Those of you who work in search marketing know that there’s a ton that goes into search engine optimization. And solutions, particularly for technical issues, can be complicated. It’s easy to say that a site shouldn’t use tracking parameters in URLs, but it’s a bit harder to really dig into the optimal solution that takes into account why the tracking parameters are used and what the system architecture that processes them is like.
While I was at Google and since, I’ve gotten lots of questions from developers about search-related issues. There’s so much great information out there about search marketing, but less about pure techie issues that dig deep into the code and technology stacks.
I’ve always been interested in all things geeky, so this led me to do a workshop for developers about search at Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year, launch Jane and Robot, a site focused on search-related issues just for developers, host meetups for web developers in Seattle, and organize a “developer day” as part of SMX Advanced.
With those aims in mind, I’m co-chairing a new conference with Nate Buggia, put on by O’Reilly. Called Found, this conference is specifically for web developers and will feature lots of case studies and real world examples from developers about their experiences and what works. We’ll cover both the LAMP and Microsoft stacks, and will dig into diagnosing technical issues, and will advance best practices to build into the web development process to ensure web applications are search-engine friendly.
This conference isn’t meant to compete with search marketing conferences like SMX, SES, or Pubcon. While those conferences definitely cover technical issues, the primary audience is search marketers (on both the organic and paid side). We envision that attendees of those conferences might send the developers they work with to the O’Reilly conference. We hope this will help with communication between marketing and development. When search marketers tell developers that the site’s URL structure or use of AJAX or Flash or redirects need to be changed for SEO improvement, those developers can have a handy toolbox for exactly the best way to implement those changes based on the infrastructure of the site.
I also talk to a lot of developers who have launched startups, and while they have a development background, their companies are just too small for them to hire separate SEO expertise. So giving them guidance on how to build their sites so they can be crawled and indexed by search engines is another goal. Startups can definitely benefit from the potential customers that search can bring.
The call for proposals is open now, so if you’re a developer who’s tackled a tough search-related problem, or you’re a search marketer who’s spent a lot of time working with developers on best practices related to SEO, we’d love to hear from you!
We’d also love to hear from developers about what issues they face and what they’d most like to see covered at the conference. And from search marketers about what technical issues they see most often.
(I’m about to jump on a plane for SMX London, so I might be a bit slow in responding to comments over the next few days. But I’ll find an internet connection again as soon as I can!)
SMX East is coming up in NYC in early October. It should be a great conference with lots of great stuff about search marketing, including an whole day on doing SEO in-house, programmed by Jessica Bowman.
I’m coordinating several sessions, and we’re nearing last call for speakers. If you’re interested in speaking at these or any other sessions, get your pitch in now! (And if you’ve already pitched for any of my sessions, you should hear something by late this week or early next.)
In particular, the sessions I’m programming are below. In particular, I’m looking for case studies, real-world implementation best practices, and tactical, actionable stuff that attendees can bring home and implement right away. OK, maybe bring to work. Unless they work from home. Or a coffee shop. Like I am right now.
CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & SEO
This session looks CSS, AJAX and Web 2.0 dynamic design techniques that can cause search engine indexing and ranking issues, with solutions to consider.
Enhanced Listings
Yahoo has SearchMonkey. Google has sitelinks management. Even Microsoft is looking at ways to dress-up listings. This session looks at the move toward enhanced listings and how search marketers can tap into them.
Flash & SEO
Google is handling Flash in a new way thanks to a partnership with Adobe, and Yahoo may soon do the same. Meanwhile, there are plenty of ‘old’ techniques to make Flash sites search engine friendly. But any of these techniques still don’t mean that Flash issues are solved. More in this session.
Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains
Can you find the same page on your site using different URLs? That might cause you duplicate content issues. Does your content management system put out parameters that block crawling? Own multiple domains pointing at the same site? Are you 301 redirecting them or leaving canonicalization to chance? Confused on even how to pronounce canonicalization, in addition to now being worried about it? Relax. This session looks at a variety of URL and domain name issues you should consider to increase your success with SEO.
It’s been a busy month. I spoke at some conferences, organized some local meetups, put together and moderated a day for developers about search, and wrote some stuff. I have a bunch of stuff coming up for this blog, but in the meantime, I thought I’d post a quick recap here of everything else.
