What a great week it has been here in Las Vegas, but I have to admit I am ready to head home. Late nights, early mornings, too many vodka cranberries, and way too much money spent on those darn slot machines have me aching for Phoenix!

1. Category Awareness
2. Brand Awareness
3. Brand Consideration
4. Brand Preference
5. Purchase Intent
6. Purchase
7. Customer Retention
8. Advocates

1. Starting a blog
2. Social media profiles
3. Niche sites and directories

1. Addict-o-Matic: this is a great starting point
2. WhosTalkin.com: gives you some good measurements, mostly social media and blog posts.
3. ShareThis.com: a free tool showing metrics for reporting, and integrates well with GA.
4. Snip-N-Tag: this Firefox addon does URL shortening, and Google campaign Ids as well.
5. GA?: this Firefox addon goes onto a specific page and determines if the code is correct or not.
6. Better Google Analytics: this Firefox addon allows you to have full screen toggle, a content search box, also has the ability to view content page and how many times that page has been added to digg, reddit, etc.
7. Enhanced Google Analytics: another Firefox addon, this one can tell if there are any unusual spikes in referral traffic with a click of a button.
8. Twitalyzer.com: is a scoring algorithum, most useful in the fact that you can log into GA directly from it.
9. Hoosuite.com: a Twitter platform which has click stats, geo stats on tweets, etc.
10. Bit.ly: this url shortner allows you to see the click through rates on any URL in the bit.ly system.
11. ExcellentAnalytics.com: this is an excel plugin best used if you already have excel reports requiring mashing up.
12. SiteScanGA.com: scans your site if you use GA and gives you a report.
13. TweetingToHard.com: pokes fun at narcissistic Twitter posts.

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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As one of the 3 lucky Vertical Measures employees soaking in all the fantastic, valuable knowledge here at Pubcon 2009 in Las Vegas I wanted to share all the best SEO related information in a fast, clean uncluttered way.  I’m not going to spend a bunch of time writing a compelling intro, talking about Vegas or parties or who is here and why. There are no links in this post, opinions or plugs for anything or anyone. 

These are tips, information and recommendations you can start using right now to get more traffic to your site, rank higher in the search engines and better conversions. This is from the most credible sources in the industry so don’t question it, just take action as quickly as possible and enjoy the success!  If there is something below you are not familiar with, Google it.

1) On Site SEO: Glossary pages are good content for SEO

2) On Site SEO: Use footer links sparingly and only link to your most important pages. Don’t waste pagerank on content that is worthless.

3) Search: You need to get your site in to the blended search results using images and video. A picture is worth 1000 words and people are clicking on it.

4) Keyword Research: Use Google Insights to make sure the keywords you are focusing on do not have declining interest.

5) Analytics: Measure your brand traffic and keyword traffic separately.

6) Analytics: Are you ranking #1 (or trying  to rank #1) for a keyword that will not provide any real benefit to your business? Check that.

7) Keyword Research: Perform ongoing keyword research. The way people search changes.

8:) Competitive Analysis: Read competitors press releases. Are they using words that may change the way people search? Think "Kleenex, Xerox, Dell"

9) Keyword Research: Use Google Trends to check traffic trends in different markets.  There may be emerging opportunities in other geographic areas..

10) Keyword Research: How long will it take to get a keyword converting? Will it be worth it when it does?

11) Launching a new product that doesn’t exist in the market yet? Associate it with one that does to make people more comfortable with it.

12) Landing pages: put the call to action above the fold.

13) Landing pages: keep forms above the fold and make them as short as possible

14) Conversions: 3% to 5% is decent

15: Bounce rate: 30% is good, 50% is ok, 70% needs work

16: Search: 80% of queries are informational. Give them the information they want and then lead them where you want them

17: Forms: make sure there are no questions they can’t answer or they will leave

18: Does your "Thank You" page cross sell or further engage? It should.

19: User experience: Screen size and resolution matters. Test, test, test

20: Local search: Just because you are closest doesn’t mean you get the business. You need to build your brand too. Build trust.

21: Local search: Pull out your phone and do a search for your business. What happened?

22: Local search: neighborhoods matter

23: Local search: Pull out your cell phone and search for your business. What happened? (duplicate)

24: Local Search: neighborhoods matter. Are you optimizing for a "bad neighborhood"?

25: Local Search: point your browser to getlisted.org and follow the instructions

26: Local search: Add photos and video to your local search listing

27: Local search: include city & state in the title tags

28: Even negative reviews help your rank. It’s all about the numbers

29: Offer an Incentive for reviews

30: Sign up to watch a video worked much better than sign up to download a white paper

31: 80% of your visitors will fill out an "optional information" form after completing your call to action

32: Most visitors will not watch more than the 1st image of a rotating image.

