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Page 1: SES Magazine January 2010

SearchEngineStrategies.com January 2010

$3.01

brought to you by

Casting a LineHook Your Audience with

Great Content • 10

PLUSTop Nine Takeaways from 2009 • 4

Popular PPC Pitfalls • 8

Nonprofits & Social Media • 12

Own the Top 10 Results for Your Brand • 28

s n e a k previewses london15-19 february

learn more13-17about nextmonth’s event!

Page 2: SES Magazine January 2010

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Page 3: SES Magazine January 2010

contentsfeatures

A

columns

10 CASTING A LINESix steps in getting your audience hooked on your content — and how to get them to share. §

13 SES LONdON PREvIEw:GO BEYONd SEARChFrom social to video and local to mobile, the new online marketing frontier is here. Learn how to connect the dots at next month’s Search Engine Strategies conference. Learn about the speakers, sessions, and workshops that make SES London a must-attend event. §

32 GLOSSARYTerms and acronyms every search marketer should know. §

18 dIGITAL Ad REvENuE TAkES ThE FORM OF CONTENTAs publishers struggle to close the gap in advertising revenue between print and online, e-mail newsletters continue to be a bright spot. §

24 FRuGAL IS ThE NEw BLACkthe recession has caused a sociological change in consumer behavior that may impact how companies market to us. §

20 FOuR NEw SIGNALS IN SEARChWhile search engines will never spell out their formulas, here are some features that, in the near future, could play a bigger role in impacting your page rank. §

26 COMMuNICATING SEARCh SuCCESSThe most important metric of all routinely gets pushed to the bottom of your priority stack: business outcomes. If you see search as senior managers see it, you can grow your practice. §

22 hOw SEARCh INFLuENCES BRANd COMMuNICATIONS PLANNINGHow do we combine communications planning with search? How do we move beyond keywords and into the psychology of search? Check out the findings from a recent study. §

28 OwN ThE TOP 10 RESuLTS FOR YOuR BRANdSix very different approaches that will help you manage — and improve — your company’s online reputation. §

30 ThE dEMISE OF SEO wON’T BE CAuSEd BY PERSONALIzATIONTo appear within the personalized results of your target audience, you need to get to know them better than ever before. §

Follow SES Magazine attwitter.com/sesmag

January 2010

Become an SES affiliate today!Are you a blogger or publisher? Do you post about SES events?

With 5% payouts, the SES affiliate program helps you monetizethe traffic you’re already sending our way — you can easily

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*Payout for 10 SES San Jose registrants (regular rate)

Learn more: SearchEngineStrategies.com/affiliate-program.html

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4 TOP NINE TAkEAwAYS FROM 2009The search industry’s phenomenal pace of change continued with fervor in 2009. ClickZ’s Adam Cahill takes a look back and explores the biggest of those changes. §

6 ThE IMPACT OF MuLTIMEdIA ON NEwS SEARChConsumers, bloggers, and journalists are all gravitating toward multimedia formats, so it’s up to you to provide them with content types that paint the overall picture. §

8 POPuLAR PPC PITFALLS, ANd hOw TO PREvENT ThEMIf you’re not positioned to hire a professional PPC manager, here’s a checklist of three of the most common PPC pitfalls — and how to fix them. §

12 NONPROFITS NEEd TO GET CLuEd IN TO SOCIAL MEdIAAlmost 80 percent of nonprofit executives aren’t sure how to demonstrate the value of social media to others in their organization. §

Page 4: SES Magazine January 2010

Staff

A

drew Eastmead | Managing Editor

about SES MagazineSES Magazine, now in its fourth year, is brought to you by ClickZ, the leading online

destination for news and expert advice in digital marketing. In this issue, you’ll find articles on the latest online trends, as well as a preview of our upcoming event, SES London (16-19 February).

We are grateful to our contributors and readers alike, and we’re always interested to hear your feedback and learn about what topics you’d like to see (e-mail us at [email protected]).

For more information on advertising, subscribing, and contributing, or to view past issues, visit www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/ses-magazine.

You can also follow us on Twitter: @sesmag.

Advertiser Index

Advertiser Page

IDM ............................................................... 19

Internet Advertising Bureau ............................ 29

Jellyfish ......................................................... C4

Online Marketing Institute ................................ 3

Online Marketing Summit .............................. C3

Advertiser Page

Revolution Magazine ........................................ 5

SearchEngineWatch.com ................................. 9

SES New York ................................................ 21

topseos.com .................................................. C2

Website Optimization ....................................... 8

SearchEngineStrategies.com January 2010

$3.01

brought to you by

Casting a LineHook Your Audience with

Great Content • 10

PLUS

Top Nine Takeaways from 2009 • 4

Popular PPC Pitfalls • 8

Nonprofits & Social Media • 12

Own the Top 10 Results for Your Brand • 28

s n e a k previewses london16-19 february

learn more13-17about nextmonth’s event!

For information about advertising in future issues, please contact sales [email protected] or (212) 457-4993.

Matthew BaileyPresidentSiteLogic

Mikel ChertudiVP, Demand & Online MarketingOmniture

Brett CrosbyGroup PPMGoogle

Bryan EisenbergBestselling authorbryaneisenberg.com

Jeff FergusonSr. Director, Online MarketingLocal.com

Andrew GoodmanPrincipalPage Zero Media

Mike Grehan, Co-ChairVP & Global Content DirectorIncisive Media

Bill huntPresidentBack Azimuth Consulting

Anne kennedyManaging PartnerBeyond Ink

John MarshallCTOMarket Motive

Lee OddenCEOTopRank Online Marketing

Pauline OresSr. Marketing Mgr, Social MediaIBM Corporation

Stewart Quealy, Co-ChairVP, Content DevelopmentIncisive Media

Erica SchmidtGlobal Search DirectorIsobar

Crispin SheridanSr. Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Marketing

SES Advisory BoardComprised of both industry thought leaders and real-world practitioners, the Search Engine Strategies advisory board brings together top players in the field of interactive media and search. The team works to deliver continually cutting-edge search techniques, more integrated and relevant content, and professional development resources to SES attendees.

SES: Volume 4, Issue 1 | January 2010© 2010 IncIsIve MedIa plc

enviroink.indd 1 10/1/08 10:44:38 AM

Please recycle this magazine!

To advertise, subscribe, contribute, or view past issues:www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/ses-magazine

Comments? Want to unsubscribe? E-mail us:[email protected]

Incisive Media, U.S.120 Broadway, 6th floorNew York, NY 10271tel (212) 457-9400fax (646) 822-5237

Incisive Media, head office28-29 Haymarket HouseLondon SW1Y 4RX, UKtel +44 (0)20 7316 9609fax +44 (0)20 7930 2238

Staff

Managing EditorContributors

Drew EastmeadChris Boggs, Adam Cahill,Sean Carton, Amanda Davie,Bryan Eisenberg, Eric Enge, Mark Jackson, Melissa Mackey, Stephanie Miller, Joshua Palau, Jim Sterne, Jiyan Wei

MAGAzINE

VP, Content DevelopmentSenior Program Director

Program Coordinator

Stewart QuealyMarilyn CraftsJackie Ortez

PROGRAM dEvELOPMENT

SALES & MARkETINGSales Directors

Account Executives

Event Client Services Mgr.Marketing Director

Marketing ManagerWeb Designer

Online Operations ManagerOnline Operations Assoc.

Andrew KatzElaine MershonElaine RomeoPeter WesterholmElizabeth HustonKatie O’HeaJoAnn SimonelliAngela ManChristian GeorgeouRebecca HolzLouise LabergeAleksey Gershin

Executive Editor, ClickZDirector, SEW

Managing Editor, NewsSenior Editor, News

Staff WriterCopy Editor

Anna Maria VirziJonathan AllenZach RodgersKate KayeChristopher HeineCaitlin Rossman

Chief ExecutiveGroup Managing Director

Tim WellerJames Hanbury

CLICkz & SEARCh ENGINE wATCh

CORPORATE

Director, OperationsOperations Manager

Michele McDermottDan Hoskins

OPERATIONS

Matt McGowanVP, Publisher

Mike GrehanVP, Global Content Director

Page 5: SES Magazine January 2010
Page 6: SES Magazine January 2010

4 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

Without question, my favorite thing about this industry is the phenom-enal pace of change, and along with it, the

endless number of opportunities to learn each and every day.

As I look back over the past year and themes come into focus, here are my top nine from 2009.

Ad Exchanges and dSPs Revitalize display

The emergence of ad exchanges has made display advertising more relevant than ever. With auction-based pricing models, third-party data overlays, and impression-

level bidding, exchanges are making display more targeted, efficient, and effective than ever. Meanwhile, Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) — like Media-Math, DataXu, and Invite

Media — enable access into the multiple exchanges, providing buyers with the tools to develop new ways of doing business.

