Depending on where you stand, scratch that no matter where you stand you will be able to see Rand`s choice of footwear, from pretty much anywhere on the planet thanks to google earth and the glimmering sheen that blinds us all.  In all seriousnous Rand Fishkin is one of those who have learned his trade through years of exploration and experimentation that makes him stand out (ahem) from the crowd, like myself right now, he was a serial lurker of the SEO forums and has broken into the SEM world by laying solid bricks with SEOmoz.org

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4 Things That Are Getting Me Rankings, Right Now - Thu, 11 Mar 2010

Posted by Glen Allsopp

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Despite my love for SEO and my presence in the industry for almost 5 years, I have to admit that I barely followed the latest trends over the last 12 months. 95% of SEO related feeds disappeared from my Google Reader account and I stopped manually checking some of the biggest resources in this niche.

The main reason for this is that I no longer work with clients so new tactics and many advanced SEO methods didn't matter to me that much. I was also at the point where I felt I was getting overloaded with the same information or bad advice, instead of sticking with the basics and going with what I know.

Instead of reading 30+ SEO feeds per day and watching every Matt Cutts video like it was a direct message from God, I shut out all the noise and just started building websites around things I love. In the 12 months since going solo I've had more success than the previous four years and I've gained rankings for a large number of very competitive keyphrases.

I'm not suggesting that you ignore the industry and try everything yourself, as there is a lot of good information out there (especially from the likes of SEOmoz, Aaron, Sebastian, Rishi and David).

What I do suggest is that you go with what works and stick to it consistently, rather than constantly looking for magic-bullets to increase your rankings. Today I want to share four things that have been working very well for me in increasing my own rankings.

1. Get People "Googling" Your Brand

Many people may disagree that this is useful in improving your rankings, but I've seen far too many examples of this tactic working well to dismiss it. I stumbled upon this idea when I released a free eBook which received thousands of downloads, and mentioned a website of mine while mistakenly forgetting to link to it.

Because the site in question was an integral part of the guide, people started "Googling" the phrase. Within the first 30 days of launching the site there had already been 500 people searching for it in Google and landing on the domain.

The reason I say this is because this website ranked 2nd in Google for its main keyphrase very, very quickly, without the link juice to usually grant such a high ranking. The site literally had 5 links compared to the hundreds that competing websites had which were also much older.

Thinking about this logically, it makes sense that Google and other search engines would want to rank a page highly when people are searching for the brand name directly. I believe that because so many people were looking for the site and having to go to page 3 or 4 to find it, the rankings improved because Google want to show the best results to their users.

Google have said that this does play a part in the algorithm, but I was surprised at how big an effect it had. I don't recommend you do this for all sites, but if you release something or mention a product, try just mentioning the name and not linking to the site (not always, of course). Get people searching for your brand / domain directly and see what that does to your rankings.

2. Monitor Repeat Sellers on Flippa.com

I was contemplating whether or not to reveal this as it has given me some ridiculously awesome link ideas, but I try to provide as much value as I can, so here goes. If you head on over to Flippa you can find people buying and selling a lot of successful and high ranking websites.

What I've noticed is that some people are selling a lot of content websites that are ranking for great phrases very quickly and very easily. If you look hard enough you can find sites making $5,000+ per month from rankings they've achieved in just 2-3 months.

Instead of buying these sites in all cases, I've simply looked at where the backlinks are coming from and figured out how the seller is able to duplicate them so easily. I've seen sites ranking with nothing but spammy chinese blog links and other sites ranking with freely available link sources and making a lot of money.

If you have the time to look around, there are some real link gems to be found.

3. Utilise Guest Blogging in Your Niche

In 2009 I wrote more personal development related guest posts than anybody else and in return built a blog with over 6,000 subscribers. I recently sold the site for a mid five-figure fee, but still use this tactic for a number of other sites. (I know Youmoz links are nofollow, so I'm not using this as an example).

Apart from ranking number one in Google for "Guest Blogging" (;)), the tactic allowed me to rank on the first page of Google for two phrases which each get over 30,000 exact searches per month. One of which, was the phrase personal development.

I've wrote a 2,000+ word post on guest blogging over here so I'm not going repeat everything I said there, but utilising this method is very simple:

• Find the top blogs in your niche and see if they have clear opportunities for guest posting. If not, contact them. If so, contact them.
• Perform Google searches like niche "guest post" or niche "write for us" to find more sources for your content
• Once you get an opportunity, write an excellent article and send it off to the editor / site owner. I prefer to send my posts as text files with HTML inside so it's easy for them to paste into Wordpress and keeps your links intact.
• Put a non-spammy, anchor text link in the bottom of the guest post which will not only be great for rankings but also send traffic to your site
• You get links and traffic, and the site owner gets excellent, free content for their community

I have noticed a few big name SEO's abusing this already (I won't say who) so I don't know how long this tactic will remain effective, but it's working well for now and is probably hard to algorithmically block in all cases.

