Paul Marek of 3RING.com, corresponding live from Search Engine Strategies Toronto '09
Video interview with Melanie Martin of MicroSoft explaining some of the features of MicroSoft's new "decision engine" - BING.
Paul Marek of 3RING.com, corresponding live from Search Engine Strategies Toronto '09
Track: Corporateville
Canada-Specific SEO + PPC Issues
Speakers:
Ari Shomair, Director of Marketing Optimization, henderson bas
Marc Poirier, Co-Founder and CMO, Acquisio
Guillaume Bouchard, Co-founder and CEO, NVI
Heather Dougherty, Research Director, Hitwise
This session went FAST. I could barely take notes there was so much information coming at us so quickly. There were lots of figures, graphs and charts that displayed statistics, but I tried to pick the "how-to" meat off the bone for you below.
"Geo-ranking" is a major issue for many Canadian companies, whether they are strictly Canada focused, or have intentions for international exposure on the search engines. SEOing for locality can be a hair pulling experience (which may be what my problem is...), but with the right tactics, getting good rankings at google.com (US), google.com (INT'L), google.ca, google.fr, yahoo.com, live.com, qc.yahoo.com, and many others will be much easier.
One interesting fact I learned today was that results for google.com are different in other countries than the US - no, not other TLD's for Google, but google.com. If you want to see what users in US are seeing at google.com, you'll need to add &gl=us to the end of your query.
For obtaining ranking in the country you desire, here's the tactics the pros have shared today - try and guess which one is more important, revealed at the end of the post;
If you guessed #5 - "links" as being the most important, you were right. All the panelists agreed that obtaining links from authoritative sites from the desired country was by FAR the most effective method of getting ranked where you want.
Links, eh? ...Should've known.
One other factor which may be coming into priority as a signal for determining rankings is address microformatting - placing special ID tags around the address in a standardized format - you can learn more at microformats.org.
Paul Marek of 3RING.com, corresponding live from Search Engine Strategies Toronto '09
Keynote Speaker #2 - Emanuel Rosen
Emanuel Rosen not only knows his stuff about creating buzz - he has great stage presence too, which makes these sessions WAY more interesting...
Emanuel, author of "The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited", did research for his book by actually spending time in real-world situations with the people who have successfully created HUGE buzz around their offering, whether it's a service, a product or a concept. This gave Emanuel many different perspectives for approaching the same issue - creating buzz for your offering. I look very much forward to reading his book, but here's a recap of his session at SES Toronto '09...
Emanuel first defines "what is buzz?": Buzz = the total comments about your offering - ALL authentic person-to-person communications (non-paid).
Here's some numbers about "buzz":
Although he did not have enough time to complete his full talk, he was able to squeeze in his first 10 tips for creating REAL buzz, or word-of-mouth advertising..
Emanuel gives a few great resources for researching word-of-moth advertising - or BUZZ:
I'll post my 1Q Interview with Emanuel later today.
Paul Marek of 3RING.com, corresponding live from Search Engine Strategies Toronto '09.
Dan Zarrella of HubSpot and DanZarrella.com answers one question:
Q: When do you think social networking will become a mainstream corporate practice, as SEO has become in recent years?
A: I think that as more corporations start to understand that thier customers are on social media (I think they are there now), I think that as the tools and the processes become more repeatable, more emulaic, although that sounds bad from a users perspective, for corporate acceptance I think that's a big part of it - that corporations need to know that what they are doing is going to produce an ROI, and that it can be repeatable and they can be successful at it. I also think that as younger people - people of my generation (around 27), as we start to move up the corporate ladder, and that we grew up with these kind of social technologies, the acceptance is going to pick up as well.
Paul Marek of 3RING.com, corresponding live from Search Engine Strategies Toronto '09.
Track: Geek Track
Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today?
This session was presented by Marios Alexandrou of Acronym Media, and Dan Zarrella of HubSpot. It was a bit of a disappointment not to have a representative from any of the search engines to hint toward anything concrete, but Marios and Dan gave a good idea on what you should be paying attention to in the now, near and distant future. Here's a recap of the session.
Marios brought us through the history and potential future of search signals, starting with;
Phase One - basic information retrieval. Search originally got its relevency signals from basic on page elements - spiders crawled the web and compiled the index from the pages they were able to get to. The problem was that the results were easy to manipulate with simple adjustement of text in on-page elements.
Phase Two - Inbound links were used as a major search signal. Again the problem was manipulation of the SERPS with the creation of spam links, link farms, and link purchasing. Another problem is that only content creators have the ability to "vote" with links, leaving actual users out of the equation.
Phase Three - Universal search. Google is providing results from several information streams rather than just content websites. Content from sites like, YouTube, Flickr, Technorati, Wikipedia is also shown along with "regular results".
