It’s not one size fits all. What you should look at are two scenarios. One is new keywords; the other is expanding your current set. That’s how I look at it. Think about the details of your business. How do you map that business in the constructs of AdWords to do the long tail right?

Hardware

Have a name for your strategy. Set up dedicated boxes with tons of RAM.

Get Excel going. The big hammer we all love and adore. You can build a million-row Excel sheet and concatenate it. You can also use the Bing desktop tool. It’s great. There’s a link in here about how to concatenate.

DKI and Landing Pages

DKI is your best friend. You should absolutely DKI. Think it through, and make sure your default copy is strong. It’s critical. Then drop your customer exactly where they need to be with the long tail. It can be a lot of work, but their quality score will go up, so it’s crucial.

Desktop Tools and APIs

If you have a technical marketing manager on your team in-house, fantastic. Or maybe you can do it yourself. You can do this before figuring out Googles APIs. Unless you have unlimited API access, Google can make it difficult.

Test the GDN & BCN

Isolate your keywords into their own campaigns. Remember that Google’s ad grouping means you have to look at it a little differently. The other thing is watch your placements and sites.

Those search query logs are going to be critical.

Dan also had a lot of information about Google AdWords account limits, so grab his slides if you can.

Next up is Brad to talk about Demystifying Quality Score.

Google’s changing how Rotate works. Maintain control: Opt out of Rotate changes here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/rotateoptout/

I’m going to talk about pivot tables. They’re not scary, they’re easy to use. Best way to learn how to use them is to read the Microsoft help files. But use the ’07 help files, not ’10.

Google makes money on impressions. If an account has the majority of its impressions at a Quality Score lower than 7, it’s probably hurting you. If you have bad accounts, don’t go for the long tail yet.

Where to Start: Spend & QS

Use a pivot table to find where to up your spend. There’s one big issue with pivot tables—they just give you averages of data, and everyone knows averages lie.

Normalizing Quality Score

Make another column in your pivot table for QS*impressions. You can also normalize your Quality Score by Ad Group.

Another analysis you an do, The first will give you spend or lower CPCs. But if you have a lot of low Quality Scores, they’re not showing, All keywords below a 3 QS is where you can start improving your Quality Score.

If campaign IS high and loss due to rank; sort by IS by Ad Group.

Sevens are great if you’re in retail. If you’re in finance, mortgages, fives are great, fours are average, so there are industries that break the rules. If you go into your Ad Groups, and your scores are 3s and 4s, but your positions are 1s and 2s, is your ad above the organics? Google only puts ads above the organics that break a certain threshold.

Here’s the problem. Google just changed how they show ranges. The steps are the same; the analysis is slightly different. In the old days, if you had a band landing page, you wern’t above a 3, period. But now they don’t tell you what the average ranges. You need to put more thought into what’s going on.

Brad goes into some great detail here about quality scores, averages, CTR, landing pages, keywords, and fixes with screenshots on his slides. You’ll want to check out his slide deck for all those details and screenshots.

Dramatically Different Ad Copy Testing

Relevance is Google’s way of trying to put CTR to semantics. You can do incremental ads, try a different tagline or something, try a different angle, see what makes a difference.

Estimated Ranges

Relevance has really big ranges, but landing pages isn’t quite as big. Google needs to tweak this a little to make it more even.

How Much Time Should You Spend?

If you see that your QS are below 5s, spend time on QS. You need to. If the majority of your impressions are 7 or higher, don’t obsess over it. Have some fun with it. If most of your stuff is at a high QS, don’t spend time on it. You have other things to do.

Next is Ping. He’s going to talk about creating a profitable PPC campaign.

It’s pretty straightforward. It’s about good volume, and good ROI. You have a landing page, a keyword, and insight into what is a good keyword. You have to think about the landing page first, not just the keyword. If you don’t have it right, it won’t convert. You have to use the right keyword to find the right audience.

How AdCenter Brings Searchers and Advertisers Together

From an AdCenter perspective, we look at the search user’s intent, and whether your landing page can help the user.

Increase Volume – Tactics

I always get this question: If I do this, will it affect my Google Quality Score? I don’t know, but it will affect your campaign. I talk about ad copy first. Your ad copy has to articulate your selling points. Make sure you know how to hit your audience’s weak spots, or the competition will just surpass you.

Sometimes when people search, they want to understand what they’re searching for first.

Two things to keep in mind: Avoid negative keyword conflicts, and increase the volume of your keyword.

In AdCenter, you can generate a negative KW conflicts report. It’s very effective. I don’t think many people are aware of this report yet.

Now let’s talk about ad copy. AdCenter is already in the process of providing a testing function, but we don’t provide an expiration date of how long you can use A/B testing.

Ping is turning on his camera to take a vote and snap a photo: Who thinks they should provide an expiration date for A/B testing? He says it’s called “help me to help you.”

Now, how to increase your ROI. It’s all about the value of your traffic. So what can you do? From an ad copy perspective, you need to be very specific. If you search “diabetic drug” right now, you’re going to get results for humans, dogs, cats, everything. It’s because those drugs are so profitable, they go for the broad match. They don’t care about being specific.

You can increase your ROI using our tools, too. In terms of keywords, when should you use a broad match modifier or a negative keyword? First, figure out what group of people you want to target.

How to Achieve the Ultimate Success

• say what you do
• do what you say
• provide a positive experience
• provide good keyword relevance
• and two more things I don’t catch before he flips the slide, but they were good, positive things!

Put it all together, and your customer will come back to you.

Frank’s up next. He’s going to talk about Google Product Listing Ads (PLA). These are the product ads that show up in the upper right hand corner. They’re driven from the product feed into the Google merchant center.

That’s how it is now, but it’s about to change and become Google Shopping. The new listings will show one product with multiple purchase options.

Why we care: PLA is a significant growth channel. At the end of the third quarter last year, we started seeing a lot of performance and reach. In 2012, there’s some variation, but it’s pushing the upper teens to 20%.

Product vs. Keyword Targeting/Bidding

• product targeting automatically determines which products to show based on how close the content of a product listing in your GMC feed matches the search intent of the user
• in PLA, you bid on products and groups of products, not on keywords

Tactics

Optimize your feed content for maximum relevance and performance.

Increase relevance and performance of product listings

• include search terms in title and description
• ensure titles are structured for performance and relevance
• align product and all its attributes to the search terms and queries you want to appear for (i.e., to help Google determine how to best match your products to user intent)

Data Quality is King

• update your feed every time prices change
• update your feed every time availability changes
• ensure no dead links
• ensure landing pages match products advertiser
• monitor and address trademark and other policy violations and errors

Get Granular

Use the flexibility of Adwords groupings/labels for unlimited targeting options. Use promotions, optimize like ad copy.

Implement Negative Matching

Apply Tried and True Paid Search Techniques

Leverage Proven Paid Search Tactics for PLA

Frank also provided a big slide of bonus information. He says now is the time to start testing before the shift to Google Shopping occurs, probably in October.

And just like that, SMX Advanced is over. Well, not completely over because there’s still the SEOmoz party tonight, and most of the Outspoken Media team will be there! Thank you to everyone for reading our coverage, for sharing it, RTing it, and for helping us to provide value to the industry and community we love so much. If you have anything to add to any of this coverage, feel free to jump into the comments. We hope to see you all again next year, or even sooner at PubCon!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

He shows a slide with logos from some major companies and says they all have issue with pagination and canonicalization.

He’s going to cover three main areas: pagination dos and don’ts;

Distilling things down to the simplest essence is the way to go.

He shows the Zales site. It’s a large e-commerce site. He shows the home page canonical URL, and it’s still messy. Their page URLs are so similar that it’s very confusing, and it looks like they have a duplicate content problem.

Panda no likey duplicate content!

We’ve always approached this using noindex, which pulls dupes out of the index, but they still get crawled.

He shows another example site that sells aftermarket motorcycle parts that is using noindex to good effect.

Rel prev/next is another good pagination tactic.

When I see rel next/prev used with rel canonical, that’s good, but when it’s used to point back to page one, it creates a conflict.

With use of rel prev/next, keep in mind:

• Pages with rel next/prev can still be shown in results
• Use of rel next/prev consolidates signals across the entire series

Adam covers a few pagination requirements and annotations that get into some detail, so I recommend checking out his slide deck if you can.

View All Challenges

• view all pages must be fast
• big sites (especially e-commerce) sometimes dislike them
• but users love them! (if they’re fast)

Adam is showing more actual site examples with very long URLs that I couldn’t get down in 10 seconds if I set my hands on fire. Again, check out his slides afterward.

Faceted Navigation

Everyone has them these days. It can be problematic for SEO. For a major category page, the approach is take that major category, and every time a facet is selected, consider it either an overhead facet you don’t care about for SEO, or … I missed the second thing. Sorry, apparently taking a lunch break just took me right out of the liveblogging zone! Okay, focusing…

Takeaways

• Identify essential and overhead facets
• Always force the canonicalization path regardless of selection order
• Build URLs according to queries (how users search)

Downsides

• Solves nothing for decreasing crawl overheads
• Labor intensive and error prone

Canonical Actions

He’s picking on LL Bean now. Looking at the men’s pants category page. The URL looks good. But if you go into a product page, and look at the canonical tag, they added keyword-rich string in to the URL at the end, but it’s nowhere else on the site. That’s not the best use of rel canonical.

Takeaways

• Use rel canonicalization to signal the preferred URL
• Internal link signals should be consistent
• And a third thing I didn’t catch before he flipped past the slide

Next up is Jeff. PetCo started as a small shop, and now has a foundation that saves animals. [Yay!]

Situation

• PetCo has 1000′s of product list pages
• large amount of dupe content
• tracking tagged URLs getting indexed
• recent site changes caused multiple URL variations
• monthly email from Google about “high number of URLs

Solution

• reduce refinement options
• cross departmental education
• imp;implement canonical tags
• use noindex, follow tag

Results

• reduced refinement choices
• overall search rankings increased
• direct SERP traffic to product list pages saw traffic and revenue improvements
• offline team supporting proper link building
• Google messages ceased

Next Steps

Testing everything to see if there’s anything else they can do that’s relevant to their platform.

Now on to Maile. In 2009, Google worked through issues of PageRank sculpting. In 2010 Zappos and “faceted navigation issues, exponential URLs to crawl. In 2011, they launched improved Webmaster Tools URL parameters.

