by Larry Sivitz and Jennifer Grimes
The season’s two major search marketing conferences, WebmasterWorld/PubCon in Las Vegas and Search Engine Strategies in Chicago faced a showdown this year, ready to drag race down the spectacular Las Vegas strip and Chicago’s Miracle Mile, respectively, from their usual pre-holiday pole positions. Only this time the inside track was on a collision course.
Both premiere search marketing events found themselves in a scheduling standoff when event organizers were unable to reconcile two unique weeks for the annual symposia. A contest for presenters and attendees ensued. Only one critical question remained: Who would go where?
WebmasterWorld/PubCon emerged as the victor, and by several laps. Organizer Brett Tabke proudly announced the Pacific time zone show as “the biggest PubCon ever.” The vast Las Vegas Convention Center was a fitting venue facilitating the first time a search keynoter was given a flying ovation with pigeons soaring inside the cavernous convention hall.
Matt Cutts, Stephen Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Vanessa Fox, Todd Friesen, Bruce Clay, Jill Whalen, Gord Hotchkiss, Greg Boser, Jim Boykin, Aaron Wall, Dan Sundgren, and, of course, your celebrity editor, Larry Sivitz, (not to mention a long list of other industry luminaries) all opted for the All-Star West team while Search Engine Strategies in the east succeeded in attracting a cadre of stalwart reserves with the likes of Mike Grehan, Brian Eisenberg, Shari Thurow and, yes, Danny Sullivan. What was odd is that Danny (the named godfather of Search), had been disenfranchised by SES owners, Incisive Media, and has since founded his own network of conferences dubbed Search Marketing Expos or SMX for short. Was Danny simply being loyal to the expatriated brand’s trade show or was this a contractual appearance clause? Sullivan is now readying his first major West Coast show, SMX West for San Jose this February and will be back in Seattle in June for SMX Advanced.
Making the A-List: Craig Newmark from CraigsList
PubCon kicked off with a keynote address by Craig Newmark the founder of the wildly successful Craigslist.com. You may have caught Newmark on Charlie Rose a few weeks ago when Charlie asked “Why is Craigslist successful?” They have 9 billion pageviews per month right now running your generic Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl. They also have an awesome caching system (that they’d eventually like to make Open Source). The server farm consists of 120 generic machines at a colocation facility. And yet, it’s still running on PINE.
So let’s ask Craig why Craig’slist is successful? “It’s an inspirational concept of shared values,” according to Newmark. In 1994 while working at Charles Schwab, Craig was active with evangelizing news groups. To give back, he started an email list sharing with friends about events in the San Francisco area. Word of mouth spread the list and people asked to put things for sale, jobs on the list. “Today, the Internet is everyone’s printing press and Craigslist is fulfilling the community publishing role for local community announcements, classified advertising, events, personals and help wanted. No matter where you are in the world or your cultural background, ordinary people are getting together and changing things on a massive scale. Craigslist is an agent for that change.”
How can Search Engine marketers ethically use Craigslist to use links? “It’s simple common sense stuff. You go to the site, you pick out the city you want to advertise in, you pick out the categories and check them out. Check out how people use that category and post your ads there. The idea is that every site has its own culture. Every site is a place in the virtual sense and when you go to a virtual place, you try to fit in – that’s how you use the site ethically.”
“Google Guy” Matt Cutts Always on the Cutting Edge
The inimitable manager of Google Web Search Quality, Matt Cutts, shared his recommended best practices for White Hat SEO along with advice on thwarting Black Hat SEM during his PubCon keynote.
Matt took Q and A from the audience on a hoist of search engine practices. What are the best procedures when changing servers (on IP addresses). “There are 3 or 4 steps. First: lower your DNS TTL (Time-to-Live) to 5 minutes. Bring up the site on the new IP address. Switch the site to the new IP address, but keep the old and the new live. As soon as you see Googlebot crawl the new IP address, you should be fine. Normally a day or two is all you need.”
Speaking of black hat practices, what is the best way for an honest Webmaster to report pernicious competitive behavior? It’s easy of the spammer is trying to capitalize on Google’s revenue-sharing Adsense programm. “Every Google Adsense ad — including ads on splogs — can be reported to Google if it is in violation of a particular AdSense guideline,” said Cutts. First, you click on “Ads by Google” (in some instances, you will see “Feedback – Ads by Google”). Then scroll down where you can click on “Send Google feedback on the ads you just saw.” After that, expand the form to “Report a violation.”
After you report, Google will send you a DMCA form to fill out and you may have to produce screen caps in order to validate your claim. It can take some time to get these DMCA complaints verified, but in the end, it’s worth it if you’re concerned that your content is being scraped and/or stolen, this is a valid resource.
