Free SEO Evaluation White Paper (coming soon)

Look for the Atlantic BT SEO White Paper soon. Today’s post shares SEO Tips prompted by a customer who successfully made SEO low hanging fruit changes and is looking to move his web site to the next level.

SEO – Martin’s Tips Note

SEO is a many layered challenge with touch points in site design, site reputation, viral campaigns, PPC (as a traffic generator and source of content research), hosting (site speed is becoming an increasing issue), meta data (particularly page titles), keyword aligned body copy and about fifty other things. We’ve seen tremendous SEO change in the last two years due to the growing influence of social networks. Diving into the middle of such a many layered challenge takes skill, time and a solid understanding of your site and business goals. Here are “best practices” you can implement in your site today to improve organic traffic:

• Facebook Likes (macro and micro) – Be sure to have the Facebook LIKE button on your home page and on important individual pages such as product pages or key articles AND make sure your counters are accurate to the page the LIKE button is on. I want a macro “reach” counter capable of summarizing LIKES across multiple touch points, but no such tool exists yet (that I am aware of) so make sure your Facebook counters are aligned to pages they are on.

• Platforms Beat Websites – read my Internet Marketing – Platforms vs. Websites post on ScentTrail Marketing to understand how significantly Internet marketing is being transformed by Web 2.0 and the promise of Web 3.0. As Amazon nears a billion pages in Google’s index understanding the interconnected “platform-yness” of Internet marketing has never been more important.

• UGC Rules – One of the implications of living in the land of platforms is you can’t create enough content to win keyword wars on your own. You team and content creation budget isn’t big enough even if you have millions. User generated content (UGC) is KEY. Create campaigns that develop community and encourage people to share your site across their social nets (and remember to use the Facebook LIKE button whenever possible). You may want to read my 1:10:89 Rule post too as it explains how magical and rare contributors are. My favorite UGC tools are polls, contests and games. Each UGC tactic has a “best practice” application I will write about in another post.

• Content, Community and Campaigns THEN Conversions – Living in a platform time means learning SEO stepping stones to success. Each step builds on and contributes to the next. Create a content strategy. We create content strategies with extensive keyword research, something we’ve named ”branding keywords”. Branding Keywords maps keywords to business values, buying personas, buyer pain points and potential blue oceans (those keywords not frothy red with competition). This kind of research is a HUGE time commitment (days usually), but it makes your content and campaigns jump off the page. We are working on sharing these steps so anyone who wants to can “brand keywords” (look for our tutorial in about a month). Community can be as little as adding reviews or as much as building out a Facebook environment. Content without community support is a tree falling in the desert with no one to hear it. Campaigns are the “buy one get one free” or the “free white paper” or the “Holiday Sale” language of email and social marketing. You need deadlines, a great offer and compelling presentation across all touch points (site, blog, social, email) to motivate and cut through clutter and buyer apathy. Conversions come because you fire on every step. Any friction such as TRUST and REPUTATION must be fully eliminated (another post for another time). Conversions Key Performance Indicators can be anything including more time on site or increased page views. We like to make conversions some ACTION such as sign up, download or buy.

• SPEED – Go to Alexa or use a speed evaluation tool. If your site is anything other than FAST redesign it or serve it better or both. Google’s margins erode when pages take too long to load so they will punish your listings for slow response.

• SPAM – Work in SEO long enough and you can feel hidden SPAM traps. You know exactly how to SEO write to push keyword density without spamming. There are tools that you can use to confirm and help eliminate things like “stop words”, but do this long enough, test enough content and you develop an intuitive feel for what works. If you don’t have such a sense yet read my SEO Writing Tips 1 – 5 on ScentTrail Marketing for a quick crash course.

• DATA – We are constantly reminded that however much we think we know about SEO we don’t know anything. SEO and the Internet live organically in Real Time. The only things that matter or define SEO success is what is happening now. The good news is there is a sea of data to help cut the cost of the gamble. SEO and Internet marketing are always gambles, but informed ones perform better and better over the long run. Every now and again we re-read Black Swan by Taleb just in case we think we can finally predict Internet marketing’s future (no one can and arrogance goes before a huge fall in our Internet marketing experiences).

• Snake Oil – In another much younger life I sold soap for P&G, an honorable straight forward job. SEO is full of people who project confidence when they should have NONE. They use words they don’t understand but do so in a way that makes listeners confused or anxious. Here is a quick Snake Oil test. Ask a prospective SEO how they would change your home page title, the most important meta copy on any page. If they answer anything other than, “I have no idea,” RUN FOR THE HILLS. Existing sites are modeled and indexed in Google. Change is expected and accepted WITHIN parameters, within modeled limits. First rule of SEO is DO NO HARM. Anyone who, at a moment’s notice, creates a SEO plan for your site is dangerous and should be avoided. Avoid snake oil salesmen since the first rule they violate is DO NO HARM and harm within Google’s Elephant Memory Brain is forever (or a very long time anyway). Another good Snake Oil test is anyone who says, “I can get you #1 on X keyword in Y time.” The only way to achieve such a mission is to wear a black hat, to game or trick Google. Never game or trick Google. The math always wins and the over/under doesn’t favor such a tactic (what you stand to gain vs. lose). A former CFO told me, “I want you to make something happen on Google by the end of the week.” Something is happening on Google all the time, I had to explain, but only BAD things can happen for sure by the end of the week. Hard concept for a CFO to grasp.

Keep the faith, keep creating content and find a way to move your “site” to a platform generating UGC and the magic Google Juice it provides is the most important SEO lesson once you are past the low hanging fruit of solid meta, body copy, tags and purple cow link bait.

Hope these ideas have helped. Look for our Free SEO White paper and more on Branding Keywords soon. If you would like to be kept up-to-date with the latest at Atlantic BT (never share our list and don’t spam) use the link below to stay in touch.

Yes, Please Add Me To Your Think Like An Internet Marketer Email List.

