SEO WORLD NEWS

Posted by randfish

A conversation last week got me thinking about how knowledge spreads in the world of SEO. I noted on a panel that 90% of all SEO knowledge is "out there," floating on the web, mentioned in presentations, and generally findable by anyone who knows enough to ask the right questions or perform the right searches. The other 10% is behind the curtain - it’s hidden knowledge that rarely ever rears its head. Things in the 10% might include:

• The names and emails of private link brokers and link sellers whose networks are still passing value
• IP lists of the search engines’ cloak-detection bots and methods of identifying potential human quality raters
• Ways around penalties, bans or other search issues
• Email access to the right people at search engines, blogs, social media sites & large web properties
• Access to email or online lists of effective social media voting groups
• Methods for scalably grabbing large amounts of competitive intelligence data from the engines or other sources
• Data on traffic, referrals and other competitive intelligence information for big brands, sites and verticals
• CTRs, CPCs, CPMs, ad payouts & conversion rates for specific keywords and phrases
• Lots and lots of other super secret stuff

The 10% number is not a stable one. I’d venture to guess that 10 years ago, it was much larger (which is to say that a far greater amount of knowledge is available today than was back then). Since I’ve only been in the industry formally since about 2001-2 (when I started working on search marketing and reading industry forums), I can’t say for certain what amount of information was available in 1997, but I did make this nifty graphic to give my rough percentages for the amonut of material available while I’ve been active:

Most SEOs probably pick up their knowledge from a few limited sources - competitive webmastering is, after all, still in its infancy, so you’ve only got a small selection. Blogs, sites & forums (both private and public) on the web serve as a solid data repository (SEOmoz would be among these), but to grasp SEO, I think you really need some serious experience on a site - either your own or your employer’s (or a consulting client’s, though hopefully that wouldn’t be your first try at the subject). I’ve put together the following chart illustrating some of these and my personal path.

I’m actually even more interested to hear where you get your knowledge, so I created a quick poll:

 

 

Every SEO is going to be different, naturally, but from experience I’d say that nearly everyone goes through some period of working on a single site, at least during the beginning of their career. Obviously, some small percentage of us become active in the participatory web of the SEO world - writing articles, running blogs, speaking on panels, training other SEOs, etc. In working to get VC funding for SEOmoz, we estimated that there were around 60-70,000 individuals worldwide who call themselves "SEOs," and another 250,000 or so who have SEO as a large part of their job responsibility. Since there’s something close to 4-6,000 active SEOs in the social, online sphere (voting on things at Sphinn, writing blogs, commenting at blogs, etc), we could estimate that around 2-3% of SEOs publicly share their knowledge.

Once again, I wanted to try to illustrate how SEOs who dive into the practice of contributing and sharing distribute their knowledge, and how much of that actually gets "out there." Here’s what I came up with:

I’m generalizing, but my concept is that at the outset of your SEO career, you might share some information - your successes and failures, but not a whole lot of advice since you haven’t been down the path before. However, as you ramp up your knowledge, you’ll start to share a considerable amount more about what you’re learning, what works and how to apply it. Once you reach the "advanced" stage, however, you’re often learning a lot more of the "10%" than anything else, particularly if you take on consulting work and get a lot of competitive intelligence and exposure to issues under NDA. If and when you finally reach the Greg Boser status of "Dark Lord," you might still be sharing quite a bit, but you’ve probably already shared a lot of what you’re going to give out, and the increase in knowledge and experience has given you responsibilities and tasks that eat up the time you used to spend "sharing."

Of course, there are individuals who fit these rules nicely (someone like Dan Thies or Dave Naylor) and those that are outliers, like Aaron Wall (who’s certainly in the "Dark Lord" category but still shares far more than 50%).

Hopefully, this excercise in guestimation and colorful chart-building has been as fun and interesting to you as it is to me. Naturally, I’d love to hear your feedback about the general topic of SEO knowledge spreading and more specifically your own experiences with learning and sharing.

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Posted by rebecca

I’ve recently been tasked with managing our PPC campaign and working with Jeff on tweaking our landing pages in order to increase our Premium Membership conversions. This week at PubCon I attended as many conversions, PPC, and landing page-related sessions as I could to see if there were any tips or tactics I could pick up. I’d classify myself as someone who knows more than the basics about PPC and conversions but is by no means an expert (otherwise, I’d be the one on the panel, right?), so I was hoping that the sessions I attended would cater to people like me, the "middle of the road" folks who don’t need a 101, but rather some guidance about what they’re doing wrong and how to improve their conversions.

With that being said, I attended 4 sessions that were designed to help marketers and webmasters with their SEM campaign:

PPC Marketing 101

I knew that this was a 101 course, but I attended anyway in hopes that there would be some hidden gems I could extract from the session. Christine Churchill, a friend, lovely human being, and president of KeyRelevance, started things off with 15 effective PPC ad writing tips. One of the tips that stuck out to me was to create a sense of urgency, such as include phrases like "limited time," "offer ends soon," "today only," and "the first 50 visitors." I wonder, however, if this sort of ad needs to be rotated or changed frequently because it’s time sensitive, or if you can keep the ad up indefinitely because new eyeballs will constantly be seeing your ad and thus won’t know that your "offer ends soon" really means "offer never ends–we just want you to click on our ad."

