PubCon Las Vegas 2012, Thursday, October 18th

Proactive Link Campaign Tactics:

Todd Malicoat sums it up pretty well, “Link is to SEOs, what snow is to Eskimos. Both have so many varieties and meanings.” There is no one link fix, as you build your link campaign, you need a broad link profile and a creative approach that keeps diversity in mind.  While social media and content marketing may be your prime focuses post-penguin, you can still have an interesting approach to link building within either category.  

Social Media Automation Tools:

The social media automation panel presented insights and tools on spending more time automating social responses and less time listening. The key to social automation is a blend of finding the right recipe of tools to increase productivity, expanding your social reach and creating messaging unique to each audience.

Twittersphere Customer Service Strategies:

Winning at Twitter customer service is dependent on putting the effort in beyond the Twittersphere. There are practices that you can take that keep your interactions on Twitter polite and engaging, but if you are not mirroring that in your other customer service channels, Twitter can just become a spot for your customers to air grievances.

Well that’s it everyone. Thanks again to Michael Dorausch for providing some great photos, and to the speakers for providing such great tips, tactics, and educational tidbits. See you all next year!

For more PubCon 2012 coverage check out:

PubCon Las Vegas 2012: Day 1 Coverage
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Two, Morning
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Two, Afternoon
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Morning

PubCon Las Vegas 2012, Thursday, October 18th

Day Three Morning Takeaways

ROI: Convergence of Online Marketing and Analytics:

The panelists urged the audience to be creative with your analytics; make sure that you are tracking things in a variety ways. You may not see the value of something tedious like tracking your top 100 keywords, but those steps are so important to setting up a baseline. You are looking for deeper insights. Likewise, capture and measure as much as you have budget for, you may not need that data now…but you may want to see what has been causing changes down the line. Invest in tools.

Competitive Intelligence- Social Media Tools and Tactics:

How are you leveraging your different social channels to promote the content on them, and across your platforms? Start with thinking competitively about what you are doing, and what others are doing in your niche. The number of tools out there can seem daunting at first, but the return on a little bit of research and analytics is worth it, if it can help you turn traffic to conversions.

For more PubCon 2012 coverage check out:

PubCon Las Vegas 2012: Day 1 Coverage
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Two, Morning
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Two, Afternoon
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Afternoon

PubCon Las Vegas 2012, Wednesday, October 17th

Day Two Afternoon Takeaways

What’s Up at Bing?:

If you haven’t been using Bing lately, you should really start. Duane highlighted some of the intuitive tools available to webmasters, including a comprehensive SEO analyzer. Bing is also introducing social search integration that is both intuitive and user experience based.

E-Commerce Marketing Strategies:

Phil Leahy and Aaron Shear discuss and demonstrate the latest tools and strategies for e-commerce sites including automated product videos, incentive based social sharing applications, and why you need to be analyzing log files. Key insights during this session included how template and video optimization, rich snippets, and page speed performance all contribute to increased performance for your E-Commerce site.

Post Mortem: Banned Site Forensics

Banned Site Forensics was all about honesty, because if you are looking to file a reconsideration request, honesty needs to be an integral part of your application. Beyond honesty, the forensic experts urged the audience to build up quality content, and learn from previous mistakes.

SEO for E-Commerce:

Spider loops, rogue web-apps, money pages and filtered navigation were all the rage during the SEO for E-Commerce presentations given by Gregg Banse and Ethan Giffin. Top takeaways during this session included how to optimize product landing pages to maximize conversions, how to offset clutter vs. quality content, and why e-comm strategies should be easy to use, easy to understand and easy to measure.

See you tomorrow for more exciting SEO goodness.

For more PubCon 2012 Coverage check out:
PubCon Las Vegas 2012: Day 1 Coverage
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Two, Morning
Pubcon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Morning
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Afternoon

PubCon Las Vegas 2012, Wednesday, October 17th

Morning Takeaways

Content Strategy:

Good content strategy is not just about fitting in keywords, or filling out your site, it’s about story telling. The panelists emphasized the need to not only tell a story that engages your audience with a beginning, middle, and end, but to focus on the purpose of your story. By thinking through what your audience is looking for in your brand, and what you as a brand want to tell them, you’ll develop more successful and engaging content.

Algo-Proofing–Sustainable SEO:

One of the best takeaways from Algo-Proofing came from Ryan Jones, “Good SEOs optimize for Google today.  Great SEO’s optimize for the Google of the future.” The whole panel echoed a similar sentiment, urging the audience to think long term about SEO, and to forget about short term fixes.  The most sustainable practices are based in focusing on the user.

More good Pubcon 2012 coverage, check out:
PubCon Las Vegas 2012: Day 1 Coverage
PubCon Las Vegas 2012: Day Two, Afternoon
Pubcon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Morning
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Afternoon

We’ll be dropping PubCon coverage at the end of each day into a post with the help of Michael Dorausch, @chiropractic who is snapping gorgeous shots along with our team to bring you the real inside scoop.