Separating Audiences from Content

What’s most interesting about exchanges is the underlying change in media plan-ning they enable. Instead of planning via an RFP process that revolves around sites, audience-based planning starts with the question, if you could define your target audience as precisely as you wanted to, what would that look like? Chances are, the combination of available data and the blank canvas of exchange inventory means that targeting approach could be put into place. Where the ad appears — within reason — is less of a consideration.

Buying Brand SafetyWho hasn’t experienced the cringe-

inducing moment when you find out your ad ended up somewhere in the red light district? Until now, there hasn’t been a way to control this, other than relying on the promises of sellers. But now it’s possible to buy a form of online advertising insurance. Companies like ADsafe and DoubleVerify have emerged to address this concern head on, building busi-nesses around the promise of preventing these issues and gain-ing adoption at a rapid pace.

Facebook Becomes a No-BrainerIn the past, I needed to be persuaded that

Facebook had a place on a given program. But based on its explosive growth, strength across demos, and continually improving marketing toolset, the opposite is now true. I go into a program needing to be convinced that Facebook isn’t a good fit. And that hasn’t happened in a long time.

Social Ads: I’m a FanSimilarly, I used to think that social

spaces weren’t a great environment for ads, but Facebook is convincing me otherwise. A recent example: Working on a holiday gift card program, our team sent messages to the friends of our brand’s fans that in essence said, “You have a friend who loves Brand X — so get them a gift card.” The postage-stamp creative won’t end up on anyone’s reel, but I’ll take targeting like that all day long.

Measuring the Right ThingsWe’ve always measured everything

online — except some of the things that really matter. In 2009, the industry seemed to turn a corner. The click has been widely and soundly dismissed. It’s become easier and more affordable to measure the offline impact of online sales. And companies like

Meteor Solutions are making great progress on the next big measurement frontier — quantifying the impact of social.

“Experimentation” versus “Test and Learn”

The industry has always loved the notion of test and learn. But many smart people have recently talked about the need for

experimentation, which isn’t the same thing. Experimenta-tion is about possibili-ties, and is inherently optimistic. Test and learn is about limiting risk, and is inherently

cautious. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but my bet is that an experimental approach will lead to more — and bigger — wins.

The Need for SpeedPerhaps spurred on by the pressures

of the recession, the need to move faster became a requirement. Production time-lines were crunched, and biweekly report-ing cycles no longer cut it. I’d expect this to become the norm in the future, and an area of competitive differentiation for agencies that can adjust their operations.

doing is Better Than SayingI’m a big believer in the “it’s not what you

say, it’s what you do” line of thinking. But it turns out that the easiest part is coming up with great ideas. The reality is that many companies just aren’t set up operationally to deliver on this kind of thinking. Agencies will need to go beyond utility-driven ideas, and help their clients with the difficult work of organizational change. §

Adam Cahill is the SVP, director of digital media at Hill Holliday.

@adamcahill

Top Nine Takeaways from 2009 By Adam Cahill

The emergence of ad exchanges has made

display advertising more relevant than ever.

§ FOCUS: trends

31.6 million

Number of unique Facebook viewers who watched a video in October, making the social

network the No. 2 video site by reach — trailing only YouTube.

Source: The NielSeN compaNy

A Learn more at ClickZ Stats.

Page 7: SES Magazine January 2010

5SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

The Insider’s Guide toDigital

Marketing2009

The Insiders Guide to Digital Marketing

Revolution’s essential guide to all that’s new in digital, provides you with everything you need to know about latest innovations in each of the key market sectors and explains how you can incorporate them into your media plan.

www.igdm.co.uk

Page 8: SES Magazine January 2010

6 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

In October 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that nearly 140 million people in the United States alone viewed 11.2 billion videos. The statistic represented a year-over-year increase in unique online video view-

ers of approximately 15 percent and validation for the near-ubiquity of online video consumption in the United States.

The increasing prevalence of multimedia online has changed the ways people produce and consume information. Marketers can use multimedia to enhance the impact of their news distribution activities — here’s how to best implement such a strategy.

Advantages to Multimedia Multimedia has several advantages. It allows

viewers to absorb information in the format they prefer. While some people are more visual, others are more tuned into specifications or technical docu-ments. The latter may not be part of a news release, but they should certainly be packaged as an attach-ment. Most importantly, multimedia can enhance search, help to build traction, and have a greater influ-ence consumer behavior.

Influencing consumer behavior. Video has the potential to capture the attention of the news consumer, breathe life into dry topics, and ulti-mately, compel the consumer to act. In 2007, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) published a study, “Frames of Reference: Online Video Advertis-ing, Content and Consumer Behavior,” where more than 1,400 video users were surveyed regarding the behavioral impact of a video advertisement.

Fifty-two percent of the respondents said they took

The Impact ofMultimedia on

News SearchBy Jiyan Wei

Page 9: SES Magazine January 2010

7SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

FOCUS: video & images §

some sort of action after viewing a video advertisement: 31 percent visited the adver-tiser’s website, 15 percent visited the actual store, and 12 percent made a purchase. The study is one of the more comprehensive to date and validates the power of video to compel action.

Generating traction. As the OPA study demonstrated, video influences news consumers to take commerce-oriented action. In the world of marketing and PR professionals, one of their priorities is to get their news releases into the hands of relevant journalists and bloggers. Just like consum-ers, journalists, and bloggers have shown increasing demand for online video.

According to a recent study by TEKgroup and Bull-dog Reporter, more than half of journalists now report they seek audio or video mate-rial from corporate websites. Video not only helps communicate stories to journalists and bloggers who are writing original pieces, but it becomes part of the story they tell. Evidence suggests that videos are appearing with increasing frequency on leading blogs, which is facili-tated by the embed code provided by video sharing sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video.

Enhanced Search Presence. When Google crawls a news story, it looks for an image to extract and place as a thumbnail in conjunction with the story excerpt on the search engine results page. The inclusion of a thumbnail can have a tremendously posi-tive impact on click-through rates, which become even more important as news results start to display in the blended search results

Also keep in mind that a multimedia release will not only be picked up in the standard web and news search engines, but will also create a presence in image search. From a search perspective, multimedia was a significant driver for increased search engine usage from 2008 to 2009, as image search

grew 32 percent year-over-year, according to comScore. Furthermore, integrating a news release with a video hosted on a video shar-ing site will provide the customer with an opportunity to engage in video search.

Five Tips for Making Multimedia a Staple of Online News Releases

Embed video from a video sharing site. Hosting your news release video on a sharing site will provide many benefits to

your overall distribution. In addition to providing bloggers with code that makes it easy for them to use your video, you’ll

also create traction by sharing your content with the video sharing community where you host it. Embedding your video within your news release will auto-matically create a link from the news release

site to your video. You should also make sure to link your video back to your news release. The interlinking between your news release and your video will have a mutually benefi-cial benefit for both pieces of content.

Properly optimise images. Images should not only be of high quality and relevance to the story presented in the news release,

but should also be optimised to help search engine categorization. Be sure to include relevant keywords in the file name, ALT tag, and text around the image. Search engines will look for signals in all of these areas to determine what the image is about.

Anyone can produce video. We are in a new age of video consumption in which profes-sional production quality is

no longer a primary attribute of a success-ful video. The absence of a professional

production crew, access to a studio, or profes-sional editing equipment should not deter potential video producers. A quick glance at the most popular videos on YouTube reveals that quality of content is now defined by what happens in the video rather than how it is produced. Get your team together and brainstorm what would be interesting and entertaining for your audience — then go out and shoot it.

Provide additional content for bloggers and journalists. If your goal is to make a splash not only with consumers but also to

prompt bloggers and journalists to pick up your story, think about the types of multime-dia you should provide that will help them craft their story. If you’re announcing a new product release, your news release should contain links to product pages on your site, product specifications included as file attach-ments, and images and possibly video of the product itself. Bloggers and journalists are thinking in multimedia terms, so make sure you provide them with the content they need to tell a great story.

No multimedia is better than irrelevant multimedia. Great multimedia will complement a great story; however, irrelevant

multimedia can ruin a great story. Don’t just throw anything in your news release. We have seen cases where customers have spent a great deal of time crafting compelling stories and then included irrelevant videos just so they can check the multimedia box. Irrelevant images and video will distract your audience, so it’s better to simply stick with a standard text-based release. §

Jiyan Wei is director of product management for PRWeb, Vocus’ online news release distribution service, which has built a distribu-tion strategy for optimising press releases for search engines.

@PRWeb

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Quality of content is now defined by what happens

in the video rather than how well it is produced.

Page 10: SES Magazine January 2010

8 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

As features and functional-ity of the major pay-per-click (PPC) engines grow and develop, so does the complexity of managing a

campaign. A growing number of advertis-ers have expressed concern about under-performing PPC accounts. A closer look reveals some glaring, yet not always easy to find, errors and omissions.

