Search Engine Strategies, Chicago 2005 - Day 2
by Chris Boggs
Tuesday morning started with a motivating keynote address presented by Danny Sullivan, the Editor of Search Engine Watch, as well as the organizer of the Search Engine Strategies conferences. He gave an excellent overview of how we have grown as an industry, and highlighted the fact that we were becoming a legitimately tighter “community.” He supported this assertion by explaining how many different forums, blogs, and even the search engines themselves united together to try to find a missing search engine marketer earlier in the year.
Ian Turner had gone missing after the Web Master World conference earlier this year in New Orleans. His wife contacted some of his associates when he failed to arrive back in England from his connecting flight in Atlanta, and within minutes, the first post in a public forum pleaded for information regarding his whereabouts. Within the next few days, hundreds of posts had been written on dozens of blogs and forums, and he was found safely a few days later. The next slide Danny presented showed a neat map that Elisabeth Osmeloski, the Search Engine Watch Forums Editor, had created, showing the locations of various search marketers around the world (see it at frappr.com/seos). In short, he feels the community is becoming tighter, and that the search engines have done their best to help support our efforts. He provided a variety of such evidence, and ended with a rousing call to motivation, even presenting a short song for us to sing together…not many bites on that one.
After a short break, I attended a session that had been reformatted for the Chicago show: “Creating Compelling Ads.” This session would cover recommended ways to create ads for use in portals such as Google’s AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing’s Pay-Per-Click system. Moderated by paid search expert Andrew Goodman, this presentation featured two very knowledgeable speakers: Vic Drabicky of Range Online Media and Darren Kuhn of Resolution Media. The room was very full, and Andrew mentioned that there may never have been so many people jammed into a room to hear about how to write so few words.
The first speaker was Vic, who outlined his company’s strategy when creating ads for use in Google and Yahoo. He suggested that these were the only two ad-writing styles that really needed to be learned, since the other PPC portals could essentially use the same copy. His main points: use the keyword as often as possible within the title and description, and if possible, the display URL. He likes using Google’s dynamic keyword insertion tool, which allows a “wild card” to be placed in the title box which inserts any keyword search under the title’s 25 character limit dynamically into the ad to act as the tile. Later in the conference, I heard conflicting views on the use of this tool, some people saying that this precludes the use of capitals un less people search it, and if they search a misspelling, it may stand out the wrong way compared to the other ads. Vic also suggests that even though it takes longer, it is highly recommended to use unique titles and descriptions within each separate Yahoo listing, although it may take longer. Among other good recommendations, I particularly liked his suggestion to “think like Rod Roddy,” the host of The Price is Right. He never tried to “sell” the sponsors’ products, instead focusing on facts about them and letting the listener decide if the offering was something worth trying.
Darren was next, and he described the process of testing ads in the PPC space. He notes (and I agree completely) that you should base a test on a minimum of 50,000 impressions and 500 click-throughs, and that the test period should be at the very least 2 weeks. When they perform the test, they like to write four to six ads differing message types, such as product guarantees, price points, and free shipping, for example. He then suggests running the campaigns until they reach at least the minimum metrics described above. If there is a clear winner, then use that ad in future campaigns, if not: start over! Darren gave some excellent results from case studies, which helped his company achieve excellent results for each of the clients. Some of the highlights included creating one test for use with only contextual match ads, as well as another which incorporated an automated creative system that generated 54 different ads. He suggests that if you use such a system, it will be hard if not impossible to track each ad separately to conversion, so use this type of test to get the 4-6 highest click-through-rate results, and then manually test using tracking codes to determine conversions. If this seems a little confusing, as always, please email me and I will offer further suggestions (to a limit, of course- we have to make money somehow).
After the morning session, I reported to the SEMPO booth and helped to introduce visitors to the concept of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization. This association of search marketers is growing rapidly, and becoming more of a voice for the community as a whole, despite some lingering bad feelings about the first few years of its existence, when there was a lot of “jostling for power.” I am proud to serve on a few committees at SEMPO, and hope to some day sit on the board.
