Please know that these notes are in raw format. Some may not make sense to you, but they do to me. This is a recap of last weeks events.
Keynote Conversation
with Steve Berkowitz, CEO and Director of Ask Jeeves
Has reduced ads with acquisition
Working on new innovative products
Not just a Q&A engine
Name is probably changing
Working on evolving products
The butler is safe for now (not going away)
Smilie Central is an Ask site
Toolbar privacy important. No spyware or adware
Sponsored search program on the 15th of August
Likes Google relationship / partnerships OK
Increased innovation for 2006 / a better search and my jeeves
If you work for Ask you work with 44 different companies and you can move around in any of them.
RSS, Blogs & Search Marketing
-Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, – Searching for Profit
No comments? Do you really have a blog then?
July 05 – 60 million blogs world wide
55% are still alive after 3 months
3% Updated weekly
Content is still king
Blogs are not the killer app, RSS is.
Uses for RSS:
affiliate communication
syndicate content
product announcements
security alerts
product uses and tips/articles
customer communications
press room
career / job opportunities
Write content so feed is meaningful
Keyword titles
500% more click though than emails
-Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
RSS is better than email in your inbox, unspammable
Full text feeds are best
Watch for other stealing content
Podcast is an mp3 in RSS
Yahoo/Gator/MSN Buttons for one click subscribing
Auto discovery tag a must
You can create custom feeds
Feedburner uses 302 redirects to get back to your site
Keep feeds on your own site
-Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO PR
Blogs are outdated because they are now mainstream
11 million in US
“opinion leaders” are typically male, under 30, broadband connection, savvy
51% of journalists read blogs
They find news not found elsewhere
Blogs convey personality and basis
Blogs need to be different, not just re-transmitted info, unique content.
Needs to be something good enough to pass on to a friend
Posts should be no more than 300 words if it’s a blog article
-Nan Dawkings, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Meet the Blog & Feed Search Engines
BlogLines Findory, Moreover Feedster Technorati
-Mark Fletcher, Vice President and General Manager, BlogLines at Ask Jeeves
600 Million blog articles, 1.4 million blog feeds
2-3 million blog articles a day
improving search with tehoma/ask
-Greg Linden, Founder and CEO, Findory
Learns and adapts to you to find you content
Learns over a short period of time, not years
-Scott Rafer, President and CEO, Feedster
Feed ads / Make money
Search engine w/ ad network
Deal w/AOL – blog search
Right blog, right message, right target
-David Sifry, Founder & CEO, Technorati
Blogosphere doubles every three months
80,000 every day, one a second
China is big on blogs
13% of people update weekly or more often
10.4 posts a second
Median time under 5 minutes
1/3 tag or categorize posts
Number of new tags has increased substantially
Cool TAG Quicktime video shown
-Jim Pitkow, CEO, Movreover
(different kind of feed engine)
Public Relations & Reputation Management
-Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO PR
Yahoo news averages 24.9 million unique visitors a month.
Google averages 7.2 Million
Topix 2 million
Most PR people can’t pitch to computer algorithms
Yahoo News has a bigger audience than MSNBC, CNN or NY TImes
Pages should be optimized for humans first
Tracking URLs are good to see where people are coming from
News quality counts. Don’t post on stupid stuff.
Ethical = Effective
-Nan Dawkings, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Journalists are overwhelmed
200 non-spam emails a day
30 phone messages
20 press releases by mail
50% of journalists follow blogs
Voters (in last election) trusted blogs over talk radio
Clients need to respond to bad press ASAP and blogs are a good way to do that
Most sites need more than one feed
Audio/Video are a plus
-Rob Key, President & CEO, Conversion
Monitor with PubSub or Tehnorati to see who’s talking about you
Fair use comes into play
75% of people don’t go past search result page one
Look at search results +/-
Create micro sites?
Diversify
Stay transparent, don’t hide who you are if creating microsites
add new content or whitepapers to existing site to improve rankings
don’t dominate more than the top 10
police your brand
Writing for Search Engines
-Heather Lloyd-Martin, Director of Search Strategies, WebSourced, Inc.
Focus on 2-3 keywords a page
250 words a page
Title = headline. No commas or | – Like a book title
50-75 characters with spaces
Think Clickable – no keywords
headlines and sublines
zappos.com and treo 600 have good links on products
Update/Create
FAQ
How To’s
-Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings
Use wordtracker
Homepage generic, inner pages specific
Keyword content is 1/3 of SEO
Alt text unread in non-clickable images
It’s not about sprinkling keywords in
who what where
FAQ about what? Specific
Be descriptive in links. Not our services
Use longer phrases than one word
Not our office, our Minnesota office
Avoid ing or s unless you want to rank for them
Use variants if you wish
Don’t use two spellings on one page. e-mail and email
Keywords don’t need to be on the top of the page.
