Today’s final track on linking included some of the brightest brains we know today, Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, Nathan Buggia from MSN, Matt Cutts from Google, Pryank Garg from Yahoo!, Peter Linsley from ASK, Todd Malicoat & Rae Hoffman representing the SEM’s.

There were several discussions about how to preserve your link juice when you move a domain, re-design etc., The simple solution as was mentioned is to make sure your 301 redirects are in place.  Also, if you have a large site, you should move and re-direct in small chunks to determine the loss, or stability of your link equity.

Regarding outbound links, the panels comments somewhat puzzled me, that outbound links can affect your rankings? Say what?  Yes, that’s what I heard, but here is the qualifier.  If you link out to lots & lots of “bad neighborhood” sites, they pretty much said this can affect your link equity.  Obviously this is not happening all the time, however I did not know this.  So the point is just be careful right? Don’t start giving people your hard earned link juice if they are not worthy, especially if you are doing this thinking it will drive you traffic, or PR.  It won’t help your PR, it can hurt it (if you abuse it), you may get traffic, but the wrong traffic.  Nuff said!

Ty and I are live from the main hall A1, here in Santa Clara, California, with a panel of Danny Sullivan (CEO , Bruce Clay (CEO Bruce Clay International), Jill Whalen (CEO Higherrankings.com), Todd Friersen (VP Google Technologies), Greg Boser (SEO Consultant) and Stephan Spencer (President NetConcepts.com).  Here are the questions and the comments from the panel.

1. When desgining a website - use iframes or ajax?  ANSWER: Cloke, have a workaround.  Ajax is good for cleaning your toilet, not for SEO.

2. What is your favorite keyword research tool? ANSWER:  Jill - Keyword discovery  Bruce - Bruce’s own tools  Greg - Keyword discovery  Todd-Firefox tools?  Everyone has thier own tools, use what works for you…

Bruce says analytics tools will be even more critical for future.. (Duh)     www.Inquisite.com  tools? www.greasemonkey.com  www.touchgraph.com for wow factor.

3. Optimum words in title tag? H1 Tag?  COMMENTS: H1 tag still is important.  Very useful, synergistic. Increase chances for crawabilty.

Title tag…Jill says fit 3 keyword phrases in title tag.  Greg says do not put commas in TT.  Jill says you can make TT longer than 90-100 characters??

Bruce says average 7 words in TT.  Just make TT compelling.

4. Paid links - Jill says do it “underground”.  Bruce does not buy paid links for clients at all.  Todd says he pays for links, but is cautious.  Just disclose to clients.  Donation pages? Is this considered a pauid link? No.  To compete, you may have to buy links, until all SE’s apply universal rule, you may have to be discreet in buying links.  Matt Cutts not keen on “sponsored” ads in blogs.  If your only looking at paid links for PR ONLY, you are possibly a target.  Bruce says, “taste great less filling”  ??  We are off topic!!!! 

5. Keywords in URLS? Underscores? Hyphens?  Dont use underscores.  Boser says keyword in domain in good.  No HYPHENS…Cutts says underscores will soon be an indentifier.  Testing showed keywords in URL did increase rankings…Keywords in domain will help, but not make you number one..!!  If url is working, dont change!

Boser is a Cloaker says Corey!!  I think he is right, kinda fishy??

6. Worry about scrapers? Dupe content? RSS feed will help, determine as originator.  Bruce HATES scrapers.  Dupe content is no longer a penalty.

7. Domain age important for ranking? Parked domain? Yes. (duh)  Register Domain name for 10 years helps.

8. Top 10 tips! From panel - Jill-sign up for HR newsletter.. Bruce-Data, competive analysis, apply inteeligence.  Greg-Dont get overwheled with data. Prioritze.  Todd-Get IT guys in the loop, dont pass on “juice” to others by doing a no-follow.  Make buddys with IT guys.

DONE!

Obviously there was lots more, just can’t type that fast, and Matt Cutts was sitting in the back! 