Also in 2011, REI pagination issues, trying to use rel canonical for non-duplicate content. Google came out with rel next/prev support five months later. They look at rel canonical to see how sites are using it or misusing it. Many of you are doing it right, which helps us identify many more sequences than we could detect on our own.

URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools

• Assists understanding parameters to crawl site more efficiently (reduce number of dupes)
• saves bandwidth
• helps more unique, fresh content to be indexed
• for removals, go to URL Removals in Webmaster Tools

It’s an advanced feature. Some sites already have high crawl coverage as determined by Google. Improper actions an result in pages not appearing in search.

Issue: Inefficient Crawling
This is a feature available to you to address this problem: key=value&key2=value2

Step 1: Specify parameters that do not change page content
Do I have parameters that don’t affect page content?
Likely mark as “does not change content;” results in One representative URL setting in Webmaster Tools

Step 2a: Specify parameters that change content
Step 2b: Specify Googlebot’s preferred behavior

This is putting a lot of control in your hands. If you have this correct, your site can be crawled much more efficiently.

Sort Parameter

Changes the order content is presented in (price, bestselling, etc.)

Sort parameter never displayed by default?
Is parameter options throughout the entire site?
Can Googlebot discover everything useful when the sort parameter isn’t displayed?

Or, same sort values site-wide?
Are the same sort values used consistently for every category?
When a user changes the sort value is the total number of items unchanged?

Sort setting: if neither setting applies, let Googlebot decide.

Narrows

Filters the content on the page. If the narrows parameter shows less-useful content, you might be able to specify “crawl no URLs.” Double check by verifying the URLs shown provide redundant useful content to the parent URL.

Specifies

Determines the content displayed on the page
Crawl every URL

Translates

Crawl every URL, unless you want to exclude certain languags from being crawled/available in the search results.

Paginates

Displays a component page of a multi-page sequence

Best Practices

• Internal links should only include canonical URLs
• list canonicals in sitemaps
• helps with canonical promotion
• providse more accurate index counts
• On-page indexing markup is still helpful
• rel canonical, rel next and rel prev can be used in tandem

Whew! That was a toughie. Again, if you can get your hands on slides from this session, I highly recommend it. Lots of super technical, but really helpful stuff. Time to put it to work!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

She’s going to share some case studies. First is an infotainment site.

Findings

• mobilization engine wasn’t pulling across SEO content
• engine was not epxiring content properly either
• they were accumulating 404 pages

They had a lot of DUST – Dupe URL Same Text. This kills the efficiency of the crawl. She also has a super creepy spider on that slide, and it’s freaking me out.

Because not all pages were mobilized, not all pages redirected to a mobile version, so they’d hit the back button. That’s bad.

The mobile engine didn’t have compression or page load done correctly, either.

Recommendations

• Update feeds to include SEO
• work with platform to update templates
• have better server rules to max crawl efficiency
• put up self-referencing canonicals

Next example was a doctor directory. The goal was to move a responsive mobile solution that increased page views and foot traffic/calls.

Findings

Their biggest problem was that they hadn’t mobilized any content. They were concerned that the landing pages wouldn’t get indexed. Also, the desktop pages were too big to use responsive design effectively. Their stuff was already compressed, so it was going to be hard to make it any smaller.

Recommendations

• Move forward with current mobile beta launch on m. site
• Start responsive design on non-mobilized directory nav pages first
• Mixed Solution and RESS eventually

Last example is an e-commerce site. The goal was to improve mobile rankings to drive more mobile shopping and sales.

Findings

• They had desktop ranking really well in mobile search
• WAP and smartphone sites
• clean, light mobile pages
• inconsistencies between robots.txt, canonical tags, and XML sitemaps

other universals not ranking well

They also had a JavaScript error message was the first thing indexed and cached as the description because they didn’t have an appropriate description written. They also had some misredirection of desktop pages that were ranking well, but were redirecting to blank error pages.

Recommendations

• fix parsing error in redirection rules
• stop js error indexing with bot-specific instructions and adding a description tag
• change linking on DIV to linking on images and anchor text
• hard to get lots of e-commerce rankings on one search
• improve social interactivity on the mobile content to drive more links

Cindy was kind enough to share a promo code for three months of free MobileMoxie service: SMXA2012. Check out her service!

Next up is Bryson. He’s going to talk about data.

Mobile search optimization is critical. Mobile search traffic will eclipse desktop search traffic in years, not decades. It’s big now, and it’s getting bigger.

Many Paths to Mobile Optimization

One URL vs. Mobile URL. Can you have a site that works well on all devices, like Apple has? Do you need a smartphone optimized site? A tablet optimized site? If you ask a mobile SEO expert, you’ll get different answers, which is why I want to focus on the data.

Matt Cutts has said that mobile URLs don’t cause canonicalization issues, but then the G Webmaster team selected responsive design for maintainability after that.

They did a study on search queries. He says keyword and concept research are critical to SEO. How do keywords and search behavior change on mobile phones? To find out, they looked at search data from the Google Keyword Tool. They supplemented it with Google Insights for Search. Mobile search accounts for 22% of all Google searches on average, according to the sample they took.

Google queries reveal differences in search behavior. They found the same keywords, but searched with different frequency on mobile. For example, 80% of “restaurants near me” searches come from mobile devices.

How does this affect marketers? He shows an example from Arbys.com. Different search behavior requires different content to achieve searcher goals quickly. Mobile searchers are looking are hyper-focused on locations. Arby’s has responded to that, and made locations the focus of their mobile site.

Because their mobile search behavior is different from their desktop search behavior, they’ve adapted.

Some categories need dedicated mobile sites. They did research on different categories using Google AdWords Keyword Tool. In the dining and nightlife category, the average was 33% mobile searches, whereas for real estate, it was only 16%.

They did another study specifically on smartphone search results. They tested page speed, code validation, and other factors to find what was ranking.

Is validation key? In 2005, yes, but not now. Only one result in their study validated, so don’t believe that validation is key to results.

Is mobile usability/page speed helpful? Larry Page says yes. But according to their sample, 65% of the sites failed the page speed test. It may matter eventually, but right now, it doesn’t seem to.

Is link building unnecessary? No. It’s absolutely necessary. Most of the sites they looked at had more than 100 inbound links.

Does DotMobi help? Maybe, but you don’t necessarily need to use a DotMobi domain to be successful. It’s really not a strong signal. They found many more m.com domains indexed in Google than DotMobi.

Do mobile sites help ranking? Yes. Having a mobile site is strongly correlated with top three rankings in Google smartphone reach.

How do the top sites approach mobile SEO? He looked at redirect strategies for some major sites. 83% of them do have some sort of mobile SEO strategy. What they do surprised him. 60% of the sites redirect to mobile URLs. Even if there’s some loss of link equity, focus on what makes sense for your users. Google can handle any kind of URL.

For a list of data-driven mobile SEO best practices, check out Bryson’s post on the topic.

Pierre is up now. His presentation is titled Smartphone Sites and Google Search. He’s going to give recommendations for building smartphone-optimized sites. Everything he’s going to go over has already been published in excruciating detail on the Google Webmaster blog, so check it out.

Are you going to have a mobile site on the same URL, or on a different one? Once you decide that, are you going to serve them with the same or different HTML? He’s using some diagrams, so I really recommend you check out the Google blog for more detail.

Two key things: all these configurations are fully supported by Google, but responsive Web design is their recommendation. So how do you do that?

Same HTML –> Same URL –> CSS media queries

Your users will see the same URL whether they’re on a desktop or on a mobile device. It doesn’t matter which Google bot crawls the site—it goes into the pipeline, so there’s an efficiency win, which allows them to have more coverage on the site, index more pages, and keep the content fresher.

Now he’s putting some code up on the screen that addresses max pixel width for mobile devices. He says there are four ways to handle media queries, and they’re trying to support all of them. They all have pros and cons, so it’s up to you which one you use.

Responsive Web Design Tips

• max-width value
• crawling – let Google have full access to the site so they can understand it better
• test in modern browser

Dynamic Serving

Different HTML –> Same URL

there are two problems with this. There are caching proxies all over the world. If you send a response for your server, and you send the mobile one and that’s not the one they’re caching, that’s still the one the user is going to get.

Now Pierre is talking about Vary HTTP header and sharing more code. I’m going to recommend again that you seek this information on the Google Webmaster blog to get more detail, and a better understanding of what he’s sharing.

Different HTML –> Different URL
This treats both the mobile and the desktop version as one entity. What we want here is for you to annotate these pages to tell us which page is mobile and which isn’t. How do you do relationship annotation for the algorithm to understand?

On the mobile page, you put a rel=”canonical” to the home page. Then he goes over using a rel=”alternate” tag. It’s not a site-wide thing; it’s confined to a page.

Separate Mobile Site Tips

• rel=”alternate” in Sitemaps
• Vary HTTP header if you automatically redirect

Key Takeaways

• Consider your users first
• Use responsive Web design if you can
• If not, understand trade-offs and pitfalls, and implement correctly

Whichever design you use, let Google bot access everything.

And we’re done! For now. We’ll be back with more SMX coverage after lunch. Stay tuned!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

But before you do that, let’s get through today’s sessions. It’s a new day with just as much search marketing goodness to be had. We’re kicking things off today with a keynote from the corporate vice president of Bing’s Search Program Management team, Derrick Connell, in the form of a discussion with Danny Sullivan while Michelle Robbins moderates. The back-and-forth Q&As are my favorite sessions to liveblog, so let’s get to it.

Derrick starts out talking about some changes that are launching on Bing today.

We on Friday went to 100% availability for the new service. So here’s a demo of some of the features. It’s a big change for us, the start of a new era for Bing. Things were getting overloaded, particularly social. We learned some things needed to change, and one thing was that people should be treated specially. We’re introducing a sidebar where we show all the people who are relevant to a query. It’s awkward to stick people in with Web pages, but we learned from it.

In the middle, a new piece of real estate has an interaction module. If we know something that may be useful to the user about that page, maybe reviews about a restaurant, but that aren’t from the restaurant’s page, we’ll display them. It’s called Snapshot.

And then core search is on the left, still the most important part of the page, but we cleaned it up. We cleand up the topopgraphy, the fonts, etc. The page is about 20% faster than before because we cleaned up the scripting.

Then he does a live demo, which proves once again that you can get more from being here than reading about it! :-) But if it’s been a while since you used Bing, head on over to check out the new features. Here’s a search I did.

