SES Magazine December 2009 by Incisive Media

YOUR GUIDE TO

SES Chicago Dec. 7-11, 2009 | Chicago Hilton

Conference Agenda 4-6 Floor Plan 8-10 Sponsors 13-22

SearchEngineStrategies.com

December 2009

Communicating Search Success Juggling the expectations of senior managers from different departments isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t easy. To grow your practice, see search as others see it. page 44

brought to you by

$3.01

Follow SES Magazine at twitter.com/sesmag

contents

features

Communicating Search Success

Around the Town: Chicago

GLOSSARY

The most important metric of all routinely gets pushed to the bottom of your priority stack: business outcomes. If you see search as senior managers see it, you can grow your practice. §

Looking for things to do around the Windy City this week? Need a bank or drugstore near the conference venue? Look no further — we’ve compiled a brief city guide to acclimate you. §

Terms and acronyms every search marketer should know. §

conference information

4-6 8-10 13-22

December 2009

columns

AGENDA

Attract, Engage, Convert: Focusing on Searcher Intent

Website Requirements Include Search Engine Marketing

Four Principles of Large-Scale PPC Campaign Management

Using Analytics to Improve Online Marketing Performance

Manage Social Media Business Profiles for Local SEO

The DIY Guide to Managing Your Google Reputation

E-mail + Social Bookmarking = Instant Rankings

Semantic Search: The True Voice of the CustomeR

Use this schedule and overview to outline your week at SES Chicago.

Floor plan Find the locations of exhibitor booths, session rooms, and other attractions.

Sponsors & exhibitors Discover what all the organizations and companies at SES Chicago have to offer.

25-39

Sessions

57-78

Speaker bios

Determine which sessions and workshops will help you accomplish your goals.

Learn more about the speakers and session moderators.

Can you match searcher intent to content without hiring a gaggle of offshore content wizards? Yes — here’s how. §

A cohesive site requirements document will spell out, in detail, how to write content for searchers, how to optimize for engines, and how to display media to sell a product. §

It’s not uncommon for companies with large PPC budgets to manage accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords. Here’s how to keep everything running smoothly. §

Delving into online analytics to give your visitors a better website experience is the No. 1 factor in search marketing success. §

How should you manage social media profiles, in addition to your local search business listings? §

If you want to push down that negative blog post, or expunge that unflattering Flickr photo, you’re going to have to break out your SERM toolkit and get to work. §

Building a loyal subscriber base takes energy, time, and consistency, but it can lead to a significant uptake in search rankings. §

With semantic search and analysis, the ideas and needs customers have been trying to tell companies for years can finally be heard. §

Staff Matt McGowan VP, Publisher

Mike Grehan VP, Global Content Director

Magazine Managing Editor Drew Eastmead Contributors Rob Adler, Brooke Aker, Andy Beal, Bill Hunt, Kimberly Krause Berg, Gib Olander, Benjamin Rudolph, Jim Sterne, Ralph Wilson

welcome

Welcome to Search Engine Strategies and SES Magazine, your official guidebook for the week. As a search marketer, you know that the interactive industry is constantly evolving — and so are we. Thanks in part to your feedback, we’ve given SES Chicago a makeover this year, with shorter sessions, more case studies, and a refreshed speaker

PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT

Mike Grehan SES Advisory Board Co-Chair

VP, Content Development Stewart Quealy Senior Program Director Marilyn Crafts Program Coordinator Jackie Ortez

OPERATIONS Director, Operations Michele McDermott Operations Manager Dan Hoskins

Stewart Quealy SES Advisory Board Co-Chair

Clickz & SEarch engine watch Executive Editor Managing Editor, News Senior Editor, News Copy Editor

lineup. Whether you’re new to the industry or an expert, we have created an educational and networking environment for you that is unparalleled in its magnitude of offerings. Please do not hesitate to approach us this week, as your suggestions and input are always welcome. We hope you find this conference to be a truly valuable experience in your professional development, and that you leave here inspired with new ideas that are relevant to you and everyone on your team. When you get back to the office next week, we encourage you to stay sharp by reading SearchEngineWatch.com. At SES, our online content, webcasts, magazines, training events, and conferences are all geared toward our yearround mission of helping you achieve your search marketing goals.

Anna Maria Virzi Zach Rodgers Kate Kaye Caitlin Rossman

www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago

SES Advisory Board

Comprised of both industry thought leaders and real-world practitioners, the Search Engine Strategies advisory board brings together top players in the field of interactive media and search. The team works to deliver continually cutting-edge search techniques, more integrated and relevant content, and professional development resources to SES attendees.

SALES & MARKETING Sales Directors Andrew Katz Elaine Mershon Elaine Romeo Peter Westerholm Account Executives Elizabeth Huston Katie O’Hea Event Client Services Mgr. JoAnn Simonelli Marketing Director Angela Man Marketing Manager Christian Georgeou Web Designer Rebecca Holz Online Operations Manager Louise Laberge Online Operations Assoc. Aleksey Gershin

CORPORATE Chief Executive Tim Weller Group Managing Director James Hanbury

Matthew Bailey President SiteLogic

Andrew Goodman Principal Page Zero Media

Pauline Ores Sr. Marketing Mgr, Social Media IBM Corporation

Ron Belanger VP, Worldwide Agency Sales Omniture

Mike Grehan, Co-Chair VP & Global Content Director Incisive Media

Erynn Petersen Sr. Mgr, Ad Platform Evangelism Microsoft

Brett Crosby Group PPM Google

Anne Kennedy Managing Partner Beyond Ink

Randy Peterson Search Marketing Manager Procter & Gamble

Bryan Eisenberg Bestselling author bryaneisenberg.com

John Marshall CTO Market Motive

Stewart Quealy, Co-Chair VP, Content Development Incisive Media

Jeff Ferguson Sr. Director, Online Marketing Local.com

Lee Odden CEO TopRank Online Marketing

YOUR

GUIDE

SES Chicago

SES: Volume 3, Issue 8 | December 2009

Dec. 7-11,

Advertiser Index

Hilton 2009 | Chicago

e Agenda 4-5 Conferenc 6-9 Floor Plan

Sponsored session

Social Media Strategy & ROI Measurement According to Forrester, Social Media will be the fastest growing interactive marketing technique over the next 5 years and account for the third largest spend category. Unfortunately, most marketers struggle with how to measure Social Media and demonstrate its effectiveness. This leads to difficulty securing budget for the channel, which in turn leads to weak or inconsistent strategy. In this session, you’ll learn how to create a successful Social Media strategy, working backwards from a solid measurement framework. We’ll show you what to measure and how to measure it, and share our secrets on high-ROI Social Media. In the meantime, download our white paper on Social Media measurement at http://www.serengeticommunications.com/measuringsm.

Se rela e ar ti ted cle p. 4

0 If you’re a small concern, you are likely leaving business on the table due to easily corrected mistakes in your online marketing plan. Whether it’s making your organic and paid search ads more tempting to searchers or correcting the simple mistakes that keep visitors from converting once they reach your site, this panel will provide you with a slew of simple changes that can dramatically increase both your traffic and your conversions. This panel will also share free tips and tools on cheap and easy campaign testing.

Moderator § Jennifer Evans Laycock, Director of Marketing, SiteLogic Speakers § Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing § Bill Hunt, President, Back Azimuth Consulting § Kayden Kelly, CEO, Blast Advanced Media

Sessions

Turning Simple Change into Big Profit

Cool Mobile Apps, Augmented Reality - It’s a Brave New World!

Speakers § Nathan Linnell, Director of Analytics, Serengeti Communications § Nan Dawkins, Founder and CEO , Serengeti Communications § Liana Evans, Director of Social Media, Serengeti Communications

Small Business

Tuesday

For more details Tuesday’s Local Search Summit (open to SES conference pass-holders), see

page 6

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Day 3: Wednesday, Dec. 9 9-10a

Vertical, Retail, B2B

Morning Keynote Keynote Speaker § Dan Siroker, former Deputy New Media Director, Obama Presidential Transition; Founder, CarrotSticks

10:30-11:45a hybrid

PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle Finally see which search marketing tactic is the most cost effective: PPC or SEO. Watch these two heavyweights battle it out, trying to prove who has the bragging rights to the best marketing tactic. Join us for this no-holds barred session where the SEO proponents square off against the PPC evangelists. Since the best battles are actually decided in web analytics, learn about an industry study examining visitor behavior and conversion data for visitors arriving from paid versus organic links. The data will help further fuel this hotly contested debate. Don’t miss this fun, educational, and lively session — and be part of search marketing history.

Sessions

Moderator § Brian Lewis, VP, Engine Ready

Advanced B2B Search Marketing Is B2B search marketing really different than B2C? The answer is yes — usually. Many B2B companies sell complex, high-consideration products and services, with a long, complex sales process that involves multiple touch-points and ultimately an offline transaction. Furthermore, most B2B marketers utilize their website to engage prospects and generate leads — not sell products online. Learn how to turn a complex buying process into an opportunity and a competitive advantage for your firm. This session will cover the significance of the buying cycle, best ways to reach prospects, and tips on generating leads. Specific suggestions regarding testing website elements, including registration forms, downloadable assets, benefit statements, and images. Brief case study on how ongoing testing improves conversion over time. Moderator § Rebecca Lieb, VP, U.S. Operations, Econsultancy Speakers § Patricia Hursh, President, SmartSearch Marketing § Ryan DeShazer, Global Director of Search Marketing, GyroHSR § Barbara Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc. § Tami Dalley, Director of User Experience Optimization, Acronym Media

Clinics Track

Ad Copy & Conversion Clinic This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their websites live to provide general feedback about improving their landing pages and conversion rates.

Speakers § David Naylor, SEO, Bronco § Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service § Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz.org § Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance § Karen Weber, VP of E-Marketing, Irwin Union Bank

Moderator § Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media, Adventures in Search

Advanced Issues

In-house

Advanced Paid Search Brain Candy

Bringing PPC In-House

Your campaigns are performing OK. How to take them to the next level? Advanced PPC tactics can actually be more fun than basic ones, because you get to activate both left and right brain power, tapping into your own unique aptitudes as well as your customers’ deepest desires. This solo session covers campaign expansion techniques, advanced ad testing, advanced auction theory, the proper use of relevant analytics reports, ideas for bid rules and campaign automation, techniques for acting on seemingly inconclusive data, and more.

While a PPC campaign can be a more cost-effective operation if done in-house, the complexities of staffing and managing one can be a lot more challenging than it first appears. In this session, we’ll discuss how to get the right combination of people, tools, and resources in place to empower the PPC function internally. Determining when it makes sense to in-source your PPC, developing an effective bid strategy, and selecting suitable ad tracking software are just some of the key factors to be discussed.

Introduction § Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

Moderator § Paul Elliott, Partner, Rosetta

Solo Presentation § Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & Principal, Page Zero Media

Speakers § Nathan Linnell, Director of Analytics, Serengeti Communications § Dan Soschin, Interactive Marketing Director, American Public University System

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Speakers § Tim Ash, President, SiteTuners § Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, RAMP Digital

§ Northwest 1 § Northwest 2 § Northwest 3 § Northwest 4 § Northwest 5

12:45-2p

Wednesday

2:30-3:45p

hybrid

in-house

Facebook Rockstars Roundtable: Marketing For the Other Internet

Selling Search to the C-Suite

For the first time at any conference, this session brings together a true rockstar lineup of search marketers who have experienced groundbreaking Facebook success. Each will share case studies and anecdotes surrounding winning strategies, tactics, trials, and process and errors, all which led to astounding breakthroughs. This session is designed to connect the dots for marketers, to better define what Facebook represents, and how to best use it. Moderator § Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear Speakers § Addie Conner, Director of Interactive Marketing, Avenue100 Media Solutions § Melissa Mackey, Search Marketing Manager, Fluency Media § Mohammed Saleem, Director of Social Media Strategy, ChicagoNow

Your CMO still calls and wants to know why your company isn’t No. 1 for the most popular, random, non-revenue-orientated terms you have ever seen or heard about. Your entire day is spent answering questions about search. Search marketers and non-search marketers have traditionally had difficulty communicating in the language of their disciplines, often creating friction and unnecessary conflict. This very interactive session will explore how both disciplines can educate each other and explore such issues as the nominal percentage of marketing spend that is allocated to search. Moderator § Bill Hunt, President, Back Azimuth Consulting Speakers § Russ Mann, Co-founder & CEO, Covario § Crispin Sheridan, Senior Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Marketing § Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor, Inc. § Ron Belanger, SES Advisory Board & VP of Worldwide Agency Sales, Omniture

Advanced Issues

Ads in a Quality Score World

Moderator § David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing Speakers § Kristopher Jones, President & CEO, Pepperjam § Marcelo Sant’Iago, Managing Director, iProspect

Clinics Track

E-Commerce Site Clinic This interactive session takes retailers and e-commerce merchants from the audience and examines their websites live to provide feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines and increase online conversion. Moderator § Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media, Adventures in Search Speakers § Ethan Giffin, CEO, Groove Commerce § Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board; Founding Partner & CMO, Joblr.com; Managing Partner & Founder, Beyond Ink

hybrid

Search Becomes the Display OS “The increasing marginal returns of search advertising are now doing more than taking market share from display advertising — they are en route to becoming display advertising’s operating principle.” — Scott Rafer, CEO Lookery Search advertising, the one-time bastard stepchild of Internet marketing — that, only five years ago, barely existed — is now poised to double the spend of display advertising in 2009 (eMarketer). With the continued decline in display performance, some people believe the only thing that will save display advertising is making it more like search. This session explores these leading-edge ideas and provides some early case studies the effectiveness of making search the operating system for display. We will provide case study examples and the amazing results achieved — and ads that are not only search applications themselves, but that can be purchased and targeted based on the keyword. Moderator § Matt McGowan, VP & Publisher, Incisive Media Speakers § Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, RAMP Digital § Dax Hamman, VP of Display Media, iCrossing § Steven Kaufman, EVP, MediaMath

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Sessions

More and more, ranking well in paid search listings is less about how much you pay and more about the quality of your ad campaign. But what goes into making up your quality score? In this panel, we’ll take a closer look at quality factors and give tips on increasing the perceived relevancy of your campaigns.

Wednesday

§ Northwest 1 § Northwest 2 § Northwest 3 § Northwest 4 § Northwest 5

Advanced Issues

Clinics Track

How to Cut Your Corporate Budget Without Cutting Leads or Sales

Pay-Per-Click Congruency Clinic Crucial to creating successful pay-per-click campaigns is developing messaging that is personalized and persuasive, but also congruent throughout each of the campaign’s elements. This clinic will review PPC campaigns offered up by audience volunteers, from ad to landing page and beyond, suggesting improvements at each step along the way.

If you’ve been asked to cut back on online marketing, and you’re wondering how or where to cut, this session is for you. You will learn how to cut back without cutting sales or leads, while increasing business at a higher profit. If you track conversions of leads or online sales, this session will give two case studies detailing how two different companies cut costs and simultaneously increased business. Tools will also be discussed during this session.

Moderator § Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance

Introduction § Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit

Speakers § Ayat Shukairy, Co-founder, Invesp Consulting § Melissa Mackey, Search Marketing Manager, Fluency Media

Speaker § Laura Thieme, President & Founder, Bizresearch

Vertical, Retail, B2B

The Oprah Winfrey Litigation: What Affiliate Marketers Must Know

Sessions

In August, Oprah Winfrey’s production company brought a lawsuit against more than 50 Internet marketers and their affiliates, alleging numerous intellectual property rights violations against the marketers and the affiliates. Because many of the merchants used affiliate networks, these merchants were being sued regarding actions by affiliates that the merchants did not know or pay. Because many of the affiliates disappeared the moment that they were sued and because many merchant/network contracts preclude indemnification, the merchants may be liable for significant damages.

