Category Archives: SEO Tools

Chris Pirillo on SEO & Social Media @ OpenCa.mp

At the OpenCa.mp conference in Dallas this weekend I was able to re-connect with Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome and the Gnomedex conference (We’ve interviewed each other in the past). We both jumped out of the same airplane with the Army Golden Knights last week and are also speaking today about blogs at OpenCa.mp . I caught up with Chris to talk about his take on SEO and social media.  He had pretty strong opinions about people who are too aggressive and not always relevant in the social connections they’re making.  This is what he had to say: You can find Chris online by Googling “ chris “. How’s that for the effect of links on search engine visibility
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OpenCamp Blackhat SEO with Social Media

The first content session I’m attending at OpenCamp is by Gio, aka Giovanni Gallucci, a longtime search and social media marketer based in Dallas. The topic is “Blackhat SEO” and the room is packed! The session was cut a bit short due to technical difficulties with getting the conference started and Gio took it in stride and was both entertaining and informative – the right mix for a morning tech crowd. Gio says “Black hat is simply another way to automate a time-consuming process. In other areas of marketing and life in general we encourage automation in order to maximize efficiency and get a leg up on our competitors”. According to the conference session description, the nature of this session doesn’t allow liveblogging or tweeting, which i think is a load of crap, so I’ll liveblog it anyway
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Jumping Army Strong on Social Media & the Golden Knights

Army Strong Stories is a program to draw attention to the real life and experience of being in the Army through soldier stories communicated via media socially. Recently  Greg Swan of the Minneapolis Public Relations firm, Weber Shandwick, that is behind the Army Strong Stories campaign contacted me with a compelling opportunity to create my own Army story: “Would you like to go skydiving with the US Army Golden Knights?” Who are the Golden Knights ? In 1959 13 men joined together to form the Strategic Army Corps Sport Parachute Team, to compete in the communist dominated sport of skydiving. The team performed so well that on June 1, 1961 the Army maded them an official parachute team and the Knights (men and women) have been wowing audiences at air shows ever since. Greg is a well known “social media guy” and works with the Army account for his agency. At first I was uncertain about the jump, but after looking at the competitive skydiving team’s website , YouTube channel and blog , I decided it was worth checking out. One thing Greg didn’t know when he invited me was that I spent several years on active duty in the military.
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Video Interview: Dave Roth of Yahoo

Dave Roth works as Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo. That means Dave is a Search Engine Marketer that works for a search engine. I’ve known Dave for several years and we finally decided to do a video interview. Watch the interview below to learn what a search marketer that works for a search engine does, especially the challenges and opportunities in communications on search marketing performance in a large company. Of course, we couldn’t talk to someone like Dave at Yahoo without mentioning the transition of search results to Bing over on the Yahoo site.
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SES San Francisco 2010 Wrap-Up

QR code on the side of a building? Geek cool. Last week the West Coast Search Engine Strategies conference moved from San Jose back to its roots in San Francisco. It was a well attended show (5,000+ in 2009 vs. 6,000 in 2010 registrations), despite the illusion created by the voluminous Moscone
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Solving Duplicate Content And Multiple Site Issues

More and more website owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content.  For example, if you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS ? Will other sites be considered the “real” site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results? This Search Engine Strategies San Francisco session looks at the issues and explores solutions. Moderator: Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc. Speakers: Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive Kathleen Pitcher, Senior Manager, Acquisitions Marketing, Pogo.com/Electronic Arts, Inc.
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Enterprise Level SEO Is Not For The Weak

