Not everybody is born an SEO prodigy. Most SEOs as kids did not envision search engine optimization as their future career (we obviously need to do a better job at glamorizing the profession). Because there are so many ways to fall into SEO, there are an equal number of ways to learn SEO and each is convinced that his way is the best way.

When asked, what do you tell people is the best way to learn SEO from scratch?

1. Just DO it!
2. Start a site and figure out what works
3. Read SEO blogs
4. Read an SEO book
5. Watch SEO tutorials on YouTube
6. Follow SEO experts on Twitter
7. Go to SEO conferences
8. Take online SEO courses
9. Get active in SEO forums
10. Find someone willing to teach you
11. Some combination of the above

As an agency SEO, I have heard each of the following recommended to new employees. I’ll also add that telling someone to “just do SEO” is really disingenuous advice.

How I Learned SEO

I was lucky enough to be brought into an agency setting with next to no SEO background. There was no formalized training. I was instructed on specific SEO tasks and given more of the same to do. I was told to read SEO blogs and borrow a copy of SEOBook. I was told to start conversing on Digital Point forums.

What I actually did was quite different.

I went online and bought Search Engine Optimization For Dummies and read it cover-to-cover. My wife created quizzes for me from the chapters as I went so I would remember everything. In month 2, I went through Conversion University and passed the Google Analytics IQ test. In month 3, I bought my first domain and spent more time swapping out WordPress templates than writing actual content. Not ideal, but many of you can relate.

Now, whenever someone asks me how to learn SEO, I always recommend they read a book. Some SEOs I know will thrash me for this, but SEO has a lot of pieces and without having a foundational knowledge, none of the pieces will have any context. While I learned on SEO For Dummies, I now recommend Kris Jones’ book for its detail and breadth.

What’s Missing?

To me, the ideal way to learn SEO is 3-fold:

1. Gain a foundational knowledge of SEO
2. Apply the principles to a website with monetary goals
3. Stay current by testing and reading industry literature

One of the biggest barriers to entry right now in SEO is the technical challenge of building a site worth optimizing. Many SEOs cut their teeth on a WordPress site or blog, but there’s nothing to optimize, so it’s really not the ideal workshop for learning and testing SEO. The big gap right now is that the skill disparity between building a good-looking, functional site (especially an ecommerce site) and doing SEO on that site is HUGE.

What the industry is missing is a turnkey ecommerce platform with the simplicity of many third party blogging platforms that comes pre-populated with good looking category and product pages and the ability to customize all of the SEO-critical information. Most of the “internet-business-in-a-box” solutions right now are either scams or too inflexible to be valuable.

eRetailers like Amazon.com have put a lot of resources into helping their affiliates sell products and have provided all of the functionality to embed products and code onto existing sites. Why not go a step further and create the actual platforms that would enable affiliates to sell products right out of the gate? Amazon could even partner with WordPress to create a basic hybrid system that would smooth entry into the ecommerce world and make them that much more money.

I know it’s wrong to hope for more competition, but I feel like having an ecommerce site that can go up as quickly as a blog (and look as normal) would be awesome for the industry.

• Good SEOs would get even better.
• New SEOs would get up-to-speed more quickly.
• Search results would become more relevant (assuming an increase in unique content).

What do you think? How did you learn SEO and was it the right kind of training or do you wish it had been different?

Why The BEST Way To Learn SEO Doesn’t Exist Yet is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Have you ever done keyword research for a blog post and experienced no resulting organic traffic? You may be thinking, “What happened? The terms I optimized for had search volume. Why am I not getting a piece of that?”

Welcome to the club.

Poor Keyword Research = Poor Optimization = Poor Results

Credibility is a major obstacle for blog posts. Search engines want to rank the most credible, comprehensive resource for a given keyword term. Most blog posts don’t have what it takes to be “most credible.” A blog post can gain credibility and ranking as it picks up links, either naturally or through deliberate linkbuilding efforts, but this is more commonly seen with evergreen content than with blog content. Bloggers typically aren’t linkbuilding.

Competition is another reason for the difficulty in getting organic traffic from blog posts. Google’s keyword tool, used by many bloggers, does not display all of the terms that people search for, nor does it display terms with small levels of search volume. Because of this, many bloggers in the same niche research and optimize using the same limited set of keyword terms and make it nearly impossible for newcomers to rank without a lot of SEO work. It’s hard for some to accept this idea that Google’s keyword volume tool is actually setting a post up for organic failure.