Martin
Director Marketing

Suggested Reading:

Phil Simon’s new book

The Age of the Platform

I created Content Marketing Networks, a short slideshare PowerPoint that has been riding on top of the term in Google since 2009 thanks to Slideshare’s SEO strength and possibly being first on an idea about to explode. Those 2009 content marketing network slides tried to explain how Internet marketing is an interdependent world of links, connections and virtual cycles (positive or negative).

My content marketing network thoughts became richer and deeper thanks to a friend and a book. The book my friend recommended was Linked: Why Everything Is Connected To Everything Else by Notre Dame network researcher Albert-laszlo Barabasi. Linked explains the organic life of networks, what happens naturally behind the the wizard’s curtain.

As a Director of Ecommerce I’d observed how hubs formed bending the fabric of networked space and time sometimes in my site’s favor sometimes against. Hubs bend the fabric of network/time in their favor because they become self sustainably bigger displacing more Google winning more traffic faster and faster.

My Internet marketing team and I could watch a hub form on the horizon (in our web analytics) almost like a thunderstorm. Dark clouds formed in the distance. Traffic moved there in ever increasing numbers. If the “traffic storm” was on keywords we cared about suddenly our site was less competitive, received less traffic and, for no fault of our own OTHER than not being as well linked or ready, the storm built moving traffic, conversions and money away.

Sometimes traffic storms built and quickly blew out. Storms from ephemera didn’t last long. Ephemera such as a single great email offer or a mention on a hot site creates quick traffic showers. Other storms, such as the use of free shipping on all orders for a full year, gathered into permanent traffic and share loss for the ecommerce site I managed because we weren’t willing to match the offer. The key content marketing network idea is not about a particular offer, but the capacity for a competitor to become more of a “hub” based on a bold and uncovered Internet marketing actions (the unmatched free shipping offer). When the smoke cleared a competitor way back in the rankings ranked higher than the good guys (my site ).

“Scale Free” networks (such as the Internet) have certain natural innate characteristics. Hub formation is a “natural” content network marketing characteristic. I think about content network hubs like Einstein thought of planets and gravity. Hubs bend the Internet’s “fabric” creating a gravitational force where links, traffic and commerce flow downhill (toward the hub) in at ever-increasing rate.

“An ever increasing rate,” is another way of saying a positive virtual cycle. Positive “virtual cycles” are when good things happen faster and faster with less and less effort (push). Barabasi defines this self-reinforcing positive cycle as, “The Rich Get Richer.”

Traffic is Internet marketing’s compound interest. When, through great Internet marketing or sheer luck, you bend the web’s fabric in your favor and so create a self-reinforcing hub life is good. Faster and faster with less and less effort means profit margins go up and costs go down. Profit going up as costs go down mean your site (or business or company) is in the middle of a network effect – perhaps the most magical Internet marketing storm.

Google’s role is crucial. Google is a leading and trailing indicator. Google doesn’t create the web’s weather, but it can amplify or significantly change Internet marketing storms. If a traffic storm seems “spammy” or illegitimate Google’s magic math cuts credit and reduces storm force, power and longevity. If magic math is in favor of the storm, meaning traffic is sticking, high value links are increasing (link love in from high PageRank sites) and bounce rates are low Google shifts more traffic to the storm blowing it up. Google plays leading indicator with spam and trailing indicator when blowing a medium storm into a larger one.

Time’s role in Internet marketing is easy to forget. Time is the great equalizer and why sudden unexplained storms appear spammy. Trends do brew up suddenly usually in response to some unanticipated news event such as Michael Jackson’s unanticipated demise, a great sports victory or a new cool thing, but most traffic storms appear, build into a bell curve and then fade.

As News Jacking author David Meerman Scott points out, traffic storms are increasing even as their longevity is decreasing in our ADD “always on” culture. Scott’s sense of immediacy changes artist Andy Warhol’s infamous “15 minutes of fame” quote.  Meerman Scott’s Internet marketing as arbitrage changes Warhol’s quote to, “Everyone will be famous fifteen times for one minute at a time”. Can the need for your business, brand or product to recognize, feed and “jack” such precious moments be overstated?

Experiencing a positive traffic storm makes you want it to happen again, and again, and again. When Oprah’s O magazine included hand made place settings (dishes for the men reading this) created by an upstate New York potter represented by FoundObjects.com, the specialty gift site I co-founded in 1999, we were off to the races selling $10,000 in a matter of hours (and melting down a server). At that time, almost twelve years ago now, we didn’t think or know how to feed Oprah’s traffic storm with blog posts, widgets and social network support. Social networks twelve years ago weren’t what they are now.

Linked defines our jobs as Internet marketers differently. We are in the business of bending the web’s space/time fabric to create self-reinforcing hubs. Creating self-reinforcing hubs can start in a few ways, but almost all include:

• Related Archived Evergreen Content
• Related Relevant NOW Content
• Related Link Love
• An Ever Increasingly Fast Content Creation Cycle
• An Ever Increasingly Fast And Growing Amount of Link Love

Related Archived Evergreen Content
One day Oprah discussed a topic out of the blue. The site I manged at the time had content on Oprah’s doctor, the one who appeared as the expert. We had content on the products discussed. We didn’t have content on doctor and products together. We scrambled to create content to match Oprah’s lead.

There is a problem. No matter how fast NEW content is created it is too late for maximum impact. Evergreen content has to cook inside Google for weeks, months or years. Evergreen content must live in the archive for some time before being deployed in response to an event for maximum return. It was a good idea to create new content pages combining doctor and products, but we wouldn’t reach Amazon-like penetration on related keywords.  Amazon is powerful because, as it moves toward being the first site with a billion pages indexed in Google, it is already cooking pages on just about any topic.