What hapopens when Websites link out to “bad neighborhoods?” How do you identify bad neighborhoods? Should you use the “rel=nofollow” tag attribute when linking to questionable sites or stay away from them totally? “Trading links is natural and it’s natural to have reciprocal links. But if you do it too often, reciprocal links look artificial.” Matt’s advice is if you’re worried, use ‘nofollow’. Using nofollow disassociates you from a cruddy link or bad neighborhood.
Mattt also informed the audience that Google has recently bought g.cn in China. “One of our efforts was to make it really easy to remember. We have google.cn and g.cn and google.com. You can go to either one.” Google.com provides main search results but we can restrict g.cn and google.cn to requirements of the country.
One of the most highly reviewed sessions at PubCon was a workshop on gathering competitive intelligence to inform your search marketing strategies and guide the positioning of your listings and landing pages in search advertising.
The following reconnaissance tools belong in every search marketer’s toolkit:
1. Domaintools.com: Reveals abundant information about a Web site including other sites that are on the same IP. What other sites are your competitors hosting? Find out here.
2. ranks.nl/tools/spider.html: Determine the keyword densities of your competitors’ pages. Breaks keywords into 2 word, 3 word and 4 word combinations
3. sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com: Find backlinks for your competition. Yahoo reports the most important backlinks first.
4. seomoz.org/tools: Page Strength Tool ñ A variety of factors that attribute to the realtive strength of a Web page including links from various sources
5. soloseo.com/tools/indexrank.html: Allows you to see how many pages have been indexed by Google over the past year, 6 months, or 2 weeks for a site.
6. copernic.com: Tracks site and page changes over time.
7. Technorati.com: The ultimate in reputation management. Find out who ís talking about you and your competition in the blogosphere.
8. google.com/alerts: Sign up for Google Alerts and learn every time a Google News or Web entry matches your query term, such as the name of ytour company, your competitor or your product name or category.
9. searchanalytics.compete.com: Type in a domain name and Compete will give you an approximation as to what key phrases are bringing traffic to your competitors’ Web site.
10. touchgraph.com: A visual graph to help you locate the centerpoints of attractionto and from your competitorsí hubs. Visually indicates where competitor links are coming from.
11. google.brand.edgar-online.com: Tracking public companiesí FCC filings.
12. seekingalpha.com/transcripts: Scan through transcripts.
13. google.com/patents: Keep track of patents by your competitors.
14. oodl.com: Keep an eye out on hiring needs/trends and how, when and where your competitors are hiring.
Testing, Testing 1-2-3, with Google Website Optimizer
Google’s Tom Leung is the Product Manager for Google Website Optimizer. The free marketing tool from Google comes in two testing flavors, multiple A/B/C, etc., page testing where different landing pages are tested against one another in an AdWords campaign, and, intra-page “Multivariate testing” where the basic page layout remains the same but different elements (photos, headlines, calls to action, colors) are tested.
Why test your Website’s landing pages? Driving traffic is just the beginning. Marketers invest in SEO and SEM resources for 100 percent of their visitors. Their pages may lose more than half their visitors in mere seconds. Visitors that do stay may choose not to convert. (The industry average for converting customers is 2-3 percent.) Why bother bringing more visitors to a site that converts poorly? The goal is to evolve your landing page presentation and content with continuous improvement so that you drive the right traffic to your site. The process is to measure & analyze site activity, test changes and implement winners.
How exactly does Google Website Optimizer work? It’s as simple as pasting a piece of JavaScript. Each version of the page has a unique sticker to identify it by. Visitors arrive on your site and are shown a random version of your landing page. The testing tool reports you what percentage of users converted based on that version of your page. After the test runs for awhile (typically an average of 100 conversions), Google Website Optimzer populates the reports for you.
What should you test? Most popular is a mix one might call a Conversion Cocktail: your headline, primary graphical image and call to action. Those are the top three variables to test. Others include the use of trust seals and other third-party endorsements; user testimonials; an inspirational vs. fact-based pitch; use of a YouTube video or site navigation, in other words, comparing the inclusion of a navigation bar on landing page (for access to rest of site) vs. controlled navigation.
Leung’s advice is to test a small number of variations. A good rule of thumb is less than 100 conversions per combination. Test big changes: If you can’t see a difference between two combos in 8 seconds, visitors probably wonít either. Consider early indicators if you donít have enough conversions: If youíre selling a $100k software package or a small business with modest volume, optimize for conversion indicators such as request info, view product details, etc. Donít jump to conclusions: Less than 2 weeks is no good, focus on absolute conversion difference, donít get too excited by sliver of green. [24×7]
