I am leading "SEO Expert" (Google it to see where I rank), specializing in organic, natural, local and paid search engine optimization and marketing. I'm also a family guy who never sleeps.
Okay, I'm just jumping in this one and throwing away good page structure to get you the meat of what I'm getting out of this session. Besides, Lisa Barone's live blog is doing an excellent job if you want to get all the great details.
Tony Adam, Director, Online Marketing, Myspace, says to get involved with MySpace testing, you can visit http:/www.myspace.com/guide/curators. Tony was absolutely awesome, spilling his guts about what MySpace has changed over the last year to drive increases in organic traffic. Ironically enough, it was the same list of tasks you'd see on industry blogs:
That last tasks was actually the most interesting to me, since I've turned from not using the CTR equity for brand name to actually using the brand name. In this case MySpace did the opposite with the thought that searchers were seeing MySpace and actually ignoring the listing with the idea that MySpace use was passe.
Adam Audette, CEO, AudetteMedia says to keep your pages under 4 seconds and to keep working on improving load speed. He also says Google is using the rel="canonical" is becoming an indicator for Google (reducing duplicate content), but to use a 301 redirect as a first choice.
Pagination is an issue in search (/page1/, /page2/, etc), particularly with a list of products.Solutions might include:
Dennis Goedegebuure, Director SEO, eBay, Inc.recommends reading about Maverick URL's: W0QQ Case (How a Search Engine Rep Can Do Your Job). W0 demarcates the start of data and the QQ is a delimiter. Ebay made changes that included removing W0QQ removed from search and adding canonical URL's. They added Disallow: *rt=nc in the robots.txt.
Dennis admited that eBay provided a poor user experience by creating a 404 on expired auctions; which broke thousands of links after a user sold a grilled cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary for $28,000. Here is how they are fixing it:
Jenny Halasz (hal-is), VP, Strategy, Acronym Media has 10+ tips
Had a great evening last night hanging out with Video Marketing Expert Mark Robertson of ReelSEO.com and one of my favorite clients. Despite feeling a little groggy, I'm looking forward to this morning's advanced search marketing track.
The Moderator, Vanessa Fox
Greg Boser, Blue Glass
Content Performance Ratios (CPR) - How well is the content you're serving Google performing right now?
Example of bad CPR:
Greg identified the importance of knowing what pages you have and how much traffic they are receiving as way to measure where improvements can be made at a content level.It also helps identify duplicate content issues, architecture issues, and possible poor external link support where top level categories are placed. Example, third party websites linking to a product page versus a category page may impact overall quality at a category level.
A point I definitely agree with is Greg's statement, "you need to get the structural issues fixed before you dive in to titles, and page descriptions", which makes sense from an organizational and website-level SEO perspective. Seach engine-friendly first, optimized for search second.
Todd Nemet, Nine By Blue (Director of Technical Projects)
When it comes to site architecture, Tood mentioned a few questions that we should ask our IT or our clients IT departments:
Checking for duplicate domains was an item in both Todd's and my check list when it comes to analyzing on-page search engine optimization obstacles. I personally do this by copying 4-6 words from a sentence and pasting them (in quotes) into the search engines to see what comes up.
Robtex.com is a site with tools Todd likes to use for this type of testing. There's also a web log parser used by Nine By Blue, that looks at bot activity, hierarchical view, query parameters, reverse DNS, HTTP response codes, all of which could impact search placement.
There are many tools you can use to analyze potential crawl and duplicate content issues, but your server log files may actually be the most useful, as you'll be able to identify cache issues, server error codes and other server and network-based obstacles.
HTRACER at www.redbot.org is a tool you might want to try out.
Brian Ussery, Search Discovery
This is scary, according to Brian, hosts can actually block bots and not tell you, which is super important to know when choosing who you host your website with. Brian recommends using Google Webmaster Tools and the Crawl as Googlebot to determine potential blocking issues.
