SMX Advanced 2007 Roundup | Danny Sullivan SMX | Search Marketing Expo
June 15th, 2007
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!
