With Marija at SES Toronto 2012

Today is Day 1 of Seach Engine Strategies 2012 in Toronto. I’m here with Adis and Marija from my team and we’ll be covering the hilights from the conference.

Here are some of my favourite comments from Day 1:

@lyndseo talking Enterprise SEO

Enterprise-Level SEO with @lyndseo

Reporting – the SEO funnel
- Crawling – Are your pages being looked at by the engines?
- Indexing – Are your pages healthy enough to be included in the search engines?
- Ranking – Are your pages relevant to a searched keyword?
- Clicking – Are People clicking on your pageas?
- Converting – Are poepel converting once on this page?

Break down by segment – line of business, product group, etc.

Keywords should fall into at least one of these categories
- Driving traffic
- Driving conversions
- Non-branded

Metrics
- Traffic to site
- Traffic available (use Bing’s keyword tool for this)
- Conversions
- Conversion rate
- Rank
- Landing / ranking page

Tools
- On-site data – Omniture or Google Analytics
- Webmaster Tools
- Raven Tools
- Xenu

Tactics
- PR – link building, brand building, keywords
- Design / Usability – build wireframes for users and robots
- IT – customize (CMS not friendly? Have your IT team implement the fields and data you need. Great external links but the pages don’t exist? Build a script that’ll detect the broken URL and serve an appropriate 301)

Content Source
- Call centers
- Customer support teams
- Internal search

Sitemaps – create many
- Broken down by segment
- Helps identify issues

Anchor text – starting to see trends away from exact match

Canonical tag – a site your size? Yeah you have duplicate content

Don’t underestimate the meta description tag

Compress – how many JavaScript files are you calling from your pages anyway? How about CSS files?

Brand at the back (of the title tag)

If you do nothing else… Verify your sites with Google and Bing. The information is staggering!

@gregjarboe talking Video Optimization

Video Optimization with @gregjarboe

Pay people for what they love to do… create videos! You can gat a much higher ROI than just advertising.

Use annotations at end of videos to promote your other videos and to subscribe.

Invite your audience to create videos
- Create a contest
- You get original video content
- You also get market research on your target audience

Create video that is inspirational, entertaining, enlightening, educational

Optimization tips
- Use the Metadata
- Create playlists
- Optimize your channel page
- Use annotations
- captions (especially multi lingual)

There are more searches done on YouTube than Bing or Yahoo.

Programming tips
- The first 15 seconds – make the beginning compelling
- Calls to action – tell people what to do next, use annotations
- Regular schedule and frequency – give people a reason to subscribe
- Tent-pole programming – create, release, and package content that it themed around your own event

Social media tips
- Involve your audience
- Reach out to related bloggers
- Work with other content creators and cross promote between audiences
- Auto-share your videos on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Google+ Presentation

Google+: Improve your digital marketing

Small business have a huge advantage over brands in social media.
- Faster decision making, easier to make a human connection, better able to connect your passion to your customers

57% of people talk more online than they do ion “real life” – Word of mouth marketing is happening more and more online.

With Google+ Hangouts you can also share documents through Google Docs and slides through SlideShare in addition to videos with your audience.

Google+ Ripples shows you how your posts are being shared with in depth analytics. It will show you who is influenced by your posts and how they are sharing your content.

How to get started with Google+:

Create – Complete Your Google+ Page
- Create a page from your personal profile
- Fill our your About section, including your website
- Keep the conversation going

Share – Connect with customers with Hangouts
- Use Hangouts for customer service, to educate, and for internal meetings

Promote
- Link your page, site, and ads – Increase the chance of recommendations showing
- Add a Google+ Badge to your site – For top sites, the badge accounts for 38% of followers

Measure
- Make social accountable – AdWords, Ripples, Google Analytics
- In Google Analytics you can see which social media sites are generating traffic for you through their new Social Sources report. To find it click on Traffic Sources –> Sources –> Social
- The conversion report (Google Analytics) will show you the ROI of each network. You can measure direct and socially assisted conversions. You can also define the goals that are important to your business.
- Through Social Visitor Flow report (Google Analytics) you can see how social visitors navigate through your site and see what pages they visit.

Google+ is releasing a new feature every day. It has 170M+ users and 1M+ brand pages.

Google Hangouts automatically records your videos and posts to your YouTube page if you want to keep a copy of it and share it.

Talking with Team Google

That’s it for Day 1 – more coming tomorrow!