Thanks to Ray ‘Catfish’ Comstock for providing the title of this post with his opening remarks during the session.  Joining Comstock on this panel, moderated by Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor, Inc.: Crispin Sheridan, SES Advisory Board & Sr Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Bill Hunt,  SES Advisory Board & President, Back Azimuth Consulting Guillaume Bouchard, SES Advisory Board & President, Back Azimuth Consulting As a good writer and analyst, I have to ask ‘why’ for even the most obvious problem posed.  So why is enterprise level Search Engine Optimization (SEO) not for the weak? The obvious answer: a lot of people, a lot of content.  Enterprise is difficult because management of a lot of content and people is difficult to scale. A recurring theme at the SES sessions I’ve attended this year is the importance of communicating SEO in a language that non-search professionals (high level executives) will understand.  TopRank CEO Lee Odden even offered the presentation ‘Selling Search to the C-Suite.’ Let’s identify the problems a C-level executive may have with a fairly basic statement that illustrates the positive results of an SEO campaign: “Our SEO efforts have helped decrease bounce rate 40% over the last 90 day from visits generated by organic keywords.” What is bounce rate? What do you mean by ‘organic’ keywords? Why are you not talking about revenue? Let’s say the same thing a little bit differently: “SEO recommendations made to our small business software page have helped decrease the amount of traffic that immediately abandons this page by 40%.  As bounce rate has decreased, the amount of visitors who have converted to sales has increased 75%.” A great line from the movie Adaptation (which I am probably getting wrong) is ‘Get them in the third act.  No matter what else is wrong with your story, you’ll win if you can get them in the third act.’ Communicating a direct effect on revenue is a great capper for any communication with a C-level and a great way to get buy-in for other SEO tactics you KNOW you need to implement.  For example: Cleaning up duplicate content The more duplicate content we have, the fewer results search engines will show from our site.  Fewer webpages basically means we have fewer salespeople online. Creating content There is a huge gap in content for this topic between our site and our competitor’s site.  Here is a graph showing all our potential customers that are going to our competitor’s website
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The Four Pillars of Building Instant Trust Online – SES SF

Websites and landing pages face very real trust issues – for consumers they can be a scary and uncertain place. Before people will take a desired action, their concerns and anxieties must be addresses. But how can you do this on landing pages when you only have seconds to establish trust? Tim Ash, SiteTuners CEO and bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization , shared how to effectively use the Four Pillars Of Trust and optimize your online conversion goals. Tim started by reiterating what we know – it’s not about technology, it’s about people.  If you’re going to transact with anyone it’s all about building trust. We can’t function without trust, we are social beings.  If we are going to cross the street, we have to trust that people driving cars will see the red light.  Trust is critical, it’s the glue that holds everything together. People weren’t designed to be in mobs, we have our “tribe” of a few dozen people that we trust and it breaks down in crowds. Users understand “cheesy,” unprofessional sites vs.
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B2B Marketing Tips From SES SF

What’s the quickest way to catch a fish? Offer the right bait. What’s the quickest way to get a B2B marketer to an SES session? Title it ‘B2B Marketing Tips .’ What’s the quickest way to get you to read this post? By diving right in to the top 5 tips shared: Your conversion goals must become more sophisticated** Yes, probably even yours.  For the simple reason that you should always be testing and always be experimenting with something new.  The keywords that convert today may transform into completely new derivations tomorrow.  Always be tracking and always be testing. Segment transactional from educational keywords* Keywords that drive sales tomorrow will rarely match the keywords that drive inquiries today.  Your transactional keywords are your bottom of the funnel phrases that represent a user closest to the buying cycle, while educational keywords are top of the funnel phrases used by someone looking for more information.  Third party tools and research can help identify what keywords lead a user down the path to a sale, while looking at repeat visits in analytics can help identify keywords that are educational. Build custom strategies for transactional and educational keywords* Build different marketing strategies for different keywords. Working with transactional keywords?  Put as few barriers between the prospect and the sale as possible.  If you are working with educational keywords, developer softer offers via landing pages that freely provide information to hungry users
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Real Time Storytelling – SES SF

For mainstream media to survive, if not thrive, it must integrate with the social web and create engagement surrounding content.  For social media to remain relevant and compelling, it must work in tandem with news organizations to create a symbiotic storytelling relationship. The future may be a stream with the authenticity of the social web and the reach of mainstream media. Lead by moderator Khris Loux, CEO & Co-Founder, Echo this panel took a bleeding edge look on real-time story telling through an open discussion and Q&A. Panel participants: Dan Schmidt, Senior Product Manager, CBS Interactive Andrew Lyons, Commercial Director, UltraKnowledge Dermot Waters, Senior Director of Product Development, CNN.com Louis Gray, Managing Director of New Media, Paladin Advisors Group Moderator:  what is a brief definition of real-time storytelling? Waters:  Weaving a coherent narrative between disparate conversations.
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