Of course, hiring a professional PPC manager, whether in-house or agency, is always recommended. But if you’re not in a position to do that, here’s a checklist of three of the most common PPC pitfalls, and how to fix them (or prevent them).

Poor Account SetupI’ve seen more than one PPC account

recently that consisted of one campaign and one ad group. This is almost never the

best way to structure your PPC account. This hurts your qual-ity score and makes the account more difficult to manage.

Setting up multiple campaigns allows you to manage each to its own objective, and provides the ability to adjust settings based on performance, without affecting the performance of your entire account.

Not Editing Account default Settings

Many PPC advertisers forget that default account settings, especially in

Google, are designed to maximize profit for the search engine. This doesn’t necessarily mean maxi-mum profit for the advertiser,

however.The first thing you should do after setting

up a campaign is to check the default settings. In Google, you’ll find these in the

settings tab. In Yahoo, you’ll need to go to the campaigns tab, select a campaign, and then click “campaign settings.” For Micro-soft adCenter, click on the campaign name, and then click

“change settings.”First, opt out of the content network.

The content network can be an affordable source of additional traffic and conver-sions, but it requires a different optimi-sation strategy and campaign setup than search. In Google and Yahoo, the opt-out setting is at the campaign level. In adCen-ter, it’s at the ad group level.

Another important setting to change is your ad delivery. The default setting in both Google and Yahoo is “optimise” — Google even goes so far as to term this the “recommended” setting.

If you’re running more than one ad varia-tion in an ad group (which you should be), the “optimise” setting will show the variation with the higher CTR more frequently. This is good, right? Not necessarily.

It’s good for the search engines,

because it gets them more clicks. It may not be good for you — the ad with the most clicks may not be converting the best for you.

The only way to tell with any certainty is to change the setting to “rotate.” This will ensure that each ad variation gets approxi-mately the same number of impressions — and enough data for you to decide which one converts better.

Sending all Traffic to the home Page

It seems obvious, and yet I’m continually surprised by how many PPC campaigns send all traffic to the home page. The home

page is almost never the right PPC landing page because it essen-tially forces the visitor to search again (remember, they already

searched once on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or some other engine).

This is where good account setup really pays off. Take the time to create distinct ad groups around a theme, be it product, service, or whatever. Use the most relevant page of your website as the PPC destina-tion URL.

For example, if the theme of your ad group is “buy red widgets,” use the red widget page of your website as the desti-nation URL. Don’t use the home page and make the visitor search again for “red widgets.”

If you’ve made these mistakes, it’s not too late to fix them. Tools like Adwords Editor and adCenter Desktop make it easy to create new campaigns and ad groups, and to move keywords and ad copy from one to another. Editing destination URLs is as easy as find and replace. In less than an hour, you can be on your way to improved PPC performance. §

Melissa Mackey is online mar-keting manager at Fluency Me-dia, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based digital agency. She blogs at Searching Beyond the Paid, writing about pay-per-click marketing and other aspects of search engine marketing.

Popular PPC Pitfalls, and How to Prevent ThemBy Melissa Mackey

The home page is almost never the right PPC

landing page because it essentially forces the visitor to search again.

§ FOCUS: paid search

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Page 11: SES Magazine January 2010

9SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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Page 12: SES Magazine January 2010

10 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

Casting a LineHook Your Audience with

Great ContentBy Bryan Eisenberg

The term linkbaiting has some negative connota-tions. Its best use can be anything worthy enough of grabbing people’s limited attention and causing them to link to, share, or otherwise promote the content you generate. I can’t tell you the number of

times I’ve seen people get overly excited about something they produced and how “viral” it is, only to be forgotten before it’s even shared. Here’s how to avoid that problem.

Define your goal. Is the goal of this piece of content to persuade or sell people to take an immediate and measurable action, or is it more long term, to develop links to improve your search engine rank-

ings or brand awareness? You shouldn’t only think of link bait as a short-term fix to a long-term problem; it doesn’t usually work.

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Page 13: SES Magazine January 2010

11SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

COVER STORY / FOCUS: content sharing §

want to learn more?Bryan will be one of three keynote speakersat this year’s SES London conference. For moreinformation, visit

SearchEngineStrategies.com/london

How will you measure success? Once you have your goals in place, you now need plans to make sure you’re track-

ing your outcomes effectively. Start by defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to monitor. Check out eConsultancy’s list of 35 social media KPIs (http://bit.ly/2BRI0k) to get your thinking started. You should also consider senti-ment analysis, such as that offered by Radian6 or Scout Labs.

Remember, it’s still quality that matters more than quantity — not only in what people say, but also in who links to you.

Knowing what you will measure should define how you measure. Will you be tracking the number and quality of links, comments, tweet or retweets, social bookmarks, positive or negative votes? What tools will you use to measure your outcomes? Will it require specialized tagging? Will you make it easy for your content marketing team to tag your content properly, to make sure you’re tracking as effectively as possible? For example, if your content is on YouTube, are you opti-mising and measuring it properly?

It used to be much simpler when all you were measuring was links, but now that everyone can share content with social media and bookmarking sites, measuring effectively is more of a challenge.

Develop your personas. Know your audience. There are two parts to your audience you must

define: your connectors and your final audience. Your connectors are individuals you hope will share your content with their network and thus, lead to greater reach than you have on your own.

Hopefully, you have an existing

relationship with some of them because it makes this process easier. But understand that no one will share anything with their network that they don’t believe elevates their self-perception.

They want to know that people in their network will think more of them for sharing

this piece of content.Ask yourself: Will

your content make them seem funnier, smarter, more gener-ous? What will moti-

vate people to share your content? Do you know what social networking and book-marking sites your content will appeal to most? For example, some content works better on Digg, over Reddit or Deli-cious. Your campaign tactics must match your audience.

Develop the content. Two simple rules your content must follow:

§ It must be relevant to your audience; and for your success, rele-

vant to your business.

§ It must be compelling to engage with and to share.

Depending on your audience, you must also decide which form your content will take. Should it be a post, an e-book (white paper), a video, a contest?

Your headline must be incredibly remarkable. It’s worth spending extra time to make sure you have it right, or to test it out with your connectors or original linkers list (much like the Huffington Post does).

If you’re stuck coming up with ideas for content, Darren Rowse from ProBlogger.net has shared 20 linkbaiting techniques to use when planning your content.

A content strategy that matches your objectives and meets your audience’s needs is essential.

Make it easy to share. Plan to add elements to make it easy to pass your content along. Use

ShareThis or AddThis tools to your posts or pages, or add a retweet button to a PDF. For example, YouTube offers 13 ways to share content. How many ways are you offering? Double-check to make sure they’re tagged properly for your analytics.

Share and refine. Send your content to a few of your connec-tors, and see how they respond. What feedback do they give

you? Do they share it with their network? If not, what can you do to refine it before you send it out to other people? Remember, you can change content after you launch it, if it will help your success.

One example of someone who has been publishing great content for the past 15 years is Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today. He e-mails his 100,000 subscribers about a new article, product, or service, and then specifically asks them to bookmark his content using AddThis.com, a gadget that makes it easy for people to use their favor-ite social bookmarking service. Subscribe to his newsletter and check it out. §

Bryan Eisenberg is co-author of The Wall Street Journal, Amazon, BusinessWeek, and The New York Times bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark? and Always Be Test-ing. Bryan has been a keynote speaker for Search Engine Strat-

egies, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, Mar-ketingSherpa, E-consultancy, and others. He is also co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Web Ana-lytics Association. Bryan serves as an advisory board member of Search Engine Strategies, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, and several venture capital backed companies. You can reach him at his website, BryanEisenberg.com.

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Linkbaiting is rarely a short-term fix to a

long-term problem.

Content Guidelines§ It must be relevant to your audience; and for your success, relevant to your business.

§ It must be compelling to engage with and to share.

Page 14: SES Magazine January 2010

12 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

Weber Shandwick and KRC Research recently published a survey that has me wanting to simultane-

ously scratch my head in puzzlement and scream in frustration.

Why? Because after surveying a broad cross-section of nonprofit executives across the U.S., they found that while 88 percent of them are “experimenting” with social media, only 51 percent are actively using social media in their organizations, and an astounding 79 percent aren’t sure how to demonstrate its value to others in their organizations.

Over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of nonprofits, and I can tell you one thing for sure: These aren’t dumb people. In fact, they’re some of the smartest people in marketing and, more importantly, they’re committed to what they do.

So why are they having such a hard time figuring out how to use social media? The answer has implications far beyond the nonprofit world and speaks to marketers everywhere who are struggling to convince clients to embrace social media.

Probably the most telling comment on the report comes from Stephanie Bluma, co-lead of the study: “While two-thirds of nonprofit executives believe social media has a positive impact on their commu-nications with external audiences, they are less convinced about social media’s resonance with donors, journalists, and policymakers.”

