November 17, 2006
A Few Pictures From The Event
Anita Campbell
Jeff Rohrs
Susan Lowry
Domain donated by eMergent Marketing, Inc.
Design donated by SiteLogic
The presentations from today’s seminar will be available here: http://cite.uakron.edu/
Eric Olsen from Blogcritics.org is the keynote.
Blogcritics is an online magazine, a community of writers and readers from around the globe.
The title is: “The Fantastically Wild Success Story of Blogeristic Organization”
He is giving us the chronology of his business.
He wants us to understand what blogging is and what blogging software is.
He mentions that “it’s all about the links.” He says that’s the #1 factor of determining how you do on the engines.
He talks about Google PageRank. He says that people have to know about you and link to you in order to increase your PageRank. He says each number is exponentially higher than the previous number. PageRank is a scale from 0-10. There are very few 10’s: Google, Yahoo, New York Times. Blogcritics.org is a 7.
He says that he has 100,000 readers a day. He has 1700 writers, 20 editors. He gets people to write for free for his site because he has readers.
He says that if you have a broad base and no money… the way you succeed is to give away your product. You get the exposure, links and higher pagerank.
Anita Campbell has the closing remarks.
She mentions that having a site like blogcritics.org here in Cleveland is a tremendous asset to our community.
[Having Anita in the Akron/Cleveland area is also a tremendous asset]
[Thanks everybody for putting on a great event. Once again, our area has shown itself to be a highly intelligent seo community.]
The panel consists of:
William McHenry, The University of Akron as the Moderator
Jim Kukral, BlogKits Affiliate Marketing For Bloggers
Susan Lowry, ATTEVO
Jeff Rorhs, Optiem
McHenry says it is not a sin to optimize your site. However, if you go beyond the rules of what an engine suggests, then you can have trouble. He talks about how the technology is still immature. He gives an example of phone company ads coming up when you search for: long distance running.
Jeff Rohrs: He says that search is the connective tissue between all marketing. You tell the engine what you are interested in. It represents a change from “mass media” to “me media”. He will discuss what search is today. He talks about how Google has less of a market share compared to what NBC had in the 1940s and 1950s. He discusses shopping.com.
He says that your cell phone will have a bar code scanner so you can scan a product and it will let you search that product online. He says that traditional, paper advertising will have codes that will allow you to interact with it.
YouTube.com: It has no revenue but sold for $1.65 billion. Google paid that much because of the audience reach.
Podzinger… it scans video and audio files, converts it to text and makes it searchable.
“Everything is Searchable”
Everything your ceo, marketing say will be searchable.
It’s all moving to “Minority Report” retinal scanning marketing.
He recommends the books:
The Long Tale
and
The Search
He also recommends Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago this December.
Jim Kukral will talk about PR.
He discusses a press release strategy he did.
He create a site:
MarkCubanpleasecallme.com
He put he press release out on prweb.com about this. It got picked up. And he was able to get his name in front of Mark Cuban. It cost him $80.
He has found that PRWeb.com is a very powerful way to get your message out.
He says that no one cares about your company. They just want to know how you are going to solve a problem. He says be an expert. Offer statistics. He says that this is really doable for small businesses.
Susan Lowry is a recovering chemical engineer. She says she is not going to talk about search. She says that catalogues get to your mailbox through microtargeting.
She says that RFID (radio frequency IDing) is a small tag that can be put on your cell phone, credit card, Best Buy Rewards card and track who you are and where you are through GIS.
She talks in detail about how all of your information is being tracked.
Some anecdotes she gives are:
People who buy Ford trucks also buy waverunners.
People who drink Sprite and watch Prowrestling are Democrats.
They open the seminar up to the group:
Q. What type of ROI can you expect on an overall internet campaign.
A. Kukral says everything is trackable. An agency should alway base everything on ROI. Rohrs says online is much better at measurement than any offline marketing. He says that the “win” is different for different clients. Don’t discount being there. He says there is a branding portion of this.
Q. How do you convince management that the money needs to be spent.
A. Rohrs says, “Jelousy”. Show them what their competitors are doing. It’s omnipresent. There is an expectation that you are going to be represented online. Your brand takes a hit if you are not there or are not helpful. It’s absolutely imperative that you are there.
Q. What’s the thought on online community.
A. Kukral - The people that are making a lot of money online have communities. Rohrs - don’t build a discussion board and expect people to just show up. He gives me some props for this blog posting. He talks about how things are being talked about and indexed in ways that you have no idea.
This was to be Paul Elliot but he wasn’t able to make it. So Jeff Pearl, the head of the eMergent paid search team is stepping in.
He is giving an overall review of key phrase research. He discusses bid management.
I lost some of his speech. I was uploading a video with Jim Kukral.
He moves to his Makeovers:
He discusses why you might want to pay for your brand if you are already ranking well. He says that it’s extremely affordable, you can guide them to a very targeted page, and you can bid on misspellings.
He made a few examples of ad copy.
He then moves on to a landing page. He suggests removing clutter, make the call to action prominent. Have a different phone number for paid search versus your other marketing.
When looking at paid search you should ask:
- what are terms that covert
- what’s the right ranking
- what’s the ad copy that converts
He discusses appending tracking codes to every paid search ad. This will enable you to track the effectiveness of every key phrase very specifically.