And now, we're headed toward a method that's less likely to be gamed:
Phase Four - Changes in - and tracking of - user behaviour as a ranking signal. An example is universal search results - tracking user behaviour (clickstreams data) has allowed to the search engines to see where clicks occur in the SERPS, which provides them the opportunity to adjust the results to push more active results to the top of results. Another is the browser toolbar. Search engines are able to track paths and trails of user clicks and pages, allowing them to not only prioritize and re-rack more active content, but allows them to find content that the spiders may not have found. From Yahoo's VP of Search Research, Andrew Tomkins "In terms of signals, the toolbar is the big one..."
Marios eludes that even though clickstream data is the new signal, it will eventually be manipulated, although it will be much more difficult. As Dan Zarrella says, "Manipulation will need to move from gaming technology, to gaming people." You can download Acronym's paper "New Signals to Search Engines" from KeywordDriven.com.
Dan offers a more analytical approach, offering his own home-grown algorithm that search engines should pay attention to. From Dan's talk:
Web search is too slow. It can take hours, days or weeks for content to get indexed, while conversly, current social news sites can take hours or days to provide a quality signal. SocNet sites are often too small or niche oriented to provide a broad quality score. Dan also suggests that the Facebook API (et al) are too closed to provide real accuracy and are limited by network privacy issues.
Dan's solution: Use Twitter data for quality signals.
Dan's own research shows some very interesting numbers that make sense when considering Twitter (and other real-time news and social sites) as a quality signal. Dan suggests that "retweets" are a very effective method of determining quality, although only 1.4% of tweets are actually "retweeted". When considering the absolutely huge number of tweets made each day, or hour, that 1.4% is still a huge number. Retweets can be a valuable measure because typically only quality content gets retweeted. Another tool being used by bloggers is automatic tweeting of blog posts. Quality posts also tend to get retweeted. Although this too can be gamed, it is much more difficult to do this on a mass scale, as you're now dealing with people vs. technology. The playing field is now moving from algorithms to psycology.
Because Dan's algorithms for determining quality score of tweets vs retweets went over my head, here's a link to his research and reports that you can view yourself.
Paul Marek of 3RING.com, corresponding live from Search Engine Strategies Toronto '09 - Keynote Speaker #1 - Tara Hunt.
You may not know it just yet, but everyone should be able to see or feel your Whuffie. Whuffie is social capital, a new type of online mojo coined by Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow.com and CitizenAgency.com, and author of her recently released book - “The Whuffie Factor”. As Tara says "Whuffie is a measurement of trustworthiness, reputation..." and what struck me most for the future of Whuffie, was her statement of the fact that "the next generation all believe they have an audience"... and it's evident - they do.
Tara talks about the power of launching a company using social networks and online communities, and how Web 2.0 should be used for so much more than just getting in touch with friends. Getting in touch and forming relationships with customers and clients is the new trend for increasing sales and profits, and is very welcome in this world of lacking customer service.
It’s easy to see from Tara’s mindset that in online communities where money has no value, Whuffie is the currency of choice, and she shows you how to raise it - because, as she reveals, "social networking has more influence over buying decisions than any other marketing tool..."
Tara offers five great tips for raising your Whuffie:
Slides from Tara's presentation can be found at SlideShare.
Hey everyone. Yesterday Rob Lewis informed me that in response to his post May 29 looking for a local correspondent, I was graciously selected to cover SES Toronto '09 (Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo) next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (June 8, 9 and 10) for Techvibes. So, I thought I'd introduce myself today - and ask which sessions you'd like to see covered?
Firstly, my name is Paul Marek and I frantically run 3RING.com, a 10 year old online marketing firm located virtually in Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax, and physically (for me) in a log cabin in the countryside hills of Caledon, Ontario - about 45 minutes north of Toronto. I'd like to offer immense gratitude to Rob for granting me this opportunity (thanks a million Rob!), and I hope I can provide you his readership with some quality, almost-real-time coverage of the conference!
Next, I'd like to know what sessions you'd like to see covered?
Each day starts with a keynote speaker (Tara Hunt - Monday, Emanuel Rosen - Tuesday) followed by three or four 1.25 hour time slots with three available sessions per time slot. Because I'll only be able to attend one session per time slot, I'd like to know which sessions you'd like to see covered rather than me be selfish and see what I want to see.
Here's a link to Monday's schedule and Tuesday's schedule. Tell me which sessions you'd like to see in the comments below - I'll get to whatever sessions get the most requests.
Here's the itinerary I proposed to Rob, so that's one vote for the sessions I've mentioned!
MONDAY - JUNE 8
TUESDAY - JUNE 9
WEDNESDAY - JUNE 10
Let us know what you want to hear about!
Hope to see some of you there! I'm the bald guy, hopefully with sunglasses on his head. ;)