Tim has a 3:00 meeting with Bruce Clay who is going to review at least one of Tim’s sites, perhaps he can post his meeting notes?  —– Stay tuned! http://www.bruceclay.com/web_analytics.htm

At SMX - Day 2 - , Ty and I were reminded of the importance of testing site content and it’s importance. (It is easy to forget some of these elements).  Multivariate testing was stressed big time on day 2, to learn all you can about your audience and what combinations of site copy and images generate the most customer conversions, which is the bottom line.

You know about this free tool, we just forget sometimes to utilize it in our site analysis’.  www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Repeated over and over at SMX is that Blended Results are the hot new trend (trend isn’t the right word, more like Tsunami) with serious staying power and looks like it will be changing, enhancing universal search dramatically (from vertical search to user intent results) for the better.  Among some of the relationship ‘faucets’ that are going to personalize traditional search results, are  must for IM’s to dial into advantage of Blended Results now are:

• Use of Video (images - with well thought out captions/keywords, news, blogging, etc.).  At SMX, they shared these astounding statistics - “3 out of 5 in the U.S. consume online videos every month.  Video category reaches monthly 111 million users generating 6 billion page views!”
• Notice this quote from the USAToday February 27, 2008, section 8B, on “Veoh” (www.veoh.com );

     The average Internet browser today [in mid-2008] watches about 5 minutes of Internet video per day.  That’s projected to jump to 45 minutes a day by 2011.

To be successful, these are recommendations to separate yourself from the casual YouTube video postings.

1. Use high-resolution video. [remember: limit video to under 1 minute.  If have more to say, create other video's.  Also, add some custom Java applet button to the end your 1 minute video to "click for more information", as a suggestion]
2. High quality audio or professional voice over. (if the customer can’t easily hear clearly, they won’t understand, and won’t be motivated to act)
3. Add your URL or logo as a watermark for branding the media’s source
4. Don’t conclude the presentation without a clear, motivating, call to action for the consumer. [This is critical for those of us that are doing a lot of Local Search services for clients, this will create tremendous viral marketing buzz as the clients are talking about how 'cool' their ads are and how they have helped increase their business.]

Blended results are obviously here to stay and we need to begin using these avenues to enrich the search results for our clients.  Yahoo’s new OSP that Ty commented on being released this week publicly for the first time is evidence of that. Here is another image that will help explain that this search result is actually a “mini website” and obviously will get preferential attention:

More to come on this subject, for sure.  SMX did make it crystal clear that this is just taking off (especially heavy use of video), and based on users sophistication will move forward as Blended Results really reorganize and truly revolutionize, SE page results.

To be helpful, check out some of these other video providers / portals:

• www.tubemogul.com
• www.videojug.com

Coming out of this topic today at SMX, it was apparent that SMM, or “Social Media Marketing” is shaping the SEO landscape, and should absolutely become a factor in your marketing plan. Getting your content or newsworthy items in the major social media sites will not only create a buzz about your product or site, but can contribute to valuable links, critical to any site owners link building strategy campaign.

It was mentioned today that in the past year, traffic to social media sites have increased 668%!!! Think about that, 668%!!! How then can you morph this into an SEO program? Well, there were several things, but take note of some points that were of interest:

• Subscribe to news/blog feeds in your cyber community, business or field
• Set up a feeburner account
• Use only one IP address when voting on SMM sites
• Take time to jump into Digg, Twitter, Redit, Stumble upon, Technorati, Delicious etc..
• Find out best time to post/vote on Digg (there are sites that have determined this already)
• Load your blog with wordpress plugins
• Create & promote viral content

There is much more on this topic…again, stay tuned!

Ty

In short, this is part of the new “Blended Results” revolution. I attended a track today at SMX on video, images, and blended results, which emphasized how critical it will be in the coming year to saturate the golden triangle (Based on algorithmic calculations).

What exactly is the golden triangle, and how do you get there?

The Golden triangle as explained is a new term attached to getting results in the top positions of the SERP but with a twist. What’s the twist?

Video, Images, Blogs!

Blended search has drastically changed the landscape of how companies and search marketers will want to proceed with their marketing efforts. Eye tracking studies have recently shown tremendous changes in how people react to blended search.

In fact, one speaker today showed that users scanning patterns changed big time when an image was shown in the results page, their eyes immediately dropped to the image!

