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

When it comes to SEO, Google Webmaster Tools and I are Best Friends Forever.

Fist Bump - courtesy Time

I know at the end of the day, dude always has my back. He’s fluff to my peanut butter, Hutch to my Starsky, my broheim. He’s brutally honest; he’s one of those friends that tells you like it is, even if it’s bad. And I admire that!

Let’s get down to it: 10 reasons why Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is my BFF (if you can’t follow this, there’s a list of straightforward reasons why I like GWT after this list):

1. He helps me rep-re-zent.  All I want is a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T.  I want to be known!  GWT tells me (“Index stats”) whether or not I can be found in his index. He should be braggin’ about me!  If not, then there’s something awry.
2. Mo Pages, Mo Problems.  GWT lets me know if he’s having problems getting to know me.  Am I slow in getting back to him (“URLs timed out”)?  Did I tell him I was going to meet him somewhere and not show up (“HTTP Errors” and “Not Found”)?  He’s a guy that keeps a journal so he knows exactly how many times he’s expected me to be somewhere only to not find me there.
3. He has has his ear to the ground.  He tells me what people are saying about me (“Top Search Queries”).
4. Helps spread the word if I want to be called “Christian” or “Chris” (“Preferred Domain”).  I mean, calling me both names is technically the same.. but what name would I prefer to be called?
5. He wants to know all. about. me.  So, instead of relying on our conversations for him to piece together what I’m all about, I just can say hey, can I just give you this full biography of who I am (“Submit a sitemap”) and just call that good?  He’s a crazy cat though – he only likes this biography in a certain format (.xml)… he’s weird like that (just playin’ GWT!).  He also is somewhat of a grammar snob, letting me know if there are any problems with the biography.
6. He’s detail-driven.  He’ll let me know if I have any issues (“Content analysis”).  So I didn’t have a title tag here and I had a long META description there – he gets up all in my grill and tells me about it!  Lay off, my man!
7. Dude is a n.e.r.d.!  We’re not talking about manga or anime or anything: he loves statistics (“Statistics Overview”).  I mean, it’s cool and all… but sometimes he starts talking about who craves my attention and (“Subscriber Stats”) even channels his ‘inner-self’ (“What Googlebot sees”) and really opens up about what he sees in me.  I mean, it’s flattering… but dang, he can be harsh!
8. He loves gossip.  He craves it, in fact.  And he will tell me whenever someone happens to talk about me (“Pages with external links”).  He’ll even note when I’m talking about myself (“Pages with internal links).  “Why would Christian steal from the Yankees?”
9. When people ask about me… GWT lets me tell him what I would like him to say about me (“Sitelinks”).  So, say someone asks about me… I can tell GTW that I would like him to let that individual know about my funny personality, perhaps a small synopsis of who I am, or otherwise.
10. Sometimes, I like to keep some details of my life private… like my love for Mandy Moore.  Or my liking of the Los Angeles Lakers.  I can tell GWT to never tell anyone of these certain aspects of my life (Generate robots.txt).  Well, I guess they’re not very private now..

And there you go.  That’s a short list of why Google Webmaster Tools and I are BFF.  Now, for the more serious readers – here’s the list again, but without all the BFF stuff

1. Index stats – says if your site is included in Google’s index.  Also if Google has accessed your home page.
2. Web crawl errors – tells you if Google is having trouble crawling and indexing your site.
3. Top search queries – gives you an quick synopsis of the top search queries people are searching on that access your site.
4. Preferred domain – specify your canonical here to tell Google if you would like your site to be http://www- or http://-.
5. Submitting a sitemap – submit your xml sitemap and see if there are any errors Google has found.
6. Content analysis – lets you know if any of your pages lack title tags or have long (or short) META descriptions.
7. Statistics – gives you some stats such as how many subscribers your site has, crawl stats and even “What Googlebot sees”.
8. Links – lets you know how many reported external links are pointing to your site (and which specific pages are being linked to) as well as your inlinks.
9. Sitelinks – you can somewhat control what sitelinks Google shows for a branded result of yours that has sitelinks.
10. Robots.txt generation and analysis – you can generate a robots.txt file on GWT and also analyze it to check if there are any errors.

Google Webmaster Tools is an invaluable tool that allows you to really see in-detail what Google thinks of your site.  If you have problems – don’t fret!  Start correcting them one-by-one and before you know it, you’ll have a website in good standing with virtually zero crawl or sitemap errors. That will make it a lot easier to get great results from Google.

Greetings humans!  My name is Robots Dot Text.  You can call me robots.txt (ah hah!  Clever, eh?).  As you can see, I am mainly part text document (hence my bland-looking figure; apologies for not being part Word document or Photoshop image), part “dot” (it is hard finding suits that fit a dot-like figure) and part robot.  I am quite a character!

Think of me as a liaison between your website and a search engine robot/spider.  I am like your website’s personal butler: I greet web robots at the door and give them directions as to where they may proceed within your site.

Usually, when you humans have guests over, you do not necessarily like others to go into your human bedroom (unless you are into that thing… not that there is anything wrong with that!). In the same way – you can instruct me as to where you want me to keep the web robots from visiting on your site.  You do not want them to see a page for some reason?  I can make sure that happens.

First and foremost, you may be asking yourself, “Why do I need a personal butler for my website?”  Well, then I may offer a retort of: “Why do aquatic vertebrate animals need water?”  Hah hah hah hah!  Best practice-wise, every site owner needs a personal butler to greet web robots at the door and tell them to not spider specific pages.  Pages that you should typically tell me to not let robots access are your privacy policy, terms of use and contact form fillout pages.  I would think having your “money” pages show in search results would be much better than your boring privacy policy, yes?