He touches on click fraud. He says that there is software that will detect ip addresses that are continually clicking on your ads to kick you out of the listings.
During a break today I sat down with Jim Kukral. Here he discusses a new site he’s creating:
BlogKits Affiliate Marketing For Bloggers
Check out our talk here:
He starts out with: Why Bother:
He says its cheap, huge and seo makes your site better.
He says he is going to talk mostly about SEO.
He says he is looking for:
- Is the site indexed.
- Is it Optimized
- Is it Usable
Then he’s going to cover what he’s going to do about it.
He starts with Progress Book
The first things he looks at is to see if the site is indexed.
He looks at the title, words in body, page weight and download time. He says this site will take about 47 seconds to download because of its size.
He goes on to a SEO Analysis:
The site is not fully indexed, there are unoptimized titles and meta tags, un-optimized H1 tags and links.
He discusses robots.txt files, custom 404 error page, site maps and the fact that pdf’s are not great for indexable content.
He mentions that they should look at conversion points and add contact information to all the pages.
He goes into key phrase research. He says you can use your competitors and even your own log files to find phrases to target. He mentions that most of the time your users and customers call your product something completely different than what you call it.
He discusses search engine saturation and link saturation. He wants to see how much content you have indexed compared to your competitors and how many links you have pointing to you compared to your competitors. This will give you a good idea as to where you stand.
He suggests
- optimizing all page titles
- create keyword-rich copy
- create an optimized sitemap
- implement a custom 404 error page
- implement robots.txt file
- rewrite clean urls
Then he moves on to
Maselli Construction Co., Inc.
He says he likes to keep the size of the home page of a site to under 50kb.
He says the Flash intro is causing them a lot of difficulty. This is causing them not to get indexed. They could use some more incoming links into the site. He discusses text links. These help search engines find all of your pages. They don’t have a robot.txt file.
From a usability standpoint, he discusses consistancy. Try to keep the look consistant.
He says that 90% of people he reviews don’t have custom 404 error pages, or robots.txt files.
He said he found some broken links. So you want to click through your site and make sure everything that you want to have is truly on your site.
He talks about a Unique Selling Proposition. He says that it’s important that a new visitor knows why you are different within 15 seconds.
He did some log file analysis of the site. He uses Clicktracks.com.
He discusses that you should review your stats to modify your site to increase your conversion rate. He looks at the “bounce rate” of the home page. That shows you how many people left the site right from the home page vs. people that continued on within the site.
He suggests starting with 15-20 key phrases in the beginning of your seo strategy.
He says that you should have at least 100s of incoming links into your site.
He says that if you are not asking for the sale chances are you will not get the sale. Contact information should be easily accessible from all pages.
Now he moves on to Trommer & Associates.
He says there are similar issues here.
- Large file size
- Optimize Titles
- Optimize links to describe where that link goes to
- Robots.txt files
- Have a footer navigation
- Sitemaps
He says that requiring a Shockwave player will alienate search engine spiders and any visitors that don’t have Shockwave installed.
He talks some more about have a strong conversion point, contact information should be readily available.
He mentions that there is no industry standard bounce rate of a home page. But if he had to guess it would be 30%-50% bounce rate.
Trommer had the most pages indexed in the engines.
He suggests that they ask for the sale, create h1 tags and build backlinks.
He gives links to
Clicktracks
Marketleap
WordTracker
Whois
I missed a couple more..
All-in-all, he discusses some foundation things. They are all good ideas. And many sites still need help in these areas.
We’re starting to develop a little blogger table in the back of the room. Anita just sat down next to me. She is going to be blogging about the event here:
Small Business Trends.
Anita is a powerhouse blogger in the area. If you haven’t checked out her blog be sure to do so.
This 45 minutes is where each makeover company discusses their company. I’m not going to discuss their company overviews. But I will post links to their sites. It sort of seems like a little plug for each company. It just seems a little off topic. There don’t seem to be talking about their specific web issues. They are more discussing their overall company. If they mention what they are looking to get out of the event I’ll post that below.
This is Makeover Case 1: Progress Book by Paul Chaffee the President of Software Answers, Inc. This is the page of his site talking about Progress Book: ProgressBook - Software Answers, Inc.
Paul says that they have a web-based product but they don’t know a lot about search.
Makeover Case 2 is: Maselli Constructions presented by Rick Maselli. He’s the president. This is their site:
Maselli ConstructionCo., Inc. - Home
He says he’s excited about this event because he feels his site needs a lot of work.
He mentions that he has a blog here: Level Advice. It seems like some interesting content.
He mentions that “everyone needs a website.” That statement interests me because it suggests that someone believes the opposite.
He talks about the Flash intro he has for his site. He realizes that it’s not a great idea.
He does not know how to increase traffic to his site.
He wants to know how to market and optimize his site.
Makeover Case 3 is Trommer & Associates presented by Steve Trommer, Vice-President. This is their site:
Trommer & Associates, Inc. Home Page
He mentions that all the years he has had his web site he has had one call from it. He needs global exposure. He needs his web site to get his name out more.
I wish these guys had focused more on their sites and less on their companies. I don’t blame them as this was probably what was asked of them. But possibly next year they might focus more on their web situations.
And now we’re off…
Here’s these two guys before they speak.
