SES San Jose LIVE / Day 3: AJAX, Paid Links, and 98 Million Blogs

One of my favorite things about the show was all the great word of mouth Ask3D has been getting. From the panelists to the Expo floor to the lunchtime banter, we seem to be on everyone's lips. My fellow Askicker Natalie noticed the same. You'll see a few of her notes about it below. As well as some choice bizspeak from Ask's Todd Morrish.

And on the "everybody's talking about" subject, nope, I didn't make it to the Google Dance. As curious as I was to see their campus, after two days of waking up at 6 and posting at midnight, I practically fell asleep on the train back to SF. At least one of my Ask co-workers did attend, determined to undermine the big G from within by putting a serious dent in their free milkshake supply.

LOTS went on at Day 3, so let's get to it:

Excuse you! I don't mind that today there are dozens of people who, magically, the day after the Google dance, started sniffling and coughing. I do mind that I have to spend an hour and a half in the WiFi lounge sitting between two coughing SEOs who did not know to cover their mouths. Seriously. It was like a bad ZirCam commercial. I would've moved but I needed the power strip access. (And when did I become that guy?)

KEYNOTE: MARISSA MAYER

This was entertaining, thanks to Danny's interview skills and expertise of working off the cuff, and Marissa taking every question in amiable stride. She seemed to manage to include plugs for Google products in every answer, but with so many Google products I imagine it's hard not to.

I did appreciate that they'll start blurring faces, license plates, etc. in Google StreetView, upon request, to assure privacy. And their 1-800-GOOG-411 service sounded pretty handy, especially if you have an iPhone.

During the Q & A segment, someone brought up the Eye-tracking results that someone (Gordon Hotchkiss, I think)  presented at a panel, which showed that, on a Google Universal Search page (with the media results mixed in among the blue links), people are less likely to look at the pages' ads. Marissa said that they were looking to change the presentation on GUS pages, and hinted that they may experiment with richer types of advertising to better compete with the blended results. Rich AdSense ads? Advertising agencies, meet your life preserver.

And yes, she got a question about the Google Phone, and yes, she dodged it like a pro.

Today's New Bizspeak …comes from Ask.com ASL Product Manager Todd Morrish: Level-setting. I've now heard it in 3 different sessions. Maybe my BS Bingo cards are out of date, but I have hardly ever heard this phrase before this show. Presumed meaning: the act of sharing info to bring everyone "level." Thanks, Todd! Hey, Reader! Did you hear any brand-new bizspeak at SES SJ? Let us know in the Comments!

SEO Through Blogs & Feeds

I wish I could've stayed for this whole session, because the tips and suggestions they were giving came at me faster than I could write them down. The proliferance of blog technologies and strategies are--and I'm showing my geek colors here--exciting.

Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts hit hard and fast with a barrage of valuable blog tips-mostly involving tagging your posts. His daughter is making a mess of AdSense cash from her NeoPets blog, so clearly he knows what he's talking about.

Some of his Blog SEO tricks:
-Tag clouds
-Related tag pages
-Tag conjunction pages
-"Sticky posts" that always appear at the top of the page and are a superb place to include keyword-rich copy.

Rick Klau of Google (and former head of FeedBurner publisher services), took a slower pace with his preso of various tools. Obviously a smart guy, he came off as quite affable but lacked the polish of most of the other Google speakers I'd seen. Maybe because FeedBurner is such a recent acquisition? Pitcher of Kool-aid, table two, please!

Rick also offered some handy search engine best practices for blogging:

-Use the "Noindex" tag in your Robots.txt file if you want to keep your blog off the indexes
-Auto-discovery "advertises" your feed's availability to browsers & bots, and puts your subscribe link right in the browser
-If you do a podcast, include show notes so the text can be crawled

Doug Hay of Expansion Plus Inc. took the B2B route, showing how RSS feeds can benefit any business, by conditioning customers or press to maintaining a relationship with your brand by:

-Putting your press releases on a feed page
-Using RSS any time you release news or content like audio or video to create
-Add social media tagging (Digg, etc) to gets you in social media networks and become more searchable

But it was Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR who lit a fire under the crowd, telling them it's no longer enough to just have a blog--you have to work it. "If you don't have a blog yet, you're too late." He smirked, "If you have one already, big deal. Now, it's all about results."

