With part of my EvanCarmichael.com team Marija and Adis.

Today was Day 2 of SES Toronto and it I was excited to kick off the second day of sessions.

Check out all the photos from Day 2 here.

I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways from three of the sessions I went to today.

Video Optimization Panel with Jonathan Allen and Terry Van Horne

Jonathan came on board as director of Search Engine Watch with Incisive Media in December 2009. This newly created role will see him bring the spirit of collaboration back to Search Engine Watch and transform the site into a vibrant community of search and tech marketing professionals.

Terry Van Horne has been developing and marketing websites since the early 90′s in various marketing and development positions including working as internet marketing manager for one of Canada’s largest real estate developers; SEO for an award winning real estate search engine and marketing manager for ecommerce stores in the apparel and musical instruments.

• Name your video according to the suggestions that come up in YouTube search.
• Copy the tags of the most popular videos around the same subject so you show up in related videos and start to drive traffic from their videos. It can lead to a huge spike in traffic.
• Create playlists around keywords to get a boost in your rankings.
• In your YouTube Analytics you can see other videos and see what’s driving traffic to them and where it’s been embedded on other sites.
• The more you get your videos embedded the higher up you will rank. It’s one of the most important Youtube ranking factors.
• Take long videos and chop them into chunks and then create a playlist for them. Think of 2-3 minutes as a maximum for each clip.
• How-to videos are extremely powerful. Entire companies are forming around creating how-to videos. Share your expertise!
• The low production cost how-to videos tend to outperform the high budget ones.
• People want to see that you’re excited about the topic and that you’re being authentic.
• A popular video trend is unboxing. People show themselves opening up new products.
• Check out Treepodia – it turns XML site map feed into videos and is a great option for e-commerce sites.
• Also check out YouTube.com/create – It contains 4 free software packages to turn articles into video
• Create partnerships with YouTube power users and find innovative ways to work with them and get the to talk about you.

The Panda-pocalypse Survival Guide For  SMBs Panel

The panel members were:

• Moderator: Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch.
• Speakers: Thom Craver, Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT), Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk SEO, Garry Przyklenk, Founder, Eclipseo Online Marketing, Terry Van Horne, Partner, Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo

• Google’s Panda update came in response from pressure from the industry for Google to improve the quality of their results.
• This was the first update that used a user panel to benchmark their algorithmic changes with a human audience.
• Some of the signals Google is using includes: click through rates, number of times site is viewed through Chrome, site blocking in chrome, and time on site.
• Some of the suggestions to help you recover: change your user interface and make it more user friendly, use canonical and rel=author tags, and look at social to build communities and build your links.
• Diversify your traffic so it’s not all coming from Google – try to have less than 40% of your traffic coming from Google.
• Diversify your SEO techniques as well – most people that were hit by Panda were using 1 or 2 techniques to generate links – ie just doing article marketing or just directories, etc – you need to mix it up.
• Don’t just look for links, look for audiences.
• Google’s new +1 button is like Facebook’s like button but for Google.
• Google created +1 because they don’t want to have a high dependency on other sites for social signals.
• A +1 vote is an indication that the site is good quality.
• +1 will be a signal but the strength of the signal is still unknown – especially in the short term.
• If Google sees that users are using it then it’ll become more important.
• Google is offering bonuses to their employees who are using the plus one button.
• If you’re going to diversify your traffic sources, look at social strategies instead of site architecture first.
• Check for duplicate content, take it out.
• Make your site move faster, make it look cleaner.
• Install webmaster tools for Google and Bing, make sure all your errors are validated and improve your site speed.
• Outside of the Internet community, most people don’t know what a +1 button is so there is a big education component still to come.
• Build your website for users not from search engines. Users buy things from you – Google will never buy anything from you.

The Secret Formula To Boost Response with Bryan Eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal, Amazon and New York Times bestselling books “Call to Action”, “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?” and “Always Be Testing”. Bryan has been the keynote speaker for Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, MarketingSherpa, E-consultancy, Webcom, SEM Konferansen Norway, and the Canadian Marketing Association.

• Every marketing campaign needs to have a unique landing page. If you’re getting traffic from Twitter, Facebook, or Pay Per Click then you need to have separate landing pages targeted for each.
• The conversion trinity: 1) Are you relevant to MY query? 2) Do I know WHY you are the right solution for me? 3) Is it obvious WHAT I need to do next and have you given me the confidence to move forward?
• To boost signups for a newsletter: show a sample newsletter, tell people what they’re going to get, don’t make them fill out too many fields – name and email only.
• The most important page elements that have a significant effect on conversions are: headline copy, content images, body copy, and form layout.
• When using Pay Per Click advertising make sure the exact wording in your ads also appear on your landing page. Maintain the “scent” and you’ll improve your conversions.

Next Gen YouTube Marketing

The panel members were:

• Moderator: Krista Neher, CEO, Boot Camp Digital
• Speakers: Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch, Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR
• Q&A Speaker: Terry Van Horne, Partner, Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo

A lot of the content was already shared in the Video Optimization Panel but here are some other tidbits of information that I found useful:

• Check out Tadcast,  a dating agency for brands who want to get their products placed in YouTube videos through power users.
• Monetization – can make $10k from every 1 million plays in YouTube.
• Curate video on your own site through services like Magnify.
• User generated content (UGC) should be authentic, no actors, no marketing budget, short form and promoted on YouTube and Facebook.
• Zero budget UGC: Make video out of text via Xtranormal and Moviestorm.
• Zero budget UGC: Make video out of photos via Animoto.
• Zero budget UGC: Remix Creative Commons videos on YouTube – use it to post video responses.
• Channel Tactics: upload email forwards, report on events.
• Video Tactics: keyword rich titles, target known search queries, transcripts, copy tags, tag people in the video (Facebook & Twitter).
• Framing the subject: Interviewee should be framed slightly to the left or right of the screen, looking off camera with both eyes visible with eyes 2/3 up the screen.
• Try to use your logo in the background.
• More than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute but nearly 30% of all the videos on YouTube are getting 99% of the views.
• You can’t make it on YouTube alone, so make friends and build relationships.
• Keep to a schedule as well as a theme when publishing your video content. Expectations are important. It’s better to upload one video a week than 7 all at once and not do anything for 7 weeks.
• Video has become a subscription business – you need to get people subscribing to your channel.
• Encourage people to thumbs up your video, leave a comment, and subscribe to your channel.
• Cross-platform promotion and the first 24 hours are both huge on YouTube. Tell everyone on all your channels as soon as you launch a new video.
• Don’t watch the comments too closely, but obsess over YouTube Insight.
• If you discover that a particular blog is sending you a lot of viewers, reach out and say thanks.
• Hot spots will also tell you where users stop paying attention and drop off.

