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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Unfortunately I was sick the beginning part of the week, so I had a lot of stuff to catch up on, but I also haven’t had much time to look around the web.  I spent yesterday at the LinkShare Symposium West 2009 in San Francisco, and I’ll give you all a quick update soon.  In the meantime, here’s some things you may have missed while you were welcoming in President Obama on Tuesday…

• Still confused about how to use WordPress for your blog?  Last Saturday they turned on WordPress.tv with a ton of video tutorials that should help you learn all there is to know about WordPress.
• There are recaps up on the Affiliate Summit Blog of some of the sessions I didn’t attend.  Social Media Dude Michael Buechele did a good job getting good coverage:
  • Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session Recap – The Black Ink Session
  • Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session Recap – Advertising on Facebook
• I don’t read SEO stuff nearly as much as I probably should but there’s an intriguing piece from seoMoz on 10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing. Very interesting stuff here.
• It pays to share posts through Google Reader!  Otherwise I never would have found this awesome article on What a “Personal Brand” is NOT by Tom Peters.  Good read.
• I’m a big proponent of proper grammar and spelling, but I do break those rules on Twitter with the 140 character limit, so I was amused to read about 8 Spelling & Grammar Rules You Can Break on Twitter.

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Yes, normally this would have come last week on Friday, but like many I was out shopping for my precious GPS unit that was on super sale.  I hope everyone had a lovely Turkey Day!  Did you know that until 1863, Thanksgiving was celebrated on different days?  The president would announce when it would be celebrated until that year, when President Abraham Lincoln decreed it would be on the fourth Thursday in November.  It actually took until 1941 for Congress to pass an official proclamation declaring it a legal holiday on the fourth Thursday in November.

So be thankful for your health and the good information you can find online!

• Our own Manda Otto reviewed the new seoMOZ toolbar, now still in private beta testing.  This looks to be an invaluable tool for SEO and SEM professionals everywhere, expected to be available sometime in January or February.
• There’s some debate on the future of the banner ad in online marketing.  Brad Waller and Peter Figueredo both discussed it over at ReveNews: The Banner is Dead by Brad Waller and Is Display Advertising Worthwhile in a Down Economy? by Peter Figueredo.
• I wrote a guest post for Marketing Pilgrim that you should check out: Mobile Advertising Has Future Among Teens.
• In more New Edge Media news, we’ve welcomed a new team member, Kate Morris, into the fold as Director of Client Services!

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