Natural Search Blog » Conferences

Are you an SEO Superhero?

Chris — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:34:27 +0000

I was tickled to see these SEO Superhero t-shirts that Covario was giving away to attendees of the SMX West conference in Santa Clara this week:

Naturally, I got my t-shirt sporting the SEO Superman-esque logo! I don’t wear t-shirts a whole lot, but this is one I’ll definitely wear sometimes.

It felt odd not to see Stephan Spencer, VP at Covario, at the SMX conference, since he’s been such a search marketing juggernaut over the past few years and his book, The Art of SEO, just came out. But, I understand that he may be hitting some other conferences, and these speaking gigs can sap the energy out of one really quickly.

There’s not a lot of companies that could pair themselves up with an SEO superhero promotion and still be taken seriously, but I think Covario can do it. I know from formerly working with Netconcepts that their automated SEO solution, GravityStream, is an awesome service, and pairing it up with Covario’s analytics makes for a very strong combination. As a technologist, I certainly think it’s best to simply program a site to have excellent optimization for search rankings, but I’ve seen time and again when large companies are unable to get past bureaucratic IT development processes to roll something out in a timely fashion. For those companies, GravityStream is a really good solution.

For all of you who also attended the SMX West conference, did you get your SEO superhero t-shirts? How often will you wear them?

10 Practical Actionable SEO Tips To Boost Your Website Visibility

Ravi — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:02:54 +0000

Today’s post covers ten practical actionable SEO techniques that can give your site a major boost and help it achieve better visibility in the major search engines. These observations are made by Whitespark, a SEOmoz member who attended the recent SEOMoz PRO Training series.

These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.

There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.

1) Request for a link in customer communications:
There are many opportunities arising in the course of a site owner communicating with a customer in the entire buying cycle. In your emails, you will be well advised to ask for a link in a courteous manner.

It could read - “If you have a website or blog, we would appreciate if you could link to us by copying this code Anchor text that suits your business.”
NOTE:
a) Vary the anchor text subtly in your emails
b) If possible, get links to your inner money pages

2) Use of Top Pages Tool To Identify Competitor’s Backlinks:
The Top Pages tool is a great way to see your competitor’s backlinks by just plugging in their site URL. The screenshot below helps you get an idea.

You can then create suitable linkbait that can attract links from those sites that are already linking to your competitor. Else, you can email the powerful domain owners and request for a link after you have referenced their site post or article on your own blog or your site. This will help answer the other domain owner’s question - “What is in it for me?” and thus incentivize her to link to your site.

3) Use Adwords Tool To Find Keywords That Have High Search Volume And Low Competition:
Many of us are prone to miss the obvious Adams in many things we do in life. This point is a classic example. In most cases, these money keywords are long tail keywords that can be optimised through on page factors and made to rank well in the major search engines.

A search for pet collar using the Adwords keyword tool results in the following screenshot:

The term

pet collar supplies

has a search volume of 49500 with limited advertiser competition. If your site is in the pet industry business, this will be a good keyword to target.

4) Use of Top Pages Tool To Find Linking Pages To Your Domain That Need A Redirect:
The Top Pages tool mentioned in (2) above is very useful to identify links from external sites to pages on your domain that are currently maybe showing a 404 Error or temporary redirects etc, whatever the case maybe.

You can then use 301 redirects to preserve and forward the inherent link juice on such pages to the latest updated versions on your site. I am reproducing a screenshot of the original post which clearly explains what I have written.

If you are the site owner, then the access to Google Webmaster Central will help you identify the 404 pages. It can be a problem if you are doing research for a potential client.

There is another instance where an entire domain has been 301 redirected to a new domain. If the old domain had pages with 404 errors, then a 301 redirect to them is still going to show up as 404 errors as far as Google is concerned. These are lost pages and will not show up in the Webmaster Tools when the new domain is analyzed.

But Top Pages tool does show up these lost pages. It is invaluable data to rectify the lost pages and gain their link juice by 301 ing them to the appropriate pages on the new domain.

5) Competitive Link Finder Tool To Build Your Site External Profile:
The new Competitive Link Finder tool released by SEOmoz is a powerful aid that helps you identify the linking sites that link to multiple competitors in your industry.