Some of Amazon’s evergreen content lives out in Anderson’s long tail for years. Suddenly a traffic storm gathers and Amazon has everything it needs to deploy new content and content fully baked in Google for years. Evergreen content’s value, when so deployed, is immense. Your site’s “trusted authority” status deepens when current storm matches NOW content (the mix of doctor and product pages we rushed to create) AND evergreen’s fully cooked content. Google’s coveted “authority” status is awarded to sites capable of creating content on the fly in response to an event combined with fully baked related evergreen content because relevance increases while traffic bounces decrease (what Google cares about).

Amazon creates content “at an ever increasing rate”. “Ever increasing rate” is another way of saying Amazon is constantly creating a network effect. Amazon is the most powerful hub outside of Google. Facebook is discussed as a Google competitor. Few understand how Amazon is Google’s Siamese twin – connected at the hip and impossible to remove.

Facebook arbitrages content and traffic trying to figure out the money. Amazon has Internet marketing money figured out. Despite Jeff Bezos’ seeming “B” status, the massive Internet marketing arbitrage implied by Google and fully executed by Amazon may be the most revolutionary change to commerce and our lives. I love my Macbooks, iPhone and iPad, but the world’s traffic arbitrage market is more Google and Bezos than Jobs. Amazon is Google’s cash register a role both are happy the other plays.

Related NOW Content
Our combination of content in response to Oprah’s show is a form of “News Jacking”. News Jacking defined by author David Meerman Scott sees and surfs traffic storms (or PR “waves”). Like Bezos, Meerman Scott’s Wall Street career prepared him for the traffic arbitrage Internet marketing is becoming. Creating unique content, content capable of several updates over the course of a storm, is a good idea. See the wave, surf the wave makes sense even if such a reaction is only half as good as NOW + evergreen.

Related Link Love (Or Facebook Shares, Likes and Links)
Back in the day (two years ago) your web site needed link love from high PageRank sites with proper anchor text. It isn’t surprising Facebook shares; likes and links are replacing such hard to achieve and rare “link love”. Getting links wasn’t “rare”. Getting links with proper anchor text with related keywords was almost impossible. Those with the knowledge to build proper links did so for MONEY not LOVE. Amazon may have ecommerce down, but Facebook has reputation economics down to an evolving new science. Facebook’s sharable LIKE widget is pure Internet marketing genius.

When there are a billion people inside your network you create weather. Figuring out how to PROJECT your vast community’s influence across the flexible fabric of the web’s space/time makes Facebook the wizard behind the curtain. Inside the Facebook firewall you are half as powerful as what can be projected beyond the wall. The Like, Share and Comment widgets project search engine optimization (SEO) power across the Internet. If you work at PowerReviews or Bazaar Voice you must be smacking your head thinking, “why didn’t we think of that”.

An Ever Increasingly Fast Content Creation Cycle
No matter how much content you are creating it isn’t enough by half AND creation is too slow. Being competitive NOW means understanding how the Internet marketing game is changing. Change is the only true constant. Noticed how noisy the web is becoming?

The web is noisy because its value is clear and beyond ROI question. Debate continues about social network marketing ROI, mobile marketing and other things we will look back on in five years and wonder what we were debating, but there is no question all companies must swim in an increasingly crowded red ocean (an ocean made red with the blood from fierce competition).

Some like Etsy.com and Amazon understand the importance of an ever increasingly fast content creation cycle. Some understand platforms beat websites. You can’t go it alone is the most important realization. You and your team, no matter how large, can’t create content fast enough to be competitive. User generated content (UGC) is a must. You must tap mob power to become a hub, to thrive and become the rich getting richer.

An Ever Increasing And Growing Amount Of Link Love
The international fashion site Zara has 10,000,000 Facebook likes. Using Marketing Profs Facebook fan value of $136.38 (seeing the full article requires sharing your email, but it is worth it) means Zara’s Facebook community is worth over a billion dollars. I can hear the scoffs now. “That’s total nonsense,” some will say. “How do they know what a Facebook Fan is worth?”

I could defend Marketing Profs numbers. They may be low actually.  The costs of trying to recreate such a community jacks the value sky high. How fast do your Facebook likes grow? Let’s not get lost in a stupid debate because it doesn’t matter what a Facebook fan is worth.

What matters is how much Google juice 10 million supporters displace. Answer: A Ton. If, like REI, you don’t have Facebook LIKES, shares and comments throughout your site it will be harder to become a hub. If your competitors understand the importance of Facebook first you may NEVER become a hub. When your competitor becomes a hub an ever-increasing amount of traffic, link love and money will move away from your site pulled by your competitor’s hub-like gravitational force.  The real frustration is you will work three times as hard for less result (than your hubbed competitor). Hubs rule the web, so rule or be ruled.

Importance Of Togetherness
Atlantic Business Technologies grew from 30 to 54 employees last year. We could grow to more than 70 this year (2012). 54 people as connected as the technical crowd at Atlantic BT is the start of a powerful content marketing network. In six steps 54 people can reach 2.5 million:

In today’s Internet marketing we are as strong as the network links we create. We can’t JUST link to each other since doing so is spam. We can link to each other and the products we create as a natural part of our Internet marketing conversations. Every now and again we may all point to the same thing by chance OR we can be more purposeful and aware using network power to create a hub, a self-sustaining hub where we do less and less to achieve more and more.

I have no idea how planets formed out of the cosmic dust of the Big Bang, but hubs form when you create great content and share it with 2.5 million people. Atlantic BT’s employees is our first content network step. We will include our customers and former customers next (Phase II), then vendors (Phase III) and finally open up the network to public participation and use.

What about competition? I can hear some readers thinking. Competition provides important and welcomed participation. What if competition wins business via Atlantic BT’s content network? Then we will learn from the experience and do better next time. No business is lost or gained because we occupy the high ground created from a content network hub. Competition wins business because we didn’t communicate our value proposition or, and this can be hard to realize, there was a better fit with someone else.

