By now, every good consultant and SEO has written their review of PubCon Las Vegas 2010, so here is mine. ;) I put together my takeaways to share with the team at Pittsburgh Internet Consulting and our clients. There was an amazing amount of great material and the multi-track format allowed each PubCon attendee to customize their conference to meet the needs of their business or clients. It goes without saying that PubCon was also a great networking event with an amazing party scene and I even scored free Blue Man Group tickets from the conference which @jillyk and I enjoyed while sitting next to a real Blue Man! (Not to mention a shout out from @mattcutts during his keynote)
So why bother reading my 2,500 plus words on PubCon? First, I didn’t waste your time with lots of my own opinions. Below you will find the great takeaways from some of the best speakers at the conference in short sweet bullet points for easy scanning. Second, rather than breaking it up by session or by speaker, I tried my best to categorize it so you only have to read the important information about the online marketing topic that you are responsible for. Please send me additions or corrections and I will get them made ASAP. Cheers to PubCon, PubCon Speakers, and PubCon attendees that were all so great throughout the week.
Now some jump links by topic: Social Media, Organic, Pay Per Click,Online Reputation Management
Social Media
General
- Marketing is not a task, it is engagement. Talk to your customers and potential customers. Be human. – Scott Stratten
- Things are not viral because you call them “viral marketing”. They are viral because they spread. People spread emotion. They spread AWESOME. They DONT spread “ehh?” – Scott Stratten
- Social media doesn’t make anything better or worse. It just amplifies. – Scott Stratten
- Do not think of it as a sales tool. Remember its relationship building. Think of it as networking. – Jeff Schroeffel
- Claim lots of company usernames and brand profiles for the future and to stop squatters and people from harming your brand. Just like buying and protecting domain names – Chris Winfield
- Do not try to build on all social platforms at one time. Pick 1-2 platforms and build up your social currency there before spreading your efforts too thin – Scott Stratten – Chris Winfield
- Do not just wait for followers to come. Target the influencers in your space. Follow them and engage in conversation with them. List them on a twitter list for example. Get them to notice you – Chris Winfield
- Do not ignore forums since they are not sexy, still some great conversation going on there. Use Big-Boards.com to find the best message boards. – Chris Winfield
- Use a social media monitoring tool to listen proactively to your audience and your competitors audience – Chris Winfield
- 30% of all traffic to websites is now social. Second only to search – Lisa Buyer
- Don’t be afraid to tweet too often, think about tweet quality and conversation, not just about sheer volume. Stats indicate that accounts with 22 tweets per day have the most followers – Dan Zarrella
- Tweets that contain links are much more likely to get RTs compared to tweets without links. – Dan Zarrella
- The more you talk about yourself, the less followers you get – Dan Zarrella
- Negative remarks harm your follower count – Dan Zarrella
- Reach and influence matter. You have to work on growing your followers and in particular followers who are influential – Brian Clark
- Don’t just tweet once about legitimate press releases. Split them up into multiple tweets and spread throughout the day/week. Such as headlines, quotes, stats, etc. – Lisa Buyer
- Resuscitate dead and buried content in your blog or news center. Some content is “Evergreen Content” – Lisa Buyer
- Metrics to Measure & Monitor Twitter
- Total Followers
- Retweets Per Follower
- Total Followers / Total Tweets
- Percentage of Following / Followers
- Content Engagement Percentage
- Klout Score – From klout.com a measurement tool to identify influencers on topics across the social web
- A Few Twitter Tools:
- Tweetpsych.com – An interesting tool from Dan Zarrella to psychoanalyze any public twitter account
- Exacttarget.com – tool to upload your e-mail list and find them in social media.
