Speaker:
Chris “Silver” Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts

Moderator:
Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz

Speakers:
Brian Klais, Executive Vice President, Search, Netconcepts
Laura Lippay, Group Program Manager, Search Strategy, Yahoo
Jonah Stein, Founder, ItsTheROI
Richard Zwicky, President, Enquisite

Watch Stephan and Avinash’s webinar as a streaming Flash video »

Or, alternatively download/watch as a Quicktime (m4v) movie (77 MB).

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

* Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning).
* Worrying yourself sick over “duplicate content penalties.”
* Relying on Sitemap XML files to fix your indexation problems (News flash: Your rankings will still stink!).
* Exchanging links.

What’s hot in SEO?

* Truly understanding and leveraging the power of “long tail” dynamics.
* Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape and Reddit.
* Building your network in MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll and the blogosphere in general, and then reaping the rewards of “network effects.”
* Building custom search engines and rallying your community to help improve it.
* Link baiting.

So how do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff? A new generation of SEO metrics, that’s how. Gauging your success on your positions in the search engine results pages is so last century.

New SEO paradigms, such as the “long tail” and personalized search, call for new key performance indicators (KPIs). In addressing “long tail” SEO specifically, some of my Netconcepts’ colleagues cleverly came up with the following KPIs:

Brand-to-nonbrand Ratio
This is the percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from brand keywords versus nonbrand keywords.

If the ratio is high and most of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand, this signals your SEO is fundamentally broken. The lower the ratio, the more of the “long tail” of natural search you are likely capturing. This metric is an excellent gauge of the success of your optimization initiatives.

Unique Pages
This is the number of unique (non-duplicate) web pages crawled by search engine spiders such as Googlebot.

Your website is like your “virtual sales force” bringing in prospects from the search engines. Think of each unique page as one of your virtual salespeople. The more unique pages you have, the more opportunities you have to sell through the search engines.

Page Yield
This is the percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month.

This ratio essentially is a key driver of the length of your “long tail” of natural search. The more pages that yield traffic from search engines, the healthier your SEO program. If you have only a small portion of your website delivering searchers to your door, then most of your pages, your virtual salespeople, are warming the bench instead of working hard for you. My colleague Brian Klais has a name for the webpages that aren’t driving any search traffic — freeloaders.

Keyword Yield
This is the average number of keywords each page (minus the freeloaders) yields in a given month. Put another way, it’s the ratio of keywords to pages yielding search traffic.

The higher your keyword yield, the more of the “long tail” of natural search your site will capture. In other words, the more keywords each yielding page attracts or targets, the longer your tail. So an average of eight search terms per page indicates pages with much broader appeal to the engines than, say, three search terms per page.
The average merchant in our study had 2.4 keywords per page.

Visitors Per Keyword
This is the ratio of search engine delivered visitors to search terms.
This metric indicates how much traffic each keyword drives and is a function of your rankings in the search engine result pages. Put another way, this metric determines the height or thickness of your “long tail.”

The average merchant in our study obtained 1.9 visitors per keyword.

Index-to-crawl Ratio
This is the ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages.
If a page gets crawled by Googlebot, that doesn’t guarantee it will show up in Google’s index. A low ratio can mean your site doesn’t carry much weight in Google’s eyes.

Engine Yield
Calculated for each search engine separately, this is how much traffic the engine delivers for every page it crawls.

Each search engine has a different audience size. This metric helps you fairly compare the referral traffic you get from each. In the Netconcepts study, we found that MSN and Yahoo! tend to crawl significantly more pages, but the yield per crawled page from Google is typically significantly higher.

As you optimize your site through multiple iterations, watch the above-mentioned KPIs to ensure you’re heading in the right direction. Those not privy to these metrics will have a much harder time capturing the long tail of SEO.

Already, YouTube has launched careers, such as that of YouTuber “Brookers” who was hired by Hollywood celebrity Carson Daly because of her zany videos. YouTube has also brought international fame to previously unknown bands such as Sick Puppies, a band popularized by the hugely popular and inspiring “Free Hugs” video set to the Sick Puppies song “All The Same.”

