Session Description: This session is a quick moving brain dump of how to use the most advanced powerful tools to help you with SEO. Expect to learn how you can walk out and use several SEO tools to grow revenues today.  The speaker was:

• Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive (Twitter @wilreynolds)

I’d never previously had the chance to hear Wil speak, despite meeting him a few times.  It always seemed poorly matched up against other sessions that were more relevant to me as an affiliate manager.  This time I made sure to make it to Wil’s session, and I was NOT disappointed.  He’s an SEO genius and did, in fact, give us tools that I used TODAY!

Bullet Point Review!

• Tool: Google Insights
• Tool: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (Formerly MSN adCenter Add-in for Excel)
• Watch your bounce rates, because even if keywords rank this is a problem.
• Always check Google Trends for the keywords.
• Evaluate bounce rates daily for each keywords (this catches problems quickly)
  • SEER did this for a client and caught a page 1 ranked keyword with a bounce rate sometimes as high as 80%)
  • Home page was ranked for the product search instead of a product page.
• Ranking is a big distraction.
• If you are analyzing search engine performance by where you rank you would never have caught the issue – analyze SEO by more than just rankings.
• Tool: Microsoft adCenter Labs Audience Intelligence – remember to search for singular keywords and plurals.
• Affiliates need to know research vs. commercial queries to help convert traffic.
• Marketers need to know what kind of message to put in front of people when searching.
• Plural tends to convert much better, but is not a hard & fast rule.
• Know the flaws before you use any tool so you know how far to trust the data.
• Yahoo Keyword Suggest is better than Google’s because it’s a general phrase match and not a character match.
• A 40 to 60 ratio isn’t enough to suggest a strong patter – go for closer to 30 to 70.
• Look for the queries highly skewed to one side or the other (commercial v. noncommercial) & look for high degrees of confidence from the engines.
• Test against your own data set on keywords that are currently ranking well before using the tool so you knoe how far to trust the data.
• You have to look at things through a marketing lens and not just take the word of the tool’s data.
• Affiliates need to take advantage of hot keywords because they can move much faster than larger corporations.
• Major competitive advantage: big companies move slow.  Their inability to act for mid/long tail/hot keywords = opportunities for you.
• Don’t look back too far because trends rapidly change.  Look at more current data sets, around 30 days old at most.
• Check out the Rising Searches area towards the bottom in Google Insights to see what trends are on the rise.
• Don’t go back more than a year data-wise, unless you’re looking for seasonal trends.
• How is a product getting hot?  How do you rank for it?
  • Try moving it up one level in the hierarchy of the site – possibly link from homepage in a hot product section.
• Top 200 products no more than 2 clicks from home page.
• Suits = slow = opportunity for you
• Google’s algorithm seems to be favoring large brands more and more; you’ve got to find ways to compete.  Lots of ideas at blogstorm.co.uk
• Link building is about exposure to stimuli.
• You can’t have all the ideas – you need a Spark.  Put yourself in a position to have great ideas.
  • Install Greasemonkey script in Firefox.
  • Install Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey
  • It’s about being exposed to things that will trigger your brain to a link building opportunity.
• Tool: Google Trends Hot Trends
• Paid Tool: SEOmoz Labs – has a graphical representation of links.
• Put plug-ins and stuff at the bottom of the HTML code in case they hang up loading so they don’t stop everything else from loading.
• Wikipedia links help.
• Paid Tool: Hub Finder from SEO Book
• Tool: SeoQuake
• Seed Keywords allows you to find scenarios if you’re having an interal battle over which keywords would work best.
• Google Universal Search’s thumbnail pictures will definitely start to influence clicks in search.

Questions were really peppered in throughout the presentation, and Wil didn’t get to all his slides but promised they’d be made available and any links would be shared through Twitter if asked.  It was a terrific session and I learned a ton that I’m ready to go back and start using now! For your benefit, here’s the presentation:

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I gave the Cribbed Content feature a rest for awhile because, admittedly, I wasn’t really keeping up with much around me.  I’ve put myself into a little corner of existence and did what I had to do.  I’ve got to say, on a personal note, that being continually employed for the last five years and then having a lull in work for three weeks waiting for some things to fall into place has been a bit difficult to handle.  I’m back on track now, back to keeping tabs on what’s going on around me, back to our weekly Affiliate Marketing Fanatics podcast on GeekCast.fm, and ready to kick some serious booty!  I’ve seen some cool stuff that I’m compelled to share!

• Link Cloaking, What is it? – Scott Jangro addresses the ways you can cloak affiliate links.  Also see where I discussed PHP redirects.
• The only coding I really know well is HTML, and I was passed this great article on 10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know through StumbleUpon.  I’m definitely going to be putting some of these into immediate use!
• Did you see the ShareASale Photo Booth at Affiliate Summit West 2009?  I don’t think I did… but that’s okay, because they’re sharing the photos online and I don’t need more goofy photos of myself on the net.  Go check them out and rate them!  And if you’re disappointed you missed it, don’t worry… they plan on bringing it back for Affiliate Summit East this summer in New York!
• A new conference for affiliates, Affiliate Convention, is taking place next month.  I won’t be able to attend, but PMG will be represented as Heather Paulson will be speaking about super affiliate marketing techniques.
• There’s been a lot of rallying together lately with the tax nexus issues in several states affecting affiliate marketers.  Ed Byerly from one fledgling organization Affilaite Trust posted his thoughts on the surge of affiliate organizations attempting to unify a rather rag-tag group of people who make up this industry.
• For those email marketers out there, don’t worry I haven’t turned my back on you!  Check out this cool free tool to make sure your reverse DNS is set up right!

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With my thoughts on my own slacking for this blog and having been researching a lot of blogs lately for work, I find myself wondering when it’s time to declare a blog “dead”.  I know that I’m no Chris Brogan, delivering quality posts twice daily, but I try to check in at least once a week, even if it is just a Cribbed Content post sharing some cool stuff I read that week.

Can you officially consider a blog dead if the author hasn’t posted since last month?  Two months?  Three?

Wikipedia defines Blog as such:

A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log“) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

So here’s my theory on when a blog can be declared dead.  If it’s a personal blog, there’s more forgiveness for not posting all the time.  I’ve been blogging with friends on platforms like LiveJournal and MySpace for years now and know several people that only bother to blog when something major occurs in their life, like moving, new relationships, etc.  While I would like for some more distant friends to blog more often with how they’re doing since it’s how I keep in touch with some people, I can understand that blogging just isn’t as high priority.

But, if you’re blogging for “business purposes” – i.e. you’re purposefully attempting to generate traffic and develop a community or readership – I feel that if the author doesn’t at least pop in once a month then they’ve given up.  Blog readers who are consuming professional content are looking for GOOD content, and consistency with that content.  So if you fall off the map for more than 30 days, you can kiss some readers goodbye.  One of the key aspects of branding is to consistently remind people you exist, and if you fall off the radar your brand goes out of sight, out of mind.

Case in point – on another website that I run, I used to run the site as a static, HTML coded website.  Because of the coding issue, it was a pain to bother updating, and I didn’t push to update it as often as I should have.  Once I made the decision to move it over to a WordPress hosted blog and run it that way, I found that a lot of my former loyal visitors had written the site off as dormant, and had to work at getting them back in with more constant updates and new content, luckily not hard with the WordPress format.

So am I totally off base with this?  What system do you use when trying to clean out your RSS reader?

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