SEO Blog | May 2009 »

29 April 2009

Is Video The Future Of Search?

Online video is fast becoming a global phenomenon (if not already) and with improved technology, we appear to be experiencing the birth of a potential rival to the most common and popular source of entertainment and news since first commercial transmissions more than fifty years ago - the television. With the continual growth in popularity in online video sharing sites, such as YouTube and Yahoo Video, video is no longer limited to commercial television and handy cams. Such afore mentioned sites have provided people with opportunities to share their videos, express their freedom and to reach potentially unlimited viewers globally.

In terms of search, users want to be engaged and as a consequence are spending more time on video sites. Therefore it is no coincidence that videos are increasingly ranking in search engine results pages (SERPS) as Google has been quick to adapt to what users want ( videos engage the user and provide a greater search experience). Considering the above, it is time for every web site owner to focus on video search optimisation immediately for the following reasons:

1. Online Video Destinations Are Popular

People love watching video, even the thousands showing other people's stupidity which usually results in some excruciating injury! Alright, maybe not everyone is like me and takes pleasure in viewing other people hurting themselves but there are millions of online videos available that are not only entertaining but also educational and informative. According to a recent report from Nielsen the number of users from the USA frequenting online video destinations has climbed an incredible 339% since 2003. This is hardly surprising since the technology and infrastructure were hardly available back in 2003. However it's still a significant increase and a strong indication of the fast growing popularity of video sites and the importance of optimising your videos to rank in search engines.

2. Users Spend More Time On Video Sites

In the same Nielsen report it was discovered that the time spent on video sites during the same time period has increased by a whopping 2000% and that in the last year the time spent by users occupied with online video increased by 71%. The more time a user spends engaging with your video the greater opportunity to make a conversion or entice the user to visit your site.

3. Online Video Is Part Of The Social Media Move

If you don't know the importance and popularity of social media sites over the last couple of years there is a good chance you have been hiding under a rock. However for those that don't know there are 87% more online social media users than in 2003 (spending 73% more time on these sites) and much of that can be attributed to video, due to its ability to engage people with common interests to band together and form online social communities .

4. Video Explains and Engages Users Attention Quickly

As mentioned above, video can engage visitors attention quickly as people then have the ability to visualise how something works, what its uses are or just what a person, product or thing looks like. Online visitors are savvy and smart and therefore commonly have shorter attention spans and if the video does not engage them within the first 30 seconds there is a strong chance they won't be hanging around to find out more. Thus the underlying video message needs to be communicated in this time and encourage interaction or further exploration from the user. Again this confirms why your videos require optimisation!

5. Search Engine Rankings

Everybody wants to rank well and be found in search engines for their related services and products. Video is an integral part of blended search and we believe that adding videos to SEO landing pages will improve rankings . The time to optimise videos online for search engine rankings is now.

6. Television Shows Are Moving Online

If you haven't heard of Hulu yet then you will soon. Not currently available outside the USA the site (a collaboration between Fox and NBC) offers television shows and movies for free and has grown to overtake Yahoo Video as the second biggest video site in terms of total video streams. This begs the question of what will happen in the near future as online television and movies are freely available at a time convenient to the user to watch? It's worthy to note that YouTube now also offers full length shows and movies and this brings us to the next point.

7. Online Advertising in Videos Has Commenced

With television shows moving online, so is advertising in videos. Search engine marketing efforts will no longer be predominantly pay per click in search engine results and will need to be concentrated within videos to capture potential visitor's attention.

With video becoming so prominent online and particularly in search results it is apparent that it will play a large part in the future of search. What does that mean for those of us in the Search Engine Optimisation game? It means roughly the same thing that Google meant when it arrived on the scene and started using links to rank pages, we adapt. That has been the success of the SEO industry, when the search engines or users throw something completely revolutionary at us, we famaliarise ourselves with the new technology and either adapt existing tools and methods or develop new ones that allow us to do our jobs effectively. That's the dynamic nature of our industry, adapt to the new innovations or find yourself a new trade.

Posted by Grant Hilton on 04/29/09 at 4:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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27 April 2009

AIMIA-Customer Experience and Usability Workshop Part 2

Vijay Balachandran , Senior User Experience Architect, Fairfax Digital, was the third speaker. He introduced himself and stressed that in the current economic climate quick win projects were seen as key, the best points of competitors were often copied and a "go live and test later " method was often favoured, however this is often not the best approach to projects.

Vijay also introduced a case study on a Fairfax property called APM. This product provides detailed property information to real estate agents. His unit's objective was to ascertain the feasibility of enhancing APM with mapping features to make it comparable to its competitor. The process was as follows:

• Analysis of competitors

• Internal workshop with the stakeholders i.e. product, technology, sales etc

• Go build it

This analysis was very short but proved to be successful with KPI's reached and exceeded. The second case study he introduced was with RSVP, another Fairfax digital property, this one dealt with online dating. Their goals for this project was to re-activate long-overdue accounts, fight the competitors who were gaining market share, increase RSVP's position as the market leader of this segment and raise communication levels between members of the site. This was achieved by:

• Utilising the in-house resources that Fairfax has(massive staff numbers) by using incentives ( free movie tickets ) to get feedback from staff on different approaches to enhance the site.

• Collect data with Wufoo

• Use the in-house MS outlook system to drive recruitment for the program.

This proved successful and the site has a design tweak with almost all objectives met and in some case exceeded. The most important message from Vijay's talk was that user validation should always be part of the process, that user validation is not always reliant on well documented wireframes and finally that user validation is not always reliant on recruiting the perfect audience.

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The last speaker was Shane Morris, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft. Shane's first topic of discussion was where is customer observation heading in the future? In the early days you were guaranteed an audience if your website had lots of cool and funky features, that is not the case anymore, these days it's how appropriate the user experience is.

The 3 F's were now introduced (totally SFW btw), these are guidelines for design based on user experience. The first F is Function- who has the best function their site. The second F is Form- How have the functions indicated been expressed i.e. experience. The last F is Fashion (now I heard this and thought one of my more fashion savvy co-workers should have been here to cover this alien subject to me), this outlined the idea that whatever site you are visiting says something about yourself to the people around you, for example why would you choose facebook over MySpace, they both have the same function and a similar user experience, what makes one site more desirable than another?

This third F is Shane's idea of where user experience is heading, how to move beyond form and function to this new state of aspiration amongst web surfers. Previously this job of getting people to believe in the aspiration status of websites was left entirely to the marketers utilising off-line promotions to drive the right kind of aspiration seeking people to the website. No longer is this the sole realm of the marketer, the user experience experts need to get involved in this heavily as well as the third F- Fashion is becoming more and more vital and the web continues to evolve.

With most of my dealing with websites coming through the eyes of a Search Engine Optimiser, it was refreshing, enjoyable and informative to look at sites through the eyes of a Useability Experience Expert and I gained some insight about how to put myself in the persona of a novice internet user to more accurately locate critical flaws in the design of a site.Usability and SEO go hand in hand. It is not possible to optimise a website without considering the impact on usability and vice versa. We are always trying to balance these requirements for our clients and often we will change the SEO strategy/implementation to accommodate the afore mentioned usability requirements. Sometime it is possible to achieve a very similar SEO outcome by using slightly different SEO strategies that meet the usability requirements of our client and potential website users. We use every opportunity to find out more about usability and the impacts/cross-over with SEO to build more usable but highly ranking sites for our clients.

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/27/09 at 5:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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24 April 2009

AIMIA-Customer Experience and Usability Workshop

Bruce Clay Australia is a member of AIMIA (AUSTRALIAN INTERACTIVE MEDIA INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION). Networking with the wider variety of marketing peeps is important for us, we like to stick our noses into their business in the hopes that they might find what we do (mostly search engine optimisation and SEM) somewhat interesting! [How could they not; its search! - Kate]

With that in mind I wandered down to the KPMG auditorium where the AIMIA conference on "Customer Experience and Usability: Getting Through the Recession" was taking place. This event started off like many others, with gremlins in the machines playing havoc with the speakers' presentation, luckily a Microsoft employee (Shane Morris) was on hand and before you could say "Customer Experience and Usability Getting through the recession" we were on our way.