You have to plug in your site URL and atleast three of your competitor sites to get the best results. You can always email such domains that link to your industry competitors and get a link to your site as well.

6) Optimize Your Google Local Listings:
Google local listings are a huge asset for any business to be listed on the first page for the most representative search phrase of their industry. It is helpful if the business is physically located close to the city.

I have found that a good local backlink profile boosts a site on Google local search. This can be achieved by submitting to local directories and other businesses in the same local geographical location in which the business operates.

David Mihm is an authority on local search issues and his points at the SEOMoz Pro Conference are outlined below:
a) Claim your local listing on Google (even if you make a multiple submit). This is given more value by Google than a bulk upload that is susceptible to spam.

b) Use keywords in the business title when submitting a local listing. Avoid keyword stuffing the title.

c) Add custom categories that your business offers. This can be a helpful ranking factor. Use the maximum number of permitted custom categories.

d) Citations are the links of Google Local rankings. Get listed on Localeze, InfoUSA, Openlist.com, etc. Americans should check out this list of places to get citations

Others should check out David’s guides to citations in Canada, UK Citations, Citations in Australia and Continental Europe Citations

You can use the search engines to find even more citation sources:

yourcity, st blog
yourcity, st directory
yourindustry, st blog
yourindustry, st directory
yourindustry yourcity, st blog
yourindustry yourstate directory

7)Buyind paid advertisements on Google Content Network:
There is a tip on buying advertisements on sites listed on the Google Content Network. Sites listed there are maximising their revenue through Adsense and would be more open to paid link advertisements. It is each individual site owner’s call whether to adopt this strategy or not.

8. Increase Link Love By Becoming A Green Business:
If a business goes green online, it is a good way of attracting links from authoritative domains. There are many sites like Ethical Directory, EcoFirms.org, Guide Me Green etc willing to give your site a link provided it is a green one. This also reflects on a business owner’s willingness to be eco friendly. With global warming taking centerstage, this issue is all the more vital.

9) Work on Your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
A good majority amongst us (especially in the SEO industry) are obsessed with rankings and traffic. Conversion of visitors into paid customers often takes a backseat. Ben Jesson’s CRO presentation provided a wealth of information and lot of food for thought.

You could make a good start by learning your customers’ needs once they land on your site. This can be done by implementing tools on your website from which you can learn what your customers are looking for.

Get some unbiased feedback from other folks who are not your friends or relatives. The more the site is torn to shreds, the better it is as an eye opener for you to take instant remedial action. A good list of tools for learning from your customers are:

GoogleTalk Chatback (I just added this to my site and it is super easy to implement)
Tell-a-Friend-King
Kampyle
iPerceptions 4Q
Distilled Reputation Monitor
CrazyEgg (I have used this, and it rocks)
SurveyMonkey
Ethnio
ClickTale
Google Website Optimizer

You would be well off checking these great Conversion rate optimization articles and sign up for the newsletter on their site.

10) Seth’s Marketing Opportunity Calculator:
To help you in your sales pitch efforts, it is worth your effort in taking a look at Seth’s Marketing Opportunity calulator. You can download his slides and spreadsheets at How to Win SEO Budget and Influence your CMO

Whitespark’s entire post titled 10 Valuable, Actionable, Take-Aways From the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar is a great read on which this post is based.

My post titled Next Frontier In Search Marketing gives the traffic figures for seo and ppc.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company offering both natural search and Auckland pay per click marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Natural Search Marketing is Just in Time Conversation

Brian R. Brown — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:34:40 +0000

I had the extreme pleasure of presenting to some of the biggest brands around at the 2009 Brandworks University. This year represented 19 years that Lindsay, Stone & Briggs has put on this annual branding conference. Brandworks is very unique in many ways as conferences go: attendance is mostly done by invitation, but attendees still pay a fee to attend; rather than elective presentations running simultaneously, there’s one block and presentations flow back-to-back and are formulated to relate to and support each other as well as the underlying theme; rather than a typical podium setup, presentations are done “in-the-round;” and it isn’t hard to find attendees who are able to claim 5, 10 or more years of attendance. Needless to say, if you ever get the opportunity to attend or are invited to speak, I highly recommend it.

