Here are my full notes from the conference…

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SMX Search Analytics Keynote Address – Vanessa Fox

Search marketing not only brings in targeted customers, it provides an abundance of metrics – about your customers, your potential customers, your entire market. So much data is available that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. In her keynote, Vanessa Fox covers the importance of focusing on the actionable data. You don’t need every metric; you just need the right metrics for your business.

Find Vanessa Fox on the web at Nine By Blue and on Twitter.

* Old data acquisition models
o Pain to impliment
o The type of data we get online would be impossible to get offline
* How is the mountains of data we can collect actionable for the client? So what?
o How to sort through all the data?
* At the end of the day, the important factor for analytics is conversion. -How do you define a conversion?
* Analyzing Data
o Rankings reports are dead
o Key is to figure out what to be measuring
o If not actionable, it can only be of limited help
o Realize what assumptions go into computing data – can be “deadly important”.
* Critical to a lot time to collect, analyze, and act on data.
* Stages of data
o Market Research – Keyword Research – Searcher Behavior
o Industry Research – Competitive Landscape – Revenue Potential
o Conversion – Search Results Conversion – Page Conversion
* Social Media Media Metrics Greasmonkey Plugin

Analyzing & Converting Organic Search Traffic
Your management has invested in SEO, or they need to be convinced that SEO is worth investing in. Regardless, people finding your site from the natural listings in search engines are visiting your site. Search analytics can tell you who found you through organic search results and what they are doing when they get to your site.

Alan K’necht, President/Founder, K’nechtology Inc. – Analytics Segmentation – What’s a click worth?
* Corporate
o Analytics
* Brand
o Searching on product name, sku numbers.
o Traffic from other marketing efforts/brand awareness or returning visitors
o Good candidate for AB Segmentation
o Look at what pages visitors are landing on
* General Terms
o Traffic generally a result of users need for something
o Concentration of analytics effort
o 2, 3 word combinations
o KPI should be focused on non-monetary
o “email this” links good for people who browse at work, and then buy at home

Joshua Dreller, Director, Media Technology & Analytics, Fuor Digital – Analyzing and Converting Organic Search Traffic using Conversion Attribution
* Tracking Everything
o Natural, paid, display, email, affiliate, sponsorships, video links
o Takes times, resources
Cookie session deletion
* Weighting systems development
o Splitting out event paths
o Aggregate weighting system

Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance – How to use analytics for SEO effectively.
* Larger sites/higher traffic easier to track real changes, filtering out random fluxuation
* Importance of keyword rankings
o Important to measure, but overall the metric to pay attention to is if referral visits are ranking.
o General keyword ranking isn’t that important – longtail is more effective and valuable.
o Suggests Caphyon’s Advanced Web Ranking
o Google does not suggest using programs like AWR, but Google does provide a small amount of ranking information in Webmaster Tools
* Mature SEO programs should shift to Conversion Monitoring
o Traffic without conversion is of limited value
o Traffic should be qualified, but don’t discount unqualified too much
* Combating the law of diminishing returns
* Metrics for additional SEO
o Clickstream analysis

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Up Close with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful search analytics package, and even better, itʼs free. Come learn how to get the most from this tool.

Craig Hordlow, Chief Strategist, Red Bricks Media
* GA- The perfect match
o Gap of advanced features available for free is closing with the paid companites
* Setting up profiles
o Set up profiles to eliminate drill downs
o Should set up a different profile for every channel
* Google Analytics Profiles
* Click drop after #1 ranking – hyperbolic drop profile from #1 listing
* Black Hat Google Analytics
o Buy a flash ad on the homepage of a site, and embed google analytics in the flash ad. In effect, you have your own peek into the traffic and visitors of a website.
o Only way to technically prevent/detect it is packet sniffing

Michael Jensen, Co-Founder, SoloSEO.com – Event Tracking and Email Campaigns
* Event Tracking useful for Ajax, Flash, Videos, Downloads, Outbound Links, IntraPage Links
* Event Tracking Model – Category, Action, Label, Value
* Email campaigns
o With google analytics, you can creat a link with a variable string in the link, for event tracking. – Able to even track individual links within a newsletter
* Use url shortening service to make the actual urls shorter

Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance – Using google analytics for optimizing locally oriented sites.
* Content targeting local users

Frederick Vallaeys, AdWords Evangelist, Google
* Lots of data is available – trick is how to narrow it down and use it
* Organic Search to find new keywords
o Useful for discovering how people are finding iste
o Useful tool – search query report
o Search based keyword tool – looks at organic listing, and lets you know where keywords are missing
* Regional targeting
o Insight into how to split campaigns based on geo conversion rates
* Website optimizer – AB Testing and multivariate testing

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Top Ten Customized Search Analytics Reports
A marketer can choke on all the data generated by web visits. Even the lowest-end analytics software and services offer hundreds of canned reports, but only a few of these are relevant for search marketers. No matter what vendor you use, these reports should be customized to increase their value to your business. This session looks at the reports most useful to search marketers and how they can be tuned to your personal needs.