First up to speak was James Breeze, who is the Chief Experience Officer of Objective Digital. Objective digital provides cutting edge user-centred design and usability services for anyone from start-ups through to Australia's largest corporations. James started off his 15 minutes of fame (I am not kidding, each speaker got 15 minutes) by discussing the vital need for synergy between all parties involved in the web site project (designers, user experience experts, technologists, client etc) [Ahem... Not forgetting the all important SEO consultant! - Kate]

James said in his experience that the best case scenario is when all external parties have one point of contact between themselves and the client, regrettably this is seldom the case. If this synergy is not achieved then things go wrong, budgets are blown and timelines are exceeded. If there is a holistic effort then balanced creativity is achieved, time and budget deadlines are met and it is a quality experience for the client. In order for this to happen each party must be aware of what their particular role is within the project.

James's next point was the vital need for communication between all the stakeholders. This often happens when the parties have a common understanding of the project. This understanding takes form when constant feedback occurs and when each stakeholder knows their partnering entity's respective strengths and weaknesses. Turf wars must be stopped before they begin to eliminate costly delays.

Roadblocks are bound to take place and when this occurs all parties concerned need to stop and think about the problem collectively and need to manage the respective ego's and understand the interactions taking place. Objective review from people outside the project is needed to ensure consistency. Templates are an important tool to manage expectation and perform regular review. Using the tools available is also essential to make the project a success.

There was little spoken on about usability but some good best practice information for initiating and running a large scale web site project. I think the key message here was that communication is the most critical element of success/failure of a project.

Next up was Tania Lang, Principal, User Centred Designer at Peak Usability . Tania got straight to it bringing out a case study of her work with iiNet (an ISP). In this example the challenge was the old homepage, which was trying to be all things for all people, this wasn't working so swell. Peak did an expert review on the homepage. An expert review is when the Usability expert puts themselves in the persona of a novice web user trying to achieve certain tasks on the web site. It is a useful function as it can provide cheap and fast results that identify specific page design issues for designers and developers. In the case of iiNet it was the broadband plan section users were finding confusing due to too much jargon.

Lang also conducted usability testing of iiNet's website by monitoring 6 prospective clients and 6 current clients (novice internet users). These users were given different tasks to perform on the iiNet site and monitored by Peak analysts. This type of testing uses a one-to-one qualitative process to understand design flaws. Lang also explained how one-to-one testing was more likely to reveal critical flaws than useability tests.

Tania then showed us some footage of the usability tests and it was a real eye opener to see some novices struggling with a site, apparently this type of footage can be really persuasive in getting CEO's and other executives to change their stance on redesign of a site.

After all the testing a new prototype was designed and tested again. The iterative approach yielded great results with not only new sales increasing as well as up selling of existing customers, the new page design even saw Google adsense revenues rising. That's the end of Part 1 of the Workshop, part 2 to follow on Monday.

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/24/09 at 4:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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23 April 2009

Google adds Local Search Volumes to the Keyword Tool

Google recently added a new metric to their Keyword Tool which will help and save time for a lot of Internet marketers around the globe.

The new metric is the "Local Search Volumes" column, providing data from the country and language selections the user has selected.

Google Adwords Help explains the metric as :

"Location and language targeting: If you access the Keyword Tool from within an ad group, the Local Search Volume column will factor in your campaign's country and language targeting (if you target a region or city, only the country will be reflected). If you use the standalone or external Keyword Tools, your country and language selections will influence this column. The Global Monthly Search Volume column always shows traffic in all countries and all languages."

This makes comparing two versions of a word with different spellings easier to analyse. For example, the Australian way of spelling "Search Engine Optimisation" with an's' differs from the U.S. version where "Search Engine Optimization" is spelled with a 'z'.

In the U.S. version of this comparison, it shows there is a significant difference between the 2 versions. "Search Engine Optimization" yields more than 16 times the amount, 450,000, searches compared to "Search Engine Optimisation" which yields only 27,100 searches.

We can also conclude that worldwide "Search Engine Optimization" is the most searched for phrase with 673,000 results vs. 135,000 results for "Search Engine Optimisation".

Therefore, for the U.S. it would make sense to target "Search Engine Optimization" as it yields more searches.

When tailoring the results to Australia we notice that "Search Engine Optimisation" yields nearly double the amount of searches compared to "Search Engine Optimization".

Therefore, if your website targets the Australian audience it would make sense to optimise your site for "Search Engine Optimisation".

This extra metric would help a lot of internet marketers determine what versions of words should be used within their campaigns.

Posted by Mike van der Heijden on 04/23/09 at 4:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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20 April 2009

Twitter and the Power of Persuasion

Twitter and the power of persuasion.

The Purchase Decision Process for consumers was first identified and analysed by psychologists 1940s. Over the next 60 years the process has been constantly refined and examined by psychologists and marketers alike.

One of the vital steps in this process is the "information search" iteration. In this step consumers use internal sources (recalling past experiences with the brand/product in mind) and external sources (personal sources, such as friends and family as well as public sources, including various product-rating organisations and the one that particularly concerns this diatribe, marketer-dominated sources, such as advertising and company websites). Now if you are asking yourself "what in the name of Zeus's big toe does this have to do with Bruce Clay Australia and Search Engine Marketing", please bear with me, I am getting to that.

Now with the explosion of the Internet in the past 10 years, comprehensive information has become easier to find. Of course, this information has not always been as focused to the needs of the individual searcher as it could be. However there is a phenomenon that is currently sweeping the globe that has made this information hyper focused and relevant... that innovation is Twitter.

Twitter is described by Wikipedia as follows; "Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them."

Twitter (for those who use it) has become a key conduit in the external source aspect of the Purchase Decision Process. Now not only can you observe what your peers think of a certain product or brand but you can follow the brand directly and be notified of specific offers or specials. The messages are short and succinct due to the limited size of tweets and this leads to a high degree of relevance.

Now you can obtain similar information through using a search engine or receiving RSS feeds regarding the product or brand but with Twitter the information is at your finger tips - complete with evaluations from people you consider peers and whose judgement you trust. That is, if you don't follow 1000s of people indiscriminately.

A really good example of this is Carnival Cruises. They have utilised Twitter not only to bring specials to their followers but to interact and answer potential customer's questions. Their Twitter page encompasses special deals, peer review, a wealth of information regarding the cruises and brand building activities - very few "normal" corporate sites can do that in 1 page.

As reported in the Bruce Clay Australia blog Twitter usage jumped 131% in March, this indicates that Twitter is rapidly gaining momentum. As recently as last week there was a high publicity "contest" between CNN and Ashton Kutcher to see who could accumulate one million followers. Ashton emerged victorious.

Now imagine Ashton tweeted about how he loved a certain kind of widget; their sales would go through the roof. Every enterprise that has some semblance of a social media strategy should use Twitter and its unique power of suggestion to connect with their clients and ramp up revenues. In addition, all tweets that mention a certain keyword in conjunction with a product, service or brand, have an impact of the ranking of that keyword or keyword phrase (particularly now after the Vince update). As a result of this Twitter has a direct impact on rankings and therefore the SEO industry.

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/20/09 at 5:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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17 April 2009

Insights and statistics from comScore

comScore has just released some interesting search engine ranking stats for March 2009. To round up:

• Google took its widest-ever lead in the U.S. search market in March, it had a 63.7 percent market share of the 14.3 billion U.S. searches in March, increasing 0.4 percentage points from February. Yahoo's market share slipped slightly while Microsoft's improved marginally.
• Overall U.S. search queries in March increased 9 percent from February, however the fact that February is significantly shorter than March accounts for many of these searches.
• Twitter.com jumped 131% in March to 9.3 million visitors! That's 5 million more visitors than in February.
• Facebook's usage in European countries grew by 314% to 100 million visitors in February from 24 million the same month a year earlier and is now the 6th biggest Web property worldwide, posting 275 million visitors in February, a 175% increase from the same period a year ago.

These figures, of course, confirm that the future looks promising for SEO and social media.

Source: ComScore, Inc

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/17/09 at 9:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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16 April 2009

Bruce Clay SEO Training in Sydney, Australia

Here's some pics from Bruce's SEO training which took place last week in Sydney, Australia.

Bruce with Sylvia from CareerOne

SEO Training in full swing

Your humble author, taking notes

Question Time

All in all I found training very comprehensive. 3 days of super-useful and demystifying SEO information which was worth every penny, and then some. Now to catch up on the required reading! For more info on the next training session, please take a look at our SEO training page.

Posted by Richard Baron on 04/16/09 at 4:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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15 April 2009

SEO Certification - Does SEO need a Hippocratic Oath?