4. Dirty Bookmarking Links

I don't know why, but social bookmarking links (even automated ones) are helping some of my sites massively. I don't love using this tactic as it feels kind of dirty but I can't deny that it is working well.

The two instances I find it working best are:

• 1. On authority sites that have tons of links but need links with more specific anchor text
• 2. On new sites in small, fairly uncompetitive niches

Trying this for competitive phrases on sites that are either new or don't have many links doesn't seem to be doing much, but for the two examples above I'm amazed at how useful this has been.

I know this won't be for everyone and I would not recommend doing it on a high-profile client site, but definitely test it for yourself. You can buy software that automates the process or you can find people on Digitalpoint who are willing to do it for a small fee.

Now I'm going to spend the next month catching up on the major changes in the SEO industry, so if you have any recommended links, please do share them in the comments.

Glen Allsopp writes for ViperChill which is a blog about viral marketing. He helps people build websites that others naturally want to talk about.

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SEO Health Checks - Regular Housekeeping Tasks for Your Website's SEO - Wed, 10 Mar 2010

Posted by richardbaxterseo

Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimised site can lead to long term traffic success. Here are some of my tips for regular checks you should be doing to stay on top of your website to maximise your search engine performance.

General Error Checking

General errors can crop up continually with any website and left unchecked, their volume could spiral out of control. Working on improving and resolving large numbers of 404 and timeout errors on your site can help search engines minimise the bandwidth used to completely crawl your site. It’s arguable that minimising crawl errors and general accessibility issues can help get new and updated content into search engine indexes more quickly and often, a good thing for SEO!

If you want to get smart with error handling and other crawl issues, start by getting a Google Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at “Crawl errors” found via the “diagnostics” panel after you’ve verified your site:



Paying particular attention to the “Not found” and “Timed out” reports, it’s wise to test each error with a http header checker online or using a Firefox plug-in such as Live Http Headers or Http Fox. I find that drilling down into the first 100 or so errors, you tend to find a common pattern with many that lead to only a few fixes being required. I like to focus on 404 error pages that have external links first to get maximum SEO value from legacy links.

It’s important to note that sometimes, there’s more to an error report than just the URL listed in the console. I’ve found issues such as multiple redirects ending in a 404 error which is important information to brief your developers, potentially saving them a lot of diagnostics time.

As a side note, be careful how you interpret the “Restricted by robots.txt” reports. Sometimes, those URL’s aren’t directly blocked by robots.txt at all! If you’ve been scratching your head about the URLs in the report, run the http header check. Often, a URL listed in this report is part of a chain of redirects that ends or contains a URL that is blocked by robots.txt.

For extra insight, you should try the IIS SEO Toolkit or running the classic Xenu’s Link Sleuth Crawl both of which can reveal a number of additional problems. Tom wrote a nice article on Xenu and amongst his tips, setting the options to “Treat redirections as errors” is one of my favourites. As well as internal crawl error checking, a site of any size should try to avoid redirects via internal links. From time to time, using Fetch as Googlebot inside Webmaster tools or browsing your site with JavaScript and CSS disabled using Web Developer Toolbar with your user agent set to Googlebot can also reveal hidden problems.

Linking Out to 404 Errors?

Linking out to expired external URLs isn’t great for user experience, and implies perhaps that as a resource, your site is getting out of date. Consider checking your outbound external links for errors by using the “Check external links” setting in Xenu.

Canonicalisation

You spent time and effort specifying rules for canonicalized URLs across your site, but when was the last time you checked the rules you painstakingly devised are still in place? Thanks to the ever evolving nature of our websites, things change. Redirect rules can be left out of updated site releases and your canonicalization is back to square one. You should always be working towards reducing internal duplicate content as a best practice gesture, and without solely relying on the rel=”canonical” attribute.

Checking the following can quickly reveal if you could have a problem:

• www or non www redirects (choose either, but always use a 301)
• trailing slash (choose to leave out like SEOmoz, or in, like SEOgadget but don’t allow both)
• Case redirects – a 301 redirect to all lower case URLs can solve a lot of headaches or title case redirects if you want to capitalise place names like some travel sites do

“Spot checks” of Front End Code, Missing Page Titles and Duplicate Meta

Just every now and again, it’s nice to take another look at your own code. Even if you don’t find a problem that needs fixing, you might find inspiration to make an enhancement, test a new approach or bring your site up to date with SEO best practice.

