Search Engine Marketing... Amplified

Amplify Interactive: June/July ‘08 Update

2008-07-16T20:35:44Z

Here’s the latest in what’s happening @ Amplify Interactive

New Director of SEM

Please join us in welcoming search marketing veteran Blu Drobushevich to the team at Amplify Interactive as our Director of SEM. Blu just started in mid-June, and he’s already made a huge impact. Blu will be focused on client strategy, streamlining internal processes and business development. With over 11 years of Internet marketing experience to bring to the table, we anticipate some exciting things in the near future. You can check out the press release and Blu’s bio on our site.

Congratulations to Christian

I’m sure he’ll be embarrassed when he finds out I put this in here - but Christian got married last weekend and I thought you all should know. Feel free to extend your warmest congratulations - christian @ amplify-interactive.com. Now we just have to figure out how to cover for him while he’s on his honeymoon…

New Clients & Client News

Audio Precision: We are currently supporting Audio Precision’s site redesign with SEO consulting services.
Digimarc: Received & approved a $310 million all cash offer from L-1 for their ID systems business.
Novas: Long time client Novas Software was recently acquired by EDA solutions provider SpringSoft. We’re working with the Web team to transition the Novas site to SpringSoft.com and work up a new SEM strategy for SpringSoft.
TheFertileSoul: Recently launched a redesigned site complete with new CMS.

Upcoming Marketing & Networking Events

We’ll be participating in or attending the following events

7/16: SEMpdx / PDXMindshare networking event @ Paddy’s Bar & Grill
7/17 - 7/18: Internet Strategy Forum Summit
Let us know where we should be in the next month

In Case You Missed It

Our most popular blog posts last month

Now is the time to make your site iPhone friendly
SMX Advanced Seattle 2008 (this recap and several of the session posts were among the most popular posts last month)
SEO for PR
The Yahoo! Ambassador Test is Wrong!

I think that’s it for this update. Thanks for reading this far!

ShareThis

Give It Up! SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

2008-07-03T17:01:30Z

From Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

As I noted previously in our SMX Advanced 2008 Seattle post, there was a 30-day embargo in place on anything learned in this “give it up” session. Meaning, you can’t blog about it for 30 days, and the search engine guys aren’t allowed to fix any loopholes uncovered in these sessions for 30 days either. So, consider this stuff old news and any loopholes fixed as of today.

Here’s what I picked up from the session:

Stephan Spencer - Netconcepts

Developed for Wordpress: An seo title tags plugin will now allow you to mass edit URLs for optimization

Marty Weintraub

Go ahead & do reciprocal linking, but be a bad link partner: Set up reciprocal links, but nofollow yours so it looks like all of your “reciprocal” links are actually one-way. put it in the tos/policy of your linkexchange and leave it up to your partner to figure it out.

Has built a nifty tool that will crawl MyBlogLog & StumbleUpon accounts so it looks like your profile visits every day. This makes it look like he/they are always visiting your site. This encourages them to be flattered and like you–then, link to you.

Michael Gray

Discovered that Google’s quality score has nothing to do with the content of the landing page despite what they say. By duplicating a landing page on two different domains & running the exact same ad & keyword on two different accounts - he found that he was able to pay substantially different cost per click and had substantially different quality scores. Therefore, quality score = algorithmic trust score. Meaning - the ‘trust’ of your domain has a lot to do with your quality score.

EvilGreenMonkey

Tip 1: micro-site creation: control inbound links, anchor text, sell links, etc

get free/cheap hosting
avoid .info domains & dupe class C IPs
choose a CMS (ie wordpress)
don’t use the same WHOIS details
don’t register domains on the same day/week
don’t get links from the same places
don’t use the same content on difft blogs
don’t use the same templates & linking structure

Tip 2 - automate content development

write an original piece of content (contentwriter)
re-write each sentence 5 times to say the same exact thing
get a programmer to create multi-source sentence arrays (instantarticlewizardpro)
submit content to every article directory with embedded links
check articles with copyscape
randomize words within sentences (ie don’t = do not, pub = bar, etc)
publish like crazy on all your domains

Tip 3 - on-topic spamming

Run precise searches on google/yahoo (site:.edu +comment +”red wine” -you must log)

Todd Friesen

Tip 1: online rep management. See a result you don’t like? Sign up to monitor that page for uptime and once you get an alert that a page is down, submit it to Google’s URL removal tool. If they catch it down too - that page is gone for 6 months…

Tip 2: Hotmail addresses are recycled after a while. You find a blog (blogspot/blogger) you want to own that seems abandoned? You can try & reclaim an unused Hotmail address (assuming it’s abandoned too) then takeover the blog.