4-5:15p in-house

Bringing SEO In-House Managing SEO in-house at mid- to large-sized organizations can pose many challenges. Once the company decides to start SEO in-house, what’s next? In this session, you’ll learn what you’ll need to do to manage a successful in-house SEO program that runs smoothly and successfully. There are many groups involved in SEO besides the subject matter experts, and if you are responsible for SEO, you need to learn and implement these tactics that will increase the productivity and reduce the frustrations you face on a regular basis. Come and see marketers deliver the keys to success in building well-integrated search marketing programs that thrive on support from all levels of the company.

Using the context of the Oprah case, the panelists on this session will discuss whether the merchant/affiliate network model needs to be changed and how the risk can be mitigated. While the industry is unlikely to ever be risk-free, it is possible to manage risk by understanding the legal and regulatory environment, keeping informed about the changes in technology and marketing, and more. Attendees will learn how to identify these and other issues and develop policies and procedures to keep informed about the current technology, marketing strategies, and regulatory compliance. The ultimate goal of this knowledge is to help insulate merchants from liability and protect their brands and reputation.

Moderator § Paul Elliott, Partner, Rosetta Speakers § Simon Heseltine, Senior Marketing Manager, AOL, LLC § Jessica Bowman, SEO Strategist and in-house SEO Expert, SEMinhouse.com § Laura Coltrin, Senior Search Engine Optimization Manager, MySpace § Carolyn Shelby, Web Experience Manager, United Way of Metro Chicago

Moderator § Kristopher Jones, President & CEO, Pepperjam Speakers § Mark Rosenberg, Of Counsel, Sills Cummis & Gross P.C. § David Adler, Partner, Adler Law Group § Grant Crowell, Senior Media Analyst, ReelSEO.com

Become an SES affiliate today!

Are you a blogger or publisher? Do you post about SES events? With 5% payouts, the SES affiliate program helps you monetize the traffic you’re already sending our way — you can easily

earn $1,000*

*Payout for 10 SES New York registrants (regular rate)

Learn more:

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

SearchEngineStrategies.com/affiliate-program.html

§ Northwest 1 § Northwest 2 § Northwest 3 § Northwest 4 § Northwest 5

Wednesday

hybrid

Vertical, Retail, B2B

Black Hat, White Hat: Does it Really Matter Anymore?

M2M: Cracking the Code on Marketing to Marketers

Some say that “black hat” search marketers will do anything to gain a top ranking, and others argue that even “white hat” marketers who embrace ethical search engine optimization practices are ultimately trying to game the search ranking system. Join us for a no-holdsbarred roundtable that will include a discussion of the relevancy of the black and white hat issues. You will hear veteran search engine marketers disclose some of their favorite search engine optimization and marketing tips, tricks, and secrets, and there will be plenty of time for dialogue and discussion.

Devising and executing campaigns for a marketing audience can be a daunting task that defies the usual rules of engagement. As a result, anyone attempting to sell solutions to marketers needs to understand what their problems are first. Join us for a candid discussion as our panel of experts reveal the secrets to breaking through the static and targeting the relevant pain points all marketers face.

Moderator § Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media

Speaker § Crispin Sheridan, Senior Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Marketing

Speakers § Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz.org § David Naylor, SEO, Bronco § Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing § Todd Friesen, VP Search, Position Technologies § Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.

Moderator § Corey Perlman, President, eBoot Camp, Inc.

Advanced Issues

Clinics Track

Eye-Tracking Research Update

Site Clinic

Eye-tracking provides valuable information about a website visitor’s focus of attention. This information is crucial in improving the design of web pages and products to enhance the visitor’s experience. Effective search engine marketing relies on understanding user interactions with continually evolving search engines. Google’s universal search, which now includes media results, is one such evolution. This panel will discuss a neuromarketing study performed by One to One Interactive, which analyzed user behavior through physiological, emotional, and qualitative data. Also covered will be the newest information in eye-tracking of SERPs and the latest on heatmaps.

This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their websites live to provide general feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines.

Moderator § Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit

Moderator § Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media, Adventures in Search Speakers § Michael Martin, SEO Director of Project Management, Internet Marketing Inc. § Tony Wright, CEO & Founder, WrightIMC

Sessions

Speakers § Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive § Jeremi Karnell, Co-founder & President, One to One Interactive § Susan Weinschenk, Chief of User Experience Strategy, Human Factors International

Want to learn from some of the most innovative minds in the marketing industry? Search Engine Strategies offers free search engine marketing (SEM) and interactive marketing and advertising webcasts that are available for up to six months on demand.

www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/webcasts SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Search Training Workshops: Thursday, Dec. 10 SES presents search engine marketing (SEM/SEO) training. These intensive workshops will provide you Thursday’s and Friday’s training with the tools and hands-on exposure you need to become — and remain — a top performer in your field. workshops will be in the This in-depth training in a small class setting means that your instructor is readily accessible for informal Continental Ballrooms (lobby level). one-on-one or small group discussions. Not only will you walk away with the knowledge and skills you need to be a successful search engine marketer, you will also jumpstart your career and learn how to improve your business results. No matter where you are in the SEO/SEM process — and whether you’re a consultant, site designer, website owner, or in-house marketing professional — you cannot afford to miss this opportunity to learn firsthand the latest developments in search engine marketing. Training can be taken in addition to the SES Chicago conference or independently, as workshops take place on the Thursday and Friday following the event. For more information, visit SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago/training.php

Track 1

Track 2

Continental Ballroom (lobby level)

7:30-8a 8a-12p

Continental Breakfast Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Workshop

12-1p 1-5p

Lunch Break Advanced Keyword Research

Social Media & Your Business

Track 1 (8a-12p)

Track 2 (8a-12p)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Workshop

Landing Page Testing Hands On: Developing Your Action Plan

A search-engine friendly website is a user-friendly, search-friendly, and persuasive site that converts visitors into buyers. For a site to be searchengine friendly, it must meet the terms and conditions set by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc.). Additionally, the site must satisfy the needs of site visitors. Ultimately, the site must be profitable for the website owner. Can a single site satisfy all of these groups? This workshop will demonstrate the skills that are essential for building a user-friendly, search-friendly, and persuasive site that converts visitors into buyers. Many search engine marketing speakers are new to the industry or merely repeat information disseminated by more experienced professionals. Why learn search-friendly design from speakers who do not design for a living? Learn from the leading industry expert on search-friendly and user-friendly interfaces in the field of search engine marketing.

Sessions

Landing Page Testing Hands On: Developing Your Action Plan

Who Should Attend? Anyone who promotes websites as part of their work. Web marketers should understand all parts of a search marketing campaign: optimization, shopping search, paid inclusion, and pay-per-click solutions. For new and experienced marketers: Whether you’re a new marketer or a seasoned veteran, this workshop will help you take your campaigns to the next level of effectiveness. For new and experienced web designers: Minimize advertising expenses by creating search-friendly and costeffective site designs. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls early in the design process. Instructor Shari Thurow is the founder and search engine optimization (SEO) director at Omni Marketing Interactive, a full-service SEO, web design, and website usability firm. Shari has designed and promoted websites since 1995, and is outsourced to many firms worldwide. Clients include Yahoo, Microsoft, America Online, ABC News, HSBC, Expedia, Deloitte and Touche, National Cancer Institute, and WebMD. She is the author of Search Engine Visibility (www.searchenginesbook.com), and she has a forthcoming book, When Search Meets Web Usability.

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Changes in landing page efficiency can dramatically improve the profitability of your online marketing programs. This fast-paced and practical hands-on training will provide you with a crash course in landing page optimization and testing. It will also allow you to develop a personal action plan that is tailored to your business. All participants will receive a copy of Tim Ash’s book, Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing & Tuning For Conversions. Short lecture segments will alternate with practical hands-on work. Participants will complete structured exercises to apply each module to their situation. By the end of the session, you will have a complete action plan that can be immediately implemented. You will learn how to define mission-critical parts of your website; segment your online audience; model the financial benefit of landing page testing; understand the psychology of your audience; select the proper traffic sources for your test; and more. Who Should Attend? This workshop is designed for people who want to quickly turbo-charge their company’s landing page performance. You should ideally already have an established online marketing program with significant web traffic. Recommended for CMOs, marketing directors, SEM/SEO campaign managers, online media buyers, webmasters, and web designers. Instructor Tim Ash is the CEO of SiteTuners.com, a landing page optimization firm that offers conversion consulting, full-service guaranteed-improvement tests, and second-generation software tools to improve conversion rates. He has worked with Google, Facebook, American Express, CBS, Sony Music, and more. Tim is a highly-regarded speaker at Search Engine Strategies, eMetrics, PPC Summit, Affiliate Summit, PubCon, and eComXpo. He is a contributing columnist to several publications, including SearchEngineWatch.com. He is the host of the weekly “Landing Page Optimization” show on WebmasterRadio.fm. He received his B.S. and M.S. during his PhD. studies in computer science at UC San Diego. Tim is the author of the bestselling book, Landing Page Optimization.

Partnered Training Workshops: Friday, Dec. 11 A Search Engine Optimization Training (8:30a-5:30p) Bruce Clay, an industry recognized expert on SEO, will offer a one-day SEO training course in conjunction with SES Chicago. This course is targeting marketing and technical staff alike and offers strategy and tactics necessary in today’s fast-changing search world. The course, which covers SEO methodology, concepts, and strategies, will provide the process needed to achieve significant traffic.

Focusing on white-hat, search engine-compliant SEO methods, the course covers techniques allowing you to change your sites while staying away from the techniques that will get you in trouble. Others who have completed the extended course have raved about it, and this training will be no exception. The Bruce Clay SEO Training offers a specific and clear view of the techniques required to beat your

competition in the war for search results supremacy for your properly selected and targeted keywords. Instructor: Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.

A Integrating Search Across All Online Marketing Efforts (8:30a-4:15p) In conjunction with the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative and DePaul University, the Online Marketing Institute (OMI) — the most widely recognized education-based organization for online marketing — is hosting an entire day to educate marketing professionals as well as search/ Internet pros on the best practices and how to’s of integrating search with all online marketing efforts, including social media, web analytics, website usability, and demand generation into a unified and executable strategy.

SES has partnered with OMI to provide the most comprehensive day of hands-on education around. Our full-day workshop consists of four subject specific modules designed to help marketing and search/Internet professionals better integrate their search efforts with other major online marketing disciplines. Additionally, those in attendance will be able to achieve up to four credits towards an OMI Level 2 Certification course and apply the cost paid for the day toward the total cost of being certified ($1150). Attendees will learn how to build a strategic plan for all online marketing efforts for 2010. Instructors: Kevin Espinosa, Director eMarketing, Caterpillar Ray Comstock, Sr. Search Strategist, BusinessOnLine Paul Sherman, President Emeritas, UPO Jennifer Wessenmeyer, VP Analytics, Stratigent Debbie Qaqish, Partner, Pedowitz Group Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder, OMS

These training workshops are produced in partnership with SES. To register, or for more information, visit www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago

Track 1 (1-5p)

Track 2 (1-5p)

Advanced Keyword Research

Social Media & Your Business

In this four-hour training session, attendees will explore the tools available for identifying, researching and zeroing in on the right keywords for your SEO or PPC campaign. We will walk through the process in theory first and then work on a real-world example that leverages the latest tools available. Students are welcome to bring their laptops to this session. Wireless access will be provided.

As reported by SearchEngineWatch.com, social media has overtaken porn as the No. 1 activity on the web. And according to a Cone research study, 60 percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media websites. According to that survey, 93 percent of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media.

Who Should Attend? Anyone who needs to know where to place keywords for maximum effect, and wants to learn how to mix in additional search term modifiers that will leverage targeted search terms for greater traffic. Instructor Ron is president and CEO of Symetri Internet Marketing, an online branding and client acquisition provider specializing in social media marketing, search engine optimization, and paid search advertising. He has provided consulting services for companies like Sealy, Inc., Broyhill Furniture, Kimberly Clark Healthcare, Wachovia, Shaw Industries, and Kayser Roth. Ron has been an avid proponent of the search engine marketing industry by hosting and speaking at seminars and conferences. He also serves as VP and board member for the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). Ron is a columnist for Search Engine Watch and writes the SEM.edu and SEM Basics columns.

Social media is happening to your business whether you want it to or not. You owe it to your business to understand the social media landscape. Consumers, customers, and clients are demanding that their service and product providers be more accessible than ever before. Social media outlets are becoming a major venue that customers require of the companies they do business with. In this session, you will learn the landscape of places like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Flickr, LinkedIn, and much more. Additionally, you will get examples of how other businesses have used these outlets and how you should and, maybe more importantly, should not use them. Who Should Attend? There’s not a business in the world that can safely ignore social media. Whether you’re a locksmith, accountant, toy store, car dealer, or machining manufacturer, social media is having an impact on your business. Consumers want the companies they do business with to be engaged with them. That applies to B2B or B2C. If you’re a business that hasn’t started to think how to use social media, this session is for you. Instructor Sage Lewis is president of SageRock Digital Marketing, a leader in web marketing since 1999 that offers search engine optimization, paid search marketing, social media marketing, and analytics services. Sage speaks nationally with Search Engine Strategies and other prominent online marketing organizations. He writes as an expert for SearchEngineWatch.com in the promotion and link building section of the site. Sage is a highly dynamic speaker who offers a depth of knowledge only possible through his decade of experience in the web marketing industry. SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Sessions

After attending this workshop, you will be able to: § understand the role of keyword research/discovery and how it is integral to SEO and PPC campaigns § identify and refine the initial set of possible keywords for any campaign § analyze the initial set of keywords to identify and target the most popular keywords for your site § understand the difficulty of achieving top rankings for each search term § score your keywords and sort them in an order that’s most likely to lead to a conversion § know where to place your keywords for maximum effect, and how to mix in additional search term modifiers that will let you leverage your targeted search terms for greater traffic.

Want to learn more? Bill will be speaking at the “Turning Simple Change into Big Profit” session on Tuesday at 4:15 p.m. For more information, visit

SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago

Attract, Engage, Convert: Focusing on Searcher Intent By Bill Hunt

earch marketing has created a unique opportunity to connect with potential customers. As marketers, we can guide those prospects through stages that we set. We educate visitors about our products and hopefully lead them to a conversion. Unfortunately, many advertisers and their agencies have become fat and lazy. They’ve taken the opportunities of search riches for granted — and are only achieving a sliver of what is possible. Marketers need to move beyond just focusing on picking the right words, creating single action pages, and ranking No. 1, and put their efforts toward a deeper understanding of the real intent of the searcher. When we understand the searcher’s intent — where a searcher is in the buying cycle or even the type of search he’s performing — advertisers can better intersect with the true needs of the prospect, resulting in significant increases in conversions. In a perfect world, we would have a landing page for each keyword phrase to precisely match the searcher’s intent with highly relevant and engaging content. Unfortunately, we live in a world of limited resources, sites that match our company’s organization, and

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

business rules inflexible to the laser-focused needs and interests of our search prospects. So, with everconstrained resources, is it possible to start the process of matching interest to content without hiring a gaggle of offshore content wizards?

Decrease Bounce Rates for More Engagements

An advertiser’s failure to engage searchers with non-relevant content is demonstrated very clearly in the bounce rate reports available in site analytics. Your bounce rate represents the “one-click wonders” who come to your site only to click the back button and leave because you did not effectively engage them. Various studies suggest the average search marketing programs have bounce rates well over 60 percent. Strangely, many advertisers are actually fine with that number when they should be devastated — or at least remotely curious — as to why less than 40 percent of those who clicked a targeted search listing are staying on their site and engaging further. The most common problem is that the advertiser is bunching too many varied keywords into a single batch, pointing visitors to the same landing page and

FOCUS: searcher intent §

then expecting that page to magically meet the needs of a varied searcher community. The following is an example of paid search results of a query for “waterproof digital camera” in Google:

In two of four results, when clicked, I would expect to land on a page showing me waterproof digital cameras. When I clicked on the Target link, I went to a landing page that presented me with three cameras that were “special offers,” plus 14 additional digital cameras that were waterproof — mined from their product database. When I clicked the Kmart link, I arrived at the home page for video games, with no obvious way to get to digital cameras. Data suggests that I would take three to eight seconds to realize I was in the wrong place and click back to the results page, never to be seen again.