Eckart Tolle taught a valuable Internet marketing lesson when he wrote, “whatever is happening is exactly what is supposed to be happening” in The Power of Now (I think). This helpful truth eliminates wasted energy. When SEO/SEM helps wins business Tolle’s statement helps. When SEO/SEM loses business it is what was supposed to happen so find out why and test something new. We Internet marketers build sand castles and Google’s tide is inevitable.

There will always be more business than we can comfortably handle in Internet marketing in our lifetime. Online commerce is less than 10% of total retail gaining rapidly but still less than 10%. There is much work to be done and plenty of work as long as insanely great is our mission, innovation our guide and togetherness our rule. We, and this is the royal we, are more powerful together than apart by an order of magnitude (100x).

PS. Hardware
Waking up this morning to finish this article I realized a missing point. If you ever wonder why it is important to hire real network support creating a content marketing network is why. If pieces of your empire are too easily self referential you will end up in Facebook, Twitter and Google jail. Getting out of jail isn’t easy, it takes time and costs money.

You need right brainers (marketing types) to figure out your blended curation plan, blended between promotion and curation. You need left brainers (network pros) to plumb your systems to appeal to Google (fast, non-spammy). Your left brain can eliminate all your right brain work and vice versa. You CAN buy a $500 web site hosted for $50 a month. I have one of those, built in half a day with a template (visit MartinMartySmith.com), but my MartinMarty site will NEVER win a keyword battle in Google. Winning Google battles isn’t always important (though I’m hard pressed to find an example in my life when I wouldn’t want to win traffic and conversions).

If winning keyword battles in Google IS important then you need pros on the right and left side of the brain. Even if you think you know how Google works trust me you don’t (only they do really). Google may be the most beautiful living art ever created so complex complete understanding is impossible. Do you “understand” or feel great art? A: Feel. Anyone tells you they will get you a page one listing on X keyword is lying and a snake oil salesman. Stick with Internet marketers who freely admit not knowing what they don’t know, are willing to share what they do know and can easily tell five stories of SEO loss and learnings (they may call it “testing” depending on how geeky they are).

No matter who you decide to receive Internet marketing help from YOU and your company, your company’s friends, vendors and even competitors are stronger together than apart.

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director Marketing
Atlantic Business Technology
Martin(dot)Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com

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What is it worth to be viewed as human, caring, flawed, brave and responsive? Your presence in social media is you or your company’s first step in an important subjective and objective journey; your customers’ idea of you as COMPANY or BRAND and so impenetrably non-human is changed by mere presence in social media marketing.

Walking in the door of social media marketing means you are ready, willing and able to listen and learn. Listening, listening as our COO Mark Foulkrod likes to say with “intent”, may be the most prized and hardest to find COMPANY or BRAND skill in a flat, furious and quickly evolving Internet marketing time.

Few things in our current marketing ecommerce or retailing world are truly free. Having customers see your COMPANY, BRAND, PRODUCT or SERVICE as more human and so able to be loved is something you get free with your first Tweet, Facebook page, Paper.li or Scoop.it.

Can initial social media value, the one you get for free just walking in the social media marketing door, be offset by stupidity, ignorance and greed? Sure, but poor performance by some doesn’t change truth. Soon winning customer hearts and minds will require, mandate and insist upon robust social media marketing presence. No Facebook page = no COMPANY or BRAND (or no viable company or brand, no trusted company or brand, no sustainable company or brand).

Count, measure, slide rule, spreadsheet and P&L your social media marketing. The subjective truth of social media marketing’s value doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bean count the heck out of it. No, the truth of social media marketing’s main benefit, that social media makes it possible, as Faith Popcorn so famously declared, to “join” your COMPANY or BRAND doesn’t change your business need for understandable profit.

Don’t count the wrong things in the wrong ways. Profit and Return On Investment (ROI) aren’t the most important ideas or values behind social media marketing’s curtain. Backstage social media’s most important contributions come from your company’s human struggle to survive matter and contribute (change the world) in meaningful ways.

Connecting customers to your company’s inner and universal human truths is not a new idea. Customer service, company mission, values and philosophy have, as Jim Collins pointed out so convincingly in Good To Great, always been important initial ideas and predictors of eventual success. Social media marketing means what used to be private is now much more public. Social media, blogs and Google killed your company’s ability to keep secrets, so don’t.

Humans are funny. The longer I live the more clear it is – high school never really ends. We stamp our feet, exclude those not “like” us and generally act foolish and immature about half the time. Does social media marketing expose COMPANY and BRAND immaturity?

At times being social does expose cracks because, and this can be a hard idea to fully grasp, social marketing can only EVER reflect character you, your company, brands and products already have. Social media is a giant, amplifying, reflecting pool. Social marketing doesn’t create values. Adding social media marketing only confirms values already present. Does social media marketing on Facebook or Twitter make COMPANIES and BRANDS look bad? At times it does. Is having those mistakes made so large and public the most important thing any COMPANY or BRAND can do? Without a doubt.

Customers will forgive, guide and understand failure. Soon no existing or potential customer will forgive social absence.

Social media marketing absence is an arrogance no company can afford. “But we don’t know the ROI of social media,” I hear owners and CFOs saying after I share that last sentence in meetings. Companies like Argyle Social and Spring Metrics are creating tools to measure the strange, chaotic and confusing multi-touch world that is Internet marketing. Just as in the beginning of Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, I purchased my first keywords in 1999, social media’s value is in advance of tools needed to validate social’s true positive influence on COMPANY and BRAND bottom lines.

If I can convince you of one thing today let’s hope it is this – the greatest value, the greatest return on your social media marketing investment, comes from making your COMPANY and BRAND feel true, flawed, real and therefore able to be loved. We don’t love Greek Gods we read about them. We don’t love despots we depose them. We don’t love uncaring companies or brands we oppose them and, in so doing, try to help them find their, and by extension our, humanity.