Derrick says, if you haven’t tried it, please give it a go. They’re very excited about it.

Now Danny begins asking questions.

I saw the preview before it came out, and you guys were saying that because screens are wider, you could add more stuff, maybe four columns or five.

Well, columns are interesting, but separating them will be key, whether it’s vertical, stacked, or whatever. We’ll see.

You guys have taken this approach where the social is all off to the side rather than in the main bar. Why does Bing feel that separation is the better route?

Putting people into the algo results is just unnatural. Consumers just don’t get it. How do you rank a person as opposed to a page? And they just deserve their own real estate. The algo results are what people will look for most, and if you want it, the social is there off to the right, too. Ranking people is different.

Even though you have that separation, there’s still social signals you’re using. I’m wondering, is that going to get heavier? Do you see the social signals as somehow taking over from links going forward?

I don’t see them taking over. I do think they’re important. New links can show up on Facebook or Twitter, but I don’t see them taking over.

It seems like you’d have more social signals you could measure. The idea of links as votes, right? Linking is a lot of work to reward someone. In contrast, if I have a good experience at a store, I can just tweet a thank-you. It seems like that would have more weight.

The thing you just described is about freshness. You’re giving a recent signal that the store is good or bad. Restaurants change over time. The reviews from a year ago aren’t as important as reviews from a year ago. The freshness signal is very strong.

Among the signals you’re pulling in, you’re even looking at Google+, not just Facebook.

We don’t build a social network. Our job is to go find all the signals from the social networks, get the content, and rank it, versus building one.

What about Facebook? Should they be building a search engine?

Don’t go there.

When you have the announcement, one of the things you talked about was relevancy scoring, and internal testing was showing that you’re…better?

As good.

As good as the other ones. How do you convince people of that?

Some marketing is needed. The good news is that we have our own internal judging of the relevancy of our results, relative to our own current, and to the competition. We’ve been closing the gap. In our more recent studies, we’re just ahead, but it’s statistical. We did a test where we went out and showed consumers up against Google’s. The surprising thing was in branded results, we did really well. But when we switched the brand, our results were far better than Google’s. So it shows there’s a perception gap. There’s a consumer perception that Google’s results are better than they actually are. We’ll do some perception marketing over the summer. And I think there’s a need to have an independent, third-party group for that.

I switched my default over to Bing, and it was horrible! No, actually it was the opposite. The first day, I kept doing a search, and then running back to Google because I felt I must be missing something. But I could visually tell I really wasn’t missing things. By the end of the week, I did a search, and couldn’t remember which search engine I had used, which was remarkable to me. I’ve seen your studies, but here it was really registering with me. Can you talk more about changing those perceptions? Do you just have to go into everyone’s homes and change their default?

I think our marketing team is coming up with great ideas. I think doing the sort of Pepsi/Coke challenge is great. We’re at the point where we’re comparable, so we just have to get that out there. We do have some reasons why you should use us vs. Google.

We released the brand three years ago, so then it was just about getting the brand out there. This conference was a great way to position the brand. So over the first three years, it was about brand awareness. Now we know it, so we have to take it to “I’m going to use it.” The marketing for the next two years will be taking the awareness and trying to transform it into usage.

So I was watching Gossip Girl…no, not really. I was watching Up All Night, and then searching on Bing because [I think Danny says here that he saw a Bing commercial].

Those brand placements have been good. We’ll keep spending on all those channels, and keep all the channels open.

Maybe you need to ask Don Draper how he would market Bing. And then I’ll take a 15% cut. We can talk about that later. Let’s talk about your market growth in the U.S. I think the last figures I saw, you have about 17%, on par with Yahoo!, so what’s the goal?

I’ll be happy on the journey when we get to 20%. I think that’s a tipping point, but we want to keep growing. 20% will be a big milestone. Getting to 16% and passing Yahoo! was big.

People seemed to be using Yahoo because they didn’t want to use Google, and they seem to now be turning to Bing.

If you go back three years, Google has grown. I think they’ve stalled. They’re probably happy at their 65%.

I don’t want to confess how many Xboxes I have (it’s three), but I don’t like my kids seeing what I’m doing because they kill me, so they have to go in other rooms to play. So I use the Xbox a little, and you had a big update happen. But it’s not Bing, right? It’s Bing as a brand for doing search, even though I’m not using Bing as a search engine. If I decide to search my desktop, will there be a Bing application?

It’s not as broad as that. Xbox is a great example. Bing is for doing, and on the Xbox it’s about finding music, video, etc. We use some of the Web signals for ranking, but we don’t need a lot of it because the catalog is small. The speech part of it is built my Bing. Same on the Windows phone. The button is powered by Bing. We’re looking for ways to improve.

If I ask Bing right now if it’s raining, can it tell me that, and wehre to get tomato soup? Google had voice search, but no one remembered you could do that. Then Apple came along with Siri, and now everyone’s asking it things. You guys had voice search before Google.

You’re a search guy, so you get the complexities of it. You still have to go to the same index for the query. People are using longer queries. Normal language queries are very hard for the engine to process and come back with results. The Xbox is giving us a good signal.

Are you seeing more searches from the Xbox rather than the phone?

We’re getting a lot more structured queries on the Xbox, like for movies and such.

I’m assuming you’re seeing the same growth in mobile search?

We’re seeing a lot of usage of the button.

What about Windows 8? What impact will that have?

More of in industry thing. It’s exciting for the consumer. The response was great. This is going to be a big year. On the Bing side, like every big tech change, we’ll be figuring out how to make the most of it.

There’ll be a default search in Windows 8, but I assume if I upgrade, does it just look at your old stuff?

I don’t know. I try to stay away from that side of things.

You talked about the social signals. Apparently, yesterday Matt said you don’t need to worry about Google+. You don’t have a social network. What should I be doing as a publisher to tie entities into my site?

You don’t need to do anymore than you’re already doing. Make sure you’re on Twitter, have a Facebook fan page. When I think about the next couple of years, as the sidebar evolves, those recommendations from friends will become more important. Go through the channels, get your products liked, they’ll still be ranked. There’s nothing particular you need to do to optimize for us.

One last thing. Earlier this year, I wrote an article about what Google and Bing took away from SEOs. Google decided they couldn’t share keywords with us. I thought that was kind of sucky. And then Yahoo! Killed Yahoo! Site explorer. So people were like why don’t you launch Bing site explorer?

We listened. Thank you!

If you have any news to share with us…

Today, we’re announcing an upgrade, a new version of our Webmaster Tools, and we’re introducing link explorer and SEO analysis tools. It’s a significant upgrade to our toolkit. We want to give you as much insight as possible. The post goes out at 10am. It’s a big day for us.

Is it true you’re going to call it the Penguin Site Explorer?

The team is calling it Phoenix, which may be apt. It’s like a rebirth.

Audience Questions

Are you using schema.org?

For the sidebar, yes.

You talked about tags. Where are you using those?

If you use tags on Facebook, we’re using those. If you want to see your friends’ tags, you just hover, and you’ll see them. [He's talking about the social sidebar in the engine.]

How is the new Bing UI integrating social results affecting load time?

On average, we’re about 20% faster than the previous experience, including the sidebar. It’s perceived to be faster, but it actually is faster.

Why is Facebook giving Bing special access? Is it because of the special relationship Facebook has with Bing? And why doesn’t Facebook just build its own search engine?

We have a strong partnership with Facebook. We’ve talked with them about our strategy, how we wan to use the social networks, and they like it. They like the fact that’s it’s open because they feel it’s a good indicator of how they’re the most relevant. On the second question, it takes time and money to build a search engine. When you think about how much data it takes…it’s a big investment. I think they’re happy with partnerships.

Can content owners provide additional information to Bing?

This goes back to schema.org. If you make your data available to the engines can pick it up…we take the data in, we store it in a structured index, associate it with an entity, and when the entity shows up, the data will show up. If you have more structured data, it will show up more often.

Why is it so hard to get into Bing News? Have you considered paid inclusion, perhaps?

We’re not big fans of paid inclusion. If you want to be part of Bing News and you have a news site, and you’re not showing up, that’s surprising. We do try to be comprehensive. [He recommends talking to another Bing employee who is speaking here later today.]

And that’s a wrap! An excellent conversation, I think. I hope you got a lot of great info out of it. Go check out the new Bing and see what you think!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

While Danny Sullivan moderates, members of the audience have the opportunity to put questions directly to Matt, who is not only the head of Google’s web spam team, but a “distinguished engineer.” No, really! You know you want to add “distinguished” to your job title now. But before you do that, listen up because I’m pretty sure a lot of people are going to ask the questions you’d ask if you were here, and Matt does not mince words.

Here we go!

Okay, Matt’s running a little late, so we’re starting with a video. And it’s the same video I just mentioned in the intro! Now, I have to tell you guys, I prepare these post intros days before the conference, so I totally linked to that video before they showed it here at SMX! Actually, I’m just psychic. Actually, it’s just a super fun video, so of course they’d show it before a session with Matt.

Danny tells us we’ll have 25% more Matt time than ever before. And then Matt’s throwing stuffed penguins into the audience, and he and Danny are showing us early prototypes for Google glasses. I just can’t do the visual justice. It’s mayhem in here! [Seriously, if you couldn't make it this time, you really need to try to get out to SMX Advanced next year. Fun times!]

Now we get down to business.

Is Penguin a penalty?

At Google, we think of it more like trying to find the right calibration level. On one end, you’ll have fantastic, quality stuff, and on the other end you have spam, and then you have a bunch of stuff in the middle. Penguin was designed to tackle all that stuff in the middle. After Panda addressed the spam, there was a lot of other stuff we wanted to address, so that’s where Penguin came from.

It does demote web results, but it’s an algorithmic change, not a penalty. It’s yet another signal among over 200 signals we look at.

Are you saying that from this point forward, a penalty is someone at Google looking at a site and identifying it as bad?

That’s pretty much the nomenclature we use. If you look at our videos, we’re more likely to say “manual action” as opposed to penalty, to differentiate it from algorithmic changes. The reason we do that is we want to be as transparent as possible. We can’t possibly reveal the exact code for each change, but we’ve gotten pretty good at revealing the manual changes. If you haven’t registered in Webmaster Tools, you should, because whenever we make a change, you’ll hear about it in the Webmaster Tools console.

That’s why if you were hit by Penguin, a reconsideration request isn’t going to help you?