33: Your marketing purpose must be the #1 goal of your website

34: 7 choices tops for your main navigation. Too much = no choice

35: Don’t use a final forward slash on your URL’s

36: Buttons should never say "Submit". Try "Download Now", "Start Free Trial", "Request More Information"

37: When building links make sure they have a random life

38: Link magnets are more productive than link begging

39: Local Search: Local business’s need local links

40: Text links in a page carry more weight than alt text

41: Link Building: No follow one link on a page and all become no follow

42: Link Building: The sequence of links on a page matters. Put the important ones on top.

43: Check your analytics for pages that are getting links and no traffic and redirect them.

44: Always be testing and measuring results. Before you change something get a benchmark.

45: The order of links in the code is more important than the order of links in the user experience

46: Surface conversations about your product, service or brand that are happening

47: Google’s technology is emerging to be able to read text in images. (Think picture of a newspaper page)

48: Google’s technology is also emerging to be able to understand words spoken in Video and index the transcripts.

49: If you are going to do video write the script with keywords in mind

50: If you use a map on your site embed a real map versus using an image.

I hope you found this information useful!  Visit http://search.twitter.com and type in #pubcon to hear the chatter all around Vegas.  Posted by Chris von Nieda, Director of Search Marketing at Vertical Measures. Twitter: @SEO4Vertical

Vertical Measures

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Today in Pubcon’s social media sessions broader topics were discussed. Day 1 at Pubcon seemed to focus on Twitter, and today each of the sessions broadened the scope to help the attendees see the use of a variety of social media sites as the real way to address your social media marketing plan. Below you’ll find a summary of the information received at the sessions I attended. Don’t forget to check out my tweets during the session for more real time information. Follow me: @cliquekaila on Twitter.

How Do Social Media and Search Intersect? with Lee Oden, Bill Hartzer, Tony Adam, and David Wallace.

This session focused on the true benefit social media provides in regards to search, and how the two overlap in many different ways. Lee Oden, from TopSearchBlog.com, started off the session discussing how small business can really benefit from social media, and Twitter in general. "60% of marketers plan to take money away from traditional marketing and spend it on interactive ads instead". He stresses that marketers realize there is a need for social media because, SEO=increased conversions. He suggests optimizing social media for search. Grow your social network via search, help people find your network using search, and advises combining your search and social objectives.

Bill Hartzer, a presenter in a few of the social media sessions at Pubcon, discussed his opinions of how search and social intersect. Starting off he discusses the old style SEO and the new style SEO, which involves content creation, on-page optimization, and utilization of social media to get noticed. He makes a direct correlation between social and search stating that "success in social media = getting noticed in search". How?

• Participate on a regular basis
• Vote and comment often
• Utilize social media niches
• Use digg, delicious, reddit, facebook, etc…to get the market share of links- being first with market share of links gives you the advantage. You do this by making news/repeating news in your industry, and promoting your content.

Tony Adam was up next, and explained the ‘visibility factor’. You should stand out from the crowd, create content people want to share, and don’t use social media as a replacement for search but rather as a visibility option.

David Wallace, from SearchRank.com, wraps up this session. He states that there is an obvious reluctance to embrace social media, and many excuses: 1) blogging: don’t know where to start…which isn’t a valid excuse, there are a multitude of things to discuss. 2) Gossip: leary of what people might say, but guess what? They are already saying it! You might as well get in on the convo. 3) Oversight: businesses don’t want to manage social media, but Wallace states: they just have to get over that, its apart of business and marketing these days.

Understanding the Complex Social Media Marketing Playing Field with Jennifer Laycock, Dan Zarrella, and Rand Fishkin (presenting due to the absence by Ben Huh from Pet Holdings, Inc.)

This session, about the complex web equation: brand management, discusses how traditional media, blogs, forums, groups and even chat can leave you vulnerable. Jennifer Evans Lavcock is up first and gives a great way to think about your social media strategy in order to address the vulnerability: as a dating relationship. 1) listen to your partner/public, 2) learn how to be ‘romantic’ to coax and encourage your demographic, 3) Don’t expect ‘sex’ on the 1st date: you aren’t going to get the full ‘value’ out of your social media marketing plan if you try to make it ‘happen’ on the first try, 4) don’t pretend to be someone else, just like in dating embrace who you are, 5) make yourself available and open, find a way to interact with your customers, 6) Seek out the right match, and find the right person to connect with by understanding how to be objective, 7) value the long term relationship, its far cheaper to keep a customer than it is to find a new one!

Dan Zarrella, from Hubspot, follows Jennifer with "Twitter by the Numbers: The Complex Playing Field of Microblogging". A few key points here: 

• Put a bio in your profile! Out of 5.5 million Twitter users indexed, 70% of the accounts don’t have a bio specified, and surprisingly 6x as many people follow those with a bio than those without one!
• Keywords to put in your bio: "official" is highly regarded, just make sure you don’t use "guru" or "author".
• Don’t forget to put a link in your profile: A link equals 5x as many followers as those without a link.
• Also worth noting: the more tweets with links you tweet the lower the CTR.