As a hypothetical example, suppose I write a blog post about keyword research methods (how apropos). I do a little bit of research using Google’s Keyword Tool and find that “how to do keyword research” gets 320 global monthly searches.

I convince myself that the term is within reach. 320 isn’t a very high number after all. So I title my post “How To Do Keyword Research,” and interlace those words and phrases throughout the body of the content and press “Publish.” A couple of days later, the blog post is ranking on page 6 and gets no organic traffic except for the occasional hit from a bizarre semi-relevant phrase. Failure.

Obvious Keywords = Higher Competition Levels

What I didn’t realize when I published the post is that the competition level for a term like “how to do keyword research” is high enough to keep my new blog post from getting anywhere near the first page.

On the results page are several posts that have my exact term in the title. As a blogger, I know my niche well enough to know that several of these sites are far bigger and more credible than mine. (A few SEO-savvy bloggers will be able to verify their hunch by looking at backlinks, PageRank, etc). So if I want my blog post to rank well for this result and get any organic traffic, I’ll have to build my own links to the post and I just don’t have that kind of time. I barely had time to write this post! Alas!

Best Keyword Research Method = Find Under-the-Radar Terms

If you’re a blogger who cares enough to do some keyword research for each post, but doesn’t want to build links, then consider trying what I’ve been testing for about the last month. It involves targeting under-the-radar keywords that are relevant and being searched, but are too low to register on most keyword tools.

The goal in being a guerrilla keyword researcher is to find the best “ultra long tail” terms, optimize the post, rank in the top spots automatically, and reap the traffic. As you get traffic, you’ll get more engagement, more natural links, and more site credibility, allowing you to rank for even more competitive keywords later. This approach works best if you have a blog with a little bit of PageRank. A PR1 or PR2 should be able to get a high ranking for guerrilla terms.

The basic steps to my blogging keyword research strategy (which I’ll explore in detail):

1. Write a good, interesting post
2. Identify core keywords related to the post
3. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find long-tail variations with search volume
4. Use Soovle.com to find even longer variations with implied search volume
5. Search these terms in Google to identify low competition results
6. Optimize and win!

Step 1: Start With Strong Content

Whatever you write should be engaging, have a unifying theme, and a decent length. More is usually better for SEO, so try for at least 300+ words.

Step 2: Identify Core Keywords Related To The Post

In the example, we identified “keyword research” to be the core term. In your case, there may be certain terms that are used interchangeably so you may have multiple possible core terms.

Step 3: Use Google’s Keyword Tool To Find Long-Tail Variations

Working off the core term, Google’s keyword tool provides some keyword suggestions that still have measurable search volume. You can play around with different combinations of these to find relevant long-tail terms. In this case, we liked “how to do keyword research” as a long-tail keyword, even though it was still too broad to keep. There are probably other long-tail terms we could work with.

Step 4: Use Soovle.com To Identify Longer Variations With Implied Search Volume

Soovle.com is basically an aggregator of “suggest” results from search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Answers.com and Amazon.com. One thing we know about “suggest” results is that they are based on searcher behavior and that results at the top have more search volumes than those below (but the important thing to know is that all “suggest” results have some search volume).

There’s nothing novel about the way Soovle works, but I like it for its simplicity and its breadth of results. And it’s free (you could also use something like ScrapeBox for a more robust, paid solution).

So we plug in the term “how to do keyword research.”

We get several variations of this term including some relevant ones:

• How to do keyword research on google
• How to do keyword research for seo
• How to do keyword research seo

Since there are 10 results listed, there’s a good chance that there are other combinations we’re not seeing, so starting with “how to do keyword research,” we can start going through the alphabet and adding letters as if starting a new word at the end of the phrase, e.g., “how to do keyword research a” and “how to do keyword research b,” etc. Doing this reveals a few more variations we didn’t see before:

• How to do keyword research for free (this made me laugh)
• How to do keyword research google adwords
• How to do keyword research niche
• How to do keyword research tutorial

As I mentioned before, all of these terms get search volume, even though most of them would show none using Google’s volume tool (which is exactly what you want).