[Please note: After a 4 day long weekend, posting frequency has returned to normal - Richard]

The recurring theme around my long Easter weekend was not what you would expect, neither Easter egg hunts nor massive dinners that made you feel bloated for 28 hours after. It was that I kept bumping into friends and family who were recent medical graduates and had just taken the Hippocratic Oath.

Most of them considered the Oath something sacred, with its tagline "Above all, do no harm" being close to their hearts. Now I know as SEO practitioners we don't hold lives in our hands but what we do hold is the livelihoods of certain businesses, employees and by virtue of this their families in our hands. Do we need a Hippocratic Oath of our own?

Imagine this; a small organisation that is entirely web-based enlists the services of a less-than-honourable SEO firm. For the first few days, rankings soar, sales double and all is good with the world. Within in a week the search engines have detected the dubious SEO techniques on the page and have removed it from the index. The business cash flow is destroyed, cut backs are made, people lose their jobs and families go hungry, all while the SEO firm is left unaffected. I know it is the main aim of SEO to achieve certain KPI as dictated by the client but to destroy their site in the process of achieving this aim is definitely not the way forward. Improving the user experience must also always be kept in mind as a primary aim.

Now I know in every industry in the world there are dubious operators but it seems more and more of these spammy SEOs populate our industry, offering cheap services and quick fixes. This may, however, be a symptom of the SEO industry growing as a whole. Google itself has recognized this as a problem and has posted this SEO guide to help clients choose a respectable SEO.

I recently attended the Bruce Clay training and to receive accreditation for the course, I had to submit a site to Bruce Clay for an audit to ensure SEO efforts didn't employ any spamming techniques. In addition to this, Bruce covered his own SEO Code of Ethics and SEO Code of Conduct. I might be a little biased, but that's something to respect.

Now I know there is some debate as to whether the SEO industry should be somehow regulated, with certain organisations such as SEMPO and seocertification.org offering certification. However I don't believe that certification is the complete solution for the trials currently facing the SEO industry. In my opinion compulsory certification and regulation would detract from the free-thinking, dynamic nature of our industry.

I do think that some kind of ethics or code should be introduced; I don't know about the entire contents of the oath (I am no Hippocrates after all) but I have a feeling it should start with something like this "Above all, I will do no harm or face the vengeance and wrath of the one called Matt Cutts".

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/15/09 at 1:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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9 April 2009

Bruce Clay SEO Training in Sydney

The first day of training was daunting to say the least, it wasn't the training itself that was intimidating but the coffee machines outside that required some kind of Vulcan logic processing to get working, after many attempts (and much mess) I was sufficiently caffeinated and ready to dive into Metas, URLs, keywords and links.

Each day as training began Bruce would introduce a number of principles and lay the foundation for the day ahead. During the training session Bruce built upon these foundations and drilled down deeper into the essence of his methodologies and by the 3rd session of each day we were into the real good juicy stuff. With the amount of time the number 42 was mentioned, I just had to believe that Douglas Adams himself was a SEO.

Bruce makes the very long trip 'down under' twice each year so we get the opportunity hear SEO straight from the horse's mouth. Flying half way round the world in order to be barraged by question after question on all types of topics including personalized search, behavioral strategies, algorithm updates and social optimisation means poor Bruce doesn't have much rest.

The training covers some home truth basics through to the very complicated strategies required to maintain complex, dynamic sites with established rankings and search traffic; all with a focus on getting your site to be 'the least imperfect'. The granddaddy of SEO (yep the nickname sticks - it's on twitter!) explained to us how Google is growing at an average of 0.5% each month since 2007 and how they are planning to continue gaining market share in the future. Also covered in depth was the complex PageRank formula and how managing this can improve rankings. The back breaking manuals have been scrawled over with all sorts of diagrams of how to link verses how not to link, with detailed examples of the Google 'data' (or supplementary) index and what a crawler does when they get to a site.

By the end of the training on the evening of the 3rd day I experienced a strange contradiction between body and mind. My brain felt physically full to capacity; however the most important thing was learning what I didn't know. Now the yearning to learn is even stronger than at the beginning of the training. It's a good thing too, as I am new to the office and have yet to get my SEOToolSet Certification so essentially that studying is only just beginning! I still haven't mastered the coffee machines but SEO, well that's another matter completely.

Marc

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/ 9/09 at 4:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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6 April 2009

SMX Sydney Site Clinic

During the site clinic the team of experts speaking and attending SMX Sydney will attempt to show ways to optimise several sites chosen at random.

Following are key points the team made regarding the sites chosen for inspection.

Billabong.com - Rand Fishkin & Greg Boser

• Misspelling of URL not redirect to main site
• On t-shirts page, all products below the fold which is not great for usability
• Hash tag in URL for products which means that Google ignores those pages
• Consider sub-domains for several subjects

Spaceout.com.au - Mike Motherwell & Stephen Pavlovich

• Blog ranks better than actual site
• Perhaps list al the garages available for storage on Google maps
• Move to spaceoutstorage.com
• Tweak some content for higher conversions
• Hardcoded landing pages for search results of storage locations

Creditcardfinder.com.au - Bruce Clay & Greg Grothuas

• Preferred section on home page is not populated


• Title tag needs some more keywords for certain pages


• Lack of global navigation


• Too much white space and try encourage more comments about article entries


• Some inbound links are from non-relevant sites


• Sitemap is not in the correct format

Eatout.co.nz - Aidan Beanland & Rob Kerry

• Top navigation looks more like a breadcrumb
• Home Page title too keyword orientated as opposed to describing the page
• Use different anchor text besides "restaurant" and "click here" for internal links
• Linking architecture could be improved, stop using link farms etc
• Be consistent with content i.e. New Zealand as opposed to NZ
• Publicise the user generated content section more

This really was a great session to finish off a phenomenal conference, the interaction, dynamics and banter between all the experts on the stage showed how much they enjoyed themselves. So long SMX Sydney, bring on the booze cruise, Marc is outtahere.

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/ 6/09 at 10:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Search Engine Stats Australia and New Zealand by Bill Tancer, Hitwise.

The Day 2 opening keynote for SMX Sydney "The Australian Searchscape: All the Latest Stats About The Search Engines in Australia and New Zealand" is presented by Bill Tancer, General Manager Global Research - Hitwise.

As the GM for Global Research, Bill leads a team of research analysts in the US, UK and Australia, providing cutting-edge research and insight into online consumer behaviour and the application of online competitive intelligence.
Bill starts off by telling us that search data is valuable as it tells us about ourselves and human nature.

Hitwise Data

The Hitwise dataset includes 25 million users, 1 million websites and 172 industry categories. This can be analysed on monthly weekly or daily basis.
Bill says has Google still hasn't reached saturation point for search engine market share for Australia and New Zealand.

In Australia, the current market shares:

• Google - 90%
• Yahoo - 4%
• MSN - 5%
• Other - 1%

In NZ, the current market share is:

• Google - 92%
• Yahoo 3%
• MSN 2%
• Other 3%

Hitwise statistics show that top searched keywords are still brand names like: Facebook, Ebay, Youtube, Myspace, BOM, Hotmail. Users feel safer going to those sites via search results rather than typing the URL into the browsers address bar.

Adult Entertainment & Cognitive Dissonance

Hitwise statistics show that people are not honest when asked about the sites they visit, if they feel telling the truth could embarrass them. This is a great example of how observing real behaviour and search statistics can reveal the sites they actually visit.

Hitwise Predictions for 2009

• Words per query will continue to increase
• Search success rate will continue to degrade
• Long tail continues to grow as the amount content on internet grows exponentially
• Current search algorithms will become less effective in helping us find content online

Bill thinks that sites like Twitter could solve the problem of less effective search algorithms as people can ask friends for relevant suggestions. [Can Twitter really help with anything other than procrastination...? - Kate]

Posted by Des Odell on 04/ 6/09 at 10:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Tom Petryshen on SME Tricks of the Trade

The 3rd session in the SME Track is "SEM Tricks of the Trade & how to deal with Implementation Blockages" by Tom Petryshen, CEO of Amplify who leads an eclectic group of marketing, usability, and web development professionals and is responsible for client strategy, demystifying Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and ensuring work remains fun.

As an early student of usability and design, Tom delivered his first presentation on effective online design to a standing only crowd of over 300 communicators in New Orleans in 1996. Since then, he has assisted clients around the world to improve market share, increase sales, and measure online effectiveness using search, email, analytics and integrated marketing.