I hope you enjoyed the 2 day coverage and if you have any questions just leave a comment below!

It has been another pleasurable day at the SES Conference and Expo here in Toronto!  The theme of today’s sessions was Social Media  – the topics varied from Social Media 101, Social Media Solutions on a Budget to Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics.  Below I have listed some of my favorite points from the sessions I have attended.

Social Media 101

This was a solo presentation by Krista Neher, CEO of Boot Camp Digital; throughout Krista’s session the audience was exposed to the main issue most business owners have – creating value for your audience.

• A successful approach to social media is to create value for the communities that include you, not to promote your product, service or yourself.  The more value you create for the community the more value they will create for you.
• When companies decide to join the social media network – they always start from the bottom.
  - First you should listen, holistically understand the person you are trying to reach.
  - Second think about your marketing strategies and what you are trying to achieve with social media.
  - Third you have to know who your target audience is, figure out how your product or service can solve a problem for them.
  - Fourth step is to figure out your content (good strategy & creative execution)
  - Final step is to track and measure, and then make adjustments accordingly.
• If you want people to like you, keep them around you more often – to do that you have to bring them into your marketing funnel which includes four points:
  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Desire
  • Action
  • When you create content make sure you think about the easy ways other people can share your content.  Also look for social networks that apply to your network, it will make it easier to find people that are interested in your products/services.
  • Twitter is the most powerful social media because you are able to connect with anyone whether you know them or not.  13% of Americans use Twitter (which is up 5% from 2009)
  • Ratings are very important when it comes to your product or service – people are willing to pay 50-99% more for a 5-star product over a 4-star product.  You can use LinkedIn to get reviews from people you have made connections with.
  • The 8 categories of Social Media include: Publishing, Sharing, Social Networks, Microblogs, Co-Creation, Public Relations, Discussions & Review and Mobile.

Social Media Solutions on a Budget

This session contained wonderful tips from Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group and Jason Yormark, VP of Marketing and Social Media, Strategies 360.  I will provide the abundance of programs they have listed for the audience below for various Social Media Networks.

• Keep updates short, sweet and optimized
• Since Social Media takes up so much time, and time is money Lisa has given an efficient scheduling timeline for one hour a day:
  8:00 am – 15 minutes
  12:00 pm – 15 minutes
  4:00 pm – 15 minutes
  15 minutes – unpredicted
• Results:
  • Referring traffic to website or blog
  • More engagement/interactions
  • Increased followers
  • Increased subscribers
  • Blogging Resources for Themes since the design of the website is very important check out these links:
    • ElegantThemes.com
    • WooThemes.com
    • StudioPress.com
    • ThemeForecast.net
    • 99designs.com

Twitter

Building Reach:

• • Listorious.com
  • WeFollow.com
  • Twellow.com
  • Branding:
    • Twitrbackgrounds.com
    • Fuelyourcreativity.com/free-new-twitter-psd-background-template
    • CRM:
      • Hootsuite
      • Tweetdeck
      • Seimic

YouTube

• GoAnimate
• One Time Media
• Xtranormal Movie Maker
• Stuperflix Video Maker

LinkedIn Groups

• Great resource for new leads, customers, web traffic
• Identify relevant groups to join
• Contribute regularly outside of sharing your own content

Social Analytics

• Social Mention
• Hootsuite
• Postrank
• Google Analytics
• Klout/Peer Index
• Google Alerts
• Export.ly

Golden Tool of The Day!

Triberr.com – is a reach multiplier which is an invite only website (you could request to join), it allows you to interact with people that are related to your business.  The reason the website is invite only is to keep spammers out however, it allowed Jason to grow his initial reach over a million in one month!

Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics

Actual Bio:

Marty Weintraub, CEO of aimClear, an online marketing agency that has managed Facebook ad campaigns generating over 10 billion impressions internationally.  Client credits include MarthaStewart.com, Siemens, Second Life, Budget Direct, and other global brands.

• PPC is to SEO as Facebook Ads are to Social Media
• Targeting Creativity:
  • What personal traits?
  • Who’s professional characteristics?
  • Which radically private predilections?
  • Concept transcends Facebook
  • Inspired by bottomless personalities
  • Facebook ads are targeted by location, sex, age, relationship statuses, profession, and education etc – what people are interested in.
  • If you are trying to sell noise cancelling headphones it is best to advertise to people on Facebook that like travel agencies such as Expedia.com etc.
  • Make sure to differentiate where the potential lead works instead of the company they like – it can be as different as a page they like or a company they actually work at so you have to be careful where you are marketing.
  • There are over 35 million people in the world who speak English in countries other than US, Canada, Australia and UK
  • When advertising on Facebook
    • Do not take hard core sales positions
    • Offer value
    • Serious Marketing Power
      • Your target is never truly off duty, whether they are home or at work they could log into their Facebook
      • Catch them at home off guard

It has been an amazing experience at SES Conference and Expo – being around the SEO experts themselves has allowed me to learn so much!  I look forward to attending the SES next year!

With EvanCarmichael.com author John Alexander before he began his session at SES Toronto.

Today was Day 1 of SES Toronto and it was a lot of fun being surrounded by people who are all talking about their rankings and what they’re doing to drive traffic to their websites.

Check out all the photos from Day 1 here.

I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways from three of the sessions I went to today.

Content marketing optimization with Lee Odden

Lee Odden (@leeodden) is the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and public relations firm specializing in strategic Internet marketing consulting, training, and implementation services, including online PR, SEM, and social media marketing. A veteran Internet marketer, Odden has consulted for clients such as HP, McKesson, Northwest Airlines, PRWeb, and the national PRSA.