This year’s talk was around the core theme of the “conversation economy” and how marketing, branding, and business in general is being shaped by and around conversations. Not surprising, there was a fair amount of talk around social media. Of course, my portion was to focus on natural search as part of this conversation, which thanks to blended search, crosses over and intersects all marketing channels. While my view on natural search hasn’t changed much over the years, preparing my presentation for the conference helped me frame it up with the exact message phrasing that I’ve been looking for - “just in time conversation.”

Just In Time Conversation

This description is excellent for natural search, and those who have been doing SEO for any amount of time have probably recognized this viewpoint. Natural search provides the opportunity to reach out and connect with a website’s target audience at the ideal time…when they are seeking what the site has to offer.

Of course you would think that presenting to some of the whose-who of brands would make this messaging old news. However, even today, this still couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of brands have made great strides online, but there is still a lot of ground on the natural search marketing front to be gained.

In prepping for the conference, I had a chance to preview a list of some of the represented brands and took that as an opportunity to see how well they were doing already regarding SEO. To protect the guilty, I won’t call out any of these brands here. Many of the fundamentals that you’d expect these brands to have already addressed, many of which would be evident even through a 60-Second Website Audit, actually hadn’t been addressed: canonicalization, duplicate title tags, keyword cannibalization, generic anchor text, etc. Beyond some of the more technical issues, many of these sites could benefit greatly just through thin slicing natural search optimization tactics.

I can only hope that the presentation helped to start more of these big brands down the natural search marketing path. I certainly did what I could in the 45 minutes I was given to illustrate the point.

Natural Search Users, Please Stand Up

Early in the presentation, I invited the attendees to participate in a little poll by having them stand up based on their own personal interaction with various marketing vehicles. Specifically, I asked them to stand up if:

Within the last week, you…

Used a phonebook?

Acted on a billboard ad?

Acted on a magazine ad?

Acted on a radio ad?

Acted on a TV ad?

Used a search engine?

Clicked on a paid search result?

Clicked on a natural search result?

As you might imagine (and can see below), out of 300 plus attendees, the numbers grew gradually, from 2-3 for phonebook usage (which I was actually amazed that the number was that high), up to nearly everyone in the audience when I reached the “Used a search engine?” part of the poll. Presenting in-the-round also meant that it was very easy for all of the attendees to see how much search engine usage has become a part of their and everyone’s everyday life. Not surprising, those who clicked on a natural search result compared to a paid search result was far greater.

This of course was the first step…now to get marketers to question why they continue to put a disproportionate amount of their online spend toward paid search versus natural search, even when their own usage of search engines contradicts that logic. But just like natural search takes time, it takes time to turn this kind of thinking right side up.

For many companies, natural search marketing may itself be one of the most important just in time conversations they have this year, after all, it’s now July and the 2009 holiday season is just around the corner.

Speaking at Dallas WordCamp 2009

Chris — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:19:52 +0000

I’m speaking at this year’s WordCamp in Dallas again later this week.

WordCamp is a mini-convention for Wordpress and blogging enthusiasts. Some of the content is Wordpress-centric, but other content is applicable to bloggers in general, such as how to promote your blog and other stuff.

I’ll be speaking on how to use social image sharing services for promotion. Social media sites such as Flickr allow people to publish and share their photos with many other people, and the site is well-constructed in terms of search engine optimization, so posting images there helps get media distributed all over. Using Flickr can help one gain more attention, inbound links, and overall search rankings.

I’ve spoken on using Flickr for promotion and optimization before, and I’ve written on details of image optimization here a number of times.

I’d further recommend blogging to everyone - I first started blogging here on the Natural Search Blog as a guest, after Stephan Spencer invited me, and it eventually changed my overall career path. Be sure to check out Stephan’s articles on blog optimization, btw, since he’s pretty much the top authority out there on the subject.

There’s still a few seats left for Dallas WordCamp - sign up before they’re all gone!

Vint Cerf & The Architect in The Matrix

Chris — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:34:42 +0000

While attending and speaking at the recent SMX West conference in Santa Clara, I had the opportunity to photograph Vinton (”Vint”) Cerf, Google’s VP and Chief Internet Evangelist during his keynote interview conducted by Chris Sherman.