It’s been a busy month. I spoke at some conferences, organized some local meetups, put together and moderated a day for developers about search, and wrote some stuff. I have a bunch of stuff coming up for this blog, but in the meantime, I thought I’d post a quick recap here of everything else.
emetrics
I was on a panel with Avinash Kaushik, which was great fun. I’m sure you already are subscribed to his RSS feed, and if not, what are you waiting for? Mel over at Microsoft adCenter quoted me a bit loosely from the session. I think I was replying to someone who was thinking they could perhaps buy a site, replace all the content with completely different stuff, and keep the credit for all the older site’s PageRank and incoming links. But it doesn’t really make sense that if msnbc.com had a bunch of incoming links for being a great news site and was sold to someone who turend it into a site about cute cats that all those old news links would help the new cat site.
advance08
I’m working on a big write up of Bill Gate’s talk at Microsoft’s advertising summit and my tour of their house of the future (just like they’d show during the Tom and Jerry cartoons!), and hopefully will have it out in the next few days.
Convergence Vancouver
I gave a talk on universal search and discussed how to use universal search as a new opportunity to connect with customers. What is your audience most interested in? You don’t want to create a bunch of videos and images just to try to blanket the results page — think about what will provide real value to your audience and focus on building universal results that will bring you more qualified traffic and return visitors. I also talked about how the changes to the search results page mean that you may need to look at new metrics. Ranking position and page views alone can’t tell the whole story.
SMX Developer Day
I had a great time yesterday moderating the developer track at SMX. The speakers were great and I particularly enjoyed hearing the case studies and seeing code samples. Look for some of that soon on Jane and Robot. Thanks to everyone who participated (by speaking or attending).
Jane and Robot Web Development and Search Meetups
Speaking of Jane and Robot, we held two meetups in Seattle in May. They were great fun so we’re going to keep doing them around once a month. We’re going to focus on a particular topic each time and leave lots of time for questions, site reviews, and chatting. If you’re a developer in the Seattle area and there’s a particular topic you’d like to hear about, let me know! Looks like the next one will likely be June 25th on the east side, so stay tuned for details.
Writing
I’ve managed to find some time to write a few things lately. Earlier tonight, I gave my thoughts on the Yahoo! SearchMonkey searcher experience. Late last week, I wrote about how the search experience is changing and how marketers can use that to their advance. I also wrote about implementing images on Jane and Robot. We’ve got another article that will likely go up sometime tomorrow.
As always, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling, and next week is no different. I’m heading down to San Francisco to do four talks about search engine optimization and web development. If you’ll be around, stop by and say hi!
Domain Roundtable
I’ll be speaking on the SEO experts panel on Saturday about the key things to look at when thinking of developing a portfolio of domains into content sites. Building web sites with content aimed at users can be quite a bit different than managing domains for their potential inherent name value, and my advice will be focused on building long-term value. Even from a purely domain perspective, a site that’s built for long-term value should be easier and more lucrative to sell. (Of course, there are a myriad of other benefits from approaching site building this way as well.)
Web 2.0 Expo
I’ll be speaking at two sessions on Tuesday.
In the morning, I’ll be doing a session with Nathan Buggia in the development track about search-friendly design for web developers. We’ll be talking all about how to build solid infrastructure that takes into account both usability and search engine crawlability. The cool thing is that you can code the site in such a way that you accomplish both goals at once.
In the afternooon, I’ll be speaking with Dave McClure and Hiten Shah on startup metrics. At this session, I’ll be talking about the marketing side of search (rather than the development side that I’ll be talking about in the earlier session), particularly about the search metrics that matter most and how you can make them actionable.
Ignite San Francisco
On Tuesday night, I’ll try the whirlwind that is Ignite. 20 slides in 5 minutes! If you don’t have time for the three hour session Tuesday morning, you can check out the 5 minute version: 5 things developers should know about search. First thing! That you need more than 5 minutes.
I’m at SMX West and I’m actually attending a panel, rather than moderating! Woo hoo! I moderated seven sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was super awesome and I’m totally blogging how it all went, but for now, I’m finally in the audience for a session, so you’re hearing about that first!
Before I get started with my mad live blogging skilz, I thought I’d share a little story. Throughout the session, the panelists would sometimes listen to another answer and then thoughtfully chime in “Google agrees with that”. Well, not if it was the Microsoft rep. He would say “Ask agrees with that.” Because that’s funnier. Anyway. What’s up with all the serious agreeing?
Well, if you’ve been to search conferences in the past and you’ve seen Eytan Seidman from Microsoft on a panel, he would sometimes save everyone time and confusion by seriously commenting “Microsoft agrees with that” after another search engine rep would answer. Efficient and concise, yes. But also funny!
Eytan recently left Microsoft Live Search and several of his search friends, including Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz and Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye of Google showed their love for him by mocking his search conference answering techniques on video. I could describe it, but really, you should just watch it. Here’s a very short clip. .
I know, what the hell was Matt talking about? Seriously, you should just watch the entire video, which is 15 minutes long, and doesn’t have much to do with linking, and it will all make sense.
And now, onto the live blogging! Which at some point became trying-to-remember-after-the-fact blogging as my battery died.
Paid Links? No One Cares About That Topic, Right?
