August could be crowned the month of search in California. Central to the search industry sits the popular, highly attended Search Engine Strategies conference with this year’s fashionable “Glow In The Dark”-themed Google Dance in San Jose, California.
It’s one of the largest conferences in the biz, and attendees can get a private, onsite visit with a big fun factor added: Walk freely (more or less, until you try to access any computer that is not monitored!) on Google campus, socialize with your friends, make new ones, drink and eat to your guts’ content–and ask any questions of the Google engineers. All this right on the Google campus in Moutain View, California. Pretty cool. See some SES campus pictures from Google itself. Lee Odden’s TopRankBlog has some cool SES 2008 pix too. Good to meet/greet these people.
I attended two days of the show (had to get back to my search marketing firm dealing with SEO business in Los Angeles).
I made some key textual summaries below, including a short video that I used Adobe Premier to create, with John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change.”
Packed sessions were on the topics of local search, mobile applications/use, landing page optimization (Tim Ash), A/B testing, multivariate testing and search trends (blended search). Traditional SEO and paid search are still the backbone and platform for so many, but extending your knowledge into more niche-oriented tactics, both from a marketplace and technology perspective, is considered a highly valuable move.
Local search, for example, is not just about searching for (example) a dentist in your neighborhood, but more about “finding and discovering” in a new world. (A cool local application for the iPhone, which is receiving some notoriety and user acceptance, is the the “shake” application UrbanSpoon). Mobile search at this level is not about ranking top of Google with incoming links, but rather using new, cool-plus-useful mobile technology coupled with “time and location” parameters and GPS.
Say you are searching for pizza during the day. As a general guideline, the results will differ from what they would return at night. (Nighttime discoveries may reveal more alcohol-centric establishments, leaning toward a more mature, less family-oriented audience). Geographic movements will change results as well. Most of the top panelists consider mobile and local search to be THE real internet killer applications. These are still early-stage, and not with deep user penetration. Hence, there is a lot of opportunity.
Google’s Matt Cutts got asked about “Black Hat SEO,” and this private video captured some of his comments:
Search Engine Land captured more detail in its SES day-by-day play:
Since we know that search engines love text (it’s what they can “understand”) and users love quality content, how can you write the most relevant, traffic-capturing content to meet the requirements of both?
The answer lies in focusing on the user first, not the other way around.
How do you write quality content?
You need to start by understanding the learning process of humans, what drives us and what makes us take action on something we see or hear.
The best way is to get to the basics. Do you know how we learn and what our behavioral preferences are? If not, here’s a view:
Why (35 percent of people)
What (22 percent of people)
How (18 percent of people)
So what (25 percent of people)
Knowing the above can provide more clarity in your research. When you write, think about the above. More information can be found via Bernice McCarthy’s innovative 4-mat system. It’s a helpful guide, along with an expanded “cycle of learning,” with its sequential pie charts of learning.
You can see how I answered the why (search engines, users); what (traffic capture); how (links out, pie chart reference) in this post. The last category may also have been captured (what if…), but that reader might have left before reading the line.
Make the right and left brain work together. Make it educational, but also entertaining.
We know that search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and their associated retrieval technology anno 2008 are not much more sophisticated than they were, in say, 1998–or for that matter, in 1945 when a scientist, Vannevar Bush, released his essay, “As We May Think” (reference Internet Pioneers). The system he references is remarkably similar to modern hypertext.
While new interfaces, video, images, binary streams of any kind you can think of are easily presented into plugins and other “wares,” we are still struggling to get to the “next level” of retrieval technology.
Algorithmic search, human-aided search and meta search engines are par for the course. To create a search engine that can also include artificial intelligence and provide scalability for the massive internet is still far away.
In the meantime, we are having fun with universal search/blended search, local search and such.
So in the spirit of the power of video and the explosion of its use on the internet, I found this interesting film from Los Angeles that uses a “thousand words” with pictures and the human spirit.
When search engines can figure out all the “things” they must capture, retrieve, organize and intellectually present–for example, in this video–we have reached a goal that search engine scientists everywhere would want and that, I hope, captures users the same way it does in the film below.
Social Media, Web 2.0, Social Marketing, Social Search, Social Networking, Gadgets, Apps, Widgets, Ajax, Web Services, Open Social–what does this all mean for your online business in 2008?
From 2004-2007, I spent serious time in search engine optimization, product research, technical application development and online marketing (SEO, PPC, link building, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, landing pages, copywriting) and delivery. What I learned is that there really are no secrets, just hard, continuous work: changing, tracking, monitoring and not ever giving up, no matter how frustrating (yes it is!). This work has helped me immensely. I wrote about many aspects of this and more than 15 years of learning in the Ultimate Guide to SEO, coming out in the spring.
However, without the work of other people and the networks I belong to, I would not be where I am today. The headline of this post references research from a group of people that I consider to be leading the online marketing space. Not only have these people made a serious dent in the online marketplace themselves, but their goals are similar to mine: educate, and provide stellar information that you can use for yourself.