You see, search engines (MSN is actually best) are now including blog articles, news items, images, and videos in the SERP’s, so if you want to be in the Golden triangle today, you NEED to start focusing on getting your blog articles, images, news or videos indexed so as to hopefully have a dominating appearance in this area.

Just to give you an idea of this new type of search results, notice what Google now includes in what’s called “Universal Search.”

They consider and blend results from news, videos, images, local, maps, and book search engines to appear in the SERP.

Here are some quick tips to initiate a blended search campaign:

• Start a blog/posting

• Make sure your images have alt tags with the word “picture” at the end, such as “Weller WES51 Picture”

• Eliminate parameters in images

• Submit press releases

How do you submit videos? They brought out some good pointers below.

For Videos, consider the following:

1. Keyword research, story boarding, seek script/voice talent
2. Video production, raw footage voiceover
3. Optimize the video for web delivery, encode the video
4. Surround the video with HTML
5. Create media RSS (XML) Create video sitemap
6. Submit Video, track video views

Why so much emphasis on video?? Check this out.

• 3 out of 5 users in the U.S. view online videos each month, and climbing.

• 111 million unique users monthly

• 6 billion pageviews monthly

Stay tuned for the top ten list of tricks for blended search. Im out of blogging breath!

I wish I had the blogging speed of my colleague over at Hippo Internet Marketing….

[Addendum by Tim]: As Blended Search rapidly moves in upon us, some at SMX did question whether the “Golden Triangle” could become antiquated in the future as people viewing SERP’s begin looking for (and expecting) more universal and dynamic results.  Many advertisers and marketers are already wondering if the “Golden Triangle” eye scanning pattern will be changing dramatically. 

What does this potentially mean?  1) If your site is ranked on the first page for your keywords and blended search results are at the bottom of the page, you might actually lose traffic.  At the same time, if you are at the bottom of the page and the blended search results are close to (or next to you) you might see a boost in traffic simply because of the visual association.  Interesting!   2) For those on top of vertical search, we are in a unique position to be ahead of the game.  With the use of video, blog or press releases, etc., this can help to get ranked extremely well, even if not at the top of SERP’s. If you haven’t been keeping up with vertical search, it’s time to start checking it out.  

Enquire Research has a lot of information on eye-tracking, including some nice whitepapers that are more extensive on this fascinating subject.  I look forward to learning more about this.  Here is a link to their site to make it easy for you to find, let us know what you think.

http://www.enquiroresearch.com/eye-tracking-examples.aspx

For the first time in public, Tim and I heard the announcement today from Amit Kumar, director of product management at Yahoo search.  I shot the whole announcement in video and will post this later.  But for now here is the short list of this huge announcement and the improvements:

• Listings will be vastly enhanced, site owners will have much more control with a new user gallery, buttons, functionality, etc.
• You can provide structural data such as user reviews and ratings, "buy this", address, prices of product, send links to a friend, to a phone, categorize listings with "smart answers" to increase relevance.
• Add video, company logo, images, music and more.
• "favicon" with one simple uninterrupted click
• Listings can function as a "mini site" for search engine results in organic listings, very powerful

If you look at the picture I took today, you can see what I mean from the bullet points.  More to come later!!

Ty

It appears that Google is coming down a tad hard on those that are using redirect and vanity URL’s as display URL’s. They don’t seem to be playin’ either, they made mention that this will be strictly enforced in about 5 weeks, starting April 1st, 2008. Below is an excerpt of their post and a direct link if you want to read it.

An update to display URL policy

“In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st. “

Well, it’s just a few days away, and I can hardly wait. My brother (Tim) and I will be attending Search Marketing Expo West in Santa Clara California. Today I spent time reviewing the sessions I want to attend, so many good ones though!! I want to spend much of my time in sessions related to online videos, local search, and pay per click tips and tricks.

I will try my best to keep up on the blogging, I have several friends that want to hear all the current trends. A good friend and colleague Corey Creed at Hippo Internet Marketing wants me to key in on the latest talk of Web 3.0, and the secret search engine!

Are there any topics you would like for me to take special note of? Please let me know!