Another thing you can do is start with a broader term in Soovle, like “keyword research.” By starting broad, nearly every suggested term is one that also has a good amount of traffic, so none are good candidates. What you can do, though, is start front-loading the term “keyword research” with the most common adjectives and verbs to find under-the-radar variations, phrases that people naturally use when trying to search, like “easy keyword research.” For adjectives, I find that “good” and “best” are great places to start. You can also start with verbs that are associated with the term. The only verb that really goes with keyword research is “do” so I type in “do keyword research” and see what else is generated.

When I start with the term “best keyword research” and then add letters like we did previously [“best keyword research a(b,c,d,e…)”] we end up with some more fun and relevant terms:

• Best keyword research article
• Best keyword research guide
• Best keyword research method
• Best keyword research strategy

Step 5: Audit The Terms In Google

Once you have identified some good terms through Soovle, check them for search volume in Google Keyword Tool, then search for the terms in Google. You’re looking for a search result with close to zero exact match titles for the term you selected.

In this case, “best keyword research method” is nearly free of exact competition and the sites that rank look easy enough to overtake.

Step 6: Optimize and Win!

Optimization includes having the exact keyword phrase in the post title, meta description, and body content. The rest of the content should also be relevant to the keyword. If possible, you can do some internal linking from older blog posts. You can optimize images as well by giving them names that include your search term.

Once you get into a rhythm of going through this keyword research process, you get used to it, and it honestly doesn’t take very long. In some of the posts I’ve tested this out on, I’ve found it easy to rank without extra linkbuilding, and one post can pull in dozens of monthly organic visits from one term and its variations. It’s really quite nice.

But Don’t Take My Word For It…

The Best Keyword Research Method Ever Invented For Blogs is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If content can be searched, it can be optimized.

What are your customers’ content preferences? How do they discover? Consume? Share? Create a profile of your audience(s).

Use tools to create personas of data

• Demographic info from Quantcast, Compete
• Keyword info from SEMRush, Google
• Engagement info from PostRank
• Social network info from Flowtown, Rapleaf

Create an editorial spreadsheet to plan all content that includes:

• Topic
• Keywords
• Media Type
• Places Repost/Repurpose Content (Newsletter, Slideshare)
• Places to Promote (Facebook, Twitter, etc)

The SEO Content Cycle

1. Create & promote optimized content
2. Content is noticed, shared, & visibility grows
3. Exposure attracts more subscribers, fans, friends, links
4. Increase links and exposure grows search & referral traffic
5. Traffic & community provides data that you can research, develop to further grow social networks for content & SEO

Repurposing Content Example

1. Upload video to YouTube
2. Embed in a blog post with show notes
3. Post screen shots from video to Flickr
4. Upload images and text as a story in a PowerPoint or PDF, upload to .docstoc, Scribd, etc.

Takeaways

• Develop & optimize content with customers personas in mind
• Think like a publisher and create an editorial plan
• Develop channels of distribution & social links
• Leverage both web & social media analytics

Content Marketing Optimization Session with Lee Odden – PubCon 2010 is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

A quick recap of content from a competitive analysis session of PubCon 2010 with Matt Siltala, Michael Streko, Michael Gray, and Andy Beal.

Matt Siltala

Things to identify about the competition:

Hubs. Check PRWeb search, Digg, or article site search to see what’s being said about your competition, what they’re doing, and even which keywords they’re going after. You can make a spreadsheet of keywords that are being targeted by your competitors. Check local review sites to see which specials are being offered.

Tools. Use AuthorityLabs to put competitors side by side with keywords and identify areas to attack.

Social Media. You can use Social Media For Firefox plugin, Knowem, Who’s Talkin, Twitter Search/Lists, Image Search, SEO For Firefox plugin to identify.

Do “link:www.competitor.com” together with the Social Media For Firefox plugin  to identify the best content.

Identify competitor keywords. What your competitors may be using may be converting better than your keywords. Test with Adsense. Make sure you’ve got enough good content on your site around your competitors’ keywords.

Michael Streko

Ways to find the “Next Move” of the company you’re looking at:

• Search their code.
• Check out their Robots.txt. You could find a test site, pictures, a new product or domain, etc.
• Google search for possible partners.
• Check http://dotheyfolloweachother.com to see who people in your competitors’ organization are close to.
• Follow their company on LinkedIn.com Fan the Facebook page. If someone leaves, call them right away and find out why.
• Know Who Links To Them
• Read their content, don’t be afraid to email a site linking to a page that has out-of-date content and request a new link to your better version of content. Use incompetence to your advantage.
• Become an affiliate of your competitors’ sites, find out “earnings per click” to get a good idea of traffic.
• Non-Internet Bonus Tactic: call your competitor and walk through the process.