If I were a marketer and reviewed my Ask the Tough Questions and campaign in detail, I should see that a large Employ Strict Standards percentage of people using these keyword So far, we’ve discussed fairly obvious variations are hitting the back button. points: Pick the right words, write enticing While motivated, the searchers are not ad copy, and bring searchers to pages that being engaged properly. engage and encourage conversions. The other two listings in the example While it can be easy, far too many adverprove my point that advertisers can be tisers are not implementing the fundalazy and do not effecmentals to ensure tively manage their Avoid irrelevant listings they’re maximizing campaigns. opportunities. by segmenting your The Home Depot Advertisers who keywords into small, “weatherproof” listwant to get the most ing is inexcusable, relevant categories. out of search engine and Sears is just lazy marketing (SEM) need — which I don’t find surprising since they to establish stricter measures of success own Kmart, and I suspect the same agency for their campaigns and monitor them to is managing both programs. ensure they’re capturing more of the right Advertisers can fix this problem by traffic and avoiding the wrong traffic. better segmenting the keywords into So I challenge all marketers to take a few smaller, more relevant categories. minutes and ask the hard questions about Base these segments on refinement, your campaigns: What are your bounce considering buy cycle, branded and rates? Which are your poor-performing unbranded products, and feature keywords words? You should even experiment and — all matched to landing page experiences click on your ads. that complement interest and intent. You must fully evaluate the experience I strongly suggest that you deploy strict you are presenting to these high-quality, landing page optimization best practices ripe-for-the-picking prospects, and see and closely match words to searcher intent. if the experience you are presenting is Then test different messaging options on optimal. them. SEM, unlike any other marketing activiIt’s understood that you won’t be able to ties, is changeable and scalable; it offers do this for all of your words and pages, so the single best returns on your advertising segment those that are the most likely to spend. The opportunities for significant convert, drive current sales goals, or have conversions are there, but only to those performed strongly in the past. who take the time to understand what In the end, bounce rate can be a great searchers want and then engage them as diagnostic tool to measure relevance and they want to be engaged. § how well we are connecting with our Bill is the president of Back prospects. Azimuth Consulting, which foIt can work equally well as another cuses on helping companies agency performance metric to encourage understand the voice of their improvement. customer by aggregating variFor marketers, a ous digital signals into action10 percent decrease able insights and messages. in bounces will Bill is considered a top thought result in significantly leader on global search engine marketing and social more opportunimedia and is an internationally-recognized speaker. ties to connect with He was previously CEO of two of the largest global search marketing firms, Global Strategies and Outhigh-quality traffic. rider — both of which were acquired by WPP. Bill is Plus, you’ll realize the co-author of the bestselling book Search Engine value from click fee Marketing, Inc. and is a SearchEngineWatch.com you paid to get them columnist. there.

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

WebmasterRadio.FM - The Worlds Largest Online Radio & Podcast Network For The B2B Marketplace 100% original content, featuring the worlds most influential thought leaders in virtually every hot topic affecting everyone from major online brands to small businesses by helping them meet and exceed their online business goals.

Easy to Listen, Interact, and Network With 5 years of show archives, new shows posted daily, coverage of some of the worlds most prominent conferences in the B2B Marketplace, you’ll never run out of compelling

content to hone your edge and keep your fingers on the pulse of the industry.

Strong ROI For Your Marketing Dollar

Affiliate Convention - June 2010

Want a captivated audience to bring your brand to life? Our company does that in a variety of ways from fully integrated and interactive campaigns, including your own 30 minute monthly radio show, to white labels projects for clients who wish us to remain seamless to their clientele.

Mark your calendars: Summer 2010 Affiliate Convention returns to Denver, Colorado with a powerful armada of major influencers, future partners and progressive ideas-- this truly is a can’t miss event for anyone in the affiliate marketing industry.

For information SESmore § December 2009 {Chicago} contact sales@WebmasterRadio.FM | 954 736 4171

FOCUS: planning §

Website Requirements Include Search Engine Marketing By Kimberly Krause Berg

ootball might seem to be a clumsy game where men run up and down a field. But we cheer touchdowns because we like to see a wellexecuted plan that’s the result of extensive research and planning. Players study film, practice drills, and test new strategies. The same process is part of website development. Successful sites are wellplanned, documented, and executed. Web developers and designers study their competition and come up with a solid foundation. It all starts with a requirements document.

Business and Functional Requirements First

Typically, the requirements gathering phase of a web design is performed by your team as you gather around a whiteboard or conference call. The leading business requirements are laid down first. Is the site an e-commerce site, directory, blog, or informational site? What do we want the site to do, and why? What do we need to create a successful website? Top-level requirements are called parent requirements. They anchor the site’s plans. Your team discusses all the goals, no matter how big or small, for the site. There may be several business requirements, such as “provide services,” “get sales leads,” or “to inform.” Parent requirements are broad strokes that are later more fully defined. Along with business requirements, the other set of parent requirements are functional requirements. This is your programmers’ domain. Functional specs refer to technical, server, and application issues, and are typically derived from use cases, mental models, and user personas. Functional requirements determine guidelines for browsers, operating system, accessibility, bandwidth, performance, platform, mobile use, and programming choices. The process of gathering information at the start of your project helps many members of your team throughout the development cycle. This includes those who create the information architecture, those who do QA testing, and the sales department. A final requirements document can be used to create test cases to ensure every requirement is met.

Want to learn more? Kimberly will be speaking at the “Successful Information Architecture” session on Tuesday, 10:30 a.m. For more information, visit

SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago

Items to Include in Detailed Requirements Documentation Requirement

Acronym

Accounts for

User interface requirements

UIR

includes IA, design, fonts, images

Search engine requirements

SER

SEO, PPC, SEM, and linking

Social media requirements

SMR

blog, forums, social sites

Usability and accessibility requirements

UAR

usability heuristics, mobile, Section 508, PAS 78

The Forgotten Requirements

Let’s look at this example of business requirements for an e-commerce website: BR4.0 Sell online BR4.1 Shopping cart BR4.1.1 Custom cart BR4.1.2 SEO-friendly BR4.2 Marketing BR4.2.1 User-generated content, social media, weekly sales, coupons, online accounts, etc. The process of writing down all the desired elements can be a painstaking exercise. In the example, everything is traceable back to “BR4.0 Sell online.” The shopping cart is intended to help, but there is a requirement for a search engine-friendly one. One option is build a custom cart. If that is agreed upon, a separate set of functional requirements are written just for the cart. Every requirement and every guideline is traceable to a parent goal. Any time someone wants something added that can’t be traced to a business requirement, it is not included. Very few companies consider marketing or usability at the earliest stages of development. But what about “BR4.2 Marketing” from our example? To meet the user-generated content needs, team members will need to confer with those who are determining functional specs, which include the kinds of software applications that can be used for comments and customer ratings. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are not typically applied to requirements documentation, but they should be, so that certain techniques — such as how to structure title tags or guidelines for link labels — are worked out in advance. A business requirement may be “BR6.0 Be found in search engines.” Most site owners take this for granted and don’t begin the process. A requirement for SEO can be broken down into functional requirements for on-page optimization as well as details like robot.txt. When every piece is documented, anyone can go through the site at any point to test for compliance.

Critical Breakdown

When approaching the discipline of requirements gathering, it’s imperative that all stakeholders from each area of the development process are communicating. Of equal importance is testing during the development phase to make sure requirements are met and there are no conflicts. For example, a search for “leather fringe boots” displays several search results. One result is a boot with no fringe. Did the page have incorrect content on it? Or, was it the right boot but the wrong images? Why were the photos not showing the boot properly? A few things could have occurred. There may not have been a requirement for specific title tags and page titles. There may not have been a requirement that all images be shown at all angles. It’s likely that there is no requirement that covers searcher behavior. This is closely tied to usability. A cohesive document will spell out how to write content for searchers, how to optimize for engines, and how to display media to sell a product. Requirements documentation is a group exercise. Who is the site for? How will you meet user expectations, including searchers? Written website guidelines, based on the site’s requirements, determine design consistency, site maps, and mockups. If your main goal is to sell products, do you showcase some of them on your home page? Are product pages optimized for search engines as landing pages? Search engines are unable to deliver site pages the way you want them presented without first including SEM into the overall requirements documentation. This means that every element on the page has to meet criteria traceable back to business and functional requirements, as well as meeting supportive requirements such as marketing and SEO. § Usability consultant Kimberly Krause Berg is the owner of Cre8pc.com, UsabilityEffect.com, and Cre8asiteForums.com. Her work combines usability testing with a working knowledge of search engine optimization.

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Communicating Search Success Juggling the expectations of senior managers from different departments isn’t easy. To grow your practice, see search as others see it. By Jim Sterne

ou certainly have your hands full. You track enough keywords to fill five dictionaries. You juggle budgets that fluctuate more than a health care bill in Congress. You drive people to landing pages designed either by an agency addicted to winning awards, a freelancer with only a passing knowledge of the English language, or a multivariate testing tool programmed to act like an infinite number of monkeys. You try to please marketing directors, product managers, public relations supervisors, advertising executives, new media marketing mavens, and the CMO. You do your best to shut down your laptop before midnight. Amidst all the demands, the deadlines, and the dread that you’ll never have enough tools or

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

COVER STORY / FOCUS: the bottom line § are leads worthy of the sales representatives’ Want to learn more? efforts and how much each one of them costs. Jim will be moderating “Search and the Integrated Marketing Mix” on Monday Customer-centric types are somewhat at 3:15 p.m. For more information, visit interested in the number of contact center calls SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago you helped avoid, but they will be delighted that your work has improved customer satisfaction. Yes, that’s right. You are expected help your fellow diner make his or her boss to do such a great job at search optimiza- look good, you will make a friend for life, tion that prospective customers routinely say make the company successful, and make information on the company website is easy yourself indispensable. That’s golden, but to find. What’s that? You didn’t know you it’s not the end of the story. were in the satisfaction business? You didn’t think that measuring customer satisfaction Deliver the Goods But the more you explain what you do to was important? It is if you want to commuPeople consume information in a variety those around you, the more you talk about nicate in terms that senior managers already of ways. Some read spreadsheets at a glance. click ratios and differunderstand. Some can look at a chart and intuitively ential keyword traffic If you live in an grasp the relationships between elements The business objectives generation, the less that matter are connected e-commerce world, and spot dangers and opportunities by shape time senior executives your task is decep- and color. Others absorb information best by directly to profits. seem to have for you, tively simple: Deliver reading a couple of paragraphs. the less attention you the sales. Ring that Until you know how each of your interget for your team, and the harder it is to get cash register. Bring in the orders. But the nal customers consumes information — and more resources. people managing the shopping cart are well their supervisors — your best bet is to deliver The most important metric of all routinely aware of tweaking the persuasion process reports that include a: gets pushed to the bottom of your priority and segmenting it by lead source right down spreadsheet stack: business outcomes. The key is to start to the keyword level. That means they expect graph or chart looking at things from the other end of the you to be well aware as well. They want to couple of paragraphs of insight spectrum. It’s time to start at the ultimate know what the searcher searched for, what list of three or four bullet points business objective and work top-down. he clicked on, how long he stayed, whether he came back, and more. Yes, you are going Make sure that each of these elements only to have to get to know web analytics better. Start at the Top and Tailor Your delves down into a few issues. Overwhelm Oh, and don’t forget about those image Message executives with data, and they will take you The business objectives that matter are managing, media manipulating, spin doctoroff their Christmas connected directly to profits. Clearly, the ing people in the PR Don’t give executives data. card list. Don’t give search-specific metrics listed earlier are department. They want them data — give to hear how their press Give them analysis. profit divers, but they’re exclusively the them an analysis. language of the search professional. And as a releases are impacting That “insights” item metric, profits are crucial, central, and funda- site traffic. They want above is the kicker. They want your opinion. mental to business — but are not directly to talk view-through just like the advertising The rest of the report is there to back up your managers. Everybody wants credit. controllable. perspective. You, after all, are the expert. When talking with, working with, or Tell them what the numbers are — by all simply reporting to senior managers, stick Find Out What They Need means. But then be sure to tell them what Your best defense is a strong offense. to the language they know. The secret to the numbers mean and what they might do success here is that the language they know Don’t wait for them to beat down your door about it. is different from company to company and with specific requests. Instead, expect them Give them an opinion, a frame of reference, to show up, unannounced, at the most inconfrom executive to executive. and some options, and they will reward you Those in advertising or with a Madison venient times and ask the most off-the-wall, with more tools and more people. Someday, Avenue background still want to talk about ill-considered, and senseless questions that you’ll amass enough to find yourself turneyeballs. They want the raw numbers of need answers yesterday. So be proactive. ing off your laptop before dinner. Stranger reach and frequency. They want to know if Take them to lunch. things have been known to happen. § When you’ve got your colleagues or search is the best way to get the word out Jim Sterne is an international conto the masses or if they should push even clients in a relaxed, non-meeting, non-politsultant who focuses on measuring more dollars into television or fire up that ical environment, do not ask them what they the value of the web as a medium want. Given the choice between A, B, or C, old direct mail machine. for creating and strengthening Sales-oriented individuals want to know they will, in all sincerity, tell you, “Yes, all of customer relationships. Sterne about the cost and quality of leads. You can them. Thank you.” has written eight books on Internet Instead, ask them what they are trying get a billion people to show up on a landmarketing, produces the eMetrics ing page because you have this minute’s to accomplish. Get them to talk about their Marketing Optimization Summit hot YouTube sensation. Good for you, but business goals, and then go for the gold: Ask (www.emetrics.org), and is co-founder and current so what? They want to know if any of them them how their boss is evaluated. If you can chairman of the Web Analytics Association. people to really do your job, it’s understandable that you tend to focus on those things over which you have direct control: keywords searched key phrases searched search results position links clicked ads displayed ads clicked landing pages served landing pages seen landing page engagement

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

§ FOCUS: ad campaigns

Four Principles of Large-Scale PPC Campaign Management By Rob Adler

ay-per-click (PPC) advertising continues to be a key marketing channel for companies of all types and sizes. It’s not uncommon for companies with large PPC budgets to have accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords. At this scale, a PPC campaign can quickly become disorganized and unmanageable, since the complexity of PPC management increases exponentially — managing 1,000 ad groups is far more difficult than managing 500. Similarly, as the number of potential actions you could take to optimize your account approaches infinity, the need for percent effective workflow processes Display ad impressions from becomes even travel advertisers rose more important. 28 percent in September. Source: Nielsen Online Large-scale A Learn more at ClickZ Stats. PPC campaigns are daunting, no doubt, but proper keyword management practices can help any advertiser meet their paid search goals. Let’s take a look at four principles of keyword management that keep the gears running smoothly in PPC accounts of any size.