• The big lie about content strategy is:  Build it and they will come.
• Search is becoming social. You need to have a presence in all the major social media sites to have greater influence with your audience.
• If something can be searched on then it can be optimized.
• Make it easy for customers to discover consume and share your content, products and services.
• Create content that educates and makes it easy to follow a logical conclusion to buy.
• Blend content creation with curation. You don’t have to create everything from scratch as long as there is value to your audience.
• Build customer profiles. Who are they? What are they looking for? What type of content should you create and share to attract them?
• Pay attention to what people are saying about you on Social Mention.
• Create an editorial calendar for what content you’re going to create and how you’re going to share it.
• Always include an image or video. Your message will travel further.
• Search in your Analytics for a “?” to get a sense of the questions people are using to find your site.
• For content curation, don’t just copy and paste or Google will drop the page via their Panda update.
• Try to add your own commentary on the content to avoid duplicate content penalties.
• Also do what you can to get links to your curated content.

Information architecture for the modern website with Shari Thurow

Shari Thurow is the founder and search engine optimization (SEO) director at Omni Marketing Interactive, a full-service SEO, Web site usability, information architecture (IA), and Web design firm.

• Why should website owners care about information architecture? You lose customers when they can’t find your content.
• Information architecture also impacts your crawability and indexation. If Google has a hard time finding your content it won’t get ranked.
• Websites which are great examples for information architecture: Mayo Clinic, MedicineNet and National Cancer Institute.
• Every website needs a taxonomy, a hierarchical structure to organize your content.
• Rethink your top navigation. Ask yourself does it serve our readers as best it can?
• Use embedded text links from content to other content on the same site. It serves as a label to tell search engines what the content is about.
• A blog to look at as a best practice in information architecture is Matt Cutts.
• Create author pages to show all the posts by an author.
• Navigation labels need to be scannable, unique, and clear to readers.
• Stick between 4 and 10 links in your primary navigation.
• For user generated content look at at viewpoints as best practice example. Lead by example, show them what a good article looks like.
• Reward good behavior, you’ll get better results.
• Link to content vertical and horizontal. From parent to child and sibling to sibling.

Managing your online reputation with Ezra Silverton

What to do when you’ve been smeared in public:

• Request removal
• Review clients own web properties
• Optimize existing web properties
• Setup new profiles
• Link building

5 things to enhance your online reputation:

• Claim your name – Domain name and social networks.
• Brag. Write content about what you’re doing and share it.
• Request feedback. Reviews, testimonials. People are less likely to leave positive feedback so you have to ask.
• Belong to your community. Become a member and get involved.
• Monitor. Use Google Alerts, Social Mention both are free.

I’m looking forward to Day 2! I’ll post again after tomorrow’s sessions.

The SES Conference and Expo has jumped to a great start here in Toronto!  This is my first year attending the SES Conference with Evan; it has been an exciting day learning about trends, techniques and tips from the SEO Guru’s themselves!

Below I have listed my favorite highlights and tips I have learned from Day 1.

Is Retargeting/Remarketing Right for You?

“Research shows that as many as 90% of the people who visit a website leave without completing any action that online marketers intend them to take, such as making a purchase.”  Chris Sukornyk the CEO of Chango Inc, a Retargeting platform talked about the most effective ways for website owners to become engaging with their audience.

• 7 Types of Effective Retargeting, which consist of on-site and off-site engagements with your audience.  Examples include targeting individuals based on the specific products viewed, actions taken or actions not taken, or even targeting individual’s based on searches they conducted on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• The “leaky” SEM Marketing Funnel – which includes visitors clicking on your competitors ad through your website, or visitors searching through SEO websites and going through review sites instead of going directly to your website.
• 5% of Internet use is researching which gives limited amount of time for marketing online due to the lack of amount of searches being conducted.

Dan Taylor from Google Display Network went more in depth to talk about “delivering the right ad at the right time”.  He believes that audience and contextual marketing should be a great layer for your marketing efforts.  A great example he used for retargeting is Expedia.com; a prospect searches for an Alaska Cruise, does not purchase the package and leaves the site.  Next time they visit the site an advertisement will pop-up with “Our New Great Deals On Alaska Cruises! – Click here to learn more” sign, motivating them to make the purchase.

SEO 101

Considering my lack of knowledge pertaining to SEO and optimizing a website Bruce Clay, president of Bruce Clay Inc. did a tremendous job presenting a ton of useful information for the non-techies like myself!

• Use clarification words for your content to help the crawlers understand what your website is about and what you are trying to rank for.  Write in a natural way for your audience (do not use language your audience would not use themselves or else they will have difficulties finding you through search engines).
• To get your site spidered more often you should add new content as frequently as possible, the recommended amount is on a daily bases.  Bruce gave an example of a very popular website CNN which gets spidered every 2 minutes due to the amount of changes the website undergoes, they have one million articles added every month!
• What is natural ranking?  Placing the keyword blank amount of times, but not to the extent to be considered as a spammer.  Top 50 sites were analyzed and they all used the keyword every 7 words in the content.  Which brings me to a story the audience was told about a camping trip.  Two friends decided to go camping; while they were making bbq a bear approached them.  The two friends decided to start running, now as the first guy running you don’t have to be an Olympic racer; you just have to beat the guy behind you – that is SEO!  Beating your competitors not the search engines.

Analytics 101

This was a very informative and energetic presentation done by Matt Bailey, SES Advisory Board and President of Site Logic Marketing.  Notifying the audience that “big numbers lie” especially in analytics was noted at the start of the presentation; furthermore Matt provided in-depth information how to work Google Analytics to your favor.

• Big numbers lie because they are a set of data – data cannot be good or bad, it is just classified as data.  However, if you do not ask good questions about the numbers you receive from your analytics you cannot go in-depth to figure out which data is good from the bad, and use the analytics to figure out more information.
• When data is complex, understanding is easy.  First thing you need to do is list the goals of your website.  The first goal should be how to make money; you have to understand the value of your leads.  The second goal contains segments, which are the intentions people have when they are on your site.
• 3 C’s of Analytics:
  Context – create a segment
  Contrast – contracts and compare your different segments/personas
  Comparison – by comparing you can create a story from the analytics data to help you get more leads!
• Did you know the Segmentation feature on Google Analytics are the hardest features to use?  However, it is the most important because this is the set of information that will differ from the monthly data you copy and paste into your spreadsheet.   Using Segmentation will provide you with more complex data however, it will allow you to understand your visitors more and understand how to get them to make that purchase.  It also helps distinguish which pages on your site rank better for your keywords so you know where to work harder.