Any of you who are involved in search at all will be shocked and amazed to hear that the discussion focused largely on paid links. Crazy! Who would have thought! For those of you who aren’t in search and are thinking what the heck are paid links, you might check out a I wrote a post on Search Engine Land a while back that summarized the world of paid links throughout 2007.
Reps from all the engines are on the panel, and as it turns out, Matt Cutts is against paid links! And wants everyone to use nofollow! Rae Hoffman is representing search marketers on the panel (along with Todd Malicoat) and wants to know why search engines, after creating a link economy, are putting all the responsibility on webmasters to figure out when to use nofollow. (It certainly is the case that lots of people with websites have never even heard of nofollow and yet the engines are expecting them to use it.) All the engines say they’re working on it! Stop being so mean! And Rae is all, well stop banning me then! That’s even meaner! And then there was a duel.
Am I kidding? If you were here, you would know.
Link Sabotage! Not Impossible! But Really Hard!
Someone then asked if link sabotage is possible. Rae’s like, heck yeah! Matt said, well, it’s not “impossible”, because maybe nothing is impossible. But it’s really frickin’ hard. Todd and Rae looked unconvinced.
But It’s Scary To Change Domains
Someone asked about moving a site, and everyone on the panel spent lots of lots of time trying to one-up each other with the best tip. Oh, you want to know what they are? Right then.
User-Generated Content Links: Can They Be More Than Links You Give Yourself?
What about links from user-generated content? Todd said that if you have a balance of links, you’ll be OK. If 100% of your links are from user-generated content, then the engines just might think you’re signing up for every social site in the world, sitting at home drinking Mad Dog 20/20 and eating cheetos, and staying up all night just adding comment after comment with a link to your site. And seriously, Mad Dog 20/20 just doesn’t go well with cheetos.
Does It Matter Who You Link To?
Matt said if you’re linking out to scuzzy, spammy sites, Google might think you’re hanging out with friends who are a bad influence on you. Just like your mom always told you.
Should you link out at all? Todd said this isn’t discussed much, but is pretty important. Who you’re linking to can tell search engines about your site as well as get those other sites’ attention. Rae said outlink when it makes sense for the user. The search engine reps were so proud they could barely stand it.
Sure, search engine optimization is important, but users are what you’re ultimately after anyway, so your primary goal is to make them happy. Without them, what’s the point? It’ll just be you and your page of lolcats. And that would be a sad internet indeed.
I have been crazy busy with lots of things to write about but no time to write them.
In the meantime, check out this LA Times story on using the internet to broadcast details of our personal lives that we previously reserved for friends and family (specifically, using Twitter to document the Yahoo! layoff). Obviously, this topic hits close to home for me. I’ve been talking to people online for more than 10 years, I’ve blogged about my career changes, and I dug into the question of online identity at Gnomedex last year. I talked with the reporter about how we lose privacy but gain a sense of connecting with the world around us when we post online.
On a completely different topic related to the world continuing to move online, my latest article for Information Today magazine is up and focuses on the recent PEW Internet study that found that 77% of Americans are online and most turn to the internet for answers.
If you’re more into talking and listening than reading, head over to Search Marketing Expo West next week in Santa Clara! I’m moderating seven sessions: four on blended/ universal search, and three “wonder twins” sessions: blogging, social media marketing, and user-generated content. (Speaking of universal search, did you see the SEOmoz whiteboard Friday I did about it not too long ago?)
And if you’re more into listening and not traveling beyond your couch and laptop, check out the webinar I’m doing March 11th on how companies can successfully engage with customers using social networking.
Hope to see you all next week!
How was Pubcon, you ask?
Well, Danny found that Sphinn has made its way to Vegas:
Matt Cutts and I talked with Mike McDonald from WebProNews while at the pub. SEOHack, is this what you meant by mom and dad getting back together? (Sorry, Syzlak, I was confused by you getting a haircut. 
)
And Greg and I had Nate Buggia from Microsoft’s Webmaster Center on GoodKarma (live! from Vegas!) to talk about the recent issues with MSNbot’s cloaking detection gone awry.
Believe it or not, I didn’t gamble even once. Not even to play craps.
I haven’t quite made it all the way home to Seattle from Pubcon, and I’m still working on the write up of my sessions. I did a few interviews that I’ll link as soon as I see them online. The video during which I imagined myself as a real estate agent is already up. We all had limited internet access during the conference (it was like I was missing a limb!), so things are a bit slow coming online. It was awesome meeting so many new people and seeing what people had to say in the sessions.
Speaking of sessions, you all may have heard that the first major, chock full ‘o searchy goodness conference held by Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is coming at the end of February. SMX is the conference series put on by Third Door Media (which also runs Search Engine Land, Sphinn, and Search Marketing Now) and is programmed by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman (who previous programmed the SES conference series).