Friend and Lovely Lady #2, Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media, who wrote the book on Yahoo! Search Marketing (uh, literally), talked about some differences between Google Adwords and Panama. At this point we’re only running campaigns on Google, but we’ll most likely expand to Yahoo and MSN after I get the hang of PPC and am able to garner some success with our current campaigns. I did find it interesting how YSM allows you to have 40 characters in your header vs Google’s 25. I wonder if the extra characters makes a difference in clickthroughs, or if the limited characters forces marketers to craft their campaigns for optimal clickthroughs and thus extra characters wouldn’t make much of a difference. I think I could be more creative with more characters–I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come up with a headline I’ve wanted to use, only to get as far as "12 SEO Tools That Kick As" (kidding, though our tools do kick ass).

Lastly, Andrew Beckman, president of SearchAdNetwork, talked about bidding on misspellings and having an ad that incorporates misspelled words because it’s likely that you’re the only one bidding on the misspellings; thus, your ad will be the only one showing. I asked him how effective this strategy is because I know that when I search for something and get a "Did you mean blah blah blah?" prompt, I go "Oh yeah, I did," immediately click on the corrected search query, and don’t even see the search results page long enough to notice any paid ads displayed. Andrew said that he gets clicks and conversions from misspellings as long as there aren’t any competitors doing the same thing, so I guess it does work.

Quality Score Management

The second SEM session I attended was Quality Score Management. Mary Berk from MSN talked about some general quality score stuff, but the really interesting thing she touched on was that she wanted feedback from the audience and attendees about how much information MSN should share about their quality score formula. Currently, MSN displays information about your ad quality, your total quality on a numbered scale, your minimum bid, and your mainline reserve, but she said that MSN was mulling over the option of having a drilldown menu that provides the following information:

• ad text
• landing page
• ad performance
• consumer engagement
• keyword choice and bidding
• aggregate information

Mary contended that the potential problem with the second route is that it leaves the system vulnerable to gamers/spammers, so she wants feedback on what type of quality score metrics to divulge/expand on. I personally think that more fleshed out QS metrics would be really valuable to marketers, as it leaves out the guesswork and helps marketers better tweak their campaigns to get better results faster.

Geoff Price from Efficient Frontier talked about some common myths and misperceptions about quality score, including the following:

• There is only one QS. Geoff said that there are multiple math formulas, one for each of the following:
  • ad position on search
  • minimum bid
  • eligibility and position on a content site
  • other relevance factors
• The QS is updated daily. I’m not sure how often the QS is updated, but he did mention that the Adwords Blog said on September 18 that QS changes will no longer be pre-announced.
• You can 100% control your QS. At this point, a man in the audience disagreed with Geoff and said that you can completely control your quality score, but I’m inclined to agree with Geoff. The search engines can make changes to their QS formulas at any given moment, and you can’t control what their metrics are, so one factor could take into account a metric that’s completely beyond your control.
• Restructuring an account kills your QS history. This just doesn’t make any sense–why would the search engines penalize you for tweaking your accounts? Nobody can strike gold on the first try, so it’s silly to think that you’d get dinged for not having a perfect account from the get go.
• QS is about improving the quality of your ads and nothing else. Obviously, your QS is about a multitude of factors, such as your landing pages, your keywords, your account structure, etc. Also, your quality score isn’t just good for the advertiser, but for the consumer and for Google as well.

Lastly, Michael Stebbins, CEO and founder of Market Motive, suggested creating a "Relevantastic Landing Page" by making your landing page relevant to every ad. You can do this by making your home page dynamic in order to match the search query (do it server side with PHP). I got the gist of what he was saying, though the technical aspects were a bit over my head (CTO to the rescue if ever we decide to implement this).

Landing Page Optimization

Mona Elesseily was back in action, and this time she had some tips on catering ads to different buyers’ needs. She recommended testing pricing on your ads, information that reassures your buyers (e.g., "Official Site" and "24/7 Phone Support"), and, like Christine Churchill recommended, time sensitivity ("Offer Ends Soon," etc). Mona also mentioned that "Get Thermal Oxidizers" performed much better than "Need Thermal Oxidizers?" for her B2B client, which I found interesting because I wrote "Need _______?" for a few of our ads. I’ll have to test a few "Get ________" and see how well they perform.

Lily Chiu, senior strategist for Offermatica (which we’re running on our landing pages), suggested analyzing your sources when altering your landing pages, such as your search queries and geolocation. She also recommended considering settings like screen resolution and language.

Lastly, Janet Driscoll Miller, president and CEO of Search Mojo, gave the audience some landing page best practices. She recommended keeping information above the fold and to avoid scrolling if you can avoid it. I personally prefer shorter, more succinct landing pages, but conversely, our winning landing page for our Landing Page Contest was a long form that was ~25 pages long, so obviously scrolling converts for some people for some weird reason.

Janet said that a simple landing page layout is a logo and headline followed by a "hero" shot (a graphic of some sort) on the left, a caption on the left, and the content and/or form on the right.

Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking

Glenn Alsup, the president of Viewmark, said that one of his clients added a "There are X matching accessories" line at the top of his landing page, which correlated with the number of accessories the page displayed. This line acted as a continuation of the ad that advertised accessories, and the result was a 53% success rate and 400% less clicks (meaning that users were finding what they wanted quicker and easier). Jeff and I thought this tactic was really interesting, and we’re thinking of testing the "search result" line on our landing pages.

