SMX Advanced Seattle 2009 ended up being a great educational & networking experience. While I go to a lot of search engine marketing conferences and educational events, my primary goal isn’t usually to learn something entirely new. In my book it’s a success if I pick up a couple of useful takeaways, a new way of explaining or thinking about a particular search marketing tactic, or uncover a new tool. This year’s show didn’t disappoint.

Rather than try to give you a complete conference recap – I’m just going to give you my notes & links from what I thought were the best takeaways at this year’s show. Hope you find them useful.

Before I get started – I will point out. SMX was great – but MANY of the speakers I saw at SMX also participate in our SEMpdx events – including SearchFest – at a fraction of the cost…

Social Media & Search Engine Marketing Session

Moderator: Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting

Speakers:

• Brent Csutoras, Social Media Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc
• Jen Miller, Manager, Delta.com Onsite Marketing & Content, iProspect
• Dave Snyder, Co-Founder, Search & Social
• Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service

IMPROVING SEARCH WITH SOCIAL

Social Media is having an impact on  SERPS – as represented by cases where content distributed via Social Media gets indexed & ranked faster than without. Google & the rest using engagement & influence (social media) signals to determine relevance, popularity & priority when it comes to what to index & rank.

GAINING INFLUENCE

• Utilize appropriate Microformats in your page markup
• Add “retweet” functionality to your content (easy Wordpress plugin)
• Influence tagging of your site (suggest tags in your del.icio.us widget etc)
• Engage users with content like video, which encourages longer visits & more ‘bookmarking’ of your site

REVISITING STUMBLEUPON

Stumbleupon redesign = better usefulness & more influence. Instead of stumble & forget, better integration, fb, etc = more users, traffic, better sharing & LINKS!

• StumbleUpon is now capable of driving a lot more traffic.
• StumbleUpon is giving you links now
• Stumbling is no longer so ‘random’

Success in StumbleUpon requires full, legit profile & real friends. Must build out & become a full “persona”…  Speaker recommends building a “Persona” not a Person. The distinction? Choose a niche that you’re trying to target and build your persona accordingly– don’t try to be all encompassing with your persona (ie – if you’re a tech gadget persona don’t try to push sports equipment)

StumbleUpon Content Submission Tips for Success

Obviously – the key is genuine participation… But here are some tips for better results.

• Use “hot” tags (see stumbleupon.com/submit instead of toolbar) to get better visibility
• ADD YOUR OWN CATEGORY to your submission (don’t use current quick submit – you don’t have category choice) otherwise others / algo will choose for you
• Tags are a big deal
• Sharing = use the toolbar “send to” functionality
• Avoid patterns – don’t stumble only friend’s stuff, discovering too much from one or group of friends section = getting flagged/banned
• Add friends in your categories (seek out top stumblers in the categories)
• Post to your stumbleupon blog (not your pers blog)
• Spend time going to the video & photo sections of StumbleUpon specifically – they aren’t automatically shown to you

USE FLICKR TO BUILD LINKS

Tips:

• Write proper title, tags, filenames (don’t use camera file name because the picture’s name = anchor text)
• Make pics creative commons so that others will use them
• Interesting photos count – duh
• Build links to your pics ON Flickr: (put photo gallery on & link to your sets & images – there’s a wordpress plugin)
• Find relevant groups & submit
• Post pics on a limited basis – stick with your best pics
• Put links back to your site in the description – but sparingly (for example – if you posted a review of a restaurant on your blog. Put the picture on Flickr & link to your review)
• Use Creative Commons pics on your site/temp & let those photographers know. They may link to you.

DELTA AIRLINES – SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING EXAMPLE

Primary takeaway is that focus helps

• Delta uses their blog as the central launching point, then they use other channels (Facebook/YouTube/Flickr) to echo the content
  • Blog links to YT & Flickr
  • They don’t build posts around specific keywords, but they do review after the fact for anchor text linking opps based on their keyword list
  • They produce more content based on what gets the most comments (example – people really interested in wifi rollout, so they produce more details about it)

MY THOUGHTS

Social media is not about the link – it’s about the eyeballs that’ll give you links. While you must truly participate with your social Web, you can think of these various sites/tools/communities as distribution channels for your content. Reminds me of Tom Bennett’s quote from our WebVisions session earlier this year “It’s not about the container – it’s about the content”. It’s the old “fish where the fish are” mentality. While getting visitors to your site is obviously important – it’s highly likely that their first experience with your brand will probably not be on your site.