Finally Rand Fishkin fills in for missing session panelist Ben Huh. Gotta give Rand props, he pulled this session out of thin air with little time to spare! The session focuses on user generated content. He advises the following: 

• Incentivize visitors to create content (user generated content) that you can then exploit by giving them an ego boost for starters! Having users feel like they are getting something out of your site will give them a reason to link to you.
• Give your readers/visitors a vibrant community: a profile worth sharing like SEOMoz’s profile system with points for comments/views/etc.
• Use old/outdated domains and URLs that have old pieces of content that use to rank high for your keywords. Use these pages for new content that will get indexed for keywords agian!
• Don’t forget to measure link value of content and iterate, learn from the examples of others.

Going For the Gold: Optimizing for the Social Media Payday with David Snyder, Jay Berkowitz, Rebecca Kelley and Reem Aeidoh

Rebecca Kelley started off with "How to Make Money with Social Media Marketing". She stresses a few key points: traffic, links, and a relevant consumer base are key to being successful online. Proving ROI is a bit hard but with sites like: reddit, digg, delicious, stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin provide you as variety of items: links, traffic, mindshare, subscribers, a sense of community, brand loyalty, and great for promotions.

Reem Abedoah, up next, addresses how best to approach social media. A brand can’t dominate the conversation but rather encourage the conversation to occur. Have a larger share of voice by having a holistic approach.

Put social before money suggests Dave Snyder. Customer service (retention) links (SEO rankings) and traffic = conversions. Building a sites equity is important and often involves building a home for a community for your site visitors. Make them feel at home, turn a friend into a customer, create incentives which encourage conversions AND evangelism, and finally collect data and revise your social media plan. Don’t just start spamming but rather focus on communication and engagement.

Finally Jay Berkowitz discusses Going for Gold. This can be acheived by: 1) Crowd sourcing, 2) Getting more friends 3) Utilizing linkedin and Youtube, surprisingly many people use search functions on these sites, and 4) Take all the video and audio you do and throw it up on your site via a transcription.

Lastly I attended a site review session, which focused on volunteers requesting advice for their sites in regards to their social media interactions. A bankruptcy site, education site, and social media advocate site were evaluated. The panelists suggested the following:

• Blogger outreach: this was reiterated time and time again. Look to guest post on others blog, which can help you, with many different benefits: SEO, publicity, and branding!
• Optimize your efforts: blog titles, Youtube video titles, keyword centered bios, and local search optimization.
• Create a blog, and don’t forget to create a community on your site for your users to go back to. While it is great to go to a third party hosted site, its advisable to look at an onsite solution.
• Continue to be responsive, and interact with your fans/followers.
• Don’t forget about the real world: sometimes there are people who just aren’t on social pages, so make sure to interact/comment on your own blog.

Today’s sessions at Pubcon provided quite a bit of information about social media.

What did you find interesting in our Pubcon Las Vegas Day 2 summary?

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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Three Vertical Measures employees attended Pubcon 2009 this year, and as the social media architect I had the privilege of attending the social media sessions. The social media topic du jour this year? Twitter of course! Below you will find information on the great sessions I attended November 10th. Don’t forget to check the Vertical Measures blog tomorrow as well as Friday for summaries of the sessions I’ll attend this year at Pubcon 2009!

Twitter Landscape: Hot Topics and Trends with Warren Whitlock, Dan Zarrella, Kate Morris, and Chris Winfield

This session focused on Twitter: where its headed, what the tweetscape is like, and how important Twitter is to your marketing campaign. Warren Whitlock started off this session (btw: he wrote the book "Twitter Revolution") discussing his strategy on this twitter account. 90% of his tweets are actual replies. He doesn’t like mindless retweets, therefore he listens more than tries to sell a product or idea to his 50K + followers. He advises letting your followers know you care, expressing interest, and actually interacting to see results.