That’s right. People who think it should rank higher after Penguin can let us know and we can look at it, and in a couple of instances, it actually helped us make a couple of tweaks to the algorithm.

Speaking of cases being approved, there was the WPMU site out of Australia who said they haven’t done anything wrong, referring to footer spam.

They didn’t rank as high after Penguin, they made their case, and I thought it was a good case. We were able to remove about 500,000 instances of links, and that helped them.

Why aren’t blog networks effective anymore?

We’ve been taking stronger action. It’s interesting to see the reaction to that in regards to negative SEO. People have asked about negatvie SEO for a while. There’s the case of sex.com, where someone actually faxed in an impersonation of the rightful owner, who had to go to court to get it back. So we’re trying to make it more difficult for a competitor to make things difficult for another competitor. We build in a lot of protections. Some people have indicated a hope that we could disavow links. Even though we put in a lot of protections, there have been enough people to ask about that to make us consider whether it might make sense.

Getting back to WPMU…

There are people who continue to sell links, although they don’t do any good, and that’s part of how SEO has a bad reputation. If we de-index a site, it’s a clear indication that selling links isn’t doing anyone any good. Here’s the litmus test, why we think it’s important to differentiate between penalties and manual corrections: It’s not practical to have 500+ changes every year, and for every one of those, you get a notification that you’ve been affected by it. Early this year, we’ve started to send more messages, something like 700,000. People thought it was unnatural link warnings, but they weren’t. The vast majority of them were very clear-cut black hat, and spam. We told people about things like hidden text, and earlier this year we said let’s also tell the people who have a black hat violation so we’re completely transparent with the manual actions we take.

About paid links…anything going on there? Anything recently?

We’re always working on improving our tools and how we can spot people buying links and blog networks. People don’t realize, when you buy links, you might think you’re very careful, that you have no footprints, but you may be getting into business with someone who’s not as careful. People need to realize as we build new tools, it becomes a higher-risk endeavor.

Last year JC Penney got hit, and this year a major agency got hit.

Yeah, if everyone else is jumping off a bridge…no, don’t do it! If you ask any SEO, is SEO more dynamic and maybe a little harder than five years ago, they’ll say it’s more challenging. You can expect that to continue. I feel pretty good about the way all the search engines are getting more serious about it. We see good trends. Some things that work short-term aren’t going to work long-term.

Affiliate links—I think you said we don’t need to worry about that. Do people need to make sure they’re nofollowing?

We handle the vast majority of network links appropriately, but I would say if you’re worried about it, go ahead and nofollow them if you’re making money from them.

[Unfortunately, I missed Danny's question here. Maybe someone can share it in the comments?]

Douglas Adams wrote, space is big. You have no idea how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big space is. The Web is like that. If you look at the Library of Congress, they have roughly 34 millions books, something like 235 terabytes of data. That’s not that much data. YouTube gets videos uploaded every minute. There’s more data on the Web than in any other source in the world. If you look at the percentage of nofollowed links on the Web, it’s a single-digit percentage. I wouldn’t write the epitaph for links just yet.

Matt likes 30-day challenges, like I’m going to go off the Internet, I’m only going to use Bing for 30 days…

I try to only do good habits!

I’d like to see you and members of your team find a small, non-profit and spend 30 days building links to that site. I’d like you to get in the trenches and see what it’s like. And they want it so badly, they’re going to agree. I would like to ask the SEOs to do a 30-day challenge where you put them into your shoes, too. So think about how you want to do that.

That’s totally fair. It’s one of the reasons I started my blog. A lot of people on my team do run their own Web sites. I’ll think about that.

What’s up with your war on SEOs, man?

There’s no war on SEOs!

Or is it just a war on spam?

Yes. We’ve been consistent over the last seven years. Make your content compelling. Give people a reason to come back to your site. If you look at black hat sites, you’ll see stuff like, how do you fake sincerity? How do you fake being awesome? Don’t fake it! Just be genuine! We do what we do so people can compete on a level playing field. Our philosophy has been relatively consistent.

Does Google look at bounce rate?

People keep asking, do you use GA? Google doesn’t use GA in its rankings. That’s the sort of thing…I like that, personally. Think about bounce rate. It’s going to be noisy. Every time you have a redirect, you lose about 1% of your traffic. That’s a good reason to minimize redirects. Bounce rate also doesn’t measure if you just got the answer you need. If you go to Google and type in “sunset,” you get the answer immediately, so you don’t need to stay. I understand the interest in people saying Google’s going to use it. We try not to take stuff off the table, I just see a ton of pitfalls in trying to use bounce rate.

What percentage of the organic queries on Google are now secure?

Not provided. If you look back with the perspective now, you can see Google is trying to make it so you can search more personal stuff. Over time we’d like to be able to index more data. That’s why we were adding all the SSL and all that. Whenever we launched SSL, we were launching it only in the US, so as I said, it was only 1 percent of sites that saw it. If you have a large percentage of signed-in users, you’re more likely to see a higher percentage of not provided. If you look at the trend, you’ll even see some browsers like Firefox saying they want more secure data. You want to know that no one can see your queries in Google. I think SSL is a good way forward to protect users’ queries. I realize that puts marketers at a disadvantage. We’re not happy about that, but we have to put the users first.

Now you can go back 90 days, and get 2,000 queries. The only thing you’re missing is the exact query when someone landed on a page. Moving toward SSL is the right direction.

We now have a Python script where you can run that every day, and keep that data for as long as you want. You can download it, at least.

What is going on with not being able to block sites anymore?

You can block in the Chrome extension, and in the search results. People who complained about some very high-profile sites, the Panda update we did incorporate that data.

Blogs powered by WordPress have that footer link. Why weren’t they affected by the most recent update?

We’re trying to address Web spam violations. When you look at the volume of WordPress links, it’s a pretty high volume of quality links.

Why isn’t AdWords secure?

I wouldn’t mind going back to revisit that decision, but the reason is if it were, I’d expect every advertiser to go in and make everything exact match. We’d have to deal with exponentially large amounts of matching data.

If you received a warning due to unnatural links, should you submit a reconsideration request?

Yes. Then we’ll let you know whether you did enough, or you still have work to do.

Does Google penalize sites for using rich snippets?

People used to complain about not being able to get rich snippets. Now, it’s that other people have rich snippets. I’m glad we erred on the side of inclusion. You’ll see people using rich snippets wehre they don’t really apply. So that could lead to a demotion. That’s an example of where we need to make sure it doesn’t get abused.

We were penalized because of incoming links, submitted a reconsideration request, but we remain penalized. What do we have to do?

When you’re getting a warning like that, we’re typically looking at a sub-sample, a random sample. When you submit a reconsideration request, we’re going to look at those, and if none of those have been removed, nothing’s going to change.

If you can’t get rid of the bad links pointing to a page, should we get rid of the page?

You could, if it’s not a critical page. But think about how you’re going to document the effort.

[Missed another question here. Sorry!]

We have a good list of leads ourselves. We’ve shut down tens of thousands, maybe hudnreds, involved in networks, link buying, etc. We have to differentiate between what the person is saying, and what information we have available to us. The balance is, we take the impact of the spam report, and multiply it by a factor of four. We basically say, look, they might be reporting a small incident of spam, so if you multiply it by four, we get a better idea of the impact it has.

Is Google making Google+ so SEOs simply become your pawns to take over Facebook?

Not in my opinion. It’s still early days…(the crowd erupts in laughter)…no, wait! It’s still early days! When we look at that data, it’s not the best quality signal yet. We’re going to look at search quality rankings, and other things, and the +1 data has to make its way in that world too. I think Google+ has a lot of potential. There are reasons to be excited about it, but I wouldn’t say you have to do a ton of +1s right now.

There’s a blog post going up right now, “Matt Cutts says don’t use Google+!”

Hey, why’d you guys call it Penguin, by the way?

There actually was an engineer named Panda. We let the lead engineer pick. I suggested a cute, furry animal might be good, but he chose Penguin.

If you were hit by Panda and Penguin, should you just give up?

Sometimes. Sometimes you should. It might be better to start over. But both are algorithmic, so if you change the signals, you can recover. If you produce content people like, you can come back. We’ve seen sites come back, like WPMU. But if you’ve been spamming, don’t expect that to work anymore.

What’s with paid inclusion?

You call it that, but that’s not a Web ranking. Google’s take on it is that you’re taking money and not disclosing it. I think Google’s Web rankings remain just as pure as they were ten years ago. By doing these different things, we can get access to data we didn’t have before, and it’s helpful to users. But I think if money is going to change hands, you should absolutely disclose it. We care very much about the integrity of our rankings.

So, I stalk you. I searched your name. People say some really mean things about you sometimes. How do you handle that? Do you want to slap them upside the head sometimes?

The beauty of participating in forums for the past decade is I’ve developed a thick skin. People aren’t striking out because they’re vicious. It’s because they’re defensive, or they’re hurt in some way. But you also have people who sincerely think Google is doing something wrong, so we want to listen to those people and see if there’s anything we need to change.

What’s the coolest thing you like in search right now?

There’s some fun stuff I’m looking forward to that hasn’t launched yet, but I’m excited about it.

That doesn’t help us.

If you search for Danny Sullivan, you’ll see a little knowledge graph about you, and it’s pretty cool.

What’s the coolest thing you like about Google right now?

I’m really excited about the fact that we’re pushing for more transparency. I think we’re not done, but we’re getting there. If you had told me before that after we caught a spammer, we were going to tell them that we caught them, I would have thought you were crazy. But we’re doing it, and we’re trying to make the Web a better place.

What other thing do you think is really cool right now?

FitBit. It’s like a little pedometer that tells you how many steps you take every day, and you can connect with friends. It’s actually very competitive, though. People will ask me, do you want to be FitBit friends? And I say, I don’t know, how many steps a day do you take? Oh, you’re too fit for me, forget it. But yeah, it’s a fun thing.

And that’s it! Day one of SMX is over, but there’s plenty more good stuff coming up tomorrow. So in the words of Matt Cutts, peace out, spread the love, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

I’ll get as much as I can, but you’ve been warned! [Now that I'm done, yeah, wow, he went super fast, so what follows is basically a big list of all the tools Mike mentioned.]

The ability to write code is pretty much a super power today, according to Matt Cutts. Mike says it’s the first time he’s ever agreed with Matt.