The gold of Toms presentation is his suggestion to get everyone's buy in (IT Guy, Old school marketer, CEO etc) and make sure they have incentives to make sure your search marketing project succeeds.

Tom's top suggestion is don't spend so much time monitoring which keywords you rank for and spend more time focusing on KPI's (volume of search traffic to your website, signups to newsletters, email sales leads etc). [Tom must have seen the video, rankings are dead anyway... Or so I have been told ;) - Kate]

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 6/09 at 10:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Andy Jamieson on SEO for the SME

The 2nd session in the SME Track is "SEO for the SME" by Andy Jamieson, Co-Founder of Switched on Media - a fast growing boutique agency that specialises in paid search marketing, SEO and Social Media and works with clients such as Canon, ABC and PayPal to achieve meaningful business outcomes.

Prior to founding Switched on Media, Andy worked in numerous client side roles at Fairfax Digital across Drive.com.au, Domain.com.au and MyCareer.com.au.

To kick things off Andy starts out by suggesting that when SME's decide to do SEO, they need to describe "what do we actually do" and which half dozen keywords they want to rank for.

Be realistic, a small independent Sydney hotel won't be able to rank for keywords like "sydney hotel". However with a search engine optimised website it might be possible to rank for a more targeted search phrase such as "sydney ultimo hotel". Localised results will result in less traffic, but that traffic will be highly targeted and relevant to the SME's site.

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 6/09 at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Steven Power on PPC for the SME

The 1st session in the SME Track is "PPC for the SME" by Steven Power, CEO of ReachLocal.

In 2006, Steven began working with Netus, one of Australia's pre-eminent technology investment companies, focused on bringing proven technology-based services and products to the Australian market. Netus entered into a joint venture with ReachLocal Inc to found ReachLocal Australia.

Steven became founder and CEO of ReachLocal Australia which has quickly become a leading Digital Advertising Agency, providing local online advertising solutions for prominent national and local businesses (SMBs).

Even before starting a PPC campaign SME's need to be ready to handle increased demand from prospective customers. Who's going to respond to sales queries by phone/fax/email. What about after hours and on weekends? Search queries don't stop happening outside of your business hours. Steven outlines how SME's should figure out what each lead is worth to them and how much they are willing to spend to get each subsequent lead.

Businesses embarking on a PPC campaign need to concentrate first on promoting the products/services which have the highest profit margin, regardless of whether the PPC budget is large or small. Steven has found that SME's don't need to have fancy websites to get a lot of leads. Simple websites with key product information and clearly visible contact details on each page, especially phone numbers, can be really successful in gaining relevant leads

Steven concludes by suggesting SMEs spend their budgets wisely to gain the best possible ROI: test, measure, learn and improve.

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 6/09 at 10:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Google & Yahoo, Greg Grothaus & Priyank Garg - What is Spam

In this session two heavyweights of Search, namely Google and Yahoo send members of their search quality teams. Greg and Priyak will be defining what exactly Spam is and how it affects organisations and everyday searches.

What is Google's definition of spam?

• Anything that violates Google's quality guidelines


• Making pages designed solely for search engines is moving towards spam territory


• Hidden text or hidden links


• Sneaky redirects or cloaking


• Keyword stuffing


• Duplicate content


• Misleading or deceptive behavior that hurts users


• Avoid link farms, links from bad neighborhoods, deceptive link practices and paid links that are devoid of editorial judgment

Greg mentions users can spam your site by adding comment spam, injected links and hacking your site. Prevent comment spam by using Captcha on your sites, prevent getting hacked by keeping your server's software up to date.

How does Yahoo deal with spam?

• Very few guidelines are black and white when it comes to dealing with spam
• Yahoo's goal is to minimize the impact of spammy actions
• Yahoo fights spam with both their algorithm and manually for a holistic spam fighting action
• There is an option to report a spam site in Yahoo Site Explorer

Pretty informative session and was nice to see Google and Yahoo working against a common enemy however during the Q & A when asked if they worked together when a particularly dangerous spamming technique there was a fairly quick brush off of the question followed by a quick no by both Greg and Priyank, seems cooperation between to the two for anything is a non-starter.

Posted by Kate Gamble on 04/ 6/09 at 10:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Cogentis, Chris Dimmock - Up Close With Google AdWords Quality Score

Chris is the MD of Cognetis, an organization that provides website marketing strategies & search engine marketing services. This session takes a fresh look at the current state of the Google quality score, how it is implemented and tips on using it to your advantage.

What is quality score?

• It is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords
• Its calculated using a variety of factors and measures

3 components in Adwords search QS

• Click Through weight-largest single factor, now accounts around 60%
• Ad to keyword relevancy- how well your ad campaign is structured 30%
• Landing page relevancy- worth about 10%, relevance of landing page, ease of use etc

Quality Score and Ad Rank

• Adrank = maximum bid X quality score
• Actual cost per click = Adrank of the advertiser below you/ your quality score and add one cent to that answer
• Improving quality score reduces your CPC

Chris also suggested applying some core aspects of SEO to your Adwords landing page in order to optimise your campaign. Some maths in this presentation however it was pretty simple stuff, unlike per usual I didn't even need a calculator. Some great insights into lowering your CPC in Google Adwords.

Posted by Kate Gamble on 04/ 6/09 at 9:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Rob Kerry of Ayami Search on CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO

The 1st session in the Technical SEO Track is "CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO" by Rob Kerry, Head of Search at Ayami Search

Rob is an internet marketing consultant specialising in Search Engine Optimisation. Currently based out of London, he has over 8 years of experience in traffic generation and conversion boosting online

You can chat with Rob on Twitter.

Geeks perfected the perfect web. They created mostly text based web pages, html TABLES were used for data and sites were designed with Library style indexing and navigation

But then marketers ruined everything, Microsoft Frontpage created uncrawlable sites and corporate designers became obsessed with flash

CSS was used to try and solve these problems
It separated content from code, made search engines job easier and replaced old image navigation buttons with CSS styling & hover effects therefore search engines recognise the navigation links
Unfortunately CSS was also used to hide dodgy content offscreen using code like "display:none" and "margin-left:-2000px to show users one type of content and search engines another type of content

AJAX
Fetches data without loading a web page. Don't overuse it.
Good uses of Ajax are data grids/sort tabular data, shopping baskets, form verification
Bad uses of AJAX are content tabs (not indexable), search results (no back button), product listings (cant bookmark specific lists)

User generated content
Is free content - but not free to manage - you will need to budget for a moderator. Communities need a lot of hand holding and Rob stresses the importance of watching for dodgy links in users comments. [C'mon people, wake up and smell the comment spam! Auto rel=nofollow=solution - Kate]

Syndication
RSS can stimulate regular visitors who end to link to sites more often than other readers. API's stimulate buzz and open up some of you data/content to be used on other sites with a link back to your canonical authoritative version

Posted by Kate Gamble on 04/ 6/09 at 2:35 PM | Comments (0)
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4 April 2009

Rand Fishkin - What is ethical social media marketing?

The 1st session in the Social Media track this afternoon: "What Is Ethical Social Media Marketing?" presented by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.

Since attending his first ever industry conference in 2005 (SES New York City), Rand has guided SEOmoz to being one of the most world's most respected search marketing companies.

You can chat with Rand on Twitter

Ethical Tenets

Rand believes there are a few ethical tenets that we should be paying very careful attention to when engaging in online social media:

• Don't break the law
• Don't hurt other people or organisations

Obviously, this rules out downright malicious techniques such as malware or email spam but, Rand feels it's OK to use an anonymous "sock puppet accounts" to promote content under a contract. An oft overlooked tenet that many people miss is creating value for the client. You have an obligation to do the best job for them.
Organisations should be participating in social networks and the best way to do this is to recruit social media experts for help.

A common question often asked by clients: "Is there value in full disclosure when participating in social networks for a client or even for your own company?
The consensus from the SMX Sydney audience is that marketers should operate ethically, but without disclosing all their activities upfront. Although, I wonder, is this non-disclosure deceptive in itself and how far should a marketer push this limit?

Rand signs off with 10 Tips for Social Media Success

1. Build simple stuff
2. Make if look authentic
3. Expect 75% of viral social media campaigns to fail
4. If more than 5-6 people are involved in planning it will FAIL
5. Funny sells
6. Funny is really hard - Interesting is easy
7. Consider microsites for social media marketing
8. Hire professional pushers (eg: Digg voters) and leave them alone
9. Don't try to help them - it will backfire
10. Use social media to accomplish business goals

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 4/09 at 2:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

In the 2nd session Darren Rowse aka Problogger presents "Twitter Tips & Etiquette". Darren Rowse is founder and editor of ProBlogger.net, a Top 50 Blog Globally (as ranked by Technorati) and one of the leading sources on the Web for information about making money from blogs.