After lunch, the butterflies started. I was to deliver a formal presentation during the Link Building Basics session, along with Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla.com and Mike Grehan of Smart Interactive. Detlev Johnson of Position Tech and searchreturn.com was moderating, and he quickly put me at ease. Before I knew it, it was my turn to speak. My presentation focused on the seven major myths associated with linking. Those included: “Reciprocal Linking is somehow bad;” “Outbound non-reciprocated links are bad;” “Inbound Links can hurt your site;” “Only high-Google™ PageRank™ pages provide valuable links;” “Higher numbers of links = Greater success in rankings;” “Only Google-reported backlinks count;” and “DMOZ/Open Directory links are the most important.” Without going into much detail, I gave a brief overview of why these statements for the most part are myths instead of facts. The main point I tried to get across was that proper research would help individuals decide the relative value of different links, and that website proprietors should always question blanket statements.
After fielding some very interesting questions as well as some nice compliments about my presentation, I was off to cover the next session for the blog. “Successful Site Architecture” is always an excellent panel, and even though I had been to the same session about 16 months prior in San Jose (see Marketing News page for recaps from all the SES conferences I have attended with Instant Position), I again learned new facts. The moderator was Barbara Coll, WebMama.com Inc., who is certainly one of the unquestioned leaders in our industry. I came in during the presentation of the first speaker, Derrick Wheeler of Marketleap. He was discussing the importance of not hosting a development version of a site on a server that could somehow be indexed by Google spiders. He suggested that if the development server is not password protected, one should use the Robots.txt exclusion code to prevent the content from “getting out early.”
Derrick also spoke to the importance of not using Sessions ID’s on pages that should be indexed, including the use of some types of cookies that attach session ID’s. The main problem this can cause is a tremendous loss of rankings and traffic due to the content not being able to be indexed by spiders. He then described how “weird redirects” can affect a site negatively, such as an example which showed subsequent visits to omahasteaks.com revealing different URL’s after a quick redirect. He spoke about the negative effect that JavaScript can cause in the form of indexed pages showing the “This page requires the installation of JavaScript in order to be viewed properly” message instead of the content that a human would see (if JavaScript enabled).
Derrick continued with many more tidbits about various issues that can affect rankings, which are detailed in this blog post. James Jeude from AskJeeves next spoke briefly, and provided the advice of ensuring that keywords within your content are surrounded by relevant and helpful descriptions. This causes the “snippets” used by some search engines to be more “reader-friendly,” and can help with getting more clicks on the listing within the organic results page, where it is harder to ensure a good description accompanies the page title. Rajat Mukherjee of Yahoo! Spoke next and gave some sound advice regarding the proper use of the robots.txt tag. He then announced excitedly that Yahoo’s Site Explorer, a tool designed to help webmasters and marketers with optimization efforts, is now able to filter specific in-links by domain, and that you can now use various feeds to submit URL’s directly. They have also added more support at: help.yahoo.com/search.
After the afternoon session, I headed off to the networking cocktail reception hosted in the expo hall by Google. Later in the evening, I was fortunate to attend one of the very few parties thrown this week, an event for Google Advertisers held at a local club. It was fun, but certainly no Google dance (see San Jose recaps). I was happy to see my old friend from urchin, now Google Analytics, Scott Crosby, and spend some time catching up. The evening was not over, as I then headed about 20 minutes from downtown to a club called “B.L.U.E.S.” All I can say is WOW! I could live in Chicago if it weren’t for the cold, and survive almost solely on Blues.
The highlight of the evening was an older (about 60-70 range) gentleman that went by the name of “Dangerous Wayne.” After he played the harmonica with the band, he went on to dance with just about every lady in the bar, and at a level that astounded me, especially considering his age. He was squatting about 5 inches above the floor, straddling dancers on his legs, and jumping back up with them. Elisabeth Osmeloski was a lucky beneficiary, and she did just about the best job keeping up with him. It was one of those situations where you really “had to be there;” I was wiping tears of amazement from my eyes. That capped-off a wonderful second day.
