photo credit: pmarkham

All good things get better! aimClear has exited  those architecturally picturesque halls of Duluth’s historic Carnegie Building and “moved on up” to  loft-style grandeur, third floor corner suite offices in the iconic Paulucci Building.  We’re pleased to announce that we’ve relocated to Duluth’s famed Canal Park.  This space doubles the ol’ dig’s square footage, along with an immeasurable upgrade in scenery.

Overlooking our building and filling my window is Duluth’s historic Aerial Lift Bridge.   All day, sounds and sights of the World Wide Web inside converge with  harbor ambiance.  The bridge goes up and down while honking at passing ships from around the world. Manny just took this picture out my office window.

The Paulucci Building, named after legendary entrepreneur Jeno  F. Paulucci  sits in the heart of Duluth’s lakefront and is literally the last building before the Ariel Lift Bridge, timeless passageway to the beaches of  Minnesota Point AKA Park Point and the world.  Mr. Paulucci owns this building and is famous for starting over seventy companies during his long career including Chun King,  Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, and Michelina’s.

Peer out a different window and be graced by a view of the largest of the great lakes, Lake Superior.  The power of the lake makes itself known on days white caps threaten to overtake everything in their path.  Other days, step outside and lunch becomes a peaceful, zen experience walking or sitting along a lakewalk that spans over 3 miles and takes you up the rocky shores of the lake. With sounds of Bob Dylan inside and Seagulls outside, aimClear staff experiences the magnificence of Duluth every day.  Richard Bach eat your heart out.

Nostalgically, our airy space is reminiscent of the 1920s with one open corner dedicated to Marty’s baby Grand piano (one of his favorites).  The recording studio is under construction and expected to come on line next week.

Add some Far Niente Cab’ and mood lighting to be instantly   transported to a lakeside lounge scene that rivals the days of the Velvet Fog.

We hope you’ll drop us a line any time you visit Duluth, Minnesota.  You know where to find us: last door on the right before you go over the bridge .

photo credit  (just fragmented link-juice by 2 links to do the right thing): Mykl Roventine

The most important news to come out of  ‘Advanced 2009 is Google’s blurt-of-a-revelation that they removed the algorithmic benefit from internal page rank sculpting, “about a year ago.” The change also affects how Google handles noFollowed outbound links.

Boiled down, noFollow still prevents the passing of link juice (energy) to the internal or external destination page. However the value is no longer divided up amongst the remaining followed links on the page. Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings.

No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs. Here’s what we’re telling our clients:

Internal Linking & noFollow

• Don’t panic! Google dialed in the change a year ago and nobody noticed. Even Matt Cutts noFollows hundreds of internal links on his blog including his subscription form and “comments” #anchor links.
• Link-count matters at least some of the time. The new PageRank sculpting is about not placing unnecessary links on a page to extraneous or duplicate content, as opposed to noFollowing links. Sadly, at times this sometimes may seem incongruous with usability. This usability-sacrifice may  hurt the Internet IMHO.

  Forgoing gratuitous internal linking to pointless or little used pages does not mitigate the critical need to create a keyword-rich, diverse and colorful internal link graph to compliment global navigation. Just don’t build tons of extraneous crap-content and associated navigational links,  which could dilute the power distributed by other links to important content.

• Don’t hide links. Google’s already told us that they read javascript and that the links can pass juice. iFrames in conjunction with robots.txt may work to mask links. We’re telling clients not to bother. Today’s effective cloaking is tomorrow’s red-flag penalty. Really the days of PR sculpting by hidden links are over.
• Arguably, it still makes sense to send Google sparse clues that some pages should not receive internal link energy. We think it’s still fine to noFollow privacy policies, registration forms and other obviously inconsequential pages that webmasters’ truly don’t want to waste site strength on.
• If you have already noFollowed internal links holistically on your site, Google says you won’t be penalized. It’s not necessary to remove existing noFollow attributes that are not gratuitous. Because Google was steadfast in their PageRank sculpting recommendations for the last year, we’ve made some conservative noFollow suggestions to clients.  It does not appear that any damage has been done. In fact, sites we’ve been working with are thriving. This is congruent with what other SEOs are reporting.
• Reciprocally, we don’t recommend adding many if any new noFollow internal links. It’s a good time to watch and wait, while focusing on re-tooling sites to “sculpt” link juice by better architecture using more meaningful links that lead to more to valuable content.
• Some or all sites may be ranked differently than by traditional theories. The algorithm is complicated and, outside of Googlers, most analysis regarding black box factors is speculation. There are credible theories to suggest that some sites may not be evaluated by the PR bean-counting approach.In fact there is reliable evidence (watch the whole video) to indicate that, at least for some sites, there is a pot of link power applied to the entire site and hoarding excess domain juice could be a negative.
• (Not a recommendation) If you’re feeling snarky, radical, and you’re not the Washington Post, consider making unnecessary navigational links copy and paste instead of hot. For instance, look at the date archives on this blog in the left hand sidebar.We don’t offer them as clickable (hot) links anymore  because we don’t want to dilute the link-count on the page.

  We hope any user motivated enough to view our date archives, won’t mind the the copy/paste. Sadly, welcome to the new copy and paste era of web navigation. Without noFollow, that’s just what you get.

External Linking & noFollow

• Don’t panic! This is not a very big deal.
• Outbound links are simple to think about. As a rule of thumb, only follow links you can vouch for from an editorial perspective. The obvious intent of eliminating noFollow benefits for outbound links is to impel webmasters to police their own links. This is good for SEO. It’s known that linking to quality sites provides an organic boost to the link-source site so linking out to other respected sites is a great thing to do. However, choose outbound links wisely and link out to high quality relevant and top trusted sites when appropriate.
  
• The new rules present somewhat of a conundrum in regards to user generated content that contains links. Link-count in user generated content could be a problem. There’s been much written about what the effect of long comment threads, with many noFollowed links, might be.

  Many believe that Google “knows” the footprint of popular blogging platforms like WordPress and will somehow compensate. There are those respected webmasters who believe that all approved user generated content links should be followed.

• Many webmasters don’t use WordPress or other common and recognizable content management systems to handle user generated content. Since we don’t trust Google to tell webmasters what they need to know straight up, maybe we should remove the links from our comment-threads as opposed to noFollowing UG links or eliminating comments.

  This is not a “recommendation.”Users would still see the anchor text along side the non-linked URL for easy copy and paste. This will reduce the link-count on the page to potentially mitigate any potential dilution factor, should Google not recognize WordPress and compensate. It would be great for Matt Cutts to provide some honest clarification to this point before fear of the new algorithm guts webmasters’ willingness to engage their readers.

• It might make sense to apply this principle to other outbound links on the page. Maybe Twitter links and other outbound links in widgets should no longer be hot. Thanks Google …welcome to the new copy and paste navigation paradigm.

On June 3rd, Matt Cutts freaked the technical SEO community by casually stating that PageRank sculpting, the subtle art of flow-managing page value distribution, had changed significantly from what Google had been prescribing.

Who cares, we don’t need noFollow. What bothers many is that know we’ve learned Google flipped the switch a year ago, all the while offering misleading public information.

Industry journalist Danny Sullivan, organizer of the SMX conference series and Editor-in-Chief of SearchEngineLand highlighted missed opportunities for Google to retract what had previously been stated as best practices. (BTW, I would have linked to SearchEngineLand in this paragraph too, but now I’m counting links.)

I note  Danny’s graciousness, even as he outlined the delay in disclosure:

“There were plenty of opportunities for this [Google disclosing]. PageRank sculpting was discussed at no less than four different conferences after the change happened, including our SMX Advanced search marketing conference in 2008. There was no end of articles and commentary on the web about it. In Matt’s video from May 23 of this year, specifically about PageRank sculpting, he said nothing about the change.” –Danny Sullivan–

Did Google Throw Matt Cutts Under the Bus?
There might be 2 possibilities and hybrids thereof for this debacle: 1) Matt Cutts, Google’s affable spam ambassador knowingly gave us misleading information. 2) Maybe his relationship with Google is somewhat detached, more insular than other insiders on the WS team. Either way, we don’t care about noFollow, my feelings are hurt.