Michael Gray

• Using Blekk0.com – use “/adsense=XXXXXXXX” with the Adsense code or analytics code and get a list of competitor sites.
• Use Tineye.com to see where an individual has other profiles and whether they are legitimate.
• Quarkbase will show popularity of content.
• Use a Google search for “submitted on” OR “submitted by” OR “discovered by” OR “posted by” to determine which content is being submitted and by whom.
• Identify the pattern of content “sneezers” when new content is being promoted/submitted. Try to get into the circle. TwitterCircles.com will help you identify who competitors are connecting with.

Andy Beal

• Look for customer rants. Poach clients, promote your alternative, improve your own products and services to avoid these same issues.
• Look for any negativity coming from competitor employees or clients. Blow on the spark that lights the fuse.
• Use Twitter. Use custom parameters at search.twitter.com and set up competitive searches. If X employee talks to Y employee about Z keyword, track it. Export as RSS. Take advantage of private Twitter lists.
• DomainTools.com/Registrant-Alert/ and /Mark-Alert will let you spy on competitors to find out when they’re registering new domains.
• Oodle.com/job helps spy on job listings. Look up competitors’ name and create an RSS feed then aggregate multiple competitors.

Tools for Competitive Intelligence Session – PubCon 2010 is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Ted Ulle

Information architecture is often ignored or just set on default. If there’s anything in search that IS rocket science, it’s information architecture and building a taxonomy that’s actually useful for people.

A lot of glorified hover menus are like hosting a dinner party, then letting people raid the fridge. Hovers mean visitors cannot see and compare all the options at once. Categories are often from some company mindset, not a user mindset.

Avoid organizing content:

• Like the company hierarchy
• Like a print catalog
• By content owner
• By someone’s pet ideas

Forget the “3-Click Rule.” In terms of the user, the number of clicks isn’t important. What’s important is the “information scent.” They should feel like they’re on the right track, not having unnecessary barriers, and not becoming more unhappy as they progress.

When you’re creating information architecture, you should keep menu items to 6 or 7 items, max.

You can be creative with “off-main” nav tools instead of just hover menus. Consider putting contact info and other info in a small drop-down outside

People in the company want the website to be in hover menus, but that’s because they use it every day. Visitors need something different. One test removed the hover menu and page views doubled overnight, with time on site, conversion rates, etc. also increasing. In another case, the number of menu items was reduced from 9 to 6. Revenues went up 58% in the 1st week and were up 46% over 6 months.

Information Architecture with Ted Ulle – PubCon 2010 is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Tim Mayer is the former head of search product and business at Yahoo.

The Future of Search

• Traditional Search – You enter a query and get back a result.
• Predictive Search – Search engines are able to connect your check-in history, personal profiles, and that of your friends to make recommendations for other plausible actions and transactions.

5 Key Trends That Will Influence Search

1. Growth of mobile queries. By 2012, mobile queries will make up 1 in 5 searches. The largest categories of mobile search right now are informational, local, and product lookup.
2. Growth in apps, not browsers. The majority of the time people spend on the phone, browser accounts for 50% of face time. Just a couple of years ago, browsers were taking 70-80% of the face time. We’re seeing a strong migration to apps.
3. Input is difficult. We’re going to have to find more ways to integrate our personal data “inputs” from the past to impact current searches.
4. More context. With the increase in local, more results will be returned in the context of location.
5. “Verticalizing” SERPs. People are starting to go directly to brand sites, i.e. Amazon, etc. to search, and less to search engines. Look to search engines to start integrating more of these results.

Opportunities for service providers

App discovery is the key to customer satisfaction in the smart phone era. Right now, it’s difficult for people to identify which apps are really the best and most effective for accomplishing their goals.

There’s a huge opportunity for technology to bridge the gap between apps and search boxes. In the future, we may see aggregators that determine which is truly the best search tool to use when you perform a search, be it app or HTML site, and automatically use those to return results, depending on the query and context.

