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!

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!

(Photo Credit: Jeff McNeill) This is a special edition of SEO University where I have a guest post by Elisa Gabbert. Elisa was introduced to me by Byron Gordon, a great guy who I’ve worked with for a couple of years at the Search Engine Strategies conferences here in Toronto. When Byron asks me to check something out, it’s usually good!

Byron said I should check out WordStream’s new keyword tool located at http://www.wordstream.com/keywords. For years I’ve been a fan of using Google’s free tools, namely the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator Tool. They are both free, provide great data, and it comes directly from Google – what more could you ask for?

I posed the question to Byron and he put me on to Elisa who wrote this guest post. I look forward to your thoughts on WordStream vs. Google after you read the post.

“At WordStream, we recently launched a new free keyword tool. One of the questions we get asked frequently is how the tool compares to the Google keyword tool (in fact it gets asked so frequently we put it in the FAQ).

Let me try to run down the pros and cons of using each tool.

Where Google’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool is similar to many of their products in that it has two core strengths: it uses Google data, and they give it away for free. If you’re in a market (and there are many) where Google is the dominant player, having access to Google’s data can definitely be useful. And Google has a lot of data.

The tool also provides several columns of numerical stats including both local and global monthly search volume and search volume trends, as well as information like advertiser competition and estimated average CPC which can be useful for the PPC advertiser. Aside from keywords and related terms, WordStream’s tool currently only shows you an estimated relative volume.

Where WordStream’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool taps into the company’s huge data sources, but they’re not giving you full access to that data. For example, a search for “britney spears” returns 72 results. Performing the same search on our tool yields over 37,000 keywords. We only show you the top 100 within the tool itself, but you can enter your email (or sign up for a free account) and we’ll send you the full list, all 37,563 keyword phrases, free of cost. So we are giving you a lot more to work with, including many long-tail terms, and this is really valuable for large PPC accounts or affiliate marketers especially.

Another advantage to our keyword tool is a greater diversity of keyword sources. We aggregate search query data from Internet Service Providers, browser toolbars and search engines—amounting to more than a billion unique keywords and over a trillion search queries—and we carefully weight the data to avoid bias toward any particular source. So our data is more comprehensive.

The “related keywords” feature allows you to select related terms and synonyms and include them in the results with your original query. Again, this is important for keyword expansion and can tell you what other phrases your audience may be using to search for related topics.

There’s also a filter feature so you can weed out terms that aren’t relevant to your search.

Finally, WordStream’s keyword tool is faster than Google’s. You get results pretty much instantaneously.

In the end, the point of using any of these tools is to get keyword suggestions, and it’s important to remember that they are in fact just suggestions—many of them may be irrelevant to your website or business. The more data you start out with, the more usable, actionable keywords you’re going to end up with after you drill down and figure out which terms are going to be most relevant and valuable for you. Then you can get to work optimizing your web copy and PPC campaigns based on those keywords, which in turn gives you more data to analyze (like which keywords drive the most traffic and conversions, and which aren’t delivering any value). This creates a cycle of data-driven decision making.

Our view is that keywords in and of themselves aren’t worth anything. It’s what you do with your keyword list that matters. That’s why we developed the tool. We hope that dedicated search marketers will stick around to learn the benefits of keyword management—tools and strategies that help you group, organize and act on all that raw keyword data to get real results in return.”

Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a software manufacturer specializing in keyword discovery & management software for SEO and PPC. To get in touch with Elisa, you can send a note to egabbert at wordstream dot com, follow her on twitter, or check out the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog, where she’s a regular contributor.

What do you think about the WordStream Keyword Tool? Are you going to give it a try? I would love to hear your thoughts on the tool if you comment below!

For those of you who follow search engine news you’ll know that the biggest events that cover the industry are the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Being based in Toronto I was able to attend SES Toronto last year and am pleased to be able to attend again this year. It’s one of those must-attend events where you get to hear from the top experts in the industry, be able to directly ask them questions, and get valuable advice to help you grow your business.

“Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.”

I’m also fortunate enough to have been able to connect with two of the experts who will be presenting at SES Toronto this year. I asked them about what factors they see as being important for website owners in the year ahead. The two interviewees were Greg Jarboe and Amanda Watlington. Here is a little more about them:

Greg Jarboe

Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm, public relations agency and video production company. Founded in 2003, SEO-PR has won a Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for Public Relations and PR News, and was a finalist for SES Awards in three categories: Best Social Media Marketing Campaign, Best Business-to-Business Search Marketing Campaign, and Best Integration of Search with Other Media.

“Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.”

Amanda Watlington

Amanda Watlington is owner of Searching for Profit, a search marketing consultancy focusing on the interaction of the consumer with businesses, using search engines, RSS, blogs, podcasting, or other new media to deliver their messages. An industry thought leader and an internationally-recognized speaker, Amanda has led sessions on search marketing, web strategy, and social media at Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World, Ad:tech, and DMA. She shares her views of where search marketing is headed on her blog, Blogs and Feeds, and as a blogger for Search Engine Watch.