Rand Fishkin

Tip 1: Rand went through lots of advanced search operators - I didn’t have time to get them all down…

Use the “related” search (related:sitename.com), find the top ranking sites then go get links from their related sites
What’s popular in a particular realm? use wildcard * searches. try a product search “dell desktop *”
linkfromdomain (MSN live search) - where does this domain link to?
pages in order of importance “www site:sitename.com”
anyone else want to add the notes you took down on advanced operators - go ahead & comment below. We’ll link to you.

Google Local Ranking Tips

registration
perceived closeness to center of city
number of local reviews
local link popularity (other places in gg local in the same city)
local phone number
participation in the online menu services (zagat, allmenus, menutopia, etc)
quality of local review
city name inclusion in anchor text
local (non-google) directory listings
keyword/city in business name
domain authority/page rank
address inclusion on web pages
category. if google local’s categories don’t fit - disable them and let yellow pages categories do it…
For a more comprehensive take on local search ranking factor - check out David Mihm’s “Local Search Ranking Factors Vol. 1“

That was all the notes that I took down - there were more nuggets to be sure. Add links to your notes from “Give It Up” below.

ShareThis

‘Follow’ the green bird… (get it?!)

2008-07-01T22:19:58Z

Almost all of our employees are twittering… so we thought, “Hey, during the frequent Twitter down times let’s set up an Amplify Interactive Twitter account.”

So we did.

Feel free to follow us. What this Twitter account will be is essentially an RSS alternative for those who like to use Twitter. You’ll be getting blog post alerts whenever we post our usual amplified SEO information. We will also be looking into the possibility of providing some exclusive Twitter-only content, so hey, if that’s not an incentive to follow us along with the thousands of other people you’re following, I don’t know what is.

ShareThis

Now is the time to make your site iPhone-friendly

2008-06-16T22:33:22Z

By iPhone-friendly, I’m not talking about creating a wholesale ‘mobile’ version of your site. I’m talking about auditing your current site to see if you can cut down on some of the trim that might make it load a little quicker on a 3G (or EDGE) connection. The following are a couple of things you can do to make your website be a little more mobile / iPhone-friendly:

Take a look at the images on your site. If you’re finding the file size to be a little hefty, look into perhaps squeezing down the quality a little and shorting up the download time for the image.
Your site is, essentially, built around providing one big sales path. Help users continue upon this path in a way you want them to by providing call-outs to the ‘next-step’ along this funnel at the end of the content or on the sidebar of the current page they’re on. Make these links / graphics ‘tap-friendly’ for iPhone users.
Provide your contact phone number somewhere easily seen on your site. Often, iPhones will make a phone number ‘tappable’ on the page. Give iPhone & mobile web users an easy way to contact you directly this way.

Even if your product or service website isn’t something you think an iPhone or general mobile web user would possibly want to access on their device, the percentage of users who use the mobile web to access content is rising. The new version of the iPhone - coming July 11 equipped with G3 speed - will only increase our mobile web surfing habits. Better strike while the iron is getting warmed up…

ShareThis

SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

2008-06-05T23:12:52Z

Julian & I took the short trip up to Seattle this week to attend yet another search marketing conference - SMX Advanced. SMX Advanced is a two-day conference for “advanced” search marketers where the sessions focus on topics beyond optimizing title tags and using keywords in your copy and other more “basic” topics. So, it’s a little smaller than Search Engine Strategies, and a little bigger than the SEMpdx SearchFest.

Between the two of us, we were able to attend a number of sessions, and have captured our notes on the blog. Perhaps the biggest draw for SMX Advanced though is the “Give it Up” session, which promises to all in attendance some top secret SEO tips… however, you aren’t allowed to blog about them for 30 days, so you’ll have to wait for my notes on that session.

Day 1

Money for What? Search Marketing Payment Models (Ben)
Creating Value In Your SEM Business (Ben)
Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques (Julian)
Bot Herding (Julian)
Buying Sites for SEO (Julian)

Day 2

Search Friendly Development (Ben)
What You Should Be Measuring — But Aren’t (Ben)
Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know (Ben)
Search Marketing & Surviving a Recession (Julian)
International SEO (Julian)
Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues (Julian)
Give It Up! (Ben… ~~this post won’t go live until 9:01 AM on July 3 2008~~)

ShareThis

Diagnosing web site architecture issues

2008-06-05T23:12:40Z

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Second day of SMX Advanced, Developer Track
Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land:

Vans.com has problems with javascript code. They don’t come up high in search due to this. She uses this as an example of identifying problems with websites to determine your strategy.

Chris Silver Smith, Netconcepts:
blog: naturalsearchblog.com

For the newbies:

Do a sitecommand and see how many results your site has.
Yahoo shows many more than Google. This is somewhat due to Yahoo! showing duplicate content.
Do a “inurl:sessionid” search to see if you might have duplicte content.

New area in Webmaster tools on title tags, meta, content, etc.

