Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

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

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

Chris Silver Smith, Netconcepts:
blog: naturalsearchblog.com

For the newbies:

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

Register with Webmaster tools and look for errors

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

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

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

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

Another utility: Acxiom’s MarketLeap – Benchmarking Link Popularity

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

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

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

Jonathan Hochman, Hochmanconsultants.com

Diagnosing and Fixing Websites:

Favorite tools:

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

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

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

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

Firefox Web Developer:
You can view code problems

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

David Golightly, Zillow:

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

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

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Second day of SMX Advanced, Organic track

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

Ian McAnerin, McAnerin International:

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

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

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

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

SEED Tactic: Symantic Expression Equivalency Document

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

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

Andy Atkins-Kruger, WebCertain:

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

Language and content presentation

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

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

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Second day of SMX Advanced, Multiple tracks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where should you spend your first advertising dollar?

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

SEO and value

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

Prioritizing SEM

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

What to do when clients want guaranteed search results?

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

How to deal with differing economic regions?

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

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

First day of SMX Advanced, my focus today is on the SEM Organic Track
Moderator: Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
Q&A Moderator: Eric Enge, Stone Temple

Two of the panelists spoke about how they value sites when considering buying them. That is interesting enough, but that is not really what I was looking for as an SEO. It was more a business valuation and negotiation class. Then, there was this problem from the actual SEOs:

I had a different understanding of what this would be when I read about it. Mainly, Amplify Interactive is not in the affiliate business. We are not in the Adsense business. We try to drive quality, targeted traffic to user-friendly websites. Our business is not to drive large amounts of untargeted traffic to our clients so that they will click ads, etc. Yet, this seemed to be the point of this session.

Here is what I expected: I do think there are many cases when buying a website for SEO purposes is a great idea. For instance, if you are a major beer site and buy a well-read blog about beer or a brewers forum. Then you sponsor the site and make links back to quality content at your company site. This can be tricky, because you don’t want to turn a formerly good site into corporate shilling and create the opposite effect.

There are many Social Media Marketing cases of companies upsetting potential companies by doing such things. I think many of the same best practices of say, creating a facebook profile for a company apply to buying sites for SEO. But, which sites are best to buy and what is the best integration model(s)? Sadly, this was not covered..

First, any session where “consulting a lawyer” is mentioned more than once is a red flag for what I am interested in. We all understand the place of lawyers, but I don’t feel that good SEO practices (our company) dictate a business where I am attached to them on a frequent basis. What was covered is “advanced” ways of getting domains that have a good amount of links or quality links to them and then directing this “link juice” to your site by…well, mainly tricking the search engines. Again, this might be good for someone who wants to sell online gaming advertising (as was talked about) or other advertising and don’t care if Google or other search engines shut down their site when found out. But, that is not our model. That hurts our model of creating strong, reputable online brands.

Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney Media Group:

Not in attendance but sent a video.

Found many websites with good links and history but had expired. He bought them and moved his stuff on them. Doesn’t work well now since Google nailed his last project, a Joe Lieberman site.

He calls this the age of links, b/c of the way Google appreciates links over domains now.It is great to get a keyword serious domain though if it is possible, such as fighters.com

Jeremy Wright, b5media

Jeremy is not an SEO, he represents a “media company”. He describes how b5media’s metrics to find how much a site is worth.

He uses Compete, PageRank, and some internal tools.

Always verify traffic.
Watch out for inflated traffic numbers (buying traffic).

Gabriel Goldenberg, SEO ROI:

Content is undervalued on the internet. Writers charge much more for print journalism than web, which is around $35 for 500 words.

Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl:

Again, this was about how to get old sites and buy/value them, then figure out a way to trick Google into thinking it is still the old site and keeping that “link juice”. Tips (Tricks): Keep the same host, whois information, and look at the archive of the site and recreate it so that it appears to be the same. Then, over time, put in some links to your company.

Is is copyright infringement to revive content that wasn’t yours? Well, maybe give the person the money for it…OR…you know, contact a lawyer.

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

First day of SMX Advanced, my focus today is on the SEM Organic Track

Session 1: Bot Herding
Moderator: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, SEO For hire

The real title of this session probably should have been “Pagerank sculpting”, and that was the focus. It was about making sure that the Pagerank you acquire from Google goes to the right places on your site. Due to this, there was quite a bit of technical (SMX “Advanced” right) information concerning cloaking and “conditional redirects” that I am not covering.

Amplify Interactive does you robots.txt files and nofollow to accomplish PageRank sculpting. The more technical elements (“conditional redirects” and “cloaking”) are not used by us. Using these methods can be viewed as sinister by Google b/c the search result may not be the same page as the user sees. There can be ways to do this correctly, except the definition of “correctly” seems to change with search engine algorithmic and policy changes.

Michael Gray, Atlas Web Service

There is no reason to waste your PR on your contact page.
What to sculp out?

• Pivacy policy, terms of use, contact
• Locations (unless multiple location business), put address in footers
• Company bios, unless wanted for rep management
• Legal pages, advertising stats,

Use Nofollow to sculpt.
Javascript works, but that may change in the future.

New sites should do this. When you are building a new site, it is much easier to put these practices forward at the beginning. If you are trying to work with an older site–”If there are other major issues (fires), take care of this first.” Basically, although it is important, we don’t know how important so work on serious problems (duplicate content) before going into this advanced method.

Adam Audette, AudetteMedia

Adam is not a fan of PageRank sculpting and he had eight points against it. The main issues are that we don’t know everything about PR. We do not know how much we have on a domain. It fluctuates as well.

Also:

• Sculpting PR is back-seat to making a good user experience.
• There is no standard among search engines.
• Nofollow is aimed at Google PR, not user experience and as stated above, not fully understood.

More at www.audettemedia.com/nofollowStephan Spencer, Netconcepts:

First, Stephan came out with some serious slides and information. There were a ridiculous amount of slides that even a court reporter couldn’t keep up with. Stephan speaks about very technical subjects and problems with dynamic URLs and duplicate content problems on e-commerce sites and how to fix this. At Amplify, we provide SEM-friendly URLs. We currently do not deal with any e-commerce sites that put users through a shopping cart that can later cause this duplication problem.

Q&A:

The highlight of Q&A was a Microsoft Live representative who said that MSN currently does not follow (no follow), but that will change. He later corrected this after the end of the session, but it highlighted the problems with “Page Sculpting”. In this, I agree with Adam. One should robots.txt out pages that don’t need to go into search results and use nofollow when it is obvious and can do no harm. On the other hand, building good site architecture that a visitor will enjoy is the real goal.