Therefore, a combination of all the strategies you’ve learned should be included in your internet-marketing and search-marketing work (which includes search engines). But do not miss out on the single most important aspect of growth online: the social medium.
Look at the stats on this traffic graph. Can you see how fast Facebook has risen in 2007? Look at the red line–this is compelling data.
The toughest part is not understanding the importance of this data. Rather, it’s understanding how to execute within this fast growing, social media space.
For example, if you are in the B2B space, how can you leverage and take part in this huge growth and future explosion? Is it only meant for B2C? For example, does the ad network in Facebook even matter to a corporate business, since most believe it’s only for kids and teens anyway?
You may have it all wrong, as I am learning as well.
I recently came across a fun, interactive and useful presentation that could help in better understanding the Search Giant.
From Portfolio.com: “In the past 12 months, Google doubled its staff, tinkered with its search engine to speed up results, and now answers more queries than Microsoft and Yahoo combined,” Paul Smalera reports.
The question remained, though: “How does Google work?”
Over the years, the ALT attribute (the popular term is “tag,” which is technically incorrect, but I use it in the headline, since most folks are familiar with that term) and its use have not been well understood for search engine optimization. It has been used–still is– as a spammy way to try to manipulate resultsfor search engines.
Learn how to optimize for users and search engines in this short post and discover the ALT attribute techniques that work. A total of 508 accessibility issues are also included briefly in the video snippet.
The basic syntax looks like this: <img src=”my-image.jpg” alt=”description of my image”>. Where spam would enter the scene is via keyword stuffing (many words crammed into the ALT attribute) in hopes of getting ranked by those keywords inserted.
This does not work.
Do it correctly and optimize for Google’s image search by providing a good filename and a short, related description. If you are looking to brand yourself, you may even put a transparent or overlay text right on the image, so when it shows up, users have a reference of its origin. You see this often on videos these days (i.e.: youtube), where a reference to the website sits on the bottom of the screen during play–as a reminder of where it came from.
Enjoy this latest video about ALT / image attributes from the top Google Search Spam Guru: Matt Cutts.
Recently, a conference was held in Las Vegas, the Publishers Conference (pubcon.com). Lots of discussion around search marketing and opportunities to generate traffic and business online: Link building, universal search, local search, social search, personalized search, web 2.0, social media optimization, content strategies and much, much more.
One of the top videos that came out of the conference that’s available now is the Matt Cutts interview for top SEO advice. You will also find more tips on Wordpress and its recent release.
Lastly, some tips on YouTube and Google Video optimization, which is important for possible massive exposure.
When a user searches in Google, the results pages show listings with titles, descriptions, url(s), size and other things. Are you optimizing these results in the best way possible? Did you know that you have some control over this, and that it’s the number one underutilized opportunity for upselling your site in these results?
Did you also wonder how to get those multiple authority links in the search results?
Try entering pubcon in Google, and you’ll see the site listed with title and description, but also a number of other links. They are called site links. How do you get this level of authority display for your own site?
And, are you going to this year’s WebMasterWorld Pubcon? It will be my first. It’s a very popular search-marketing conference, if you’re interested.
All the answers to the above are found in the recent snippet video by Google Guy Matt Cutts:
New site owners are always eager to get listed in the search engines, and why not – it’s such an ego trip to see your site in the search engines for the first time (hopefully for some relevant, searched keywords!), and to think about the amounts of money and information you can exchange online. Call your friends, partners and your business networks and just tell them you are “all over the Internet”.
However, many spend too much time doing it incorrectly, manually, or via software automation (spamming). They add 100’s of links and descriptions to as many search engines and related directories as quickly as possible. They feel that this exercise will surely avert the dreaded (and mythical) Google Sandbox, where new sites appear to be “stuck” with no ability to be searched or found – for weeks, possibly months. And, they believe that Pagerank and Authority will quickly be built.
Not only are you possible spamming the search engines and directories – but you are not going about it the right way.
First of all, the Google sandbox does not exist. While true that newer sites will receive a higher level of scrutiny from SE’s like Google – there is no real truth to that rumour. However, you should not try to fix it by adding your site to 100’s of search engines (there’s really only 4 that matter) – instead, setup and organize your site and links, and you will have no problem at all.
If you want to add to search engines and directories, use a more comprehensive strategy, and add to these sections with the top 4 engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask:
The simple secret to effective web search index inclusion uses the strategies above, but it first starts with links – get as many high quality and relevant ones as you can – and you’ll be included faster than you can say “am I out of the sandbox yet“? Do this over time, not in one day, or one week – and you’ll see your traffic and business grow.
(To this day, I have never used the links for search engine submission, I simply build links and search engines come spidering. But, for products, directories and shopping portals, you should use the above).
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ULTIMATE Guide to Search Engine Optimization