Sound familiar? Unless you work on big consumer brands all the time, chances are you’ve had similar push-back from your clients, even if they aren’t nonprofits. “Well, that social media stuff is all well and good,” they say, “but our customers are too old/wealthy/poor/whatever to be ‘tech-savvy’ enough to use that stuff. They’re not a bunch of kids.”

As nonprofit execs and other clients reject social media and deny that their audi-ences are actively engaged with the web, newspapers are going out of business, civic engagement is at an all-time high online

(especially, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “the wealthy and well-educated”), and nearly half of U.S. adults are using a social networking service.

As far as the “digital divide” goes, 79 percent of U.S. adults are now Internet users — a 67 percent increase from 2005 — and 59 percent of Americans have accessed the web from a wireless device. Clearly, we’re

past the point of, “Oh, our folks don’t use the Internet or social networking!”

So, why the reluc-tance by so many

nonprofit executives? The answer consists of three parts:

§ a misunderstanding of how to use the medium

§ difficulty measuring results § ignorance

If I had to add a fourth, I think the “we’ve always done things this way” inertia effect is probably a very prevalent (but unspoken) factor.

Luckily, conquering these objections isn’t difficult. It just takes education, logi-cal thinking, and flexibility. Here are some tips:

Help your clients (or your colleagues) understand they shouldn’t get hung up on the

technology. Most of us don’t fret over the technicalities of how radio or TV works, yet we’re able to use them in our marketing all the time. What’s important is understanding that this is a medium for communicating with people, not at them. What’s also important is helping them understand that social media is not some magic bullet that’s going to solve all their problems (or create more), but rather another tool in the communications toolbox.

Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Any social media initiative must be accom-panied by a communications

plan that will let people know what you’re doing and encourage them to participate. If

you create a YouTube video or Facebook page and fail to promote it, you — not the medium — should take the blame when no one shows up.

Measuring results in social media is no different than measur-ing results with any communi-cations activity. How much did

you spend? What did you get back? Divide the two to figure out your ROI. Done. The difficulty comes when organizations don’t clearly define their success metrics before beginning a new initiative. You need to understand your goals (Donations? Members? Comments?) before you can know if you succeeded.

Ignorance is one of the easiest things to cure: Just educate your clients. There are loads of online resources out there that provide

enough demographic data to convince even the most hardened skeptic that the Internet has now reached the point of near-ubiquity. Unless you have some very special, very niche audiences who have been resisting the web (charities that target the Amish, for example, probably won’t have much luck), chances are your people, your audience, and your clients are using this stuff.

Finally, breaking past the “we’ve always done it this way” objection is tough, but can be

done. It may take time and some small-scale experimentation (and expecta-tion management) to get there, but as we’ve seen over the past decade with the web in general, eventually most folks will come around. They have to. It’s the way things are. Wishing for things to be different is a recipe for irrelevance at best and eventual defeat at worst. Just ask most of the “old media” industries how well fighting the changes worked out for them. §

Sean Carton is chief strategy officer at idfive in Baltimore. He was formerly the dean of Phila-delphia University’s School of Design + Media and chief expe-rience officer at Carton Donofrio Partners, Inc.

Nonprofits Need to Get Clued In to Social MediaBy Sean Carton

Only 51 percent of nonprofits are actively

using social media.

§ FOCUS: nonprofit

1

2

4

5

3

Page 15: SES Magazine January 2010

13SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

KEYNOTES | EXPO HALL | SESSIONS | NETWORKING

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14 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

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15SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Your keycode begins with “kEYLN” and is located above your name on the mailing label, found on the magazine cover. Sessions

Keynote Speakers

Bryan Eisenberg

SES Advisory Board & bestselling author

bryaneisenberg.com

Avinash kaushik

Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist

Google

Jim Sterne

Chairman

Web Analytics Association

SES London is packed with sessions for search be-ginners and veterans alike. For more session descrip-tions, visit SearchEngineStrategies.com/london

Introduction to Search Engine MarketingThis session will provide a clear and concise over-view of the key concepts involved in search engine marketing. Who are the major search engines, and how can you best optimise them to gain “natural” or “organic” traffic without cost? Learn how to achieve top ranking or placement by utilizing search engine advertising opportunities. This is a must-attend basic session for anyone new to Search Engine Strategies events.

Introduction to AnalyticsCut to the chase! Use analytics tools to get the spe-cific answers you need about your search marketing campaign’s economic performance, your users’ on-site behaviors, and how to look for major red flags in traffic patterns. This slate of experts will keep you focused rather than poring through hundreds of pages of meaningless statistics.

Search: A Real Time Paradigm?Search engines strive to have the most up-to-date content on the web, indexed and ready for display to searchers. They are moving toward that goal quickly, showing fresh, instant content higher in the blended search results. Google has created “show options,” which includes pages crawled in the last 24 hours and forum/review results. Others like Twitter, Face-book, and LinkedIn are indexing instant submissions and making them highly visible in search results. Fresh content is a high priority for search marketers and advertisers to create and optimise.

Crossing Borders: Global Site ClinicGoing global with a brand is one of the key chal-lenges facing search marketers today. Non-English, multi-currency, and dealing with symbols (double byte) are the first stumbling blocks. So, if you are running an international search campaign across a multitude of diverse markets and cultures, then you can’t afford to miss this opportunity to get your website reviewed live by a panel of search engine marketing experts who really do think globally. Bring your business cards to the moderator at the begin-ning of the session, and get concrete advice on ways to improve your site’s SEO, ASAP.

Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the NumbersAs knowledge of SEO practices moves from the offices of the optimisers to the board room, the stan-dard metrics used by the practitioners of this former dark art are straining under the weight of the all powerful bottom line. The days when upper manage-ment was impressed by subtle changes in Page Rank have been replaced by questions of LTV and ROI. As more resources are being dedicated to creating the perfectly optimised and keyword rich landing page, C-level executives are demanding proof of the return they are receiving from these resources. This panel will discuss a myriad of ways to move beyond page rank, indexed pages or linked sites and into metrics that can make you a hero and, better still, get your budget increased to a respectable level.

Successful Information ArchitectureThis session will provide a fresh look at how to suc-cessfully architect your site for search engines and how specific page elements and design technologies

may impact your ability to gain good organic listings. The speakers will cover topics such as directory and file structure, server-side includes (SSIs), 404 error trapping, JavaScript, robots.txt use, frames, secure area usage, and much more. If time allows, volunteers from the audience will have their sites examined to see how changes could be made to their site architecture and design to increase search engine traffic.

digital Asset OptimisationSearch result multiplicity is not a new phenomenon, but recent advancements guarantee that the world of search and marketing will be changing forever. How do the new “blended” search results pages affect your marketing strategy? Do these changes mean that the major search engines are eager to keep the “second click” on web properties owned by themselves? How popular are the new blended search results with users?

Social Media 101Social media has become a major piece of the search marketing puzzle and is changing the way we work, communicate, and live. Companies are amazed by the influence social media is having and want to understand how to use it effectively. This session is designed to guide you through the complex landscape of social media and how it relates to your brand or web property. You’ll learn about the leading sites, the functional-ity they provide, and best practices for interacting in these virtual places. You’ll also come away with some valuable tips on how to effectively leverage your brand, services and products in different social media environments, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, Digg, and more.

keynote Panel: SEO: where to Next?It’s been said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And almost everyone likes to speculate about the future. When it comes to search market-ing, none are better at it than our veteran panel of industry insiders. Join us for an illuminating discus-sion as we peek into the next generation of digital marketing and predict what search might look like in the following five to 10 years. What should be on your search radar for 2010 and beyond? Does the key to the future of search lie in personalization? Do social networks herald the end of search? Certain industry pundits have even been heard to say that SEO is dead. The future is coming. Are you ready for it?

Paid Search 101Paid search is one of the quickest and most efficient ways to gain visibility on the search engines. Done incorrectly it can also be one of the costliest. There are many diverse components to a pay per click campaign, but all have to work together to achieve the best return. This informative session will familiar-ize attendees with the key players and cover a variety of paid search advertising topics including writing effective ad copy, creating targeted landing pages and auditing paid listings. Designed for both agencies and brands alike, you will come away with a firm understanding of the paid search landscape and the many paid search advertising options available.

developing Great ContentWithout meaningful content and compelling copy, your website is not grabbing the attention it de-serves. In this session, we’ll explore a diverse range of web content development strategies, along with

innovative techniques for dramatically boosting the visibility and interactive appeal of your site. From SEO copywriting tips that encourage consumers to click to persuasive design strategies that turn browsers into buyers, it’s all about improving the end user’s experi-ence through superior content.

Advanced Paid Search Brain CandyYour campaigns are performing OK. How to take them to the next level? Advanced PPC tactics can actually be more fun than basic ones, because you get to activate both left and right brain power, tapping into your own unique aptitudes as well as your customers’ deepest desires. This solo session covers campaign expansion techniques, advanced ad testing, advanced auction theory, the proper use of relevant analytics reports, ideas for bid rules and campaign automation, techniques for acting on seemingly inconclusive data, and more.