Tom Leung, product manager for Google, discussed Google Website Optimizer. He reminded us that your pages may lose more than half their visitors in mere seconds, and most of the people who do stay choose not to convert. This fact was supported by an interesting chart that showed the total number of visitors who enter onto a page and the sliver of those visitors who end up converting. Tom said that the industry average is around a 2-3% conversion rate, so if you’re hitting those numbers you should be doing fairly well.

Tom recommended testing a small number of variations and wait for about 100 conversions per combination. He also stressed testing big changes. If you can’t see a difference between two combinations in 8 seconds, chances are that your visitors won’t notice anything, either. Run the tests for around a month and don’t jump to conclusions–instead, focus on an absolute conversion difference.

The three biggest things to test are:

1. The headline
2. The image
3. The call to action

Tom also suggested testing trust seals (on/off), swapping testimonials, aspirational vs. fact-based pitches, implementing videos, and tweaking your navigation bar.

Philippe Lang essentially talked about LivePerson’s features, so check out the website and poke around if you feel so inclined. Lastly, Boss Man Rand Fishkin talked about SEOmoz’s Landing Page competition (I’ll add a link to his presentation once he gets it to me).

Conclusion

Overall, I’d say that I did get some nice takeaways from each of the sessions, despite most of them being fairly 101 in nature. I think that people like me who are either starting out in the sordid world of Conversions or have been tasked with being the Conversions Guru at their company have a nice selection of sessions to attend that flow logically and complement each other. Obviously, all of the tracks stressed basic information and highlighted the importance of your keywords, testing, and landing pages, but that just means that those facets are the most essential takeaways and thus should require most of your attention. The specific means and tips to tweak your keywords, testing, and landing pages is what truly interested me, and I hope that future panelists will keep that in mind and share their secret sauce with the audience.

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Posted by randfish

I’ve been asked several times to give presentations on the basics of social media marketing, and have now refined my 15 minute introductory tour to the point where I think it’s fairly good (and I’m really damn picky about my presentations). The following presentation (in visual and text form) should be helpful for anyone trying to convince their bosses, team or cohorts that investing in SMM is a worthwhile pursuit. Enjoy!

SECTION I: What is Social Media Marketing?

Before we ask that, we really need to start with the goals of online marketing as a whole!

• Basic Things Like:
  • Web Site Traffic
  • Conversions and Sales
  • Page Views & Ad Exposure
• More Complex Things Like:
  • Growing Brand Awareness
  • Creating Positive Brand Association
  • Business Development & Networking

Guess What? Social Media Marketing Can Help with All of These Things.

How, you might ask?

The first step is social interaction over the web. Platforms like Wikipedia (in the Web 2.0 world) or even forums and chatrooms (way back in the ’90’s) let ordinary users reach hundreds or thousands of other web-savvy people.

You + Wikipedia = Your Content in Front of Lots of Eyeballs

SMM also involves the practice of viral content creation and promotion. By building content on your website that’s inherently alluring to a web-based audience, you can attract positive attention of all kinds.

In the example above, this singles map, showing the distribution of cities in the US with high/low men-to-women ratios was "spread" across the web after it was promoted on Digg. The content’s creator, National Geographic magazine, hadn’t enabled the map to be visible in an online format, so the owner of a dating website actually re-published the image and built up a considerable amount of mindshare and relevant links.

Technical goals, like control of the search results to help with reputation management are also a part of SMM’s appeal. You can push down negative listings, swarm competitors and build high ranking pages that can drive secondary traffic to your site(s).

The image above shows the power of social media profiles - a search at Google returns pages and pages of my profiles at various sites where I’m a regular contributor (and plenty where I’ve barely contributed at all, too).

Social media’s power lies in its ability to engage the "right" kind of particpants. Key influencers are heavily overrepresented in social media (and the blogosphere), and immense value can come from getting your brand/content/product in front of their eyes.

SECTION II: Why is Engagement with Social Media Valuable?

Because social media supports both branding and mindshare goals

See? Branding on the left, mindshare on the right.

Social media participation can also bolster your search marketing goals. The engines want to see high quality, frequent, editorial links pointing to your site as a pre-requisite to rankings. The social web allows marketers to reach audiences who can provide these valuable links, giving them an edge on their less social competition.

SMM is also, obviously, great for traffic and even conversion rates. Social sites like Digg, Reddit and popular blogs drive tens of thousands of visitors and while those users frequently won’t engage directly with your brand right away, they’ve now had a "branded experience" and are more likely to have positive associations and a brand memory in the future, both of which will serve to increase conversion rates.

SECTION III: Why Now? Why Has Social Media Suddenly Become So Important?

Because social media has suddenly become very, very popular.

The chart above shows that year over year, 2007 was a breakout for user-generated content and participatory sites. The bottom half tells the story of opportunity - social media marketers have an opportunity to contribute and shape the social web before the noise of millions of users makes a single voice impossible to hear.

A few quotes from studies performed in the last 2 years stand out, including:

Brand Advocates" have emerged online as primary influencers, with at least a two to one rate of converting an actual friend or family member to buy the same product or brand…

…Brand Advocates are incredibly valuable to marketers because they are better connected consumers with a larger sphere of influence…

…Social Media is the Key – Study findings showed that Brand Advocates are taking full advantage of social media tools and actively leveraging them for product purchases. Through instant messaging, chat, community, photo sites and blogging, Brand Advocates are able to influence their vast online social circle…

 Source: Yahoo! + ComScore Study on Brand Advocates - December 2006

Passionistas heavily engage with communities of like-minded consumers who use email, text messaging, and instant messaging significantly more than typical users, and are more likely to create and share user-generated content online such as photos, blog posts or videos about their passions. Because of their intense engagement around sharing information about their passions through digital media, Passionistas are natural brand advocates and 52% more likely than typical users to recommend or influence others about brands aligning with them.

