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On June 4 and 5, The Karcher Group attended and exhibited at the inaugural SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, WA. Being the first SMX show for Danny Sullivan, long-time organizer of the Search Engine Strategies shows, no one knew exactly what to expect. Here’s our take:

Overall impressions: The billing prior to the event was that this was the show for search marketers who thought that they had heard and seen it all and wanted brand new, advanced tips, techniques, and strategies. It was much smaller than a typical SES crowd, and it seemed that most attendees had several years of search under their belts. There was no beginners track to go over fundamental information – speakers assumed a certain level of knowledge.

Our verdict on the advanced content? SMX delivered!

What We Liked: Definitely the availability of top level staff from the major search engines was a major plus. Attendees did not shy away from asking tough questions (and even tougher follow-up questions) to the likes of Matt Cutts (Google) and Tim Mayer (Yahoo!). Even better, because of the manageable size of the crowd (only 600 people) you could snag them in the exhibit hall for a question or two as well.

Another advantage was the speakers who took the gig seriously and offered some of their best tips and techniques. We can’t say enough how much we appreciated this.

Oh, and the food was great (no boxed lunches!).

What We Didn’t Like: No centralized hotel (the event was held in a conference center), know-it-all attendees whose questions for the panel were really statements, too many breaks between sessions (especially with only 30 or so vendors in the exhibit hall), and speakers who used their same content from SES shows or didn’t offer up new strategies (only a handful did this, but still).

The party scene: Of course, no search engine marketing event is complete without some amazing parties. MSN, Yahoo!, and Google all tried to top one another with free drinks, food, live bands, etc. The Google party was so loud it was impossible to carry on a conversation, but fun nonetheless – and of course we had to get Google t-shirts to add to the collection. There wasn’t as much carousing in the hotel bars as usual because there wasn’t one centralized hotel for this event like there is at SES.

Seattle: Beautiful city. We loved attending an event here, but it was really far from home. Still, it was a nice change of pace from the New York – Chicago - San Jose conference circuit. Our favorite Seattle moment was definitely dinner at the top of the Space Needle. Amazing!

Session take-aways: The show had two tracks – organic and paid – and I bounced between the two tracks depending on what the sessions offered. I’ve created summaries of the seven sessions I attended:

You & A with Matt Cutts from Google

-Manual intervention for paid links (like Google spam forum) will be coming soon; this basically means that users can let Google know when they “come across” a site (competitor) that’s using paid links and getting link popularity for them

-No good explanation for why Google ranks Wikipedia searches so high in the search results. Matt says that “Wikipedia results in general are good”; however, not always the best when it come to expert level searches

-Include as much user-generated copy as possible, ie: user comments/reviews on inside product pages – will help keep inside pages ranking well & out of supplemental results

Paid Search Roundtable

-12 – 15% of clicks on the Yahoo! network are identified and never billed for (not necessarily click fraud)

-Yahoo! Search Marketing has launched their commercial API program – 3 levels, including a basic free level

-MSN adCenter acknowledges low click amounts; however, insists the traffic is normally pretty targeted

-MSN adCenter is adding a content network

-SE’s will soon be rolling out referrer blocking (ability to block certain domains (competitors)).

-MSN adCenter will soon give users the ability to view non-billed (low quality) clicks

SEO, Meet SMM

-Social Media Marketing should be used for increasing brand awareness & SE rankings. In addition, SMM helps grow a company’s (product) fan base, shows community participation, can influence traditional media….

-Web 2.0 Directory - http://www.go2web20.net/

-The “Unwritten Rule” of SMM (Neil Patel): self promotion; add biased info; ask friends for votes

-The “Golden Rules” of SMM (Neil Patel): add tons of friends; participate in the community (leave comments, aim, email, etc); become a top user; use site’s features against them (send requests, emails, etc); create a social brand (brand username & icon)

-The Top Social Sites you should be participating on (according to Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz): YouTube, Wikipedia, Y! Answers, Yelp, Linkedin, Flickr, Best of Craigslist, Facebook, Myspace, Technorati (tagging content), Judy’s Book, Newsvine, Twitter, Citysearch, Wikihow

-Top Viral Marketing SItes you should be participating on (according to Rand from SEOmoz): Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Netscape, TechCrunch, Newsvine (at the top), Boing Boing, Far, Engadget, Techmeme, Lifehacker, Y! Picks

Inside the Auction BlackBox

-Click-through rate is the biggest piece of the quality score

-PPC ranking = max CPC x quality score

-Pay per Action: Positives and Negatives

-Positives – don’t convert/don’t oay; click fraud proof (?)

-Negatives – requires sharing the value of a customer with SEs; distorts the web (every site turns into a marketing site); increase costs (more advertisers); turns Adsense publishers into affiliate channels; turns SE (google) into everyone’s silent partner

-For those concerned with Google knowing too much….Google already is gathering data from: search; Google toolbar; gmail; adsense; google analytics; adwords conversion tracker; google checkout, etc….