A scalable, proprietary keyword database is a competitive advantage. Keywords, or more specifically search queries, are absolutely a marketing asset — they’re a corporate asset, period. You should treat them as such, by maintaining a private, proprietary database that is specific and unique to your business. Using your own web analytics and log files as a data source gives you a more competitive edge — these are the consumer search queries that bring real, qualified visitors to your website. This is much more valuable than generic keyword data from public sources, which may or may not be relevant to your site. I’m an advocate of housing keywords in a relational database versus a spreadsheet

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

— a database is so much more dynamic and and content creation (workbenches) are manageable. This system enables frequent divorced. This disconnect introduces room updates and changes without the hassle of for error, for workflow confusion, and for manipulating a cement-like Excel file. In tasks going unaddressed. When dashboards addition, with dataA shared workspace and workbenches base software you can are united in a single create smart relationallows a scattered team keyword management ships among data sets. of marketers to contribute application with actionBoth of these abilities to PPC projects as a able analytics, marketare crucial for executunified front. ers can take immediing large-scale PPC ate action on the data campaigns. provided by their existing campaigns, using Just as important as room for growth is that data to further optimize those campaigns the ability to organize your data. in a continuous, positive feedback loop. Effective keyword segmentation Large-scale PPC accounts usually require is critical for achieving everimproving ROI from PPC. The a team effort, with multiple cooks in the reason it’s so important has to do kitchen. So in addition to actionable tools, search marketers need collabwith quality score — a grade that Google orative software to orchestrate applies to your PPC ad, which determines complex workflow processes. both ad position and how much you pay per A shared workspace means that click. Google awards high quality scores to well-structured accounts with small, tightly- a scattered team of marketers can contribute related ad groups. Keeping your ad groups to PPC projects as a unified front: Everyone closely knit also ensures that your text ads are knows which tasks have been completed and targeted and relevant. In other words, having which ones haven’t; this means duplicate a strong keyword grouping strategy in place efforts are eliminated, objectives and targets are prioritized, and best practices are clearly brings your overall PPC costs down. Again, a database system makes group- communicated. All of this boosts productiving keywords and managing those keyword ity, so you’re better managing your workgroups much more efficient. As your keyword force, not just your keywords. PPC advertising is evolving, and the tools list grows toward the millions, it becomes nearly impossible to manage and organize in and strategies that we use need to evolve a spreadsheet. A database is easily searchable apace. Smart advertisers will take advantage and automates some of the tedious manual of new advances that make it possible to work involved in grouping like keywords. manage the unmanageable. § And keyword grouping software is “smart” Rob Adler is the president and CEO in the sense that it learns from your groupof WordStream, an Internet marings and can automatically sort new keyword keting company. He is responsible opportunities into a taxonomy. This frees up for the company’s business stratmarketers’ time for higher-level work.

Part of managing your keywords for PPC is acting on them — not just shuffling them around. Search marketers need actionable tools for data-driven PPC decision-making. Oftentimes the tools used for analysis (dashboards) and the tools used for campaign

egy and day-to-day execution. Previously, he co-founded 80108 Media (now go2 Media) as well as CCBN. He holds a B.A. from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard University. Rob is currently an adjunct professor in the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College. He also serves on the Jimmy Fund Visiting Committee at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

FOCUS: analytics §

After the Click: Using Analytics to Improve Online Marketing Performance By Benjamin Rudolph

egardless of how high you rank in the organic or paid listings, customers ultimately decide whether to transact with you based on their experience on your website. While marketing plays an important role in the success of your online marketing campaigns, using web analytics to tend to the site is ultimately the determining factor. What methods can you use to optimize your website to maximize conversions after the click? Let’s start by defining what an analytics tool cannot do. First, it cannot quantify “user experience” — that requires a human element. Rather, analytics provide smart people with the data they need to drive decisions that improve the user experience on your site and in turn, the site’s marketing ROI. Second, while an analytics tool can tell you what customers are doing on your website, more important is its ability to provide insight into why customers interact with your website. Third, the tool cannot provide context around metrics. Instead, it allows you to track trends and performance over time. Finally, analytics is not a tool like Google Analytics or Omniture. It is the practice of intelligently using those tools to drive decisions that improve your website experience. Before you can configure analytics for your site, you need to start by identifying your website goals. There is no such thing as the right number of unique visitors. Generally speaking, more is better than fewer, but ultimately you want to drive qualified traffic to your site that ends up converting. Looking at bounce rate is important as well as knowing the most popular entrance and exit pages. The key question is whether visitors are finding the content that they are interested in. Think of how little time you spend on a website looking for what is relevant. If you don’t see the information you want in the first few seconds, you hit the back button. Your customers do the same thing, and simple design changes can make a big difference. There is no perfect formula for a PPC landing page, but here are four best practices to follow that will lead to conversions: Provide a consistent experience from search result to landing page. Telling users they should expect the Ritz Carlton and showing a website that feels like a Howard Johnson is a bad user experience. There is nothing right or wrong about either of these institutions, but users will certainly

be frustrated with a bait-and-switch experience if your media promises something that your site doesn’t deliver. There are customers interested in both segments, and available web conversions for both. The important thing is to match the experience with the content. Provide a searcher with relevant information. Whether you want to answer a customer’s question, offer more information, or lead a customer to a purchase, you need to provide relevant information as promised by the paid search ad immediately. You don’t need to spell out the return policy and privacy policy, but it would be helpful to have the links available should someone be interested. This is not the home page, so you don’t need to list everything you have to offer, but place yourself into the role of the customer, and think about the information you would need to complete your task. A landing page is a post-search experience. The customer has already told the search engine — and by association, you — what he’s looking for, so your landing page should provide a custom experience based on the context of that search, rather than recycling a handful of landing pages across a wide array of keywords. For example, if a customer searches for Samsung LCD TVs, don’t take the customer to your home page or a plasma TV product listing page. Provide an opportunity to buy a Samsung LCD TV, information about the features and benefits of LCD TVs, and a method to contact a live customer service agent for help in making the decision. If you don’t sell this version, be clear in your creative why your alternative is valuable, so you can be sure to only attract qualified traffic — saving you valuable marketing budget. Provide a clear call to action and a clean, simple design. If you had to identify the one action that the advertiser wants you to take, could you name it in less than two seconds? If not, there is no clear call-toaction. If three buttons, your logo, and your navigation are all red, nothing stands out. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t provide the customer with multiple options, but there should be a primary goal, and if you as the advertiser can’t name it, your customer will be equally clueless. The general rule of most landing pages is, “Don’t make me think.”

Take advantage of the web’s inherent advantage as a medium: Never stop testing

your landing pages. Free tools like Google Website Optimizer and paid tools like Omniture’s Test and Target enable multivariate testing of factors like creative messaging, images, offers, colors, and fonts. While people can argue over what they think will perform best, I prefer the democracy of data. If a purple “free shipping” message works, use it. And if you have a better hypothesis, prove it. Analytics tools help you quantify the impact of your design decisions, and since the transaction happens on your website, that is the most important component to measure. Just because you don’t have the budget to hire an agency to help you doesn’t mean you can’t improve your website yourself using free resources available online. Google offers a number of great free resources, including its help forum at http:// groups.google.com/group/analytics-help. Very few analytics problems have never been encountered before, and you can and should take advantage of the web community. In addition, you can take Google’s online Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) training available at http://www.google.com/ support/conversionuniversity. If you want, you can pay $50 to take the test and become certified. Or you can find paid advice from one of the Google Analytics Authorized Consultants at http://www. google.com/intl/en/analytics/authorized_ consultants.html. Whether you do it yourself or hire an expert, the important point is that you need to invest time and resources in constantly improving your website experience. Most companies recognize the need to spend on search marketing, but they often fail to match that investment on their website. Before you blame the search marketing, take a look at the analytics data. There is a lot to learn about why customers are not buying on your website, and by improving your conversion rate, you can improve profitability significantly without spending more on PPC. § Benjamin Rudolph is the director of business development at Search Discovery, an interactive advertising agency based in Atlanta that specializes in SEM, SEO, and web analytics. He is a Google AdWords certified professional, a Yahoo search ambassador, a Microsoft AdExcellence member, and president of the SEMPO Atlanta Working Group. @benjaminrudolph

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Drive Traffic to Your Site

PRWeb Drives More Visitors and More Sales For Your Growing Business Used By Over 40,000 Organizations of All Sizes “On the Internet... PRWeb has the pole position.” - Fortune

For a Fraction of the cost of Internet Advertising or Traditional Press Releases, you can: • Boost your Web site traffic and SEO • Get your news on top sites like Yahoo! News & Google • Add images, audio and video to your release • Send your news directly to the media and top newspapers • Track your results

Special Offer for SES Chicago attendees. www.prweb.com/go/seschicago2009 48

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

PRWeb is a Registered Trademark of Vocus Inc.

FOCUS: social media §

Manage Social Media Business Profiles for Local SEO By Gib Olander

recent survey by Internet2Go found that nearly half of small business respondents today manage profiles on both Twitter and Facebook. And while that is a testament to growth in social media, most are still on the fence as to the real benefits for their local business. Today, all of the major search engines are providing users a search results page that includes available social media elements among local business content. Examples include images of local businesses from Flickr, and local ratings and reviews from sites like Yellowbot.com, Citysquares.com, or Getfave.com. Also, the new Google Places and revamped Yahoo Local give users local business listings with added social media content. Essentially, these sites have started to provide a 360-degree view of businesses in local areas. Admittedly, this is great for users, but how should you manage social media profiles, in addition to your local search business listings? Although it’s tempting to a business with a local presence to alter its Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP) to try and market itself in a variety of ways across social media forums, a business’ foundation — NAP — should serve as the consistent anchor that ties a business’ online content together across the web. Without this consistency, multiple identities are created for your business online, making it difficult for search engines to find you. Your business’ online identity should not differ from its physical identity when it comes to any type of online business listing or profile information. If you change how consumers know your business for online purposes, you will potentially have a big identity management problem on your hands. So dive into social media, but remember these key elements that will tie all efforts and conversations together — and ultimately drive traffic and sales: Invest the time to get on social networks. Easy, right? Sometimes jumping in and getting accounts started on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks can be the toughest challenge because you aren’t sure how to use them or don’t know what the ROI will be. However, once a profile page is

started that includes your name, address, and phone number, search engines have more content to crawl related to your company. Although you might question whether you have enough time and resources for social media, these tools can be very cost-effective and help engage consumers unlike any other medium. Also, this can be a quick way for small businesses without a web presence to quickly establish one. Consistently use your exact corporate name for social media profiles. Once you are signed up on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, your exact corporate name should be used for profiles. Including a complete company name will increase the chances of users finding a wealth of information about your business when searching online. When a consumer looks on the web for your business, several things should be returned in search results, including a Twitter page, Facebook profile, Citysearch reviews, and Flickr photos. Keeping your business name consistent on all sites will help search engines aggregate all content related to your business. Occasionally tweet the name, address, and phone number. Make sure a primary phone number and address are listed clearly on all social media profile pages. Once on Twitter, a business should tweet its name, address, and phone number occasionally by tying this information to products, services, specials, events, promotions, or coupons. For example, “huge selection of Cubs T-shirts at business’ NAP.” Now there is an important keyword (Cubs T-shirt) and your business address associated with each other, available to be crawled and indexed by the search engines. Also, add a link back to your company’s website in your tweet, so you can drive traffic and include more information than what you provided in your 140-character tweet. The same type of information can be distributed on Facebook. If time is an issue, use a tool like HootSuite to schedule a calendar of relevant tweets. Add your social media profiles to your business listings. Once a company has its business listing information on its social media profile pages, the company should include social media links — Twitter handle and

Facebook URL, for example — to its business listings on the major search engines and data providers. Add a local component to social media campaigns for best results. It’s beneficial to tie your social media strategy into advertising or local search campaigns. For example, a large restaurant chain recently ran a nationwide promotion on Facebook offering a free food item, but failed to add a local component to its social media strategy. Ultimately, the chain did interact with users on a national level but missed an opportunity to point diners to restaurant locations in their regional areas. An integrated social local strategy would include fans posting positive comments on Facebook or Twitter about the restaurant’s local franchise. The chain could even include a sub-page or landing page with the NAP tied to each local restaurant from the corporate social page. The NAP would act as a signal to search engines to pull “fan” engagement together when the search engine is trying to answer a local search query like “hamburger in Downers Grove, IL.” Ultimately, this would have promoted conversation about and drove traffic to regional locations.

The bottom line is that social media is happening with or without your business. Make the most of these tools by getting online and interacting with your customers. Social media is about creating engagement and generating sales. Most businesses drive the majority of their sales through in-store purchases, and social media is a way to increase traffic to your physical service or retail location. Just remember, these conversations are bound to happen, so do things on your terms and claim as much web real estate as possible for your business. § As director of business development, Gib Olander has helped Localeze become the largest online content manager, serving local search engines, businesses, and ready-to-buy to consumers. Over the past decade, he has become a recognized thought leader in search, local search, and online content management; he speaks frequently at search industry conferences. Previously, Gib was a business development director at iCrossing and held positions at Ameritech Yellow Pages, Chicago.Citysearch.com, and Advo.

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

The DIY Guide to Managing Your Google Reputation

By Andy Beal

ust recently, Google confirmed two things that made this reputation management consultant smile. First, yes, Google is in fact a reputation engine. What it discovers on the web — and subsequently adds to its search index — can indeed “harm your reputation.” Second, it’s quite all right for you to improve your Google reputation by “proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.” Just don’t ask Google to help you out by removing the negative web content from its index. While we can rejoice that Google has given its blessing to the practice of search engine reputation management (SERM), the real reason for Google’s blessing was to provide a public service announcement that the search engine is in no way interested in helping you clean up your act. The underlying message conveyed by the search giant? By all means,

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

FOCUS: reputation management §

try it yourself — just don’t come knocking on our door. How exactly can you improve your Google reputation? While Google does provide some basic advice (http://bit.ly/googlerep), you won’t get too far by following the suggested “contact the site’s webmaster and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.” Neither will you be able to counter some unflattering photos by simply taking “some pictures you prefer and publish them in a blog post or two.” No way. Negative web content is just like a negative newspaper article or a scathing 60 Minutes expose — sensational content attracts attention, which attracts links, which attracts Google’s spiders. If you want to push down that negative blog post, or expunge that unflattering Flickr photo, you’re going to have to break out your SERM toolkit and get to work.

Your SERM Basic Toolkit

Here’s what every brand owner should have in place to try and combat a negative reputation in Google’s search results:

Get your own website. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? You’d be surprised at the number of individuals and companies that haven’t registered their own branded domain name and launched a website. Registering yourcompanyname.com or yourpersonalname.com and adding a basic website is a sure-fire way to occupy one of the top 10 Google listings for your name.

Add a sub-domain. If you’ve put a lot of effort into growing your main website, chances are there’s an opportunity to add a sub-domain. Google considers them as separate from your main site, but they still include your main brand. There are a lot of great reasons to add a sub-domain: careers, corporate information, and product info. Take a look at support.microsoft. com as an example of a legitimate use of a sub-domain.

Start a blog. If you love and nurture a blog, it will likely become a great asset in your reputation management toolkit. But the great thing about a blog is that it tends to rank well, even when left unwatered. Blogs are the cactus of online content. WordPress and Blogger both provide free blogs and free hosting. Add just a few posts, keep it targeted to your name — that means use it in the blog title, posts, etc. —add a few links, and bake for a few days. It will be on the first page of Google in no time.

Want to learn more? Andy will be speaking at various SES Chicago sessions, including “PR, Social Media & Search” on Tuesday at 1 p.m. Find out more at

SearchEngineStrategies.com/chicago

that your content is more relevant — and deserving of being in the top 10 — than the negative stuff that’s already there. The key is to link to your new content. I tell my clients: You own the “superbrand.” In other words, if your company name is Apple, then everything you link to, Each new site or profile Create your using the anchor text you create needs to be own wiki. “Apple,” tells Google fleshed out with relevant, that you are endorsing If you’re facing a Google the recipient site as unique content. reputation nightmare, an extension of your you may be tempted to brand. Link to your blog, sub-domain, and create a Wikipedia profile for yourself. After profiles using your company name in the all, Wikipedia ranks all over Google, right? anchor text, and you’ll greatly improve your Bad move. Not only is it hard to get one chances that the content will push down the approved, but they’re totally unbiased. That negative web pages. DUI incident that you’re trying to cover up will likely make its way into your profile. Don’t Take Shortcuts and Don’t Not good. Instead, create your own wiki Give Up and build your profile that way. Wetpaint Despite the brevity of this article, don’t is perfect for this. You can focus it on your assume that improving your Google reputapersonal name, or your company name. tion is going to be a piece of cake — it’s not. The best part is that you get to decide who Each new site or profile you create needs to contributes to it. be fleshed out with relevant, unique content. Each is going to need external links pointing Pick a social network profile. to it. And, each will take a while for Google Simply creating a social to determine its rightful place in the index. networking profile does not My advice? Be patient. Repairing a guarantee that it will rise to the damaged Google reputation won’t happen top of Google’s search results. However, if overnight. In fact, while you’re waiting for you’ve been thinking about creating a Twityour Google results to improve, why not do ter profile or building a Facebook fan page, a little self-examination and figure out what then you can use it to help push down that you did to get yourself in this mess in the bothersome newspaper article or negative first place? As Abraham Lincoln once said, blog review. “Character is like a tree, and reputation like The key is to make sure that you don’t its shadow. The shadow is what we think of get too cute with your profile name. Stick to it; the tree is the real thing.” your main brand name, and point a few links Fix your character, and you’ll fix your to each page from your official company reputation. § site or blog (see below). Your social media profiles will quickly climb toward Google’s Andy Beal is the CEO & Founder of Trackur.com, an online reputation top 10 results.