- Backtweets.com – locate yours and your competitors brand evangelists and connect with them
- Mentionmap – Online app to visually see the influencers in your space
- Some interesting & applicable Twitter Stats:
- Stats indicate that accounts with 22 tweets per day have the most followers – Dan Zarrella
- Over 50% of journalists are on twitter already – Lisa Buyer
- Recommended audience size to shoot for is: – Brian Carter
- 10-20% of the local population
- 10x the number of customers you want
- 10x the size of your e-mail list
- Facebook uses the EdgeRank Algorithm to decide how many people see your posts. If you have a 1% engagement rate, then 70% of your followers see your postings – Brian Carter
- A click through rate on Facebook from .02% to .15% is good. Cost per click of .02-.30 can be good depending upon your industry – Brian Carter
- The Facebook “Like” button is now installed and in use on more than 12 million sites – Lisa Buyer
- Fatal FB Pay Per Click Mistakes: – Dennis Yu
- Not keeping users inside facebook. Don’t send them away from the platform they have chosen. Let them interact with your business there
- Not rotating and changing ads regularly. Click through rates can go down by 50% within 24 hours
- If you are selling and not engaging, you are doing it wrong
- Not using a reveal tab. “Click Like above in order to see XXXXX”
- Targeting keywords with pay-per-click rather than identity. Use friend of fan targeting
- Not using the full real estate of the large size that FB pay-per-click offers you
- Not using the traffic on your existing website to grow your Facebook fan base
- Not integrating your site with the Facebook login system to allow interaction on your site
Organic
General
- Many speakers at Pubcon 2010 theorize that “user data signals” will become an important factor in organic search rankings. This includes items such as: Tweet links, URL shortener data, Click through rate, bounce rate, google toolbar data*, even Facebook Likes in the future. It is assumed that many of these items are already in place and their influence on rankings will increase over time. – Jeff Schroeffel
*Mike Grehan believes this is very important – Mike Grehan
- I believe it was Marty Weintraub who explained that google actually has two indexes: a fast index and a deep index. I have not found confirmation of this YET, but I will. From observations, I agree with Marty – Marty Weintraub
- When choosing keyword phrases to target, focus on phrase that ARE NOT generating blended results where your article or blog post will have to compete with video, image, and local results. Target phrases where the result set is primarily the traditional organic listings. SEOs have to start looking at “distraction factor” of queries – Greg Boser
- Do not use spaces within URLs inside your canonical tags. Be sure to HTML encode them – Mike Grehan
- Google Labs is now reading the text in images, so this may be indexed & utilized in ranking algorithm soon – Bruce Clay
Local Search
- Your data should match across the platforms where Google would spider your location. From your contact page to whois data to Google Places and other 3rd party local web directories. The more places your local phone number, business name, address, and web address appear together and identical improve the trust in your local listing – Jeff Schroeffel
- Here is a (partial) list of platforms recommended from the Pubcon speakers:
- Local.com
- Yellowpages.com
- Whitepages.com
- Dexknows.com
- Local.com
- Localeze.com
- Yelp.com
- CitySearch.com
- When your company has the ability to service local areas legitimately, the dependence on a physical location to get rankings is clear in today’s results of local organic search. To combat this, use virtual offices. Not PO Boxes. There is some indication that UPS mailing locations are currently working, but that is not recommended. A true virtual office should appear to be an actual location of the business
- Do not mess with your business name in Google Places to get rankings – Doyal Bryant
- Listings across sites are matched together using your local phone number. So do not use tracking numbers and be sure these all match – Doyal Bryant
- Huge boost to Google places positioning when video is added – Doyal Bryant
- Review velocity is definitely a factor in the algorithms to monitor SPAM, so do not batch reviews in anyway or overdo the strategy of encouraging reviews. – Brian Combs
- Ways to encourage reviews of your business – Brian Combs
- It’s a mindset, make it part of your processes
- Promote multiple review options to spread them out and to let user choose the review site they like
- Be ethical and transparent. Be clear you are not asking for a positive review
- Tips about responding to reviews – Brian Combs
- Listen first and decide if you should respond
- Calm down before you respond, don’t make it worse. If you had a problem, then own it
- If there were positive items within the review, own those as well
On Page & Content Development
- Stop moderating comments on your blogs and articles. Let the conversation occur. Then people will share it and talk about it. Edit out trolls, spam, and vulgarity after it is live. Setup notifications so you can delete this stuff quickly.- Scott Stratten
- Take an editorial stand on your blog or buyers guide and don’t worry about upsetting manufactures. Milk toast reviews do not get shared or linked too and do not have much value. – Rob Snell
- Interview the “expert” at your company and transcribe the interview as text to generate content – Rob Snell.