Create and invest in a social media marketing plan because you must. Bean count it to within an inch of its life, but never forget your COMPANY and BRAND is social because there is, in the end, no other sustainable choice.

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director Marketing

Martin(dot)Smith(at)Atlanticbt.com

Marshall Brain (@brainstuffHSW) from HowStuffWorks.com took the stage to kick off day 2 of the Internet Summit in Raleigh and threw down a great argument for why we should care less about design and more about function.  Now design matters of course and I would be thrown to the lions if I said that if it didn’t. (Working for a firm that cares a great deal about design that we should take design and shove it is crazy talk)

My goal here is do give an overview of what he talked about, why some of it is valid and what I think the true balance is. (Full disclosure – I am a developer and my User Interfaces look like crap without our design team).

His examples though were quite compelling: Google Search Results, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit.  The content is what is truly driving customers back to these sites over and over again.  Now I would argue that the experience is what matters and how quickly one can access content, FOR these examples is what makes them hugely successful.

Now for us in the industry we can all be fairly certain that a great collaboration occurred to create Google’s new search results:

User Experience Improvements in Google Search Results

My point is that these are elements of design!  Now what they really could be is a great collaboration between UX and designer. Check out the Search menu is in red and it knows my location.  Savy? Also it is subtle, but changing the top search button blue is a great choice that draws attention to it.  But I argue that was indeed a design choice.

Now Marshall’s real point was that in start-up mode don’t really waste your time pushing pixels around and making things perfect.  If you create great content your followers will come and they will use your product.

He said, “I shop at Walmart.  Fonts and colors go over my head and I don’t even see them.”

His point was here that most of the regular everyday people out there that don’t care about design and if you are trying to get investors they don’t either, they want to know how much traffic you are getting and whether or not you are “converting”.

Now it is tough to argue with this point, but again, I go back to the fact design, form, and function are all required.  So I nuance his point slightly and say perhaps spend a little more that he is abdicating for so you can make your site accessible for all, usable for all, and create an experience with content that tells a story brings you back for more.

His other great point was that great content tells a story and if you tell a great story it will resonate with people (and I add then share it with all your friends @darylhemeon ha!).   Marshall also outlined his major issues with sinking too much design time up front:

1. It is expensive
2. time consuming
3. It is never done – fashion is always changing
4. browser compatibility issues
5. distraction from what is important

Marshall’s points are well taken. All I am saying is that is our jobs in this industry to find the right balance for every customer.  What he did say rang true though about the top three most important features are the Content (Content is King #ISUM11), Navigation is simple and functional and SPEED.  If your site is a dog, no one will run with it.

I do understand that what he was trying to do was stir people up on the morning and I started this conversation first thing at my office and people started to wig out!  Which personally I think is great because what it does is make us think about what matters for our customers and that is what is truly important.

Marshall Brain, thanks for a great talk, thanks for stirring the pot and thanks for recommending WordPress…by the way, this blog uses that too.

@lindzie Lindsay Wassell Partner and Consultant, KeyPhraseSEOlogy

Commentary:

Notes:

Create great news content and you can compete with main stream news media if you have expertise in that space.  It is easier to rank a video as opposed to entering a simple web page.

Images get great rankings, make sure you have a file name, alt tag and text around the image.  Use images in News articles, places pages, and use Panoramio.  Look for any opportunity to add rich media types as they will increase your rankings.

Google Local – if you have brick and mortar locations you absolutely must in local listings and encourage and manage reviews.  Local Places page you can add photos, videos, description, categories and address.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors is a great resource for using Google Local.

Microdata = Rich Snippets – all the search engines got together and set standards for classifying information.  Microdata (the date about data) is really important for rankings.  Check out Schema.org for examples of this.  Music microdata can be used to have links in search results directly to songs.

Products can be tagged using microdata to make them show up in a different way so it shows the reviews.

Info on Rich Snippet resources can be viewed on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997.

Key Takeaways:

1. Expand your view of Search Marketing
2. Explore new content types and find ways to expand
3. Identify your content with microdata to help it shine in the SERPs.
4. Think beyond the web page

Next Generation SEO: Beyond Best Practices

@michaelmarshall Michael Marshall SEO Guru

Commentary:  The brunt of this one and its discussion of the Power Law did go over my head, but it was interesting from how this is used to generate traffic.  Personally I think he had too much content in his slides and moved too quickly so it was difficult to digest and get any true takeaways from the session.

Notes:

This is important because traffic leads to sales.

On-page Optimization has to do with Title Tags, Meta tags, ALT tags, Header tags, URL structure, anchor text, Keyword proximity is more important than Keyword density.

The Key to navigating through all of the methodology is MATH.

The Key benefit is to get the data so that you connect it to a mathematical model to create understanding.

More often than not your competitors have changed something that improved their rankings.  Don’t change too much at once on your site when it comes to SEO so you can track what you have changed.

StatistiXL is a great product for evaluating your SEO performance to do the work using Math as opposed to trial and error you will save money over time.

Make Your CMS Work for Your SEO, Not Against You

@markusrenstrom Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO Yahoo!

Commentary: The big take away here for me that the SEO team of your company needs to own how new pages are created to make sure they conform to a template that can be re-used to save money.

Notes:

It makes sense to have quality over quantity and you need to focus on your platform that you are going to use to get good SEO rankings.

Concept #1 – Expectations – If you work in search you need to educate your company on what they can expect from the results.  Markus spent time talking about what SEO is not.  SEO takes time, strategy and investment and not more links.

SEO is a long term Content Strategy.  50% of people are using 3 or more keywords to search now.  You also need to make that content accessible to everyone.  Search engines disable all of the javascript so that it can search through the content.

Think about who is the top user to your site?  Is the search engine your top user because they will actually look at everyone one of your pages.  SEO is about User Focused content.

Concept #2 Ownership – ownership created agility, enables standardization and automation, and it saves time and resources. If you create standards to tags and Urls it gets faster to create content.