New area in Webmaster tools on title tags, meta, content, etc.
Check your robots.txt file

Coca-Cola has a homepage redirect (bad redirect).
He uses web-sniffer.net to see what is returned by the server.
Coca-Cola shows a 200 redirect code which is bad. It should be a 301.
Google handles these issues “pretty fluidly” now, but not the other search engines.

Use Lynx Browser to look at links on a page.
Use the Firefox Developer extension and the Link Counter extension.

Another utility: Acxiom’s MarketLeap – Benchmarking Link Popularity

SEOMoz’s SEO Toolbox. They have many good utilities all in one in place.

example: who else is hosted on my IP
your ISP could host several domain names on the same IP address which could hurt your site.

Look at “Google Sets” to ID your top competitors, and then see why they are ranking well.
Special Whitepapers available at chris@netconcepts.com

Jonathan Hochman, Hochmanconsultants.com

Diagnosing and Fixing Websites:

Favorite tools:

NoScript (firefox add-on), blocks all client side scripts
More sophisticated users might have javascript disabled. There are not many of these users, but could be influential.

Flash issues: make html content as well
Check Google’s cache to see what they actually got out of your page
Live HTTP headers (exposes redirects)
Gillete.com (after redirects which were 302ed) has an OK cache

SWFobject() 2.0 to help with flash sites
For java/ajax, modify DOM to replace HTML content, or use <noscript> tags
For Silverlight, create your own SEO-friendly insertion code.

SWFobject is not cloaking. It is open-souce Google development now.
it is not considered cloaking.
There is an article in Searchengine Land about it
Text must be identical to text in flash, but you can not describe the flash.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth: Contains some anti-Scientionlogy information due to 90s controversy.
It is a handy spider to look at sites

Firefox Web Developer:
You can view code problems

Watch out for search problems with frames, iframes, Flash and Silverlight.
Each object is treated as a separate item, not as part of the host page.
Watch out for AJAx due to iframe issues

David Golightly, Zillow:

Optimizing Zillow’s Search Interface for Engines: A Case Study.

David is not an SEO, and discusses the issues Zillow had including issues using Ajax and Javascipt.

ShareThis

International SEO

2008-06-05T23:12:13Z

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Second day of SMX Advanced, Organic track

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, ExactTarget
Q&A Moderator: Barry Smyth, Search Strategies

Ian McAnerin, McAnerin International:

You can geolocate web pages (not just sites).
Search Engines look at the domain country code (ccTLD), ip address, and link analysis.

This is a script, and if the country domain is country specific, then the engine stops and assumes that country. If not, then IP address. Then, link analysis.

When looking for international links, you can have many issues:

local terms
spelling issues (UK vs US)
Pop Culture
Other Cultural Issues

SEED Tactic: Symantic Expression Equivalency Document

“Good marketing material appeals to your emotions” and then look at info. Emotions are very culturally relevent. Better writers/writing translates poorly.

Put information into bullet points and take out emotion. Then translate to other language. Then take that and give it to a real copywriter in the country to put the emotion back in. You might want to translate back as a check.

Andy Atkins-Kruger, WebCertain:

Adopt a global PR strategy.
Manage 301s
Keyword URLs (can be very difficult)
Source local links
Need expert keyword research in target language
Local hosting and cctlds needed

Language and content presentation

Don’t mix up languages on the same page
Need more than limited content to help google detect location.

This becomes a the recurring theme from all the other panelists. You need to understand culture, spelling, etc. you need to host locally and get local links.

ShareThis

Search marketing & surviving a recession

2008-06-05T23:12:01Z

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Second day of SMX Advanced, Multiple tracks

Moderator: Jeffrey K. Rohrs, ExactTarget
Q&A Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Business.com

Panelists:
Andrew Beckman, Location3 Media
Dave Davies, Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning
Russ Mann, Covario
Jon Miller, Marketo

Right at the beginning, the moderator asks if we are in a recession. Most people believe we are. This was not a presentation panel, it was Q&A style. Therefore, I will hit some of the points made.

Companies are going to tighten up budgets in these economic times.

This will lead to more focus on results rather than branding. Top companies may spend more to take advantage of smaller companies weaker positions in these times.

Since larger companies may increase paid search spending to get what they perceive as more measurable, results-oriented traffic, there could be a rise in competitive term costs.

Because of this spike, it would likely be better (according to David) for more companies to focus their efforts on link building and SEO. This type of marketing can be effectively measured through analytics and has lasting effects.

Where should you spend your first advertising dollar?

Most panelists agree that fundamentals–building a sound, search-friendly website–is the most important way to spend advertising dollars. There is also discussion of customer research and how SEOs must think like businesses in understanding customers.

SEO and value

Good analytic reporting can prove the value of SEO to clients. It is more difficult than other forms (ppc), but is doable and SEO is the most effective means of advertising.