SMX started ramping up conferences in 2007, but these were niche conferences for specialized audiences (such as advanced, local, and social media). Those niche conferences will return in 2008, but new to 2008 are two general three-day conferences with tracks and sessions for all levels and all specialties.
SMX West will be February 26-28th in Santa Clara, CA and SMX East is October 6-8th in NYC.
SMX West has sessions on everything about search marketing, from the fundamentals and basics, to the advanced coming trends.
I’m coordinating several sessions, and pitches are currently open for speakers. If you’re interested in any of these sessions, use the handy speaker form to send me a brief description on what you’d like to talk about. Below are my openings, but take a look at the form and the agenda to see all the sessions.
Space is filling up, but there’s still a bit of room if you’ve got something super awesome to talk about.
Search 3.0 Track
This track is all about how the search engines are moving towards blended results. I wrote an article a few months ago for Information Today magazine about how each engine has been incorporating more than just web pages in their search results.
The Blended Search Revolution
The first generation of search engines ranked pages based on the content of those pages alone — the words-on-the page. The second generation increased relevancy by analyzing links. The third generation, Search 3.0, is upon us now in full force. Google Universal Search, Ask.com’s Morph, Microsoft Live Search Scopes and Yahoo Shortcuts are different names for the same core concept — automatically blending in results from specialized or “vertical” search engines such as video search or local search. This session looks at the revolutionary change happening with blended search and how search marketers can ride the wave to success.
Video, Images & Blended Results
This session looks at how video and image content is being blended into the main results at major search engines and provides tips on increasing the odds that your content makes the cut for the first page of results.
I’m specifically looking for people who can talk about how they got video and images into the regular search engine results.
Local Search & Blended Results
This session covers how local listings are being blended into the regular results of major search engines and offers tips to increase the chances that your listings will be among those folded in.
As with the images and video panel, I’m looking for people who can talk about getting local entries into the local results and what the impact of that was.
Online Retail & Blended Results
The session focuses on how online retail listings from shopping search are being mixed into the regular results of the major search engines and how to better ensure your products are positioned in front of searchers.
For this session, I’m looking for people who’ve gotten products, reviews, and other retail-specific items into the regular search results.
Wonder Twins Track
So here’s the thing. Both at Buffy night at my house a couple of weeks ago and last week at Pubcon, we did an informal poll and way too many people don’t know who the wonder twins are!! How can anyone not know about “wonder twin powers… activate! Form of steam rising from boiling pasta water, the good kind of pasta that you toss with parmesan and olive oil!” Apparently some of you are younger than I am.
They were part of the superfriends cartoon on Saturday morning and were twins with these matching rings. All they had to do was touch rings and one of them could be something crazy out of water (a dancing tidal wave! a giant screwdriver made of ice!) and the other could be whatever animal she thought of (a tiny zebra seahorse that lives in Parisian streams!). If you haven’t seen the wonder twins, you can conveniently use Google to return blended search results that include YouTube videos.
Ahem.
The Wonder Twins track is all about how you can pair tactics that aren’t search specific with SEO for well, activated wonder twin powers. Only instead of getting rain and prairie dogs out of it, you get better rankings and increased traffic. Now go watch those YouTube videos so I stop feeling so old and unhip.
SEO & Social Media Marketing
More and more, people are finding that social media marketing — SMM — can help with SEO efforts. Getting your content into the major social media sites can generate links or provide rankings you might not be able to tap into with your own site. In this session, SMM essentials that SEOs need to know.
SEO & Blogging
Blogging can help SEO in a variety of ways. Blog posts are “syndicated,” meaning your content — and your links — spread across the web. There are also dedicated blog search engines with readers you might be missing, if you’re not blogging. This session introduces you to blogging and the SEO advantages it offers.
SEO & User Generated Content
Search engines love good content, but good content can take a lot of time to prepare. So why not turn to your users and visitors? User Generated Content — UGC — has the advantage of often being full of passion plus the “authors” who create it in turn may turn into marketers for your site. Learn more in this session.
If you’re not ready to speak at SMX, but would like to attend, I think early bird pricing is still available.
I’m sure I’ll be recovered from Pubcon by the time SMX West comes along…
I’m halfway to Vegas and may even make it in time to speak at the Monetizing Social Media Traffic session at Pubcon tomorrow morning. I thought the hurricane-style winds might the deterring factor, but it was the flooding that almost kept me from the airport entirely. I made it through this part of the road:
But I do drive a Mini, after all, so a bit of that was more floating than driving. When I came across an even larger lake of water, I figured it was time to turn around. I have managed to make it to the airport, so if you’re planning to be in Vegas this week, come by and say hi. If you twitter to @vanessafox, I should get the message on my phone.