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Advanced SEO 1/2 day workshop (with IdM)Tuesday, 16 February, 1-5plimited seats available (up to 50). Price £365Part I: SEO ArchitecturePart II: Advanced link building principles SEM Training (with Search Engine Strategies)Friday, 19 February, 8a-5:30pFull day £695, half-day £395

Workshops offered include:§ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Workshop§ YouTube & Video Marketing Workshop§ Using Analytics to Increase Search Effectiveness§ Mobile Marketing 101

For more information, visitSearchEngineStrategies.com/london/training.php

Page 18: SES Magazine January 2010

16 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

Agenda SAvE 15% when you use your keycode at SearchEngineStrategies.com/london

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Introduction to Search Engine Marketing Introduction to Analytics Search: A Real Time Paradigm?

Successful Information Architecture Digital Asset Optimisation Social Media 101

Conference welcome & Morning keynote: Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist, Google

keynote Panel: State of the U.K. Industry Discussion Panel

Morning keynote: Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board & New York Times bestselling author, bryaneisenberg.com

keynote Panel: SEO: Where to Next?

Search Fundamentals Search Analytics Search on the Edge

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Why Does Search Get all the Credit? Augmented Reality: It’s a Brave New World Paid Search Site Clinic

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Advanced Paid Search Brain Candy Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues E-Commerce Site Clinic

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Search Advertising Tools Introduction to Information Retrieval Global Site Clinic

Morning keynote: Jim Sterne, Chairman, Web Analytics Association

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Page 19: SES Magazine January 2010

17SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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Page 20: SES Magazine January 2010

18 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

The Harvard Business Review recently published a cartoon with two dogs chatting. “I’m rooting for the demise of the rolled up print media,” one

quips to the other.As B2B publishers (and all publishers)

struggle to close the gap in advertising revenue between print and online, e-mail newsletters continue to be a bright spot in the mix. As subscribers show only fickle loyalty to brands online, the idea of “push” publishing continues to gain ground.

“E-mail newsletters are a key part of our business,” said Sarah Welcome, director of customer intelligence at International Data Group (IDG), a publisher of many tech B2B and consumer properties. “Our heritage is in rich editorial content for IT profession-als. E-mail newsletters can be the first place readers interact with companies and prod-ucts, and are the primary source to generate page views and identify prospects as part of a lead generation program.”

In the U.S., digital revenue has surpassed print for IDG. “Digital revenue, such as advertising and e-mail marketing, is defi-nitely helping to make up for substantial losses in print advertising,” Welcome said.

The recession might have scared some publishers, but we haven’t yet seen many digital ad opportunities that take advantage of the unique attributes of the digital chan-nel. These are some bright spots:

§ TVGuide.com nicely creates cross-channel advertising opportunities between their print, web, Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail properties.

§ CondeNet.com offers a sponsored widget for some of its properties.

§ IDG offers a display/e-mail combination that advertisers value.

§ Chemical Processing magazine offers a cartoon caption contest, where readers are invited to submit a caption for a cartoon posted on the site.

There is still more change to come,

predicts Rose Southard, director of IT for Putman Media, a multi-channel publisher with titles in many industries, including chemical, pharma, commercial food, and manufacturing.

“The B2B publishing industry as a whole will survive as long as there are indus-tries to write about and business buyers and sellers who want information,” she said. “However, I don’t think the B2B publishing business model will look at all the same in the next decade.”

E-mail is a powerful tool, not just for editors to reach readers (and for advertis-ers to ride along), but to provide data back, Southard said.

“We use e-mail newsletters to bring focus to specific content that we believe is valu-able to subscribers — giving advertisers a valuable place to deliver their message. We also gather sets of stats that can help a publisher keep the message relevant,” Southard said.

Context and endorsement of the editorial brand is important, but even in our era of citizen journalists, Welcome is certain that the brand endorsement matters more than content alone.

“Visitors look for a range of content produced by journalists, peers, and third-parties such as analysts and vendors. They are also overwhelmed with offers,” Welcome said. “The relationship and cred-ibility of the content provider with a key ingredient of editorial content is important for engaging readers.”

Content from readers also creates new advertising opportunities. Putman offers microsites and forums to advertisers that are focused on a specific topic and feature user-generated content (from YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter).

Advertisers are wise to demand more

context, Southard said.“Publishers can do more to play a lead-

ership role in helping marketers. Deliver-ing an ad based on context helps to ensure you are catching the visitor in a ‘learning moment,’ when they are in the frame of mind to absorb the message,” Southard

said.The opportunity for

B2B publishers is big, but not everyone will make it — or even evolve gracefully.

Southard said the generational shift in the work force affects how publishers must present and allow interaction with media.

“This is like ‘new math’ in the 1960s,” Southard said. “If you grew up using the Internet in the ‘pontificate’ (listen to the expert), push marketing era, you may not understand how to leverage the Internet in the ‘moderate’ (listen to me), pull market-ing era.”

It’s both an opportunity and a vulnerabil-ity for publishers — and advertisers.

“Publishers are in the middle and need to create a balance between what our audi-ences are ready for and what our clients are ready for,” Southard said.

What are other publishers doing that help transition to the “new math” of our times? As advertisers and marketers, how are you pushing your publishing partners? §

Stephanie Miller is VP of market development for Return Path, the global leader in e-mail deliver-ability and performance. She is a relentless customer advocate and a champion for quality inbox experiences. An e-mail and so-cial marketing expert, she helps

B2B, publishing, and other marketers optimize re-sponse and revenue from their online channels. She speaks and writes regularly for the industry and is very active in several direct marketing and anti-spam organizations.

Digital Ad Revenue Takes the Form of ContentBy Stephanie Miller

Brand endorsement matters more than

content alone.

§ FOCUS: e-mail

Page 21: SES Magazine January 2010

19SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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Page 22: SES Magazine January 2010

20 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

Search engines constantly look for new signals they can use to improve the quality of the results they provide to users. Ultimately, user satisfaction is a

critical component in retaining or increas-ing their market share, especially over the long term. Let’s explore some of these new potential signals and the way search engines evaluate and make decisions to use a new signal.

Back in the days of AltaVista, search engines were keyword-centric. These were the days when spammers loaded meta tags with a large number of keywords, and also used invisible text to jack up the perceived relevance and value of a search page.

Google drove the next generation with its link-centric algorithm. However, this algorithm was also attacked and manipu-lated by spammers. As Google tuned its link-based algorithm, however, they were still able to keep the impact of spam much lower than it was in the keyword-centric days of search.

All the search engines rely heavily on links today, and these will remain criti-cally important for the future. However, the complexity of the link algorithms in use today far exceeds that of the original PageRank paper by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Spammers still have an impact on search results. The search engines want to continue to reduce that impact as much as possible. To aid in this, they continue to evaluate new potential signals that can improve search quality while making life harder for spam-mers. When good ideas are found, they are implemented.

Page Load TimeGoogle engineer Matt Cutts discussed

this factor at Pubcon in November. Cutts indicated that there is a strong movement within Google to make page load time a ranking factor because pages that load quickly improve the user experience.

Because that is the case, why not make

it a ranking factor? Cutts indicated that Google could start using this within the next year.

ClicksIn an interview with Josh Cohen of

Google News, he indicated that click data is used as a ranking signal in Google News. In rough terms, the way that this would work is that Google knows what a normal distri-bution of clicks will be across the results.

Data leaked by AOL in 2006 suggested that the first result would get 42 percent of the clicks, the second would get 12 percent,

the third would get 9 percent, the fourth result received 6 percent of the clicks, and so forth. But, if one particular result gets 10 percent in the fourth position instead

of something closer to 6 percent, this could be a sign that the fourth result needs to move up in the SERP.

Cohen also indicated that Google News doesn’t use links as a ranking factor. But if click data works in the Google News envi-ronment, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that it would be helpful in Web search as well.

web ReferencesIt’s well known that Google’s local search

results factor in web references as a rank-ing factor. A web reference is a mention of a business that isn’t implemented as a link.

Web references count as votes in a manner similar to the way links are used. As with click data, it isn’t a stretch that these could start to have some weight in search results.

Closely related to this is the treatment of nofollowed links. Just because a link has the nofollow attribute doesn’t mean that it counts for absolutely nothing. Certainly, nofollow links in blog and forum comments will count for nothing. Nofollowed links that are implemented in something that looks like an ad will likewise pass no link juice.

However, other sites implement nofol-low policies on all external links, such as many U.S. government sites. These sites

are trying to identify resources that they consider valuable, even though they nofol-low the links. The search engines could choose to associate some value with these links anyway. Remember, the goal is search quality.

Social MediaFacebook and Twitter are all the rage

these days, and there are a lot of potential signals available from these sites. These can be treated as a type of web reference by the search engines.

