WebmasterWorld Conference - Day 2
The second day of the WMW conference kicked off with an interesting keynote by Noel McMichael, founder of MarketLeap (now owned by Digital Impact). Noel discussed his theory of the search engine marketing ecosystem, and highlighted his Seven Imperatives for Success in the Search Engine Marketing Ecosystem:
1. Define ecosystem direction and values
2. Foster open relationships
3. Focus all participants on customers
4. Treat employees, partners & vendors as investors of human capital
5. Search Engines must define governance and rules of engagement
6. Leverage knowledge and innovation of external entities
7. Evolve or become extinct
The second session I attended was the proactive linking session featuring Bruce Clay, Jim Banks, and Greg Boser. Good insight and a different point of view from each of these guys. Not a lot of new information for people who understand linking strategies, but good information. The overarching theme was that you want as many quality links as possible (from unique c-class IP blocks), and you should always use your keywords in the text link, but not always the exact same keyword phrase. Bruce emphasized the need to manage your links just like you manage every other part of your marketing strategy. Bruce also mentioned the use of what he called the "silo" linking strategy, where you segment your internal site links into keyword themes or "silos" to maximize the themed relevance of those pages/links. He also mentioned the opportunity to include href links in PDF files that you distribute. He even suggested that PDF files are not currently subject to the same stringent spam filters that html files are subject to.
Jim Banks suggested using PPC search engines such as Google Adwords as a testing ground to test the effectiveness of specific keywords before you go out and spend a lot of time and/or money building links to your site with a certain set of keywords. The idea is that you can test to see if conversion rates and traffic/order volume is sufficient to warrant the large amount of effort required with link building.
Greg Boser advocated the use of links by trying to "aggressively replicate what happens in nature". I guess by nature he means on the web, but outside of SEO efforts, not the backwoods. Greg also said that he believes that the benefit of keywords in the text links are passed through to a site even if pagerank is not, for example a link on a PR0 site still has value to determine a site's relevance.
The next session was Site Promotion on a Budget. Panel members for this session included Adam Jewell, Anne Kennedy, and Brett Tabke. All three provided some good suggestions for additional marketing methods and tactics beyond the search engines.
Wednesday's super session was the much anticipated Webmasters and Search Engines, featuring a panel of reps from several of the search engines.
Tim Meyer from Yahoo discussed new features on Yahoo, with an emphasis on the recent release of Yahoo personalized search. Tim also addressed one of the pressing issues for Webmasters, the 301 redirection issue. He said the problems should be completely resolved within a couple weeks. They should have fixed the issues regarding redirects that have caused some sites to be dropped from Yahoo's index. Their new policy for redirects also applies to meta refreshes, being handled as either a 301 or 302 redirect.
Dan Boberg gave a dog and pony show about their PPC program and also pitched their (relatively) new service, Search Optimizer.
Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves gave a very entertaining presentation about the progress they have made as a company and their search technology. He ended up getting the bulk of the questions during the Q&A, probably because nobody has paid much attention to optimizing for that search engine for a while, so there were a lot of questions that came up.
Matt Cutts from Google was great as usual. Showed some slides outlining all the new features Google has added this year and discussed several of them. He showed some funny examples of spam he came across in Google (or more likely that didn't make it into Google). Matt said that outgoing links don't play a factor in Google's ranking currently, but he left open the possibility that they could add that to their algorithm in the future (doesn't he say that about everything?).
The final session of the day that I attended was News Search. There were some fine panel members for this one, including Rich Skrenta from Topix, Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR, Kevin Karim from Looksmart (findarticles.com, furl.net), and Matt Cutts from Google. Each explained their news-related search products and services and discussed how news and press releases can be used to increase exposure, traffic, etc. Very interesting topic that many SEOs ignore. The best point came out of Greg Jarboe, that if you want to really be effective, you need to have good, actual news to let people know about.
Wednesday night was the Yahoo party at the Palms. Yahoo paid for the party and provided chips to gamble with. I wasn't able to go (I had a prior engagement to take my wife to Celine Dion), but I heard it was a lot of fun. My favorite quote was heard on Thursday morning, "those geeks sure know how to party!"