One quick check I find useful is under “Diagnostics” > “HTML suggestions” in Webmaster tools:



Duplicated title tags or meta descriptions or both can reveal problems with your dynamic page templates, missed opportunities or canonicalization issues.

Site Indexation

Site indexation, or the number of pages that receive one visit or more from a search engine in a given period of time, is a powerful metric to quickly assess how many pages on your site are generating traffic.

Aside from the obvious merit in tracking site indexation over time as an SEO KPI, the metric can also reveal unintended indexing issues like leaked tracking or exit URLs on affiliate sites or huge amounts of indexed duplicate content. If the number of pages Google claims to have indexed on your site is vastly different to the site indexation numbers you’re seeing through analytics, you may have found a new problem to solve.

Indexed Development / Staging Servers

Is your staging or development server accessible from outside your office IP range? It might be worth checking that none of your development pages are cached by the major search engines. There’s nothing worse than discovering a ranking development server URL (it does happen!) with dummy products and prices in the database. You just know that customer is going to have a bad time on a development server! If you discover an issue, talk to your development team about restricting access via IP to the staging site or consider redirecting search engine bots to the correct version of your site.

Significant / Recent Changes to Server Performance

Google have put a lot of effort into helping webmasters identify site speed issues and it could make a lot of sense to keep a regular check on your performance if you’re not doing so already. There are a few useful tools out there to help you speed up your site, starting with Google’s “Site performance” reported located under “Labs” in Webmaster tools:



It’s good to check out the “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)” report found under “Diagnostics > Crawl stats” in Webmaster tools, too:



Tackling search engine accessibility issues like errors and canonicalization problems is a really important part of your SEO routine. It’s also a favourite subject of mine! What checks do you carry out regularly to manage the performance of your website? Do you have your own routine? If you manage a large site, or many large sites, what "industrial strength" tools or automated processes do you gain the most insight from?

This is a post by Richard Baxter, Founder and SEO Consultant at SEOgadget.co.uk - a niche UK SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz.

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SMX West 2010 - Man on the Street Interviews - Wed, 10 Mar 2010

Posted by jennita

Note: This post will make you smile, possibly even laugh. It won't however teach you much about SEO. You've been warned.

Last week I attended SMX West in Santa Clara, California and took a couple flip video cameras along. I thought it would be fun to do "man on the street" interviews, somewhat along the lines of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" episodes on The Tonight Show. Another great idea I had was to employ the help of Dana Lookadoo from Yo! Yo! SEO to help with the interviews. Little did I know she'd be so great at it (ok, I lie. I knew she'd do much better than I would!). She did so well in fact that our video editor, none other than my (awesome) husband Rudy Lopez, mainly only used Dana's interviews. A rockstar in the making!

Rather than keeping you from this awesome video any further... I present to you: SEOmoz "Man on Street" - A Who's Who in Search Marketing.

Thanks to all our great participants!

I also had great intentions of getting several Whiteboard Friday's with some of the speakers. Unfortunately I ended up just toting a mini whiteboard around with me all week instead. I'm sure I looked like quite the winner with my whiteboard in hand. I wonder if people think all mozzers are required to carry a whiteboard around just in case they get the urge to record a Whiteboard Friday. heh.

Thanks for watching along! I hope you had as much fun watching, as we had putting it together. Again a HUGE thanks to Dana Lookadoo and Rudy Lopez for all their help.

 

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Optimizing Search Conferences: How Differing Incentives Create Audience vs. Organizer Issues - Tue, 09 Mar 2010

Posted by randfish

WARNING: Get ready to read with this one. There aren't a ton of fun graphics or quick bullet points, but I do promise that if you read through, you'll feel much more knowledgeable about the topic, and likely get more value from organizing, speaking or attending an event.

Over the past 6 years, I've attended nearly 100 conferences on search, online marketing, startups and technology. I've given presentations or sat on panels at nearly all of them. I've organized our own SEOmoz seminars here in Seattle and in London, built panels for a variety of other conference series and sat in the audience for many hundreds of sessions. Oddly, in the past 3 months, I've had more discussions about the conference format and the optimization of the experience than I can ever recall in previous years.

I don't know whether it's me thinking about the problem more or just stumbling into conversations that center around conference strategy and business models, but like Twitter and conversion rate optimization, it's been finding its way into the nooks and crannies of every lunch, dinner, casual coffee or post-session beer.

Wow... Even Google Trends says this is a hot topic.

