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!

Today was the first day of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference here in Toronto. I was invited to come as a guest blogger as part of the media. I did the same thing last year and it was a great experience. They have three streams of sessions going on at the same time so registrants have to pick which ones they most want to attend. The three streams are: Nuts & Bolts (practical how-to type of information), Geek (technical more advanced workshops), and Corporateville (for the attendees who are from large companies).

Today was an information filled day with a host of excellent speakers and lively discussion. I stayed mostly in the Geek track and thought I would share some of the valuable information from two of my favorite presentations of the day.

The first workshop I attended was Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today? One of the panelists was Marios Alexandrou who is a SEO Manager for Acronym Media. The bulk of Marios’ talk was on universal search. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, universal search refers to search engines like Google showing more than 10 blue links when you do a query. Instead you get video results, news results, maps, images etc thrown in as well.

Here is an example using the key word “Paris”

As you can see from the Google search results, three out of the top six results are not the blue text links that we’re used to.

The top result is a Google Map of Paris, France. The #5 result shows videos about Paris from YouTube and the #6 result shows recent news about Paris from Google News.

If website owners were to try and rank for this keyword with a regular webpage, they would only have a one in three chance of doing so because half of the ranked pages are from universal search.

Marios provided the following suggestions for entrepreneurs who are trying to get on page 1 for their important keywords and what universal search can mean for them.

#1 – Can’t get the top spot with a website? Try video!

YouTube videos are frequently popping up into the search engine results and if you optimize the video titles they can often be far easier to rank for than a regular website. If you’re having a hard time getting to that coveted #1 ranking, consider using a video to try and knock off your competition.

#2 – Dominate the rankings – Push out competitors!

So you rank #1 and #2 for your important key words – why not take over another spot in the top 10 with a video and another spot with a Google Maps result and yet another with Google image results? The more your site is featured on that first page the less your competition is going to get. Don’t settle for just the top two spots.

“Page load time will likely be a future factor in search engine rankings – the faster your pages load, the more you will be rewarded with high rankings.”

#3 – Engage more with your users!

Some people love the text content while others prefer the videos, search, maps, and news. By optimizing for all the different universal search categories you can cater to all the different tastes of your potential customers.

Two other interesting thoughts that came out of Marios’ presentation and discussion:

• SearchWiki – Google wants your vote and they are paying attention to how people are using the SearchWiki rating mechanism
• Page load time will likely be a future factor in search engine rankings – the faster your pages load, the more you will be rewarded with high rankings

The other speaker who I really enjoyed hearing today was Mike McDerment. Mike is the CEO & Co-founder of FreshBooks, an online invoicing company that caters to professionals and entrepreneurs.

Mike’s talk was part of the workshop Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions and was special because it was different – he focused on the importance of making your website a business. It’s great to rank well in the search engines but if it doesn’t lead to a lot of business, who cares? Mike shared his story about how his website was originally designed for search engines and he got traffic and did get some customers but he wasn’t where he wanted to be.

“Nobody expects the personal touch from a website and by reaching out FreshBooks generated media attention as well as earned customers for life.”

By switching the design to focus on the customer and not the search engines he was able to see a massive increase in business. Mike is heavily customer-service oriented and has managed to create a 30-person company which truly cares about their clients. He tries to go out of his way to make sure that his customers are happy, which is rare for an online business. His talk reminded me a lot of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos preaches about excellent customer service.

It was refreshing (no pun intended) to hear someone talk about buildling a business and not just how to rank in Google. Some of Mike’s advice included:

• We are all in service businesses, not technology businesses
• Giving outstanding customer experiences should be the main focus of your business
• Relationships with customers is the currency of your success
• Take care of your staff and they will take care of your customers who will take care of your business
• Follow the 4E Mantra of: Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday

Mike also shared a story about a customer of theirs who was on Twitter and mentioned that she was stood up by a date that night. The FreshBooks team, which makes a regular habit of following their customers, responded by Tweeting that they would never stand her up and then sent her flowers. Nobody expects the personal touch from a website and by reaching out FreshBooks generated media attention as well as earned customers for life.

Mike’s session was a reminder that we all need to think about the business of our business, provide outstanding customer service and not just worry about ranking #1 in the search engines.

I’m looking forward to another great day tomorrow and I’ll keep you posted with another update!

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.