On-page Analysis

• Screaming Frog – You can crawl a whole site in minutes.
• Scraper for Chrome
• HTTPFox
• Page Speed Plugin

Keyword research (other than AdWords Keyword Tool)

• Yahoo Clues – lets you see the type of people who search for your keywords.
• Keyword Eye – gives you a word cloud
• Soovle – scrapes suggest for things from Amazon, Google, YouTube
• Ubersuggest – does the same thing, but adds location
• Scrapebox – don’t use it as a black hat tool; use it for keyword research
• AdWords API Excel Plugin from @SEOGadget
• GoFish – pulls the last 200 tweets from Twitter, and find the keywords that occur several times
• Facebook Recommendation Demo – not a tool, a widget for your site; you put in a domain name, it gives you the top five most shared pieces of content from that site, you can expand to top 20

Spreadsheet Magic

• SEOTools by Niels Bosma – get this now
• ImportXML for Google Docs – you can do a lot with this
• Link Research Tools – tells you why your competitors are beating you; slices and dices all your competitor information
• Link Detective – important post-Penguin; crawls links and tells you the location, sidebar, comments, etc.
• SearchMetrics Essentials – you can see how well a site is doing in just seconds

Analytics

• Keyword-Level Demographics – put your site on Facebook Open Graph, and you get information on everyone who visits your site; read the post on SEOmoz
• Google Analytics Debugger – you don’t get to see custom variables in Analytics real time, but you can with Debugger.

Personas – How do you find them

• Facebook Ad Creator – same as keyword tool, but for ads
• Facebook Insights
• Doubleclick Ad Planner

How to Visualize Data

• Infogram
• Piktochart (a good post from pointblankSEO)
• shy away from infographics—they’re played out
• Storybird – you can make books; Mike encourages you to do this
• Ahrefs
• Blekko
• linkdiagnosis

Bookmarklets

• Open Graph Helper
• Wirify

Rankings

• STAT – they update every day, and have the STAT codex that tracks tons of keywords for brands and verticals

Link Building Toolkit

• FollowerWonk – quickly identify influencers
• Outreachr – gives you IP, link metrics, country, etc.
• KnowEm – uses it to stalk people and find out who they are in social
• MentionMapp – lets you see who people talk to
• IFTTT
• Rapportive – see who you’re talking to
• Boomeragng
• Buzzstream
• Zemanta – WordPress plugin for bloggers

Managing Multiple Blogs

• ManageWP – don’t use for blog network (but you could)

Most important tool Mike uses: his brain! You’re not going to use all those tools. Just figure out which are the best tools for you, and use those.

Next up is Merry. She’s going to talk about Facebook hidden gems in Insights.

She just jumps right into listing the tools she recommends.

Organic Social Questions

• What are my goals?
• What are my KPIs?
• How big is my circle? Degrees of separation?
• Where can we associate conversations?
• To what extent was content exposed?
• What types of content received the most exposure?
• How did users engage with site? Rebroadcast? Like?
• What are the demographics of your audience?

Hidden Gems in Facebook Insights

• Post-Level Reporting – tells you what people hate. You can pull the report and find negative feedback.

Third-Party Tools for Social

• Identify Your Needs
• Page Management
• Manage Multiple Accounts
• Social Listening
• eCommerce
• Robust Analytics
• Reporting

Button & URL Analytics

• Bit.ly
• ShareThis
• AddThis

Social & Open Graph Site Tool

• janrain – prices range from free to $2,250/year; it stores users demographic info; you can socially share activity; they also have loyalty reward games

Google: Social Analytics Overview

• You can see who came from where, how long they’re spending on your site, and find the search volume
• Conversions and Assists
• Visitor Flow

Monitoring Tools

• SocialMention – free
• TrackUr – inexpensive, but there’s an enterprise-level option

Twitter-Specific Tools

• The Archivist – free
• TweetReach – free to $899/month
• TwitterCounter – free to $150/month

Facebook Tools

• CrowdFactory
• WildFire
• Shoutlet
• PageModo
• Vitrue – has a multilingual tool

Facebook Management and Analytics Tools

• Hootsuite
• MediaFunnel
• Buddy Media
• Awareness
• Lithium
• Sprout Social

Posting, Listening, Analytics and Reporting Powerhouses

• Sysomos
• Raidan6 – has eCommerce integration

SEO, PPC, Social and Analytics Super Powerhouse

• Raven Tools – Multiple profiles and users, white labeled reports, Basecamp integration, and much more!

Now Rhea is going to talk about the business case for purchasing tools. Why is she qualified to talk about tools? She’s not a programmer, but she’s the CEO of a small agency that has to be nimble. She’s also worked in-house, and she’s built tools in our organization. She’s also purchased a lot of tools…and dated some!

Most of us weren’t hired to build tools—we were hired to think. As a boss, there’s nothing that drives her crazier than not thinking strategically.

When we combine tools and brains, we make something incredible. Sometimes we don’t.

Epic Tool Fail Study

She uses data from one of our clients, whom we can’t name. Their traffic went up overall, but their organic traff for target keywords went down. Why? Beause they switched to a new CMS.

What Went Wrong

• The new CMS contract was signed before we got involved. The executive team signed off on it, and we couldn’t get access to the dev site beforehand.
• IT had no training on how to manage the CMS, so everyone was dependent on the CMS proider, who didn’t hold to their guarantees
• IT turnover
• unplanned and extended code freezes while they worked on the CMS
• SEO agency (us) were not positioned as a consultant, but as a vendor (Rhea has an SEOmoz whiteboard Friday coming up all about that, so watch for it!); we weren’t involved in the purchase decision

How Are We Fixing It?

• Immediate SEO audit, which cost the client more money
• In-person visit, met IT
• Bribed IT with doughnuts, and our work got done
• Agency is now contracted as a consultant; now we’re managing their in-house team
• Halted development of new CMS on any new property; still have to work with the one we have

Actual Cost of Tool

It’s called a “switch-cost” when you’re going from one tool to another. They might sound good in theory, but turn out not to be good in practice.

• New CMS
• Internal time
• Agency time
• Loss of sales due to drop in organic traffic
• Agency SEO audit and consulting
• Travel down to see client
• Internal team morale and productivity
• Turnover
• Missed opportunities

Tool Selection Criteria

• Access – accessible in Windows and Mac? Viewable in multiple browsers?
• Cost – this is more than just the up-front cost of the tool
• Usability – is it user-friendly? Easy to use? Does tool provider offer customer support?
• Privacy and Intellectual Property – does it protect your personal data?
• Resource Management
• Added Value – Can the tool be easily replicated? Can it be customized?

Making the Business Case

Tool Value – (True Cost + Risks)

Switch Cost Considerations

Here, Rhea provided a list of about 20 things, so I’m going to recommend you seek out her slide deck. I’m sure we’ll be tweeting it soon. :-)

Make Things Simpler

Rhea mentions Jon Cooper (PointBlankSEO). He built a list of link building tactics. We took it and put it into a spreadsheet with dependencies.

She did the same thing with all the tools that were presented in this entire session, because she’s awesome like that. You can get it on the Outspoken Media Google+ Page: https://plus.google.com/101895425639809783585/posts

If you like it, +1 it!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

Mike says he’s been looking at Google since 2006. What is Google’s problem? Well, How do you rank a phone book? They needed to create an algorithm that covered about 125 million businesses. Not an easy task. So they created a mix of traditional local information and Web information.

They identified attributes they thought were important to Google, things like proximity, business name, score of highest citation, total number of Web pages, etc. Most people aren’t familiar with the linking part of the algorithm, but it’s very significant in local search.

Two things that drive rank: location prominence, and distance from the centroid.

Google will mix and match, and then normalize those two rankings to give you a result. That’s why it sometimes looks odd, because there’s no normalized solution.

Still valuable and used:

• reviews
• citations with links on business name or with keyphrase links, which are citation links

The location prominence algorithm is critical to local search. In the recent past it was about domain authority.

Regarding relevance and ranking factors, branded search is important. Google is showing a willingness to embrace branded search with blended results, which does away with the need for place pages.

In the very recent past, it was about place, domain/page prominence and personal authority. Google was relying a lot on local; now they’re relying on blended results. This is a big shift. Page prominence is taking a much bigger role in the new algorithm.

MapMaker has also grown in importance. It’s become a primary data source for them. It can be used to clean up records, and to get rid of spam. But in typical Google fashion, it’s buggy, sometimes just wrong, so hang on for the ride.

Venice Update

This was supposed to provide improved local results. Mike Ramsey wrote a great post [sorry, no link was provided] about the “citification of organic,” as Mike B. calls it. It opens up a longtail strategy to everyone. But more interesting was the triggering mechanism used to show these new, blended results.

Post-Venice Blended Result

Organic results can be in positions one through four, you have authorship… It’s a more complicated algorithm.

Look at AOL. They don’t buy Google local universal results. Their results are purely organic. Compare it to what you see in Google. The top three listings are the same. If you then compare with Google Maps, you can see how Google backfills information.

Now Google Places has become Google Plus. Mike B. confirms he just did these slides yesterday. [Did I call that, or what?!] All Google did was move your Places pages from one place to another, so the information is intact, but they left a bunch of broken links in their wake.

Mike B. says the change in reviews is huge, and Mike D. is going to talk about that more. Review stars disappeared from search results, and they added Zagat scores, which are less engaging, but they left the stars on the ads, which is kind of odd, but they’re more engaging. Google giveth, and Google taketh away. They took away rich snippets, but they gave us authorship.

The Near Future

An integration with G+ Business Pages. It’s going to be a very laborious process. He thinks an improved backend is also coming.

So, reviews are important, but there’s little change in the algorithm, so just manage it the way you always have.

Clearly, Google is moving toward place authority, domain authority, author rank, social signals, but brand is going to be very important, and will remain consistent throughout these changes.

Next is Mike R. [I'm going to have to call too many Mikes pretty soon! :-)] who’s going to talk about Understanding and Competing Against Black Hat Tactics.

Mike R. starts out by saying he doesn’t believe in white or black hats, but that everyone operates on a scale. His focus for this presentation is going to be what he considers pure black, which causes harm to others.

Negative local SEO have been going on for years. It’s nothing new, and he’s been dealing with it for years.

Fake Reviews

It’s hard to tell the real from the fake sometimes. The first question is, why do people fake reviews? Beause they matter. 72% consumers trust reviews, and 52% said positive reviews make them more likely to use a local business.

And because it’s easy! Take fiverr. Five bucks for someone to put up fake reviews, it scales very well. And those reviews can be found across the Internet.