Advanced SEOs were out there striving to work within Google’s TOS, having just finished nearly a generation of websites, built the way Google told us to do it. When Google told SEOS it works to flow PR by noFollow, we used noFollow out of trust.

Is Google suggesting that somehow we should have caught the change? For goodness Google, do you want us to test everything you tell us to do and prove that it works or find out your ambassador might have mislead us? Or was he in the dark?

So What About NoFollow?
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve used do/noFollow lightly, always asking the question “is this link an important citation, needed for the content, one that flatters the reputation of ours and the destination  publication?” The method by which Google public relations  mishandled the SEM community sure points to poor etiquette on somebody’s part.

We relied on no/doFollow for the basics, ya’ know not being completely stupid with where we want to recommend content. Like lovers that failed together (SEOS & Google), I can honestly say that nearly every SEO I’ve ever met truly cares about offering authentic citations, just like Google.

“@netmeg @aimclear plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. in other words, we didn’t worry about it before, and we’re not worrying about it now.”

“@SebastianX to complete it: As always: [...]. Don’t bother w/ rel-nofollow for anything else. For advanced SEO purposes just cloak nofollow properly.”

The SEO Changes are Good
They impel us to police the integrity of links from sites within and without. My sadness is more about the concept of an ambassador 1) not telling the truth 2) getting hung out to dry in front of the industry the ambassador serves.

The last thing I ever want to do is call anybody out. Google owns the machine and it’s a damn fine one. For goodness sake they’re a small country! Countries have ambassadors who represent positions to citizens of communities.

Colin Powell, a truly great American, seemingly got hung out to dry. The community was mad. Sound familiar? After stewing on this for a couple of days, having attended the session, I just felt it important to point out that partnerships work both ways between ambassadors and the communities they serve.

“There are times in public life as in private life when one must protest, not solely of even primarily because ones’s protest will be politic or materially productive, but because one’s sense of decency is offended, because one is fed up with political craft and public images, or simply because something goes against the grain. “The Arrogance of Power by –Senator Fulbright– (New York, Random House, Inc., 1966)

Maybe there are 2 agendas, one from Webmaster Tools & other divisions - and one from Matt himself. Google’s a pretty big company and never underestimate the propensity of freaky politics to bubble up from the holistic ooze. I’d rather eat a live chicken than prognosticate what it’s like to be inside any of these people’s heads.

Maybe some Google IT-rock stars would have preferred that there never be any sculpting or talk of noFollow for link sculpting. Maybe Matt’s an awesome guy who has the privilege of operating outside the team and didn’t know. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter.

Google’s ambassador seems like the kind of guy who operates in the interest of community, and can handle the gig. WTF? Are we at a place now where SEOs ask questions like “who’s on our side and who’s not?” Or can we put this cloak and dagger bullshit to bed?

For a while, I was one of these skeptics. I didn’t understand Twitter and doubted it had much to offer, something I regularly heard from friends, clients and family.

Still as a marketing professional, it was obvious that Twitter was required-reading, a channel any serious social media marketer should totally understand. As a young woman, I wondered if anyone as shy as me, could contribute to the micro-blogging dialog.

I’m here to tell you that Twitter offers staggering networking opportunities, to the benefit of friendships, careers and (yes even) sales. Case in point, aimClear’s guest blogging invitation comes as a direct result of daily Twitter sharing.

Taking the Plunge
On December 29^th, 2008, I stopped wondering about Twitter. I created @beebow: a real girl with a real avatar, a relevant yet relatable bio (turns out “SEO/SMO blogger” + “likes gummy worms”= smash hit), and an insatiable hunger to learn about, and meet people that love, social media.

The ultimate goal wasn’t to cruise around cyberspace, goofing off and wasting company time on this exploding social platform. It was to establish a substantial presence on the Web-to learn, connect, and share- to introduce new friends to the work we do here at Hudson Horizons, when the time and tone of the ongoing conversation was appropriate.

It took patience, attentiveness and some wacky social media stunts to help connect with about 1,750 followers. From them, I’ve learned so much about social media marketing. Plus, my agency-boss doesn’t think I’m making a weird waste of the workday every time he hears a TweetDeck alert go off. That’s a win-win, that’s what that is.

Grow Physical Networking on Twitter
At Search Engine Strategies NY, I did what people do and briefly chatted with top industry folks like Guy Kawasaki, Dave Evans, Hollis Thomases, Liana Evans, Matt McGowan and Marty Weintraub. Twitter has proven an invaluable resource, allowing me to continue conversations started in person.

Twitter is an equalizer; it’s like in cyberspace, we all weigh the same (not poundage… more like the ability to reach out and connect). Whether you have 50 or 500,000 followers, you’re human and available on Twitter. We’re all there - behind computer screens or typing away on smartphones - and we’re all accessible by choice because of our era’s marvelous technology and our shared interests.

It’s awesome to share on par with such an amazing community. You shouldn’t be afraid to connect with people- even the real Twitter “superstars.” All it takes is the right time, the right content, a little @ symbol, and, of course, confidence.

You Never Know
The saying’s true: “you never know.” You never know what may come of those 140 characters. You never know who will see your tweet, embrace it, and share it with the world (at least their world of followers). You never know whose interest will peak with that simple message-whether it’s a useful piece of advice, a link to an interesting article, or just a genuinely kind message to Twitterland.

“All it takes is a 140 character (or less) tweet to open priceless windows of opportunity, and establish truly rewarding connections.”

Six months ago, I didn’t even know what Twitter was… now, it’s an integral a part of my life every day. The power, potential and opportunity have completely vaporized the skepticism once felt. I’ve learned so much. That’s really more than I could have ever asked for.

If these months have taught anything it’s that, when Twitter is approached appropriately and enthusiastically, even the shyest of wannabe social butterflies (e.g.: yours truly) can soak up.

Lauren Litwinka is a Social Media Specialist for Web Development Company, Hudson Horizons, and has been writing for their Web 2.0 blog since 2007. Follow Lauren on Twitter @beebow.

Don’t cut corners on your site’s foundation! Information architecture is an important part of a site’s performance and should be addressed from the very get-go of development. Many existing websites could benefit greatly if their content was only properly organized, labeled and prioritized.

This SES Toronto session Information Architecture, Site Performance, Tuning and SEO offered attendees classic methods to greatly increase site performance, while making navigation easier for users and search engines alike.

Anne Kennedy (Beyond Ink) was session moderator. Speaking on the panel was Shari Thurow (Omni Marketing Interactive), Jill Sampey (Blast Radius), Jodi Showers (HomeStars) & Naoise Osborne (NVI).

First up to speak was Shari Thurow. If you ask web professionals what site architecture is, you will more than likely get several different answers. There is one definition she finds to be the definitive answer: The combination of organization, labeling, search retrieval, and navigation systems within web sites. Nowhere in that definition do you see Page Rank, crawlability or indexation, these are all variables that affect site architecture.

Before you create a page layout you should develop an information architecture. The URL structure should be developed after you develop an information architecture.

Taxonomy. Nobody should skip this step. This is the hierarchical layout of categories and pages (1^st level, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, and so on). After creating a taxonomy, establish a usability test where you ask users questions to determine the ease of navigation of the layout. Can they tell very easily what page they’re on? On average it takes half a second for people to orient themselves to page. The longer it takes for them to orient themselves, the longer it takes for them to find what they’re looking for.

Work to use the language of users when developing architecture not only for the benefit of users but for data retrieval and spiders as well. The goal of controlled vocabulary is to make products easy to find by browsing and retrieval (searching).

Taxonomists understand business goals, IT and user goals, but they often conduct usability tests to ensure people can orient themselves quickly.