Craig Hordlow, Chief Strategist, Red Bricks Media
* Top Ten Reports
o Keyword Level ROI
o Money Left on the Table
* True Click through rate
* Understanding visitors motives is key to optimizing reporting structure and format to provide them with the most relevant information.

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Successful Testing For Improved Search Marketing ROI
Improving conversions is often a trial-and-error proposition. Continuous testing and tuning is crucial for improving results and ROI in search marketing campaigns. Youʼll leave this session knowing what elements of a search marketing campaign you should test, the best practices for testing and to document and communicate the results to others in the organization.

Chris Goward, Co-Founder and CEO, WiderFunnel Marketing – Optimizing conversion rate
* Important to be able to ask the right questions.
* Six Foot legibility test – if you can’t see the call to action from six feet away, it’s too small.

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Traffic Segmentation & Why It Matters

Each of your visitors is unique, and your site should accommodate their needs. Search analytics allows you to segment your traffic by location, demographic characteristics, psychographics and other dimensions. This session looks at audience segmentation and how to do it right.

Scott Brinker, President & Chief Technology Officer, ion interactive – Why traffic segmentation matters.
* Segmentation granularity as strategy- as a business becomes more segmented, key is to define which segments are the most valuable.
* Optimizing keywords requires build-out of multiple landing pages, not just one. Amount of landing pages comes from ROI analysis.
o With multiple landing pages and behavioral choices up front, visitors segment themselves before having a chance to bounce. Active Segmentation
* Landing pages – site-wide navigation is generally not advisable.

Carrie Hill, SEO Team Leader, Blizzard Internet Marketing
* Showing demographics by URL or keyword Phrase – http://kl.am/msndemographictool
* When asking form questions, people will tend to fill out a form if “optional” is not used.
* Email marketing – next frontier for optimized online marketing
* PPC – Easy way to geographically target

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Search Analytics & Competitive Intelligence
Your competitors are smart and aggressive. Knowing their search marketing strategy allows you to validate your own, and to outflank them with innovative tactics. Search analytics is the answer. This session shows you how to implement and profit from a comprehensive competitive intelligence campaign.

Helen Overland, Director of SEM, non linear creations
* Using analytics to view traffic and clicks based on network name and location
* Ability to track individual competitors and their PPC campaigns based on advanced filtering in Google Analytics to narrow down to specific company/network.

Dharmesh Shah, Chief Software Architect and Founder, HubSpot – Competitive Intelligence in Social Media
* Social media matters – lots of traffic, activity. Companies should care because the demographs are changing and diversifying.
* Social media integration with search marketing – Facebook seach box is within the top 10 search engines in the world for raw search volume!
* Twitter Grader
o Measures social media authority and reach

Ian Strain-Seymour, Director of Product Strategy & Development, ApogeeSearch
* Outcome you’re trying to get to will tell you a lot about what type of competitive research to focus on
* Competiors to consider for research
o Direct Competitors
* Industry stragglers?
o Semantic Competitors
o Parallel business models

This is especially valuable for media-rich sites, in which a users engagement and value on a site is not necessarily most accurately measured by clicks, but more by engagement length and habits.

This move by Google is yet another show of search and tracking support for flash. Earlier this year Google announced that they were going to be indexing content in flash objects – this indexing has already begun, however the quality of the index is largely dependent on the flash development community implementing best practices for ensuring semantic relevancy and organization of data contained in a flash object.

The combination of flash content indexing – and thus giving flash objects SEO-relevancy, along with flash object analytics tracking – enhancing a flash object’s potential for monetization are two huge factors in ensuring flash has a place in the future, and that the technology continues to grow and be a viable commercial medium on the web.

Now that flash sites are becoming increasingly monetizable assets, I believe support and development will continue to grow. Based on my experience working with clients who are focused heavily on their brand image and website, I know that maintaining the flashy aesthetic of a flash site is important. Sure, a similar feel can be attained with a hybridized XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and Flash site, but for those companies who choose to remain purely flash based, this is great news.

Industry support for these new tracking and indexing initiatives for flash has been strong. Shenan Reed, owner of Morpheus Media (full disclosure: I currently work there as SEO & Emerging Technologies Manager) commented:

“This is very exciting news for some of the luxury brands out there that are very concerned about the image their sites project and maintaining the same smooth, glamorous aesthetic they have in their stores. The previous challenge was that they were building beautiful sites that were un-findable – it would be like building a gorgeous retail location in a dark alley of a major city and not putting a name on the door. Finally they can have their cake and eat it too!” – Shenan Reed

I agree, and look forward to the future of the semantic, trackable, indexable and usable web. In addition to the Morpheus Media Mlog, I also write my own emerging technologies blog, Jeffzilla.com and have posted a summary of this post on it. Here’s Google’s video explaining the basics of the tracking, as well as a real world demonstration, hosted by Brett Crosby, Group Manager Google Analytics, and Matthew McNeely, VP of Engineering at Sprout.