Darren is a full-time blogger himself, making a six-figure income from blogging since 2005 and in 2008 co-authored the book 'ProBlogger' (Wiley Pulishers). In addition to ProBlogger, Darren also founded and edits the popular Digital Photography School (digital-photography-school.com), TwiTip (a blog with daily Twitter Tips) and is a co-founder of the b5media blog network with 300+ blogs across numerous verticals.

18 months ago Darren was a Twitter doubter (weren't we all?), now he has around 50,000 followers (Darren's next birthday is presumably being held at the Telstra Stadium?) and is the most followed person in Australia on this fast growing online network. Send Darren a tweet @problogger

Darren's initial Twitter-phobia was caused by the people talking about cats and what they were eating, but he has since been swayed by the $250M micro-blogging platform.

BENEFITS

A few Twitter benefits from Mr Rowse:

• Darren asked his followers a research question for a blog post yesterday and he received 100 responses in 10 minutes. Twtpoll.com is a service that allows you to collect data from your followers
• Branding
• Driving traffic - #3 referrer to traffic to his blogs
• Humanises his site
• SEO (indirect)
• Acts as an outpost/satellite to promote and make his sites more visible

OPPORTUNITY

• Twitter is the fastest growing community site on the web amongst 35-49 years of age (Neilsen data)
• Hitwise says Twitter is the 85th most popular site in Australia and it is trending up the list really fast

WAYS THAT BUSINESSES ARE USING TWITTER

• Directly with their own accounts eg: @bigpondteam
• "Making"/encouraging employees to spend time on Twitter during work therefore dispersing information about the company's activities
• Internal communication - like Yammer
• As a monitoring tool - what people are saying about them and monitoring their industry/niche e.g.: using tools like Twitterhawk.

Tips for Business Twitter Accounts

• Identify your objectives - consider having multiple channels, each of which has specific objectives e.g.: US office, UK office, Australasian office. Dell has 34 Twitter accounts.
• Provide value, solve problems and fill needs
• Leverage other profiles and networks like your blog/website which already have readers/subscribers
• Dress nicely: use an appropriate avatar and twitter background wallpaper for your profile
• Introduce yourself - Use the whole biography space to describe yourself and your interests accurately
• Reserve your company name account now even if you don't plan on using it soon
• Learn the culture and language - make sure you are aware of the rules of engagement
• Link to a twitter specific landing page from your twitter profile which encourages people to follow you
• Identify people who are participating in Twitter well, and see how you can emulate them
• Ask questions and answer other people's questions
• Be conversational and be as active as you can. Be active when the people you want to communicate with are online.
• Be a thought leader
• Use direct messaging or Skype etc for conversations that go beyond 3-4 tweets back and forth
• DO NOT send automatic direct messages to each new person who follows you
• "Cotweet" is a new service that businesses could use to monitor and manage multiple corporate twitter accounts
• Use an URL Shortener like www.bit.ly

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 4/09 at 2:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Cindy Krum, Rank-Mobile

The 3rd session in the Technical SEO Track is "International SEO" by Cindy Krum, Founder of Rank-Mobile. Cindy is up for the second time today - SMX are making the most of having her out!

Rank-Mobile provides mobile marketing consulting for companies who want to drive traffic, sales and loyalty through the mobile channel focussing on mobile development and search engine optimisation but can also offer advice on mobile application development etc.

Multinational brands/websites have issues like multiple currencies and different ecommerce laws even before they consider international SEO issues. So what's a webmaster to do if you want to rank for thousands of keywords across multiple engines worldwide?

You have 3 Site architecture options

Location detection software serves content suited to the main language of that country/location

It provides a good user experience; one URL that serves different languages. However risk of inaccurate location detection via IP can occur and it can be tricky to setup technically eg: may require URL's with query strings that contain lots of variables.

Cindy Tip: Always check the IP translation. This allows users to override and specify their own language/country and save this option as a cookie, buy country specific domains eg: .de for German and use this to set the language cookie to immediately display content in the correct language

One site Approach - Sub domains/directories are easy to setup. The same content in different languages is never duplicate content and you can create sub domains/directories by country or language. If you do end up using sub-domains eg: germany.company.com can host them in that country to get better rank in local Google/yahoo etc

Disadvantages: it's bad for targeting multiple countries that speak the same language (duplicate content risk), home page only ranks for the chosen default language
Cindy Tip: spell the name of the subdomain or subdirectory in the appropriate language eg: www.espanol.website.com rather than www.spanish.website.com, avoid SEO and user unfriendly "Choose a Language" homepage

Multiple Sites Approach - Multiple sites have incrementally lower startup costs, they rank better in country specific search engines faster and allow country specific hosting options.

Disadvantages: are that its a higher cost to maintain and design so many sites, harder to rank in .com search engines and forces you to target countries instead of language. Strategy Tip - Add all the sites separately in Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 4/09 at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Priyank Garg on Bot Herding

Next up on the SMX Sydney Technical SEO Track is "Bot Herding" by Priyank Garg, Director, Product Management at Yahoo! Web Search

Priyank Garg is Director of Product Management at Yahoo! India. He is leading Product Management efforts for the Yahoo! Search team based out of Bangalore. [Aiden, our local Yahoo search universe master, made Garg's visit happen for SMX this year so a big thanks for him for that effort. - Kate] Priyank has published multiple papers and filed for more than 12 patents over his professional career.

Gard explains that Robots.txt is the baseline must do for "bot herding" (telling search engines what to do when visiting a site. Robots.txt allows publishers to tell search engine crawlers which content should be included in search results. The independent site http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html answers a lot of the most frequently asked robots.txt related questions

Priyank suggests that all webmasters sign up for Yahoo Site Explorer, it's a useful tool to let you privately see how Yahoo is indexing your content.

More information at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-much-do-you-know-about-use-yahoos-site-explorer-and-link-research and an explanation of the Yahoo Dynamic URL Rewriting content tool http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-site-explorer-adds-dynamic-url-rewriting-tool-11991

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 4/09 at 1:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Rob Kerry of Ayami Search on CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO

The 1st session in the Technical SEO Track is "CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO" by Rob Kerry, Head of Search at Ayami Search

Rob is an internet marketing consultant specialising in Search Engine Optimisation. Currently based out of London, he has over 8 years of experience in traffic generation and conversion boosting online

You can chat with Rob on Twitter

Geeks perfected the perfect web. They created mostly text based web pages, html TABLES were used for data and sites were designed with Library style indexing and navigation
But then marketers ruined everything, Microsoft Frontpage created uncrawlable sites and corporate designers became obsessed with flash

CSS was used to try and solve these problems

It separated content from code, made search engines job easier and replaced old image navigation buttons with CSS styling & hover effects therefore search engines recognise the navigation links
Unfortunately CSS was also used to hide dodgy content offscreen using code like "display:none" and "margin-left:-2000px to show users one type of content and search engines another type of content

AJAX

Fetches data without loading a web page. Don't overuse it.
Good uses of Ajax are data grids/sort tabular data, shopping baskets, form verification
Bad uses of AJAX are content tabs (not indexable), search results (no back button), product listings (cant bookmark specific lists)

User generated content

Is free content - but not free to manage - you will need to budget for a moderator. Communities need a lot of hand holding and Rob stresses the importance of watching for dodgy links in users comments. [C'mon people, wake up and smell the comment spam! Auto rel=nofollow=solution - Kate]

Syndication

RSS can stimulate regular visitors who end to link to sites more often than other readers. API's stimulate buzz and open up some of you data/content to be used on other sites with a link back to your canonical authoritative version

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 4/09 at 1:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in SEO Tips & Tricks

3 April 2009

Blitz Local, Dennis Yu on Advanced Paid Search Tactics

Dennis Yu has been doing web analytics and PPC since 1995, maximizing online leads and revenue for companies such as Yahoo, American Airlines, JC Penney and is the co-founder of Blitz Local. In this session by Dennis, tips and techniques to help you get even more out of your paid search campaigns will be covered extensively.

Dennis says in his opinion Adwords quality score is all about the landing page and using SEO techniques to improve the landing page. It's all about getting more conversions at a lower CPA. Increased volume generally leads to increased CPA. Your profit margin = lead value - CPA.