Brands that stimulate conversation among passionate consumers will be rewarded through the credibility that comes from trusted word of mouth,” said Jim Kite, President of Connections Research and Analytics at MediaVest. “Accessing Passionistas online also offers the ability to track this valuable group’s media consumption habits, enabling brands to optimally – and accountably – leverage their advocacy power.

Source: Yahoo! Passionistas Report - September 2007

If that doesn’t convince you, read on:

It’s not surprising for most Internet users to find that influencers of all varieties are heavily engaged with the web in general (and the blogosphere in particular), but it’s amazing to imagine that US influencers are actually trailing countries like China, South Korea & Japan in blog engagement.

SECTION IV: How Does SMM Help with SEM?

Remember back to a time long ago when search engines weren’t too smart? There it is - just about 1997. Altavista and Lycos and NorthernLight were scanning keywords and meta tags trying to sort out who repeated the phrase "dancing baby gif" the most.

Obviously, these primitive engines didn’t last long, and with the evolution and popularization of link-based algorithms, search engines became smarter. However, the gaming continued. Once search marketers learned of the biases towards links, the Internet starting flooding with "non-editorially given links" based on a desire to manipulate the rankings of the engines. These links were never intended to be clicked, and the motivations behind them weren’t to "endorse the quality or relevance of another site’s content."

The "links as votes" algorithms could only persist so long as links were truly meant as votes - and with the Pandora’s box of PageRank spilling across the web, the search engines had to resort to better and more careful analyses of which links to count. Thus, they developed advanced algorithms for calculating trust, segmenting pages, watching for spikes of unnatural link activity and generally cramping down on the search world’s less cautious manipulators.

With tactics like link farms, reciprocal schemes, paid link networks, forum, guestbook and blog spamming all going the way of the Dodo, websites that wanted to rank atop the engines needed to return to the roots of organic marketing. This re-ignited the age old conflict of the marketer vs. the trusted source - how does a company get their product or service in front of the right people to let it spread editorially?

 

This phenomenon brings us to a string of fundamental questions… and their answers

#1 - Who Creates Links on the Web?

Oh, right… It’s these guys:

I like to call them the Linkerati, but they are, in essence, merely an extension of the offline world’s influencers - journalists, traveling salesmen, and your neighbor Jessica, who always has some new remarkable product or company to tell you about. The Linkerati are powerful - they own the editorially given link structure of the web, and this brings us to our second question…

#2 - How Can Marketers Reach the Linkerati?

Oh, right… Social Media Marketing! Through the sites and blogs that Linkerati frequent and are influenced by, we can build a marketing campaign that uses content-based strategies to get in front of the right people. But, is getting in front of them enough? Can we play a passive role once our brand has been seen? Or, do we need to do something more - perhaps ask another question.

#3 - How Do Influencers Spread Content?

Oh right… We’re going to need to know this if we want our Linkerati to socially spread our ideas. Lucikly, I’ve got this handy bullet point list:

• Email to friends and associates
• Share via social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn)
• Vote up at social news portals (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Mixx, Propeller)
• Link to from Blog posts and comments
• Discuss at forums and groups
• Spread via word-of-mouth directly to colleagues and contacts
• Link to on their websites
• Broadcast via multimedia (video, podcasts)
• Mainstream media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines)

Not all of these are inherently trackable, but many of them are, and by measuring successes against failures in the online world, we’ll be able to get a sense of what plays with the Linkerati.

#4 - What Types of Content Are Likely to Become Viral?

This final question comes after months and years of experience and in many cases, its uniquely tailored to your specific industry or niche. Luckily, we’re not really going to leave you hanging - Jane’s new linkbait guide is out today (it will be on SEOmoz by 2-3pm this afternoon), and although it’s part of our premium content, it does a fantastic job of explaining the ins and outs of why some content suceeds while others falter. In the interim, this chart is pretty useful, too:

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this social media basics presentation in blog format. For those who’d prefer, you can download the whole thing in Microsoft Powerpoint here as well.

UPDATE: Sorry about the missing PPT file - I’ll try to have that up ASAP tomorrow.

p.s. I did not end up giving this presentation at Pubcon Las Vegas - instead, I asked the audience to vote between this and a more advanced walkthrough of social media sites, and more than 90% opted for the latter. I’ve asked that no one blog or reveal the contents therein, but we will have it available for download behind the premium content curtain at the request of a very smart audience member

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Posted by randfish

SEOmoz’s Q+A section has been a goldmine of eye-opening experiences for the entire staff, and never more so than when we see something so bizarre, so surprising, that it defies explanation. Tonight, we not only got to see one of these fascinating search riddles, we’re actually able to share (a rare event as most domains with specific search problems ask to remain confidential).

Thanks to the generosity of Assaf from Paintyourlife.com, a fun, international site that lets you create custom paintings from photos, we’ve been given permission to share the perturbingly strange search results below:

The above screenshot shows Google in the #1 position for the search phrase "paintyourlife.com." Not only that, but the sitelinks are displaying, suggesting that Google (the search engine) thinks that "paintyourlife.com" is closely connected enough to be a branded search term referring to Google.com.