I asked them both the same questions – here are their answers:

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

The first hidden gem is Wordstream. It’s a new keyword tool for taking long keyword lists for search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns and putting them in buckets that are segmented intelligently.  Another hidden gem is Radian6.  It’s an automated solution to monitor and analyze a variety of social media, including blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  The third tool has been around for a while, but it’s unfortunately a hidden gem: Yahoo! Site Explorer.  It allows you to explore all the pages indexed by Yahoo! Search and find pages that link to that site or any page.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

I do think reducing page load time is important.  Gzip is a popular data compression program.  It’s main advantage is much better compression.  However, gzip 1.2.4 may crash when an input file is over 1200 characters. (info on gzip compression here: http://www.gzip.org/)

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

I could say it depends on your target market, but that would be dodging the question.  Or, I could say YouTube, because I’ve just finished writing a book entitled, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, but that would be self-serving.  So, I’ll say Facebook.  Why?  According to Compete, Facebook had 104.1 million unique visitors in April 2009, YouTube had 77.8 million, Digg had 37.8 million, Twitter had 19.4 million, and LinkedIn had 12.1 million.  Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.  Plus, with more than 52,000 Facebook apps, there are countless ways to connect with social networks of friends and family.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.  According to comScore qSearch, there were 9.8 billion expanded search queries in the U.S. during April 2009 on Google, 3.2 billion on YouTube, and 3.1 billion on Yahoo!  That’s game changing.  We’ve also found that video content can generate more links and higher rankings than text content.    In fact, The Technorati Attention Index for May 14, 2009, shows the top site with the highest number of blogs linking to it in the past 30 days was YouTube with 60,644, followed by The New York Times with 17,374,  guardian.co.uk with 8,039, The Wall Street Journal with 7,513, and The Washington Post with 6,891.  What does this mean to search engine marketers?  You are more likely to see a YouTube video in the top results pages than a news story, blog post, or website page.  That’s a change with a big impact.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I’m looking forward to the keynote by Emanuel Rosen.  I’ve read his book, “The Anatomy of Buzz,” and can’t wait to hear about his latest book, “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.”  As for one of the conference sessions, I’m looking forward to “How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with Your IT Department to Get Things Done.”  Why can’t we all just get along?

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

There are lots of tools that a website owner should know about. I personally advocate trying a large number of tools and then determining which suits the individual’s workflow best. Here are three tools that I consider really powerful: Spyfu for keyword research. It is an excellent second line of research that enhances and enriches the data gathered from Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker. With Spyfu, I particularly like the Keyword Kombat feature that lets me clearly see comparative strengths and weaknesses relative to competitors. A second tool that I consider valuable is Crazy Egg. I use this tool on a regular basis to check how users are interacting with my pages. This gives me quite a few insights into how I can improve conversion and improve the user’s experience.  I must include in my tool kit the Web Developer Plug-in for Firefox. It is a super tool for analyzing sites. I use this in conjunction with YSlow to understand how a site is performing.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

Page load time is important for both users and search engines. Users want to receive the information immediately and are increasingly impatient. Speed issues also impact search. Every site has a “crawl budget,” and performance issues can impede how much of a large site is crawled. Managing performance is essential to indexing for large sites. Gzip compression is a recommended speed enhancement. The choice and recommendation would, of course, depend on the site. As I indicated above I use YSlow as part of my tools for evaluating sites. Speed is an issue.

“If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube.”

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

My choice would be YouTube since the sheer volume of traffic that comes to the site is so huge. YouTube’s traffic is the second largest online. It is also readily optimizable so the site owner can ensure take measures to get maximum performance from their videos. If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube. As a professional, I would urge the website owner to have a personal LinkedIn account and a Facebook page. Both are good networking tools. I personally prefer LinkedIn.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

The biggest impacts have come from the global recession. As a result I have seen an increase in the demand for SEO services as businesses that previously were prepared to spend lots of money on SEM are now reconsidering the virtues of SEO.  Many are taking budget from other marketing efforts to put them into SEO and SEM. There is also an increasing demand that search deliver results.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I am keenly interested in the future and use conferences to tune up my radar for what is the next big thing. For this reason I am looking forward to the session entitled “Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps.” As search migrates to the phone we all need to understand mobile marketing. Overall, the session line up is so good that it will be difficult to chose one session vs. another being held at the same time. I am moderating the session “SEO Then & Now: What’s the Same? What’s New?” which should be very interesting, but at the same time there is also a session entitled “Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today?” that should be an excellent forward-looking session. Overall, this should be a terrific conference.

Thank you to both Greg and Amanda for spending the time to answer these questions. To learn more from them you can always attend SES Toronto! If you’re planning on coming out let me know and we can have lunch together.