Although I would love to see SEO on the frontpage of everypaper everyday, I am not sure this is what I had in mind.  So a potentially bad or missing meta description (or number of other minor elements) may have inadvertently cost a major American corporation a billion dollars.

As more details on this failure become available I will follow up with greater analysis here as to what companies must do to ensure that there content is correctly labelled as “past due”.  In the meantime I will leave you with the thought that a minor piece of code almost single handedly cost thousands of individuals thier jobs and a company its very exsistance.  I guess I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue.

Brian brought up some amazing points in this session:
• Companies on Twitter should be using it to monitor and communicate with their clients.
• It is important to approach people as people, individually and personally while conducting outreach in social spaces.
• Using Social Media tools to search for brands is much more helpful than searching on search engines.
• Always consider the long term. The sky is the limit for how brands reputation online can be damaged or improved in the long term of social media success or failure. The content spread around the internet will never disappear.

For me the Keynotes at these events tend to be the most entertaining and informative. This year was no exception, with an explosive panel tackling “Universal Search” and the outcome that may result from the eventual transition. I think that there is some further ground to be covered on this topic but I will save it for a future post.

Day 2 also gave us a presentation by author Nick Carr covering the topic of his latest book “The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google”. Besides being an engaging speaker, Nick posed some interesting ideas to the crowd that day. Mr. Carr elaborated on the evolution of the computer from mainframe to PC and beyond. Mr. Carr did a great job of providing scale to the future of computing and the effects that cloud computing will have on individuals. Pretty cool stuff and again I think more great ideas for a later post by me.

Day 3 was highlighted with a Q&A of Jason Calacanis the CEO of Mahalo.com. Mr. Calacanis has a rather well known reputation for being (um, well, for being Jason Calacanis). With that being said I am know a big fan of the man. Although he may be a tough boss to work for, I liked his approach and demeanor. Maybe its because I will always be a just a guy from Jersey, but I was picking up what he was putting down. He also spoke of how he had learned of an individual stalking him, yet still provided the audience his email address. Whether he really reads that or not is irrelevant, I get the idea.

So all in all I benefited from the event. Besides reinforcing a lot of ideas I already had, it was an opportunity to enjoy the search community and reconnect with some old colleagues.

Although this process of information harvesting has been in affect for some time, the level of sophistication and depth is increasing at an accelerated pace. With the recent backlash Facebook has received for its Beacon advertising, every good marketer should be keeping a watchful eye on this trend.

We here at Morpheus Media are lucky enough to have our very own all-knowing eye, Adam Broitman. Mr. Broitman who is Morpheus Media’s Director of Emerging and Creative Strategies was recently involved in the before mentioned Associated Press piece found here on USA Today.com. As always Adam’s insight and knowledge place him as a true industry authority.

As organizations such as Yahoo continue to demonstrate that data mining can be a useful tool for marketers new and innovative approaches can be taken to alert the world of the benefits of your brand. So as the digital marketplace is successfully taking all of the guessing out of the guesswork we here at Morpheus are thankful we have Adam Broitman to keep us well informed.

Once you’ve created your site you may have thought the toughest part of the operation behind you, but be weary.
Building great content is only the first step of the often-dangerous endeavor known as interactive marketing. The most treacherous element of your digital journey has yet to begin. Outreach.

Ask any professional in the interactive arena and they will tell you that content is king. What they won’t tell you is how to effectively spread the word to the digital community. Standing on your chair and screaming that you are relevant is no longer a viable option (if it ever was). How then do you build readership, drive traffic, and create conversions?

The simplest answer of course is the most effective, hard work.

Many tactics exist that allow marketers and public relations professionals to reach a large target field with minimal work and effort. Most of these efforts involve bulk emails driven by purchased target lists that claim accuracy.

Be careful.

Recently Chris Anderson editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail took more than 300 professional communicators to task by publicly outing them as industrial spammers. With over 300 response comments posted on his blog he obviously touched a nerve.

The uniqueness of your content in combination with the added value it provides your readers will eventually gain you a following. This being the case do not get yourself blacklisted before you are even out the gate.