You’re the Super-Brand, so Link

It’s not always enough to simply build new websites or profile pages. If you’re facing a negative review on Ripoff Report or the Consumerist, the chances are you’ll need a lot of links to help convince Google

monitoring tool, and coauthor of the critically-acclaimed book Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online. You can reach him at AndyBeal.com or read his blog, MarketingPilgrim.com. @andybeal

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

around the

Town: Chicago R Restaurants 1 11 City Diner $ 1112 S. Wabash Ave. (11th Street) Hours: Sun-Thu 9a-9p; Fri-Sat 9-12a Phone: (312) 212-1112 Cuisine: Coffee shop/diner www.elevencitydiner.com

This week in Chicago... § City Hall Holiday Concert Series (free) www.explorechicago.org Where: City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle (west end of lobby) | When: Dec. 1-18 (weekdays, 12-1p) § Christkindlmarket Chicago (free) Where: Daley Plaza, 50 W. Washington Street | When: Nov. 25-Dec. 24 (11a-8p) Experience a traditional German Christmas. This outdoor market offers exquisite handmade gifts, unique ornaments, rare European fabrics, and German delicacies like bratwurst, goulash, potato pancakes, and gluhwein (a warm spiced wine). www.christkindlmarket.com § ZooLights (free) Where: Lincoln Park Zoo, 2200 North Cannon Dr. | When: Dec. 4-6, 11-13 (5-9p) Illuminate your winter! Meet Santa, watch ice-carving demonstrations, and marvel at more than 1 million lights. www.lpzoo.org/events

§ NFL Football: St. Louis Rams @ Chicago Bears Where: Soldier Field | When: Sunday, Dec. 6 (12p) § NBA Basketball: New Jersey Nets @ Chicago Bulls Where: United Center | When: Tuesday, Dec. 8 (7p) § NHL Hockey: New York Rangers @ Chicago Blackhawks Where: United Center | When: Wednesday, Dec. 9 (7:30p) § NBA Basketball: Golden State Warriors @ Chicago Bulls Where: United Center | When: Friday, Dec. 11 (7p)

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

2 Chicago Firehouse $$$$ 1401 S. Michigan Ave. (14th Street) Hours: Mon-Thu 11:30a-10p; Fri-Sat 11:30a-10:30p; Sun 4-9p Phone: (312) 786-1401 Cuisine: American (traditional) www.chicagofirehouse.com 3 Edwardo’s Natural Pizza $ 521 S. Dearborn St. (b/t Congress Pkwy & Harrison) Hours: Mon-Thu 10a-10p; Fri-Sun 11a-11p Phone: (312) 939-3366 Cuisine: Pizza www.edwardos.com 4 Exposure Tapas Supper Club $$$ 1315 S. Wabash Ave. (13th Street) Hours: Sun, Tue-Thu 5-10p; Fri-Sat 5-11p Phone: (312) 662-1060 Cuisine: Eclectic/international (small plates) www.exposuretapas.com 5 Gioco $$$ 1312 Wabash Ave. (13th Street) Hours: Mon-Thu 11:30a-10p; Fri 11:30-12a; Sat 5-11:30p; Sun 9a-10p Phone: (312) 939-3870 Cuisine: Italian Northern www.gioco-chicago.com

6 Opera $$$$ 1301 S. Wabash Ave. (13th Street) Hours: Sun-Thu 11:30a-10p; Fri-Sat 11:30-12a Phone: (312) 461-0161 Cuisine: Asian www.opera-chicago.com

9 Grace O’Malley’s 1416 S. Michigan Ave. (14th Street) Hours: Mon-Fri 2p-2a; Sat 10:30-3a; Sun 9:30-12a Phone: (312) 588-1800 www.mainstayhospitality.com

7 Oysy $$ 888 S. Michigan Ave. (9th Street) Hours: Mon-Thu 11:30a-10p; Fri-Sat 11:30a-11p; Sun 11:30a-9p Phone: (312) 922-1127 Cuisine: Japanese/sushi www.oysysushi.com

14 John Shedd Aquarium 1200 S. Lake Shore Dr. Directions: 4 blocks southeast from Chicago Hilton Admission: Adults $15.95; seniors (65+) $11.95; children (3-11) $11.95 Hours: Daily 9a-6p Phone: (312) 939-2438 www.sheddaquarium.org

10 South Loop Club 701 S. State St. Hours: Sun-Fri 11-4a; Sat 11-5a Phone: (312) 427-4727 www.cityinsights.com/slc.htm 11 Villians 649 S. Clark St. Hours: Mon-Fri 3p-2a; Sat 5p-3a; Sun 11-2a Phone: (312) 356-9992 www.villainschicago.com

8 Zapatista $$ 1307 S. Wabash Ave. (13th Street) Hours: Mon-Thu 11:30a-10p; Fri-Sat 11:30a-11p; Sun 12-9p Phone: (312) 435-1307 Cuisine: Mexican www.zapatistamexicangrill.com

G Drugstores 15 Target 1154 S. Clark St. (312) 212-6300 Directions: 8 blocks southwest from Chicago Hilton

¶ Attractions

Key

16 Walgreens 2 E. Roosevelt Road (312) 212-1579 Directions: 4 blocks southwest from Chicago Hilton

12 Adler Planetarium 1300 S. Lake Shore Dr. Directions: 5 blocks southeast from Chicago Hilton Admission: Adults $10; students & seniors (65+) $8; children (4-17) $6 Hours: Sat-Thu 9:30a-4:30p; first Friday of the month 9:30a-10p Phone: (312) 922-STAR www.adlerplanetarium.org

F Chicago Hilton 720 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605 (312) 922-4400

1 Find the numbered destinations on the map below.

R Restaurant pricing $ $$ $$$ $$$$

Admission: Adults $14; students & seniors (65+) $11; children (4-11) $9 Hours: Daily 9a-5p Phone: (312) 922-9410 www.fieldmuseum.org

Bars

under $20 $21-30 $31-40 $41 and up

$ Banks 17 Chase Bank 850 S. Wabash Ave. (312) 922-3930 Directions: 1 block southwest from Chicago Hilton 18 Washington Mutual 620 Dearborn St. (312) 834-0158 Directions: 6 blocks northwest from Chicago Hilton

13 The Field Museum of Natural History 1400 S. Lake Shore Dr. Directions: 4 blocks southeast from Chicago Hilton

[

Note: Walk one block north (of Michigan Avenue and Jackson) to Monroe to visit the Art Institute of Chicago or Millennium Park.

F 17 7

15 1

16 14

5 8 6

13 2 9

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES SearchEngineStrategies.com

§ FOCUS: linking strategy

E-mail + Social Bookmarking = Instant Rankings

By Dr. Ralph Wilson etting links is one of the most difficult tasks in search engine optimization. It’s a slow, tedious, never-ending process. Here’s an approach to linking that can rapidly boost your rankings for selected landing pages — if you have an e-mail newsletter or a group of people who read your blog regularly. In a nutshell, the technique is this. E-mail your list about a new article, product, or service. Specifically ask them to bookmark the web page using AddThis.com, a gadget that makes it easy for people to bookmark using their favorite social bookmark37.5 percent of video ads ing service. If you run between 16 and provide valuable 30 seconds in length. content to loyal Source: EyeWonder A Learn more at ClickZ Stats. readers, you’ll get a number of social bookmarking links to your web page — using your own selected anchor keywords. These targeted links add up to higher page rank for your landing pages. Let me break this down into its elements.

16-30

Develop a Following

The key to this strategy is to develop loyal e-mail newsletter or blog post readers. This has three parts: 1. Get subscriptions, either to an e-mail newsletter or subscriptions to an RSS feed for your blog. To achieve this, you’ll need to make getting subscriptions one of the highest priorities of your site. Display a subscription form on every page. Provide readers with a rationale as to why subscribing is in their best interest. Offer incentives to subscribe. Don’t be shy. Get the subscription. 2. Offer great content. Once you’ve obtained a subscription, then offer great content to your readers on a regular basis. This is a lot of work, but your readers will appreciate it. So much of what is written online is just fluff — and fluff doesn’t

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

produce loyalty. But if you offer solid content consistently, your followers will continue to read your newsletter or blog each time you post a new issue. 3. Write personably. One of the keys is to build a personal relationship with your readers. If you write with a dry, third-person, corporate-speak style, no one will care. Rather, write conversationally — though not sloppily. Share something of yourself — but without wasting your readers’ time. Share personal anecdotes that help you make your point. I try to obtain my subscribers’ first name, so every newsletter addresses them personally. If your readers get to know you — and you offer them great content — they’ll become personally loyal.

I ask my newsletter readers to bookmark a particular page: 1. I include the button in my e-mail newsletter, with the appropriate URL and title fields already filled in. 2. I also include a button at the top of the landing page — and ask them again to bookmark the page. My readers have been asked twice. Since many have become loyal, they’ll often do as I ask. Of course, if a reader chooses the “favorites” option on his web browser, I won’t get a link. But most will select a bookmarking service, such as Google Bookmarks or Delicious. Incidentally, AddThis statistics will indicate the number of bookmarks for each bookmarking service.

Ask for the Bookmark

Choose Your Keywords Wisely

The second prong of this strategy is to deliberately ask people to bookmark an article or landing page. I used to ask people to link to a web page, with only limited success. Few people control a website or blog that enables them to link easily. But everyone can use social bookmarks — and many or most social bookmarks constitute a link to your site. Google trolls social bookmarking pages to see what users find valuable. Those bookmarks act as votes for your site. Those links to your web page add up. My tool of choice is AddThis.com. You can set up a free account with them. They supply you a bit of JavaScript encoded with your account number that shows up as a button when you paste it on your web page. The JavaScript automatically grabs the title and URL of the page. When someone clicks on the button, it takes them to an intermediate page showing dozens of social bookmark logos. Your reader picks his favorite — mine is Delicious — and clicks on it. Now he’s taken to the social bookmarking site. The title and URL fields of the bookmark are already filled in. Your readers saves the bookmark, perhaps adding comments or a few tags, and he’s done. And you have a link. I’ve taken this two steps further. When

Because you can control the title in the AddThis button, you also have control over the keywords associated with the resulting social bookmarking links. Construct these titles carefully, making sure to include the specific keywords that will draw the right people to this landing page in the future. With many linking strategies, you don’t have much control over the anchor text of the link. But with AddThis, you do. Dig into the HTML of the AddThis button, and you’ll see how it works.

The Bottom Line

I’m not claiming that these linking strategies are easy. Building a loyal subscriber base for your newsletter or blog takes energy, time, and consistency. But if you’re willing to put in the hard work, you’ll find a wonderful bonanza of higher rankings for your projects. § Dr. Ralph F. Wilson is a pioneer in Internet marketing. His free Web Marketing Today newsletter (www.wilsonweb.com) is read by more than 100,000 subscribers each week. Subscribers also receive six free e-books and white papers on Internet marketing.

FOCUS: semantic search §

Semantic Search: The True Voice of the Customer By Brooke Aker

ustomer satisfaction is not merely one of a company’s many goals — it is intrinsically related to a business’s growth and well-being. To stay on top of purchase trends and get into the minds of consumers, marketers spend millions (if not billions) of dollars administering surveys, organizing focus groups, creating target advertisements, and evaluating website click-through numbers. Not only are these methods expensive, but they have grown antiquated with the advent of online message boards, Facebook, and Twitter. Today’s consumers take their gripes, questions, and accolades to the web for all the world to see — and they’re much more honest in these forums. Everything from lunch menus to favorite brands of toothpaste is broadcast to the masses. The more negative the brand experience, the more vocal consumers seem to be — and the affect it can have on a brand is astounding. About 84 percent of Americans reported that online customer evaluations have an influence on their decisions to purchase a product or service, according to an April 2009 survey from market research firm Opinion Research Corp. As such, keeping track of consumer comments on blogs, message boards, comment sections, and social networking sites is crucial to one’s brand sustainability. Tapping into the voice of the consumer and simply saying, “I hear you,” can do wonders for a brand. For all of the negative comments Comcast has received about its customer service in the past, establishing a presence on Twitter has helped. Frank Eliason, who manages the @comcastcares account on Twitter, has received a ton of positive attention for his prompt, kind responses to customers. When a customer takes his complaints to Twitter, Frank immediately responds with a, “How can I help?” Even if he doesn’t have the answer right away, the customer interaction has been enough to quell a flurry of complaint calls. Sure, creating a corporate Twitter account and closely monitoring the blogosphere are smart marketing practices. But the challenge remains: How does one identify and prioritize all of those web-based comments? The web’s reach is boundless, and social media text is quite unstructured, thus making it

impossible for a typical search to uncover about the Chrysler brands’engines and brakes. everything of relevance. So, how can execu- The Sebring, for example, received a 90 out tives sift through all of the social media of 100 in poor brakes ratings. The PT Cruiser noise — the ruminations, the misfindings, received nearly 70 out of 100 in poor engine the insignificant rants — to find the true ratings. Again, these opinions began to take form in 2006. opinions and reviews about their brands? The auto industry has some of the most The answer: semantic search. Semantic search provides early identifica- web-vocal consumers out there. The gap tion of consumer concerns, suggestions, and in consumer/manufacturer communicapurchasing trends — and uncovers this infor- tion has created a huge negative aftermath, as evidenced by the mation from the most downturn of the “big unstructured corners of Keyword search simply three” U.S. auto the web. The retrieval won’t find the data-rich companies. The voice of such information is not limited to recogniz- content manufacturers need expressed online is not one that should be to improve their brands. ing keywords as typiignored, and keyword cal web searches do. search simply is not Instead, it uncovers the meaning the words express in their proper going to find the data-rich content manufaccontext and accepted meaning no matter the turers need to improve their brands. Semantic search and analysis uncovnumber (singular or plural), gender (masculine or feminine), verb tense (past, present, or ers information from various, unstructured sources and identifies the meaning and relafuture), or mode (indicative or imperative). In the English language, the same word tionship between words and how they are can take on various meanings. For example, used in a sentence. As traditional search is a consumer can voice his dissatisfaction about collaborating and sharing informaonline about a plane delay. However, with tion online — giving average consumers a a keyword search, results will contain text powerful voice — semantic search is about about flat surfaces, sailing, tools, and trees. bringing understanding and accuracy to the Go ahead, Google the word “plane” and see vast amount of information found on the how many different meanings appear in the web. The value of the voice of the customer results. Semantic technology is the only way to corporations is nearly infinite. Twitter, to solve cases of ambiguities because it is blogs, Facebook, and other social media based on the true comprehension of the text, outlets have given customers a stage and a thus determining the correct meaning of the megaphone — and they cannot be ignored. words. But, it doesn’t end there. Not only Successful competitive positioning, messagcan semantic analysis find the true meaning ing, advertising, pricing, and much more are of the terms used in the search, it associates all dependent on understanding the customer. the correct connotation to the appropriate With semantic search and analysis, the ideas and needs customers have been trying to tell words in the sentence. The industry that may have benefited companies for years can finally be heard. § most if it had incorporated semantic search J. Brooke Aker is the CEO of Expert is the U.S. auto industry. Take Chrysler, for System USA, a semantic techexample, which filed for bankruptcy April nologies company. He is a serial 30 of this year. Using a semantic search entrepreneur and economist by tool, I researched consumer sentiment online education. Previously, he was CEO between September 2006 and April 2009. of Acuity Software and before that, Public opinion about Chrysler began to drop Cipher Systems. He is the technolaround July 2008. The automaker began to ogy designer of intelligence softreceive “poor” or “very poor” ratings for ware for corporate use, and a long-time speaker and its Voyager, Town & Country, and Sebring author in the areas of strategic planning, knowledge models, especially. management, and business intelligence. His designs Diving into specific features, there was a have been recognized by IBM, SCIP, and The Journal of predominance of negative consumer opinion Strategic Planning. SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

We’re giving away an iPhone!! Subscribe today and get real-world solutions for Internet success in every issue. Download our new mobile apps so you’re connected wherever you are. Request a FREE subscription at booth 309 or visit http:www.websitemagazine.com/get today.