These web robot guests are quite the fickle bunch.  They only seem to respond to a particular greeting.  Think of it as a secret “bro-shake” that we do before they know they should comply with my requests.  It goes like this:

User-agent: *

That is my universal greeting to all web robots.  I can also greet individual web robots if you would like me to.  Here is my personal greeting to my ‘brother-from-a-search-engine-mother’ Googlebot:

User-agent: Googlebot

If I were to say this, only my web robot friend Googlebot would respond to the directions that follow.

If you were to say, “Hey Robots Dot Text, I do not want any web robot guests visiting (and consequently indexing) my bedroom,” or a single-page on your site, I would then instruct the “User-agent: *” this way:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /upstairs/bedroom.html

Web robots are totally cool with me telling them where they can visit in your website and where they can not.  They are quite proper, like me, and will not look down on you if you only want them to see a section of your site.

Let us say, for example, that you do not wish for your web robot guests to see your bedroom… but thinking about it, you do not want them to visit the entire upstairs which includes your “man-cave” (hey, that is what you call it, not me!) and guest bathroom.  This is acceptable as well; I can tell your web robot guests not to visit (and subsequently index) upstairs, or an entire sub-directory of your site, I would then instruct the “User-agent: *” this way:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /upstairs/

If I tell your web robot guests this, they know that visiting upstairs (i.e. your ‘upstairs’ sub-directory) is most definitely not allowed!

I can also promptly tell all web robot guests who come over to turn away and come back at a better time.  This is best when you are performing any maintenance at your place (like a redesign).  Do not feel bad about turning away your web robot guests during this time; it is best for them to see your place when you have everything organized and looking sharp!  If you would like me to tell your web robot guests not to visit (and subsequently not index) all of your pages of your site, I would instruct the “User-agent: *” this way:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Those are the basics of my butlerly-duty.  I am hoping that the word I created in the previous sentence makes sense for you since it is not a real word in the English language.  Entschuldigung! Hah hah hah hah!

Well, I am off to greet some more web robots.  I tell you: some of these guests come back almost daily!  It is tough work being me.  But it is quite rewarding!

Hitwise recently published a study on search query length that showed that longer search queries are getting more & more popular. In layman’s terms – search engine users are typing more words into the search box than they used to.

The major takeaway from the study is that people still primarily use two-word queries in search engines, but searches that contain four or more words are getting a lot more popular.

Impact on the SEO Process?

A colleague at one of our partners actually forwarded me the article and asked me how it would effect our approach to search term research. I replied:

We were actually talking about longer search query length at lunch today… yeah, our days are pretty exciting around here! We do our research real time – so [longer searches are] basically accounted for. By and large – this is good news. more sophisticated searchers = better site traffic and less frustration when trying to optimize & get ranked so we can focus on the really targeted stuff (the long tail of search)

Then, I turned to the team and said we needed to write a blog post on the subject! But rather than do it all myself, I thought it might also be interesting to get feedback from members of the Amplify Interactive team to see what their thoughts were on the article as well. Luckily, I don’t have to do all the thinking around here. Here’s what the team had to say – in all our poor-grammar and over-punctuated glory:

Search Query Length – Our Impressions

BEN

Personally – I think it’s obvious why people are typing in longer searches:
1. avoiding spam and off-topic results
2. auto-complete & search suggestions from search engines
3. higher degree of sophistication and level of experience using search engines (kind of the same as #1)

I also think that it’s extremely encouraging. It’s so much easier to target and get ranked for ‘long tail’ type search queries with SEO. if more people are searching this way, the search term research will support it as well.

CHRISTIAN

I think people are becoming more familiar with how to use search engines.  I think they’re starting to learn that specific search queries bring specific search results which are generally more favorable than any super-general searches.  For example, if I have a problem with my Mac, instead of typing in something like, “Mac startup problem,” I’ll simply copy and paste the exact error notification sentence into the search box and I’ll find specifics about that exact problem that other users have encountered.

The predictive search box tool that Google debuted the middle of last year has certainly helped searches “type-in” relevant long-tail searches easier.  I’m fairly certain this has contributed to the percentage increase of longer search queries.

SPENCER

My initial response to these data is that of “well duh”. I know that when I am search for something and I use 4+, I know what I am looking for, and the results will be targeted to my query.

Consumers get smarter and smarter every year, as they adapt to new and changing technology. They are becoming more and more comfortable with it and the rapid pace in which it develops. I believe the more comfortable they get, the more savvy and sophisticated their search queries will become. These data reflect at least the second part of my statement. Great stuff and good news for intelligent, strategic minded people in the industry, as poor guidance will inevitably lead to poor results quickly.

Moving forward, data like these should prompt Google to fix the “other unique queries” as it will help their advertiser create better ads and more relevant landing pages which leads to more sales, more competition for phrases, and most likely more revenue for Google. Marketers should take heed of findings like these and really dig into keyword and phrase research. So they can develop their landing pages and target their consumers more effectively during the entire buying cycle.

BLU

Users are becoming more savvy and are entering in longer tailed searches to find what they are looking for but I also think a huge reason why long tail searches are growing so rapidly is because of “search assist” features being used by the major search engines.

So – that’s what our impressions from the study were. What are yours?

I gave a Webcast presentation for OEN (Oregon Entrepreneurs Network) last week titled “Capturing Market Share in a Recession with SEM“, which we just posted in the SEM resources section of our site.

Enjoy!

Ben