And then there are the hugely successful commercial viral campaigns, such as Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?,” the brilliant video series on various household objects that are run through a Blendtec blender—including marbles, rake handles, and even iPods.

“Will It Blend?” was the brainchild of George Wright, Marketing Director at Blendtec, and Blendtec’s Founder and CEO, Tom Dickson. George Wright recalls the birth of the idea: “Tom likes to run non-standard things through our blenders in the demo room to test out their strength. One day I wandered in to the demo room and saw sawdust on the floor. Tom was testing out the blenders again, this time it was a 2 x 2 jammed into the blender to see if he could destroy the blender or the 2 x 2.”

That gave George an idea: why not post those demonstrations of “extreme blending” online. The trick to creating a viral campaign George reckons is to make it funny and worth watching. They went to work creating the videos back in the fall of last year, starting with five videos: “Don’t Try This at Home Blending.” They built a companion microsite to go with it—WillItBlend.com—and sent an email to all employees to pass on the word of the videos and the Web site.

They also emailed their customer base and asked for suggestions of things to blend. At the time George was traveling and had his Blackberry; all the emails coming in were set to forward to him as well. Calls to his Blackberry wore out the batteries in a few hours, coming in from the media, print magazines, and TV. They were featured on a Today Show segment the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. iVillage Live did a segment on them too. They were interviewed by Newsweek, Playboy Magazine, and the New York Times.

Blendtec had a surprisingly low budget. It happened to have an on-staff video producer and on-staff webmaster, so development of the first five videos ran somewhere between $50-$100—including buying the domain name, a couple of rakes, some marbles, and few other supplies. So it can definitely be done on a meager budget.

George Wright advises that companies wishing to get into YouTube marketing focus on something that is fun, with either the interviewer laughing or scratching his/her head, because only then will they want to pass it on. But don’t force it. It really should be something worth watching.

George’s second piece of advice is to clearly demonstrate the product. For Blendtec, initially it was 100% about branding. After the brand awareness has been established, there has to be a need, a problem in need of resolution. George says a consumer watching a blender that is blending a rake handle would conclude that that make and model of blender would do a pretty good job at blending ice as well.

Blendtec has seen a dramatic increase in sales of at-home and commercial blenders (which are sold to restaurants and coffee shops, etc). The “Will It Blend?” campaign targeted the home market and online Web sales were more than four times greater than in the previous top-selling month. All other channels have seen big increases as well.

George also advises to make sure that the subject of the video is real: no “smoke and mirrors.” Tom Dickson is real. The blender is real. Tom is the owner of the company. He designed the machine. The experiments are reproducible.

Blendtec isn’t the only company having success with YouTube. Intuit, maker of the Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax software, are in the midst of a YouTube campaign, known as the Tax Rap. It was a pretty off-the-wall idea suggested in a brainstorming session; as luck would have it, Intuit was able to secure rapper Vanilla Ice as its front man. After that, it decided to just pull out all the stops—avoiding any corporate marketing feel to the campaign.

Seth Greenberg, Group Manager of Online Advertising and Internet Media at Intuit, says, “Rather than people making fun of our campaign we wanted to poke fun at ourselves.” They went to Vanilla Ice’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, and spent several hours there shooting. Vanilla Ice has been a big supporter of the campaign, according to Seth. What is interesting is that Vanilla ice is a polarizing figure. But that is what is making it a phenomenon on YouTube. (AdCritic.com said “I don’t know how to read this campaign…”)

The campaign has been getting more buzz offline than online. It has been covered at least 50 times by news outlets like CNN, as well as local stations. Entertainment Weekly listed Vanilla Ice’s Tax Rap as #10 on its Hit List. And it made it onto Page Six of the New York Post.

The key to the Tax Rap video campaign is not just that Vanilla Ice is the front man, but that it also encourages participation and viewer support. There is a contest with prize money of $50,000, with users encouraged to create their own rap about taxes to compete for the prize.

Unlike Blendtec, Intuit made a much more sizeable investment, including buying a Contest channel and a Branded channel on YouTube, as well as paying for visibility on the YouTube.com homepage. Those were crucial factors for Intuit’s getting over one million views of its video. Seth figures that it would have been hard to scale virally without it.

