As you might imagine, most organizations are reluctant to share publicly the strategies and tactics that have given them an edge over their competitors online. So it is a testament to our clients’ generosity and commitment to partnership that they have graciously granted us permission to publish this inside view of their SEO, e-marketing and web development initiatives.

Below you will find a selection of case studies from some of these valued clients.

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

Speakers:
Cam Balzer, Director of Search Strategy, Performics Inc.
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Marshall Clark, Director of Search, Organic
Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Speakers:
Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI
Todd Malicoat, Internet Marketing Consultant, Stuntdubl
Jeremy Schoemaker, CEO, Shoemoney Media Group
Jeremy Wright, CEO, B5 Media

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

Speakers:
Adam Audette, Founder, AudetteMedia
Hamlet Batista, President, Nemedia S.A.
Nathan Buggia, Lead PM, Live Search Webmaster Center, Microsoft
Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Moderator:
Greg Boser, President/CEO, 3 Dog Media

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
Jay Young, Owner, Link Fish Media, Inc.

Tuesday, June 3rd - Day 1
10:45am - 12:00pm

By definition, SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website with the goal of having major search engines (primarily Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search) return pages from that website in highly-ranked search engine results. SEO is almost always employed as a form of marketing, but it is a very specific form of marketing that takes place within the search engines.

Lately, some industry blogs have suggested that SEO has grown beyond its primary parameters, suggesting that successful SEO includes expanding into other realms of marketing. I don’t think that makes any sense. By definition, SEO - search engine optimization - does not include any form of marketing that goes outside of search engines. The use of the term SEO in such a way is disingenuous and confuses many webmasters and owners of ecommerce sites.

For more about this controversial topic, visit the full article on Practical eCommerce here.

Keyword suggestion tools help you understand what words are used in search queries and what phrases are associated with those words. Keyword analytical tools provide some measure of keyword suggestion functionality, as well as the ability to understand the competition levels for specific search terms. More importantly, keyword analytics tools help you determine the relative size of the search referral market associated with specific keywords and phrases.

Read more about keyword analytics tools and how effective they might be for your site in this article at ClickZ here.

Don’t be afraid to do something off-color. Most folks in the corporate communications, PR, and legal departments shy away from anything potentially controversial. And for good reason, right? Then why would a company selling life insurance online dare to venture into the taboo topic of weird and disturbing death trivia? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly what Lifeinsure.com did with their link bait article, “19 Things You Didn’t Know About Death.” With such goodies as “After being decapitated, the average person remains conscious for an additional 15-20 seconds,” you can imagine how much of a hit it was with the irreverent alpha-geeks that make up the Digg community. The article made it to the Digg front page, which in turn got it in front of countless bloggers and social bookmarkers. Surely the success of this article in attracting links has contributed to Lifeinsure.com’s impressive #4 ranking for “life insurance.” Not surprisingly though, this contentious article is nowhere to be found in Lifeinsure.com’s navigation hierarchy, so customers and prospects are unlikely to stumble across it (phew!).

Deviate from your core business. Successful enterprises are built on the relentless pursuit of excellence in their core business, trimming the fat, and outsourcing the rest. It may seem like a bad idea for an SEO firm like ours to own a bed and breakfast directory and a writers community. But the great links these sites attract make it a good investment.

Netconcepts benefits from these links in two ways: link juice is passed from these sites to our own corporate site, and both sites’ rankings have earned (and continue to earn) us a respectable passive income from Google AdSense (six figures for each site, in total, to date). Our firm also develops WordPress plugins and distributes them for free on our corporate site (netconcepts.com). Dedicating resources to WordPress plugin development when the market for WordPress is mostly made up of individuals and small businesses may seem counterintuitive, given that our focus is SEO for ecommerce and that our target market is large, brand name retailers. But it works. Our free SEO Title Tag plugin has been a magnet for links from bloggers, to the point that the traffic to the plugin page now exceeds that of our home page.

Do it for a good cause. The linkerati love a good corporate citizen, so be one. Consider such activities not as an expense, but as an investment that will generate a return in the form of links. With Second Chance Trees, social media marketing agency Converseon really went out on a limb (ugh, bad pun, I know!)—creating a charitable initiative using internal resource and expertise that could have instead been put on to billable work. The idea was to create an island in Second Life where players could purchase a virtual tree with Linden dollars and plant it. This would then trigger the planting of a real tree of the same species in an ecologically sensitive region, such as a Central or South American rain forest. For a charitable endeavor, the payoff was huge. High-value links came from news outlets, the blogosphere, organizations, and elsewhere. Nicely done, Converseon!

Be bold, be off-the-wall. You don’t always have to toe the corporate line. If you’re thinking that this will garner links that aren’t very relevant to your business and industry, you’re probably right. But remember that PageRank is topic independent. Time after time, the tests we conduct at Netconcepts show that high PageRank endowed yet topically irrelevant links still help—and they can help a lot. Definitely still work to acquire topically relevant links as well, but don’t neglect the off-topic ones too.

Panelists:
Lauren Freedman, President, the e-tailing group
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Amy Africa, President, Eight by Eight