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SES Toronto: SEO is Dead. No it's Not.
Essentially, the key questions discussed in this panel centered around what is it that we’re doing as marketers that could be considered as SEO vs. Marketing. Other topics included: Google +1, personalization, evolving nature of SERPs, “Trust Rank”, analytics and other technical aspects of SEO were discussed. Moderator: What does search engine optimization mean anymore? The thing about SEO is that there are many technical considerations. What ranking factors still matter? Should we still be considering tags, H1, Titles, etc. Terry: Title tags are one of the biggest factors. Jim: Beyond the URL the first thing the search engine will see is the title tag. You can gain a great deal of power from your title tag. Jim: Being a great SEO isn’t being a magician. It’s about being a great marketer that uses SEO. Terry: I’ve always followed the Document Object Model to identify what HTML attributes are important for SEO. Then you have other formats like RDFa and microformats. Jim: It’s important to remember we’re writing for two audiences: people and search engines. Terry: Spiders don’t buy anything Jim: Titles help people navigate the website Moderator: Is link building a SEO tactic or a marketing tactic? Terry: Its a marketing tactic. I’ve been link building before I started doing SEO. If you look at link building without SEO then you’re pretty safe when it comes to Google guidelines. Audience: How does personalization and Google +1 affect SEO? Jim: Search engines will continue to innovate and change. Just because things change doesn’t make optimization any less relevant. We may need to change how we do things and use different sets of tasks, but you’re still doing things to make it easy for search users to find your content. There’s not a lot you can do with personalization when it comes to SEO. Localization and personalization are very close to each other. Except personalization is mostly informed by your behaviors. Garry: Social is an area where Google wants to move into for signals, but I don’t think they want to have a high reliance on any one source. Google +1 is their attempt to mitigate reliance on external social signal. It does have some correlation between personalization and localization. Terry: The most important part of personalization, is that when people are logged in, Twitter becomes very important. Tweets can take up a lot of SERP screen real estate from . People say +1 is a ranking signal, I don’t believe that. Terry: As far as personalization, I try to use personas and optimize according to customers. You’ve got to look at audiences, not just keywords. Garry: Personalization and +1 is still new. We’re going to have to wait a little bit to see it gain some traction and see if it will have an impact. Moderator: With Twitter, we know Google uses the firehose of data. With +1, content posted can appear on a Google profile and can also appear in real-time search results. Is that SEO or marketing? Audience: Now that traditional SEO is changing, what are some of the key things we need to be looking at for the “new SEO” Jim: What’s old is new. In the beginning there was Alta Vista. Search engines of that day were just about acquiring content. Content was king before links became commoditized by Google. Today, quality content, making your sites accessible and usable is important. Usability is polite. Accessibility is the law. Audience: The +1 is all user generated content. I don’t see anyone outside of techies ever using it. What do you think the shelf life will be? Also, what about Bing? Garry: Buzz died pretty quickly because it was so similar to other services. With +1 it depends whether it gets traction or not. Bing conversion rates overall have been very good with PPC. Bing is also a center of innovation and could be a real competitor. Terry: +1 really is only known and used by techies. There’s nothing obvious about what will happen with +1 for users, whereas with other sharing buttons, you can tell it’s for Facebook or Twitter. Moderator: +1 on PPC ads provides better demographic data for advertisers and can positively affect quality score. Google has a lot of data that shows if you integrate social, with display and PPC you get better overall lift. Panel: Google is a bit naive about how they approach social. They have engineers deciding to make things that will be cool, but don’t really make an effort to explain to users why it’s important. Google +1 is a good example of this. There are many reasons why advertisers and Google would want people to use +1, but not many compelling reasons for people to use it. Jim: Is SEO dead. SEO dies every day. We spell die wrong. It should be “dye”. SEO is dying, changing every day. Audience: I’ve not seen having a mobile optimized landing page or site helps your Google ranking on a Google mobile device or search. Terry: I’m of the opinion that “mobile” sites will be obsolete because HTML5 will improve. Mobile and website from a code perspective will converge. Garry: Is an optimized site on mobile a great user experience when you have to pull back on certain features to accommodate mobile limitations? Terry: If you’re looking at your users with mobile, you’ll give them a different experience than on the web. Audience: When you’re logged in, it seems everyone has a YouTube or Gmail account these days. How many queries happen when logged in vs. logged out? Terry: Since caffiene you’re pretty much always logged in. Garry: If you’ve ever logged in, the cookie will persist whether you’re logged in or not. Terry: Google is also pulling data from Chrome and the toolbar, whether you’re logged in or not. Keep in mind advertising networks like Google’s DoubleClick can read those cookies too. Audience: Can you name the top 10 signals you’d advise someone to use that is a large player, software, international, high end. That already has #1, #2 ranking positions. What are your top 10 signals for the “uninitiated”. Jim: Titles, description meta tags, text and links Terry: Title, copy and links Garry: Agree with Jim. Quality of content is king because that’s what will attract links. Jim: Site structure and quality of site structure is also important.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | SES Toronto: SEO is Dead. No it’s Not. | http://www.toprankblog.com  SES Toronto: Keyword Forensics
The session starts with an inspiring quote on the projector “Keyword Forensics – Exploring the Hidden User Search Behavior for Keywords That Are Often Missed by Keyword Researchers.” I research keywords! What am I missing? Here are some good nuggets from the presentation: Understand the Difference Between Keyword Research vs. Keyword Forensics Keyword Research: Researching identified keywords to determine which phrases will provide the most search traffic. Keyword Forensics: Discovering keyword variations associated with a root word. According to Alexander, keyword forensics does not begin with any assumptions. The purpose is to uncover how people search. Exploring User Behavior Challenge: One of the challenges one encounters when researching user behavior for most people is the need to lose the “keyword hunt mindset”. The more you tend to guess at the most logical keywords, the less likely you are to find exactly what phrases people are actually searching. Solution: Don’t guess or assume search phrases. Uncover popular keyword phrases in tools like Wordtracker by entering a root word and discovering how that word is most often being used. For example, entering the root word “buy” will produce variations like “What do people buy?” Wordtracker 101 Wordtracker is Alexander’s weapon of choice for keyword forensics. Here’s a little Wordtracker 101. First, enter a root word into the search query. Second, sort by KEI and consider the following: Keyword Effectiveness (KEI): The higher the number here, the better. Use this metric to identify popular keyword phrases with little competition. In Anchor and Title: Count of the number of pages for which the exact keyword phrase appears in both the title tag and as anchor text on the page. This metric gives you an understanding of what kind of keyword focused content needs to be generated to achieve a quality search engine rank. Think Laterally About Behavior A person searching for baby names=diaper purchasing prospect. A brand doesn’t need to sell baby names (although that would be an interesting business model!) in order to provide relevant content. Imagine a diaper company that aggregates all common and uncommon baby names on one site. People searching for baby names, i.e. likely parents to-be, will be introduced to the brand in an organic manner. The diaper brand can then provide special offers or relevant links to visitors so they can learn more about the products or receive discounted pricing. To wrap up the session in a nutshell, Alexander takes a very creative approach to keyword discovery and encourages others to do the same. Put even more succinctly, SEOs should discover keywords and not assume them. If you’re in need, here’s a list of keyword research tools you might find useful. Stay tuned for more posts from SES Toronto. Follow @TopRank and #sesto on Twitter for real time updates.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | SES Toronto: Keyword Forensics | http://www.toprankblog.com More Recent Articles | | ||
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