I consider the organizers of conferences like SMX, SES, Pubcon & many overseas events (RIMC, SMX Sydney, the SMX/SES shows in the UK & Europe, etc.) to be both good friends and good people. This blog post is in no way meant to denigrate or cast aspersions at their intents or achievements (which have been remarkable - SEO itself has gained tremendous legitimacy because of their efforts). Quite the opposite - it's meant to highlight some of the reasons why things we, as conference goers and speakers, complain about continue and why it's hard to change the status quo. I'm also going to try putting forward some ideas at the end of the post that I have seen work well and would love to see more of (or more experimentation with) in the future.

(Added late) It's important to note while reading this post that I'm sharing my perspective, opinions and experiences, so please read with SEOmoz's usual "this is an opinion piece" lens.

Competing Incentives

On one side, we have conference & event organizers. They have businesses to maintain, revenue and profits to grow and pressures from owners/investors/boards to meet certain goals. They have to please advertisers, sponsors & exhibitors, but can't do any of that without first delighting customers (those who buy tickets to the events).

On the other, we have attendees (and, to a lesser extent, speakers) who want to learn, have an enjoyable experience and get personal and professional value from the event(s). Most attendees are not paying themselves - this is a business expense they need to justify and hence, managers and C-level types hold the pursestrings.

In the subsections below, I'll try to walk through the competing incentives and goals of these two parties and why they make the conference experience so tough to perfect.

Venues, Locations & Timing

This is one of the easiest dichotomies to describe. In one corner, we have the organizers, who are optimizing on cost. In the other, we've got attendees, who want the best experience (particularly if they're traveling). Not surprisingly, every organizer wants to hold their event at the best possible time in the most optimal location. That means, at least here in the US, winter events in warm weather climates like southern California, Las Vegas, Florida and Hawaii, summer events in mild climates like the Pacific Northwest or the Bay Area and events in extreme climates like the Northeast and Midwest in Fall/Spring.

Economics dictates that supply for these optimal locations at optimal times will be low because demand is high. This also means that prices will rise accordingly. Organizers know it's hard to pass those costs on to attendees. Once a conference's price has been set for a few years, fluctuating dramatically is challenging.

What many may not realize is some of the additional, behind-the-scenes inputs. For example, conference venues like to book 12-18 months in advance (sometimes more for very large/expensive/high demand events/locations). They require down payments and guarantees, since re-booking a space if an event cancels 3 or even 6 months ahead often proves impossible. In addition, advertisers, speakers, exhibitors and conference goers themselves get accustomed to certain events at certain times in specific places. Changing an established event always carries risk.

Next time you wonder why SES has a show in Chicago in December and New York in March or why RIMC hits Reykjavik in winter, remember that costs, momentum and contracts make those very hard things to change. If we were all willing to fly to Anchorage in January, you can bet the costs would be rock bottom.

Attendance Level

This one isn't quite as clear cut. For some attendees, an intimate, small show experience is ideal. You get one-on-one time with the speakers, more opportunity for Q+A, a less stressful environment and, typically, easier times with everything from getting good food to booking hotels to scheduling meetings with other conference-goers/speakers. However...

The incentives are frequently the reverse for both speakers (who want large crowds so they can justify the travel expense and preparation time) and for organizers (who have a tough time charging enough to a small group to make up for what a larger base could bring). Organizers also want to signal that their event is "a big deal" and high attendance numbers is one of the best ways to do this.

So why not go for huge venues and trim the costs down to minimal levels I hear you ask? Good question.

The obvious answer is profit margins (and sometimes, just covering costs), but it's not the whole reason. Advertisers, sponsors, exhibitors and even speakers want to be in front of "qualified" audiences. An audience of web marketers paying $100 to go to a show is hard to pitch as a compelling and potentially lucrative base to these groups. However, if tickets are $1,800 and 5,000 people show up, every speaker and sponsor in the world wants to make their voice heard and presence known to that group. Even the big industry players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. will be willing to lose their top notch talent for a week to get in front of the audience, mingle with the crowd and network with the best and brightest.

Some attendees are also more excited by large events. They provide greater opportunities to meet a high quantity of peers and help lend credibility to the value and importance of the event. They also tend to draw big name speakers and presenters, which means a perception of greater value from the learning aspects of the conference.

Of course, this is all balanced by the availability and affordability of venues. SMX Advanced happens in Seattle and for each of the past 2 years, it's been completely sold out. The organizers could go to a larger facility, but Seattle doesn't have many that support in excess of 2,000 people without dramatically raising the costs (and likely lowering quality) and the SMX organizers may like the feel/vibe of the current audience size. It can also be a positive signal to consistently sell out a show - every SEOmoz seminar we've thrown has sold out weeks before the event and this means more early bookings, greater consistency in attendance and revenue and an easier time planning (to be fair, SEOmoz's seminars are a small fraction of the size - 150-250 attendees - of true, large conferences like Pubcon, SES, SMX or even OMS - and hence aren't particularly comparable).