After returning, one of my friends saw my pics and remarked that Vint Cerf resembled the Architect character in the Matrix movies. It immediately struck me that he was right — so I knocked together a comparison pic:

Vint Cerf and the Architect in the Matrix share a number of feature similarities: similar age, dress, coloring, and facial hair. The biggest difference is that the Architect has a full head of hair while Vint is balding.

In the last two films in the trilogy where the Architect appears, the character is portrayed by Helmut Bakaitis.

Further underscoring the resemblance, the Architect in the Matrix is depicted seated in an armchair during the pivotal scene when he’s introduced, and Vint Cerf was seated on stage with Chris Sherman during the SMX Keynote:

As I recall, Cerf was not obsessively clicking a Bic pen the entire time he spoke with Chris Sherman, though.

Okay, I’m not the first to mention this resemblance — TotallyLooksLike mentioned it as well, along with a few others.

I wonder, could the Wachowski Brothers who wrote and directed the films have been somehow inspired by Vint Cerf when they created the Architect? I see that a number of others out there have mentioned Cerf in relation to the character, but no direct proof that the Wachowski’s knew who he was, much less based a character in whole or in part upon him.

Okay, am I a total geek airhead for posting this?

Dan Heath, 5th Keynote at SES San Jose 08

Chris — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:08:37 +0000

Dan Heath, one of the co-authors of the book, “Made to Stick“, spoke on the last day of the Search Engine Strategies conference, last week. Dan is a Consultant to the Policy Programs for the Aspen Institute.

Dan Heath presenting Made To Stick’s hallmarks of sticky ideas:
Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories.

Dan presented the main concepts from his book, covering why some ideas survive and spread while other ideas die. As with a number of SES conferences in the past, many attendees apparently decided that this last day of the conference would be of lesser worth, so the audience for this keynote was a lot sparser than on previous days. This was a shame, because, aside from the Orion Panel discussion, this preso was likely the one that would’ve been of the highest worth to marketers.

How do you introduce an idea so that it may catch fire and spread? What are some characteristics of sticky ideas that make them viral and persistent?

The classic antipollution ad campaign with the weeping Indian.

Many companies try in vain to introduce new ideas in the form of products and services, and it’s challenging to promote those ideas into the marketplace. So, how does one improve the chances that a worthy idea will catch consumers’ interest and spread? This is really the basic problem that marketing seeks to solve. Made to Stick analyzes the components of sticky ideas and provides methods for making concepts or stories viral.

The book was co-written by Chip Heath, Dan’s brother and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. (I went to school with Chip and knew him to be a really savvy guy.) The brothers have received a lot of critical acclaim since the book published in late 2006, including positive reviews from Guy Kawasaki, major newspapers (it’s a New York Times bestseller) and various TV interviews such as The Today Show.

One really interesting exchange between them and Guy Kawasaki is as follows:

Question: “Can a slick marketer apply your principles and make a piece of crap stick—or does the intrinsic value ultimately decide stickiness?”

Their answer: “Slick marketers are already using most of these principles. We wanted our book to serve as an equalizer. Because you’re right—instrinsic value counts…” and “The problem is that ideas with intrinsic value don’t always win…” and “We can bemoan the fact that dumb ideas win out. But we can also reverse-engineer them. We can figure out the principles that make them stick and teach them to people who have worthwhile messages. Slick marketers know a lot of these principles already. Urban legends have them baked in. But no one teaches engineers or entrepreneurs or chemistry professors how to make their ideas stick.”

Dan’s presentation of the book’s highlights at SES was excellent and well-polished. Here’s a pretty good recap.

Googledance 2008

Chris — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:20:04 +0000

The Googledance party was held last night at the Googleplex for SES Conference attendees, and it lived up to its traditional party-on-a-grand-scale reputation for which it has become known.

Googledance, 2008

The theme this year was “Glow in the Dark”, and they gave out t-shirts which flouresced nicely under blacklights, and those endothermic glow sticks that can be linked up for bracelets or necklaces. In one area was a large Lite Brite station that allowed party-goers to make colorful messages or illustrations of their choosing with the translucent pegs.

One really cool entertainment was the “Glow Graffiti” - they had set up a couple of different stations to allow the crowd to do digital graffiti — using laser pointers to write on the sides of a couple of buildings. A camera tracks where one drags the laser pointer beam on the wall’s surface, then a computer captures the trajectories and redisplays the lines drawn back onto the wall continuously with a projector. In this way, one can draw all over the side of a building with light.