Duplication is your enemy.  Your one article should not exist in more than one category. Dynamic URLs are scary from a search perspective.

The importance of tagging cannot be underestimated especially around the coverage of titles and well formed anchor tags.

Yahoo’s traffic is up even though they have reduced the number of pages by 40%.

Yahoo has its own content management system.

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration

@bill_slawski Bill Slawski, President CEO, SEO by the Sea

Commentary: You should be teaching your clients about relevance of social in search results because they are the subject matter experts.

Notes:

Google has reacted to the advent of social media to show fresher more relevant content.

Bill brought up several sites that failed fast and hard like Dodgeball.com, Google Answers, Google opensocial, Googlevark, Google hotpot was integrated into Google places, Google SearchWiki, Google Wave, Google Buzz.  All of these have been shed and some parts are now being incorporated into Google Plus.

Real Time Search is what is changing.  The recent earthquake is great example of this.  Address recency-sensitive queries are starting to drive results from social media.  The results cannot be ranked the same way that normal web pages are ranked.  When you interact with Google Plus you are building a type of ranking system that will help results with your +1 activity.

Google Plus of course is now showing up in search results.  Authorship markup standards are now published by Google that will show your Google+ posts and your author picture to have richer content.  Authorship markup is difficult but uses the aforementioned mircodata from schema.org.  All Blogspot and YouTube contributions automatically incorporate authorship markup.  Google is using a contribution score to control how the markup is displayed in results.

Why Google+?  Well we should be using it because of the access to all the collateral data that they have access to.  Teach our clients on how to social network instead of networking for them.

Driving Innovation in Audio : How ESPN Takes Content Local, Mobile and Social

@espn Traug Keller Senior VP, Production, Business Division

This is a mix of my thoughts and pseudo quotes of all presenters.

Notes:

ESPN’s mission is to bring sports to fans anywhere at anytime and now you can be bored in any meeting and watch ESPN.  This might be the greatest innovation in history.

They were one of the first radio companies to stream their presence. How are their audio users interacting with ESPN?

1. 21.1 minutes with the Internet
2. 12.3 minutes per day with Mobile
3. 55.9 minutes with Terrestrial Radio
4. 27.5 minutes with Streaming Radio

In 2010 the decided to put the World Cup on the Radio.  Many thought this was a dicey proposition.  During the Cup on an average day 6.6 million people tuned in to the coverage. Among all the listeners 30% were digital.  This is HUGE.

I have to get a hold of Traug’s slides because ESPN does great data management.  The thing they spent the most time on is the ESPN Radio App – Number One Paid App on iTunes. $2.99 one time fee.  They really focused on the less is more strategy.   The App has more than 500,000 downloads.   He dropped @sportsguy33 Bill Simmons, when he does a pod cast over 1 million people download it after it is posted and they have found a way to monetize it.

Mobile Audio is no more complicated than making the experience convenient, on the go, and INTERACTIVE.  They monitor the number of Tweets on Mike and Mike to see when to move on to a new topic.

The story for ESPN Audio is GROWTH.  The prediction of the session was that we may see the end of AM Radio in our life times because of mobile devices.  ESPN just make it easier to listen and they were able to increase revenue for ad sales.

Some stats:

1. Most listened to sports stream on the planet
2. ESPN brand lives in over 350 markets nationwide
3. Over 24 million listeners per week consuming ESPN content
4. Over 24 million total streaming listening hours
5. Nearly 32.5 million session starts
6. 9 million to 10 million podcast downloads per week

Someone asked a question about whether or not they were worried that users were transitioning to moving away from traditional cable providers.  Traug’s response was that people a lot smarter than him are going to try and figure that out.

Commentary:

Mobile Consumer Issues – Privacy and Trust

@franmaier Fran Maier President & Executive Chair, TRUSTe

Notes:

Privacy Tips for developers: Get Serious about Privacy, Give Consumers Transparency and Choice, Always Ask Before Collecting Location Data, Prepare to Offer Opt-Outs For Mobile Ad Targeting, Push for Mobile App Directories to Filter by Privacy and Security.

Shorthand for TRUSTe is Transparency, Choice and Accountability.  TRUSTe works with companies to figure out how information is shared.  Consumers want choice over how their information is shared and they want CONTROL over how my information is shared.

A lot of apps are asking for notice about collecting location data, but they don’t explain what they are doing with their location information.

Without transparency 70% of all consumers think they are being tracked on your mobile phone, but we need to do a better job of educating consumers. 45% of consumers said that they would not share information even if they were offered free services.  Many consumers feel like the App Stores don’t give a good overview of privacy security.

300 of the largest free apps and only 25% of them have a link to their privacy policy, the message there is to really as consumers to push for privacy policies so you can hold companies accountable.

You can download a mobile privacy policy generator at TRUSTe if you don’t have one.

Commentary: The content of this presentation was really relevant to what is happening today in the mobile space, but the stats and survey’s were really powerful, but the slides and charts were not really very easy to read and they really were the story about educating the consumers so they can make better choices.

Uses for Location-Based Mobile Marketing for Non-Brick and Mortar Business

@gregkihlstorm Greg Kihlstrom, Chief Creative Officer and Founder, Carousel30

Notes:

Why location based services?  It is all about engaging people about where they are physically located. How do you take advantage of this technology if you have on-line presence only. Location based marketing does not only mean FourSquare.

Consumer = location.  As the consumer you can become a location now.  Greg referenced the Heineken’s app that allows users to connect during soccer games.

Red Cross created a Blood Donor badge on FourSquare.

Deliver exclusive content that can only be delivered at a conference.  Animal Planet had a campaign at ComicCon where you had to find BigFoot and Tweet a picture if you found him.

History Channel has offered tips at Historical Places when you check in to them to better send a message about their brand.

One of his major points was to use the right medium to cater to the audience that you are trying to reach.  The California Department of Public Health created a text service to send locations where you could get a flew shot during the H1N1 crisis.