Speakers

Things get more contentious and thorny around the issue of speakers. Attendees and organizers alike can agree that in a perfect world, only speakers who consistently earn top ratings and attract large followings would present. Sadly, in virtually every industry, these individuals comprise only a handful of players. Google's Matt Cutts and Avinash Kaushik are likely among them as is Danny Sullivan of Third Door and Seth Godin. However, I'm hard pressed to name many more that would attract paying audiences simply with their presence.

There's also a large group of phenomenal speakers like Greg Boser, Dave Naylor, Vanessa Fox, Jessica Bowman, Marshall Simmonds and the like who are excellent presenters, incredibly valuable to the audience, and, together with other positive signals, are likely to draw in paying attendees. This is where the trouble starts, though. These individuals didn't necessarily start out as remarkable presenters. In fact, I've personally seen speakers I'd consider "rock stars" today many years back and the same couldn't always be said of them. It takes a trial-and-error, weeding-out process to determine who's going to be great, and that means you need to try out new names and faces as an organizer.

Finally, you've got groups of new or nearly-new speakers, some of whom may be diamonds in the rough and others who may be complete duds. Organizers have little information to base this on other than their CV, a pitch form and possibly recommendations from previous events. Tragically, even great online writers/bloggers/personalities sometimes turn out to be less-than-amazing when placed in front of hot lights, a restless audience and 15 minutes of Powerpoint.

Organizers & panel leaders (those who organize individual sessions or tracks) complain to me all the time about the necessity of finding the new stars, getting those diamonds-in-the-rough enough experience to shine and providing a diversity of speakers. Many technology conferences face the constant problem of gender imbalance and I'm certainly not immune to it. Last year, between Seattle and London events SEOmoz & Distilled had less than 15% women give talks - a shameful number.

Everyone can agree that we need more truly great speakers and fewer mediocre/poor ones. But when you're trying to discover new talent, mature up-and-coming stars AND bring as many speakers into the event as possible (see the next section), it clashes with the goals of consistently excellent quality speakers and presentations.

Session Formats

This might be the toughest problem of all. More speakers = more attendees. And yes, that often holds true for even new speakers and those of low-middling quality. The reason is that speakers frequently invite clients, partners and colleagues as well as promote the event on their sites, blogs and social media accounts. If you want your event to have thousands of attendees, get 100+ speakers and they'll (hopefully) help spread the word for you.

The problem is the session formats this creates. In order to maximize numbers of speakers while fixing the event length, you move from solo presentations to panels with increasingly larger number of participants.

Some organizers argue that panels are a good thing and I'd agree in moderation. For something like an "Ask the Search Engines" panel, having a representative from both Bing & Google makes sense. For Q+A sessions in general, 3-4 panelists can help to spark discussion and even get into vigorous and valuable debates (at SMX West last week, my friend Roger Monti and I got into a nice tiff that I think helped keep the audience on its toes - and yes, it was all in good fun and good humor).

However, when it comes to learning about an individual topic in a robust, in-depth fashion, I think it's very tough to argue that having a highly talented panel of 4 or 5 speakers give 10-14 minute slide decks can compare to a single 45-50 minute session with a single great speaker who can go both broad and deep (and then take questions). The highest rated panels (from my understanding and from direct experience with the ones I've seen) are always those where a remarkable presenter has the full time to dig into their subject matter. Three weeks ago I was at OMS San Diego where Dharmesh Shah spoke on Twitter and Tim Ash presented on Conversion Rate Optimization. The difference between that and a panel approach is night and day - there's just no comparison.

But, as an organizer, if you optimize towards these highly rated sessions and kill the panels, you lose speakers which costs you reach and buzz and, likely, attendees. Happy attendees might rave about the value of the session in their reviews, but no one has the incentive to fill the seats like a speaker (even a bad one). Solving this issue might be a pipe dream.

Session Topics

What about the topic choices themselves? I hear attendees constantly complain about certain topics going missing while others get too much coverage. Organizers, meanwhile, struggle with how to fit in esoteric, but likely fascinating topics against tried-and-true (and in-demand) popular sessions.

The best thing an organizer can do is to survey their audience ahead of time and plan/prepare from that feedback. But, this is much easier said than done. Organizers don't necessarily know who's going to be at a show with enough lead time to arrange speaker schedules and build a topic plan. It's also very hard to get commitments from a large number of speakers with a shorter deadline and nearly impossible to nail down keynotes and big names without months of advance notice.