As it pertains to hosting issues, speed can often be a problem as well. For example:
(see http://www.netcraft.com/)
Brian recommends compress files and insure your server offers Last Modified data. He picked on the Google-Store.com website and how they they don't redirect default.aspx, home.asp and non-www URLs to www.Google-Store.com and www.GoogleStore.com. He also recommends Google Webmaster Tools (I'm seeing a theme here).
Brian's SEO Checklist
Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants
Jonathan says not using a staging server is called "Cowboy Coding", which can cause a robots.txt with a Disallow: / to get uploaded to live. I can't tell you how many times I've had to deal with this personally in the past. Fortunately, it's on my post-migration checklist. He also claims that, "good code is often five times shorter than average code." Watch out for infinte URL spaces, such as calendars. Again, the advice is given to use Google Webmaster Tools, this time the idea of submitting an xml sitemap to understand what percentage of pages are being indexed. He uses GSiteCrawler to index over 500 URLs. And don't forget adding this line to your robots.txt file (replace domain of course):
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Jonathan recommends running a spell check of your entire website, which there are tools you can use online to do this. He also recommends my favorite SEO tool, Xenu Link Sleuth, which checks for broken links across the website. The biggest reason for hacks is failure to patch CMS's and developers who store passwords on Filezilla and Dreamweaver that get compromised by auto-crawlers.
Matt Cutts helped Jonathan get IMCharityParty.com's malware message removed when the site was compromised. Validation helps you check for errors automatically, run on mobile and other devices and may improve load time.
Q&A
Greg says architecture sculpting to channel link juice back to category pages will fix the problem discussed earlier. For example breadcrumbs might help as well as quality content.You may also try to get more top level links to the category pages from other websites.
For international SEO, changing content on the same URL based on IP is not a good long term solution. It's better to point geographic IPs to specific URLs but also allow Google alone to see those other URLs.
A live blog from SMX West in San Jose, California. This session, moderated by Danny Sullivan, covers an update on what's happened since the launch of Google Instant in 2010.
Othar Hansson, Senior Staff Software Engineer
Othar reminds us of the importance of following Google's webmaster guidelines, which isn't necessarily what not to do, but also best practices such as using keywords users would type in to find your product or service.
Impressions are going up, click-through rate is going down, which means ads are being displayed more frequently for advertisers. To this SEO guy, that means local businesses and lead gen companies should be using phone numbers in ads more than ever.
Othar mentions that "predictions are easier for Google to get", which I found interesting considering many of us thought it used the same database.
Avi Wilensky, CEO, Promediacorp
In his example, however, he explained how crowd-sourcing a keyword phrase could inject predictions. However, search volume alone is not enough enough to fix negative search prediction history, as we learned in the Beat the Autocomplete study. I will say, it made me proud to be an SEO seeing Avi stand up to Google in front of Othar, who barely looked up as he took notes on Avi's method of influencing predictions (cross crowd-sourcing off).
I had to step out for a near the end of Avi's presentation to take a call with a company who was ironically suffering the same wrath being discussed during the session; I'm very appreciative that he left us a link to the deck. :)
At #smx #1b1 this morning, starting with the Social Signals & Search, moderated by Danny Sullivan, featuring Paul Yiu from Bing. Danny asked some fantastic questions during the Q&A about influencers to search results, but got very little feedback in terms of which social sites hold more weight and other algorithm factors.
Paul Yiu, Microsoft
Before recently, we knew that links were the main signal search engines used to understand relevance and popularity. Paul said "what's awesome about today, is that you don't have to go to search to make friends, you can bring your friends to search. If you know people who are paying attention to things you're interested, wouldn't it be cool if some of their results bleneded into yours."
"At Bing, you can bring your friends with you", said Paul who seemed to be doing an awful lot of promoting for the search engine as opposed to getting to the point. Blended search results in Bing now include Facebook recommendations from friends.Brunching in Waikiki, Paul was looking for a place to eat and found Kalekulani.com, which was recommended in Bing ("friend source") based on a Facebook link that appeared below the listing.
Interpretation: From a strategic perspective, it may influence Click-Through Rate (CTR) in Bing by having your clients, vendors and employees Like the company Facebook page.