7 ways to flush money down the toilet

• Indiscriminate bidding on your own brand
• Starting off with a zillion keywords
• Choosing the most expensive software possible
• No conversion tactic
• Using default campaign settings
• Staying with keyword targeting-Google is not the be all and end all
• Relying completely on the agency

[Just to drive home the facts above Dennis includes a quality 'flushing' sound grab as each point animates onto the screen. Love the powerpoint skills here! - Kate]

After this intensive session that squashed in about 2 hours of content into 30mins the afternoon fatigue is setting in somewhat and I am looking to a nice coffee or 3 before spending some more time with the search engines.

Posted by Kate Gamble on 04/ 3/09 at 2:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Meet the Search Engines

After a great lunch that unfortunately ended up more on my shirt than my stomach, we have a quick chat with two leading figures among the Google and Yahoo search teams, Priyank Garg - Director of Product Management for Yahoo Web Search and Greg Grothaus- Senior Software Engineer for the Google Search Quality Team.

The two head honchos go all out upsizing each other with innovation mania!

New innovations at Yahoo

• Yahoo BOSS (Build your own search service)
• Really imposing barriers to entry prevent new entries into the search industry so search is primed for innovation
• BOSS lets you build upon Yahoo's current search offering and customise it
• You can re-rank results, blend results, use any monetization platform, access unlimited queries and present queries in any way. These are only some of the capabilities of BOSS
• Developers pay based on the volume of queries and type of query or they can display Yahoo search ads in lieu of payment if they meet certain requirements

• Yahoo SearchMonkey
• SearchMonkey is a tool for site owners to increase the quantity and quality of organic search traffic by customizing search results to make them more visually
• appealing and structured
• Designed for publishes and third party developers
• Very simple to implement

[I have only been preaching Search Monkey at every Friday arvo beer, chips and search sessions round at BCA (that's Bruce Clay Australia) HQ for the past 6 months... *mutter* But no one listens to me... - Kate]

Google Innovations

• Google suggest with local flavour- the search recommendations now have a local slant to them
• Crawl error sources - these errors are now shown in context by providing links to the site and on which side of the link the error is located on
• Vulnerable Site Warnings - Google informs webmaster via webmaster tools if they think that your site is vulnerable to attack
• Google services for websites
• Search Wiki-if you are logged in with your Google account you can change the ranking of sites, comment on the pages etc
• PDF optical character recognition
• Improved flash indexing

Great to see reps from the big search engines here and keeping us updated on their new features and innovations.

Posted by Kate Gamble on 04/ 3/09 at 2:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Panalysis, Rod Jacka on What you Should be Measuring - But Aren't

Rod Jacka, MD of Panalysis will advocate the virtues of measuring not the usual metrics such as CPA, ROI, CTR but also of hidden and little thought about abstract metrics that have an impact on all levels of your firm.

The air is thick with anticipation on this the second day of SMX Sydney, most of the audience is bright eyed and bushy tailed with the remnants nursing some sore heads after a few drinks last night. Lets hope today is as dynamic and informative and yesterday

Rod starts out by explaining that ROI is generally calculated as Total revenue/Fixed costs & Unit costs. Bounce rate is only useful when applied to specific keywords, pages, visitor type and other individual elements. Good bounce rate is hard to assess, it must be viewed in context to make it relevant.

Segmentation, a relatively new feature that has been introduced to Google analytics, has taken the tool from adequate to enterprise class, making it one of the best free tools on the market.

Some good insights into some analytics programs with a heavy emphasis on Google analytics with Rod going into a fair bit of detail on segmentation and setting up of goals, quite a few case studies were also shown. Overall it was an intriguing session showcasing the benefits of measuring multiple metrics rather than the standard few.

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/ 3/09 at 1:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Alkemi International, Nathan Stewart on Landing Pages Basics

Nathan's primary focus is as the CEO and Chairman of Alkemi International, which has offices in Melbourne and Auckland. Alkemi focuses on getting the right traffic to their clients' sites and increasing conversion rates. Optimising landing pages to improve the Google Quality Score will be one of the major features of Nathan's session

Last session of a thoroughly informative and enjoyable day here at Sydney SMX, let's hope Nathan finishes things off with a bang and blows us away with his revolutionary insights into landing pages.

Don't be average! The average website converts only 2% of its clicks into sales or enquires. Most websites lose most of their visitors in the first few pages of their site. Aim for a bounce rate of less than 25% as opposed to the norm of around 40%

Understand online customers

• Customers control their experience
• They are goal orientated
• Actions only take place after a prospect makes a decision, however decisions are made in different ways by different people
• Sales is simply a transfer of confidence to a person that has a need, confidence is best transferred online through relevance
• Who are your visitors
• What is their intent on arrival?
• At what stage of their research or buying process are they at when they arrive?
• What action do you want your visitor to take?
• What do these visitors need in order to feel comfortable taking the action?

What factors to consider on your landing page?

• Relevant content that matches the intent on arrival
• Keyword targeted copy and heading
• Avoid the use of the word 'we' all over the site
• Have a great Unique value proposition
• Be conscious of the content below the fold
• Keep forms as short as possible and always offer point of action assurances
  

What factors affect your quality score?

• CTR
• Relevance of the keywords to the search query and of the landing page
• Other issues i.e. regionality, server/page load times and contact info

Well that wraps up day one of SMX Sydney so thanks to Nathan for sharing the wisdom. Just enough info to keep me interested but not too much that I felt overwhelmed and had a need to start a fire drill, although that's always an idea for next time a poor blogger gets overwhelmed. Tips to Barry - desks desks desks. Keep your livebloggers happy by giving them a table up the back for computers to sit on. The chairs at SMX Sydney aren't as good as the speakers.

A few networking drinks upstairs and nights rest and we will be back and set for DAY 2.

Marc, out.

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/ 3/09 at 1:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Fairfax Media, Lucas Ng on Creative Management, Writing killer ad copy

Lucas Ng is the Director of Search & Analytics at Fairfax Media where he manages search marketing and web analytics operations for many of Australia's most viewed websites. His session concentrates on writing relevant ad copy and how this affects the SEM process.

Google's guidelines to ad copy

• Use the keywords in the headline
• Use prices and promotions so users know what to expect
• Use a strong call-to-action

What else is there to killer ad copy?

• Capitalise the first letter of every word
• Understand the audience - what is the audience profile and behavior?
• Who is it for? What has triggered their search process?
• Who else is influencing the searcher?
• Killer Ad copy differentiates itself from the crowd by understanding the audience better than the rest or identifying a unique selling proposition that the product/service has
• Killer ad copy is highly relevant to your landing page
• Killer ad copy uses a psychological trigger i.e. emotion, sense of urgency, instant gratification and a desire to belong
• The copy needs to filter clicks so all your leads are qualified
• Test, refine and test some more
• Put the product/service/brand into the display URL

Finally if you're stumped for ideas Lucas suggests using magazine covers to get ideas for copy.

[-- I always read Vogue to inspire internet marketing brilliance, it's not bludging, its work! - Kate]

Posted by Kate Gamble on 04/ 3/09 at 1:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Found Agency, Tim McDonald on Ad Group Management

Tim is the founder and CEO of Found Agency. Found positions themselves as the paid search advertising experts in Australia.
Tim will explain how imperative it is to group keywords and ad copy correctly in order to have an optimised paid search campaign.

Being from an organic search background I am really excited for this session, it's always nice to see how the 'other side' live and work.

Plan before you start

• Research your market
• Key drivers for buyers?
• What makes you better?
• What do people actually search for?
• How much time for SEM?
• Budget?
• Audience- geo/time/network type?
• Search/content?
• Creative options?

Targeting Options

Campaign targeting

• Search/display
• Geo/time/demographics
• Start/end dates
• Daily budgets

Ad group targeting

• Keyword and sites
• CPM/CPC bids
• Ad creative-text, display

Adwords Limits

• 25 campaigns per account
• 100 ad groups per campaign
• 200 keywords per ad group
  

Why be concerned with CTR?

• Direct impact on ROI
• Metric of ad/keyword effectiveness
• If little/no relevancy, ads may not sure
• High CTR= more visitors and better ROI

What's the best AdWords structure?