When Will Critchlow and I do the planning for the SEOmoz/Distilled seminars, we get to cheat in a lot of ways. First off, we have the email addresses of all the PRO and registered (free) members on SEOmoz, so we can survey to our heart's content ahead of time (and do). Second, we actually optimize to speakers - since we largely don't use the panel approach, we pool together a list of the speakers we've seen in the last 12 months that have wowed us and then ask them to give performances that speak to their strengths and experiences. Since we only need 10-15 speakers per event, we can personally invite a handful of top-notch folks each time. We know we're only covering a fractional amount of material (more cheating), but can get away with it since this is a niche event that doesn't need to appeal to a broad audience.

Can a larger conference use these tactics? Almost certainly not. Their audiences aren't nearly as nicely packaged ahead of time, and panels are critical to growing the number of speakers, providing the diversity, giving experience to the "diamonds-in-the-rough," addressing all the important topics of the day, etc. Conferences like Pubcon, SMX, SES and OMS would also almost certainly take a huge amount of heat if they stopped accepting pitches and simply relied on a smaller contingent of consistently excellent speakers. Advertisers, exhibitors and sponsorships would likely drop too (even though they're technically not at all tied to the editorial programming side of the equation), and these are a massive source of revenue.

Amenities

As an attendee, we probably think that things like reliable wifi, better food and comfortable seating with tables and power outlets in session rooms makes a big difference. The problem is, these don't tend to correlate with how we actually choose conferences to attend and/or return to.  I know organizers who've invested hugely in the attendee experience, only to see retention rates drop (despite the fewer numbers of tweeted/blogged complaints). When those dollars are re-invested in marketing the conference, drawing in bigger keynotes, or optimizing other aspects, the numbers get better (even when cardboard sandwiches and grade-school chairs are employed).

We, as conference goers, vote with our wallets, and we apparently don't care as much about the amenities as we make out to (personal note - please, conference organizers, don't use this knowledge against us too much; I love comfy chairs, good food and great wifi).

Press Passes & Guest Passes

Speaking of thorny issues - little in the conference world raises as much public ire as this one. For nearly every event it makes good sense to give bloggers and journalists press passes. However, when a big, expensive, popular event is thrown, these can quickly gobble into profit margins with questionable returns.

The problems are myriad - bloggers don't often deliver the extent or quality of coverage they promise and traditional journalists frequently make no promise of coverage at all (and then write nothing). Feeding and seating them alone can run into the hundreds of dollars per day (trust me, you don't want to know what a trade venue will charge for a cup of coffee or a bag of Cheetos). And, as savvy organizers know, some (possibly even many or most) bloggers would pay to attend the event if their press pass request was rejected. You don't want to anger this vocal minority, but you also can't afford to be taken advantage of.

For sold out events, it gets even harder. Longtime "friends" and traditional receivers of press passes may need to be sacrificed to make room for paying attendees, especially if the event relies on those last 1-200 seats for the majority of the profit margin.

Organizers know they need to be careful to be generous, but discerning, or risk becoming known for "giving free access to anyone who can set up Wordpress." They also want to try to give newcomers to the blogging/coverage scene a chance to make an impact, while being mindful of abuse and sensitive to the dangers of angering influencers. It's a tough tightrope to walk and one that press pass requesters should be more sensitive to (I'm speaking from personal experience on this one, and know that we certainly owe some apologies for past requests and perceived slights).

Optimizing the Conference Experience

Now that we're through some of the reasons events are so hard to get right, I'll try to provide some recommendations for every participant in the process. This is personal opinion, and unlike SEO, it's not based on thousands of hours of experience, but probably just a few hundred and my own observations. Still, I hope it's valuable, or, at the least, worth considering.

Advice & Experiments for Organizers

• If possible, try to shave panels down to more reasonable sizes. Both speakers and attendees will appreciate it, and those nasty timing issues that can wreck schedules and hurt moderators will get better, too.
  