Prioritizing SEM

It is much better to do strong SEO first before beginning other campaign. People often overlook simple fixes such as title tags and meta descriptions.

What to do when clients want guaranteed search results?

There are many ways to show growth of search engine presence for clients. You may not be able to guarantee 1st place results, but you can increased results. SEO in a constantly evolving process.

How to deal with differing economic regions?

You can geo-target your paid search to spend money in areas that are doing better economically.

ShareThis

Analytics every SEO needs to know

2008-06-05T23:11:34Z

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

This session delved into some of the deeper things that SEO’s can do to measure and improve their efforts beyond rankings & search referrals. This ended up being one of my favorite sessions at the conference due to the in-depth actual usable tips and methods.

Brian Klais - Netconcepts

“10 Essential Natural Search KPIs”

There’s more to search success than measuring ego term hits and rankings

Keywords: brand to non-brand ratio (we’ve been doing this for a while)
Unique pages & pages crawled (each is a potential advertisement in search results, this is essentially your inventory of advertisements)
Indexation rate (pages crawled vs pages indexed - work to increase your advertising inventory)
Yielding pages (ratio for how many pages got click through from search? This is your effective advertising inventory)
Search phrases per page
Visitors per phrase
Page placement (quantify value of page 1 placement, develop strategies for improving page 2 rankings)
Engine Yield Rate (searchers delivered per page crawled by search engine, ie - google drove 3 visitors per page crawled vs yahoo vs msn etc - tells you which engines to focus on)
ROI calculation
Missed opportunity cost calculation (he demonstrated a method for working through the ratios above to generate a missed opportunity cost. Essentially, the method used the ratios in a logical order to figure out how much additional SEO might be worth and where to focus the attention)

Laura Lippay - Yahoo

“The Ultimate SEO Data Grid”

Laura presented a grid she uses to do SEO internally at Yahoo. Here are the 4 things you can do with the grid:

Balance SEO, PPC & Paid Inclusion channels
Find SEO referral gaps - where do we have content but not performing well
Find SEO content opportunities - what search terms do we need content for?
Make SEO traffic & value projections

It all looked great, but her she won’t make the grid / Excel spreadsheet available… hopefully the slides are so the grid can be examined a little more closely.

Jonah Stein - ItsTheROI

“Five Forgotten Metrics”

Customer Lifetime Value

Use persistent cookies (like Google AdWords conversion tracking), as soon as you have an action take place, capture source, keyword & date… and you need a strategy for getting the info that’s mission

Prevent Stolen ROI

Your brand terms claim your ROI because people find you via SEO but then later search for your brand name

Crawl Frequency - the New Page Rank

Lets you know what pages a search engine consider more valuable… more so than toolbar page rank - pages that don’t get crawled have an issue (less than weekly/monthly)
How to measure: crawl rate tracking for WordPress, SEOmeter.com, log file analyzer - javascript analytics packages can’t tell you this (Google etc)

Page Views to Conversion

Good SEO gets user closer to conversion, so page views & time on site won’t necessarily increase PV & TOS, so know your funnel for each landing page

External Links

Most important Total number of external links & # of links per page

Google Webmaster Central “All Query Stats”

Shows your keyword ranking by directory … Apparently it’s unintelligible until you spend some time with it - so you should check out this tool to help you: http://www.cumbrowski.com/googlestatsconverter.asp

Richard Zwicky - Enquisite

Presented his own tool for measuring SEO efforts… the tool definitely warrants further investigation. I’m going to grab a free trial asap.

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
SE Roundtable Recap

ShareThis

Paid search, what you should be measuring but aren’t

2008-06-05T23:11:13Z

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Christine Churchill - KeyRelevance - Offline Conversion

When to measure offline conversions? Most appropriate for ‘high touch’ sales processes where phone & in-person close the deal (mortgages, b2b, etc)

Simple Offline Conversion Tracking Methods:

Making assumptions based on sales
Anecdotal data (ask salespeople to ask people how they learned about them)
In-store surveys
all of the above are imprecise

Intermediate

Unique phone numbers, etc

Advanced

customer tagging (cookies) & tie the cookie to cc data for offline purchase
unique phone numbers
pay per call
keyword driven traffic: match unique phone number back to keyword phrases used in PPC

Rich Devine - ZAAZ

Only a small % of your visitors convert, and if you focus on them - you’re missing the other successful behavior that takes place on your site

Most marketers are probably under-valuing non-converting keywords, but if you start looking at “other” conversions on your site and successful visits (micro-conversion behavior), then you are able to assign a value to them.

Akin Arikan - Unica Corporation

Study showed correlation between online ads & search. The finding was that when running online ads in parallel with search and then turned them off - paid search ctr & conversion down, cost to maintain volume went up.

Takeaway - take off the blinders and look to how other channels are influencing your success.

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
Search Engine Roundtable recap

ShareThis