After a taxonomy is complete and it has been tested, begin development of a page interlinking structure. Every site needs both horizontal and vertical linking. Interlinking pages is a big priority that allows you to not only pass authority, but further give insight into what a page is about.  Use related and supporting links to build up pages within the site.

URL structure is part of the interface not the architecture. Many think that the URL structure can make or break ranking, that’s not exactly true. URL structure should be thoughtful and useful for users. Generally speaking, people like to see clean URL’s.

Shari closes with some words of wisdom.
- Be sure to check for broken links using Dreamweaver, Yahoo! Site Explorer or whichever platform you have an affinity for.
- Whoever is in charge of developing a taxonomy needs to be very objective.
- As always, keywords should be a part of a sites information architecture.
- Don’t assume your architecture will work, test it!
- Implement both vertical and horizontal page linking.
- Prioritize your navigation.

Next up is Jill Sampey. She will be talking about the marketing opportunity rapidly changing online landscapes and new competitors bring.

How do you know a site is performing at its best?
- Use on-site analytics &  search trends

EA Sports Games - Website was built for gaming audience. Users knew how to look for games and navigate the site. They built title sites for popular games. These users were pre-qualified, searching on branded terms. Over the past couple years, offline market targets have moved online to look for game option. The site didn’t easily allow for this segment to access the information they were looking for from the main page. Navigation and content hierarchy had to be changed to address new users.

What are we looking for when deciding if a site should be changed?
- Steady or low traffic levels
- New competitors (are they getting traffic from the same keywords or different?)
- Search query changes

SEO and Design: When Designing a Site
1. Always have your users needs in mind
2. Look to how they’re searching
3. Don’t forget about the spiders, they’re always looking for URLs to index, links to follow & text to identify

Some of the key points Jill stressed were the importance of having on-site analytics to monitor performance and weaknesses. Always have your eyes open for additional traffic opportunities. Lastly, remember that rich media and optimization can happily co-exist.

Next to the podium was Naoise Osborne. He began by telling of his first job out of college as an inhouse web developer at a casino. He really wasn’t aware of information architecture until he had to deal with clients. After all, you only really have to deal with problems when you have to deal with clients. Since then he’s realized that site architecture needs to be the first step.

Early in the architecture development stage the marketing team, editorial staff, webmasters, and SEO’s need to meet together. There needs to be an understanding and agreement across all departments of the big picture and overall objective. It’s a holistic process. Editorial needs to know about keyword importance, internal linking/anchor text, etc. The only way they can incorporate this into copy is if they know the importance of site architecture and understand it.

Now to get Technical
What does everybody need to get?
- Search engines crawl sites by following html and other links
- Quality and quantity of links pointing to a page = link popularity
- Pages need link popularity to get indexed and rank
- You can control which pages on your site get indexed and which ones get link juice.
- A page being indexed by search engines is separate from that a page’s ability to accumulate or pass on link juice

robots.txt (addresses indexation): Doesn’t control the flow and accumulation of link juice. You can however control duplicate content. You can block what you don’t want indexed, session id’s, duplicate URLs, entire directories. If another site links to the URL disallowed in robots.txt the link will be listed in the SERPs.

on-page meta no-index: This will stop the page from appearing in search engine indexes entirely. The page can still accumulate and pass link juice. You may want to use meta noindex if you can’t alter your robots.txt or if robotx.txt standard is not flexible enough or if you don’t want URL listings. This is often used in conjunction with nofollow if you don’t want to pass link juice.

Nofollow works on the page level. If you use it with out no index rel=nofollow will stop spiders from following a specific link. They don’t crawl or discover through nofollow links. This is not for duplicate content rather it stops link juice from flowing through a specific link.

301 redirect: Spiders follow redirect and discover new pages. If you are restructureing URLs, you want to transfer all the link juice from old pages to the new ones. 301’s will tell search engines to transfer link juice from old to new. If any need to be URLs changed, 301’s are the best way to shift link juice from old to new. This is also they only way to transfer link juice for one domain to another. Canonicalization tags work within domain but not across domains.

Canonicalization: Spiders go to referred page like a 301 redirect. Search engines will transfer link juice from variation pages to real page. It’s a new approach to both indexation control and link juice control and is supported by the big three (Google, Yahoo! & Bing). Canonicalization may be cheaper than redoing your entire site from scratch, but it may become a maintenance nightmare. It very easily can turn out to be as or more complex than doing it right from scratch.

javascript link: Google tries to crawl and index these if URL is easy to access - don’t use this to block crawls.

Spider your own site to learn how page rank is flowing and identify what you need to change.

Last up to the podium was Jodi Showers. He spoke about performance issues and how these impact indexation. He reveals the direct correlation of a website’s load page time to the amount of pages indexed from that site. The truth of the matter is that the slower a website is the less pages that are crawled during a search engine’s scheduled visit - And if it ain’t indexed, it ain’t ranked.

Use web master tools to look at the number of pages crawled per day, in comparison to the average time it takes to download a page from the site.

HomeStars website last summer had an average page download time of 3000ms/3sec per page. With 2 million pages, the number that were actually being crawled was way too low. Once they began solving performance problems the load page time went down and number of pages crawled, jumped.  Faster page download = more indexing love.

Jodi closes by reinforcing the need to establish metrics (pages indexed vs. page load time) and to monitor these metrics daily.

Web analytics data provides an abundance of insight that can ultimately increase revenue for a company. The problem is many aren’t up to the task of deciphering the metrics to really understand making associated reports pay. Today’s  SES Toronto session titled “Analytics for Search: ROI, Engagement, Attribution, and More” was just loaded, with a great panel which shared many actionable recommendations to attendees.

Moderating the session was SearchEngineStrategies Advisory Board & Principal Andrew Goodman (Page Zero Media).  Speaking on the panel were Richard Zwicky (Enquisite), Anne Marie Lorriman (Outrider), June Li (ClickInsight) & Bryan Eisenberg (Future Now, Inc.).

First to take the podium was Bryan Eisenberg. His presentation will cover major issues in web analytics at a high level. He reminisces of at time when tracking analytics meant using log files and parsing them in excel. It was a very painful time in the late 90’s. The main goal of analytics has always been the same, to gather an idea of if we have achieved success? Are we winning the game?

These days a lot of people are talking about attribution. Attribution is a tricky thing; you’re probably getting bias answers. Google has been found to be over-reporting search visits. Attribution is a critical thing. What keyword was actually responsible for the conversion? So many time a user will begin their purchase process by looking for information on the product or service with a particular keyword or phrase. Further down the buying process they may enter a completely different phrase to get back to the site and complete the purchase.

Bryan gives the example of being the parent of a kid on a basket ball team. The first player checks the ball in, the second passes down the lane, the third sets up a pass to your child who dishes the ball to center where the player dunks. As the parent of the child, who do you want to give credit to? Who deserves credit for the score? In the game, the guy who dunks gets the credit. The goal of attribution is to identify the assists in the buying process. He shares an example of a client who found a keyword that wasn’t converting and cut it off. After that sales dropped 30%, because it was a crucial keyword in converting further back in the buying process.

What do we need to know?
Google likes to report on the last click or the person that last touched the ball. There has to be a solution that will show you the all time conversion process.  The objective is to get a better idea of the visitors needs and addressing it. Once you do that you can begin correlating what works and what doesn’t.

Problem with People Using Analytics
Astonishingly, out of 79% of people gathering information on their site, only 30% make the changes needed to garner better results. So many people suffer from “data diarrhea,” they find it easier to discard the information then to make the changes. People are forgetting to do the basics of analytics, hoping they can toss the ball all the way down the court and get that 360 dunk right away. You need to figure out how to make changes on the turn of a dime, every single day. Companies that can do this are the ones that are most successful.