• Great networking events should be built into more conferences. Many attendees say that the most value they get is from the networking outside the sessions (which, to my mind means the sessions need help, but that's another matter).
• This also speaks to the value of providing great areas to network during the event. Quiet areas with couches, tables, drinks and wifi can make for very happy conference goers (note: for some reason, putting these in/around the trade booths never seems to work very while, though perhaps I just haven't seen an optimal configuration).
• Select speakers more carefully. Yes, it's hard work, but it's worthwhile. And consider optimizing topics to speakers rather than the other way around - if you know that a particular individual can give an amazing experience to attendees, block off 45 minutes, email and offer to pick up a flight and/or hotel. I've been consistently shocked by who will say yes (and then feel so guilty/thankful about having their expenses covered that they'll put in twice the effort preparing and promoting) .
• Be harsh on returning speakers if their last presentation wasn't up to standards. I understand having some new blood every time, but if someone under-delivered, you need to axe them, or make it clear that the next one needs to make the audience stand up and cheer.
• Likewise, bring back great speakers more often, but make them craft new content. In my experience, great speakers seem to do well no matter the topic (so long as they have some experience/relevance to it) far more so than experienced/talented professionals correlate with great presentations on those topic.
• Try playing with venues. OMS this year moved to a new location that was 10X better than their previous spot, and my understanding is that the cost was lower, too (SEMpdx's Searchfest also had a new location in downtown Portland this year that was fantastic, though I don't know the cost differential). When you find venues that will be accommodating, magic happens because your cost structure suddenly becomes less of a burden and more of an opportunity to do creative, interesting things attendees will remember.
• Big one - don't let the room sizes dwarf the audience sizes. I was just at an event where the room could hold 1,500 people but only 200 were in the session. It feels to everyone - speakers, organizers, attendees -  like there's no energy or excitement. In comparison, I was at an event a few weeks back where the room could only hold 150 and 170 squeezed in. The air felt electric and every presentation, question and tip felt alive. Optimize this one carefully because it makes a huge difference.
• Make new speakers jump through a few hoops to sell you on being installed on a panel. An impressive CV, a good blog and a high ranking title do not correlate with great presentations, but the ability to make a compelling web video (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) on the topic does.

Advice & Experiments for Attendees

• If you love an event, a speaker or a session, sing it from the rooftops. Tweet, blog, write reviews, tell friends and invite colleagues next time. So many of the incentive problems described above happen because as attendees, we don't do the marketing or give the feedback we could and should.
• Don't tolerate low quality speakers/presentations, but also don't make it public. Tweeting nasty remarks about a speaker while they're on a panel shouldn't be any more acceptable than booing or throwing fruit. Make your voice heard to the organizers afterward - it will have a real impact (and if it doesn't, don't come back).
• You get out what you put in. Come with an open mind, a stack of business cards, openness to new ideas and a slough of great questions. Introduce yourself, don't be shy and make the most of networking opportunities; they often end up producing the most memorable value.
• Be the change you want to see - make sure to let organizers and speakers know what you liked and didn't via email and feedback forms. This includes venue/amenities/location/timing. None of us are clairvoyant (though Google's working on something, I hear).

Advice & Experiments for Budget Authorizers

• Give your employees freedom to choose their own events. Great people will choose wisely, and that's who you want to keep anyway.
• Let them stretch their budgets and time - at SEOmoz, we fix number of dollars and let our people do the rest. If they want to spend it all on one big trip to a conference in Fiji, go for it. If they'd prefer to optimize for multiple events closer to home, that's great, too. You'll often find employees are much more accountable if they know their budget really belongs to them.
• Ask attendees to record and share their experiences. Internal docs or wikis or a 20 minute PPT during a brown bag lunch from employees who attend events goes a long way. It will force them to take some notes and provide some actionable value back to the rest of the company and it lets the employee be the star - the one who's been somewhere and learned something no one else knows.

Advice & Experiments for Speakers

• Be empathetic - imagine yourself in the audience or better yet, remember yourself in the audience in the last session or at the last conference. What impressed you? Do that. What sucked? Avoid that.
• Go advanced - I have almost never been asked to go more basic at a search marketing event, no matter how adavanced my presentation or content gets. My takeaway is either that everything I do is way too beginner level or that audiences just love more "down-the-rabbit-hole" material. If you're on the fence, lean advanced.
• Don't pitch or present if you can't kick butt. You owe it to the audience, to the organizers and, for goodness sake, to yourself, to do an amazing job every time you're up speaking. If you're not funny or charismatic, don't sweat it - let the material do the talking.
• Fewer bullet points, less text, less time talking about each slide and less.
• More images, more screenshots, more callouts (text boxes with arrows to important stuff on a slide/screenshot), more stories and more real life examples.
• Don't ask for a business card to send someone a copy of your slide deck. Make it available online at a URL everyone can access. If your material is good enough, you'll get plenty of warm leads.
• Prepare. I'm a busy guy - no, seriously, I mean really busy - and I still take hours putting together high quality decks for even small conferences and 12 minutes presentations in half-full rooms. If you don't have the time to set aside and do great work on a presentation, you better either be incredibly naturally gifted on stage or have a team that makes great decks for you. If you can't do any of these, don't present.
• Remember you are why the event happens, you're why everyone is there, and you have a massive responsibility to deliver something that will add value for the audience. Just one or two actionable tips can tilt the balance, but don't settle for that. Do better than anyone would think possible and I promise the rewards will be tremendous. This industry is still craving excellence from its presenters and you have that chance - don't waste it.
• Experiment with taking questions in the middle of your talk, particularly if you're going longer than 20 minutes (which, sadly, is quite rare). It brings a liveliness and level of engagement that's tough to match with a purely "I'm going to talk at you" presentation.