Online jewelry retailer Ice.com made its first foray into YouTube marketing this year as well with its “Mr. Cupid” interviews of passersby. Executive VP of Marketing and founder Pinny Gniwisch put some videos up of himself conducting impromptu interviews on the streets of New York City, in Times Square, on the ski slopes of Utah, and elsewhere, prior to Valentines Day. Pinny said the videos did very well for the company, which has even bigger and better plans for Mother’s Day: Those interviews feature celebrities, such as one of the actors from the hit TV show Heroes.

Speaking of Heroes, it was revealed that the hilarious viral spoof posted to YouTube called “Zeroes” actually had NBC behind it. NBC pulled it off brilliantly, but it was somewhat risky, because sometimes the community lashes out at the company behind the campaign when it is revealed as a marketing stunt.

YouTube has been used for effectively brand damage control as well. For example, the CEO and founder of JetBlue Airlines recently put up an apology video on YouTube because of the Valentine’s Day winter storm incident in February—a campaign that was well-received.

One product that got some excellent brand recognition and building from being on YouTube was Smirnoff’s Raw Tea. Smirnoff produced an uproarious music video called “Tea Partay,” with preppies rapping.

Another beverage, Mountain Dew, executed a successful YouTube campaign with its videos of jive-talking octogenarian Sue Teller offering surprisingly hip advice to young viewers.

H & R Block is using YouTube to promote its Tax Cuts software. The promo to the “Me & My Super Sweet Refund” contest is the most linked to comedy video in the history of YouTube.

It’s great to get the links to the video, as it increases the video’s visibility in the search engines. However, social media expert Neil Patel notes that the problem with most popular YouTube promotions is that YouTube gets the links and the original site usually does not. That means that the search engine visibility benefits don’t usually transfer to the company’s Web site. That’s not true of a MySpace marketing campaign, however, because its profile page can link directly to a company’s Web site.

Regardless of this shortcoming, YouTube offers much in the way of brand visibility when the campaign is well-executed. That doesn’t just mean posting a great video; marketers must also know how to take advantage of the social nature of the site—to build up friends and to get on user subscription lists.

Jonathan Mendez of optimizeandprophesize.com is an evangelist for the power of tags for marketing on YouTube. His advice is to make copious use of tags on your videos (ensuring, of course, that the tags are all relevant to the content), to spread your tags out among your clips, to use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don’t use natural language phrases or waste tag space on words like “and” or “to.”

Along with all these great pearls of wisdom imparted from the above-mentioned viral video marketers, I would also interject: Don’t be afraid to make a start, even if it’s modest and has no budget behind it. You won’t get anywhere without experimenting with the medium. No risk, no reward. Who knows, it might be your inroad to Hollywood!

Webmaster Central began its life as Google Sitemaps, a protocol for submitting a list of your URLs to Google. With it you can let Googlebot know how you want your site crawled. Sitemaps still exists; but the breadth of services expanded so much that it warranted Google changing the name of its webmaster resource area to Webmaster Central last August.

What are some of those services? In a recent interview, Vanessa Fox, product manager at Google Webmaster Central, offered some detail about those tools and resources (interview audio available at Marketingspeak.com/audio/vanessa-fox-interview.mp3).

First, at Webmaster Central, you can be informed if your site is being penalized for a violation, or if it has malware on it, or if Googlebot can’t gain access. Furthermore, the Link Reporting Tool reveals virtually all the links to pages on your site, including the ones that are most often linked, as well as inbound links and internal links. And the PageRank Tool tells you which of your pages has the highest PageRank each month (often it’s not those you expect!) along with a graph that shows the PageRank distribution across all your pages.

If you aren’t ranking well for a particular product or category, you can use these tools to identify missed opportunities or previously unnoticed mistakes. For example, perhaps you have inadvertently severed an internal link to a page you hope will rank well. Webmaster Central’s reports would reveal this problem, which you could then rectify by linking to it from one or more pages well-endowed with PageRank.

Other reports reveal the queries that most often return your site in the search results and the level of traffic those SERPs (search engine results pages) received. How else could you learn which pages of your site receive many impressions in the SERPs but very few clickthroughs? Certainly not through log file analysis!