More Data = More Comparison

More Comparison = More Relationships

More Relationships = More Answers

Which brings you to more leads!

I’m looking forward to Day 2 of the SES Conference, don’t miss the second post!

As part of SES Toronto 2011, I’m doing a series of interviews with some of the expert panelists to get some insider advice to help improve your SEO efforts.

Last month I interviewed Terry Van Horne (7 Answers to Google Panda Questions with Terry Van Horne – SES Toronto) and today I’m pleased to connect with Matt McGowan. Matt joined Incisive Media in 2006 and is responsible for the North American business in addition to overseeing all marketing, sales, editorial and operations for ClickZ.com, ClickZ.asia, SearchEngineWatch.com, and the multinational SES Conference and Exposition series. You can find him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Here are my questions for Matt and his answers.

Matt, I’m wondering if you can give my readers your best advice on what’s changing in the world of email marketing, online publishing, online advertising, and social media marketing and how they can leverage those changes to grow their businesses this year? Perhaps you could give an example of someone who’s doing it right as a best practice to follow?

Evan, thank you for this opportunity and I look forward to seeing you at SES Toronto.  Jumping right in…

1) Email Marketing

Email is critical and by far the most powerful tool in a marketers arsenal. Originally email enabled a marketer to communicate a single message to many customers and today many still use it that way.  However, the companies on the cutting edge are using email more and more as a tool to have many individual conversations with their customers; one on one. I am not talking transactional based emails here. In this vein and as ClickZ published earlier this month many advanced email marketers are looking at new metrics, above and beyond the tradition delivered, open, click and conversion metrics of old.  I will list them here but for those who want more detail on them I recommend reading the article.  They are: Advocacy Scores, Frequency Factors and Device Preferences.

2) Online Publishing

Online publishing is changing so fast that I fear by the time your readers read this it will be out of date =) Seriously though, very much in the same vein as email, media companies are experimenting with how they can customize their publications to their readers individual preferences.  This factor alone is why we have witnessed so many general news publications fail while the more vertical publications have held their ground and grown. Think about it, is any one reader really interested in everything in the New York Times or Globe and Mail? Probably not. When a reader hits one of their sites wouldn’t it be nice if the home page customized based on your reading habits and interests? I like business and technology news and don’t ever read sports or life news, therefore business and technology news would propagate the homepage and recommending reading sections for someone like me.

This takes me to the second thing online publishers are working on which is reader profiles, both public and private.  If I take the time to write thoughtful and intelligent comments on certain subjects wouldn’t it be nice if I could show off my expertise by linking to my profile? A portfolio so to speak.

3) Online Advertising

Other than Privacy, which is probably the biggest issue on the horizon (we can get into that another time if you like), the biggest issue we deal with when it comes to Online Advertising is its effectiveness. In order for online advertising to scale the industry needed consistency, hence the IAB Ad Unit Guidelines.  Now that most online ads have the same general shape, look and feel problems like low click through rates and banner blindness abound.  So, publishers have begun to innovate and introduced increasingly impactful (think HTML5, pushdowns and peels) and social advertisements, including a few that have begun to cross the line between editorial and paid advertorials.  Couple this with the recent surge in exchange traded media, many worry that the “art” of advertising is losing out to the “quants”.  Are we commoditizing advertising is a question that comes up often.

As a publisher the most common discussion I have with marketers is how do we do something special because the box isn’t working for me.

4) Social Media Marketing

The biggest thing most companies are still dealing with here is grappling with the sheer amount of resource impactful social media marketing consumes.  More and more automation solutions are hitting the market and I do believe marketers are finding automation much more acceptable today than they did just a year ago (I have moderated a session for the last few years on this at SES Conferences globally –next one will be held at SES San Francisco this August). That said, automation solutions only really help with the top of the funnel, at some point human contact is still a necessity.

Another equally pressing issue is that social media marketing is leaving the “testing” line and starting to get allocated its own budget.  What sort of returns should marketers expect/plan for? Should a dollar spent on Social get you a higher or lower return (ROI) then Search? Display?

5) For SES Toronto, what are some high level points you’re going to be discussing in your session on Display Network Ads and ROI?

Display has evolved. The CPM while still prevalent is not the only game in town.  For those marketers who have become addicted to the accountability of Paid Search Advertising (PPC), Display now offers a similar model which in many cases can return a higher ROI.  This session will focus on the conversions and lift Search advertisers are missing that are not also buying Display.

6) For SES Toronto, what session are you most interested in attending and why?

As part of SES Toronto 2011, I’m doing a series of interviews with some of the expert panelists to get some insider advice to help improve your SEO efforts.

Up first is Terry Van Horne. Terry is currently a partner with David Harry in Reliable SEO, a Search and Social Media Marketing Agency, and the award winning SEO Training Dojo, a learning community as well as three other marketing and industry news sites

He’s going to be talking at SES Toronto about a timely topic: the Google Panda Update

Here are my questions for Terry and his answers.

1) What are the main differences between the first and the second Panda update? The second was supposed to be the international rollout but a lot of US traffic fell for many sites as well.

One of the problems with Panda is that there were a number of changes over a very short period of time. The attribution and scraper update was released just before Panda. In fact this year has absolutely been the most volatile I have seen in my 15 years of doing SEO.

Part of the reason some may feel that they were adversely affected is that there is a suspicion in the SEO Dojo that Panda was accompanied by another unnamed update or other algo. Also consider that if you had links from properties affected by the second wave then your rankings would be affected a second time.

IMO, some of the shifts in rank are due to sites affected by panda passing less authority/link equity hence if you had a lot of incoming links from affected properties you are going to see hits to authority.

2) How much of the second update was related to Google user feedback in your opinion?