What is the Secret?
Have a continuous improvement process. You need to have the ongoing process. The companies that have had success were the ones that made small steps to improve the site continuously (Dell, Intuit, Walmart, Xerox). Ask what do  you need in order to have an organization set up for marketing optimization

3 Key resources
1st - People
Marketing (the ones in charge of making business decisions), analysts (can point you to challenging areas that need to be addressed and areas of opportunity), graphic design, copywriter, creative resources, & a little bit of technical

2^nd - A Process
Identify who you’re trying to talk to, what action you want them to take & what they need to take that action?

3^rd - Tools
The analytics information you used to have to pay for in the past is free today. Get good at free before you go out and purchase a big analytics package.

Increasing conversion is like compounding interest in a bank.  If you improve conversion every month by 3% over the course of a year you will have improved your conversion rate by 42%.

Next up was June Li. She begins by stating that converting data to dollars is what we want. If you don’t have money in the bank, you’re missing the bottom line. She breaks her presentation into suggestions for those that extract analytic reports themselves and those that will need to ask a team for reports and changes.

Data and reports don’t make you money you have to take that information and analyze it.

Data to dollars Conversion Funnel
Collect Data & Reports -> Ask Questions -> Segmentation Analysis -> Take Action -> $$$

It’s important to realize you are the person that makes the data meaningful, not the tools. Hammers and nails don’t build houses people do. The same is true with web analytics tools. Get in on the web design early in the process. All too often the campaign is set up and running and then the team will call for SEO and SEM. If you’re able to be there from the design conception, address what extra tagging or scripting will be necessary and define goals for the future performance of the site.

Once you have the data, now you need to segment. Ask yourself what is different between those that are converting and those that aren’t.

Drive segmentation with questions as simple as what’s working & what’s not working? Do more of what is working and do less of what’s not working. Look at how visitors are converting and compare that to those that aren’t. That sounds easy enough.

Analyze the data and fix the right problem. What you want is a de-bottle necked funnel with good persuasion and good conversion. Sub-optimial conversion can result from - un-targeted promotion attracting the wrong people - good targeting persuasion ineffective conversion - good persuasion through the purchase funnel, but people are leaving right before conversion.

Drive Action with Analysis
Work backwards from the “conversion” or “value event”
- Are there sources that drive more conversions
- What are the keyword or phrases that drive more traffic, what does that tell you about audience you are tracking.
- What days of the week have higher conversions
- What content did those that converted access (pages, downloads, etc.)

If there’s NO ACTION, there’s NO DOLLARS. You have to take action. Get in on the design process!

Andrew goodman - do what you can with the free tools. Custom advanced segments on each page, Google analytics is getting better.

Next to bat was Anne Marie Lorriman. Her presentation focused on what happens when paid targeting fails and how to diagnose and prescribe a remedy. It all starts with targeting the right keywords.

Issues to Diagnose
1 - Offside search result
2 - Hidden defect search result

Offside Search Result
She asks the audience, what does “sonic” mean to you? The problem is this word can have several different products associated with it - DVD publishing company, brand of tooth brush, a restaurant or a video game character. Keywords will inevitably mean different things to different people. You have to regularly go back and review your how keywords are being targeted in your campaign.

Say your trying to target the keyword “car” in the context of a purchase (ie. “buying a car”). Broad match is not a bad strategy but it requires appropriate attention.  The keyword “car” has several different contexts in which people search for it, buying, repairing, selling, etc.  Without filtering out these different irrelevant contexts you’re campaigns may fair poorly. Incorporate negative keywords into your campaigns to drive down high impressions and low click through, thereby increasing your quality score. Negative keywords may reduce the amount of ad impressions, but ultimately your click through rate (CTR) will increase as you hone in on what your targeted audience is looking for.

Prescription
Step 1: run a search query report
Step 2: analyze the report and create negative keywords for those that are not applicable

Hidden Defect Search Result
After filling your offside prescription, look back at your search query report for each campaign to discover the hidden defect search result. Although you may have honed in on the intention of the search, the spider doesn’t realize “car” to be the same thing as “automobile,” this can drive down quality score because of low query relevance. Separate each keyword into their own campaigns: vehicle, car, automobile and auto into their own campaign. Fill these different campaigns with negative keywords of the existing campaign keyword names.

Last to take the podium was Richard Zwicky. He makes note that although we as search marketers know what the marketplace looks like as to paid and organic, it’s astonishing how many customers out there do not. Looking at how most individuals spend time in the search engine result pages (SERPs), you find that there is very strong focus on organic results. How strong? It’s been reported that 88% of traffic from SERPs is through organic listings. Is an organic refferal worth as much as paid referral?  The problem is that it’s much easier to assign a value to paid rather than organic because paid can be directly tied to keywords and other metrics.

Advertising spend in the past year on organic was $1.4 billion, yet accounted for 88% of traffic. Paid advertising on the other hand had a $39 billion piece of total ad spend and only accounted for 12% of traffic. Organic provides so much value but because it’s difficult to track, it’s often overlooked.

There are countless actions to take in order to gain your share of the organic pie. Richard lays out some very specific things to consider. If you want to be recognized for the specific geographical location your company serves, you need to focus on links that reflect that location. If you don’t segment out value, you’ll never see your opportunities. Keep thinking about how you can move placement for keywords. Keep striving to identify what you’ve missed and what else is out there that can drive value to your business.

Analytic data can seem complex and daunting at times, but it’s ability to effect the bottom line makes it an area of search that can’t be overlooked.

YouTube has become a beast, taking seat as the second largest search engine in the world. Hulu and other niche’ engines are nipping at YouTube’s heals. Yet video search optimization remains relatively uncharted territory for most.

Today at SES Toronto, respected industry experts answered the question “Are you overlooking the opportunities of video search?” The  answers were a veritable “how to” clinic on tactics and optimization techniques, which will undoubtedly prove insightful for any business looking to fire up a video content campaign.

Panelists in the session, “Optimizing for Video Search: Virgin Territory?” drilled deep  into the promising statistics of this massive vertical. Moderating today’s session was Mona Elesseily (Page Zero Media). On the panel was Amanda Watlington (Searching for Profit), Gregory Markel (Infuse Creative) & Steve Espinosa (eLocal Listing).

First to speak was Amanda Watlington. She begins by noting that Canadians are global champions of online video viewership with a whopping 21.1 million people  watching according to comScore. Nearly 3.1 billion videos have been uploaded to the Internet and the average viewer watches 147 videos per month.

Eighty-eight percent of Internet users viewed online video in February.  The average Canadian video viewer watched 605 minutes of video in February. These facts mean one thing, if you aren’t doing video you are neglecting a gigantic online user segment.

How do viewers find videos?
Forty-five percent of video viewers begin their surfing experience by navigating directly to a video sharing site, mainly YouTube. To a lesser extent people find video via search engines, social networks, bookmarking sites and email.

Set Realistic Expectations
A small percentage of videos reach 1 million or more views. If you want more views, you must work hard to get them. Optimization & social media engagement are key components in driving viewership.

Challenges for Brand & Search Marketers
Brand marketers - creating brand personality, engagement and loyalty in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem.

Search marketers - challenged with limited search engine result page (SERP) real estate. With a large amount of advertising and various verticals funneled in with universal search space is limited.

Advantages for Brand & Search Marketers
Brand marketer - Creates a direct communication channel with users, adds new media outlets and taps into communities that may not have been available to you through traditional broadcast media. Community engagment and brand personality are easily channeled to create a meaningful relationship with users.

Search marketers - Optimizing video content is another way to gain a foothold and take a significant place in the SERPs.

Should you host or post your video content?
Host it - Hosting your own videos allows you to seize control, but also presents optimization challenges. It’s necessary though to optimize the video content landing page to ensure your users know video is available.

Make sure you:
- Create video with branding in it
- Write a clear title and description
- Create tags to identify subject
- Create landing pages for each video
- Avoid pop up layers

Post it - YouTube, Yahoo! & Brightcove get the most attention, but just because videos are branded and get significant views on these sites doesn’t mean you’ll take over the SERPs.