Opportunities for publishers

Mobile advertising demand is not increasing at a very fast rate, so prices are still fairly slow. There’s an opportunity for

First mover app in a new category on new platform. Epicurious became the default recipe app for the iPad. There are other opportunities to capitalize on existing trends in new platforms.

The Future of Search – Tim Mayer Keynote at PubCon 2010 is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Day 2 of PubCon 2010 kicked off with a knockout keynote panel with Sarah Evans, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, and Scott Stratten. With back-and-forth from all the participants, I’ll summarize the overall topics of discussion. Here are the highlights:

Is Social Media A Fad? (Gotta start somewhere)

No.

Getting Internal Buy-in On Social Media

You can with the question, “What kind of metrics can we move?” rather than just saying “We need to make videos.”

You can point to the fact that the conversations are having regardless. It’s a choice whether to participate.

Leveraging social media the right way is extremely effective because it is fueled by word-of-mouth and personal persuasion. It’s one of the most effective channels.

Social Media Planning Phase

The social media plan should be created in the context of the entire marketing plan with a portion of budget allocated to social media and the same cohesion and accountability as any other marketing channel.

If you hate people, you shouldn’t be on social media. People have been making mistakes for a long time. Social media just makes those mistakes more public. Make sure the right people are behind the plan and execution.

Social Media vs. SEO

Social media and SEO are on one continuum. Some of the smartest people in social media are SEOs, because they know about the importance of content and distribution.

It is not a competition between channels. Whether it’s social media, SEO, PPC, etc., the amount of time to spend on the channels depends on the effectiveness of the channels. It’s different for every company.

Social Media Failure

Find a good blend of active and passive income. Many in social media are failing because the social media revenue foundation and business model they’ve created requires them to “be there” for everything, and it’s impossible for one person to keep up in that way.

Highlights From Pubcon 2010 Social Media Keynote Panel is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Speakers:
Rob Snell, Managing Partner, Gun Dog Supply
Khalid Saleh, President and Co-Founder, Invesp
Paul Boisvert, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Small Business, Yahoo!
Ethan Giffin, CEO & Founder, Groove Commerce

Khalid Saleh

Tests to go above and beyond to assure customers of checkout security actually can backfire and decrease conversion rates.

Process of CRO

• Plan where to start
• Implement optimization using a framework
• Improve in iterations

4 No’s of Conversion Optimization

1. No more “Start Anywhere” approach
2. No more brute force optimization
3. No more “best practices”
4. No more “test, test, test!” (Testing is part of conversion optimization, but not the end of CRO)

Elements evaluated in a good CRO framework

• Visitors (Visitors have categorically different personas: spontaneous, aggressive, caring, logical, etc.)
• Trust (Value proposition, design, congruency, continuity)
• Buying stage (Information/research seekers)
• FUDs (Fears, Uncertainties, Doubts)
• Incentives (Urgency, clarity, upsell)
• Engagement (Stimulating return visits/purchase)

Paul Boisvert

Good design = right content, right place, right time, right treatment

Good design does 3 things:

1. Smells – when the visitor comes to the site, the “scent” helps users stay on the path and provides a very strong measure of consistency from start to finish to help them accomplsih your goals.

2. Tells

Content should address buyer personas, as offered by Bryan Eisenberg:

• Competitive
• Spontaneous
• Methodical
• Humanistic

New research suggests that people fall on several persona types, and some are activated more at different times. Depending on branding and intention, you may need to activate the “Captain Kirk” persona and stifle the “Mr. Spock” persona in your visitor to get the sale.

Get media mentions on your site. Let the reputation of other credible organizations rub off on your reputation.

3. Sells

5 Steps to Drive Sales

1. Start with best practices (don’t let them get in the way of testing outside-the-box practices)
2. Test before launching
3. Measure after launch
4. Run A/B/n or MV tests
5. Implement winner, revise & repeat steps 2-4 until sale of business, retirement or death

Ethan Giffen

Focus on Site Search

Important facts about site search:

• Visitors that interact with site search want to engage.
• Conversion rates of people that use site search are 3-5X higher for good site search
• Average Order Value of people that interact with site search are 25-50% higher than average customers
• Much easier to double conversion rate of site search visitors than doing the same on product pages

Ways to fix your site search:

• Use Analytics

Check the top 100 searches. Check top 100 searches with no revenue – plug them into your site search and see what you get. Check the top 100 searches with no results. Are similar products called something else? Are you missing important words from product descriptions? Do you not currently sell the product online when you could? Is site search not offering alternatives for last year’s or discontinued models?

