitemap for spiders

Speaker: Steve Espinosa, Director of Product Development, eLocal Listing

• Set up local profiles on sites
• A/B Testing is key
• Looking to the future: local listings w/ customized profile
• 5 star reviews are incredibly powerful
• Helpful to have keyword in business name
• Helpful resources: InsiderPages, Open List, Google coupons, Meetup
• When submitting at Google Maps, link videos – adds web reference
• Phone tracking through Google: pretend to make an audio campaign, “call reporting”, track phone numbers!

Q & A

• People are still ignoring modifiers (above regular google ten pack)
• H card format for Local
• Keep check with local reviews
• Google TV – distribution onto TV
• Synergize site with local listings
• Submit to Google
• Other speaker: Eric Stein, Director, Local Markets, Google

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

So begins my long list of hybrid blogposts – notes from the SMX East Conference in New York City.

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Founding Principal, Sterling Market Intelligence

Speaker: Cindy Krum, Director of New Media Strategy, Blue Moon Works, Inc.

• Searchers make an average of 9 mobile searches per day.
• iPhones have 5% of the mobile phone market, and 75% of all mobile searches.
• Mobile is important (mass mobile convergence, most personal marketing medium ever, more interactive marketing possibilities, mobile device on you at all times)
• Mobile is different (mobile bots, mobile algorithms, smaller screen, simplified rendering, more sophisticated searchers, have immediate intent)
• .mobi is BAD (splits traffic, links, index size; doesn’t benefit from history, risks duplicate content, confusing for users)
• Direct .mobi to real site; it’s no longer necessary to have a .mobi address
• External stylesheets/CSS creates separate design/copy for real site and mobile site
• Optimizing for phones, options: do nothing, create tiny pages for tiny screens, mobile/traditional hybrid pages

Speaker: Greg Markel, Founder and President, Infuse Creative

• iPhone Apps are important – creating one can increase revenue
• Another reason for “marketing message” in meta-tags: click for iPhone users to call immediately
• Greg’s prediction: in the future, there’s going to be a lack of keyword optimization, and instead location specific and device specific
• TRY APP: Urbanspoon; searching in Google causes the iTunes store to open w/ app → get google to index apps!!
• Set up YouTube channel → automatically makes site iPhone friendly by video default in interim before making site completely iPhone friendly

Speaker: Alex Muller, CEO, Slifter

• Slifter – local shopper app
• Create an iPhone app – what can you create for an entire app where you can actually HELP users??
• Loopt app – social network to find friends in the area → drive sales/advertising to specific location

Q & A

• New Nokia – going to run flash w/ “better” 3G
• Better browsers for mobile devices are coming
• SMS marketing converts better than any other mobile marketing – gather phone numbers w/ email addresses!
• Apps that go across all platforms – forward thinking
• Marketing apps: cannot marketing directly for iTunes URL, so use paid search for app description

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.