Make sure you:
- Create and optimize a channel
- Socialize and engage through the channel
- Optimize each video submitted
- Seek subscribers & ratings
- Aim to be on page 1 featured videos
- Look at what successful channels are doing
- Embed videos (use the same techniques for optimizing the landing page)
- Experiment with annotations, video responses and thumbnails

If you host it you can also post it; as of now there is no duplicate content screen for video content. In either case the SEO must be good. As more video is optimized users will be able to find video more easily in the SERPs. If the optimization of a video isn’t strong enough it will be pushed farther down as new content with better user search syntax.

Tips and Tactics
- Offer videos in multiple formats
- Do keyword research before creating the video
- Write a compelling video summary
- Use PR and word of mouth
- Embed links to video in online press releases
- Use marketing communication
- Feature links on you website
- Make it easy for viewers to share your videos
- Optimize video by applying SEO principles

Next up to the podium was Gregory Markel. Gregory begins with a disclaimer:
the best YouTube expert in the world still doesn’t know what a YouTube engineer knows. It’s necessary to search out the information for yourself, subscribe to the YouTube blog and Twitter YouTube channel.

Once upon a time keywords and video counts were very important to ranking. These are still very important, but they are only two of several ranking factors.

YouTube Ranking Factors
Title, keywords, descriptions, tags, links, ratings, view counts, thumbs up/down, shares, favorites, comments, authority channels, annotations,  flagging, one box result, subscribers, usage, embeds and paid search. Whhewww!! Is that it? It’s better than 200+

A big mistake many people make is using the wrong keywords or placing the keywords too late in the title and description. Tip: YouTube will tell you what is popular with the drop down suggestion menu under the search query box.

Greg feels that community ranking factors are more important than traditional ranking factors. Analyze the competition, check their public statistics & data on the video watch page. There is a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. View numbers, favorited, honors, links, ratings, comments, etc. After that, assess your marketing objectives and targets and meet or beat them!

Tips for Optimizing Community Ranking Factors
- Make great and unique videos
- Ask users to rate your videos
- Post a “video response”
- Add comments prompting people to watch your video
- Use similar but not the same keywords in your titles
- Post new videos on Thursdays or Fridays
- Join the YouTube partner program (easier said than done)
- Use social media and websites within your control to submit/post your video link/embeds and get the word out.
- Submit your videos to multiple video sites using www.tubemogul.com - currently free but limited use.
- Link your videos together - use annotations with a message to your viewers “stay tuned” /prompt them to click through to the next video.
- Create playlists
- Monitor your video content with YouTube Insight

Video Paid Search
- Adwords: advertise your video or channel via Google/Yahoo!/Bing
- Use “promote your video” and/or “promote your channel”
- Target the YouTube content network via Google content and site targeting
- YouTube Direct Sales: Buy Brand channel ($170-$250,000), buy homepage for a day 240 million views @ $250,000
- Network placement
- Ad insertion placement in YouTube TV and Movies
- Relevant video overlays for certain videos

It’s all changing quickly!
Gregory closed with a one minute research study his company explored. Using the iPhone app 12seconds.tv they uploaded a video targeting the phrase “disruptive marketing example”. The video upload took one minute. In 2 weeks the video ranked 2 and 7 out of 300,000 results. There’s a vast amount of video platforms available today which equates to a great deal of opportunity for you to take advantage of.

Last up was Steve Espinosa. He doesn’t waste time describing how to create a viral video, he assumes we’ve already got some ideas cookin’, but he does ease the tense crowd with a picture of his 6 month kid.

Many people don’t know that Yahoo! has implemented universal search into their search results. Yahoo! still accounts for 20% of search volume so don’t turn your back to them.

Video Length
- Each industry is different, therefore each threshold of attention is different depending on the target audience. Use Google analytics to determine what the videos bounce rate and average time on the page.

Use Google Website Optimizer to do A/B testing. Create different variations of the video and then run a test using the free tool to track your conversions.

Exporting Video
- Export videos as SWF file type - YouTube and Yahoo! video players do not use Active X controls
- Utilize Google video sitemaps
- Be sure to export in 4:3 aspect ratio. Google is still using this aspect ratio for universal search.

Video Link Building
- Drive users to your channel!
- YouTube adds “nofollow” to all video titles except for your latest video
- Yahoo! doesn’t add “nofollow” to video links. By building links to these static Yahoo! pages, it will benefit your

Show your call to action in your thumbnail
YouTube takes thumbnail captures at  the ¼, ½, and ¾ mark of the video, why not optimize this with a call to action?

Optimize your embed code with a link back to your video. If anybody copies this embed code they are ultimately assisting you in bolstering links back to your video.

Twitter nofollows all links on the main twitter.com profile but not the mobile version of the site. Begin by building links to your twitter site. Once you tweet about your new video and provide that link you will ultimately be passing link juice to the video.

As you add links when distributing your video on sites like twitter, use URL parameters in order to gather the same data you get on your site with Google Analytics.

Channeling YouTube Link Juice
Subscribe to big brand YouTube users with high authority profiles and you will be added to their profile under recent subscribers. The link goes to your channel page and that link juice is funneled through your most recent video post.

Continue subscribing to these big brand authority pages and spread it out. After you’ve been removed from the ‘recent subscriber’ section, go back and comment on their profile. The DoFollow link on your username will pass link juice back to your user profile and on to your video. That is just slick!!!

The session proved that although video content is a sometimes overlooked resource, this highly populated vertical is one that is worth taking advantage of if you haven’t already.

photo credit: RC_Fotos
Welcome to SearchEngineStrategies Toronto 2009. Today we took a glance back a decade to 1999, when parties had a reputation to live up to and some families were preparing for an all out cataclysmic technological failure come the new year. For the most part, times were swell.

Family Guy began its first season, Britney Spears’ hit “…Baby One More Time” climbed the billboard charts & Lawrence Fishburne took curious Keanu down the rabbit hole in The Matrix. In the realm of SEO, effective optimization was all about keyword, title & description meta tags and reciprocal link building. Life was good!

It’s a decade later and still some of those characteristics remain. Family Guy is still running strong, Britney Spears’ hair has returned and Keanu still manages to carry his signature phrase, ‘whoa’ in each film. The SEO playing field however, isn’t the same ball game. The same tactics that worked in 1999 simply won’t cut it anymore. What tactics have stood the test of time, which have become obsolete? How has SEO evolved over the past decade and what can we expect for the future?

The session SEO Then & Now: What’s the Same? What’s changed? at SES Toronto took a look at exactly that. Moderating the session was Amanda Watlington (Searching for Profit). On the panel was Shari Thurow (Omni Marketing Interactive), Anne Kennedy(Beyond Ink) & Jeff Quipp (Search Engine People).

First to speak was Anne Kennedy. She began by giving an overview of what was going on  in the world of search in 1999 in comparison to now. Less than 50% of the US population were internet users and Yahoo maintained dominant market share for online media. At this time there were a lot of different online media companies and various ways of optimizing them. One preeminent tactic or developer’s nightmare was to develop different landing pages for each search engine (panelists cringe).

At this time the amount of server space it took to power Google’s inventory was located in Larry Page’s apartment. There were no meaningful analytics to lend insight on search volume, bounce rates, top referring pages, etc. Adwords was just around the corner which would also usher in quality score. Prior to 1999 it was all about on-page factors (alt attributes, keywords in content, title tags, etc.). It was pivotal when off-page factors such as links were an added variable to the algorithm.

A great deal hasn’t changed since then, but now there are so many more ways to build and drive traffic. Much more advanced technical “spam” has filtered in today compared to ten years ago. Anne lays out what she believes to be the top 3 areas search is evolving:

1 - Stronger Focus on User Intent

Click data - Search engines are now able to predict how people navigate to their destination. The ability to see an individual clicked through 2 different sites to land on the page they spend the most time on is lends insight. It becomes obvious to search engines to deliver results that will bring users to their desired page and skip the intermediary sites.