PubCon Last Vegas 2012, Tuesday, October 16th

Morning Day 1 Takeaways

Local Search Rankings:

Making local search rankings work for you is all about the details, think small, then big. Start with verifying your information, phone number, address, and making sure that the information your customers want is up there. Then build up to making your business easily promoted by your clientele  through check-ins, reviews, and promotions.  Study your customers and find ways to creatively interact with them online. Make it fun and easy for them.

SEO: Hot Topics and Trends:

Competitive link mining and link development processes were the key themes throughout the SEO Hot Topics session. Utilizing tools to manage information and significantly refining backlink data to remove the clutter and assess quality ratings, are key to establishing a baseline to build upon. Link building has clearly changed, and while everything that used to work no longer does, it now needs to touch multiple departments including PR, legal, marketing and sales.

Reputation Management: Monitoring Your Brand Online:

Haters aren’t always going to just hate, sometimes they have a real complaint, with legitimate reasons behind it. Your reputation management strategy needs to keep the real person behind the complaint in mind.

Afternoon Day 1 Takeaways

Matt Cutts: Google:

Google’s new Disavow tool is on the way, but with great power, comes great responsibility. Get all of the details over at Search Engine Land.

In-House SEO Strategies:

In-House SEO can be hard, but by finding a way to integrate with the team and offer up recommendations and information in ways that make sense to your department you’ll be more successful. Make alliances, and present clear information in ROI terms that will motivate all departments.

The Best Tactics in Landing Page Optimization:

A bold, moving, call to action surrounded by 8 pp text may seem like a good idea, because it allows you to fit in everything that you wanted to get on the page, but think about it from your user’s perspective. You want to keep her on your page, and to do that you need to win both her trust and her interest.

Enterprise Level Local Search:

Enterprise level local search in 2012 is about focusing on the details of building up a local presence through consistency, while tracking the data to back up what is most important to your business.

For more PubCon 2012 coverage check out:

PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Two, Morning
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Two, Afternoon
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Morning
PubCon 2012 Las Vegas Coverage: Day Three, Afternoon

We certainly learned a lot, but mostly about WordPress sliders and how few good ones exist. Those technical difficulties caused a delay in our coverage, but we wanted to bring you something good and useful. Hopefully, the delay was worth it and you find at least one kernel of knowledge that can improve your Internet marketing strategies or SEO campaigns. We’re happy to have our process worked out just in time for PubCon and we’ll see you then (or on the blog).

In the meantime, check out all of the great shots, quotes, and takeaways we picked up from SMX East 2012 (as well as a fashion trend!):

SMX East 2012: Meet & Greet, Monday, October 1st

SMX East 2012: Day 1, Tuesday, October 2nd

Day 1 Takeaways

What SEO Performance Metrics Are Truly Important- Measure what matters to your business. When you focus your metrics on your business goals, your efforts will be more successful. Your data needs more than reporting, it needs to be analyzed in order to create actionable items. Use keyword bucketing, Lower Funnel Actions & Higher Funnel Actions.

Looking Ahead: Local Search in 2013- Local search is more than just optimizing your Place page, recognize the opportunities that are out there with other local listing sites. Many of these are necessary to increase the number of citations your business has, which will improve local rankings as much as on site optimization and link building.

Google Bought A Zoo: Surviving Penguins, Pandas & Other SEO Beasts- Just because you weren’t hit by penguin, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be hit.  Be proactive and clean up your links, and diversity your search marketing efforts so that there isn’t over reliance on a single, and potentially high risk method, but rather a long term investment in branding.

SEO Beware: Black Hat Tactics To Avoid & Be Wary of- Don’t be shady. Think like a black hat SEO, but don’t be a black hat SEO.  By being aware you can avoid and defend yourself against them. If you are aware of these tactics, you can run the opposite direction to something that is more long term and low risk.

SMX East 2012: Day 2, Wednesday, October 3rd

Day 2 Takeaways

Getting Ahead With Google+: Google+ is a young platform, as such, if you find an interesting or innovative way to use it, or to make it work for your brand, you will be rewarded with attention. Find ways to use the tools that Google+ has that are unique to them; hangouts, and circles have great marketing possibilities, if you put the time and effort into developing a campaign that utilizes them.

Schema 201: Real World Markup for Success Get to know the data available through your site and identify opportunities to automate schema on it (plugins can help do this on certain CMS platforms). Markup will help drive rich snippets and other compelling elements for searchers and visitors alike. The search engines are looking for opportunities to display data more creatively–give it to them.