Re-Submitting Negative Reviews

He gives an example of a person in Seattle who, every time a business gets a new listing, he just reposts his negative review, and immediately, it pops up to the top of the results.

And oh my gosh, Mike R. just threw a Twilight slide into his presentation. Minus points! But then he said Matt McGee is team Edward. Hmm…I’m not sure what that means, but okay, maybe he won a few points back.

Back to local search!

Google Reviews

It used to be, you could see when someone left a fake review, you could see their profile name. Now, it just says “A Google User.” So now the chances of being able to do anything about is are slim to none. But soon, you’ll have to start publishing reviews and have them linked to your G+ account, with your real name, photo, etc. So if you’re going to say something negative, you’re going to have to be responsible.

Not scary enough?

They’re also going to link to ALL your previous reviews! Do you think anyone is going to publish fake bad reviews under their real names? He says Google+ local raised the review bar so high only spammers will leave fake reviews.

He looked up John Doe: 356,000 results. So how many John Does can leave fake reviews? On fiverr, you can get 30 accounts for five bucks. That can do some damage.

It’s harder for businesses to get real Google reviews.

Track Your Reviews

He mentions a few tools, like getmelisted.net which allows you to track reviews, although he thinks it’s called sweetiq.com as of yesterday. There’s also getlisted.org and reviewpush.com. Any time you get a review, they send you an e-mail so you can track reviews.

Do Research

Look at the reviewer account, if applicable. Match the story and date with employees to find out more details about the event. If it’s fake, flag it as inappropriate. To do this, roll over the review, and a little flag appears. Click on it, and you can report the review as containing spam.

If that doesn’t work, carefully respond to the fake review. Be professional. People are going to react to how you react.

Important: The best defense is a good offense. If you’re constantly engaged in getting good reviews, it will be hard for bad reviews to negatively affect you.

Best way to do this? Create reviews cards. Hand them out to customers. Put a URL on them that sends people to a page that allows them to leave reviews.

N.A.P. Information

Name Address Phone number. Google grabs N.A.P. information from a lot of places and creates listings. But there are sites that basically aggregate and push information out to a lot of directories, and they submit bad data.

People will create listings with competitor names and a valid phone number, meaning when people search for competitors, your phone comes up. It’s dirty. The only thing you can do to combat this is claim all listings you can with the correct information by hand.

Other ways people can submit fake business information:

• Images
• Google MapMaker
• Hijacked Listings
• Moving Locations—People will drag the map pin to another location, like an uninhabited island, or Europe. It pulls people out of rankings.
• Mark as Closed – Supposedly Google fixed it, but he shows one from just last week. If it happens, you can click on “Not true?”, get your employees to click, too, to change it back.

Log in to your listing often, and do a “null” submit. Google will trust more recent submissions than your own if it hasn’t been updated for a while.

Please don’t do this to competitors. It’s dirty. If you use black hat tactics for yourself, then fine. But don’t use them to hurt others.

Now we’re down to the last Mike, and an Outspoken Media favorite, Mike D., not to be confused with the Beastie Boy.

Deep Granular Hyper Local Content #DGHLC

He says all the stuff Mike R. was just talking about makes his blood boil because he sees people do that. People have tried to do it to his small business.

Walking from LAS to Las Vegas Strip. Who has time to do this? Well, he took the time to do it, wrote about it, and got a lot of traffic from it.

Writing about you gets old. Provide content for your local community and go beyond the five-page mentality.

Local content is predictable and repeatable! Be the evangelist in your local community.

Every summer, there’s a volleyball tournament in LA. Mike goes, takes photos, does chiropractic work. Get involved in your own local events.

Any street fairs in your community? People want to know what’s going on. Tell them!

Local content takes discipline, persistence, and effort. He covers the LA marathon every year. He’s been doing it for about ten years, and now he gets a press pass, and about 200 pages of content beforehand.

The SMX social media conference is going to be in Vegas this December. The week before is the Las Vegas marathon. The strip is going to be closed, there will be thousands of runners, hundreds of volunteers, all kinds of stuff. It’s a huge opportunity for someone local to cover it and get some traffic from it.

People want to know about these things. Why are the streets closed? People will go to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s going on. You’ll get a lot of retweets if you’re talking about it.

Talk about when, where, and how, and then afterward, share photos and results. You can also provide information on ways to avoid traffic and crowds during the marathon, where to park. These are positive events people like and want to know about.

Never underestimate the power of an optimized photograph.

He’s had marathon posts published for Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities, and they appear high in the SERPs.

Local Content Prep Sheet

• City
• What kind of marathon/run
• maps (parking, directions, route, hot spots)
• highlight on volunteers (happy stories)
• photos (Flickr page, blog, Google+, FB, panoramio, etc.)
• video (YouTube, embed)
• race results
• twitter (engage community and use hashtags)
• success stories
• sprinkle in local links/citations

Other Ways to Provide Local Content

• Parades – There may not be an LA Lakers parade this year, but what about an LA Kings parade? NO ONE has written about that yet.
• Canoe Races
• Local Intent Photography – Sidewalk Views. Google maps take photos from the street, satellite photos are from above. Make sure you get sidewalk or up-close views that the others don’t offer. You’ll be the only person providing this. They don’t have the ability to create it—yet. They’re working on bicycle views.
• Local Construction – Take a photo and write a post. Maybe a real estate agent has written about it, so take the opportunity to provide information about it.
• Brands and Locations – People want to know things like where the Starbucks is located. The monorail is bankrupt because no one knows how to find it. You can get a good amount of traffic for information like that.
• Local Activities – Hiking. Where you can hike, where you can park. He wrote about hiking opportunities 15 minutes from his business. People who have no interest in his business, but were interested in hiking, were sharing the post, which brings traffic to his site.
• Local Art – Graffiti. He takes photos of graffiti, and it gets shared like crazy.
• Local Fauna
• Local Regulations – Skate parks, BMX parks, If you’re thinking your business has nothing to do with skate parks, you have to think outside the box. Even if your business has nothing to do with it, think of it from antoehr perspective—for example, as a parent.
• Local Transportation – Bus stop signs, parking signs, with local information.
• Local History – Monuments, statues. Take the time to commemorate people, things related to veterans and Memorial Day, people are looking for it.
• Local Archives – Venice in 1924. He says he’s the only guy who goes to the library in downtown Los Angeles. [I hope that's not true, because that would make me sad.] Who’s interested in archives? Researchers. Librarians, people who work at .edus. He’s going to spend some time in the Seattle library tomorrow gathering information like this.

Other Resources

• USDA Farm Service Agency
• DigitalGlobe
• GeoEye

Whew! With a list like that, you have NO excuse for not getting out there and becoming more involved in your city! Not to mention getting more traffic. Have at it!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

]]> http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/hardcore-local-seo-tactics-smx-advanced-2012/feed/ 6 http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/surviving-personalization-with-bing-and-google-smx-advanced-2012/ http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/surviving-personalization-with-bing-and-google-smx-advanced-2012/#comments Tue, 05 Jun 2012 19:32:33 +0000 Michelle Lowery http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=14819 Read More]]> I have to say, this is the fourth conference I’ve liveblogged, we’re only one session in, and I’m already digging the format. One session, then a 45-minute break, giving me plenty of time to not only publish my post, but get to the next session without running? Awesome. SMX, I thank you.

Now it’s time to focus on search engine personalization and how it affects results. You know Google’s not the only one playing that game, right? Our own Outspoken Media CEO Rhea Drysdale, along with Aaron Friedman, and Marty Weintraub are going to give you the lowdown on how the personalization functions work, and what you can do about it. While they present, Danny Sullivan will moderate. Listen up because it’s about to get good.

Danny starts things off by letting us know how cold it is up on stage. I have little sympathy because my fingers are like icicles and I have to liveblog and hope they don’t just crack on my keyboard.

First up is Marty. [Didn't I just see this guy?! He's everywhere!]

He starts off by saying the best way to impact personalized search is to be really personal.

Brands that aren’t participating are idiotic. Google isn’t really a social place, but to Google, it is, and they need Google+. Sure, there’s semantics in what you do, but it’s not the same as what you used to do.

Twitter and Facebook both matter less. SEO comes down to, why would anyone want to follow your smelly stuff? Here we are at a pinnacle conference in the world, and we’re talking about social. Talk about stuff that really matters. If they want to know about stuff and be alerted, they have to follow.

It’s not about fancy SEO changes. You can read about how to optimize stuff you put on Plus, but it comes down to feed marketing, which hardcore bloggers have been doing since, what, 1998? Danny, were you blogging in 1998? What did you call it?

Danny: “Writing.” [Danny is both moderator and straight man in this session!]

Vanity Bait

Understand human nature. Know that people are drawn to that.

I noticed years ago that if I gave additional resources on the blog, more people came to it. If you’re not mentioning people on Google+ that you’ve carefully brought there, you’re blogging for no one.

One thing you can do for great SEO, is go to Alltop, find your stuff, research the Plus profile for all your users, and engage them on Plus. The more people that engage with it, the better it will be.

You can tag people in Plus, you can make up/give awards—those things get people to engage. Anytime you interview people, that’s an amazing thing. Interview someone and only put it on G+, then put only the juicy stuff on your blog to get people to follow you there.

Curate the curators. Aggregate the aggregators.

Start by wiring up the inside stakeholders. This is what Google wants us to do. They just said, “You will be social.”

Get to know the media: bloggers, TV journalists, publishers, newspapers, radio jocks, etc.

Run FB ads to people who are reporters, columnists and editors. Drive them to your Plus page to see what you’re advertising and sharing.

Customer Service

Laura Lippay always says the best SEO is a product that doesn’t suck.

Celebrate Community

That’s where your business lives. Use organizations such as Rotary, Salvation Army, Junior League, Sports Volunteer Attorneys, etc. You’d be dumb not to claim the low-hanging fruit.

Minimum Participation in Plus

• Passive Distribution) Participation
• Push optimized content
• Actual day to day business flow
• Videos, press releases
• BE THERE!

If you can’t find one or two things to say about your business each week, there’s no business.

More Aggressive Participation

• Set goals
• Set community Business KPIs
• Active participation to served and delight
• research and engage users
• social ads to build circles
• Give, give, give, give, give
• network w/ competitors’ community

Closing Thought

The best way to impact personalized search is to be personal. [Does that sound familiar? Commit it to memory!]