2 - Universal Search

Digital asset optimization - Marketers have a huge opportunity to optimize digital assets as search engines are seamlessly incorporating these verticals into the SERPs.

3 - Social Networks

Global & real-time - What social networks have shown us is the ease with which buzz can propagate from one network generation to the next. Twitter has given users the ability to search for answers in real-time instead of viewing a dated file from a database.

Next to take the podium was Shari Thurow. She begins by taking a poll to see who had attended the very first SES conference 10 years ago (one hand poked up from the crowd). Shari continues by quoting a comment made by Sergey Brin in the second SES conference, “You can’t spam Google” (the crowd laughs).

Her presentation focused primarily on what has remained the same with SEO over the past decade. She shows a slide from her very first conference presentation 14 years ago that still holds true to SEO. The slide depicts the primary functions of a search engine:

- Index text

- Follow links

…all search engine spiders are like this and will continue to be like this.

Its important to organize a site using words and phrases that people type into the search query, focus the content around those keywords and  give search engines access to these files.

Back then - On-page criteria (mid to late 90s)

1. Text component (index text), keyword density, title, alt, and H1 tags

- Words at the top of the page are still more relevant than text at the bottom of the page as well as keyword proximity.

2 Link component (follow links)

- It was important to get links in the Yahoo directory, Dmoz and Looksmart with pertinent keyword rich anchor text.

Nowadays, off and on-page need to work in tandem.

1. Text component

- Still need to use keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for.

2. Link component

- Links are still a way to give search engine spiders easy, user friendly access to content through site and page architecture.

3. Popularity component

- The amount and authority of links pointing at a site is a strong off-page indicator to search engines of how popular a site is.

4. Searcher behavior

- 3 types of search queries

1. Navigational intent (2nd most searched) - Searchers with navigational intent rarely go past the first 3 results.

2. Informational intent (1st ) - Answer to question, quick fact, read reviews, quick list

3. Transactional intent (3rd) - Not only add to cart items, music, downloads and pictures

Shari parted with emphasizing the importance of optimizing not for search engines but for people that use search engines.

Last up was Jeff Quipp. Jeff begins by taking a look back at the past when there were roughly 5000 search engines. Many services would offer to submit your site t0 each of these search engines for $50. This is no longer the case. These days Google dominates with 80%+ so its critical to play by Google’s rules. Trying to cheat Google may result in a ban, and with that big of a market share can any company afford not to be found in Google SERPs?

Keywords

What’s the same?

- Proper keyword selection is still at the foundation of search whether it by organic or paid.

What’s changed?

- Google external keyword tool - Gives you a relative idea of search volume, advertiser competition, local search volume and estimated cost per click.

- Google suggest - the drop down menu that appears below the search query field can lend insight as to what people are searching for.

- 25% of terms per month have never been seen before!

Who cares?

- Choose keywords carefully

- Ranking probability - What are the chances you can rank for a certain term? Assess you strengths, weaknesses and competition in the space.

Build out your Content. The shorter the keyword the earlier in the buying process a consumer is. Its nearly impossible to know what the searcher’s intentions are, you have to build out content for the longer tail as well.

Algorithm complexity - What’s changed?

1. Now more than double the number of variables … 200+ and possibly 300+

- Many of their new variables are based on the question, who is trying to spam Google?

2. Many more filters to identify artificial linking - Google can tell the quality of a site’s link inventory. If a site has 99% reciprocal links, it’s a good sign of artificial linking.

3. Introduction of 3^rd group of variables… based on user behavior/personalization - Google Analytics and various other tools are used to determine how relevant their search results are to the query

So what? You need to build out great content, and use that to build links!

Figuring out great ways to attract authority links is a must.

Local/regional search - What’s changed?

1. Search results catered to each country based on:

- Host IP address

- .ca vs. com

2. Google is beginning to serve local results to generic queries (eg. Pizza)

- Regardless if you type your location or not Google sees the IP address and will serve up results based on your location.

What Does This Mean?

1. Companies operating in more than 1 country, have decisions to make.

2. Optimize for Google Local, Yahoo Local, and local directories

3. Implement strategies to encourage online reviews! These can help to get people to click through on links.

Content - What’s the same?

1. Text content is still very important - likened a search engine to a child, its comprehension is very literal.

2. Creating content that others find valuable

What’s changed?

1. New types of search engines including video and image

2. Universal search - many other types of content pulled in to SERPs

So What?

1. More opportunities to rank for a given keyword

2. Companies need to think of a great strategy to attack this

Social Media - What’s the same?

1. Word of mouth is the 1^st form of social media

Word of mouth has been put on steroids! Companies no longer control their brand messages, social media users do! It has become much more apparent the flaws of various businesses with the ease with which people can spread their opinions through their networks.

If you can create buzz, you can generate 100s if not 1000s of links. Businesses need to learn to offer good value to the community. It’s imperative to facilitate two-way communication and not just to talk, but to listen up. Develop an online reputation monitoring system and keep your ear to the street. Lastly, promote.

Its been proven time and again, what works today just might not work tomorrow. It will be interesting to see the evolution of SEO a decade from now. Chances are we’ll realize how easy we had it in 2009.

Looking around the gorgeous auditorium and inspired by the stunning Pacific ocean backdrop, I noted your attitudes, attire, mannerisms and powerful group-aura. Honestly, ya’ll are the most beautiful people in the world, a rainbow of eclectic professional diversity and intellectual prowess. Joy!

I can’t even express how perfectly exhilarating it is to consume twit-stream chatter amongst dozens of respected community members, discussing, debating, following, leading, quoting and sharing my thoughts and words real-time amongst tens of thousands. It’s a complete professional privilege to be perceived as any kind of starting place or reflector, for ideas that take on lives of their own.

Thank You For That
I sat in freakin’ awe watching SMX Advanced Twitter-waves ripple through the known search universe. I just want to say thank you for that. The feeling is as good or better than having a hit record. Having treasured clients in Seattle who came from around the country, in part to connect with aimClear, made Advanced so satisfying. To aimClear’s awesome clients–thank you for that (you know who you are).

Hashtag wisdom is the new black. SEO is dead. Long live SEO.

Perspective On Wing
I write at 34,000 feet, fully disconnected from the grid and alone with my thoughts. At SEATAC waiting for flights to rejoin family and aimClear team (Hat tip to Matt, Manny, Merry, Marc, Nam and Laura), I noted a tiny, unexpected and completely precious feeling, one rarely felt: living in the moment …actually living in the moment. Joy!

photo credit: Qfamily

No matter where you touch my life, personal, professional or hybrid, thank you so much. I find it deliciously ironic that our industry came to be called “search.” SMX Advanced left me feeling found, effervescent, alive and ever-so-grateful.

Coming down from mighty lymphoma haze in spring of 2006, I recall wondering what elements of my life I wanted to rebuild from chemo- radioactive devastation, to keep my feet on the ground, to be a better man, professional, father, life-partner. I pledged to remember that living well is essentially about embracing things truly important and peacefully letting others go.

At that time I had worked in Internet marketing for the better part of a decade. Then by way of an article in USAToday about Danny Sullivan, I found our community just as it went mainstream in 2006. When I attended SES Chicago that December to see Chris Elwell’s Agency Business and Chris Sherman’s social media tracks my mind was totally blown. I found it unbelievable that so many people all spoke the same language as me. That was 20 search conferences ago.

photo credit: ArtBrom

Cancer kind of brings ya’ around to purposeful perspective.  Search has become my personal island, stimulating to nearly every creative, intellectual and emotional instinct in my body. Our industry’s happily twisted combination of science and witchcraft is unique in the history of human communication. Some days we’re anthropologists, computer scientists, rack jobbers, Tin Pan Ally lyricists, analyst, thought leaders or journalists. Search is rarely boring. Dude and I so love my job.