Bing has allowed publishers to have social presence and web presence combined by using Twitter or implimenting somewhat complicated code on the business website.
"A Likehose is a firehose of social feedback. If we see a lot of people Like a certain thing, discussing a certain thing, we may use that as a signal. In terms of ranking, we also look at user attributions (who your friends are, stuff you do, other people sharing what you're sharing, and what you like). You add this stuff together, you have the secret sauce.
We also have Like Farms that Bing can pick up on (patterns of behavior) that can be filtered out.It's still about quality, trust, popularity, and timeliness. Consider making it easy to Like and share content, include links and Tweets. Trust-worthy people sharing your links orTweets; avoid spammy clumps. # of people Retweeting or Liking what you said/shared in the last minute, hour, day, week. Be prepared to turn on a dime, and for the flash mob.
If a lot of people are sharing something, we may add an annotation to the search result or rank a listing higher. We're still collecting data, but the early signs of attrition from users is very good.
Bing Social Signals
Check out http://www.bing.com/social
Mike Cassidy, Google
Google Social Signals
We also calculate eshared by friends as opposed to content retweeted. The fact that a friend shared a page may move it up in the individual's results (not necessarily the global results).
Mike says you can also connect sites privately to improve search experience without a friend seeing a Like or recommendation in their results.
We look at click-through's on annotated results. It's a great signal and people are using them.
Q&A - Danny Sullivan's Questions
Facebook and Twitter are the only sources of social data at this point for Bing. Google is looking at other sources, including YouTube. In terms of weight (YouTube vs Twitter, etc), it's more about user authority than specific destinations.
In terms of link shortners (bit.ly, etc), neither engine has any problem following the links, provided they are 301 redirect (you can check using httpwatch).
The advantage of having an embedded link helps the search engines understand the content. If you can, add a link, so that it helps the users and search engines.
There isn't currently a way to claim your Twitter or Facebook account with the search engine, it sort of happens automatically through the algorithm.
We don't go out of our way to differentiate a Facebook comment grid versus regular comments. We look at all public content to use as ranking signals.
Mike says "we can try to match names of Google accounts to social profiles."
Paul: "Kim Kardashian gets $10,000 per tweet, but may not have topical authority in say science, so unless she has authority scientists in her social circle, her tweet may not mean as much as say fashion.
Mike: "I think there is a feedback loop, such as the decline in followers from being paid to post advertising".
With all the hype going on about Google penalizing J.C. Penny and Overstock for buying links and manipulating search results, it's nice to see that my accounts aren't all impacted.
In fact, I'm almost sensing that the changes have actually improved performance holistically for my clients who implement my recommended White Hat SEO strategies.
I have to give HUGE props to our new rockstar assistant, Lexie (@LexiAsst), who came on board Monday to help us dig our way out of the work overload caused partially to my inability to learn the phrase "sorry, I can't help you". I'm optimistic about next week, but this week sure gave us a run for our money.
Monday was consumed with first of the month fire drills, one after another. You name it, from website hosting issues with affiliates using Name.com and forgetting to create accounts on behalf of their clients, which required that I migrate 3 accounts off addon domains from a personal account to their own domains on their own accounts. Another client felt the wrath of Google and Google Places hijackers, with 2 listings disappearing from universal search results; both had #1 placements.
With Lexi starting, we had to go through the typical employee setup tasks: email, software provisioning, LastPass setup, call routing, a little job shadowing, goal planning, project management system review, etc. Lunch with an old friend who bought me lunch in exchange for consulting time sucked an hour of the day. Top the day off with my mother-in-law going to ER and a late night of watching the kids, and you have the makings for a predicted long week ahead.
Tuesday should have started with a call to Nate, the Link Building Master, but due to utter exhaustion, I didn't arise until nearly 8am and the meeting never happened. The day was packed with calls and replying to emails that should have been sent from my clients to Basecamp (again, not learning to say "no"). Helped one client try to close a major prospect and spent a good 2 hours banging my head against the wall trying to influence Google autocomplete (remove negative results). Spent another hour working on the LSEO disaster from Monday, this time calling in my friend Todd Bryson for a conference call with my client. I did save what would have been an hour trip by having Lexie stop by a client's office to pickup a check. The mother-in-law is back at home resting (whew).