What makes them interesting is the “freshness” of the signal. A surge of discus-sion on Twitter about some world event could indicate that the topic of the discus-sion is a hot story. The real-time respon-siveness of these sites can provide a strong signal.

SummaryHow and when search engines will use

these signals isn’t clear. Of course, the search engines will never spell it out for us.

An important goal for them is to reduce the impact of spam, and a lack of clarity about how they use the signals available to them helps their cause. Also, just because we can identify and talk about a potential signal doesn’t mean it will be useful.

Search engines have to look at and evalu-ate its impact on the results. Certain types of signals are “noisy,” meaning that they provide incomplete, inaccurate, or biased signals. For example, a website that is primarily used by one segment of the popu-lation (e.g., teenage girls) may have a lot of usage and present many signals that don’t work well for retired people.

One key takeaway is the engines’ focus on user satisfaction. If you create a website that is useful to users, it’s likely your site will emit many signals that tell the search engines that your site is a good result for users. §

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.

Four New Signals in Search By Eric Enge

Google may make page load time a ranking factor because

pages that load quickly improve the user experience.

§ FOCUS: trends

Page 23: SES Magazine January 2010

21SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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Page 24: SES Magazine January 2010

22 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

wEvery year in search, a few buzzwords

emerge, but few brands or marketers know how to put the nuances into prac-tice. Among the aspirational topics of 2009 were semantic search and the role

of search in brand communications — though skeptics would argue that the latter has been an attempt to get our mitts on the big brand budgets.

Beyond ensuring that brands have the correct repre-sentation (coverage and message) in search, strategic brand communications planning tactics have, to date, been limited. And when it comes to fully understand-ing the psychology and the semantics of the online searcher, as an industry, we’ve barely scratched the surface with our keyword analysis methodologies.

So where do we go from here? How do we stop talking and start doing? How do we combine communications planning with search? And how do we move beyond keywords and into the psychology of search, to understand the intent behind search behaviour and search language?

In 2009, my company, Reform, collaborated with the U.K.’s leading digital content strategy consul-tancy, CDA, to conduct a research study on the linguistic journeys of online search. For example, what motivations lie behind search queries, and how does this language adapt during the “search and find” process, from the initial search to the destina-tion website? We wanted to understand how people articulate their intentions and motivations when they start their online searches, and how search behaviour

relates to the language of the web pages with which they choose to engage.

In a departure from traditional search research, we took a qualitative approach by inviting a sample of Internet users of varying levels of online proficiency and with different demographics (age, gender, and profession) to take part in a two-stage study.

First, we asked the participants to consider an online information need (for the purposes of the study, we selected a common personal finance product scenario), and to articulate how they might go about searching for it, and what criteria would be important to them in their selection process. We asked them to

consider what keywords — or language — they would use when conducting this imaginary search journey.

In the second stage, we asked the same participants to carry

out the task online, and we recorded what language they used, how they responded to messaging within the search results, and also how they responded to the content upon arrival at the branded destination website. We then compared the language across both the imaginary and the actual stages, and we analysed the influence of the journey itself to identify distinct language phases or pathways.

One of the key findings of the “online language pathways” research study was that the language people used to describe what they wanted to find online before they started their search — the language of intent — was not the same as the terms and phrases they used when they actually started to search — search

How Search Influences Brand Communications PlanningBy Amanda Davie

The language of intent does not equal

search language.

onlinelanguage pathways

Page 25: SES Magazine January 2010

23SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

FOCUS: linguistics & branding §

A Language Pathways

How brands can harness language filtering.

A An Integrated Planning Approach

How marketers can model the integration of search language into a brand communications strategy.

language. The study found that a language filtering process takes place as searchers refine their online language to eliminate irrelevant search results, and that, broadly speaking, the language of intent can be described as natural and human, while search language becomes more mechanical and staccato.

The research revealed that the language people used to deepen and refine their searches was often influenced by the brand language that they saw within the search results listing.

The study also found that the language that people appeared to respond most favorably to when they actually engaged with a website was that which most closely resembled their original language of intent. Hence, brand communica-tions planners and branded content strategists must incorporate search linguistics analysis into their audience planning efforts.

Finally, the study highlighted the need for content publishers to work hand-in-hand with search marketers, so that brands can start to use content more intelligently to attract customers. As we search marketers know, SEO cannot be a web development afterthought.

This is but one example of how the search indus-try can move past the “aspirational” and begin to take practical planning steps to ensure that brands are delivering the information and the brand expe-rience that online searchers are looking for.

My search wish for 2010 is that search market-ing strategists use this kind of rich behavioral insight to refine their linguistic analysis output, so as to encourage more customers and higher conver-sion rates. To this end, I hereby call for a ban on the phrase “keyword analysis” in 2010. §

Amanda is founder and director of Re-form, an independent search consultancy that helps businesses to improve their search marketing strategy, operation, and commercial models. Amanda has nearly 15 years’ experience in the digital media industry and is one of Europe’s leading search marketing specialists. Prior to

launching Reform Digital in 2009, she spent eight years run-ning search operations within market leading digital agencies i-level and Outrider (WPP). Amanda is passionate about the standardisation and quality of search business delivery and innovation, and works closely with brands and business lead-ers to ensure that search is an integral part of the broader communications and commercial planning piece.

Page 26: SES Magazine January 2010

24 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

It seems as though you can’t pick up a magazine or listen to a news report without someone chiming in on how there are “signs of hope” for the economy. And these economic

conversations seemingly break into two camps.

The first believes we’ll recapture the pre-recession glory days, where both consum-ers and advertisers will return to spending. People will go back to buying houses, cars, and clothes without any concern. Those in this camp point to history. We’re Ameri-cans; we have short memories. Only one month after 9/11, trav-elers were complain-ing about the lack of curbside check-in and the need to remove their shoes when going through airport security.

The other camp (which is where I side) believes that this economic period has changed us as a society. This wasn’t the dot-com bubble of the ’90s, affecting only one segment while others thrived. This recession impacted everyone. There is no discrimination by age, industry, or profes-sion. We’ve had sequential growth in the unemployment rate, and Americans who had planned to retire within 10 years are remaining in the work force.

The New NormalThis recession has caused us to hit the

reset button. A large majority will change their behavior. Even those of us not tremen-dously affected are still thinking twice about taking on expenses.

In my house, Santa will bring fewer items this year — not because my kids made outlandish requests, but because my wife and I feel the money we’ve spent in the past would be best kept in our reserves. Consumers believe that the economic changes are the “new normal” and not just a short-term blip.

Those of us in the advertising space have been waiting for the consumers to return so that our clients will start spending again. But the recession has caused a sociological

change in consumer behavior that may impact how companies market to us.

keeping Your BaseSometimes people look at search as only

an acquisition model. In this day of compar-ison shopping and consumer fragmentation, however, there is money in keeping your base of existing customers

Instead of focusing on the acquisition side of your business, let’s spend some time keeping the people who are here. Accord-ing to an April 2009 BancVue survey, 67

percent of Americans would be willing to switch banks in the next year. Isn’t this a big deal for banks?

There are plenty of “switch” trigger words, such as “best”

and “compare,” which should signal to a brand that customers are looking. Target those folks with comparison tools and content, so they know you have the best checking interest rates or the most “no fee” ATMs. You’ll gain some new customers and also keep a portion of that 67 percent.

Changing the MessageWhen the economy returns, you can’t

assume that what worked before will continue to work. If we’ve truly changed, search queries will show this.

We’ve already seen that people are more frequently inputting search terms with keyword qualifiers like “value,” “low cost,” and “deals.” Search marketers need to focus their strategies around these consumer needs.

Even if your brand hasn’t always been known as affordable, now is the time to play up money-saving items. As much as BMW wants to push the 5 Series, it needs to acknowledge that people may be looking for more affordable or hybrid vehicles.

Again, offer incentives to current custom-ers while reaching out to new customers. Yes, building out copy and landing pages that speak to new trigger words is different, but businesses need to adapt to survive.

Bundled ServicesWe must find ways to sell existing

customers more, while pulling in new customers through incentives. Target-ing messages around bundled services or a “third night free” or “10 percent off oil changes” can all reach this new, more frugal consumer. Customers are looking for ways to stretch their dollars (just like marketers are), and playing to that will be more effec-tive than previous triggers such as luxury or convenience.

As a good marketer, you’ve also (hope-fully) spent a good deal of time learning about your customers. Depending on your industry, you should have the opportunity to look at frugal consumers and target them with the other services you offer. Again, this keeps them in your network and increases the chances that they will remain loyal over time.

Embracing the New LandscapeDespite the far-reaching effects of the

recession, people’s needs remain constant. Consumers still need cars, clothing, and health care. People still desire entertain-ment and information.

What has changed is their motivators. People may no longer want your cars, your clothing, or your health care options. People may choose a short camping trip over an all-inclusive getaway — or look for career retention advice instead of how to get rich quick.