Zich… nada… more about them all being separate indexes. Google doesn’t really give SEO’s much more than lip service. Matt Cutts has stated quite emphatically that some sites are affected that shouldn’t be. These are being manually changed, but I doubt beyond “hand jobbing” the real collateral damage not much attention was paid to the complaints.

Much of what was affected was genuine low quality content with very low quality foundational linking and no “real” web promotion. IMO, this content is produced solely for Search Engines with little value elsewhere! However, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it spam. It’s what Google was giving up easily and an SEO should use as part of a diversified techniques approach.

Matt has been quite emphatic in that there is no getting up from Panda. Which IMO, means in the end it will be like the directories that were hit after the Florida update. Almost all of these have never regained the PR or value they had before the update. This has all the same kinds of “telltale” signs as that update. More interesting is that some directories (Buzzle) were also hit hard by Panda.

3) Recommendations that have been given for website owners hit by Panda have been: get rid of duplicate content, noindex low value content like tags pages, and remove / reduce the # of display ads. Would you agree with this advice?

Some yes, others no! I agree on reducing ads if you have more than 5 ad blocks on the page. I don’t believe that display ads or otherwise matter but the “number of” ad blocks is what I would pay heed to since Google AdSense uses a max of 3 ad blocks/page. However, they do allow some site ads beyond that.

One rule I use beyond Panda is ratio of copy/text to Link Text. I also look at the ratio minus the “most likely to be segmented” elements (mast, footer and left/right margins). It has always been a good idea to manage indexing of contact, privacy policy, TOS and disclaimers. You could see that some of the sites affected in the first list that appeared after the update definitely had high ratio of Link text to copy.

BTW not a big fan of the HTTP Index tags as effective ways to manage indexing, especially, when there is a multi-author blog/site scenario.

I also believe that by reviewing the flow of link equity from Home page to subsequent pages is a very good indication that Google doesn’t really see those pages as important. Of course I first check to be sure there isn’t another reason for the low flow of link equity. When you see the “juice” leave… can be pretty sure Google has lost that “luvin” feeling.

You need to either figure out why and chances are it isn’t as simple as adding more comments or pictures or videos. IMO, adding comments, vids and pics to posts is a short term fix. Kind of like the old “putting lipstick on a pig” scenario. It’s still a pig!

4) Is there any other advice you can give to entrepreneurs who have been hit by Panda?

Look at the patterns in your promotion and realistically assess your content for the role you want to play in the SERP it’s targeted at! eHow is the perfect site for some queries! Lastly, and most important is to keep your techniques and “audience types” diversified and varied!

Many SEO’s and businesses get enamored with one technique and audience and beat it to death. That results in a bad link profile with obvious signs of manipulation. Like your traffic sources try not to have one audience type or SEO technique driving all your business! The degree to which techniques “work” will fluctuate and audiences sometimes just go away.

5) Are there any examples you can think of (perhaps from your clients?) where they have successfully recovered from the Panda update? What did they do?

No examples we didn’t get hit! I think most of what got hit always have been lame tactics that worked, to some extent, but don’t drive sales or much traffic. Sorry, but I quit the article marketing in 98 and still see it as, at best, foundational links, but, even then it would be something I’d suggest as an almost last resort to get traction in a competitive SERP.

Often you end up getting outranked by your own article by some lame site that is scrapped and has a ton of crappy links pointed at it. There are lots of ways to get foundational links without going the offshore route churning out low quality content never intending it to be read just indexed and links attributed.

6) What do you think Google’s next big update is going to focus on?

Too far off to know exactly. I don’t think we’ll see another like this in years, but, it almost always is dampening links of some sort since that is the easiest way to manipulate the more competitive terms.

7) For SES Toronto, what are some high level points you’re going to be discussing in your session on the Panda-pocalypse Survival Guide For Canadian SMBs: A Search Engine Watch Round Table Special?

The signs that tell you a technique is susceptible to Panda and other calamitous events. The only one that has ever impacted me negatively is the introduction of Local Paks in the Universal SERP. Most of what I read closely will provide info that helps me to Future Proof my SEO. I am not an exploiter of the algorithm but rather I’m more interested in what it gives naturally as the Search Engines intended. Likely over 80% of all link building techniques fall directly in the not used as intended category so I tend to shy away from traditional link building and go more for the audience seeking links found more in the social web and relationship marketing.

8) For SES Toronto, what session are you most interested in attending and why?

OMI Workshop: Social Integration: Creating Interactive Conversations Across Channels

Clearly one of the future hurdles for Online marketing will be bridging the gaps between the Social Web and Search. IMO, determining where search is entering your conversion funnels with the highest chances of conversion will change how and why keyword research is being done and content created.

Is there anything else you would like to learn from Terry? Was your website impacted by the Panda update? Are you planning on going to SES Toronto 2011?

I’d love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Greg Jarboe breaking down my video at the YouTube Video Optimization session.

I’m here covering SES Toronto 2010 and posted about Day 1 yesterday. They also caught me in a picture eating lunch that the SES people put up on their Flickr channel. The last session in Day 1 was supposed to be “Performance-Based Marketing Best Practices” – for some reason the topic was changed to YouTube video optimization and boy I was I glad!

YouTube Video Optimization

Greg Jarboe, who I interviewed at last year’s conference, offered his top tips on optimizing your YouTube videos and then broke down the videos from the members in the audience (mine was the first one he looked at). Here is some of Greg’s top advice that I found useful:

Test Your Keywords

Try typing your keywords into the YouTube search box. There should be a drop box below that shows up as you type your keywords. If the words you’re typing in are listed below then they are actually search terms people are looking for and they are worth targeting. If you don’t see your  words in the drop down box then you might want to consider targeting different key terms.

Greg’s suggestion to get more people to rate your video is simple: ask them!

Ask for Ratings

Where your video shows up in the rankings depends on how many views you have, how many ratings and comments you have, and how related the video is to the search query. Greg’s suggestion to get more people to rate your video is simple: ask them! Put an ask out in your description and also ask them in the video. When you ask, they are more likely to do it, and your video is more likely to rank higher.

Use More Keywords

Greg pointed out that most people don’t use enough text to promote their videos. The more text you use, the more likely you will increase your relevancy score for multiple keywords so start adding text! Most people who do video do not enjoy writing so this can be your opportunity to stand out amongst the crowd. His suggestions are to use 120 characters for your title, 120 characters for your tags, and 5,000 characters for your video description. Most videos don’t even come close to these limits (especially the 5,000 character description).