• No single structure is best
• Make it granular and manageable
• Clustered keyword themes
• Test and adapt

Consider separating:

• Brands and high performance
• Content/display
• Head vs. longtail
• Keyword match type
• Keyword topics/themes

Content network recommendations

• Separate content-only campaign
• Fewer keywords per ad group
• Broad match
• Separate bids for content audience
• Consider top-performing placements

This past session has been somewhat of a technical nature and judging by the looks on the faces around me along with the fact that the day is slowly drawing to an end, the next speaker Nathan Stewart had better ramp things up a notch in order to keep this audience captivated.

Posted by Kate Gamble on 04/ 3/09 at 12:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Hitwise, Michael Wamsley on Keyword Research, SMX Sydney

Michael is the MD for Hitwise, one of the pre-eminent competitive intelligence providers in Australia. Michael will be elaborating on one of the most vital topics in SEM; Keyword research.

Search engines account for 10% of all website traffic in Australia. Google has a market share of around 83% in Australia. Facebook is the top brand searched for, while 'games' is the most searched generic term. Best case scenario for keyword research is when there is a high correlation between website terms and customer terms.

Elements to consider when trying to find the right keywords:

• Consider multiple angles
• Build the most comprehensive list from internal and external sources
• Conduct a GAP analysis
• Evaluate how effective terms are in driving traffic to your site
• Consider the Luntz factor (what you think people are searching for as opposed to what people are actually searching for)
• Consider seasonality when evaluating terms i.e. Christmas, Mother's Day etc.
• Be cognizant of changing market forces, changing behaviors and booking cycles
• Create a keyword value chart to find your longtail terms
• Avoid general terms - the more targeted the term the higher the ROI
• Put yourself in the customer's shoes when seeking keywords
• Target local markets
• Check out your competition
• Look for variations i.e. misspellings, plurals and synonyms
• Understand who is leveraging misspellings of your brand in the search engines
• In Australia it is possible to protect your brand
• Add descriptive and action words to your keywords

Ultimately its all about relevance, poor keywords reduce ROI, have a poor quality score and can effect brand reputation. Test, test, test and refine your keywords to unitl they are optimal.

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/ 3/09 at 12:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Rank-Mobile, Cindy Krum on What's New In Mobile Search

This was the 3rd session in the Blended & Mobile Search Track.

Rank-Mobile provides mobile marketing consulting for companies who want to drive traffic, sales and loyalty through the mobile channel focussing on mobile development and search engine optimisation.
Cindy takes the floor and start out with a little bit about why mobiles are different to the traditional browser, she includes details like the small screen, the location based search, the immediateness. Cindy goes on to explain that mobile SEO is so vital because of the convergence of people onto the platform and the unique interactive marketing possibilities that mobile facilitates.

Things are changing, and fast, as we move to 3G and open Wifi access enabling richer content through speedy downloads. It's also a lot less pricy than it used to be. [Although not as cheap as it could be - Kate]

Test to see where your site ranks on the iPhone using iSearch and Google Mobile App for your iPhone

Mobile Site Architecture & Usability

• .mobi domains are particularly bad for SEO
• Not universally accepted or known by users
• Cumbersome development standards
• Limited useful life - don't need to separate sites as the mobile browsing experience improves with new hardware and web browsers, iPhone and newer smart phones
• Test your site on the most popular mobile web browsers to see how it renders. For example, flash content may not display, multi-column websites need to display content first rather than forcing users to scroll through the navigation column first
• Code in clean XHTML code with CSS as valid as possible, this helps to make sure your site displays better as new mobile handsets and browsers are released

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 3/09 at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)
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2 April 2009

Bruce Clay at SMX Sydney

Understanding SEO, what it's all about?

The 1st session in the Search Engine Boot-Camp Track 1 is "Understanding SEO, what's it all about?" by Bruce Clay, President of Bruce Clay Inc. Bruce is out for the bi-annual 3 day Advanced SEO Training course that runs in Sydney.

Bruce Clay has also written a new book for Wiley about SEO, called SEO for Dummies which is a great resource for anyone who wants to start learning about SEO from a single source.

Bruce, the grandfather of SEO [he is not going to like that one... lol - Kate], reminds us that:

• Search life began before Google. Google wasn't always the dominant player. SEO is about continuous change, which requires training and enthusiasm - actually every Monday we have a new industry
• Google's automated artificial intelligence systems tweak their algorithm over 450 times per year or more than once a day
• As SEO specialists we're aiming at a moving target

Bruce mentioned the famous [AKA notorious - Kate] Bruce Clay "search engine relationship chart" and showed just how much this had changed during his time in the industry.

• SEO is like the TV show "House" because symptoms are hard to diagnose and the cure can take sometimes take several rounds of experimentation
• SEO is like professional sport - use great tools to get ahead of the competition [like Nike sports shoes! - Kate]
  

Six Key Factors

1. On page - Title, Meta description, body copy.

Ensure you have a clear subject matter focus. This is how you tell search engines what you are all about. It's like a well structured university thesis with table of contents, headings, structured argument, footnotes etc. Bruce suggests installing the SEM Toolbar to get information about your site's on page ranking factors

2. Expertness - inbound and outbound links.

PageRank is a factor used by Google to rank sites by "expertness". It is not a fixed number and it is quite normal for a site's PageRank score to move up and down regularly.

Once a webpage's PageRank score is calculated this score is used along with many other factors to determine if that page will rank well in a search.

The PageRank number in the Google toolbar is often weeks or even more out of date

3. Copywriting - this is structural content with keywords in strategic places throughout the page

Top tip from Bruce: use ~ to find synonyms that should be in your body copy.

4. Engagement Objects - video, mp3, images, maps, books, news, blogs etc. - all these types of content increase user engagement and will make your page more useful to users

5. Architecture/Siloing - theme align your content and internal link structures by the search query used. If your alignment matches than you are seen to be more of an expert for that query.

6. Spidering

6a. A slow server discourages spiders - if your website is slow and often unavailable this is seen by search engines as a mark of unreliability and can affect rank. Conversely a fast web server with high availability makes sure your site can perform in SERPs to its best potential

6b. Implement a search engine crawlable HTML sitemap and XML sitemap

[Bruce is also offering up a year's free subscription to the SEOToolSet if you pop your card in at the booth with the word TOOLS on the back before the end of the conference - snap to it kids, time is running out! - Kate]

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 2/09 at 11:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Steak Digital, Katie Hodgkinson on Link Building Fundamentals, SMX Sydney

Katie occupies the role of Digital Search Manager at Steak Digital. Steak specialises in online brand building for some of the best known brands in Australia. The chosen topic for today's discussion is Link Building Fundamentals, where she will outline the plan for getting a link building campaign up and running.

Katie starts out by outlining that link building is important, a link to your website is seen as a vote. Search engines also look for factors of relevance, a link from a more relevant page is going to be seen as more valuable than a link from an off topic page. Katie jumps into a top 10 list, always suitably popular at conferences.

10 Link Building Strategies

• Great content
• Syndicate link bait
• Online press releases
• List in directories
• Analyse competitors
• Cherry pick - choose your keyword carefully
• Ask for a link, if you don't ask you don't get
• Leverage social media
• Comment and become a fixture in forums and blogs
• Develop your personal brand

Evaluating the Link Quality

• Ascertain the relevance of the link
• How much authority does the linking site have
• Link profile - other websites linking to that site
• Ensure the links are not nofollow
• Are the keywords are used in the anchor text optimised
• Utilise deep linking - link to sub pages as well as main page

Where to Start

• Google webmaster guidelines
• Authority directories
• Press release sites - prweb.com, przoom.com
• Article submission sites - ezineaticles.com, articlebase.com
• Social media news and sharing sites

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/ 2/09 at 11:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Yahoo!7, Aidan Beanland on Search Engine Friendly Web Design

Taking the stand as Bruce finishes up, and introduced by our own Jeremy Bolt (BCA Director), Aiden is the regional SEO manager for Yahoo!7. He is speaking on the intriguing topic of Search Engine Friendly Web Design. This will give insight into the type of guidance that web developers need to take into account before designing a new site. Aiden must be highly qualified for this topic; he only has the whole of Yahoo Asia development teams to keep tabs on and chase re: SEO recommendations. He gets straight into it.