- For eCommerce SEO, identify your top twenty products and play “twenty questions” Then use this exercise to build out your product pages or create separate content pages within your blog, article section or buyers guide – Rob Snell
- Never use manufacturer’s product descriptions if you have the time to write custom ones. Otherwise your products will have the same copy as hundreds of other sites. If the size of your inventory prohibits this, then rewrite the important products and only use manufacturer products – Rob Snell
- Use actual customer questions to build out your FAQ section – Rob Snell
- Liberate manufacturer’s content by using product materials such as .pdf owner’s manuals to generate content. “It is easier to get forgiveness than permission” to do this according to Rob – Rob Snell*
* (This may be dangerous depending upon your size and industry) – Jeff Schroeffel
- One good technique to reduce requests and load time is to use CSS Sprites to break multiple image calls into one request and use CSS to display what you want. http://csssprites.com/ helps you in this process – Daniel Schulman
Link Strategies
- Guest blogging on a quality source is a valuable and approved form of link building when blogging on a legitmate media or blog source. You can use a service such as http://myblogguest.com/ to find opportunities. Ideally recurring blogging or articles would be ideal – Michael Gray
- Write a quality article for Google knol (http://knol.google.com/). When the content has been viewed and reviewed enough, rel=“nofollow” tags are removed and inbound links then benefit your site – Michael Gray
- Locate the “Linkerati” within your space who regularly site and source content in your industry. Find out where they get their information and then get your content into that source. What PR sites do they read? – Michael Gray
- Take and place high quality images on your site and allow webmasters to embed your images on their site. These embeds count as inbound links – Michael Gray
- Link buying is extremely high risk and against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you choose to purchase advertisements that DO NOT follow the rel=“nofollow” recommendation then: No footers, no run-of-site, No sidebars. Look for permanent, not month-to-month relationships. Do not buy links on content that has been online and not linked for a long period of time
- Be careful with having a high percentage of deep links with anchor text compared to branded links pointing at the home page. This appears to be SPAM and that you are trying too hard. It also impacts Google’s new focus on branding / trust – Mike Grehan
- Use ereleases.com to get your press releases into prnewswire. Send them a word document with embedded links rather than using their online form. Links stay put – Brian Clark
- Use search terms to find links that point to your competitor sites but generate 404 errors, then contact them with a better option from your site – Dixon Jones
- Offer testimonials to your vendors, once the testimonial is posted, ask them to link to your site. – Dixon Jones
- Use tracking tools such as majesticseo.com to find mentions of your brands that are not linked. Then request links from those existing mentions – Dixon Jones
- Speak at conferences. Most conferences will link to you from your speaker bio – Dixon Jones
Black Hat Techniques Being Used Against You
- Contact your backlinks using an e-mail that looks like it came from Google reporting malicious content and asking them to remove the link to your page – Brett Tabke
- Report your site to the e-mail blacklists – Brett Tabke
- Send Google a Re-inclusion request for your site apologizing for all the nefarious tactics you have used – Brett Tabke
- Create a link farm and make your site the hub – Brett Tabke
- If your site is on a shared server, they can keep buying new hosting accounts until they get on the same or similar IP Block. Then they create a duplicate – Brett Tabke
PayPerClick & Landing Pages
Pay Per Click
- Focus on queries more than keywords or keyword phrases. Each phrase should be geared to match about 50 unique phrases. If it gets more, refine it by getting more specific or using negatives – Craig Danuloff