Next is Aaron. He’s going to break his presentation into two parts: the current issue in personalized search, and the future of personalized search.

There are a couple of barriers in personalized search: how do I reach a larger audience, and how do I get my info to show up so people can find it?

It’s broken up into quantity and quality. They’re different, but connected. For users, it means getting more relevant results. For marketers, it means getting more people to see your results, or getting your content in front of people.

Facebook

Buy ads – not the shady way

Google+ and Twitter

Grow your other networks.

In the end, you can have all the quantity, but if it doesn’t mean anything, all you have is a bunch of crap. It’s meaningless. The goal is to make more quality content that resonates with your audience.

• Create Unique Content – don’t plagiarize
• Don’t Neglect Your Networks – If they ask questions, make sure you answer them
• Don’t use generic images
• Be creative – creativity goes a long way in search engines; infographics is a great example of that
• Be useful and helpful – answer questions, help your audience, become a valuable part of the community

Tactics to Improve Quality

Twitter buttons grab the title tag and header. The problem is, they’re underutilized. You need to have something that jumps out at people. If you put this code in your Twitter button, you can send a better message to your users. [Aaron just displayed an entire page of code. Yeah, that's not happening. I'll try to get a link to his presentation, and add it to this post later. :-)]

Engines are more social. Entities are playing a big role in this. In Google, we see entities are everywhere. Search engines are becoming more social than ever. They’re creating a new database.

It’s about understanding concepts through words: verbs, action attribution, frictionless sharing

Every one of us has the potential to become an entity.

Remember Wonder Wheel? Google Panels functions in a similar manner. Just something to think about.

The real thing we’re trying to do here is stay relevant, and be known for the things we want to be known for. This is already happening on Bing. People are showing up as experts on the search terms I enter into Bing.

The future of entity search is interest-based demographics. What I tell you I am interested in defines me. Social data is your attributes.

Interest graphs already exist using tools like MentionMapp.

What do you do with this?

• Focus on Rel=Author – this will be huge
• Focus on quality content – develop it according to what users are searching for
• Spend time growing your user base – don’t make it empty

Now we come to our own Rhea Drysdale – yay! [Yes, of course I'm biased.]

Her one takeaway is this: Personalization is the future of search, but it’s not just the future—it’s the present. Rhea says everyone’s results are already personalized, and recommends you read this post: http://www.seobythesea.com/2006/10/google-personalization-methods

Personlized Search Factors

• Location
• Search History
• Social Search

How does Google see your search history?

• browser
• toolbar
• search engine

Go to http://google.com/history and you can see your search history. You can opt out of them collecting it, but as Marty has said before, even if it’s not stored, your results will be personalized based on frequency of searches.

Google also sees your network based on the links you enter into each social profile.

How Does Google Track Your Friends?

How does Google identify your accounts?

• similarities between your Google account name and user names on other social networks
• similarities between your connections

Google also tracks what you +1.

At this point, Rhea asks everyone to +1 Outspoken Media on Google Plus. [Go ahead. I'll wait.]

How does Google Track your content?

When you link your G+ profile to the content you create, Google tracks it.

How does Google track social activity?

• conversions
• sources
• sharing
• formerly through Post Ranks, now social reporting

How do you measure personalization extent in GA?

Whether you agree with personalization or not, it’s taking place. GA will tell you percentage of people who are signed into Gmail when they come to your site, and will also tell you the percentage who are networked with social accounts.

Personalized Search is the Search Engine Arms Race! At SMX London Amit Singhal said secure search was the key to personalized results. Google doesn’t want to take over Facebook; they want to enhance search with the social graph.

Why did Google create [not provided]?

Keyword reports are obsolete when search results are personalized. If we could see which keywords are driving search rankings, it would be much easier to game. That’s what Rhea calls her tin hat theory.

Bing has said that personalization is taken from social, personal long term, short term personalization, location, privacy, transparency, and control.

Bing rank is comprised of: authority, quality of keyword match, personal preferences, and…something I didn’t catch. Sorry!

What’s in it for Bing? A competitive advantage tapping data from Twitter and Facebook.

Rhea’s BigAss List of Tactics

• Write Geo-Targeted Content – For one of our clients, 68% of their content is written with location-specific organic keywords
• Use schema.org markup language
• Use Offline Networking to Build Relationships – The client Rhea mentioned is a personal injury attorney – what do you need when you’ve been in a car accident other than attorney? Chiropractor, mechanic, massage therapist, whatever. We’re building a list of resources for this client to share with their community. We’re looking at everyone in his local area who’s active on Twitter and Facebook for him to connect with, and to send to those resources to build relationships.
• Optimize your site for Mobile
• Target for Multiple Languages
• Local Search – Ask the experts in the local panel [Yes, I am covering it this afternoon!]
• Brand Your: Name, Products, Company – Check out Branding Centric, a company we’re working with. Make sure you have a brand name people will search for.
• Write Great, relevant content
• Write often, and make sure it’s compelling and shareable
• Coordinate SEO with PR & Social
• Set up a Wikipedia Page
• Submit Your Data Through Freebase
• Set Up Authorship
• Brand Thought Leaders – This is hard to do, but effective.
• Publish Content Often
• Create Community Account Logins – Some people are too lazy to put a bookmark on their browser; use that to your advantage
• Use Gmail for Login – It’s all about getting connections.
• Use events to drive queries – Can you have meetups? Coding sessions? Post a schedule on your site.
• Create and post content to Google+
• Set Up Google+ Direct Connect
• Increase your Google+ followers – put a G+ box on your blog
• Use LinkedIn to identify your network – viewers of this profile also viewed…
• Hold giveaways, contests, sweepstakes
• Use Facebook login for comments
• Create long- and short-term content
• Engage your community – Things SEOmoz is doing: threaded comments, subscribe to comments, thumb-up comments to increase moz score.

Rhea’s final piece of advice: “Now GO DO IT!”

And we’re out! Well, at least until after lunch. See you then!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

Let’s just jump right in, shall we? We’re kicking things off with Hardcore Social Tactics. Think you already know everything there is to know about social? Think again. Vince Blackham, Brent Csutoras, Monique Pouget, and Marty Weintraub still have a few tricks up their sleeves, and they’re about to share them while Greg Finn and Eric Enge moderate, so get comfy.

First up, we have Monique Pouget. She starts off with Pinterest.

We all hear it’s valuable, right? She’s going to talk about using if for mining social and marketing data, and how you can build content around what people are pinning.

Use this to see what’s being pinned from your own site, but also as a quick competitive research tool: http://pinterest.com/source/YOURWEBSITE.COM/

Add this bookmarklet to your browser: http://bit.ly/interest-bookmarklet It will allow you to export anything from Pinterest into a .csv file so you can easily sort data like what people are pinning and their user names, which is really interesting because sometimes people use the same user names across social networks. They may also just be using their first and last name, which is super easy to Google.

Pinterest Tools

PinReach

This tool allows you to add people’s pins, and figure out their most popular pins, and their most active followers.

Pinpuff

Some of the same metrics as PinReach, but you can also see the “pin worth,” which is anything tied to a landing page, or anything tied to a sale. It also shows the CPC. Anotehr great way to compare Pinterest profiles.

Sleuthing

This isn’t a tool, it’s just old fashioned sleuthing. This is where we’re thinking about personae, who are these people, what can you add to the conversation? You can use this for content creation, as well as prospect lists of the people most likely to share your content in the future.

Pinterest isn’t just a silo—this is what people are sharing. Look at their captions—how do they speak? Get a feel for how they talk. Then go to their site and you can see what they love. It may not always be as clearly laid out, but people are sharing what they love, so you can get some good insight for your content.

You can also use their captions to create word clouds to analyze what people are talking about, using a tool like Wordle.

Create a guide to inform the rest of your link building team what they need to be going for, and what kind of content you need to be creating for your link building strategy.

Monique recommeds this post: http://bit.ly/pinterestpersonas

Convert Twitter Followers to Prospects

Hoosaid and FollowerWonk will help you identify influencers by searching Twitter bios for certain terms and trends. Amplicate, Topsy, SocialMention will also help in these efforts.

You can also use advanced search operators on Twitter.com, as well as Google to find information that isn’t shared.

After you identify the influencers, you want to dig a little deeper. Use twtrland and Twitalyzer to see people’s top followers, what’s been retweeted the most, the people who are influenced the most by your subject, network demographics, and the people they’ve connected with most recently.

Friend or Follow is another awesome tool. You can see how many people your subject follows, and how many follow him. If someone follows few but has many followers, he’s an industry leader. This also looks like a prospect list.

Twitter Lists

Separate your twitter prospects into lists so you can divide and conquer. This will help you figure out how to talk to people and customize your message.

Follow up with Twitter prospects that don’t convert after first touch. Rob Ousbey has a good process for this strategy: http://www.distilled.net/blog/author/rob

Monitoring

Monique loves Hootsuite for monitoring. One cool trick is to use one of the search terms as the URL for your site. By adding that as a search term, you pull in all the tweets that shared that site. Really cool from a branding perspective, or from a competitor perspective. Ask yourself, Can I intervene? Can I share more?

Monique says she’s not going to go too much into Facebook because Marty’s going to cover that.

And a buzzer goes off! Greg is not playing around with the moderation! Monique finishes up quickly.

Facebook

In Facebook, you can do private messaging, use cover photos, there’s some cool stuff going on with Timeline, so check that out. Facebook’s helping on the organic side of things.

Open Graph

This will help you see visual representations of people and their followers, and how they’re sharing your information.

Monique loves this idea from Mike King: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-level-demographics It helps you create these pieces of content directed at the personae you’re targeting. Gives you info you can’t find on Facebook insights.

Up next is Marty Weintraub. His presentation is called Extreme Social Tactics.

Marty says he can’t help but think back to 2007, which kicked off serious social marketing thought. Back then, we focused on Wikipedia, MySpace, and we were just starting with Facebook, and Facebook Groups. It’s been a wild trip since then because now we know what we can target with marketing.

Targeting is at risk. How long are we going to be able to target people with certain terms? Right now you can send single segments to a page, but he’s thinking we might lose that.

Greg Finn wrote a great post about this about paid organification of Facebook.

What is Facebook? It’s a glorified e-mail list with little chance of the information jumping the wall without you paying Facebook.