• Choose a Provider (unless you’re a big retailer, you should probably use a 3rd party product, e.g., Nextopia or SLI)

Don’t try to build it yourself. Does the SS have universal search for other forms of content? Does the SS offer filtered search through a navigational element? Does the SS offer solutions for spellings or synonyms? Does the SS offer auto-complete? What kind of reporting does the system provide?

• Design
• Configuration

What attributes do you want in the data feed? What attributes are important to visitors and can you integrate those into the search result feed? Don’t forget to configure for “Did you mean…” queries, synonyms, direct hits/boosting (where you always want a particular page to appear first for a given term)? What about when no result appears in SS? Is there more you can do to help the searcher?

• Ongoing Review

Rob Snell

Their site’s position was:

• We are experts
• This product is what you want
• You should buy from us

They did this by:

• Humanizing the experts through pictures and content.
• Adding the “expert” to product descriptions and PPC ad text so they appeared in search results.
• Blogging (helped demonstrate expertise)
• Publicizing the real testing results of product specifications
• Telling things how it is and not being afraid to tick off manufacturers
• Endorsing specific products over others
• Being reasonably priced (this does not mean “cheapest,” but it does mean “competitive”)
• Plainly listing the benefits of buying with them
• Answering customer questions very quickly

Doing the above things resulted in $10M increase in sales.

Day 1: Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Optimization Recap – PubCon 2010 is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Moderator: Krisa Neher

Speakers:
Andy Beal, CEO, Trackur
Rhea Drysdale, Co-founder and COO, Outspoken Media
Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMC
Todd Friesen, Director of SEO, Performics

Todd Friesen

Reputation management is about control. Being able to control what is seen. Contrast search results for “Eliot Spitzer” with “Under Armour.” In one case, “Eliot Spitzer” has negative results that are out of his control. In the other case, Under Armour not only has positive results, but they have control of those domains displaying many of the results.

80% of adults are more likely to buy a product based on recommendation. 90% of consumers trust recommendations/reviews. If reviews are showing up in the top 10 SERPS for your company, you can trust that those reviews are impacting consumer perception and purchase behavior.

83% of companies will face a crisis that will affect share price up to 30% (negatively) in the next 5 years.

Ripoff Report has 321,202 complains filed. Complaints Board has 28,500 US-based complaints filed. Consumerist is also a heavy hitter with reviews likely to rank on the first page.

Ways to “own” your SERP “ballot box”

• Host the blog on a subdomain (good for reputation management, less good for SEO)
• Host news on a subdomain
• SEM campaigns (you can control the paid search listings)
• Affiliate sites (pretend you have one if you don’t)
• Job postings (Indeed.com, Monster.com, Washington Post jobs section all seem to rank well)
• Social profiles (Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Squidoo, Scribd, Dailymotion, WordPress all rank well on their own)

Rhea Drysdale

Google has made many updates recently that allow negative sites and reviews to rank well. Reputation management isn’t a problem until you have a reputation problem. Most companies wait until it’s too late, when they should be constantly building the brand reputation. It can take as long as 4 years to recover your brand after a crisis.

How to combat bad results:

• Create sticky, good news
• Create a product feed, submit it to Google Base, and try to get it to rank
• Blogs
• Images (start collecting “digital assets” associated with your company, make sure to get pictures and video from all company events)
• Press releases (tend to rise fast in the search results but fall later; more of a short term solution)
• Books (usually appear well)

Google Instant takes a long time to change. It’s based on search behavior.

Audit your online reputation:

• Review analytics (keywords & referral traffic)
• Do you have content to match searches?
• Are you investing in customer service, marketing & PR?