+140,000 Audited Subscribers Worldwide

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Speaker Bios SearchEngineStrategies.com ยง SES

David Adler

Partner Adler Law Group David M. Adler, Esq. is the principal attorney and driving force behind the Adler Law Group, a boutique intellectual property law firm based in Chicago, Ill., founded in 1998. Adler has an extensive background, in private practice and in-house, with experience in corporate law, intellectual property law, and entertainment law, including contract interpretation, drafting, negotiation, and enforcement. Adler also specializes in advising artistic talent and creative professionals in the media and entertainment industries. He graduated from the DePaul College of Law in 1997 and received a B.A. in English and a B.A. in history from Indiana University. He is the past chair of the Chicago Bar Association’s start-up and entrepreneurial ventures subcommittee and frequently contributes as a guest expert columnist for various publications.

Duncan Alney

President & Social Media Strategist Firebelly Marketing As president of Firebelly Marketing, Duncan is focused on configuring and integrating social media marketing strategies to help clients build emotional relationships and build value for both brands and their constituents. Duncan has worked in the brand communications field for 17 years, and holds degrees from both Hanover College and St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta, India. He’s an award-winning short filmmaker and a voracious writer, blogging for Digitalia, a social media marketing blog, and Passionati, an online magazine on music, film, travel, and food. Duncan is an avid traveler, chaser of food experiences, and photographer. He’s completed five marathons and several triathalons.

Tim Ash President SiteTuners

Tim Ash is the CEO of SiteTuners.com, a landing page optimization firm that offers conversion consulting, full-service guaranteed-improvement tests, and second-generation software tools to improve conversion rates. Tim has worked with Google, Facebook, American Express, CBS, Sony Music, Verizon Wireless, Texas Instruments, and Coach. He is a highly-regarded speaker at Search Engine Strategies, eMetrics, PPC Summit, Affiliate Summit, PubCon, and eComXpo. He is a contributing columnist to several publications, including SearchEngineWatch.com. Tim is the host of the weekly “Landing Page Optimization” show on WebmasterRadio.fm. He received his B.S. and M.S. during his Ph.D. studies in computer science at UC San Diego. Tim is the author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization.

Andy Atkins-Krüger

Speaker Bios

Managing Director Web Certain Europe Ltd

Andy is a trained linguist with 20 years of international marketing experience, having worked with major brand leaders in advertising and public relations on five continents. In 1997 he discovered SEO and a couple of years later, paid search. As the marketing manager of Portakabin, Andy promoted the company throughout Europe in the late ’90s and needed a multilingual SEO solution. The result was the business now known as WebCertain, which Andy later acquired; he became managing director in 2002. WebCertain has been operating search marketing campaigns for more than 10 years and is one of few agencies that only deals with international campaigns. WebCertain centralizes campaigns in many languages and employs a team of native speakers that covers all major European and Scandinavian languages; Hebrew and Arabic for the Middle East; and Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean for the Far East.

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Adam Audette President AudetteMedia, Inc.

Adam is a second-generation Internet marketer and president of AudetteMedia, a search marketing boutique located in Bend, Ore. Adam is also a lead SEO strategist at Zappos.com, where he’s worked since 2001. A veteran of the Internet marketing field since 1996, Adam has worked with many companies, including Charming Shoppes, Motosport, Michelin, University of Phoenix, and HSBC. He is a frequent speaker at search conferences nationwide. You can read his blog at www.audettemedia.com/blog and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/audette.

Daron Babin

CEO Webmaster Radio Babin is known throughout the world as one of the top SEO/SEM experts. He has taught and lectured at conferences and has trained industry-leading organizations around the world since 1997. Babin began his career in television, where he was tenured at NBC. Since entering the Internet marketplace, Babin’s focus has been on creating tools to benefit the community. Currently, he is CEO of NewGen Broadcasting, a next-generation media company delivering interactive, entertaining, and educational programming to vertical B2B marketplaces. NGB also owns and operates webmasterradio.fm (launched October 2004), a 24/7, community-based Internet radio station focused in the SEO/affiliate marketplace. Babin is also president of Absolute Marketing International, a full-service SEO/ SEM and marketing company.

Matthew Bailey President SiteLogic Marketing

Matt Bailey is the president and founder of SiteLogic, a website marketing consultancy, and has been training businesses about website marketing since 1997. He is in demand worldwide as a speaker for the Search Engine Strategies conferences, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and the American Advertising Federation. He speaks at over 30 international conferences, seminars, and training sessions each year. Seminar attendees consistently rave about Matt’s conversational, entertaining speaking style and his ability to explain high-level search marketing concepts in a way that even “non-techies” understand. Matt is the primary trainer and developer for the DMA’s search engine optimization certification program, and the trainer for its two-day website marketing seminar. This year, Matt was selected as the DMA’s emissary to France because of his expertise in search marketing.

Dev Basu

President & CEO Powered by Search Dev Basu is president and CEO of Powered by Search Inc., a Toronto-based Internet marketing agency specializing in SEO, local search, and paid search-driven marketing solutions for Fortune 1000 and SMBs. Dev brings more than five years of ground level and strategic online marketing experience, having worked at Microsoft Canada, OANDA, Search Engine People, and Publipage Inc. Dev’s articles and opinions have been widely published and quoted by industry media publications such as WebProNews, Small Business News, Search Engine Journal, and Media Post. As an evangelist of search marketing, Dev has also contributed to fourth-year marketing courses at the University of Toronto, where he guest lectures students on building a foundation in SEO as a technical and marketing art, followed by an introduction into SEO as a career stream. Dev regularly blogs at Search Marketing Insights and is active on Twitter and Linkedin.

CEO Trackur

Andy Beal is the founder and CEO of Trackur, a powerful yet affordable social media monitoring solution. With more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience, Andy specializes in online reputation management and is the co-author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online. You can find him on Twitter (@AndyBeal) and at his blog (MarketingPilgrim.com).

Ron Belanger

VP, Worldwide Agency Sales Omniture Ron is responsible for leading Omniture’s agency program and managing strategic agency relationships. Previously, he was VP of agency development for Yahoo, where he built mutually beneficial relationships with Yahoo’s agency partners. Prior to joining Yahoo, Belanger was VP of search and affiliate marketing at Carat Interactive (now Carat Fusion). There, he grew the nascent search practice of three employees into one of the largest services of the agency. Belanger is a noted expert in the field of search marketing, with a passion for search and branding. He is a sought-after speaker, with appearances at ad:Tech, Search Engine Strategies, OMMA, Search Insider Summit, MIXX, iMedia, DMA Annual, and other top industry events.

Maia Benson Director, SEM LexisNexis

Maia Benson leads LexisNexis search engine marketing to help law firms drive measurable leads to their businesses. With more than 11 years of sales and business development experience in the technology space, Maia understands law firm customer needs and overall search marketing trends as the basis for developing and executing the best products and services. Previously, she spent eight years in Silicon Valley in sales and new business development. She was with Xerox for two years, helping businesses transform traditional document management into digital information management. Maia holds a B.A. in political science from Syracuse University and an MBA from Cornell University.

Seth Besmertnik CEO & Co-founder Conductor, Inc.

Seth Besmertnik guides corporate strategy and develops strategic partnerships for Conductor. His vision and thought leadership have established the company as a recognized authority in natural search. Since co-founding the company in 2005, Besmertnik has navigated the company through multiple finance rounds and extraordinary growth. Today the company boasts a customer list of more than one hundred Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer 500 companies and hundreds of the world’s most recognized publishers. Besmertnik frequently speaks at industry events as an expert in search marketing and is a frequent guest lecturer on entrepreneurship at various universities. In 2009, Besmertnik was selected as a finalist for Ernst & Young’s prestigious entrepreneur of the year award. He holds B.S. in entrepreneurial management from Baruch College.

Chris Boggs Director, SEO Rosetta

Chris is a specialist in search engine optimization and paid search advertising. He joined Brulant from Avenue A | Razorfish in 2007 as manager of the SEO team, and Rosetta acquired Brulant in 2008. Chris has worked in search engine marketing since 2000, starting

in-house and moving into a consulting role in 2002. He’s worked with organizations ranging from small businesses to Fortune 100, within all major industries, including health care, financial services, consumer products, and retail. He is experienced in performing and directing hands-on SEO, from keyword research to content and link development. Chris is as a regular speaker at major search marketing conferences, a moderator and expert columnist for SearchEngineWatch.com, an associate editor for the Search Engine Roundtable blog, and a member of the SEMPO board since 2006. Chris lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, with his wife, son, and daughter, and enjoys golfing, soccer, and fantasy sports.

Brian Boland

Manager, Performance Solutions Facebook Brian oversees product marketing for Facebook’s direct response ad products. Previously, Brian was a director of product management for Microsoft’s adCenter ad platform. He also worked for Performics, leading accounts in retail, travel, and finance. He was founder of Kinetic Entertainment, an entertainment marketing and management firm focused on digital marketing avenues. Brian holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Washington and Lee University.

Keith Boswell

Director of Digital Marketing Strategy Kaiser Permanente Keith is the director of digital marketing strategy for Kaiser Permanente, America’s leading integrated health plan. Keith previously worked in the digital marketing agency world for more than 13 years. In 2002, he joined Marketleap, a niche search engine marketing firm, as COO. He helped write and execute a business plan which led to Marketleap’s acquisition by Digital Impact. Their online marketing newsletter, “The Marketleap Report,” which he created and wrote, reached 11,000 marketing and media professionals regularly. He, his wife, and two daughters live in Rockford, Mich.

Guillaume Bouchard CEO & Co-founder NVI

Guillaume is the co-founder and CEO of NVI, an interactive strategy shop serving the North American market. The company builds viable revenue models for customers by developing and marketing websites based on an innovative online approach to business. Guillaume, a graduate of the prestigious Canadian business and administration school HEC Montreal, applies his nine years of experience as an entrepreneur toward client consulting, strategizing, and blogging. For a number of years, he wrote a column at SEOmoz.org, one of the top search engine optimization blog and resource sites on the web. He is recognized by his peers as a leader in his field and is repeatedly invited as a guest speaker to various conferences across North America. Guillaume enjoys jolting the market by leveraging sites, brands, and companies that would have received less exposure had they invested their marketing budgets only in offline strategies.

Jessica Bowman

SEO Strategist & In-House SEO Expert SEMinhouse.com Jessica Bowman delivers insightful, actionable advice in a way that gets people on board, moving forward, and improving the bottom line. Identified as one of the industry’s top in-house SEOs, Jessica’s specialty is building an in-house SEO program. After doing just that at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Business.com, she was hired by Yahoo to build new SEO programs and expand existing ones. She regularly speaks at Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, and Webmaster World Pubcon. Jessica writes for Search SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Speaker Bios

Andy Beal

Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and Search Engine Journal. She holds a B.A. in international economics and management from Hiram College, and earned a B.S. in information systems management from Washington University.

Eric Brown

Development & Investment Urbane Apartments Eric started his small business, Urbane Apartments, in 2003, after leaving a lengthy stint as SVP at Village Green Companies, a national apartment developer and operator. “The Urbane Way” significantly sets him apart, coupled with his unique approach to underground marketing and property management, focusing on the residents’ experience. Eric was nominated for and selected by Business Week as one of four social media innovators, for their “Voice of Innovation for Social Media for 2009.”

Ronald Burr CMO WebVisible, Inc.

Burr is responsible for product development, engineering, IT, media, and operations at WebVisible. An industry pioneer, he founded and managed NetZero through its early growth to its position as one of the world’s largest Internet service providers. With eight Internet technology patents in the areas of online advertising and market research, Burr has created technology solutions for many companies, including IBM, Verizon Wireless, and Sempra Energy. Interactive Week named him one of the “25 Top Unsung Heroes of the Net,” and he is on Response Magazine’s list of the “21 people leading us into the 21st century.” Before joining WebVisible, he served as chief product officer for LRN.

Lisa Buyer

President & CEO The Buyer Group When it comes to corporate relationships, Lisa Buyer believes the chemistry between search and public relations is exponential. As the founder of three corporate communications agencies and current CEO of The Buyer Group, Lisa is ambitious about the influence public relations has on SEO/SEM, and continues to share her innovative approach with clients, peers, and associates. She also consults traditional ad/PR agencies, transitioning from old school media to today’s best search engine strategies. Her clients have been published in print and online versions of USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. In addition to her social media involvement and interactive expertise, she also publishes a PR/SEO news blog. Lisa brings SEO/SEM to the boardroom as a critical part of a company’s public relations and branding strategies.

Sean Carton

Chief Strategy Officer idfive

Speaker Bios

Sean Carton is chief strategy officer at idfive in Baltimore. He was formerly the dean of Philadelphia University’s School of Design + Media and chief experience officer at Carton Donofrio Partners, Inc.

Vivek Chaudhuri

Director, SEO / Strategy Digitas Health Vivek is responsible for leading search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, developing high-quality talent, managing resources, and driving ongoing process enhancements. He has worked with global clients across industries and specializes in the integration of SEO strategy with overall online marketing strategy. Vivek is the founder of SEO Grail, a Philadelphia group that focuses on search engine

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

marketing trends and best practices. Prior to Digitas Health, he was the director of Internet marketing at ScreerMatter. In 2005, he influenced the growth of eDesigntree, a start-up digital communication company, and successfully managed a multicultural team across the U.S. and India.

Denise Chudy

Display & YouTube Sales Leader Google Denise Chudy is a Google veteran, and has been with the company for more than six years. Currently, she leads a team of display and video experts focused on Google’s emerging advertising products, including YouTube, the world’s largest online video destination. Chudy has the distinction of launching Google’s first automotive sales team; she also developed Google’s go-to-market strategy for the sector. Previously, she held positions at Cars.com, MTV Networks, and BBDO. Chudy has a B.S. in advertising from the University of Illinois, and a master’s in finance and marketing from Northwestern.

Christine Churchill President KeyRelevance

Christine Churchill is president of KeyRelevance.com, a fullservice Dallas search engine marketing company offering search engine optimization, web analytics, social media marketing, and pay-per-click management services. KeyRelevance’s clients range from small businesses to large publicly-traded companies and cover a wide range of verticals, including travel, education, e-commerce, and the automotive industry. Churchill speaks regularly at international search conferences such as Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld, and Search Marketing Expo. She was a member of the founding board of directors of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and has served as an officer of the board for the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) since its inception. She holds a master’s in business and has over 10 years of online marketing experience.

Kristin Clark

Director, Media & Market Planning Broadview Security Kristin Clark has more than 18 years of marketing experience, including the last 11 years in direct response with Broadview Security. Her responsibilities include investing a $40 million budget with five advertising agencies, providing the company with media planning/buying, Internet efforts (SEO and SEM), and Yellow Page buys. Kristin is a key player in the rebranding of Brinks Home Security as Broadview Security, a process that will invest an incremental $70 to $120 million over three years. Previously, Kristin ran the marketing department for a regional pizza chain for seven years. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in art and journalism.