Google’s not the only one suffering with odd results, though - Yahoo! has some odd ideas about paintyourlife.com as well:

At Yahoo!, searching for "paintyourlife" results in a title and description that comes from the site, but the domain and the referring link will send you to Google.com!

Obviously, we asked Assaf if PaintYourLife.com had recently been re-directed with a 301 or 302 or if some other event like a DNS switch could have caused these issues, but to the best of his knowledge, no such shift had occurred. I suspect that a technical problem of some kind affected the results we see above, but there’s nothing like a search for your domain name resulting in Google coming up #1 to make you feel like the search giant’s taking over everything lately.

Oh, and big props to Live & Ask for getting all of the queries around PaintYourLife.com showing their domain rather than Google’s.

p.s. Here’s a link to Archive.org’s listings for the domain, none of which would suggest anything out of the ordinary.

BTW - Is it just me, or does the idea of having a painting of your house inside your house conjure up a Monty Burns meets MC Escher theme for anyone else? I think I want one…

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Posted by Mel Gray

I’m typing this as I’m sitting at the departure terminal for my trip back home to Seattle.  It’s been quite the week, and I’m definitely feeling a bit fatigued, but saying this trip was "worth it" would be an understatement.

This is my second time in Vegas, but first time out to an SEO convention.  Being a developer, I am often a bit clueless about who most of the people in this industry actually are.  Getting out here has kind of set off a light bulb and allowed me a chance to meet some really cool folks.

Monday

---

Everything started out very early Monday morning in Seattle.  The city had seen a patch of bad weather over the weekend,  so the idea of getting some desert sunshine helped with getting me out of bed and into a cold car.  After a long commute over and around some closed streets, I arrived and promptly inhaled a pot of coffee.

After a quick hop through some gray clouds and into some blue skies, we touched down into an oasis of flashing lights.  Arriving at the hotel with a group of Mozzers was almost dreamlike.  Everything was such an assault on the senses that I was left with a kind of numbed buzzing feeling and a dumb grin hanging off my face.

Until I saw this…

We unpacked our bags and headed downstairs to unwind at the bar and survey who else had arrived.

We took a seat and were almost immediately greeted by both Tamar Weinberg and Rhea Drysdale.  Anytime I meet somebody in real life that I’ve only spoken with online, I am filled with a sense of relief that they are in fact not a giant cartoon emoticon.  It was very nice to finally meet Tamar and be introduced to Rhea.

After a brief round of hand shaking and jokes about my wardrobe, in walks David Mihn alongside Dr. Peter J. Meyers.  More hand shaking ensues (this happens A LOT at conferences) and everyone has a chance to do some catching up and chit chat about projects.

It was at this point that waves of hunger began rolling over us all and that a meal was in order before high tide.

So we whistled for a cab and when it came near the license plate said ‘fresh’ and it had a dice in the mirror. If anything, we knew that this cab was rare, but we said, "Ya know what? Forget it. Let’s go to the Monte Carlo and get some burgers with beer."

After a nice meal it was off to the Venetian to catch the Blue Man Group.

This show rocked.  If you find yourself in Vegas or they are touring near your town, GO.

I don’t want to get too off track and lead anyone to believe that SEO conventions are all flashing lights and ambiguously blue men playing renditions of  "Crazy Train" on PVC pipes, so let’s cut to the chase and jump right into the following day.

Tuesday

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It begins!

After getting  up and having a nice stretch, I notice that my phone is awash with a number of new text messages. Sliding through each of the messages I am able to gather a wealth of info on the where abouts and plans of fellow Mozzers.

Important information like "Jane is in room 123" and "Everybody will be at the courtesy shuttle in 15 minutes."

This is something very important at conferences. Constant mobile communication and scheduling is a must.

The hotel had 2,716 rooms and covered 215 acres.  That’s 9,365,400 square feet of crazy carpet, flashing lights, loud noises, and pushy tourists.  Finding 8 people in that mess without the use of cell phones would be impossible. 

Staying in touch is key.  Being able to confirm that all of your party will indeed be meeting by the elevators in 10 minutes to make it to registration is invaluable.

The Moz team is still relatively small, so keeping tabs on where everyone is and where they are going to be is not too difficult.  Organizing a larger group would prove to be much more complicated.   There are existing services out there (such as twitter) that, when used in a utilitarian fashion (rather than a purely ’social’ one), could prove quite useful when trying to manage large groups.
 
The Conference
The morning starts off with a breakfast of coffee and apples with Jeff & Matt Inman. We make some small talk about how wild the city is and then began planning out our day.
 
We decide that it would first be a good idea to register and obtain our passes.  However, while on our coffee break, the registration line had grown quite long.  Lucky for us, the registration was being handled very well, so the line moved fairly quickly.  Unlucky for me, I ran into some problems obtaining my pass.  Everything eventually got sorted out thanks to the great guys at Web Master World.

The setback did cost me the first session.   This was another lesson learned:   Early is everything at conferences. Getting up early, getting out early, and getting registered early is key.

I did manage to hop into Salon B to catch the second session:

Perl - PHP - Databases - What Every Webmaster Should Know
The panel did a fine job of presenting general webmaster info about open source software.  One thing that became obvious during Q&A is that most members of the audience were more Windows oriented, and generally interested  in best practice and turnkey solutions. 