Google Place Search is now integrated with web search. We’re seeing a greater emphasis on reviews and review sites. Solicit positive reviews from sites like:

• Yellowpages
• Yelp
• CitySearch
• TripAdvisor
• OpenTable
• InsiderPages
• SuperPages
• DexKnows
• JudysBook

Andy Beal

The big 5 tools for monitoring & managing reputation management (Free tools are going to be great for 70-80% of users. Paid tools become important for assessing reputations behind conversations, a lot of keywords, managing multiple users and levels of access)

• Google Alerts – google.com/alerts
• IceRocket – good for monitoring blogs
• Twitter – use the search parameters for specific and geographic tracking
• Keotag.com – track keywords across platforms
• Netvibes – create a dashboard of RSS feeds; it’s also smartphone-friendly

Act on the data:

• Who’s responsible?
• Bring data to R&D, Sales, Marketing
• Measure changing sentiment
• Refine your marketing/PR messaging
• Check analytics (look for traffic spikes from specific sources, spikes to specific pages)

Tony Wright

Crisis Management

Items to consider when assessing a crisis:

• Reach of the venue (where is it showing up)
• Influence of the poster
• Tone of the content
• Follow-up on the post (watch for on-topic vs. off-topic)
• Viral effects

Other items to consider:

• If you’re going to run Facebook or Twitter for someone, you should have the person embedded in the client organization. Otherwise, how can they respond to questions?
• Unhappy customers are always more likely to complain online. The janitor can illicit a negative review as easily as the CEO.
• The goal of review management is to get happy customers to talk. Facilitate this via review portals, staff incentives, and staff education.
• Do you have a social media policy? How do you enforce violations of your policy?

From the Q&A

Try to avoid “beefing up the content” on a negative review or profile. You may accidentally do this by creating a profile that links back to your site, by mentioning your brand a lot as your respond on a 3rd party site.

The only chance to really remove a negative listing is to file a complaint against the individual, not against the host site. You can even file a “John Doe” complaint or suit, but the process can be lengthy.

Make sure to funnel positive reviewers to the review sites you want them to review on.

Day 1: Online Reputation Management Session – PubCon 2010 is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

David Pogue is the tech columnist for the New York Times and a very sharp-looking individual, who incidentally spoke through a bout of laryngitis this morning.

Highlights from David Pogue’s Keynote called: Disruptive Online Tech

David highlighted “mega trends” in tech disruption.

Mobile Apps

All of today’s tech interest centers around app phones, which are really creating a whole new category of tech. Pogue highlighted a few

Dragon Dictation is distributed for free, but has been accumulating hundreds of thousands of conversations worth of data in order to analyze speech patterns and help with the development of their paid products.

Ocarina http://ocarina.smule.com sold 1.5 million copies at $1 each. The app is actually sensitive to breath and touch so that it can be “played” like a wind instrument. It also allows you to listen in real-time to the tunes others are playing across the world.

Augmented Reality

TwittARound allows you to point your phone at a building and allows you to see who is tweeting from that location.

Retina is an app that allows color blind people to coordinate colors, notwithstanding their limitations.

Phone Calls

The world wants free calls from your cell phone to any other phone. Currently, the solutions like Skype, Line2, and Google Voice are very close to providing this, but none of them have a complete solution.

We’re seeing an enormous decline in landline phone service over the past three years. We’re getting close to free phone service everywhere.

Wireless Access Everywhere

Right now, the wireless access solutions are expensive, power-consuming, or inconvenient (coffee shops, anyone?).

MiFi offers 4 hours on a charge, lets 5 people online at once, and costs $40-$60 per month. Once again, this is close to a game-changer, but there’s still room to go.

Web 2.0

Last year, Microsoft bought 1.2% of Facebook for $240 million. Wikipedia. YouTube. Flickr. All huge and disruptive.

Web 2.0 is designed to connect people of similar interests.

DoMyStuff.com lets you list the stuff you want done and people bid to see who will do it the cheapest.

Prosper.com lets users pitch their business plans with the opportunity to get microloans from other users.

GoLoco is a carpooling database that connects carpoolers who want to travel together.

E-Petitions.com lets anyone start a petition about anything. It lets the British government and people see what others care about.

Who Is Sick? displays the locations and progressions of sickness in a geographic area, almost like a weather map.

Takeaways

Nothing ever replaces anything in technology. Everything adds on to the previous version. Technology splinters everything. In the future, everything will be real-time. The small advances in real-time tech development are dramatically changing peoples’ expectations. We’re living in an age where leaving phone messages, writing e-mail, watching TV on TV and even concepts like privacy are being phased out by some people in favor of more instant solutions.

We have to teach the next generation differently to work with these trends. We have to teach how to stay credible and how to stay sane.

Well done, David.

David Pogue Keynote – PubCon 2010 is a post by SEO expert Scott Cowley. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.