Marshall Clark

Group Director, Search Organic, Inc. Marshall received his training in search engine marketing as a search engine optimization specialist with USWeb/CKS, where he worked directly with top clients, including Compaq, Transamerica, and Applied Materials. After opening his own consultancy in 2000, he continued to attract top clients such as Philips Medical and Adaptec, as well as start-ups and numerous mid-level clients across a broad range of industries. Marshall is technically proficient in SEM/SEO; viral, social, and guerilla marketing; digital strategy; and advanced website analytics. He currently leads the search discipline for Organic’s network of U.S. agencies.

MARKETING FOR A NETWORKED WORLD

What is SmartBrief on Social Media? A free, subscription-based newsletter for marketers and decision makers who need to stay ahead of social networking trends in a fast-changing environment. It’s delivered via email to your inbox, BlackBerry or PDA, daily.

SmartBrief on Social Media reaches a highlyengaged audience: • Subscribers: 50,000 (and growing rapidly)

• 100% opt-in

• Twitter followers: 6,000+

• Accompanying Blog: smartblogs.com/socialmedia

• 100% generated by word-of-mouth

SmartBrief editors serve as personal research assistants to our subscribers - handpicking, distilling and disseminating the best, most useful social media stories you might not otherwise see, from a wide range of sources.

Reach Marketing Executives Fortune 1000 companies and decision makers are eager to learn and invest more in social media. Marketing

40%

Executive Management (C-level, VP)

27%

Operations (IT, HR)

16% 10% 7%

Other

Consultant

“I’m a fan. In my opinion, this is the best social media newsletter I’ve seen so far. Relevant, short stories that keep me up to date.”

– Christine Morrison, Social Media Marketing Manager, TurboTax

“I love love love SmartBrief on Social Media - it has really helped me formulate my Social Networking Strategy. Not everyone in my company gets why I need to divert resources to Social Networking and articles from SmartBrief aid in driving my point home.”

– Stacey Kane, Director of Marketing, California Tortilla

Sign up for your free subscription: smartbrief.com/socialmedia For Advertising Rates please contact Henry Murphey: 202-737-5500 x245 or hmrupehy@smartbrief.com SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Heidi Cohen

President Riverside Marketing Strategies Heidi Cohen is the president of Riverside Marketing Strategies, an interactive marketing consultancy. She has more than 20 years’ experience helping clients increase profitability by developing innovative marketing programs to acquire and retain customers based on solid analytics. Clients include New York Times Digital, AccuWeather.com, CheapTickets, and the UJA. Previously, Heidi held a number of senior-level marketing positions at The Economist, Bertelsmann, and Citibank. Since 2002, she has been a member of the faculty of New York University’s master of science in integrated marketing program. Heidi is also a popular speaker on current industry topics.

Barbara Coll

CEO WebMama.com Inc. Barbara “WebMama” Coll is an internationally-recognized expert in search engine marketing (SEM) with a firm grasp on the industry’s offerings and their direction. Barbara has been active in the Silicon Valley world for 21 years, with roles in product and program marketing. In 1996, she founded WebMama.com to provide strategic and tactical consulting in the world of online marketing. WebMama.com is now a multi-million dollar company, with clients that include HP, Guthy-Renker, VMware and Verisign. Barbara was founding president and chair of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). She has a computer systems engineering degree from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She lives in Menlo Park, Calif., with her patient family.

Laura Coltrin

Senior Search Engine Optimization Manager MySpace Laura Coltrin is an accomplished online marketing professional with expertise in social networking, search marketing, and web analytics. She has a proven track record of driving business results through boosting organic traffic, focusing on revenue-generating initiatives, and training core business units in search methods unique to their roles. Her search portfolio includes work with highprofile sites such as FoxSports, American Idol, Fox, and Scout.com.

Ray “Catfish” Comstock Senior Search Strategist BusinessOnLine

Speaker Bios

Ray “Catfish” Comstock is the senior search strategist at BusinessOnLine. He has more than 10 years’ experience in the search marketing industry, specializing in organic search engine optimization and social media strategy. Ray has presented at numerous industry conferences, including the Online Marketing Summit, Online Market World, and the Business Marketing Association (BMA) Annual Conference. He is quoted extensively in trade and business publications and is considered an influential member of the SEO community. “Catfish” authors thought leadership papers and articles for industry publications.

Addie Conner

Director of Interactive Marketing Avenue100 Media Solutions Addie Conner is the director of interactive marketing at Avenue100 Media Solutions, a Washington Post Company. Avenue100 develops search engine campaigns, e-mail marketing programs, and highly optimized online properties for marketers to efficiently acquire new customers. Addie graduated from the University of Vermont with a B.A. in economics.

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Dr. Larry Cornett

VP, Consumer Products Yahoo! Search Dr. Larry Cornett is responsible for the Yahoo web search experience and heads up a multinational team of product managers, designers, and developers who create a world-class search experience. Previously, he was a director at eBay, where his team focused on multiple products for the tailored shopping experiences, platform, and international sites. Earlier in his career, he was a designer at Apple Computer; at IBM, he worked on database and development tools. Dr. Cornett received his Ph.D. from Rice University, where he designed and developed a coaching system for training software users. He holds multiple patents, which include design work on web-based products and hardware solutions.

Brian Cosgrove

Director, Analytics & Engineering TPG Direct, An Omnicom/DAS Agency Brian Cosgrove is a web analytics engineer specializing in tools configuration. By mastering the nuances of analytics tools, he has helped global brands translate their business needs into accurate, actionable report environments. Cosgrove has extensive experience in search engine optimization (SEO), serving as an SEO engineer prior to focusing on analytics. Cosgrove co-authored an advanced SEO course for the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) Institute. Additionally, he writes for www.searchmarketinggurus.com. Prior to Internet marketing, he developed mathematical modeling and optimization software for Lockheed Martin. Cosgrove holds a B.S. in computer science and mathematics from Albright College.

Nick Cox

Senior Product Manager Yahoo

Nick Cox is the senior product manager for semantic search at Yahoo and the lead product manager on the group’s open developer platform SearchMonkey. He leads a multinational team of product managers, designers, and developers focused on creating a worldclass search experience. Previously, Nick was a product manager and software engineer at Mirago PLC, a European search engine and provider, where he worked on the crawler technology and algorithmic products. Nick holds a BSc in business information systems from the University of East Anglia.

Grant Crowell

Senior Media Analyst ReelSEO.com Grant Crowell is the senior media analyst for ReelSEO.com, a publication dedicated to video news and marketing solutions for small-to-medium size businesses and the vendors who serve them. He is also the founder of Grantastic Designs, an online marketing solutions firm established in 1996, specializing in search-optimized, user-friendly web design and multimedia content, including video and usability solutions for commercial enterprises, non-profits, academia, and government organizations. Grant hosts ReelSEO’s twice-a-week podcast show, and is a year-round analyst in his coverage of both the latest and time-tested best practices with online video. Grant has been a featured speaker at Search Engine Strategies and PubCon on video SEO, along with providing coverage in the video marketing space for Search Marketing Expo, ad:Tech, Online Marketing Summit, Internet Retailer, OMMA, New Media Expo, WebMasterWorld, SMX, and Ragan Corporate Communications.

Midwest Regional Director Yelp Colleen is a director of marketing and community management for Yelp, a website that connects people with great local businesses. Colleen evangelizes Yelp in the Midwest and leads a team of community managers in Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Austin, Houston, and Dallas. After graduating from Loyola University Chicago in 2005, and a two-year stint as marketing director for a robust boutique real estate services firm, Colleen followed her passion for Chicago — and Yelp — by signing on as the Chicago community manager in February 2008. Read all about Colleen’s most recent urban adventures at colleenyelp.yelp.com.

Tami Dalley

Director of User Experience Optimization Acronym Media Tami is a director at Acronym Media, a top 10 search and keyword marketing agency headquartered in New York City. A selfproclaimed “fanatical explorer,” Tami’s expertise includes deepdive web analytics, usability consulting, competitive intelligence, landing page design, and multivariate testing. She currently leads her team in forecasting and analyzing all aspects of online media performance and visitor interaction. She was honored with a 2008 Search Engine Strategies (SES) award for most effective use of web analytics. Tami holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Griffith University, Australia, and a post-graduate honors degree in psychology from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Mike Dauberman

VP, E-commerce & CRM Norwegian Cruise Lines

Michael joined Norwegian Cruise Line in 2007. He oversees all aspects of the company’s e-commerce strategy development and execution, including the planning and development of the company’s consumer and travel agent-facing website initiatives. Prior to joining NCL, Dauberman was VP of the cruise division at Travelocity. He was one of the founders of the first consumer cruise website, uniglobe.com. Dauberman has been a featured speaker at numerous events and a commentator on Internet travel and customer servicing in the press. He was named as one of the “top 100 leaders of the travel industry” by New York-based Travel Agent magazine for his work in Internet and new technologies.

Stoney deGeyter

President Pole Position Marketing Stoney deGeyter is the president of Pole Position Marketing, a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm helping businesses grow since 1998. Stoney is a frequent speaker at website marketing conferences and has published hundreds of SEO, SEM, and small business articles. Stoney pioneered the concept of destination search engine marketing, which is the driving philosophy of how Pole Position Marketing helps clients expand grow their businesses. Stoney is associate editor at Search Engine Guide and has written several SEO and SEM e-books. He has five wonderful children and spends his free time reviewing restaurants and other things to do in Canton, Ohio.

Ryan DeShazer

Global Director of Search Marketing GyroHSR Ryan DeShazer is a seasoned digital marketing professional, having served entrepreneurial stints at pay-per-click (PPC) marketing firm Clix Marketing and as co-owner of interactive boutique NOEINK.

His responsibilities at GyroHSR include developing and advancing the firm’s search engine marketing (SEM) capabilities. Ryan has an extensive background in SEM and web analytics, and he was most recently GyroHSR’s director of interactive strategy. TopSEOs ranked his knowledge of organic search optimization among the highest SEO professionals in the United States while building NOEINK. Ryan earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky and an MBA from the University of Louisville.

Mark Dixon

VP, Product Management NearbyNow

Mark has more than 15 years of experience in technology and organizational leadership. His teams have consistently delivered marketleading products, which have received accolades from the Mobile World Congress, International Design Excellence Awards, Forrester, and more. He previously served as VP of product management and marketing at Sharpcast, where he drove the delivery of an awardwinning product that synchronizes user data across all of their devices. Prior to Sharpcast, he was director of product management at Avolent, where he helped the company grow market share and achieve leadership status in the e-billing software category. Mark holds a B.S. from the University of Virginia, and an MBA from Stanford University.

Heather Dougherty Research Director Hitwise

Heather is a leading authority in online commerce and marketing — a result of covering the field extensively since 1997. At Hitwise, she provides clients with insight into online consumer behavior and competitive intelligence. Her expertise of the online commerce landscape has been quoted extensively in the press, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and BusinessWeek. She speaks frequently at industry events such as Shop.org, Internet Retailer, ad:Tech, and Search Engine Strategies. Prior to joining Hitwise, Heather was with Nielsen//NetRatings as a senior retail analyst, where she provided strategic analysis and designed custom research projects. Before that, she spent four years with Jupiter Research, covering the online retail and commerce space.

Bryan Eisenberg

New York Times bestselling author bryaneisenberg.com Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of The Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and The New York Times bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?, and Always Be Testing. Bryan has been a keynote speaker for Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, MarketingSherpa, and E-consultancy. He is co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Web Analytics Association. Bryan serves as an advisory board member of Search Engine Strategies, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, and several venture capital-backed startup companies. Bryan is the recognized authority and pioneer in improving online conversion rates, persuasion architecture, and persona marketing. He was recently recognized by eConsultancy members as one of the top 10 user experience gurus.

Mona Elesseily

Speaker Bios

Colleen Curtis

Director of Marketing Strategy Page Zero Media At Page Zero Media, Mona focuses on paid search strategy and conversion improvement. In her career, she has significantly improved campaign performance for large brands such as Capital One, CareerBuilder.com, and Cathay Pacific, as well as medium to large retailers and high-tech B2B enterprise niches. Mona is SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

considered by many the authority on the Yahoo Search Marketing platform. Mona is a regular speaker at marketing conferences. She’s also a columnist at SearchEngineLand.com and contributes to a variety of other publications on marketing-related issues. Her industry knowledge is regularly sought after by the business community, and she is frequently quoted in marketing industry publications. Mona earned a B.A. from Simon Fraser University. She’s based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and enjoys West Coast activities such as yoga and hiking.

Paul Elliott Partner Rosetta

Paul is the partner in charge of Rosetta’s acquisition marketing practice. He has 10 years of experience in Internet marketing, with a focus on organic search engine optimization and paid search engine marketing. His work has helped countless companies achieve significant results and ROI from their online marketing investments. He has extensive experience in designing, executing, and measuring the performance of integrated online marketing programs for midto large-sized companies. Paul is a nationally-recognized speaker on the topics of online marketing and analytics, with recent engagements at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Search Engine Strategies, and Net.Finance.

John Ellis

Senior Online Marketing Manager ResortQuest John is the senior online marketing manager for ResortQuest, the leading managed vacation rental company in the United States. At ResortQuest, he provides SEO leadership and manages pay-perclick campaigns for more than 30 ResortQuest and partner websites. As an in-house marketer, John provides a unique viewpoint and helps ResortQuest sift through the madness of online marketing and social media. John has spoken at SMX and VRMA conferences. More information can be found at his blog, JohnWEllis.com.

Eric Enge

President Stone Temple Consulting Eric is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, a six-person SEO firm with offices in Massachusetts and California. He is also VP of marketing for Moving Traffic, Inc., a web publishing company that publishes its own websites, which can have tens of thousands of pages. Eric handles all the SEO for Moving Traffic.

Steve Espinosa

Speaker Bios

VP of Innovation eLocal Listing, LLC

Espinosa brings years of experience in Internet search, web product development, product development, multimedia, and search engine optimization. He was responsible for the development of the iZone product, the precursor to eLocal Listing’s current product offering. Based on his knowledge of SEO, video production, design, and marketing, eLocal has become a premier supplier of successful SEO and universal search optimization services to small businesses. He has consummated several major web development contracts for large companies such as Honda and Bridal Networks.

Liana Evans

Director of Social Media Serengeti Communications Since 1999, Liana “Li” Evans has been active full-time in the search marketing arena, becoming well versed in all avenues of social media and search marketing. Li runs the Search Marketing

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Gurus blog, and is the director of social media for Serengeti Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based online marketing firm that builds social media strategies and trains companies to bring online marketing in-house. As a database designer and programmer since 1992, Liana has developed technical expertise in dealing with large-scale retail sites and their dynamic natures. She holds degrees in both public relations and information technology. She speaks and trains social media and SEO at Search Engine Strategies and other conferences and is currently writing a book about social media marketing for Pearson Education.

Sally Falkow President PRESSfeed

Sally Falkow has been creating news coverage for both small and large organizations for over 25 years. She holds an accreditation in public relations from the PR Society of America. Her interest in the shift in media consumption caused by the Internet led to her cutting-edge approach to online media relations. Her understanding of the convergence of PR and search has made her a thought leader in the field of online PR, brand awareness, blogger relations, and news search. Read her blog at http://falkow.blogsite.com.

Jeff Ferguson

Senior Director, Online Marketing Local.com Jeff Ferguson currently directs all online marketing efforts for Local.com via a variety of channels, including SEO/SEM, affiliate programs, display, and social media. An online marketing veteran since 1995, Jeff has led the online marketing efforts for companies such as Hilton Hotels, Kimberly-Clark, InterActiveCorp, Experian, and Napster. No stranger to the speaking circuits throughout the U.S. and Europe, Jeff has spoken at the Digital Hollywood, Online Marketing Summit (OMS), and Search Engine Strategies (SES), where he serves on the advisory board.