- Quality score is only impacted by CTR when the keyword = query, not for broad match results – Craig Danuloff
- If your quality score in in the 4-6 range, do not work on bid adjustments. Instead work on your quality score – Brad Geddes
- Use Google Sets http://labs.google.com/sets to find “STOP” words that harm keyword relevance. Set non-relevant results from sets as negatives – Brad Geddes
- Some similar phrases make HUGE difference in quality score. So test & measure. For example:
- Changing “Read” to “Learn” increased quality score from 2 to a 7
- Changing “Testimonial” to “Review” also increased quality score from 2 to 7
Landing Pages
- Four steps in Landing Page Optimization
- Data mine your statistics for pages to focus on
- Research the current performance of the page
- Test New Options for the landing page
- Roll Out / Rinse / Repeat
- You should be tracking & monitoring the conversion rate of every page with significant inbound traffic – Tim Ash
- Images are processed by users 400 to 500 times faster than text – Tim Ash
- 80% of user time is spent above the scroll – Brad Geddes
- Load time still matters in a “broadband” world. 49% of US rural users and 35% of urban users still on narrowband access speeds. For example mobile devices – Brad Geddes
- Use wire framing to get landing page concepts approved without getting “Brand Nazi’s” upset about which image or exact button style you recommended. Get conceptual approval first – Tim Ash
- Tools for testing landing pages:
- ClickHeat from Labs Media – Free
- CrazyEgg.com – $9/month to $99/month
- Clickdensity® from Box UK
- Tools for getting user feedback
- Usertesting.com – $39/user – Single user test of your site for $39 including video with audio commentary
- KISS Insights – $0 – $29/month – $300/year – Simple online survey technology
- Keynote – Corporate Solution – Pricing not posted online
Online Reputation Management
- Audit the top 20 or 30 results for the brand name and/or personal name. Start with a simple spreadsheet with a tab for each variation. Setup your columns such as
Rank | URL | TITLE | STATUS | SENTIMENT – Andy Beal
STATUS = Good, Updated 10/21/, Independent, Competitor, CopyrightTarget- Jeff SchroeffelSENTIMENT = Positive, Negative, Neutral – Jeff SchroeffelTARGET = A negative result you want to actively push down in the result set – Jeff Schroeffel
- What strategies can be used to push down Negative reviews & other undesirables?
- Buy an additional domain or use a subdomain to create brandcares.com or cares.brand.com for a customer service section service blog or where you locate your charity work and donations. If you are going to use this strategy, it has to be a legitimate site or site section and not filler fluff. Has to be something you want your customers to see. To work effectively, you are going to want to link to this new content from your existing site. (you could also use companyname.wordpress.com or companyname.org if either matches the plan of your content) – Andy Beal
- Use Facebook pages where appropriate to occupy positions in the SERPs when appropriate and useful.
Examples: Company’s main page, Employee pages where appropriate. – Andy Beal
- Employee’s Linked In Profiles can be public and setup to rank for their current company / position. – Andy Beal
- Setup and optimize company profiles at the web services you use. Twitter,Flicker, Youtube, etc. – Andy Beal
- DONT “optimize” wikipedia except to request removals of SPAM and malicious content. Monitor changes and be a responsible editor. If a page does not exist but a competitor of equal size is listed, go ahead and create an honest brief wiki – Jeff Schroeffel
- Other options: wetpaintcentral.com, associatedcontent.com, business partners who have existing content about your company on their site, convention sponsorships or speaking engagement bios – Andy Beal
- At some stage large brands need to go beyond the spreadsheet. Monitoring services starting with Google Alerts and advancing to something like Andy Beal‘s Trakur Service move you towards real time monitoring of your company reputation. Combining this with some of the tools geared to monitor twitter and facebook merge reputation management with social media and customer service. – Jeff Schroeffel