Playing the Game

You need to be prepared to fight for resources when a new site is designed or an old site redeveloped. Some elements to take into account when designing a site are:

• Visual design
• Technology
• Accessibility
• Cost manager

SEO vs. Visual Design (They are not mutually exclusive)

• Specify SEO requirements before design plans, i.e. unique titles URLs, Hx headings, reasonable amount of copy and spiderable links
• Treat flash like images or create an HTML version
• Use image alt attributes and keywords in file paths
• Apply 'CSS image replacement' to replicate text embedded in an image
• Use CSS layers to position text
• No cloaking or hidden text using the above points
• Much SEO relies on link optimisation which doesn't affect page design

SEO vs. Technology

• AJAX and client-side processes can affect SEO so you should weigh the cost vs. benefit and use it as an enhancement not for core content and links
• Use technology to:
• re-write URLs
• link to related pages
• enable progressive enhancement
• distribute content
• Let keyword research drive information architecture

SEO vs. Accessibility

• An accessible site is good for:
• disabled users
• low bandwidth users
• legal compliance
• mobile browsing
• older hardware and software
• search engines

Most of the W3C accessibility tips for allowing disabled users to access sites translate into good SEO practice

SEO vs. Cost

• SEO is hugely cost effective
• SEO almost always delivers the highest ROI of any online marketing channel
• First 80% of SEO benefits come from 20% benefit
• Medium upfront investment, low ongoing cost
• Do SEO right the first time to reduce cost
• Consider the cost of:
• Not optimising (handing users to competitors)
• Equivalent PPC traffic
• Optimising your site after it's launched
• Offline advertising
• Become a web analytics expert to prove your value

Final advice

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

[Aiden I am sure meant to say beer, the secret to success is making friends with devs. The secret to THAT is beer - Kate]

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 2/09 at 8:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz. SMX Sydney Keynote: SEO for the CEO

Our opening keynote for SMX Sydney "SEO for the CEO " is presented by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz. Since attending his first ever industry conference (SES NYC 2005), Rand has guided SEOmoz to being one of the most world's most respected search marketing companies.

[-- The best bits are at the bottom - Kate]

SEO for CEOs

There is a great amount of misunderstanding amongst CEOs about search marketing. In his keynote Rand is going to talk about "How to get SEO into the mindset of CEOs". First up those facts that CEOs need to know:

• Web search is the most popular service used by people. E.g.: 100-150million searches on Google in the USA every day
• Half of users only enter 1 query and only check 1 result
• 80% of the time, the abstract dissuades users from clicking on search results
• If you're not in the top 3-4 results you're nowhere.

Next Rand explains how SEO can help your business

• As a marketing & sales tactic
• Acquire customers
• Lower acquisition costs
• Create awareness
• Brand your products

Ranking #1 makes people searching implicitly trust your company/product/service. Google is seen as the arbiter of quality and authoritative content

HOW SEO WORKS

Search engines -crawl, index and ranking
Search engine crawlers are looking for content that is relevant to what the user wants to get, not necessarily what keywords they enter. There is a certain amount of second guessing their intentions e.g.: did they make 1 search query and then quickly modify the search words and submit another query?

Rand explains PageRank to the audience, search engines look for trustworthiness. One factor is how many links they have to follow from your site before they hit a spam/website. In essence are you participating in a clean/trusted community of sites or a disreputable low quality community? Just like the 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

Getting linked to by a lot of trustworthy sites over a sustained period of time will make your site eventually rank better because search engines will judge these incoming links to your site as a vote of confidence that your content is high quality.
Trust/authority of domain 35%, page level link metrics 25% usage data 10% on page and keyword factors 30%

HOW TO EFFECTIVELY BUILD SEO INTO YOUR BUSINESS

Set business goals

• Establish how necessary contribution of search referrals traffic to over
• Search referral conversions (sales)
• SEO for discoverability (branding)
• Reputation Management - make sure your company/product name dominates the SERPs so it pushes down any negative results
• Create a content & keyword strategy
• Develop a link acquisition strategy - content by itself is not enough

CASE STUDY - YELP USER GENERATED REVIEW

SEOMoz suggested that www.Yelp.com give out window badges to restaurant owners so they could show off how well they ranked on Yelp, this incentivised the restaurants to link back to Yelp in droves. A win win strategy

Require Actionable Analytics - collecting screens and screens of data and creating charts is not helpful by itself. Decide which are the key metrics e.g.: long term (more traffic via SERPS) and short term (tracking results of one-off traffic because your company was mentioned in the media)

KEEP THESE TIPS IN MIND

• SEO IS NOT FREE - Just because it has high ROI doesn't mean you don't invest time/money into it.
• SEO IS NOT GAURANTEED - search engines don't owe you
• SEO CHANGES CONSTANTLY - even if you have a great rank now, don't rest on your laurels
• SEO IS A TACTIC - but also requires long term strategy

EMERGING TRENDS IN SEO

• Global financial crisis causing companies to be more aware of more measurable marketing techniques like SEO
• More tools and metrics available all the time from: Bruce Clay, SEOMoz, SEOBook etc
• Search engines cracking down on sites that they see as spam/disreputable
• Search engines now have many more data sources to decide how to rank your site e.g.: how long do people who use Google Toolbar stay on your site and using this as a sign of quality
• Social media marketing is merging with SEO

Q&A

• Rand explains query deserves freshness (QDF) - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshness When you're trying to get SEO budget from your investors/board:
• Explain how much better ROI it has than television, print media etc and results can be measured better
• Tell them what about the successes of your biggest competitors that have resulted from their SEO/SEM efforts

Posted by Neerav Bhatt on 04/ 2/09 at 6:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Websalad's Jason West on Blended Search Tactics at SMX Sydney

Jason West, first up in SMX Sydney's Sunset Room, is the MD for Websalad and is speaking on the subject of blended search tactics, with an emphasis on video optimisation.

Jason dives into video goodness by explaining that the volume of YouTube searches is equivalent to 25% of all Google searches in the USA. This alone should be more than enough reason to optimise any videos uploaded to the internet. Jason also mentions that 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!

The challenge for SEOs is that Google only displays 1 or 2 videos on page 1 of any given search. He provided anecdotal evidence that videos being returned on Google results were often clicked on more than the first text result returned.

What strategy is best? Are we going to optimise your website or a 3rd party site (e.g. YouTube) or is it best practice to combine both? Unless your site has some serious power behind it and is by far the most appropriate site, Google will generally return YouTube results first. This works as you can piggyback on a 3rd party's established SEO strength, but what do you do with all those views?

With 3rd party sites, Jason states it's all about distribution, that is, finding the correct distribution paths for your video to take advantage of long tail searches.

Benefits of YouTube

• Increased traffic to your site
• Top 10 rankings for videos (get that real estate)
• Links back to your site (YouTube will no nofollow links, but if you optimise your YouTube page correctly, it's possible to drive traffic to sites)
• Push your competitors off the first page of Google
• Gain subscribers

YouTube Optimisation

• Optimum length = less than 3 minutes
• Shorter video = more views
• More views = more popular. Therefore your video is likely to generate comments and be bookmarked more
• More comments and bookmarks mean higher PageRank
• Use target keywords as your YouTube keyword tags
• Cross promote through Facebook and other social media sites
• Consider sponsored YouTube promotions
• Targeted anchor text links back to your video from your site
• Include a call to action at the end of your YouTube video. For example, offer a full length version of the video on your site.

Benefits of Podcasting

• More flexibility, you can do it at your own leisure and podcast time limits are less important, unlike a YouTube video
• ABC had approximately 21 million podcasts downloaded in 2008
• BBC radio station had 950,000 podcasts downloaded in one month
• Set up an RSS feed so users can subscribe to your podcast
• Consider potential bandwidth usage, potentially huge
• To help with SEO, ensure you get transcripts made from the podcast which can be mirrored in your silo theme
• iTunes and Yahoo are two of the most important podcasting directories, but search for your niche amongst all the directories

Content ideas for video and podcasting

• Weekly features on new projects
• Short promotional videos
• Instructional videos
• Thank you videos
• Your goal is to go viral
• Start by marketing to your existing customer base/target market

The Future

• Google can't see your video, but now they can hear it! Currently on the Google political channel, keywords extracted using text-to-speech technology are shown in the status bar of the video

Next up is Aidan Beanland of Yahoo!7 in the Crystal Palace Ballroom. Bloggers get desks in the Ballroom - yay.

SMX Sydney, Websalad, YouTube optimisation

Posted by Marc Elison on 04/ 2/09 at 4:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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1 April 2009

Hello SEO World

Welcome to the shiny new Bruce Clay Australia blog!

We'll be kicking things off tomorrow with news from SMX Sydney, so open up your RSS readers and get subscribing.

Posted by Richard Baron on 04/ 1/09 at 4:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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