Bleeding Edge Thoughts From The Leaders In Search - SMX West Day 2

Today I managed things at the office, learned loads, fired a client, negotiated a deal, made 5 new Twitter friends, inked a new partner deal, found 2 new freelancers, and bought a house all from the floor of SMX West here in Santa Clara, CA.  Not a bad little Wednesday all in all.  Here is my conference Day 2 wrap up.

Keynote Louis Monier - cueil
Topic: Past, Present, Future of Search
Started his presentation off on the wrong foot with me by using the extinct font Comic Sans for his slides.  I digress.

• The web is only as good as its index
• Claims that the only way search will work is to have robotic index (Mahalo & Clusty would disagree)
• Future - long tale terms, which don't have a single answer, do not offer any guidance from search engines (today).
• eCommerce search works differently because they allow you filters and guidance to complete and structure the query. 
• Current engines work very similar to the way that they did in 1995.
  • word soup - build points based on frequency and structure and shingles within the doc.
  • links and anchors - page rank and inbound links increase relevance
  • user behavior - whatever gets the most clicks gets the highest rank
  • UI - still sitting around 10 blue links.
  • is anything new other than "scale" (millions to billions of pages)
• fundamental q - what portion of the web are they indexing and ranking - search can be a lot more than it is today.
• The Future
  
  • search should provide insight
  • is Human Powered search the answer (Wikipedia, Mahalo, Squidoo) - he says no.
  • is personalization the answer - filling in the blanks? It will only help so much because it cannot discern what you want or desire based on your basic demographics like age, geo location, language, etc.  that would assume we are all the same.  not true.
    
    • ex. diamond = jewelry if you are a woman, baseball if you are a man
  • is vertical search an answer - the more specialized or niche, the more likely it will work but only on a VERY THIN scale so this doesn't scale.
  • what about natural language processing? problem with natural language is that there are too many variations on written language.  wont match the realities of the web.
  • semantic search/semantic web - everything gets marked up...issue is that there is no motivation to put this level of detail into the META and backgrounds...also it is too exploitable.
  • !spell checker - the concept of type a word in and see what version has more matches.  That returns the "norm" and allows you to make a decision.
  • !aggregate information - structured data comes into play and returns better results based on known options and frequent selections - this leads to research assistant as a concept...
    • research assistant - part of the evolution of search
  • Bottom line - size matters - you have to have the whole web.  Nobody will ever be able to decide based on any robotic factors what, or what is not important to you.

Multi-variate Testing

• Johnathan Mendez - interesting base level knowledge presentation. worth reading this optimization blog, he has some great ideas.
• Closed Loop Marketing - getting more from your multivariate testing
  • have a plan & a goal
  • choose the right starting place - get your program to the right place first, then start testing...not before!!!
  • gather inputs
    • who
    • baselines
    • other info
    • apply best practices
    • integrate usability testing
    • work with designers that GET IT
  • elements - what elements matter headlines, call to action, button, hero image, bulleted benefits, tables & charts, forms, etc.
• seth rosenblatt - optimost/interwoven
  • another great presentation that outlined countless justifications for testing, optimization, and design.
• Jon Diorio - google
  • discussed Google's free analytics process
    • identify impactful page, section or element
    • develop hypothesis for each element
    • test a few variations (2-4)
    • repeat (if needed)
    • google.com/websiteoptmizer - upcoming seminars for beginners
    • review tom ash landing page optimizer book
• Gregg Makuch - Widemile
  • current Fuze partner and experts in multivariate testing and optimization - lots of traction in this area

SEO & Social Media Marketing

• Rand from SEOmoz.org had a great presentation about "cool shit on the internet"[his words] - Rand is a great speaker and always offers a wealth of information about social media marketing (SMM).
  • why is social media so important? its BIG. growing at an exponential rate (especially globally)
  • blogosphere is fully engaged and the way they find blogs is that they click links on other blogs.
  • influencers spread content via a number of social media methods.  There are a number of turn on's/off's
• Neil patel from acs - ran through a number of great case studies on different business types and how they use social media.
  • HP example
    • photo sharing
    • social news
    • social networks
    • blogs
  • american greetings
    • assisted with a popular photo/flash combo to raise their presence on "greeting cards" in search because of the viral video
  • life insure
    • embraces the fact that publishing content on dying which resonated in the social networks
  • Gawker media
    • 90% of their traffic driven from social media efforts.
• Barbara Boser from 3 Dog Media - added some insight on how important commitment and participation are required to be successful in social media.
  • prepare to be consumed for at least 2 months
  • read what is popular in the different communities
  • look for tools you can use within sites and on the web
  • subscribe to as many feeds as you can - particularly popular sites in the community you want to break into
  • keep your profile and persona unique
  • memorable avitar
  • match gmail account ad IM that match your username
  • see top users and associate with them - watch out for people who are too high maintenance
  • vote fast and often
  • dont submit more than 2-3 stories and dont submit stories from your own site
  • avoid hitting top users too fast and hard
  • make sure your profile is listed on all the sites you are in
  • never make multiple accounts on the same site
• michael grey - greywolf seo blog & atlas web services - took the leading edge tact and had a number of new concepts and topics to discuss
  • current event social media (oscars, deaths, etc) - oscars/prius post good for auto blog
  • twitter is seen as a great traffic generator - lots of great plugins with twitter that make it possible to publish where you are.  try not to "sell" in twitter, but rather use it for persona development.  Can also be used for product releases or service
  • let people who monitor you know you're out there.
  • jetblue, carnival, southwest, amazon gold deals, woot, all use twitter as a sales channel
  • tactics: look into your profile, make it real
• Top social sites for marketers are:  Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube,

SEO 2.0 for Web 2.0 sites
interesting set of concepts/opinions on the new emerging programming and development techniques that are having influence and are buzz-ie on the web.  Lots of opinion, all of which i agree with.

• Sherry Thureau - CSS & Search engines
  
  • obvious advantages of using CSS
  • couple refreshers:  make sure you create a sense of place - make sure your CSS clearly shows visited and non visited links.
  • keep your headings and H1, H2, Text matched up.
  • title tag should be 40-60 characters - cant H1 a page
  • CSS should never be used to exploit search engines
  • images are not satan and can easily be optimized.  THINK OF YOUR USERS!
• mikkel deMib Svendsen - web2.0 and ajax etc.
  • web.2.0 importance - new types of applications, deeper interaction, embrases power of human interaction, but may be exclusionary to some
  • Mikkel says say NO to AJAX - it breaks a unified model of the web - it breaks the standards of the web. can only link to the application, not to the page.  people cant be referred back (by search engines) to the same piece of information...thus search engines may never fully index AJAX apps
  • always ask WHY, when people say they want to use AJAX or FLASH.  They can be used for good, but usually for no real reason.  Must improve conversion or make something better.
  • be careful when using AJAX applications...they are NOT secure.
  • social web 2.0 is great [duh] for SEO
    • higher freshness, grammar issues (but it doesn't matter, the message comes through)
    • great to have 20,000 SEO's - you want their comments, but be careful with SPAMMERS

great conference so far all in all.  Much different than SES.  A tad more out on the bleeding edge, but cool for me and lots of great ideas to take home to the Fuze Basecamp.

More coming for Day 3.

BL