By taking the time to understand your vertical and appreciating what editors are looking for you can initiate a productive outreach campaign

So you’ve got the next best thing to sliced bread for content. And content.. is king! So why not deliver it all, expand your reach and give the search engines everything you’ve got, throw the kitchen sink in, and you’re bound to rank for those juicy terms with high search volume? Wrong! Just think of what you’re doing to those computer databases that are indexing all your material. Your overabundance of content is just wasted KB’s to the search engines, just more data for the search engines to have to mine through with their extensive algorithms and decide what content to rank your site for. This is called cannibalization, and can be a killer towards the search engines getting a clear picture of what your site is about.

Here are some steps you can take to avoid being the Hannibal Lecter of the search world:

1. utilize robots.txt to limit what pages are indexed by the search engines. Make sure only content that you want to drive traffic to is available to the search engines.

2. NO DUPLICATE CONTENT. No matter how important a bit of content is, don’t write about it 10 times and have multiple landing pages for it. You’re only hurting yourself as now all these pages are competing against each other for relevancy among the search engines. Focus more on making that one page shine.

3. Utilize title tag/head tag/paragraph tag hierarchy. Search engines understand this, and can filter paragraph content as supplemental. Use tags sparingly and wisely, as this will boost relevancy for terms held within. Think about a table of contents and descriptive paragraphs in books.

Content is king, but overabundance of supplemental content is a silent killer! Deliver your content wisely!

Rand Fishkin – SEO Moz – Comprehensive overview of Social media marketing essentials
-National Geographic plurality map
-Leveraging UGC Sites for Technical goals
-Using social media to control which results how up in search
-Reaching key influencers via blogs and social news portals
-Social Media Marketing supports both branding and marketing goals
-Rising rate of a single link lifts all of the links on the domain
-Helps with traffic and conversion goals
-Social media usage is up, but very few users actually create content -Social media participation
-Brand ambassadors
–Google’s “passionistas”
-Blogosphere engagement

Link-bait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
-Attracting visitors on social media sites involves using the right bait — link-bait. Compelling content is best. Added benefit: it appeals to bloggers too. Do it right and they’ll link to you, enhancing the prominence of your brand and driving traffic to your site. This session explains link-baiting and provides examples and ideas to help you craft your own bait.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Brent Csutoras, Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com – Linkbaiting on dig
-Linkerati looking to tap into crowd
-Gotta act fast on current events
–Offbeat or extreme gets good hits

Rebecca Kelley, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz
- Successful link bait creates a domino effect
- One page can strengthen your entire domain
-Research your sectors link worthiness- Dig, Engadget, Boingboing, Flickr, Yahoo buzz, AOL search hot searches, Google trends Ask.com IQ
, Lycos top 50
- See if there is some way you can put a new spin on your topic to make it sync up with what is popular on the internet at any give moment

Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites – Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine and others allow community members to share and rate news stories. They are primary news sources and influential outlets that must be considered by marketers. But don’t expect to post your old-school press release and get a good response! Learn how these sites work and how to best tailor your message for maximum visibility on them.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services – Intro to Digg
- Many 19-24 year olds
- Mostly male (data from quantcast)

Chris Winfield, President & Co-founder, 10e20
- What works to get on dig
- Creative idea
- Links from other websites
- Submitting to dig
- Use numbers
- Have a compelling description

Tamar Weinberg, Search Marketing Strategist, Rusty Brick, Inc. – How to make good content for Digg

A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging – Consumers are sharing best-of-Web content with bookmarking and tagging sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Flickr, YouTube and Technorati tap into “tagging” to categorize material, so people interested in topics can locate community finds. This session is a marketer’s guide to using bookmarking and tagging effectively.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Guillaume Bouchard, CEO, NVI – Guide to social bookmarking and tagging
- Tagging
- Parses down information
- Benefits
– Helps for search results
– Natural incoming links
- Increased in online social communities

Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service – Deli.icio.us – Social Bookmarking
-Bookmarking tool to research and share pages on the web
-Site navigation and functionality walkthrough

Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services – Stumbleupon

Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp and del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter head up two of the most important social bookmarking and discovery services on the web. In this session, the two will talk about trends in social media, where the future may be heading and entertain questions from attendees.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and others allow people to connect with others and foster networks of friends or colleagues. Participate appropriately, and your company will find “friends” interested in what you have to say (and sell). Cross the line and the mob may turn on you and reject your message. In this session you’ll learn to network and participate in an acceptable and effective manner.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Cindy Krum, Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works – Myspace Woahs and Woes
- Good things
– Flying Dog Brewery
– Using their myspace profile to drive sales and drive traffic to brewery
– Using the photos section to post flyers about upcoming community and brewery events, as well as starting discussion about their branding and labeling artwork.
– Using events listings to get people involved in community events
- Bad Things
– Westwood College Branded Profile
– A large number of people had self identified as westwood students, and they wanted to create a community online for them
- Lessons
– A cool branded profile takes time and skill to create
– Must keep content fresh
– Friends must be managed