Netconcepts

Netconcepts on the Speaking Circuit

Netconcepts — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 07:07:59 +0000

We at Netconcepts love sharing our passion for search, ecommerce, and online marketing in all its facets (blogs, email, RSS, microsites, paid search, etc.) and educating others on ways they can get more from their Internet marketing initiatives.

Upcoming seminars, panels and workshops

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques and Bot Herding panels along with Buying Sites For SEO moderated by Stephan Spencer, also Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know panel with Brian Klais at SMX Advanced 2008 in Seattle, WA (June 3rd - 4th, 2008)
SEO: How creative link building can multiply site traffic workshop with Patricia Fusco and Web site design spotlight: Live, on-the-spot critique of retailers’ sites panel with Stephan Spencer at Internet Retailer 2008 (June 9th and 11th, 2008)
Social Media Success panel with Stephan Spencer and Web 2.0 & Search Engines moderated by Chris Smith at SES Toronto in Toronto, Canada (June 18th, 2008)
Blog Monetization: From Soup to Nuts Seminar for The DMA Conference with Stephan Spencer (October 13th, 2008)

Archives of past presentations

Browse by topic:

Or browse them all below. Presentations are organized in reverse chronological order.

Blog Monetization: From Soup to Nuts

Stephan Spencer — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:08:03 +0000

Get the nuts-and-bolts of how to turn a blog into a “profit center” - generating wildly positive ROI by making sales, attracting leads, and generating ad and affiliate revenue. Our panel of expert money-making bloggers will share step-by-step advice, most profitable tricks of the trade, pitfalls, hazards, resources required.

Learn…

Learn how to diversify and supercharge your blog’s revenue streams
Leverage others’ blogs for your own gain
Maximize your blog’s search visibility and traffic

Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts

Panelists:
Jeremy Schoemaker, Founder, ShoeMoney Media
Duane Forrester, Senior Program Manager (SEO), Microsoft, and author of How to Make Money with Your Blog
Steve Spangler, CEO, Steve Spangler Science
Chloe Spencer, Blogger, Neopets Fanatic.com

Web 2.0 & Search Engines

Chris Smith — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:08:26 +0000

An overused and amorphous term, “Web 2.0″ nonetheless encompasses an evolutionary shift from the typical web user experience of a decade ago. Some aspects of the “new” web environment are great for improving your search traffic. Other developments may lead you to make serious SEO errors. Among other things, Web 2.0 is about new user interface designs that speed up user actions with techniques such as AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), which allow users to perform operations nimbly without loading a new HTML page. This session will cover AJAX, CSS, user-generated content, and other new trends in web design and user experiences that may require a re-think of your SEO strategy.

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

Social Media Success

Stephan Spencer — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:00:57 +0000

One of this year’s panelists promises that search marketers have the potential to “own” the social media marketing space because of search’s inherent bias towards ROI measurement. Panelists will focus on defining different measures of success, and exploring case studies of social media campaigns that worked to help clients get rich, famous, and better-looking.

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

Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know

Brian Klais — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:52:28 +0000

It’s more than just rankings and traffic reports to measure the health of SEO efforts. This session focuses on analytics that SEOs should be considering.

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

Buying Sites For SEO

Stephan Spencer — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:48:05 +0000

Forget the debate over buying links. How about buying entire web sites to gain success in search. This session looks at how to find the gems out there, criteria to consider, ways to negotiate and how to best leverage your new purchase. Tips, tricks, success stories, and painful lessons learned will be shared.

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

Bot Herding

Stephan Spencer — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:42:23 +0000

Search spiders and bots are pretty stupid when the come to your web site. If you don’t guide them, they’ll generate duplicate content issues, miss important pages in favor of junk, not realize where existing content has moved to and have other problems. This session looks at some advanced techniques in herding bots when “good cloaking” make sense.

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

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques

Stephan Spencer — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:24:29 +0000

Want to learn how to build a database of high-value link acquisition targets? Want to know how to get on the radar of nonprofits, government and university departments and compel them to give you some of that sweet, authoritative link love? Want to learn the most coveted secrets to “buying” the links the engines would never consider a “paid link?” This, along with non-traditional link sources, linking strategies and nofollow PageRank “scuplting” or “siloing” are covered in the session.

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

SEO Report Card: Pinkorpunk.com

Jeff Muendel — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:31:01 +0000

In this edition of the SEO report card, Jeff Muendel reviews eCommerce site pinkorpunk.com. This niche eCommerce site sells accessories that (you guessed it) are either pink or punk. This website audit is especially helpful for other new eCommerce sites, since pinkorpunk.com launched quite recently. Here’s a little bit about what Jeff has to say about this unique boutique.

Pinkorpunk.com is a fairly new website, which may partially explain its PageRank of 0. But, the other factor in the ranking is the site’s small number of inbound links. Yahoo! sees 45 links from outside sites while Google doesn’t list any at all. Inbound links translate to PageRank, and higher PageRank translates to better search engine results. This site, with its vibrant content, should have no problem garnering links! A linking campaign is in order here. Research online directories and get listed in those that still have decent PageRank (many have been recently demoted by Google in that regard). A blog is also in order, especially with such hip content. Online press should be a target as well, as should social media avenues like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook.

For more about this niche eCommerce store, visit the Practical eCommerce website audit here.

Being Off-Topic, Off-Message, or Off-Brand Can Be Good For Your SEO!

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:26:23 +0000

Ok, perhaps I’m being a bit provocative here, but sometimes it’s the off-topic, off-message, or off-brand content that earns you the most valuable links—links that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. Those links can really pay the bills, in terms of the extra search traffic and resulting sales. The brand police within your company may pitch a fit, but heck, it’ll be worth it! Here’s how it’s done:

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.