Not everyone is motivated by obtaining a FourSquare badge, but a lot of people think that it is valuable.  These are successful because they are exclusive!

Commentary: There is tons of room to grow in this arena, but find something that motivates and captivates your audience.  The main point is that mobile location marketing creates an opportunity to create ads that are beyond the normal flat advertising.

Right Here, Right Now: The New Pace of Mobile Consumer Insight

@lumimobile Dana Kirchman SVP, Head of Client Operations

Notes:

The opportunities to survey your costumers are out there because you can collect information instantly and Report Immediately as to what is happening with your clients.

Mobile unites four insight types: Self Reported, Behavioral Insight ( your phone can tell you how far your drove to get a bargain ), Social Insight, Emotional Insight ( video recording of emotions in reactions to advertising ).

With the mobile world has the focus group died? Can you have access to larger groups and get access to data in the same day?

The challenges that are out there today are the multiple platforms (iPhone, Droid, iPad), device customization, data plans and costs of those plans are some of the challenges.  Are we trying to reach users that don’t have a TV, a high bandwidth plan, but they have a phone.

What is the potential of mobile?  Can an app capture health and wellness?  Can it capture leadership behaviors?  Could we use games as a diary? Is Crowd Memory very far away to share all of our experiences?

Commentary: This is more of a high level overview of what a few different valuable people in the industry are trying to push, but overall I thought it was at too high, too broad, but again some valuable insights.

I entered the grand ballroom and my first thought was, “is this Vegas?”  Fortunately for me it wasn’t Vegas and I found a comfortable spot to take notes on the first session. (note to all speakers:  I did my best to regurgitate your notes, don’t hold it against me)

Christian Sullivan (@differentwalk) “Creating a World Class Social Media Campaign”.

Here are the highlights:

• Gap’s use of Groupon sold 400,000 coupons worth 11 million
• Moutain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” campaign gained 800,000 Facebook fans
• Sam-e’s Good Mood Gig campaign used contents to generate buzz
• Ford’s new car reveal actually connected fans by driving customers to their site throughout the day of the reveal
• Levi’s created a “Like” store which placed the Facebook “Like” button on all their products, it created more referrals to their site than any other source.  It also created trust amongst their consumers because their friends recommended their products.

One of her overall messages was to remember that the consumer is in control, so let them have control because the consumers want to participate in their experience.

Todd Moy @toddmoy : “The Secret World of Usability”

Todd gave a great talk about how usability permeates all function in life and not just applications.  He discussed some really key concepts which I will spit out in note format and give some good examples.

The Shaping of Perceptions

• When people are given a gift they immediately think the products they were were working with are more usable.
• As consumers we are strongly encouraged by feedback as you move through the product – we want to take an action and then see what the reward is taking that action.  Good example of this turntable.fm – your virtual friends’ avatar’s will head-bob when they dig your tunes.
• “We when we feel good we overlook design faults.” – Norman – This can also apply to how we interact with our significant others!
• The timing of the reward is important, when it is given.  Try to make the reward not long after the interaction.  I immediately thought of RunKeeper and how they send me an email when I reach a goal or logged my 100th activity.
• Amazon found out that they significantly increased revenue by offering free shipping at $75.  People were given an incentive to spend more.

Matthew Munoz @matthewmunoz : Web Design as a Strategic Tool

Matthew gave a great presentation with trying to answer to the question, “How do we make the designer a catalyst?”  In this crazy world of scarce attention, how to we dedicate the time an energy to show abstract concepts?  The challenges that he put out there were ones we face everyday in this industry. How do you design a visual argument?  How do you design a story that breaks down complexity?

Great example here of Dan Roam’s Napkin Design for Health Care reform. The point here was how do you take a 2000 page bill and come up with a way to show visually what is it all about?  How do you tell a visual story that breaks down the complexity?  How do we create meaning or a process for creating options?

Matthew’s manifesto is as follows – his prescription for solving those confounding problems.  Some of my notes are mixed in here as well:

1. Use Metaphors
2. When you use scenarios things feel less risky
3. –missed this one Dr. Gonzo was sabotaging lunch–
4. tell stories – Tom’s One for One
5. Ask Why 5 times – continue to ask this question until you get to the root meaning of what you are doing
6. inspire action with openness, create an architecture of participation, contribution and participation (I thought of crowd sourcing and social media)
7. every project is chance to find common ground – he positioned his team as Sherpa.
8. break your project into sprints and workshops and have your clients participate
9. imperfection breeds participation – get people to be involved even if you work isn’t done
10. release early and release often
11. design with, and for
12. design the system
13. everyone is a designer – great point here about how everyone can give you feedback, they just might not be able to move elements on a page, but they can tell you WHY they like or dislike
14. build your reputation as a problem solver and opportunity finder and doors will open for you, and yes like Sally Field, people will like you, they really will.

That is all for now, I have to run because Dr. Gonzo is trying to make his way to take over the podium for the key note, heaven help us all.  I just hope I can find my turkey sandwich.

Google twists precariously on a thin wire. Actions now define the future of the most successful technology ever created. There is so much power in Google, so much fair intent. Google may be the purest expression of who we are as individuals, countries and a blue marble spinning in infinite, expanding space.

The nature and value of the most perfect mathematical expression of human aspiration is at risk. Aspiration collection at this level is pure art. Well removed from the science of its creation Google’s massive brain is the closest thing to intelligent silicone and integrated circuit so perfectly matched to human desire and intention it may be more human than humans.