Early this morning I made changes to my recent video Small Business Ideas – How to Sell, Promote, and Showcase Your Business Like P.T. Barnum. I changed the title to be more keyword oriented. I added more words to the title and tags. And I also put in a very long description. We’ll see how this impacts the views – I’ll report back with my findings!

Day 2 Inside Google Webmaster Central

Maile Ohye from Google delivers keynote speech at SES Toronto 2010.

Day 2 started off with a keynote presentation by Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer with Google.

Official Description: Be sure to take advantage of this rare opportunity to have an exclusive peek into the latest in Google Search and their one-stop shop for webmaster resources, Webmaster Central. You won’t want to miss this candid keynote conversation as Mike Grehan sits down with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google, to dig deep into Google’s approach to supporting site owners, and their breadth of offerings in Webmaster Central.

From site performance to real time search, we’ll explore all the latest features and tools to help you better serve your users. Whether you’re a newbie interested in reducing duplicate content and submitting Sitemaps, or a veteran more concerned with malware tools and the new verify by DNS record update, we’ve got you covered.

Google will continue to crack down on low quality pages so if you’ve noticed a drop in your traffic for longtail keywords, make sure to bump up the quality of your content!

My Take: Maile started the session by talking about the recent Mayday update that Google made. She said that pages that target longtail keywords now also need to have unique, high quality content if you want to get ranked. Gone are the days of having a boilerplate template, changing a few words, and being able to rank for longtail keywords. Maile said this is just the beginning and Google will continue to crack down on low quality pages so if you’ve noticed a drop in your traffic for longtail keywords, make sure to bump up the quality of your content!

Edit Your Snippets

A snippet is the two lines of text that show up under your website name in the Google search engine results. These are sometimes generated by Google by pulling content from the page that contains the search terms that were used. You can edit this by changing your meta description tag. She confirmed that Google does not look at the meta keywords tag but they do use the meta description tag in the results snippets so if you’re not happy with what’s showing up, try editing your meta descriptions.

Google is now considering how fast your page loads as a signal in their algorithm. The bottom line is the faster your page loads, the higher you’ll be ranked.

Google Webmaster Tools

Maile went over Google’s Webmaster Tools product which is a free tool webmasters can use to learn about how Google sees their website. She mentioned that Google will be messaging you more frequently beyond telling you about warnings with your site. She also said to make sure you look at the Google Labs within Webmaster Tools to find out how fast your pages are performing and where you can make improvements. She concluded with discussing the importance of using Webmaster Tools to find out which pages are generating 404 errors and which ones have duplicate title tags so you can go in and make the necessary changes to improve your website’s ability to rank well.

Page Load Time

The session ended with a discussion of page load time. Google is now considering how fast your page loads as a signal in their algorithm. The bottom line is the faster your page loads, the higher you’ll be ranked. Relevancy to the search term that was used is still the most important factor but if you and your competitors both have highly relevant websites then the one that loads faster will be ranked higher. Page load time only carries a small amount of weight in Google’s algorithm right now but she wanted to give us a “heads up” that it will become more important in future updates.

SEO Super Tools

John Henshaw discussing SEO super tools at SES Toronto 2010.

My favorite session of the day was SEO Super Tools. I have always found this session to be extremely valuable in years past and was excited to see it on the agenda again this year.

Official Description: If you are responsible for your company’s search engine optimization, then you know that you need all of the various tools of your trade close at hand. This session will describe the latest and greatest tools that will help you to accomplish your tasks including indexing, competitive analysis, site ranking, diagnosing and remedying problems, page level information, site level information, on-page optimization and much more.

My Take: This panel featured Connie Stack from WordStream whose tools I’ve featured a number of times on this blog. John Henshaw from Raven Tools provided an information packed talk that was hard to keep up with because he offered so many useful SEO tools that he recommended. Here is the list:

Onsite SEO

• SEO Automate, GT Metrix, SEO Browser

Keyword Research

• WordTracker, WordStream, SEM Rush

Keyword Management

• Raven, WordStream

Website Research

• Linkscape, OpenSite, Majestic SEO

Research Mashups

• Quarkbase, Xinu Returns

Link Building

• SiteFinder, Ontolo, Link Insight

It’s going to be a fun couple of weeks checking them out and seeing how they can help with my website.

Link Management

• Buzzstream, SecondStepSearch

Content Optimization

• WordStream, Scribe

Rank Monitoring

• Google Webmaster Tools, Authority Labs, Raven SERP Tracker

Campaign Reporting

• Raven

Raven is obviously mentioned a number of times given that’s where John works but I haven’t used many of these tools so it’s going to be a fun couple of weeks checking them out and seeing how they can help with my website.

SES Toronto 2010 has been another great success and there are so many takeaways that I’m going to implement into my business. I’m already looking forward to next year’s session!

What are your most pressing SEO concerns? I would love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Search Engine Strategies Toronto Day 1 yesterday was jam packed with cutting edge tactics and great networking opportunities. Day 2 of the conference series was no different, opening with an interactive keynote from Maile Ohye of Google, followed by information sessions on Twitter automation, paid search, site clinic and more.

Day 2 Keynote with Google

Maile Ohye, Sr. Developer Programs Engineer of Google, talked about the recent Mayday update and its effect might be here to stay. For the future, Google also plans to have social search take properties from your social circle to make search results more personalized. However, the social graph is still in its early stages of development and its reach will not go beyond a user’s primary contacts just yet. Maile also says that soon, presence on social networks might play a vital role for your content distribution as real time search for media will take the popularity of your content into consideration.

Linkbuilding is always a popular subject with the public for Google, and the senior developer would like to see linking being thought of as a real business expansion. Google takes link quality very seriously and block-level link analysis will show that not all links on the same page is treated equally. There are hundreds of other components when it comes to search engine rankings and webmasters need to focus on effectively providing users what they want.

Google Webmaster Central is becoming increasingly versatile and will continue to develop into one of the most important tools for webmasters to communicate with Google. Maile confirms that speed is an important factor as slow websites hinder users’ search for the most relevant information. Last but not least, make your suggestions to Google Help Forums because Google listens!