1. Define ecosystem direction and values
2. Foster open relationships
3. Focus all participants on customers
4. Treat employees, partners & vendors as investors of human capital
5. Search Engines must define governance and rules of engagement
6. Leverage knowledge and innovation of external entities
7. Evolve or become extinct
The second session I attended was the proactive linking session featuring Bruce Clay, Jim Banks, and Greg Boser. Good insight and a different point of view from each of these guys. Not a lot of new information for people who understand linking strategies, but good information. The overarching theme was that you want as many quality links as possible (from unique c-class IP blocks), and you should always use your keywords in the text link, but not always the exact same keyword phrase. Bruce emphasized the need to manage your links just like you manage every other part of your marketing strategy. Bruce also mentioned the use of what he called the "silo" linking strategy, where you segment your internal site links into keyword themes or "silos" to maximize the themed relevance of those pages/links. He also mentioned the opportunity to include href links in PDF files that you distribute. He even suggested that PDF files are not currently subject to the same stringent spam filters that html files are subject to.
Jim Banks suggested using PPC search engines such as Google Adwords as a testing ground to test the effectiveness of specific keywords before you go out and spend a lot of time and/or money building links to your site with a certain set of keywords. The idea is that you can test to see if conversion rates and traffic/order volume is sufficient to warrant the large amount of effort required with link building.
Greg Boser advocated the use of links by trying to "aggressively replicate what happens in nature". I guess by nature he means on the web, but outside of SEO efforts, not the backwoods. Greg also said that he believes that the benefit of keywords in the text links are passed through to a site even if pagerank is not, for example a link on a PR0 site still has value to determine a site's relevance.
The next session was Site Promotion on a Budget. Panel members for this session included Adam Jewell, Anne Kennedy, and Brett Tabke. All three provided some good suggestions for additional marketing methods and tactics beyond the search engines.
Wednesday's super session was the much anticipated Webmasters and Search Engines, featuring a panel of reps from several of the search engines.
Tim Meyer from Yahoo discussed new features on Yahoo, with an emphasis on the recent release of Yahoo personalized search. Tim also addressed one of the pressing issues for Webmasters, the 301 redirection issue. He said the problems should be completely resolved within a couple weeks. They should have fixed the issues regarding redirects that have caused some sites to be dropped from Yahoo's index. Their new policy for redirects also applies to meta refreshes, being handled as either a 301 or 302 redirect.
Dan Boberg gave a dog and pony show about their PPC program and also pitched their (relatively) new service, Search Optimizer.
Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves gave a very entertaining presentation about the progress they have made as a company and their search technology. He ended up getting the bulk of the questions during the Q&A, probably because nobody has paid much attention to optimizing for that search engine for a while, so there were a lot of questions that came up.
Matt Cutts from Google was great as usual. Showed some slides outlining all the new features Google has added this year and discussed several of them. He showed some funny examples of spam he came across in Google (or more likely that didn't make it into Google). Matt said that outgoing links don't play a factor in Google's ranking currently, but he left open the possibility that they could add that to their algorithm in the future (doesn't he say that about everything?).
The final session of the day that I attended was News Search. There were some fine panel members for this one, including Rich Skrenta from Topix, Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR, Kevin Karim from Looksmart (findarticles.com, furl.net), and Matt Cutts from Google. Each explained their news-related search products and services and discussed how news and press releases can be used to increase exposure, traffic, etc. Very interesting topic that many SEOs ignore. The best point came out of Greg Jarboe, that if you want to really be effective, you need to have good, actual news to let people know about.
Wednesday night was the Yahoo party at the Palms. Yahoo paid for the party and provided chips to gamble with. I wasn't able to go (I had a prior engagement to take my wife to Celine Dion), but I heard it was a lot of fun. My favorite quote was heard on Thursday morning, "those geeks sure know how to party!"
posted by Dave @ 10:47 PM
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