Tuning Up Your Twitter Tactics: Twitter is a community, treat it as such. Find ways to add content and have conversations, always being careful not to spam your fellow community members. If you make your twitter presence a conversation with rich takeaways for your followers, you will be successful. Outside of Twitter, make it easy to share your content on Twitter through integrated share buttons, and valuable content worth sharing.

Pagination & Canonicalization For the Pros Take advantage of the canonical tag, rel=”prev” and rel=”next,” and the hreflang=”[x]” tags to help fix complex problems like duplication, international targeting, and domain acquisitions. The search engines are offering a new way to communicate with them and it’s up to you to learn more about these opportunities and find ways to automate intelligent inclusion on your sites. Be careful though! With great tags comes great responsibility.

Getting Liked and Shared on Facebook: It is absolutely necessary to get your fans to interact with your page. As long as you have engagement, your fans will be able to see your posts, without it, you will disappear into the background. How do you get engagement? Questions, surveys, contests, promotions, pictures, Facebook is a multimedia platform–offer as much as you possibly can. Partner with your vendors, your community, and your fans to make content that is rich and engaging in visual, dynamic ways.

Direct Answers & The Knowledge Graph: Friend or Foe? The decision was split–Knowledge Graph is both a friend and a foe. It may keep searchers contained within the SERPs for informational queries, but it’s also a great way to drive more clicks for related queries. If you’re providing information to Wikipedia or Freebase, take ownership of your data to ensure that Knowledge Graph has accurate information.

SMX East 2012: Day 3, Thursday, October 4th

Day 3 Takeaways

Conversation: Is There Really Advanced Link Building? Short answer- No.  Long answer- No there are no specific tricks that will make you an advanced link builder, instead there is just better marketing. Advanced Link Building is all about thinking like a journalist, finding a story and an audience, and pairing the two. You need to be adaptable to the situation, find the right content, the right source, and the right pitch.

The New Killer Content: Focus, first and foremost, on your readers.  What are they looking for on your site, and on other sites?  Offer up something that they aren’t finding elsewhere, and you will have successful content. Make sure that your content extends to your title tags and meta descriptions, don’t let any opportunity to create a headline pass you by.

How to Use Search Marketing as a Force for Positive Social Change: How does (RED) approach search marketing? They tell a story, with content that’s about those they help, not the organization itself.  They engage people by using pictures that make an emotional impact.

I’ll be moderating and speaking on What SEO Performance Metrics Are Truly Important? with Vanessa Fox, Ryan Jones, and Rob Bucci. I’ll also be Q&A moderating for Looking Ahead: Local Search In 2013 and Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros, bring your questions. On Wednesday, October 3rd from noon to 1:30pm, stop by Table 7 to talk with me about Personalization & Search. Amanda will be volunteering on Wednesday in the Issues & Tactics track and Pearl will be doing the same in the Social Media track.

At SMX East, we’ll be rolling out a new style of conference coverage. Stay tuned for that and here’s the schedule, but we’ll be covering everything from the sessions and speakers to attendees and after parties. Get your smile on–you may end up on the site!

SMX East Schedule

UPDATE: All of the SMX East 2012 conference coverage has been posted.

Tuesday, October 2nd

• What SEO Performance Metrics Are Truly Important?
• Looking Ahead: Local Search In 2013
• Google Bought A Zoo: Surviving Penguins, Pandas & Other SEO Beasts
• SEO Beware: Black Hat Tactics To Avoid & Be Wary Of
• Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan

Wednesday, October 3rd

• Keynote Conversation: John Borthwick – Founder & CEO, Betaworks
• Getting Ahead With Google+
• Schema 201: Real World Markup For Success
• Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros
• Direct Answers & The Knowledge Graph: Friend Or Foe?

Thursday, October 4th

• Going Viral On YouTube
• The New “Killer” Content
• How To Use Search Marketing As A Force For Positive Social Change
• In-House SEO: Organizational SEO Challenges & Solutions

After SMX East, we’ll be back in Troy for a week with an exciting launch. Then Pearl, Sean, and I head to Vegas for Pubcon.

I’ll be speaking on Reputation Management: Monitoring Your Brand Online with Krista Neher, Arienne Holland, and Melyssa St.Michael, and also on Protecting Your Brand – Competitive Intel with Amanda Watlington, Brian McDowell, and Sarah deDiego. Want to meet or have an online reputation management question? Check out my Pubcon Labs on Thursday, October 18 from 11:00 a.m. to noon on reputation management.

The Outspoken Media team will be covering all of the action from Pubcon with some help from the amazingly talented Michael Dorausch. If you see one of us, stop and say hello–you might just end up on the blog!

The week we return from Pubcon, we move into the new office, so basically, October is full of incredible things and we hope you’ll join us for it. If you can’t make SMX East, Pubcon, or Distilled (which we’re missing to move, no!), subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter for live updates. We’ll see you soon.

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!