Twitter Nation

Tracy Falke, Social Media Specialist of Freestyle Interactive and Paul Madden of Crea8 New Media gave a very interesting presentation on Twitter, everyone’s favorite micro-blogging platform.  The theme of the presentation was centralized around automation.  Bots can tweet and retweet valuable information but they could never engage in a meaningful conversation with a human being.  The wrong kind of automation could lead to a reputation crisis and perhaps even jeopardize brand equity like John Deere’s @DeereRobot.

Don’t be the loud drunk guy at the bar. Invest in content and not the platform.

Paul believes that to get a decent return on your investment in Twitter, you must engage as much as possible.  The follow-and-unfollow game still works but to do it correctly, you will need semi-intelligent tools.  Use Twitalyzer to analyze your Twitter presence and match your audience’s activity for the best return in investment.  While it is possible to code a bot, it is impossible to code a person.  Paul uses automated tweets but steps in for real human interaction when engagement happens.  One of his rules of thumb is to never post more than one link for every ten general tweets.  He had one of his bots follow someone from the room and it was amazingly hard to distinguish its behavior from a normal user.

It is social media.  Retweeting spam, using auto direct messages and asking for follow are bad behavior.  Don’t be anti-social.

Introduction to Paid Search

Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster holds a very informative session on paid placement as a form of search advertising. Pay-per-click and search engine optimization campaigns are complementary; while SEO will yield a good return on your investments in the long run, PPC will act as a insurance policy and gateway for secondary traffic. Matt briefly discusses important concepts such as keywords, ads, bids and landing pages and goes on to give great tips on time, geographic and demographic segmentation. It is important to target your audience not only to drive conversion but also to save on campaign costs. Also, expenditure on content network sites needs to be monitored for effectiveness; conversion might be low when users encounter ads in a passive browsing mode.

Since the competitive landscape of keyword research has changed, a lot of what used to be key information are now publicly available.  This makes it hard for anyone to hold a significant informational advantage over the rest of the playing field.  Matt addresses this by alluding to the story of two men’s encounter with a bear; you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to stay slightly ahead of your competition.

I asked Matt for some good books on paid search and he recommends Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day by David Szetela, Joseph Kerschbaum and Michael Flores, Winning Results with Google AdWords by Andrew Goodman, and Advanced Google AdWords by Brad Geddes.

Canada-Specific SEO & PPC Issues

The proximity and relationship of Canada with United States have created a unique problem for Canadian businesses on the internet.  Heather Dougherty of Hitwise, Ian McAnerin of McAnerin Networks Inc. and Guillaume Bouchard of NVI each gave their takes on what are some of the Canada-specific SEO / PPC issues and solutions.

Some statistics could provide companies with relevant insights.  For example, Yahoo and Bing have a stronger presence in French Canada in comparison with English Canada.  Queries with added Canada and Canadian geographical modifiers had higher click-through rates, likely due to the prevalence of U.S. results in searches.  Canadians also responded better to fact-based advertisements over emotionally charged commercials that work well in the U.S.

Also, be mindful of the difference in sentiments that exists in seemingly similar markets and try to avoid using alienating terms like ‘foreign’.

Tough Love: Get Your Site Tuned Up

Jonathan Allen of SearchEngineWatch and Dawn Wentzell of Outspoken Media provided some critiques, a few tricks and tips for those who were brave enough to offer up their sites for the site clinic.  Some of the suggestions include:

• get Google Rich Snippets
• use Cascading Style Sheets over Table tags to divide up content
• be descriptive with product page title tags
• create relevant tools for linking opportunities
• use iFrame to embed outside pages
• employ robot.txt to secured login pages and other sensitive areas
• stick with either with or without the www prefix to prevent diluting PageRank

The day ended with an Open Mic session on Black Hat vs. White Hat, where everyone just enjoyed themselves over conversations, drinks and cowboy hats.

The amount of knowledge and interactions makes it easy to see why this conference series garners so much attention from the industry leaders.  My experience with Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2010 has been an amazing one.

What are your most pressing SEO concerns? I would love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

Dan Klyn, myself, and Ezra Silverton at SES Toronto 2010.

SES Toronto officially kicked off this morning and it’s always a blast to meet some of the top people in the SEO industry, learn from their experiences, and stay on top of the new trends. I’m covering the event with Ringo So who will also be guest blogging from the 2 day event.

Here are my personal highlights and learnings so far from Day 1.

21 Secrets of Top-Converting Websites

Official Description: The average conversion rate for a website is around 3%, but many websites convert at 10% or higher. What do they do that you may not be doing? Bryan Eisenberg, who has been helping companies improve their conversion rates since 1998 will reveal 21 of his most valuable tips that will help you increase your conversion rate. In this fast paced session you’ll find relevant examples from retail sites, B2B sites, publishers and everything in between. You’ll learn the key principle of GTC – Get the Cash! You’ll never be able to look at a website the same way again.

My take: Bryan did a great job of providing amazing value to the audience as well as entertaining us. He started off the presentation saying that the information was confidential to the people in the room but I had to share at least a few of his 21 tips to improve website conversions.

Bryan Eisenberg presenting at SES Toronto 2010.

Tip #5: Make a Strong First Impression

You only have one chance to make a first impression and people make up their minds within seconds of hitting your website. Catch their attention immediately and give them a reason to stay on your site. Bryan recommended checking out LifeLock as one of his favorites. The site deals with identity theft and as soon as you land on their homepage it does make quite an impression telling the story of one of their customers.

Tip #10: Use Social Commerce in Your Promotions

By social commerce Bryan meant reviews and feedback from your customers. Encourage them to give you genuine feedback on what you’re selling and then use their comments in your promotions. For example, offer people the option to search for your highest rated products, show which ones received five stars from satisfied buyers, and use it to add credibility to your website. He also suggested not removing negative comments as this provides transparency to your visitors. Make sure you do respond to any negative feedback, however.