Reputation Monitoring and Management
Before filing into this session, I ran a few folks I had met from the night before, so unfortunately had missed the beginning of Cameron Olthuis’s talk. I felt that Andy Beal and Geoff Livingston had some interesting things to say, especially Geoff’s notions on meeting someone on their turf, keeping your ego in check, and the power of the underdog. 

Landing Page Optimization
This was a session I dropped in on with Jeff & Rebecca, because they had both been underwent a project involving the optimization of landing pages.  Curious as to what they had been up to, I sat in for a listen.  I was particularly impressed with Leslie Chiu’s presentation and Offermatica’s test cases.

Large Scale Bid Management
Surprisingly, I felt that this was one of the most useful sessions I had attended this day.  It was definitely very business-oriented in nature, which is something I generally tend to stay away from because I develop code.  However, business guys have a direct relationship to developers because they’re the ones that say "If the code can do X Y Z, I can sell it for 123, you then get some money, and everyone is happy." 


Wednesday

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Photos of me practicing reverse Savasana are circulated amongst Moz staffers and are promptly  displayed for everyone’s viewing pleasure at the conference (thanks Jane!).

Local and Mobile Search
I’m a big fan of all things mobile.  Jeff & I attended this one because it was tech oriented and mobile development is something that is currently outlined on our ’super secret’ development whiteboard.  The gentleman from Quattro had a mobile CMS outlined in his presentation that looked very interesting.

WereWolf Tournament
Being on staff, I had the privilege of moderating a few games of Werewolf.  I was a "Werewolfie," if you will (LOL, see what I did there?)

Thursday

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Interactive Site Reviews
I like these sessions a lot.  Anytime a member of the audience can provide a sample of their work to be critiqued by the panel is great.  It gives you an idea of not only who the audience is, but how members of the panel think when they see a ‘problem’. 

Startup Costs - Getting in the Video Game
I’ll admit that I first walked into this thinking it was the video search session. (Las Vegas Pro Tip: Always remember what day it is, so your schedule can make sense when you read it.)  However, I am a big Alfred Hitchcock movie buff and like photography, so I stuck around.  I was actually very impressed with Robin Liss’s presentation about video equipment.  You can tell that she has a passion for what she does, and that’s something I like to see very much. 

That same passion was also seen tearing it up behind the drums at Microsoft’s Rock Band Ghost Bar party.

Friday

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We get to go home!

This week was so much fun I can’t even put it into words.

During the course of my outings I managed to not only meet a lot people and learn a lot of cool things from them, but I feel much better oriented about who is who and what is what out there.  While I found the sessions to be informative, I feel the real value comes into play by coming out, sitting down, and talking to people.  Remove the media layer and REALLY be social.

Anyway, I’d like to say "Cheers" to everyone I met this go around, I hope you all have safe trips home and that I can see you soon.  Everybody get some rest, this next year is going to rock!

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Posted by great scott!

It’s Friday. It’s the last day of Pubcon. It’s been fun and informative and exhausting (too little sleep, too much drink…it’s a conference and it’s Vegas).  So here’s another installment of the Danny Sullivan interview in which Danny tells us what goes into programming a conference like this, how he gets content ideas, and what you can do if you want to be a speaker.

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Posted by rebecca

Last night SEOmoz hosted the much-anticipated Search Spam party (much anticipated by Rand and Gillian, anyway, who have been skipping around the office like giddy little school girls the past couple weeks). Held in the room opposite the Google Meet the Engineers mixer (how very Sharks vs. Jets!), Gillian did a lovely job of setting up tables adorned with Search Spam cards and black and white M&Ms (to enhance the Black Hat/White Hat theme, of course).

Search Spam is essentially an SEO-themed version of the parlor game Werewolf (or Mafia, depending on how you’ve played it). Begrudgingly (threw that in for ya, Rand), Wikipedia has a comprehensive entry about the game and how it’s played, so give it a read if you’re intrigued about the rules. Werewolf is a game of bullshitting, deceit, and persuasion…so we found it only natural to give it an SEO theme and repackage it as Search Spam.

One of Rand’s friends who’s also an artist drew caricatures of several well-known SEOs and search engine reps. These folks were divided into the White Hat and Black Hat players, with Danny Sullivan being the Reinclusion Requester (the "healer") and Matt Cutts being the Revealer of Hats (the "seer"):

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Posted by JaneCopland

I don’t know what it is about this town, but things work very differently here. I’ve been getting little sleep and not eating very much (aside from a trip to the Bellagio’s buffet where I ate myself sick), and yet I feel fantastic. They say casinos pump oxygen into the gambling halls and bars in order to keep you awake and alert and spending money. Whatever it is, it works.

This morning, I sat at the front of Rand’s "Search and Blogging Reporters Forum" with Lisa and Tamar, who made me look bad by tapping away and recording everything the speakers said, while I wrote half-sentences on Notepad. Andy Beal spoke about how more and more reporters are reading blogs to get story ideas. While most reporters have done this, around 52% do so on a regular basis, which is a smart move since reporters who don’t keep up with the technological times tend to lose their jobs!

Rand then mentioned how the New York Times has removed its paid content and is now monetizing that content with advertising. He also spoke about the difference between bloggers and reporters in terms of their mistakes. When a blogger messes up and says something he or she shouldn’t, they tend to discuss their mistake. Traditional media sources usually do the opposite, printing a small retraction which is buried deep within the publication. Personally, I like neither approach particularly much. There is a balance between over-hyping a screw-up with multiple follow-up posts and commentaries, and hiding a blunder. Bloggers usually come closer to achieving this balance than newspapers and magazines, but I dislike the lengthy conversations that the blogosphere sometimes gets into over controversial or mistaken posts. For anyone who thinks I’m silly for saying that, please be reminded that Vegas made me write it.