Wednesday wasn't too bad, despite about 6 interruptions from clients that can't stick to their dedicated support hours, a wild 4 year-old that didn't understand what "working from home" meant, a few support escalations calls, and well, I guess it was just as crazy now that I think about it. I did get to have an awesome call with Mark Robertson (@markrrobertson) about a big, yet simple promotion strategy for Q1, just before he took off for CES. My 4pm appointment was cancelled, but was quickly replaced by an SEO consultation with one of my favorite clients who practices the fine art of SEOO (over optimization), so I got my hands dirty and removed about 20% of the 119 instances of a keyword within an article. Had an awesome call with Angela (@seochick) who will be playing a major roll in the development and marketing of BlogMarketingToolkit.com. Her agency has a major prospect that she me need my help with here and there, so we did a planning and estimating session. My dinner got cold with good cause, finally getting 30 minutes to talk to my good friend Warren Whitlock (@warrenwhitlock) about working together in 2011. I know he is going to be a major contributor to our Creative Search Strategies Internet Marketing Webinars. Worked until 4am on the Name.com migration issue for the affiliates; despite the fact that it did not produce income for us (the things I do, ya know?).
Thursday I was up at 7:30 and I finally got to get my hands dirty on an important account, optimizing a category page for Internet Marketing Services. I also helped that same agency with an SEO Audit review and some simple sales tasks. While I optimized, Lexie was on office-search mode and secured us a great little space in Orange with a move-in date of Friday. Melissa stayed up Wednesday night scouring the Web for office shares and gave us some great leads. Chucky Cheese was the venue for lunch today with our little Trinity. Lexie saved me another two hours of picking up payments from clients (you get that most take forever to pay unless you send a courier, right?). Stayed up until 3am again feeling wired from no sleep; my body wanted rest, but my mind and fingers wanted a couple hours of Epic Disney (gave up for the night at Captain Hook).
Up at 7:30 again on Friday, immediately realizing that I had absolutely no attribution to my products and upcoming speaking engagements on my SEO blog (uh, fail). Spent some time working on the Live Events page and started the My SEO Products page, but was interrupted with client emails and calls a few times before noon. Got moved into our new office in Orange at 1pm, took the family to Hooters for a quick bite while Lexie got us all setup. Took a call with a rev-share ecommerce client, a quick call with the client having the LSEO issue, a 30 minute call with the big prospect for the important agency client (see Thursday), fixed Internet connectivity issues (bad Ethernet), had a 20 minute call with an old client who is building a charity website, and got booted from the new office by the last person out (we don't get our key until Monday).
Took a 20-minute call with a consulting client needing a referral for performance-based local SEO services, stopped at home to grab the kids, hit McDonald's to let the kids play for an hour, came home and saw the progress Melissa was already converting what was the home office back into Paris's room (a pink and black theme with an overall French motif), watched some cartoons with the girls, defeated Captain Hook on Epic Disney and wrote the Wiideman Week in Review on Posterous.
Want to be me for a week? Working through the weekend on two projects I won't make any money on, but promised to help with (Lexie is putting an end to my kindness, so don't even ask - lol), researching the LSEO strategy and the Google autocomplete issue, and if I'm lucky, I might even be able to work on my last [legacy] technology project - it's all hush hush.
Have a great weekend everyone. If I don't answer my phone, it's because I'm either working or getting a CAT Scan (it won't be the latter, I don't have time for that).
Search Engine Marketing Specialist Steve Wiideman describes how 1 seo'd page of content can be produced and optimized for greater search engine ranking and better conversion. Pause this training video to find the many screenshots and help hints referred to in this ultra powerful seo training by an industry-leading veteran. Get the free writing guide here: http://bit.ly/atifM1