Twitter Tactics & Search Marketing Session

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
• Craig Greenfield, VP of Search and Performance Media, Performics
• Joanna Lord, Co-Founder & CMO, TheOnlineBeat

GROW YOUR FOLLOWERS

• Tweet interesting things & links – don’t be self-serving
• Have some interaction – most can’t get away with just robotic style content (except cnn)
• Be helpful, friendly & aggressive
• Set up pre-programed searches for questions that you can answer quickly & easily
• Talk with peeps in your vertical who are leaders or have more followers – talk with who they talk with
• RT your vertical’s leader’s self-serving content and get noticed

PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT TIPS

• Answer @ replies when you can, no need to be real time.
• Use scheduled tweets
• Ask questionss, use surveys & polls
• Hold contents give away related to market (don’t giveaway  something just anyone would want)
• RT’s are gold
• Leave extra characters for people to RT
• Ask followers to RT (”please RT”)
• It’s OK to Tweet the same thing multiple times per day (same content – people are in different time zones)
• Shorten URLs on your own so you can track… which shortener to use? (see this post at searchengineland)

TWITTER TOOLS LIST

• tweetdeck: the cadillac of twitter clients
• twittermail: good for scheduling
• EasyTweets: add a continuous search, manage multiple accts

Automating Twitter:

Find & follow:

• Wefollow: directory of twitter users
• Mrtweet
• Chirpio
• #followfriday

Auto-follow/unfollow/dm:

• tweetlater
• futuretweets
• tweet spinner
• twitterhawk

Researching the conversation:

• Search.twitter.com
• Hash tag trending (on your twitter dashboard)
• Tweetbeep.com

Track & Quantify:

• Tweetmeme.com – hot links on twitter
  
• Backtweets.com – search for links on twitter
  
• Twitt(url)y.com – top twitter links

For Marketers:

• Twibs: business directory
• Twitterfeed: link your blog to twitter
• Grouptweet: tweet as a team
• CoTweet: group tweets as one user
• Twitterhawk: local marketing tool
• HootSuite: full-service for marketers

SEO Ranking Factors 2009 Session

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz
• Laura Lippay, Dir. Technical Marketing, Yahoo
• Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

SEOMOZ RANKING FACTORS SURVEY – PRESENTATION

We’ll probably examine the SEOmoz survey more in-depth in a later blog post. This was one of the more interesting sessions from a straight ahead SEO standpoint.

* Note – correlation just means that people who do X tend to have better rankings… Correlation DOES NOT = causation

Factors, Correlation & Comments

• Low: Markup – h1,2,3 = pretty low correlation with ranking
• High: Keyword in the URL has very high correlation
• High: Alt text w/ images = high correlcation with ranking
• High: Title Tag has high correlation between ranking & keyword POSITION (1st word is better than 10th word)
• High: Unique content is very high (duh)
• Low: Validation doesn’t matter that much
• High: Number of domains linking to a URL is important in ranking (not the number of links – the number of linking domains – domain diversity)

Other Notes:

• Toolbar Page Rank is a poor predictor of rankings
• Sub-domains are treated partially as part of the primary domain – so they don’t inherit all of the ranking benefits of the root domain – but they aren’t completely separate
• “NEW SIGNALS” = some impact: Traffic & CTR data, social graph, registration & hosting
• Be careful with that optimized anchor text on every page footer

International Factors

• TLD of root domain
• Location of the host IP
• Links from other sites w/ same root domains
• Manual review
• Google Webmaster Tools – Geographic Target Settings

OTHER TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS SESSION

• Your product / service has to be  worthy of a better ranking… SEO is not a band aid for a crappy product (you can’t polish a turd)
• You need a user friendly site w/ compelling offers
• Site Architecture paper: http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/site-architecture.ppt

Conducting An SEO Audit Session

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

• Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia, Inc.
• Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
• Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect, Microsoft

TAKEAWAYS & TOOLS

Off Page Factors to Consider When Auditing SEO for a Site:

• Backlinks
• Social Media Signals
• Cache Date(s), Indexed Pages
• Toolbar PageRank (it’s the best we have)

Interesting On-Site Factors

• URLs – maybe the biggest/best/most valuable?
• Site Architecture & Navigation
• Product-level Pages
• Duplication? Orphaned pages?
• Site Latency – Slow loading pages?

Tools:

• “Site:” searches (add inurl product ID  and/or intitle to find dupes)
• seo-browser.com: see your website like a search engine sees it
• yslow (firebug)– diagnose site latency probs (sits between browser & server & documents activity)
• wave toolbar – web accessibility evaluation tool
• seobook toolbar – comparison feature – compare 5 URLs
• linkscape – look at internal links
• semrush – competitive research
• Microsoft IIS SEO toolkit

Sitemap xmls for large sites

You can actually create multiple sitemaps (products or categories) then a sitemap file that links to all of them. Then – you’ll be able to better determine which areas of the site are not being indexed and why