Service the needs and desires of your target audience, and appeal to their motiva-tions. You may need to adjust your messag-ing and your offerings, but by staying attune to the needs of your customer base, you can ensure your success in any climate. §

Joshua Palau is VP of search for Razorfish. He helps clients to understand how search fits into the overall marketing plan. He writes a SearchEngineWatch.com column and serves as the editor of Razorfish’s weekly newsletter, Search Marketing

Trends. Joshua began his digital career in 1996. Prior to joining Razorfish, he worked for About.com, Hearst Magazines, and Johnson & Johnson.

Frugal Is the New Black By Joshua Palau

When the economy returns, don’t assume

that what worked before will continue to work.

§ FOCUS: the changing economy

Page 27: SES Magazine January 2010

25SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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Page 28: SES Magazine January 2010

26 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

You certainly have your hands full. You track enough keywords to fill five dictionaries. You juggle budgets that fluctuate more than a health care bill in Congress. You

drive people to landing pages designed either by an agency addicted to winning awards, a freelancer with only a passing knowledge of the English language, or a multivariate testing tool programmed to act like an infinite number of monkeys.

You try to please marketing directors, product managers, public relations supervisors, advertis-ing executives, new media marketing mavens, and the CMO. You do your best to shut down your laptop before midnight.

Amidst all the demands, the deadlines, and the dread that you’ll never have enough tools or

CommunicatingSearch Success

Juggling the expectations of senior managers from different departments isn’t easy. To grow your practice, see search as others see it. By Jim Sterne

Page 29: SES Magazine January 2010

27SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

people to really do your job, it’s understand-able that you tend to focus on those things over which you have direct control:

§ keywords searched § key phrases searched § search results position § links clicked § ads displayed § ads clicked § landing pages served § landing pages seen § landing page engagement

But the more you explain what you do to

those around you, the more you talk about click ratios and differ-ential keyword traffic generation, the less time senior executives seem to have for you, the less attention you get for your team, and the harder it is to get more resources.

The most important metric of all routinely gets pushed to the bottom of your priority stack: business outcomes. The key is to start looking at things from the other end of the spectrum. It’s time to start at the ultimate business objective and work top-down.

Start at the Top and Tailor Your Message

The business objectives that matter are connected directly to profits. Clearly, the search-specific metrics listed earlier are profit divers, but they’re exclusively the language of the search professional. And as a metric, profits are crucial, central, and funda-mental to business — but are not directly controllable.

When talking with, working with, or simply reporting to senior managers, stick to the language they know. The secret to success here is that the language they know is different from company to company and from executive to executive.

Those in advertising or with a Madison Avenue background still want to talk about eyeballs. They want the raw numbers of reach and frequency. They want to know if search is the best way to get the word out to the masses or if they should push even more dollars into television or fire up that old direct mail machine.

Sales-oriented individuals want to know about the cost and quality of leads. You can get a billion people to show up on a land-ing page because you have this minute’s hot YouTube sensation. Good for you, but so what? They want to know if any of them

are leads worthy of the sales representatives’ efforts and how much each one of them costs.

Customer-centric types are somewhat interested in the number of contact center calls you helped avoid, but they will be delighted that your work has improved customer satis-faction. Yes, that’s right. You are expected to do such a great job at search optimisa-tion that prospective customers routinely say information on the company website is easy to find. What’s that? You didn’t know you were in the satisfaction business? You didn’t think that measuring customer satisfaction was important? It is if you want to commu-nicate in terms that senior managers already

understand.If you live in an

e-commerce world, your task is decep-tively simple: Deliver the sales. Ring that

cash register. Bring in the orders. But the people managing the shopping cart are well aware of tweaking the persuasion process and segmenting it by lead source right down to the keyword level. That means they expect you to be well aware as well. They want to know what the searcher searched for, what he clicked on, how long he stayed, whether he came back, and more. Yes, you are going to have to get to know web analytics better.

Oh, and don’t forget about those image managing, media manipulating, spin doctor-ing people in the PR department. They want to hear how their press releases are impacting site traffic. They want to talk view-through just like the advertising managers. Everybody wants credit.

Find Out what They NeedYour best defense is a strong offense.

Don’t wait for them to beat down your door with specific requests. Instead, expect them to show up, unannounced, at the most incon-venient times and ask the most off-the-wall, ill-considered, and senseless questions that need answers yesterday. So be proactive. Take them to lunch.

When you’ve got your colleagues or clients in a relaxed, non-meeting, non-polit-ical environment, do not ask them what they want. Given the choice between A, B, or C, they will, in all sincerity, tell you, “Yes, all of them. Thank you.”

Instead, ask them what they are trying to accomplish. Get them to talk about their business goals, and then go for the gold: Ask them how their boss is evaluated. If you can

help your fellow diner make his or her boss look good, you will make a friend for life, make the company successful, and make yourself indispensable. That’s golden, but it’s not the end of the story.

deliver the Goods

People consume information in a variety of ways. Some read spreadsheets at a glance. Some can look at a chart and intuitively grasp the relationships between elements and spot dangers and opportunities by shape and color. Others absorb information best by reading a couple of paragraphs.

Until you know how each of your inter-nal customers consumes information — and their supervisors — your best bet is to deliver reports that include a:

§ spreadsheet § graph or chart § couple of paragraphs of insight § list of three or four bullet points

Make sure that each of these elements only delves down into a few issues. Overwhelm executives with data, and they will take you

off their Christmas card list. Don’t give them data — give them an analysis.

That “insights” item above is the kicker. They want your opinion. The rest of the report is there to back up your perspective. You, after all, are the expert. Tell them what the numbers are — by all means. But then be sure to tell them what the numbers mean and what they might do about it.

Give them an opinion, a frame of reference, and some options, and they will reward you with more tools and more people. Someday, you’ll amass enough to find yourself turning off your laptop before dinner. Stranger things have been known to happen. §

Jim Sterne is an international con-sultant who focuses on measuring the value of the web as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written eight books on In-ternet marketing, produces the eMetrics Marketing Optimization

Summit (www.emetrics.org), and is co-founder and current chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

want to learn more?Jim will be one of three keynote speakers atthis year’s SES London conference. For moreinformation, visit

SearchEngineStrategies.com/london

FOCUS: the bottom line §

The business objectives that matter are connected

directly to profits.

Don’t give executives data. Give them analysis.

Page 30: SES Magazine January 2010

28 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

Recently, I received a call from a prospect who works in the info-mercial space. They get plenty of traffic to their website, by virtue of the promotion on

television, but they wanted to speak with me about conversion rate optimisation.

While I shared some thoughts on the topic, and referred them to my friend Tim Ash who literally wrote the book on landing page optimisation, these people might still want to consider search engine optimisa-tion (SEO). However, this SEO effort would have a different focus: owning the top 10 results for mentions of their brand.

For companies like this, people will search the brand name to see if others are bashing the brand or product. Imagine how many conversions are lost because of any bad press or blog posts and reviews that exist. Websites like Ripoff Report make it too easy for anyone — including your compe-tition — to post something negative about your company, and these pages tend to rank well.

The time and money you put into SEO seems well spent, right? For any company in any space, just owning as much SERP real estate as possible for mentions of their brand is a basic, fundamental element of control-ling the public perception.

Here are a few methods you can employ to own more of the top 10 results.

Social Media ProfilesSocial media profiles include things like

a company Facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, Flickr, Twitter, Mixx, YouTube, bx.businessweek.com, Digg, StumbleUpon, and FriendFeed. There you go — 10 profiles that each have the opportunity to rank within the top 10 results.

You can do different things to optimise your presence for each of these. At a mini-mum, you should have the keywords that you’re focused on (most likely the name of your company) as the profile name and the user ID. In many cases, when you set up the profile, the title tag includes the name or keyword you use, which will help the profile page “rank” for the keyword (or company name).

It’s helpful to fill out the profile with as much information as you can, including a unique bio or “about us” information. If you fill out several of these profiles, remember

that you’ll want as much unique content on them, so they aren’t seen as duplicates of your other profiles.

Then, it’s helpful to get some links to your profiles so that they have the necessary juice to actually rank for your company’s name. Some prefer to link their websites to their profiles, asking their site visitors to “follow us” or “join us” on certain social networks.

Press ReleasesWriting press releases for reputation

management means using the keywords that you’re focused on within the title of the press release and the header, and including mentions of the company name within the body copy of the press release itself. Then,

spend the money on some good distribu-tion partners, such as MarketWire, BusinessWire, and PRNewswire. That said, there are many quality free PR distri-

bution providers, such as PRlog, FreePress-Release, and PR.com.

Linking to Positive Mentions of Company

Find some positive news on other websites and develop a linking plan. This will help boost these from perhaps page two or three of the search results to the first page.