-Landing page relevance is not a factor in Yahoo! Search Marketing ranking/positioning

Pump Up Your Paid Search: Things to consider when setting up a PPC campaign:

-Map account structure before using SE (create campaign in Excel, Word, etc)

-Don’t use engine daily budgets to guide spending (hitting budget or coming close throttles ad serving; want to serve as if unlimited budget)

-Use Google’s website optimizer to test new traffic sources

-Use broad match with negative keywords

-Ad position should be a side affect to your ROI, not as a lever for driving the campaign

-Use geo-targeting (even for national campaigns)

Better Ways to Do the Boring Stuff

-Create awards, organization or free tools/widgets to gain more links

-Add new links to homepage

-Add related article links to each content page within a site

-Buy links embedded in text/copy

-Avoid commonly known link networks

-Use no-follow tags to reference sites

-Use target_blank for external links

-Rants, controversy, anything shocking will normally start a buzz

Give It Up!
Per Danny Sullivan: no one is allowed to make any part of this session public until July 5th (30 days after this session occurred). I’ll be posting my notes from Give it up then!

Geoff recently wrote in this very blog about the shortcomings of submitting a Request For Proposal for Web development, and in fact strongly recommended against it. This of course scared me more than a little as part of my job is to reply to RFP’s, and Geoff is of course our owner. If he submits a new entry stating that my office would perhaps look better empty, I might weep openly. Again. So I thought it might be a good idea to help justify my continued employment by outlining the type of situation where an RFP can be a useful project tool.

Defining our Terms – Project Proposal Stages

Generating an accurate project proposal has two distinct stages. The first stage is Project Discovery, where the goals, specific functions and budget of the Web project are determined. The second stage is Proposal Development (aka the “Phil Phase”, but I’m still waiting for that to become official industry jargon) where a proposal is prepared that outlines the entire project in detail and gives the cost to develop each piece. This brings us to the big questions to see if a Web development RFP is appropriate:

When to Submit an RFP - Which stage are you in?

Not completing the Project Discovery stage makes for a bad RFP, and trying to respond to a bad RFP is like trying to build a house using a child’s drawing. Two windows and a door can do, but I highly doubt that this is all you wanted for your project. But shouldn’t an experienced Web firm such as ourselves know the industry and our own capabilities and be able to help you develop a project outline based on your needs and market? Yes we do and yes we can, and please by all means call us, but don’t ruin your week and mine trying an RFP. You have to finish off your Project Discovery stage to get anything detailed enough for us to tell you what it will take to actually make the thing.

So, for the attention-challenged:

Submit and RFP If - You have completed the Project Discovery stage and established the goals and functionality for the site. If the picture of the project isn’t that clear for you yet, please follow the steps that Geoff laid out in his entry. If you have a good understanding of your needs, a strong summary of your project and would like to get a bunch of proposals for it, submit away.

Do not submit an RFP if - You are not ready to clearly quantify what the site should do and how it should work. “I would like to improve communication with our clients through the site” is not a statement, it is a full-blown conversation. Call us and talk through your needs, goals and potential site users.

Oh, and please do not go the RFP route if you are looking for SEO. Optimization is too market-specific and goals are too varied – please see above regarding us and a phone call.

That’s it for me, other than to point out that I am generally a nice guy that people like having around, and I believe we should fully explore my phone-answering skills before letting me go if the RFP’s stop coming in.

Now Available! Check out The Karcher Group’s sample development RFP by clicking here

As the show floor draws to a close, we pulled Matt Clark from Yahoo! into our booth to get his thoughts on the initial SMX show. He thought that the show went well for the most part. He also mentioned that it was a great opportunity to discuss Yahoo’s! new commercial API with the individuals attending the show. As a side note, he was amused that as usual attendees were making statements framed as questions. Overall it was a great show for Matt and everyone at Yahoo!

Day 2 is under way (it’s about 1:00 here). The show and conference ends in about 2 and a half hours.

People are looking tired, but we’re still hearing good things about the sessions.

It still seems to be holding true that just about everyone here is in the search marketing industry and has been for some time now. There aren’t a lot of SEO beginners, which seems to be what people like most. They’re finally getting some detailed ideas and optimization techniques they can use to make themselves better at what they do.

We’ll be packing up the booth and heading out to see a bit of Seattle in a few hours.

The 1st day of SMX Advanced is winding to a close…the Yahoo! sponsored networking party is about to begin, then we’re off to the Google Dance NW!
The overall tone of the conference has been positive. Attendees are sharing ideas & rubbing elbows with some of the big names in search, which is creating an informative and laid back atmosphere.

I anticpiate posting more in-depth summaries of the sessions I attend over the 2 day conference; however, I wanted to briefly summarize some of the key points I took away from Day 1:
1. Y! Search Marketing admits that 12% - 15% of clicks on the Yahoo! Network are identified & never billed for
2. MSN adCenter acknowldeges low traffic for advertisers and assures us that they’re working on a solution
3. Don’t be afraid of Social Media Marketing (SMM); just be prepared to invest a significant amount of time researching, creating & keeping up on your SMM initiatives

Off to the Yahoo! party, more to come…