“Google” tagged in digital graffiti on side of building

I first reported on the digital graffiti phenomenon around a year ago in a post called “Laser-Projected Graffiti Ads on Buildings“, as an emerging form of subversive art which could be exploited by guerrilla marketers. However, after I reported on it, many others reported on it as well, so I’ve said that the phenomenon of digital graffiti has gone mainstream.

For those not in the know - both the laser projected graffiti and various LED light displays have been invented or innovated by a subversive group called the Graffiti Research Lab (”GRL”). You might remember the “Mooninite” bomb scare of Boston, which was sparked by a guerrilla marketing ploy using little LiteBrite-like LED advertising units left all around the Boston area — those units were quite similar to the Nite Writer idea published by the Graffiti Research Lab. It seems as though the GRL’s work inspired the planners behind this year’s Googledance. Not surprising, since the GRL provides these subversive art/marketing ideas in “open source” format, generating detailed plans and schematics for anyone to use for any purpose — something that aligns philosophically nicely with engineers who believe in open-source code.

One disappointment I had with Googledance was that there was no “Meet the Engineers” session as there has been in the past. I’d found those sessions to be surprisingly intimate chances to chat with Google’s engineers and to hear the burning questions people brought to them. While the app demos gave the opportunity to chat with engineers as well, it was still less worthwhile due to the chaotic party atmosphere and noise. Perhaps the party has just grown so big that it’s not really feasible to have attendees traipsing through hallways to interior rooms.

Click to see the rest of my Flickr pix of Googledance.

Orion Panel: Tech & Info Giants - 3rd Keynote at SES San Jose 08

Chris — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:56:49 +0000

The Orion Keynote Panel, “Technical & Information Giants”, touched on fairly broad topic areas this afternoon at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

Speakers included Matt Cutts (Google Engineer), Rich LeFurgy (Partner, Archer Advisors), Kirsten Mangers (Co-Founder & CEO, WebVisible), Robert Scoble (Managing Director, FastCompany.TV), Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land), and Tim Westergren (Founder, Pandora).

Conference Chair and moderator, Kevin Ryan, framed up the introduction to the panel by using numerous pop culture video snippets to emphasize the impact of Google, social media, and the overall internet on everyday lives. Some of the funnier snippets included quotes from South Park and Californication.

Moderators Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan engaged the panel speakers on topics as diverse as whether it was reasonable to consider the possibilities of a “Google Killer” in the near-term, and what were the trends to watch for in search and internet/mobile app development.

One particular topic of interest to me that panelists highlighted was local search and how mobile still hasn’t “arrived”. Danny Sullivan noted that each year for a few in a row now, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has stated that “THIS will be the year mobile arrives…” (my emphasis), but mobile still hasn’t really arrived.

Also, Robert Scoble joked about how he loved his iPhone, but “it doesn’t do everything well”, so he carries two other phones — and will likely start carrying a fourth when Google’s Android phone comes out. A number of panelists commented about how entertainingly compelling the iPhone Urbanspoon application is — it certainly has some coolness, but I wonder how widely it’s adopted? Kirsten Mangers commented about how it ranks restaurants and whether it gives users what they’re really wanting.

The commentary on the Urbanspoon has been recurring from a number of top internet commentators, so it’s definitely one hot app to watch.

Matt Cutts and Robert Scoble show each other their iPhones

Satya Nadella, 2nd Keynote at SES San Jose 08

Chris — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:46:35 +0000

Satya Nadella (Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of the Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group) spoke at this morning’s keynote at the Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Nadella spoke on how Microsoft approaches search and how the company intends to shape trends in search development and how they intend to exploit them.

Lee Siegal, 1st Keynote at SES San Jose 08

Chris — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:26:23 +0000

On opening night at the Search Engine Strategies Conference this week in San Jose, Kevin Ryan () spoke with Lee Siegal about his book, “Against the Machine”, and the ideas in it.

Kevin Ryan Interviews Lee Siegal, SES Keynote

Siegal proposes that the internet culture is perhaps damaging our attention span and he points out the benefits of having intentionality about what we do. Interesting!

Lee Siegal, author of “Against the Machine”