Your Thoughts

I don't mean to be forward, but I suspect a lot of organizers, speakers and attendees in the search marketing conference space will check out this post. Please, please share your thoughts and feedback below, with one caveat - we like to keep this blog TAGFEE, so no harsh insults or personal attacks. That's what YouTube comments are for :-)

p.s. I'm just back from Searchfest in Portland (which was a terrific event that continues to get better every year). I was originally asked to give a 20 minute presentation on SEOmoz's toolset, but decided I couldn't be quite that self promotional and created a deck that covers a wider range. I saw folks giving my co-presenter, Enquisite's Richard Zwicky, a hard time over Twitter for talking all about Enquisite's software, but in fact, that's what we were asked to do and I was the one who went off-focus (so if anything, you should blame me). You can check out my slide deck here -  SEO Problems and the Tool to Solve Them. Hope you enjoy and sorry about the weird formatting; Scribd didn't import PPTx very well this time.

p.p.s. Please excuse my lack of links to appropriate sites/pages/people and probably spelling errors (drove back from Portland tonight and still not over my sinus infection). Jen, if you have time early tomorrow, maybe you can help add those in? :-)

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Targeting Multiple Keywords vs. Singular Keyword Focus - Mon, 08 Mar 2010

Posted by randfish

Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There's a natural conflict that creates the issue - the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.

To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:

1. How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
2. How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?

When you answer the first question, you'll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent." Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below).

NOTE: This data is from averages via AOL's data release in 2007. New numbers have not been forthcoming from any of the engines or third-party studies.

For the second question, you need to know something about the competition levels. In a scenario where every shred of keyword usage matters a great deal, from the anchor text focus to the keyword being employed at the very start of the title tag, breaking up keyword targeting to multiple pages can make a great deal of sense. If you're deep into research on this topic, you can do something like the image below, where I've taken stats and metrics for all of the top 25 ranking pages for the query "broadway tickets" on Google.com and run analysis:

NOTE: data in this graph via Open Site Explorer's Backlink Analysis

If a keyword is highly competitive, I suggest single page targeting. This is not only because you can maximize on-page optimization, but also because it means that internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target term/phrase. It's also likely that you'll be competing against pages that are more highly targeted on that keyword phrase and could lose out if you don't have that singular, pinpoint focus.

I wrote another post on a similar topic highlighting how to format titles, meta descriptions and keyword usage on pages that aim for multi-keyword targeting that may also be of help.

Look forward to your thoughts on the topic.

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If you can not read the posts above, then here is the easy link to SEOmoz

Rand on Twitter (@randfish)

randfish: @jennita @joannalord - have a working lunch w/ @bhendrickson on DA/PA stuff, but happy to invite. Also, shouldn't we do this over email? :-) - Thu, 11 Mar 2010
randfish: @jennita @joannalord - have a working lunch w/ @bhendrickson on DA/PA stuff, but happy to invite. Also, shouldn't we do this over email? :-)

randfish: Whoa... @jennita - we just simul-retweeted. Scary. - Thu, 11 Mar 2010
randfish: Whoa... @jennita - we just simul-retweeted. Scary.

randfish: RT @JoannaLord Nice summary of @SEOmoz?s Free API ... you dev heads will like this one :) http://bit.ly/bBFz0Z - Thu, 11 Mar 2010
randfish: RT @JoannaLord Nice summary of @SEOmoz?s Free API ... you dev heads will like this one :) http://bit.ly/bBFz0Z

randfish: #SMX West "Man on the Street" Interviews http://bit.ly/cX2ci3 from @lookadoo & @jennita is hilarious - Wed, 10 Mar 2010
randfish: #SMX West "Man on the Street" Interviews http://bit.ly/cX2ci3 from @lookadoo & @jennita is hilarious

randfish: Speaking of conferences; Here's what a great presentation looks like - "Twitter Newbie to Ninja" http://bit.ly/dharmeshoms (via @dharmesh) - Wed, 10 Mar 2010
randfish: Speaking of conferences; Here's what a great presentation looks like - "Twitter Newbie to Ninja" http://bit.ly/dharmeshoms (via @dharmesh)