Our friend Dennis studied 100M pageviews on Facebook last year. At its base, FB is a subscription list. Don’t get confused by it. People can like you. Conversations happen among users, among brand pages, between brands and friends. It’s very simple.

As a brand, if I post on a page, my followers see it. They might engage. I’m speaking of content now, but there are other applications. Conversations break out between friends on the wall. You understand this part, right? Their followers see it play out in their News Feeds. But it’s not as good as it was before they neutered the virility of Facebook [I'm quoting that verbatim, just in case you're wondering. -Michelle]. FB has ratcheted it down because they’re a big company and it makes sense.

The ticker neuters the visibility of it. It goes by really fast. It isn’t sitting large in the News Feed. It limits its ability to jump the wall. The part where it goes from friends to friends isn’t there. When friends endorse something, we all know it’s very valuable.

When you’re looking at that increased place where friends of friends interact with a brand and others see it, that’s big. It’s called a sponsored story. Don’t worry about how you get to these types of ad units, just know they’re there. The kind of ads that jump the wall come in two flavors: the paid kind, and content or application.

First, start your content on a site you own with proper open graphs with the right size image and the right description so when you put it on your FB page, it looks right. Then when you make an FB ad out of it, it also looks right.

We know on LinkedIn, I can target a lot of journalists, but most people don’t know you can run that in Facebook too. Run Alpha patterns. Like “magazine A” in the employment bucket, and you can find amazing people to follow.

Summary

• Page post ad (first degree) – Don’t worry about it. It’s expensive, site & wall traffic, likes
• Page post like story (second degree) – inexpensive, traffic to sit, few likes
• Page like story – (second degree) expensive traffic to wall, many likes

When someone likes your brand, all their friends see it, and the whole thing just keeps going like that. It’s really amazing.

Look for the stuff that works with your people. Then you’ll have a really focused community, and you can decide what to do with it. How to channel it offsite.

When you hear about legislation about how things online should be curtailed, really think about it. We need to have open minds as marketers.

Now it’s Brent’s turn. He’s going to talk about viral traffic and the different networks out there. He’s not going to talk about FB or Twitter, but tactics.

He got into content marketing about six years ago, and he wants to pass on what he’s learned. Some of it is about concepts and philosophies.

Most importantly, content marketing still works! It actually works better today than ever. It’s harder, takes more effort, focus, and work, but when you do it right, the effects are astounding. I want you to get an idea of why you should be interested in this.

For example, a Chinese gangster shared a photo on line and it went viral. We shared it, and we got quite a few good links and good traffic from it.

On Search Engine Journal, we do Friday humor posts, and we’ve seen some good traction on that. Anywhere from 30K to 80K views. Also seen good traction on Pinterest. It’s a marketing blog, so we see some resistance, so to get that kind of traction on social media is important to us.

Just want to emphasize that content marketing really does work. You should be concerned with social signals right now.

Be Prepared to Succeed

It may sound simple, but it’s really important. The majority of people tend to look at social media as a band-aid solution to get links, traffic, or conversions. It’s a very narrow approach rather than having a real strategy or making it part of your business plan. This is how people are finding content. This is the future.

You need to have a dedicated team, person, or contractor. Have someone who’s nimble and able to respond quickly. They need to understand the networks, what categories to target. You need to have established networks. If you don’t take the time for it, you won’t be able to make your voice heard. When you have a story go popular, how are you going to get it on FB?

Biggest wins I’ve had on social media, I never thought would succeed. Ended up getting millions of views, and I didn’t even think they were very good. Like the Chinese gangster guy. I didn’t think it was that great, but we put it out there, and it worked. If you’re not nimble, you’ll miss out. Might not seem like a hardcore tactic, but it’s important.

Monitor Your Site in Social

Most social sites allow you to enter your URL to see what’s there. You can do it on Reddit, Digg, Delicious, etc. You may find something you can transition into your own existing content. Sometimes you’ll find an image on one of those sites, and you can connect it to your content. It’s a really basic tactic.

Go to the site, do the searches, make a bookmark folder, and just monitor everything. It goes back to tip one—be nimble. It’s important to have diversity on these sites. Don’t submit your own all the time. Find someone who’s submitting your stuff, and promote them.

Reddit

One of the hardest sites to succeed in right now. It’s layer upon layer of code band-aids and fixes to keep spammers out, so it’s really difficult to use. Most people get discouraged and give up. Here are a few tips to be successful on Reddit.

• Don’t worry about accounts
• Silent bans and filters
• new to reddit
• new to subreddit
• account filtered
• domain filtered
• manual approval
• Checks (while logged out)
• view profile for page not found (if this happens, you’re done. it’s time to create a new account. Reddit does not monitor the subreddits. It just acts as a dashboard. You can contact subreddit owners directly.)
• check new section

Learn These Rules

• Understand where to submit
• redditlist.com
• biggest isn’t always best
• Know the subreddit rules
• TIL has to be two months old
• bestof is only for Reddit links
• NSFW needs to be nude
• WorldNews excludes US
• Participate where it is active
• Entertainment
• Show in top 10 on submission

Pinterest

We haven’t seen a hug amount of traction from this.

• Focus on your network
• Pinterest cares about the ACCOUNT (Going to share this with you: Pinterest doesn’t care about username, e-mail, boards—if you can figure out what that means, then good luck to you)
• #tags for search
• Weekends and evenings

Hat tip to Ross Weale @wealer for this information.

Success with Stumbleupon

• Network Tree/Popular Algorithm
• build network appropriately
• share with network stragtegically to get positive votes
• Stay Very Active
• show on on /content/
• choose categories and tags strategically
• run stumbleupon ad campaign
• help whitelist your domain
• ID related tags
• Learn subsriber numbers
• choose real stumbleupon interests for tags

What I’m Not Saying

There’s a lot I won’t say in public about these sites, but will say in private settings, so come up and talk to me and I’ll be happy to share with you.

Last, we come to Vince. He’s going to cover why content marketing is more important than ever.

His presentation is called Why You Should Be on Pinterest. He starts out by showing a video, which is just about impossible to liveblog, and is just one reason why you have to try to make it to these conferences if you can!

We’ve been doing a lot of visual content and viral stuff lately. It’s getting tougher to get your content out there, but Pinterest really helps.

We all know content is king, but I’m going to talk ab out the visual aspect of that.

Visual Content is King.

Infographics get no love. We thought it would be awesome to post them on Pinterest, but it turns out people on Pinterest don’t like data. It’s more of a how-to thing. As cute as your infographics may be, Pinterest may not be the best place for them.

I want to talk about some things that really work. First, is the size. He shows a photo of the rake turned wine glass rack which got thousands of views on Pinterest, but didn’t turn into site traffic. So make the photos small enough to pique interest, but not so large that they don’t have to click through to your site.

Make your images less than 5K pixels long – make people go to your site, and you’ll get a ton of repins. There’s also a lot of shares on FB.

Use a large title and easy-to-read steps for instructographics.

They did one called 21 household uses for vodka – household stuff gets shared a lot, and does really well. They’ve seen almost 300,000 visits from that one.

With Pinterest, bounce rates have gone down. They average about 2.5 minutes from instructographics pinned on Pinterest. They’ve also tracked instructographics for conversions, and they’re doing really well. One company dropped their radio advertising to focus on Pinterest, and their traffic skyrocketed.

It’s not a backlink generator. It’d be great if it was like Digg in the old days, but it’s not.

Quick Tips for Pinterest

• Make it about your product, but not. Make it relevant, but not about yourself. How to use your product, but not about the product.
• DIY and how-tos are the most popular and most successful. Top 12 lists are ideal 10 not enough 15 too much
• Use ubersuggest to mine for ideas of what people are looking for, and how to turn it into a DIY piece
• consider how the subject can cross over into multiple categories so they’ll move to the top of the category pages. You’ll get a lot of repins, and a lot of traffic.
• Two – three times a day is more than enough to get a good push. Look for peak hours. Between 4pm and 11pm is the best time when people are most active. Still get some during work hours, but not as much.
• If something doesn’t work, repurpose it, and do it again.

Move away from what’s going to get you links to what’s going to get people to the site. Start thinking “resourcebait” instead of “linkbait.”

Also use tineye to check for attribution. A lot of people will take stuff without crediting you for it.

And that’s it for the first session! Can you believe all this is from just one session?! I may need oxygen before the day is out. Stay tuned for more SMX Advanced awesomeness!

Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!

]]> http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/hardcore-social-tactics-smx-advanced-2012/feed/ 0 http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/smx-advanced-2012-liveblogging-schedule/ http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/smx-advanced-2012-liveblogging-schedule/#comments Fri, 01 Jun 2012 13:30:25 +0000 Michelle Lowery http://outspokenmedia.com/?p=14805 Read More]]> Okay, nobody move! I seem to have misplaced the entire month of May. I could have SWORN it was just here a minute ago, and now somehow it’s June already. But it turns out that’s a good thing because it means it’s time for Search Marketing Expo Advanced! Rhea, Emily, and I are headed to Seattle next week for what promises to be a fantastic conference. Great speakers, interesting topics, and a networking event at the Seattle Aquarium, which I’m super excited about. I don’t like to eat fish, but I do think they’re pretty to look at.

If you’re attending, you won’t want to miss Rhea speaking on two panels: Surviving Personalization with Bing and Google, and Hardcore SEO and Social Power Tools. If you’ve seen Rhea speak, you know she brings it, so get there early for a good seat.

This will also be the first industry conference ever for Emily, so we’re counting on all of you to help her feel welcome. And me? Well, I’ll be liveblogging both days, so if you can’t make it, you’ll want to stick close to the blog for all the SMX Advanced coverage you can handle. Don’t let that stop you from saying hello, though!

Take a gander at the sessions I’ll be covering:

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

9:00 – 10:15: Hardcore Social Tactics
11:00 – 12:15: Surviving Personalization with Bing and Google
1:45 – 3:00: Hardcore Local SEO Tactics
3:30 – 4:45: Hardcore SEO and Social Power Tools
5:00 – 6:00: You & A With Matt Cutts

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

9:00 – 10:00: Keynote with Bing’s Derrick Connell
10:45 – 12:00: iSEO: Doing Mobile SEO Right
1:30 – 2:45: Pagination & Canonicalization for the Pros
3:00 – 4:15: Amazing Paid Search Tactics & Tools

Looks like a lot of great info, right? Right. So take a moment to subscribe to the blog and follow us on Twitter because you don’t want to miss a moment of this conference.

See you in Seattle!

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