On to other topics. They panel discussed "owning" a space because of its lack of blogs. I think this applies not only to blogs but to a range of areas, especially forums. While I’m willing to bet that 99% of industries have forums to their names, some industries are far less competitive than others. Plus, there is no need to feel restricted to topics and areas where blogging has always been popular. You can always bring blogging to a community whose members have not used blogs before.

Lee Odden spoke about the formula that seems to apply to most successful blogs: passion, an understanding of the community, and inventive posts, such as interviews with industry leaders. I agree: there is nothing worse than a blog that is written by people who don’t really care about its contents. You see this sometimes (often?) with corporate blogs. They’re sometimes written by employees who are knowledgeable and intelligent, but they don’t have much passion for their topic. And it always shows.

Rand then made everyone feel bad for not being an industry insider by telling us that he’d been let in on some neat SEO secrets during the week but that he couldn’t write about said secrets for "at least a year." So I’m being unfair: he was just highlighting how 90% of information is "out there" but the remaining 10 is not public because it’s either too sensitive or too valuable.

I don’t like these short paragraphs and sudden changes in subject, but the forum changed subjects pretty regularly as well. The educated writer in me should be coherent enough to come up with tactful ways to transition between each topic, but one of the Convention Center’s security guards is glaring at me like I’m doing something wrong (I’m blogging from the hallway outside the conference rooms) and I’m getting distracted… The next topic the panel discussed was the SEO-friendliness of blogging platforms such as Wordpress. The general consensus was that these services are relatively good for SEO, but they could still be better. For example, nofollowing tags links could make these blogs so much more SEO-friendly, as the majority of bloggers won’t know to do this themselves.

On to the frequency with which you should blog. Most people will tell you to blog every day. At SEOmoz, we try to post daily; hence our tagline. However, there are bloggers such as Todd Malicoat and Greg Boser who don’t post every day and yet are very successful.

Get ready! Another ill-conceived topic change is going to happen right now…

I am hesitant to write about the "Getting Into the Video Game" session I attended next, as Scott and Mel were also there and I don’t want to usurp anything they wanted to write about it. Basically, the session covered the necessities of creating good video content, not so much from a search point of view but from the production and quality perspective.

I have to go now. The sun has gone down and the Convention Center’s lights are way too bright. I’m also suffering from a jittery, nervous feeling that many people report when they come to Vegas. It’s not even that I don’t like it here. I do like it, in the strangest possible way. It’s like a paranoid, nervous feeling that has no rationale or explanation, but that you just can’t shake. Mel calls it The Fear.

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Posted by randfish

This week, the SEOmoz crew and I are heading to Pubcon in Las Vegas for one of the search industry’s more advanced conferences. However, before departing, I felt an irresistable urge to do some coverage of a tough competition from the world of search marketing and use it to illustrate how search-savvy analysts can use the engines to get insight about multiple brands in an industry.

The inspiration for this comes from two sources, both worth a read - this interview from Lee Odden with Kevin Ryan & Kevin Heisler from Search Engine Strategies & SearchEngineWatch, respectively - and this one - SEL vs. SEW: And the Winner Is? by Matt McGee. The interview suggests to me that there’s is considerable defensiveness, hubris and contention over the competing conference series, and Matt’s post (along with the water cooler gossip of lots more threads on the subject) tells me the search industry is particularly fascinated by the conflict (no surprise, as our niche has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for drama).

First off, I want to take issue with Matt McGee’s post. Matt’s an incredibly smart guy, but I think he does a bit of disservice by using a single metric to calculate a brand’s reach in comparison to another. Yes, comparing feed subscriptions through Bloglines over time is a reasonable data point to use, but when so much information is available at our fingertips, shouldn’t we go all the way?

Here’s how I’d analyze competing brands in the search marketing space:

First, you want to see where the overlaps are between the businesses. From the chart above, I’d say that SEW and SELand are directly competitive, as are SMExpo, SES & Pubcon. The other businesses target similar groups, but probably don’t overlap to the same degree. The founding year is very important, because it will help us as we look at comparative data to make guesses about the speed of growth or stagnation.

Here’s a key to the data columns above:

• URL - the domain of the various properties (note that I’ve shortened these to fit)
• G#s (6m) - the number of Google results for a search for the domain name (including the extension) for the last 6 months, excluding the domain itself. Here’s an example of how to perform this search - "searchenginewatch.com" -site:searchenginewatch.com
• G#s (3m) - as above, but for only the last 3 months
• GBlog (All) - a Google Blog Search for the domain name, excluding the domain itself, on the default settings (no particular timeline)
• GBlog (1m) - as above, but for only posts that have appeared in the past month
• GPR - PageRank of the domain homepage as reported by the Google Toolbar

This data gives us insight into the prevalence of mentions for the various domains. By referring back to this data, we can draw some conclusions about domain and brand popularity in general, including the respective brand penetration and saturation as well as an idea of who’s "gaining" ground and how quickly.