Tip #22: Use Your Thank You Page to Sell

The presentation was only supposed to have 21 tips but Bryan included a bonus one in for us. Once people take the action you want them to take (buy your product, fill out your contact form, sign up for your newsletter, etc) they are usually sent to a thank you or confirmation page. Use this page as another opportunity to sell your customer on another offering or take another desired action. They have already expressed an interest in your company by getting to that Thank You page so use it as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship.

Information Architecture, Site Performance Tuning, & SEO

Official Description: The technical and navigational foundations of your website can significantly impact search referral traffic, either directly or indirectly. Experts explain why all of this matters, and offer tips on how to organize, label, and prioritize your content; how to speed up your site; and how to assess and fix bloated code that may impact the user experience and search rankings.

EvanCarmichael.com Author Dan Klyn Answering Questions at SES Toronto 2010.

My Take: This session featured Dan Klyn who I interviewed for this blog earlier this month. It also featured Ezra Silverton, founder of 9th sphere. In Ezra’s bio I noticed he wrote “He frequently contributes to publications such as The Mark, Visibility Magazine, SES Magazine and Evan Carmichael.” With over 5,000 contributors to my site I don’t know many of them personally so I had to go introduce myself! You can read what Ezra has written for EvanCarmichael.com here.

Google recently announced that page load time is a factor they look at as a part of their ranking algorithm. In other words, the faster your website loads, the higher up you’ll be ranked in Google.

Ezra shared some great tips on how to optimize your website including using a global CSS file to replace some of your images, using CSS sprites so that only one image loads, having a maximum image file size of 50k and using a content delivery network. Unless you’re a programmer all of this is probably over your head but it’s something you should start looking into. If you’re not using some of these methods then your more technically savvy competitors will pass you by in the rankings. Having a site that loads faster also helps improve the experience for your visitors.

Link Building Basics

Official Description: Discover how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for ranking web pages. You will also learn how to increase traffic to your site by building quality links in an appropriate manner.

Not even standing room available for Jeff Quipp's SES Toronto 2010 Presentation.

My Take: I was interested in this session because I interviewed the presenter Jeff Quipp earlier on my blog as well. I got there just before showtime and there was a lineup that was out the door! On my call with Jeff he mentioned that the presentation would be focused on the basics and not get into any advanced tips so I thought I would use the time to start writing this post – sorry Jeff!

I’m planning on finishing the day with the Performance-Based Marketing Best Practices session and then get ready to start it up all over again tomorrow morning for the presentation by Maile Ohye who is the Senior Developer Programs Engineer with Google.

Stay tuned for more SES Toronto coverage by Ringo and an update after tomorrow’s sessions!

What are your most pressing SEO concerns? I would love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!

I was very excited today to join Evan Carmichael and the rest of our team at Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2010 at the Downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel.  Aside from rubbing shoulders with the top names in the search business, the conference series cover cutting edge information on the evolution of search, conversion, information architecture, global SEO campaign management, augmented reality and much more.  This year at SES Toronto, 1100 attendees will try to soak up as much knowledge as possible from 26 information sessions.

Here are some of my personal highlights and so far from Day 1.

Conference Welcome & Opening Keynote

Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios and co-author of Search Patterns opens the conference by discussing his view on the science of information.  He compares the information architecture challenges of big organizations with the construction of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose; a staggering structure with a utter lack of any master building plan.

Peter also talks about strategies on shrinking the search space, principles of design and focusing on learning as well as usability.  Aside from theories, he also gives empirical examples from Buzzillion’s user-generated tags to NCSU Libraries’ faceted navigation system.

The opening keynote was astoundingly philosophical and informative.  Peter has a collection of search patterns available on Flickr for those who are interested.

Search & Display: Driving Customers Through the Purchase Funnel & the Myths of Display

Mike O’Sullivan, Ad Platforms & Strategy Lead from Microsoft, spoke on the importance in display and search advertisement integration to deliver optimal results.  In a Search Engine Strategies conference, Mike was not shy to point out the dissimilarity from the rest of the search-driven group.  Microsoft displayed slide after slide of statistics that show search and display integration has a high level of influence on click conversion.

Most search advocates will see a high conversion rate and attribute it to a successful search campaign while Mike argues that measuring only the last point of contact conceals the history of the consumer’s relationship with a brand.  Consumers on average touched an advertiser 18.5 times from as far as 90 days prior to the conversion.  Microsoft believes that a holistic approach using search and display will successfully drive customers through the purchase funnel from awareness, favorability, consideration, intent to purchase.

Managing a Global SEO Campaign

Ian McAnerin (McAnerins Networks Inc.), Crispin Sheridan (SAP) and Michael Bonfils (SEM International) address some of the problems that most companies face today in a global market.  While Google has a solid foothold on countries with Latin-based languages, Yahoo remains a force to be reckoned with countries that fall outside of that category.  From this statistics alone, we can see that there is no one size fits all strategy approach that will yield the most desirable outcome.  For companies who are targeting multiple markets or countries, what are the best practices in determining target markets and developing campaigns that will speak volume to your foreign customers?

Ian McAnerin believes that from a management point of view, companies should plan centrally, synchronize globally and execute locally.  Also, translation is a far inferior process in comparison with localization. The best method in starting out your global SEO campaign should be to analyze local competition to develop a local strategy with a Localization Specialist, someone with local, industry and linguistic knowledge.  Michael Bonfils put an emphasis to never rely too heavily on analytics to determine a foreign market’s behavior but instead use multiple avenues of research.

Bring SEO In-House: The Pros & Cons

Laura Callow, Sr. Search Marketing Manager of Intuit Canada and Andrew Goodman, President of Page Zero Media had some good fun in debating the pros and cons of bringing search engine optimization work in house.  Laura is a strong proponent in taking advantage of the synergy between in-house knowledge and SEO work.   Intuit Canada has done a great job in internally communicating each department’s needs to yield desirable results.  Andrew believes that SEO specialty firms maintain a competitive advantage in expertise, technology, process, contacts, vendor relationships etc.  He compares the situation to someone who wants a donut; would it be easier for him to bake one from scratch or to buy one from Tim Hortons?

Overall, it has been an amazing day and my notepad is filled with lots of invaluable information.  I can’t wait for what SES Toronto Day 2 has in store.  Stay tuned!

What are your most pressing SEO concerns? I would love to hear your thoughts if you leave a comment below!