The next speaker, Dan Zarrella, provides information I felt was most important/useful to Vertical Measures and our blog readers: Twitter statistics. Zarrella has a HUGE database measuring retweets in the twittosphere. If you aren’t familiar with Twitter you might not realize the importance of retweets: they are essentially votes cast for the best, most informational, interesting, etc….tweets on Twitter. Studying the patterns of retweets will help you get more followers, expand your reach, and improve your clout/influence on Twitter. Some things to note: 

• 60% of RT (retweets) contain links
• bit.ly is the most popular URL shortener (used in 8-9% of RTs), ow.ly is the 2nd most commonly used
• Words most RT’d (in order of importance): you, twitter, please, retweet, post, blog, social, and free (notice "please" "retweet" is actually utilized successfully!)
• Using the word please occurs in 5-6% of RTs
• Least RT’d words: 1) game 2) going 3) haha
• RT’s are ‘smarter’, IE: grammatically correct, no spelling errors, etc in comparison to other tweets
• Over 95% of RTs contain colons
• RTs occur most often between the hours of 1-6PM (CST)
• The likelihood of a tweet to be RT’d increases dramatically each time it’s RT’d

Chris Winfield was the next speaker. He suggested adding mystery to your tweets, asking qualified questions to your followers to increase engagement, reminds us not to make it all about business, and to actually respond to the answers to questions asked of your followers.

Finally Kate Morris finishes up this first session with "Integrating Twitter With Your Business". She stressed that "we can influence word of mouth with Twitter", and that the best uses of Twitter in regards to integration for your business should be in this direction.

Capitalizing on Twitter & the Microblogging Revolution with Jon Henshaw, David Snyder, Brian Carter and Brent D. Payne

Traffic was the main topic in this session. Capitalizing on the huge traffic potential on Twitter is critical. Jon Henshaw from Raven Tools discussed a few tools he utilizes including EasyTweets.com, SocialOomph.com, and Topify.com to follow, unfollow and direct message followers via e-mail.

David Snyder was next up, stating he was recently quoted as being ‘the most dangerous man on Twitter’. He doesn’t measure success with follower count, but rather influence. Using his influence recently he launched a client promotion. In three days he received 100 opt in sign ups for his clients software utilizing: a wildfire application to create a coupon, kl.am shortened URLs, SocialOomph.com, Facebook Ads, utilizing industry professionals to help promote the software, and Blvd status (social media tracking and to monitor the promotion). 

Brian Carter discussed social capital. Social capital is the value of your network. Without a valuable network of social media contacts you have little to no social capital. It’s all about gaining social capital. Brent D. Payne added to the session with his discussion of Twitter types: News feed (broadcaster type profile), Celebrities (‘faces’ for a company), and a Brand Persona (your company/brands social ‘face’). He suggests engaging your local audience in tweetups. He even does tweetups for a ‘fake’ type profile, a face to a company/brand that is a fictitious persona who cannot actually attend. Each and every follower understands this fact, and appreciates the hilarity of the fact that they are following someone who isn’t actually ‘real’. You too can utilize a ‘faux tweeter’ to your brands advantage.

Killer Twitter Apps, Services, and API Trends with Dan Zarrella, Brian Breslin, Joe Fernandez, and Alexander Barbara

Brian Breslin is a web addict, and twitter application builder. He gives a list of his favorite Twitter tools including: startpr.com, pikchur.com (like Twitpic, etc..), tweet suite, twitbin.com, twittercounter.com, socialtoo.com, tweetbots.com, and twittermass.com.

The "RT King", Dan Zarrella, is back again with this presentation, discussing Twitters next move in regards to RT’s. Project Retweet, as Twitter is dubbing their new RT functionality, seems to be a bit of a let down. Comments on RTs aren’t allowed, no reappearance available, and no RT signature. All of these items pose issues for Twitters new RT functionality. Alexander Barbara and Joe Fernandez discuss further where Twitter is headed with regards to their RT functionality, and additional items on the horizon: "GEO-Awesomeness": trending tweets by geographic location, further functionality with lists, merging searches of direct mentions, and potentially internationally applications.

Experts on PR and Twitter with Sean Jackson, Lisa Buyer, Adam Singer (for Lee Odden), and Ben Fisher

Sean Jackson discusses PR success, not just for Twitter but PR success for any medium. A point he stresses: clarify (why use Twitter?), monitor (use search.twitter.com to monitor keywords even misspelled ones), engage (realize it takes time and resources, build your authority!) and then advocate (be 90% authoritative and 10% advocate/self serving promoting). Lisa Buyer is up next, and a fact she states that is worth noting: "90% of retail companies will be on Twitter by 2010".

TopRankBlog.com’s Adam Singer and Ben Fisher from TechPad Agency finish up this session discussing why using social media for PR is so important. Authenticity, long term story telling, leverage, and intersects with SEO are all important reasons to use social media for PR. Some tools to utilize: PitchEngine.com, SocialMention.com, Twitalyzer.com, Tweeteffect.com, and Twitteranalyzer.com. Singer also mentions: TopRankBlog.com has over 1.5 million backlinks, so we ought to take notice of the tools they are utilizing as they are obviously working.

What do you think of the social media sessions so far? Any questions you are itching to have answered by the experts? Comment below!

And don’t forget to check back to our post tomorrow to see more highlights from the social media sessions at Pubcon. I’m also tweeting throughout the sessions, so feel free to follow me: @cliquekaila on Twitter.

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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