The risk of so much manna is ever present and always tempting. Twist the dial even the smallest amount in either direction and purity leaves the building. Evil isn’t the result as much as something surely perceived as an inevitable slouching toward Bettelheim. What is the common trend of these Google moves:

Index Float

Secure Socket Layer Encrypting

G +

Google’s Index Float
When Google decided to create individual search results sets based on mob + individual results something important ended. Once I see a different result set than you striving for a #1 listing carries less or no value. Even when using a tool like Mike’s to determine a true Google organic listing what does it mean? Nothing really because the only thing that means anything is did you drive more traffic today than yesterday and today vs. last year trended for as many years as you have. Google’s float means metrics drive. The need for viral, purple cow, content has never been greater. Google’s floating index values what you’ve searched in the past, what your friends are talking about now and what their super-model tells them makes sense, what is relevant. Watching a presenter at Content Marketing World decry metrics tools before sharing a logged in screen view of “all my #1 listings” I didn’t have the heart to explain I had a very different set of listings on my computer.

The idea of the #1 listing dies hard. Google float is a hard concept. Fighting tooth and nail to get to the top of a hill (achieve a Google #1 listing) is easier to understand. Google’s number 1 listing’s demise means comparison to an absolute as a search engine optimization is dead and gone buried by Google’s search for relevancy and our human tendency to ask the wrong questions, in the wrong way about the wrong things.

SSL Encryption
Brian wrote a great piece about Secure Socket Layer encryption and Rachel is working on the evil side of the equation so I will stay out of the “he said” vs. “she said” controversy only saying that SSL is really about search volume. Retargeting, showing ads to you in the vast infinity of our content network world, after visiting site works because we trust things we see more. Retargeting watches your shoe search and increases the relevancy of the display ads on sites you visit next significantly increasing chances of your buying. The problem isn’t in your buying it is in your NOT continuing to search. If SSL cuts 30% of your search volume moving it from Google to retargeting content marketing networks it saves YOU (consumers) time and costs Google money.

G+
Google Plus is the key. It could make both moves outlined benign or cancerous. If Google artificially maneuvers G+ results ahead of Facebook and Twitter they mess with the very forces of nature, forces they created, nurtured and carefully grew.  Pervert, change or sell in any way even to themselves and Google becomes the next Yahoo (an example of the dangers of selling editorial search engine credibility to the highest bidder).

Is Google already Yahoo? Is Rome crumbling? As Jason Fells, author of No Bullshit Social Media, said tonight at Argyle Social’s event in Durham, the Jury is out with little indication of pending verdict. Hope Google does not become the next Yahoo since creating anything is hard, creating an “insanely great” thing is damn near impossible and creating GOOGLE is the hand of God.

Rain changed my plans. I spent the morning writing Facebook and Social Media Marketing for Technorati instead. When Facebook and Social Media Marketing received over 400 Tweets and ReTweets in the first day it was a surprise. I got another surprise using TweetReach to see my rainy day post reached over 400,000 people thanks to a handful of power Tweeters. The almost 30 Facebook shares was frosting on a big Google and search engine divot.

Since I’d just been in a meeting with someone who didn’t like Twitter I wrote Twitter’s Long Tail to attach conversion metrics to my most popular post. Twitter’s Long Tail calculated the value of a 1% conversion rate at over $100,000, not a bad return on an article written in a few hours on a rainy Saturday. Twitter’s Long Tail received over 50 Tweets and 4 Facebook shares too reaching another group of Internet marketers.

Twitter’s Long Tail left out significant value including being on Google page 1 for a keyword phrase (Facebook and Social Media Marketing) currently returning over 527 million documents. The article has been on Google page one for four months (current rank according to Mike’s is 10). Remember Google floats its index so you see different results than me. The only way to know where your pages rank is with web analytics. The path of these two articles point to important ideas including:

• Platforms Beat Websites
• Conversations Not Lectures
• NOW
• Authenticity

Platforms Beat Websites
Technorati is the real winner. Note how Technorati broke my 500-word article into two pages to create twice the Google displacement. Technorati, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon are platforms not web sites. Platforms aggregate user generated content (UGC) creating a constant heartbeat of keywords inside the chest of our search engine dominated world. Platforms know how to curate; aggregate and blend content against keywords in Google approve ways.

Conversations Not Lectures
Conversation is different than lecture. We live in conversational times. Attending Content Marketing World recently many large websites were concerned about negative comments on their social media properties. It is important to create and share feedback guidelines, but not flinching from negative feedback is the first rule of conversational times. Negative feedback may provide the greatest opportunity to walk your company’s customer service talk. Most reviews are positive. Are negative reviews and comments really negative? Many read negative reviews first and, if you are anything like me, buy because some negative reviews outline exactly what other customers want. Customers also parse the whole review and user generated content universe. When the crowd sees outlier negative reviews or comments they treat them as outliers understanding truth is more accurately represented by the majority.

NOW Matters
Now is what matters in Internet marketing and NOW is getting shorter and shorter. If your competitors understand the web’s insatiable content demand and feed the monster more aggressively than you pain will be the result. Use Google’s SITE:WWW.WEBSITE.COM to see how many pages Google has indexed for your site vs. your competitors (remember to use www and non www as some sites aren’t consistent with their internal linking and use either number as long as you are consistent). If your site is at a content disadvantage create a content marketing plan to get back on top. Part of your content plan should be incorporating or increasing user generated content (UGC).

Authenticity
My Facebook and Social Media Marketing article didn’t come out of the blue. It is the most popular incarnation of ideas and concepts I write about across several blogs and social media platforms. The article is consistent with my brand. Attempts to identify and manipulate popular themes and trends are doomed to wisdom of crowds failures. The mob can sense inauthentic manipulation almost faster than anything else. Your company, brand or product content should come from core values, beliefs and practices. Walking your talk, being authentic, has never been more important than when 400,000 people can see your thinking, ideas and processes in less than 24 hours.

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director of Marketing
@AtlanticBT
Martin.Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com

Helpful Books and Links

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything by Dov Seidman
Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want by Gilmore and Pine

Managing Content Marketing by Pulizzi and Rose

Platforms vs. Websites on ScentTrail Marketing

Curation Revolution on Scoop.it (note the chart You Just Shared A Link. How Long Will People Pay Attention)