Greg quoted a startling statistic: there are currently 98 million blogs, but only 100 million websites. At this rate it won't be long before blogs outnumber sites.

He also gave some tips on how to benefit from blogs--even if you don't have one--from a PR point of view:

-Look for emerging terms something that's ranking in importance but hasn't peaked yet.
-BuzzLogic has a product that lets you type in a search term and find out which bloggers are most influential in the conversation on that emerging topic
-Find them and give them an advance lead on the story.They'll generate traffic to your site.

During the Q & A , the moderator asked the panel what they thought about the news that Radio Shack forbids their employees to blog about the company. Greg rolled his eyes and said: "Yeah. And they should prevent their employees from talking on the phone, or from talking to their neighbor while shopping. Get real." I like this guy!

Fashion note: I stopped counting goatees after I got to 36.

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines

A VERY popular issue at this conference. Everyone wants AJAX for its flair and its User Generated Content flexibility, but it can't be searched. Or can it?

Mikkel deMib Svendsen of deMib.com gave us a flashy spiel about how the social web and UGC are great for SEO, since they provide content freshness, authenticity, etc. His presentation ended with a photo of him with his arms around two showgirls.

Vanessa Fox of Zillow.com was refreshing by comparison, not just because she had some great, useful examples of the pitfalls of Flash, Javascript, AJAX, etc., but because she used her own company's site for some examples of "don't"s.

Amit Kumar of Yahoo! had some simple tips as well:

-Turn off js/css in your browser and nav yoru site. Is all the content viewable? Okay then.
-Provide alternate navigation for flash-heavy sites
-Use your Robots.txt file
-List your sitemaps files

Then there was Amanda Camp of Google's Webmaster Central, who led off with "Hi, I'm Amanda, and I don't have any slides, but everything you need to know is on my shirt." The shirt of course, had the "Google" logo. She told us that she was from the "Google Webmaster Ecstasy Group" or somesuch, and that her group was dedicated to making webmasters as happy as possible. Uh…yay?

Eyes and ears on the floor A few choice bits of reportage from Ask.com's Search Marketing Manager, Natalie Cann: After Jim's keynote, I noticed a lot of foot traffic at our booth and people were buzzing around the Expo saying "I really want to go check out the Ask.com booth". I spoke to a couple of people that raved about our new Ask3D product and said they really enjoyed Jim's keynote, and in particular, his thoughts on personalization and how you can "over-personalize". Our own Michael Ferguson's quote and face was featured in a presentation during the Putting Search Into The Marketing Mix session. And finally, I turned in a lost iPhone at the Marriott, which I was very proud of myself for doing. :-) Thanks Natalie!

 

Search Engine Q&A On Links

Shashi Thakur of Google explained the philosophy of proper linking in a simple, charming way: "A link from your page is like a personal reference; it says a lot about you. And poor linking affects your credibility." Giving someone a bad link (i.e. an un-relevant or black-hat link) is like sending them into a bad neighborhood. How likely is that person to trust you after that?

Sean Suchter of Yahoo! Search gave some great link tips as well:
-Attracting organic linkage is important
-Don't bother generating massive numbers of links
-Keep your URLs clean-looking and stable
-Attract cut and paste behavior
-No pop ups
-It's OK to create links between multinational sites (.com, .uk versions of site), but be careful of duplicate content

Eytan from Microsoft announced the debut of the beta version of the new MSFT webmaster tools portal, and Peter Linsley of Ask gave some sage advice as well--without even using PowerPoint slides, no less!

The Q & A devolved into a paid links dispute--an extremely hot issue at the conference.

Of course, after that came the Searchbash we co-sponsored at Vivid…but I think that warrants a blog post of its own, don't you?

Ken Grobe
Product Content Manager
Ask.com