Google shares which words appear most on your site, and which words are used most often in the anchor text of inbound links.

“If you think your site should be ranking for a word but it doesn’t show up as one of the common words on your site, or as a link to your site, then you may need to optimize a little better for that particular phrase,” Vanessa advises.

Of course you should check whether those words are popular with searchers or not. For that, Webmaster Central offers the Keyword Popularity Data Tool, in order to spot trends and view historical data on the keywords you most care about.

Google also has you covered when it comes to crawlability diagnostics. Webmaster Central reveals the pages that were blocked when Google tried to crawl them. It will also tell you the crawl rate of your site — i.e., how many pages per day, how much data are downloaded, and how long it takes to download a page.

If your site operates at two locations, one at www.yourcompany.com and one at Yourcompany.com, your PageRank will be split across the two sites, resulting in poorer rankings due to the dilution effect. Webmaster Central has a tool to help you rectify this, where you can specify which version you want indexed. That’s handy, but the best scenario — as I have mentioned in numerous SEO Report Cards — is to do a 301 redirect to aggregate both versions into one. It certainly won’t hurt to use the tool within Webmaster Central as an additional measure.

That’s an invaluable list of tools, wouldn’t you agree? On top of that, there’s also the Webmaster Central blog and the Google Webmaster Help discussion forum. On my wishlist of tools to add to Webmaster Central is the ability to see which of your own site’s pages appear in the Supplemental Index. Let’s hope that Google considers my suggestion.

In the meantime, go sign up for Google Webmaster Central and verify your site. You’ll be glad you did.

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates
Don Steele, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

We’re proud to call Neil one of our “Cool Friends.” Here he is being interviewed by our founder and president Stephan Spencer…

What are the most important social media sites in your opinion? And why?

There is no particular social site that I feel is more important than another. They are all important because of the varying audience that uses each social site. For example people into politics use Netscape while people into technology use Digg. Because of this it is important to keep an open mind about all of the social sites.

Which ones are the easiest to manipulate, in other words to raise your content to the top?

I have not tried to manipulate any social sites, but it seems the less popular ones like Furl and My Web are easier to manipulate because they have less sophisticated algorithms. Once they become more popular and start becoming abused more it will become increasingly difficult to manipulate these sites due to the growth of their algorithms. When it comes to social media marketing, the idea is not to manipulate the social sites; it is to add value for users by creating compelling content that they are interested in.

What is the traffic potential if you manage to get to the front page of Digg.com, or to the del.icio.us popular page, or any other site that you recommend?

The traffic that Digg drives once a story hits the homepage can vary quite a bit. I have seen some stories get only a few thousand visitors and some have received as much as 20 thousand to 30 thousand visitors.

Del.icio.us on the other hand does not drive as much as traffic as Digg, but if you get on the popular and hotlist page you can usually get a few thousand visitors.

Some of the other sites that also drive great traffic are Reddit, Netscape and StumbleUpon. With each of these, traffic levels could be as low as a few hundred visitors and as high as 10 or 20 thousand visitors. For most social websites, traffic mainly depends on the time of day the story hits the homepage and the topic of the story.

What are some of the more clever examples of companies achieving a high level of visibility on some of these sites?

One clever example that comes to mind is a “Geek’s Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips” because it did really well on the social sites and was not really related to the topic of the website.

Some of the other companies that achieve great success from these sites are all the web 2.0 sites that try to get on the homepage right when they launch.

If alpha geeks are the primary users of Digg.com, and they are not your target audience, is there still value in achieving a front page story on Digg?

There is still some value of reaching the homepage of Digg because a few of those visitors may love your site. In most cases if your target market is not tech geeks you should look at other social sites that your target audience uses. Getting on any of these can help increase your traffic, readership, branding, and links.

If it is about the links that you get out of it, what is a typical outcome in terms of the number and quality of the links obtained?

When most people judge the amount of links these social sites drive they use Yahoo. Rand Fishkin and a few others have seen up to 2000 backward links every time a story gets on the homepage of sites like Digg. Personally, I prefer using Technorati to check backward links and based on their estimates, you can usually see between 40-200 links for every successful story.