SubdomainsYour main website may be www.mycom-

panywebsite.com. And, because the search engines are primarily interested in delivering a variety of results for searches for “mycom-pany,” they will most likely not include more than the No. 1 ranking for searches for your company name. However, other official “mycompany” websites can also rank, but they must be different websites.

With subdomains, the search engines will see an official relationship with “mycom-pany.com,” but because it’s a subdomain, the search engines will grant a top 10 rank-ing for this, because it’s seen as a unique website. Again, include the keywords that you’re targeting within the title tag, but the subdomain will piggyback off the value already established with the root domain (the links/authority already achieved) and the subdomain will, in a short period of time, earn a top 10 ranking for searches for your company name.

Walmart.com does this with a subdomain

of its website established for sales of mp3s (mp3.walmart.com). Only use a subdomain when you have enough content within a given topic/vertical of your business to support a website of its own. This section of walmart.com has more than 6,300 pages indexed in Yahoo.

Building Other Official websitesPerhaps your company is involved in

charity work. Why not own have a website designed to speak to all of the positive things that you do within your community?

Walmart again shows us how they have tackled this by setting up www.walmart-stores.com. This website is dedicated to giving visitors a look at the corporate side of their business, speaking to their charitable work, and other news and information.

Optimising all Official websitesAbout a year ago, I did some reputation

management work for a multi-level market-ing company (you can imagine what the top 20 results looked like, as these companies tend to get bashed by all comers). They had many websites basically sitting on the side-lines not doing anything. They were live, but hadn’t been touched in years.

With just a little effort in optimising these to include the company’s name in the title tag and content, and getting a few good links to each of them, we were able to get a couple of them to pop into the top 10 results for searches for their name. It certainly doesn’t hurt if your company’s name is actu-ally contained within the root of the domain (www.mycompanywebsitenews.com or something similar).

SummaryYou can employ many methods to gain

ownership of your brand and own the top 10 results. I’ve only listed a few here. By following these steps, you can ensure that you’re doing everything you can to protect one of your most valued assets — your brand. §

Mark Jackson is president and CEO of Vizion Interactive, a search engine optimization company. Previously, he worked at Lycos/Wired Digital and AOL/Time War-ner. A regular speaker at SES and Pubcon conferences, he earned a B.A. in journalism/advertising

from The University of Texas at Arlington and spent several years in traditional marketing — radio, televi-sion, and print — before venturing into all things web.

Own the Top 10 Results for Your Brand By Mark Jackson

§ FOCUS: reputation management

Only use a subdomain when you have enough content

within a given topic/vertical of your business to support

a website of its own.

Page 31: SES Magazine January 2010

29SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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Page 32: SES Magazine January 2010

30 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, a few people — including some panelists and many influential members of

our industry — made it seem like personal-ization will mean the death of SEO.

Aside from the obvious jabs from paid search extremists — whose model would predict growth as a result of less emphasis on organic search — others seemed to lean a little too far toward fear-mongering.

There were voices of reason as well. During the “Search Industry Today” panel, SES board member Anne Kennedy eloquently stated: “(SEO) is evolving, not dead. What is dead is the rankings, yet over and over people talk about top 10 rankings.” I couldn’t agree more.

In recent discussions with some of our leading clients, it seems the market-ers who have accepted that ranking alone

doesn’t equal SEO success are rapidly moving forward to define the importance of future organic search metrics.

Perhaps, finally, broader personal-ization will really drive home what one commenter

accurately lamented: “For SEOs, this creates additional confusion in explaining to our clients that the Google results they see in their browser are not necessarily what others see. But that already was an issue.” Market-ers will at last focus on traffic.

SEO Best Practices Still RequiredTo rank for non-branded keywords within

search results, you need to have performed some sort of SEO, be lucky enough to not be in a competitive space, have an old domain with strong content, or a few other “ways

in.” Traffic comes from ranking for terms that are often searched.

Although Google has a lot of information from power users, the majority of “part-time” searchers will take a while to get results that have been drastically personal-ized. The rest of the results are then likely backfilled from the “regular” results (what you optimise for) for at least six months.

According to Google: “Previously, we only offered personalized search for signed-in users, and only when they had web history enabled on their Google accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding personalized search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.”

How many searches does someone have to perform over 180 days for the system to really begin changing results?

This doesn’t even address users who regu-larly clean their cookies. There is conflict-ing information about how many web users disable cookies or regularly clean them. Granted, many of those may not be disabling all cookies from their systems. (In related, albeit old news, 99 percent of web users eat cookies.)

I’m not sold on how many results will be personalized for most users, even after 180 days. Of course, we may never know. A good test would be to develop some perso-nas and use proxies to study, but obviously this will come out after some time.

You still need to rank in personalized search to drive traffic. Why not just focus on traffic and its quality, along with improving the user experience, and just forget about rankings?

deeper Consumer Insight is Paramount to Success

If you want to increase your chances of appearing within the personalized results of your target audience, you need to get to know them better than ever before. You also need to provide content for them, as well

as the search engines, which shows that you know them and what they’re seeking.

In the past, especially in the e-commerce model, the primary goal of

SEO was to get people into the purchase cycle and move them toward conversion. For branding and awareness efforts, the goal is slightly different, but still requires the same focus in order to drive qualified traffic through organic search.

Not all websites have the type of content that provides the answer to problems people are trying to solve through search engine use. In the past, this was often referred to as “finding the hidden keyword.”

One excellent way to understand your target market needs: Do deep dive segmen-tation research and properly classify groups. You can also find plenty of hints within your visitors’ keyword search behaviors, both from search engine referrals and internal search use.

Lastly, primary research of personalized results, especially using different variet-ies of keyword phrases, will lead us to better chances of driving qualified traffic to websites — personalized search or not. §

Chris Boggs is a director of search engine optimization at Rosetta. Formerly with Brulant, an inter-active agency and application development shop acquired by Rosetta in 2008, Chris has been living and working in the Cleve-land area since 2007. He is also

associate editor of the SEW forums, and has served on the SEMPO board of directors since 2006.

The Demise of SEO Won’t Be Caused by Personalization By Chris Boggs

The marketers who have accepted that ranking alone doesn’t equal SEO success are defining future organic

search metrics.

14.4%In the IT/Internet category,

“paypal” was the most searched term in the U.K., garnering 14.4

percent in November.

Source: The NielSeN compaNy

A Learn more at ClickZ Stats.

§ FOCUS: personalized search

Page 33: SES Magazine January 2010

31SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

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Page 34: SES Magazine January 2010

32 SES § January 2010 {london prevIew}

A

advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple websites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

algorithm: The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyper-link. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

content network: A group of websites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. Examples include Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

cost per click (CPC): Also called pay-per-click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”;

for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

inbound link: An inbound link is a hyperlink to a particular web page from an outside site, bring-ing traffic to that web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algo-rithms use to measure the popularity of a web page.

invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many websites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

link bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

link building: The process of getting quality websites to link to your websites, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

meta tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in vary-ing degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine market-ing are title, description, and keyword tags.

pay per click (PPC): See cost per click (CPC).

quality score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s click-through rate, analyzing the relevance of the land-ing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a qual-ity score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undis-closed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

return on investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads.

search advertising: Also called paid search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed

above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search.

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are return-ing blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

social media: A category of sites based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the web, visiting web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

glossary Below you will find commonly-used terms that everysearch marketer should know. Keep this list handy!

Page 35: SES Magazine January 2010

Online Marketing Summit 2010San Diego, California: Feb. 22 - 25

Get out of the cold. And into the know.Collaborate, network, and learn online marketing best practices in sunny San Diego.

Laptop and sunglasses required. Surfboard and flip flops optional.

Why Attend The Online Marketing Summit?

• Education First. No distracting exhibit floors or vendor sales pitches, and our speakers cover topics from Social Media to Search Engine Strategies.

• 1-on-1 Labs. Get personalized consultations with experts on search, usability, analytics, and email.

• Peer Matching & Networking. Connect with over 500 marketing peers at vertical industry round tables and “Job Title Connect” social events.

• Certification & Training. Choose from several training workshops and courses offered by the Online Marketing Institute and the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative

• Knowledgeable Speakers. Senior executives, best-selling authors, marketers and social media experts from Cisco, Disney, Eastman Kodak, Federated Media, Google, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, MTV, REI, Southwest Airlines, the Wharton School of Business and Yahoo!

Our Topics

• Social Media Marketing Integration Strategies

• Search Engine Marketing and SEO Beyond the Basics

• Web Analytics and Measurement Tactics

• Integrated Marketing and Strategic Planning

• Website Usability and Conversion Best Practices

• Email Marketing

• Online Advertising, Affiliate Marketing and eCommerce

NEW! OMS 2010 will offer a special SES Search Marketing Day. It will feature the latest in paid and organic search case studies and best practices, presented by the top thought leaders of SES.

Register now to save 25% with discount code SES25www.onlinemarketingsummit.com

Page 36: SES Magazine January 2010