Again, some quick bullet points to explain the columns:

• URL - This is the same as the above chart.
• MS Links - Live says they’re shutting down their link searches again in a few weeks, so I’m lucky to have this data. The format used for the search is +linkdomain:searchenginewatch.com -site:searchenginewatch.com to remove internal links. QUICK NOTE - The numbers here jump around so much that they may not be valuable. I just ran 3 queries for the searchenginewatch domain and got results ranging from 600K to 3.5million.
• Yahoo! Links - This link data comes courtesy of Yahoo! Site Explorer, where the search is performed with the parameters that include external links onyl to any page on the domain. The numeric data here appears far more reliable than the Microsoft/Live link data.
• Trati Auth - This is Technorati’s Authority number, which derives from the number of individual, unique blogs that have linked to a site in the past 90 days.
• GfdSbs - Google’s feed subscriber numbers, which can be found by searching for domains inside Google Reader.
• BLSbs - Bloglines’ subscription numbers which derive, as above, from searches performed inside Bloglines.

This data is a bit more domain and SEO-centric, but it also tells a great story about the success of the various domains from a web marketing perspective. Link data and feed subscribers are going to be highest for sources reporting the news and offering popular blogs, but even the secondary sites make for interesting comparisons between one another.

Key to the Above Chart:

• Brand Name - this is the exact term or phrase I used to perform queries. In some cases, such as "search engine strategies" and "information world review," it appeared from the results that many mentions were meant to be general, rather than representative of the brands, but I’ve included the data nonetheless.
• G#s (6m) - A search at Google, restricted to the last 6 months, for the brand name term or phrase.
• G#s (3m) - As above, but for only the last 3 months.
• GBlog (All) - A Google Blog Search for the brand term/phrase using the default settings (no time frame).
• GBlog (1m) - As above, but limited to blog posts from the last 1 month.

As much as the website metrics are valuable, the brand names themselves can sometimes provide even more insight. After all, not everyone is going to use the domain name when talking about a conference series or brand, nor will they all link. Thus, looking at brand mentions over the past few months can provide valuable competitive analysis.

The numbers in this last chart come from the posted member numbers on pages like SEWatch Forum Members, Sphinn Members, an educated guess about WebMasterWorld, & SEOmoz’s internal figures. The "user engagement" data is a pure guess on my part, based on the amount of user-generated content and activity on the sites. The last column, brand recognition, is also a pure guess, based on my experience of talking to, emailing, and visiting folks in the search marketing world.

This kind of data is valuable because it helps us realize the level of interaction users have with these various sites on a regular basis. Not every site is going to have data like this, but if you’re analyzing competing domains that offer user engagement, don’t overlook this information.

Takeaways from this analysis:

• Third Door’s Search Engine Land property is clearly a runaway hit. According to nearly every metric above, it’s taken only a year to grow to a size similar to SearchEngineWatch, though the latter had a ten year lead.
• Search Marketing Expo isn’t yet of comparable size to Pubcon or SES, but again, the growth rate over the past 6 months (the first SMX was June of 2007) would indicate that if it stays on this path for 2-3 years, it could leapfrog both.
• It would appear that Third Door Properties and SEOmoz both have faster growth curves than either of the other two (although SEOmoz doesn’t really compete directly with any of these sites). Between the two, however, Third Door is clearly on the faster path of growth.
• Revisiting these numbers in 6 and 12 months would probably be incredibly interesting

Hopefully this example serves not only to satiate the curiosity of search marketers wondering about the X vs. Y battles, but also illustrates how to perform a more robust competitive analysis on domains and brands.

BTW - As a pre-emptive strike against the inevitable, let me point out that I have good cause not to trust any data from Alexa, QuantCast or Compete, and I would suggest that savvy brand analysts stay away from these services until they prove themselves to have greater accuracy.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Although we at SEOmoz don’t directly profit from any of the conference series or businesses mentioned above, we have had professional and financial relationships with all three organizations in the past, and have currently active relationships with both Pubcon & Third Door Media’s properties.

p.s. Joe still has a few tickets left for shows in Vegas tomorrow night, so if you’re itchin’ to see Spamalot or Blue Man Group, make sure to visit his blog.

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Posted by randfish

Today at Pubcon, I’m speaking on the Link Buying Panel, but here on the blog, you’re getting a sneak peak at one of my topics for the presentation.

It’s my feeling that we (search engines and search marketers) have hit some intransigence on the paid links debate. The marketplace has to exist - and search engine have to fight against what they perceive to be manipulative, non-editorial votes. But, what if there was a solution that could make both sides happy? A place where money changed hands between parties, but editorial decisions still came into play?

I’m calling this idea "Sponsored Editorials." The concept is simple:

• Create a marketplace where those seeking to have their web-based content reviewed, written about and possibly linked-to can connect with website and blog owners interested in earning money off their investment of a review
• Buyers (who want their content reviewed) pay up front.
• Reviewers get paid to review the content, whether they write about it (or link to it) or not.
• If the reviewers like the content, they can use a nofollow link to tell search engines that they’re not editorially endorsing it.
• If the reviewers LOVE the content, they can remove the nofollow and editorially endorse the content.

Here’s a couple graphics for those who prefer visuals:

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The idea isn’t perfect, but I think it has some potential, and I’d be thrilled to participate in a system that essentially rewards content creators and reviewers precisely how the engines might intend.

Naturally, feedback is welcome - constructive is preferable, but critical is fine, too, of course. I’m not sure if this a project that SEOmoz would take on (though our new marketplace would be a fun place to give it a spin), but I certainly hope that in freely sharing the idea, it can grow and become even more valuable and interesting.

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