My colleague Shawn DeSouza staked out the Search Engine Strategies conference a few weeks ago, getting a feel for what’s going on with search engine marketing and search engine optimization these days.
He reported back as follows:
For the search marketer, life has become even more challenging. Now, not only should you worry about optimizing your web content, you must also optimize for multimedia – images, videos, podcasts, blogs, wikis. What’s more, nothing is sacred. A less than flattering picture of your CEO ( posted by an irate ex-employee or worse, a competitor) might surface in the search engine results page, along with your company’s last quarter results.
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Another session worth mentioning, only because it had people talking about it well into the 4th day of the conference, was the one entitled “Are Paid Links Evil? which saw Google’s Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) valiantly defend his company’s policy against some very passionate paid-link proponents who say they do it because it works.
A related topic is, of course, paid blog posts. A growing industry has mushroomed with offshore teams scouring the blogosphere and posting link-laden comments on industry blogs.
The Search Engines consider paid links that pass PageRank a violation of quality guidelines and a form of ‘pollution.’ Matt said that it was also very difficult to buy paid links effectively as a search marketer because Google does such a good job detecting and eliminating the value of those links. A blow-by-blow account of this highly contentious session can be found on Rand Fishkin’s blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-paid-links-debate-rages-on-ses-san-jose-2007
Other quick hits from around the show:
Patricia Hursh, from SmartSearch quoted a Forrester 2006 survey which showed that only 59% of B2B marketers were utilizing any form of search.
Karen Vogel of Clearguage suggested companies need to map visitors needs to assets and content that you have available for them. Vogel talked about mapping chunks of web content to stages in the buying cycle and then scoring and measuring web activity.
Simplified forms, offering action options eg. Using a primary conversion tactic such as “Download a Free Trial” alongside secondary ones like “Register for a Webinar” or “View Demo”.
Paul Slack from WebDex showed how the two critical players in B2b – influencers and decisions makers search differently – influencers look for products/solutions to specific pain points while decision-makers look for validation – financials, management profile, press, reviews, analyst reports etc.
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