Since search marketers are undisputed stewards of early-adoption connection-tools so (of course), we’re marvelously deep-linked to each other. I meet someone physically I’ve known forever online, at every search event attended. As colleagues, teachers and students, so many of us have found personal and professional perspective, in shared commitment to excellence and friendship, to bring our employers and clients best practices.

Industry insiders call our marketing sector “search,” which takes a nearly romantic tone. We grew from the geeky very-early-90’s cult of BBS, IRC, newsgroups and nascent webs. The modern “search” category has come to imply all things SEM (SEO, Paid, SMO, ORM, PR, DR, etc…).

Waxing nostalgic, it’s easy to see our vocation as a poignant life-analogy in craftsmanship, community and overcoming adversity. We help people find things by making them more discoverable. In search, I’ve found myself. Together we make our living, grow companies, provide for our families, see the world and thrive. Thank you so much for that. The other side of search is found.

Do those old H1 tags still work? Actually word’s out, they don’t really count much anymore for SEO. Does quantity, power or diversity of inbound links take the hill for search engines ranking pages algorithmically for keywords? Actually, correlation data indicates that link diversity is a factor which has become more important.

SEO Ranking Factors in 2009 at SMX Advanced 2009 was a classic shredding session, originally blossomed from a session pitch submitted about “attainable SEO”. The esteemed panel was comprised of Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Laura Lippay (Yahoo), and  Marty Weintraub (aimClear). Danny Sullivan, Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand moderated. Read on for a  summary of which state-of-the art SEO ranking factors still work… and which page, site and keyword attributes are dead by the side of the road.

Danny explained that this session “was a challenge,” the difficulty is that people ask “can you just tell me what the formula is” which is quite a topic  to be conveyed in entirety during one session. Danny notes that some basic ranking factors, important in 1996, still seem relevant today.

Speaking first is Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.  Rand said that Danny asked him to present data that is exciting in his opinion, but a little bit early. For their forthcoming 2009 SEO ranking factors report, they sent out a survey to 100 SEO’s around the world. Rand will be presenting data from the 70 responses they received, with the full data being published in the next few weeks.

Expert opinion on keyword usage -

• Experts had similar opinions to what they’ve seen in years past. Most folks are saying keyword use in the title tag is highly important. Root domain keyword use is perceived as far more important than in the subdomain. There is a majority consensus regarding the meta keywords tag, with 51 of 70 respondents saying this is not used at all. With meta description there is slightly less agreement.

Correlation data on keyword usage -

• Rand shows off a spiffy yellow-orangeish pie chart. An interesting finding is that H1, H2, H3 etc. tags are just a sliver of the important on-page features.  Alt text has quite a high correlation with successful ranking. Correlation is not causation! Rand doesn’t want to suggest that because someone has great alt text is why they rank well.

• Rand also looked at importance of keyword usage in various parts of the URL. An interesting finding was that Microsoft seems very interested in the keyword usage within the entire URL path.

• Regarding importance of keyword position within the title tag, the data suggests there’s a  high correlation with ranking well and having the keyword your are targeting as the very first words in your title tag.

• Substantive disagreement compared to expert opinion exists in a number of places. H1 tags had a low correlation with rankings; Rand says you should definitely still optimize them, just don’t bank on them. Alt text showed a higher correlation with rankings, indicating that there is good reason to spend time on this. Results also showed high correlation for keyword usage in the domain & subdomain path, anywhere you can get it.

Expert opinion on non-link factors -

• Non-link factors include signals (not links or keywords) related to the domain and how they are relevant. Experts mostly found freshness of page creation to have a significant impact, with existence of unique content on a page to have the largest consensus of a very strong impact. Experts found that HTML Validation to W3C standards to have a weak impact.

Rand went through that correlation data pretty fast, the search marketing world awaits the finished report.

Expert opinion on link metrics -

• Link popularity of course, was perceived as highly significant.

Correlation data on link metrics -

• Google and Yahoo places great importance on external domain link trust while Microsoft was more page focused. When Rand was initially looking for an absolute among metrics, he found only 1 metric that has any ability to predict rankings and that is the number of different domains linking to a URL.

Data takeaways on link metrics -

• Page rank may be important, toolbar page rank is a poor predictor. Domain Authority, Trust Rank, and Moz Rank may be important but these metrics still need some work.

Expert opinion on considerations of subdomains vs root domains -

• Overwhelmingly, SEO’s agreed that content on subdomains inherit some link popularity features of the root domain but not all.

Correlation data on subdomains vs root domains -

• Rand says that data correlations were in step with SEO expert opinion.

Data takeaways on subdomains vs root domains -

• Subdomains likely do not inherit all of the ranking benefits of the root domain, neither are they completely separate entities.

Expert opinion on the high level view of Google’s algorithm -

• In order, expert’s say that trust /authority of the domain, link popularity of the specific page, anchor text of external links, and on page keyword usage are the four most important signals. Newer signals like hosting data and social graph metrics were not perceived as important.

Data correlation on the high level view of Google’s algorithm -

• Rand sees that overall percentage link popularity is in step with the top three choices of SEO’s. Interestingly, they have seen page content having slightly less correlation to rankings than keywords in the URL.

Expert opinion on geographic ranking factors for country specific targeting -

• Experts mostly agreed that the ccTLD  of the root domain was the most important for SEO impact.

Expert opinion on the future of ranking signals -

• Most experts agreed that  links will decline in importance but still remain powerful as newer signals rise from usage data and other sources

Rand closed with a warning about his Link Juice drink, consumption of which should be limited to 3 cans per day and  not intended for women who are pregnant or nursing.

Speaking next was Marty Weintraub, President of aimClear. Marty’s presentation was entitled Attainable SEO: Page Strength vs SERPs Difficulty.

Marty says that good SEO’s cared about attainability back in 1996.  They were the good old days, achieving high rankings was so easy it was like stealing *sigh*.

Marty said that before we start, understand that pulling spreadsheets is a far cry from programmatic automation. However, understanding page strength and SERPs competitiveness is a powerful tool, you can use this to advise anything in your site.

You need to ask the question, What can we rank for on this page, dude?

Marty says that what is state of the art is still pretty crude. Public understanding on the semantic and power nodes of search is pretty weak, especially at the enterprise level, but with cool API’s it won’t be crude for long.

Sad facts of SEO Life: You can’t slay a dragon with a slingshot. That is, you can’t rank for “Las Vegas Hotels” with your new blogspot domain. Mediocre SEO’s make the mistake of using keywords based solely on search frequency and then wonder why their site is sucking in the SERPs.

The internet is sooooo competitive, you need to understand attainability as a critical SEO ranking factor. Still, attainable doesn’t matter if nobody cares.

Attainability & search frequency should be used in tandem; attainability doesn’t really mean anything without frequency.

Marty acknowledges that Webmaster Central is useful and cool, but it does not reveal the crucial SEO data we all crave. Search Engines have a “don’t ask don’t tell policy”, how many times can they tell us to make “relevant pages?” You would think that Google would let us buy better data.

Marty says the Dawn of Transparent Next-Gen tools is upon us. The metrics are coming to give us what we really want independent of what the search engines can feed us.

Marty likes SEOmoz’s Linkscape as the anti-black box for SEO’s, revealing the metrics we’ve been asking for, with a volume of crawled data that’s quickly catching up to Yahoo.

Marty also likes MajesticSEO,  another amazing tool that gives away remarkable data. It has alernatet trust scores spawned from seed sets and incorporates metrics likes traffic, engagement, and even social citations.

Marty says that all SEO’s need to be correlating ranking factors against what’s happening in the SERPs,  real SEO’s test the crap out of the SERPs.

Build a spreadsheet of metrics you hypothesize show correlation of pages to Google SERPs:

1. It’s about easy semantic evaluation from many sources, not in Google Webmaster central!

2. You can use the linkscape internal/external page site scrapes for determining how much page & domain trust there is. Why can’t we see all these things in webmaster central?

