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

So we did.

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

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

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

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

Day 1

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

Day 2

• Search Friendly Development (Ben)
• What You Should Be Measuring — But Aren’t (Ben)
• Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know (Ben)
• Search Marketing & Surviving a Recession (Julian)
• International SEO (Julian)
• Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues (Julian)
• Give It Up! (Ben… this post won’t go live until 9:01 AM on July 5 2008)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Brian Klais - Netconcepts

“10 Essential Natural Search KPIs”

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

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

Laura Lippay - Yahoo

“The Ultimate SEO Data Grid”

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

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

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

Jonah Stein - ItsTheROI

“Five Forgotten Metrics”

Customer Lifetime Value

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

Prevent Stolen ROI

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

Crawl Frequency - the New Page Rank

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

Page Views to Conversion

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

External Links

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

Google Webmaster Central “All Query Stats”

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

Richard Zwicky - Enquisite

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

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
SE Roundtable Recap

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Christine Churchill - KeyRelevance - Offline Conversion

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

Simple Offline Conversion Tracking Methods:

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

Intermediate

• Unique phone numbers, etc

Advanced

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

Rich Devine - ZAAZ

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

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

Akin Arikan - Unica Corporation

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

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

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
Search Engine Roundtable recap

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This session dealt with some of the common web site development issues that impact search engine crawling & indexing of your site, which can have a big impact on your site’s presence & ranking in search engines.

Amplify Interactive audits every single client web site for these issues when performing site audits during our research & recommendations phase. We also educate the developers & designers that our clients work with on these issues when they are developing or redesigning client sites.

Nathan Buggia - Microsoft

Some things to pay attention to for your site:

• Load times - the faster your pages load, the more of your site that a search engine will crawl
• All flash sites and using cloaking as a workaround = bad (he used an example from Nike, who apparently does a lot of this)

Sharad Verma - Yahoo

Web site development & search engine considerations

• Search engines don’t speak javascript, turn off JS in browser & navigate your site to look for issues (I give this tip in every SEO speaking session that I do)
• All flash/video = bad; text & links = better
• Dynamic urls - lead to duplicate content & splits link juice, less likely to be crawled & indexed
• 301 redirect dynamic to static, limit the number of paramaters

Use Yahoo Site Explorer & other search engine webmaster tools

• Rewrite dynamic urls through yahoo site explorer
• Tell yahoo about dynamic urls & remove session id’s etc
• We’ll aggregate link weights

Duplicate content

• Less effective crawl
• Search engines are less likely to extract links…
• Solve by using 301 or disallow duplicate content via robots.txt

Best practices

• Flatten folder structure - deeper content (meaning, multiple directories in your URLs) is less likely to be indexed
• Redirect old pages
• Use keywords in urls
• Use sub domains ONLY when appropriate
• Remove file extension from URL if you can (.asp, .html, etc)
• Use robots.txt exclusion to eliminate content from indexing - see http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000587.htm

Maile Ohye - Google

Develop a crawlable architecture for rich media

• Build on html, then add ajax & flash to enhance html version of site
• Alternate versions aren’t a good alternative, splits link juice & user experience (can’t share the same thing etc)
• YouTube is a good example of progressive enhancement: they put one “thing” (video) on each page, the site navigation is in html, they put descriptive html content next to rich media
• Consider sIFR for flash: text matches content seen by enabled users, accessible to screen readers and search engines (see Google Webmaster blog “Best uses of flash” & Google Webmaster Central help “Working with flash…”)
• Alternate for AJAX: consider Hijax for AJAX (see Google Webmaster blog “A spider’s view of Web 2.0” & Google Webmaster Central help “Working with AJAX enhanced sites“)

Tips to improve the indexing of your site

• Set preferred domain to www or non-www, then 301 redirect to the other
• Reduce duplicate content by keeping URLs clean: remove unnecessary paramaters, internally link to your preferred version, store visitor information in cookies rather than session id’s
• Planning server downtime for maintenance? Make sure you serve a 503 not a 404

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
Search Engine Roundtable recap

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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.

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