3. Use lots of other unique data sources- MajesticSEO, The Wayback Machine, Whois, Alexa, Compete etc.

Choose your  personal grid and compare against the SERPs with every attribute you find. Expect Marty to publish this entire process in specific detail at aimClear Blog in the near future.

Up next was Laura Lippay, technical marketing director for Yahoo!. Laura’s presentation was entitled “This Ain’t Your Mother’s SEO.” Laura informed us not to be alarmed if she fell over while presenting because she got food poisoning, though I was interested in a warning about which restaurant it was from.

Laura says that when she first came to Yahoo!, she brought in Rand’s original factors. She has since learned that SEO is about much more than code tweaks and traditional ranking factors. If it was really about that, what’s to stop her mom from creating a thoroughly optimized motorcyle site that outranks Yahoo Autos?

It really is more than that;  it’s being viral, having buzz, getting bookmarked naturally, being your own linkbait.

What is that top secret (but not really) ranking factor? Laura says simply, it’s a Good Product.

Laura presented a case study on a Yahoo property that they were doing an optimization overhaul on. This property was in a competitive vertical, but their optimization effort was a tight production. They ended up seeing a big dip in traffic after the relaunch. What happened?

She says that Rand’s SEO ranking factors and specifications were mostly followed, but no one ever asked the question “what will it take for us to outrank the top competitor, to create buzz?”  It ultimately required a far bigger strategy. Their biggest competitor was (still is) killing them, but at least they have the SEO basics built in.

For example, if Laura’s mom had to choose a knitting site to sign up for which one?

Knitting World - which has yarn articles, knitting news, knitting stories

Knitting Life - which has all those same things + upload knitting videos/photos, knitting communities of interest to her online

Now, if you were a search engine and you could see that her mom spends more time on Knitting Life, which would you rank higher?

The more competitors you have, the less you should rely on traditional SEO tactics and more on creating a buzz-worthy product in order to rank well. Testing the relationships between high ranking and hot products, does a good product = good SEO?

Yahoo! did consumer surveys to compare their products against competitors. They compared top mindshare vs top search ranking across several topics. For the topic of sports, the top 3 companies in surveyed consumer mindshare correlated directly with Yahoo’s top search rankings. With finance, they correlated although ordered differently, the same things were observed when comparing top movie sites.

What does this all have to do with ranking factors again? SEO is not a band aid for a run of the mill product; think about strategy, look at what your competitors are doing, how can you build something that will outrank your competitors?

You can’t forget the big picture, the best ranking factor you can have is a hot product. Make the product manager and other big people your best friends (buy them beer). Ask yourself questions about strategy before working on SEO.

Q & A Session (note this section is largely paraphrased)

Question: I’ve observed Google giving new sites 1 to 3 day ranking boosts, how can we deal with this, how can anyone compete with this if you are not the New York Times?

Danny Sullivan: Pages that are particularly fresh, Google will pop them in the top results. I don’t really think it’s a case of just new sites, but that Google is displaying hot content that they think is relevant, separate from search results.

Rand Fishkin: QDF (quality deserves freshness) has a few algorithmic components that are obvious, like domain trust, particularly news sites. If you get even a few early references, you can outrank stuff that normally kicks your butt in search results. You can see these in searches for, well tragically Air France. Quite possibly you’ll see news results about the plane crash in the search results (Marty shows the audience a number 1 unpersonalized result for “Brazil Confirms Jet Crash - Yahoo News”).  If you are trying to do that, have domain authority, get your feed into Google news, hire a blogger, and think about syndication. Syndication partnerships can get you good links fast.

Marty Weintraub: We filter out for immediacy in unpersonalized SERPs.

Q: Does SEO factor around trust of a domain, and does Marty work for SEOmoz?

Danny: Marty likes that tool because there is data in it that you don’t get elsewhere.

Marty: It’s the concept of tool strings by API, wiring up what you need to power your API.  Just because I like it (linkscape) doesn’t mean it’s not cool, the days of big enterprise are all over, we can all get used to having this stuff now.

Danny: Over the past 2-3 years  there was a concept of “certain domains are authoritative” they can do no wrong in Google, as long as they’re focused on particular content. People inside these organizations don’t want to screw this up. Aaron Wall created waves a few months ago when he showed a strong correlation between top brands ranking in Google when they hadn’t before. Was this Google deciding “we need to reward the brands turn the brand dial up?” I think they didn’t necessarily crank the brand dial up, but brands have general authority, maybe they cranked the authority dial up.

Marty: Let me get this right, they aren’t necessarily favoring brands, just everything that a brand happens to do? Brands are brands.

Danny: Proctor & Gamble might outrank Crest for toothpaste because they are more of an authority.

Rand: When you see a high correlation of brands ranking well, not Google saying turn up the brand dial, but it’s Proctor and Gamble got a listing on Fortune 500 and they have a stock ticker. I get worried when SEO’s think “Google is out to get them.” Google is out to serve their users. What is it that brands do that I can do?

Laura Lippay: At the high level, Yahoo brands, it didn’t really affect us, I didn’t see anything that affected us.

Marty: What signal does Yahoo look to decide who’s a big brand?

Q: If I register my domain name for a milion years, do i rank better?

Rand: The experts seemed to think this correlated very low.

Marty: I think it does.

Q: Any evidence that Nofollow links contribute to linking domain diversity, like Wikipedia, mainstream media, does it matter at all?

Rand: Surprisingly, it does appear to, when you pull out Nofollow links, correlation drops a little bit. My initial suspicion is yes, that a Nofollow link from Wikipedia is still a good signal

Laura: Well, if you pull out a link that’s Nofollow, you’re also losing traffic too, there are so many things going on at the same time. It’s hard to say that’s it just one thing, there’s a lot more to it

Rand: If you believe that we’re right, do not go out and get a bunch of Nofollow links, there’s clear signals of what is natural growth of Nofollow links and what’s non-natural growth.

Danny: I think Google’s official thing is that “no no, we still don’t follow it.”  If you are clever you can ask Matt Cutts that during the official You & A session.

Q: Is their a positive role that microsites can play without being spammy?

Rand: I would not suggest that, look at large networks, Conde Naste, dozens of companies linking in different ways.

Marty: Does it serve the users?

Rand: Do not optimize links in the footer, we see lots of q & a’s about people getting penalties for this, the natural flow of the web is that a lot of related sites will naturally link to each other.

Laura: I always try to get people with related content to create modules, we see results when we do that, we put a content module in Yahoo sports of clothing we’re selling in Yahoo rivals. I don’t really waste my time on footer stuff.

Q: Laura, how do think Google might measure buzz?

Laura: If you think about it, the big metrics people look at, repeat visits, bookmarks.

Rand: I would say branded query data is huge, the benefit from getting a link from Techcrunch isn’t so much “get a link from Techcrunch” , it’s everything around that.

*Marty continues asking search algorithm questions of Laura even though she is part of Yahoo’s marketing team*

Laura: Really smart people have been working on these search engines for years, how could they not be thinking about these things that we’ve though of?

Rand: Something like 80% of all sites, Google has access to some kind of usage data be it analytics, webmaster central etc.

Q: How do I do an analysis for a 15,000 page site?

Marty: You can totally do it at the enterprise level.

Rand: This is not new, lots of people use the Linkscape API.

Q: Is SEO dead, it sounds like everything is back to traditional marketing?

Danny: I’m gonna say that literally people were saying SEO is dead in 1996, there are still people who have to do the basics of SEO, page titles, make sure the site gets crawled. These are still rocket science the vast majority of people who are out there.

Laura: I don’t think it’s dead, it’s ever changing.

Rand: How do you get to changing?  I looked at the ranking factors report between 2007 and 2005, man the fundamentals look alike.

Marty: Really, your title tag is your ad headline, and the meta description is the three lines in your ad.