Greg Finn

Director of Internet Marketing 10e20 Greg Finn is the director of Internet marketing for 10e20, a leading social media marketing company. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for five years and specializes in social media marketing along with e-commerce optimization. Greg has a knack for taking creative approaches on social media that provide a positive ROI for some of the biggest companies in the world. He is also a columnist for Search Engine Land and writes in-depth articles about social media and Internet marketing on 10e20’s blog.

William Fischer

Co-founder & Director Workdigital, Ltd. Bill (@williamfischer) is co-founder of Workdigital Ltd, a natural language search solutions development company. He’s also co-founder of DVD Station, Inc., a world-class media/entertainment Internet retail systems company. He has previous marketing and general management experience at more.com, threerings.net and Ebates.com. Bill is a frequent speaker, interviewee, and panelist for entertainment trade and classified search discussions.

Rand Fishkin CEO SEOmoz.org

Rand has been in search marketing since 2002 and spoken around the world at dozens of events, including keynoting events in Portland, Montreal, and Madrid. He has presented to the search quality

Todd Friesen

VP, Search Position Technologies Todd Friesen is considered by many to be an SEO pioneer. He entered the SEO world in 1998 and has since worked with top-name clients like Sharper Image, Nike, and Neiman Marcus on natural search optimization. He is an expert in search engine marketing, a former administrator at WebmasterWorld, and former moderator for Search Engine Watch. He is co-host of the popular “SEO Rockstars” on WebmasterRadio.FM, and a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, SMX, and other conferences. Todd holds a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of Calgary and currently resides in Gig Harbor, Wash.

Ryan Gibson

Director of Marketing The Rimm-Kaufman Group, LLC Ryan is responsible for business development as well as facilitating networking between RKG and the industry. Ryan has managed multi-million dollar PPC programs for both Internet-only and multichannel retailers. He continues his involvement in paid search through consulting projects and through PPC audits that help retailers find opportunities to increase profitability. He speaks at industry events such as Search Marketing Expo (SMX), the DMA B2B Show, and ACCM. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Ryan guest lectures on paid search at the UVa and the James Madison University School of Business.

Ethan Giffin

CEO Groove Commerce Groove Commerce is the brainchild of Ethan Giffin, an industry expert in the dynamic technologies behind e-commerce and e-marketing. Formerly the director of e-commerce at $5 billion Allegis Group, Giffin was the chief architect behind the management, marketing, design, and success of Thingamajob.com, an Internet job portal for some 18,000-plus continuously updated job openings with a database of more than 5 million members. For over a decade, Ethan has lived and breathed e-commerce and web marketing through his career, his personal interests, and now through Groove Commerce. He envisions clients being highly successful in e-commerce without having to become experts on e-commerce technology. Ethan has spoken at many of the industry’s top conferences, including Search Engine Strategies, ad:Tech, and Webmaster World’s PubCon.

Adam Goldberg

Chief Innovation Officer ClearSaleing Adam is a seasoned sales manager. Prior to ClearSaleing, he grew Google’s first inside sales team into a $500 million a year organization. He also created Google’s proprietary B2B search engine to help his sales team identify prospects and to help the company better understand its customer base. Prior to Google, Adam started Actuate Software’s inside sales division, growing the team from one person to 20. Before that, Adam was a salesperson for Oracle Corporation and managed major accounts such as Nike, Wal-Mart, and Frito Lay. Adam holds a B.S.B.A. degree in marketing from The Ohio State University.

Aaron Goldman Managing Partner Connectual

Aaron Goldman is a 10-year digital marketing veteran and Founder and managing partner of Connectual, a company that brings together buyers and sellers of digital marketing solutions. Services include digital marketing consulting and representation for marketers, agencies, media companies, and technology providers. Before starting Connectual, Goldman was VP, marketing and strategic partnerships for Resolution Media. During his nearly five years there, he helped grow the company from eight employees to more than 100 at its peak and more than $200 million in annual search media billings. In his role on the executive team, he managed corporate marketing, industry relations, and business development, landing new accounts like Bank of America, Dell, Gatorade, Hertz, FedEx, and State Farm. Goldman currently serves on the executive board of directors for the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association (CIMA). He has been published in iMediaConnection and DMNews and has a regular column in MediaPost’s Search Insider.

Sean Golliher

Founder & Publisher SEMJ.org Sean is founder and publisher of the peer-reviewed Search Marketing Research Journal. He is also chair of the SEMPO working group for Montana. Sean has a B.S. in physics from the University of Washington in Seattle, earned a master’s in electrical engineering from Washington State University, and holds four engineering patents. His current research interests are search algorithms, linked data, and semantic web technology. In February 2009, he joined the Montana web development company Future-Farm.com as president and director of search marketing.

Andrew Goodman

SES Toronto Chair Principal, Page Zero Media Goodman is founder and president of Toronto-based Page Zero Media, a full-service marketing agency founded in 2000. Page Zero focuses on paid search campaigns as well as a variety of custom digital marketing programs. Clients include Direct Energy, Canon, MIT, BLR, and a host of others. He is also co-founder of Traffick. com, an award-winning industry commentary site; is author of Winning Results with Google AdWords (McGraw-Hill, 2nd ed., 2008); and is frequently quoted in the business press. In recent years, he’s acted as program chair for the SES Toronto conference and has spoken or moderated at countless SES events since 2002. His spare-time eccentricities include rollerblading without kneepads and naming his Japanese maples. Also in his spare time, he co-founded HomeStars, a consumer review site with aspirations to become “the TripAdvisor for home improvement.” He lives in Toronto with his wife, Carolyn.

Eli Goodman

Search Evangelist comScore, Inc. Eli leads the business development team for comScore’s search division, driving development, sales, and marketing of comScore’s search products. He is a 10-year veteran of the technology and market research industry. Previously, Eli worked at Hitwise, focusing on search projects related to retail, travel, financial services, and publishing. He began his career at Gartner, Inc. as a member of the business development team for the research and consulting division, where he helped technology vendors with market sizing, product development, and public relations. Eli earned a B.A. in organizational and behavior management from Brown University in Providence, R.I., and currently resides in New York City. SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Speaker Bios

teams at Google and Microsoft on SEO topics, and consulted for dozens of notable organizations, including NPR, Real Networks, Zillow, and Yelp. When he’s not on the road or in the office, Rand spends as much time as possible with his wife, Geraldine.

Michael Gray

Owner Atlas Web Service In 1998, the company I was working for said, “You’re in management, you understand sales, and you seem to know a little something about computers, so we’re going to put you in charge of our new website starting Monday.” I took some classes and learned some programming, and a few weeks later, I actually had an idea of what I was doing. We were paying $10,000 a month for someone to host our shopping cart for us; we had less than 1,000 visitors a month and were making less $10,000 in gross revenue. That was a problem. I rewrote the shopping cart and we were in business. A few years later, after several design and programming revisions, we were averaging between 30,000 and 50,000 unique visitors a day, with yearly revenues in excess of $25 million. Currently, I work on my own affiliate marketing projects and client work.

Craig Greenfield

VP Search & Performance Media Performics

Craig leads a team responsible for sales, marketing, product development, operations, and customer service for Performics, the performance marketing arm inside Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Nerve Center. A proven marketing and communications professional, Craig is skilled in the introduction, development, and application of customer marketing information to achieve continued growth and advantage. Prior to Performics, Craig served as management supervisor at Jacobs & Clevenger, where his responsibilities included multichannel marketing communications planning, execution, and response analysis. He has extensive automotive experience as a planner on the Ford account at J. Walter Thompson.

Mike Grehan

SES Advisory Board Co-Chair VP, Global Content Director, Incisive Media Mike Grehan is VP, global content director with Incisive Media, publisher of Search Engine Watch and ClickZ, and producer of the Search Engine Strategies international conference series. Previously, Mike worked as a search marketing consultant with a number of international agencies, handling global clients such as SAP and Motorola. Recognized as a leading search marketing expert, Mike came online in 1995 and is author of numerous books and white papers on the subject. He is also chair of the Search Engine Strategies advisory board and is currently in the process of writing his third book on search marketing, due in spring 2010.

Dax Hamman

Speaker Bios

VP of Display Media iCrossing Dax Hamman founded and now leads iCrossing’s global display media group. He’s been in the digital space for 11 years, with experience in search, media, usability/accessibility, creative, technical, and affiliate marketing. Previously, Hamman was the international managing director at Bluestreak, where he was responsible for overseeing all European operations, and was heavily involved in overseeing client campaign strategy. Before Bluestreak, he managed business development and client services for new media agency Pod1. Hamman has a B.S. from University College London.

Beth Harte

Community Manager MarketingProfs Beth Harte is a marketer, blogger, speaker, adjunct professor, and community manager for MarketingProfs. She has more than 14 years of experience in integrated marketing communications,

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

strategic planning, branding, and SEO/SEM, with five years of experience in social media. She speaks on a range of marketing, communications, and social media topics. Beth’s blog, The Harte of Marketing, is featured in AdAge’s “power 150,” a globally recognized ranking of top media and marketing blogs.

Bill Hartzer

Manager SM & SEM Teams Vizion Interactive Bill Hartzer manages the search engine marketing and social media marketing team at Vizion Interactive, a leading search engine marketing, social media marketing, and web design firm based in the Dallas, Texas, area. He recently joined the company, where his experience in both search engine marketing and social media marketing bolster’s Vizion Interactive’s already robust search engine marketing and social media marketing offerings.

Nancy Harvey

Executive Director Wolfram Nancy Harvey is executive director at Wolfram Research, Inc. where she is responsible for domestic sales and business development for Mathematica, global business development, marketing, and public relations for Wolfram|Alpha, and Wolfram Solutions. Recently, she conceived and directed the innovative go-to-market campaign that earned Wolfram|Alpha a place on Time magazine’s top 50 websites just four months after launch. This effort was immediately followed by the rollout of a developer API, an iPhone app, and a consultancy service that provides custom Wolfram|Alpha enterprise solutions. Harvey brings 25 years of management consulting and executive management experience to strategic business vision and marketing, new business development, and partnerships. She is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, has her Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Minnesota, and received her master’s in business from the Wharton School. She is an avid amateur downhill skier and loves to travel.

Martin Hepp

Professor, General Management & E-Business Universität der Bundeswehr München Martin Hepp is a professor of general management and e-business at Universität der Bundeswehr München in Germany, where he heads the e-business and web science research group. He is the creator of the GoodRelations vocabulary, a technique for more precise and more reusable descriptions of business offers and interests. GoodRelations has been adopted by Yahoo, BestBuy, and numerous other technology providers and merchants. In his academic career, Martin was the organizer of more than 15 workshops and conference tracks on conceptual modeling, semantic web topics, and information systems. Martin holds a master’s degree in business management and business information systems and a Ph.D. in business information systems from the University of Würzburg in Germany.

Simon Heseltine

Senior Marketing Manager AOL, LLC Simon Heseltine is a senior marketing manager at AOL in northern Virginia (AOL properties had an average of 106 million domestic monthly unique visitors during the first quarter of 2009). Simon has had experience working both in-house and in an agency capacity, performing search marketing functions for small and large companies in a variety of industries.

Bill Hunt

President Back Azimuth Consulting Bill is president of Back Azimuth Consulting, which focuses on helping companies understand the voice of their customer by aggregating various digital signals into actionable insights and messages. Bill is considered a top thought leader on global search engine marketing and social media and is an internationally-recognized search marketing speaker at conferences in more than 30 countries. Press, industry analysts, and corporate leaders frequently seek Bill’s advice to effectively leverage enterprise and global search marketing and social media strategy. Bill has previously been the CEO of two of the largest global search marketing firms, Global Strategies and Outrider, both of which were acquired by WPP. Bill also writes a popular blog on search and social media marketing at www.whunt.com, as well as a column for Search Engine Watch on international search marketing.

Motoko Hunt

Greg Jarboe

President & Co-founder SEO-PR Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm, public relations agency, and video production company. Founded in 2003, SEO-PR has won a Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for Public Relations and PR News, and was a finalist for SES Awards in three categories: best social media marketing campaign, best B2B search marketing campaign, and best integration of search with other media. Greg is a frequent speaker at Search Engine Strategies and is the news search, blog search, and PR correspondent for the search engine marketing news blog at Search Engine Watch. He is regarded as a pioneer and leading authority on online publicity and is a member of the Market Motive faculty.

Jeff Jarvis

Author What Would Google Do?

Founder, Japanese Search Marketing Strategist Jeff Jarvis is one of the most provocative and optimistic voices AJPR LLC

Patricia Hursh

President SmartSearch Marketing Patricia Hursh, president and founder of Boulder, Colo.-based SmartSearch Marketing, is a pioneer of electronic marketing. Patricia has been using technology to improve marketing and communications for more than a decade. She began working in the search marketing arena in 1997. She writes columns for ClickZ and Search Engine Land and regularly serves as a speaker and subject matter expert at industry events in the U.S. and internationally, such as ad:Tech, BMA, Search Engine Strategies, and DMA conferences. She frequently authors search articles and is often interviewed for industry publications. As an educator, Patricia has led numerous seminars and workshops and recently authored several courses for SEMPO’s fundamentals of search marketing program.

Mark Jackson

Search Engine Watch Expert President & CEO, VIZION Interactive Mark Jackson joined the interactive marketing fray in early 2000. His journey began with Lycos/Wired Digital, where he managed several integrated marketing programs with a focus in the finance vertical. He then worked with AOL/Time Warner on cross-platform marketing programs. After the bubble burst, Mark established an interactive marketing agency and has since cultivated it into one of the most respected search engine optimization firms in the United States. Mark is a board member of the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association (DFWSEM) and a member of the Dallas/Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association (DFWIMA). He received a B.A. in journalism/advertising from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1993 and spent several years in traditional marketing (radio, television, and print) prior to venturing into all things web.

weighing in on the future of media, technology, and business today. At the forefront of the media world for more than two decades, Jeff is author of What Would Google Do? He writes about media, technology, and business on his blog, Buzzmachine.com. Jeff is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new graduate school of journalism. He is consulting editor and a partner at Daylife, a news startup. Until 2005, he was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. Before that, Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of The New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on The San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for The Chicago Tribune; and a reporter for Chicago Today. Jeff consults and has spoken for a number of media companies, including the Guardian, News Corp., USA Today, VH1, Sky.com, The New York Times, and Hearst — as well as major brands, including GM, Nike, Chrysler, Estée Lauder, Starcom, and Edelman.

Kristopher Jones President & CEO Pepperjam

Kristopher Jones is considered one of the top Internet marketing experts in the world. A true pioneer and leading voice of the industry, Kristopher is a prominent speaker and moderator at leading national and international marketing conferences, including Search Engine Strategies (SES), Affiliate Summit, Elite Retreat, and eComXpo. As president and CEO of Pepperjam, a full-service Internet marketing agency, Kristopher is looked to by thousands of businesses worldwide as one of a small group of pure Internet marketing experts. He was recognized in 2005 as an “entrepreneur of the year” by Bank of America.

Aaron Kahlow

Chairman & Founder Online Marketing Summit Aaron Kahlow serves as chairman and founder of the Online Marketing Summit and its educational arm, the Online Marketing Institute. Having delivered hundreds of keynote speeches and seminars nationwide, he is one of the more well-known faces in the online marketing and advertising space. Aaron is considered a leading online marketing educator and can translate online marketing technology jargon into simple marketing and business terms. He is a recognized authority on social media, e-mail marketing, website usability, SEO, web analytics, and overall web strategy. He was named one of the “top 40 entrepreneurs under the age of 40” SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Speaker Bios

Since Motoko established AJPR in 1998, she’s been providing online marketing services targeting Japan and Asia to companies from around the world, helping them enter the Far East market using the Internet. Her search marketing consulting services are highly valued and have made a big impact on multi-national brands’ search marketing campaigns. She writes about the Japanese online market on her blog and Multilingual-Search.com. She is a frequent speaker at search marketing conferences globally, and gives seminars and trainings about search marketing targeting Japan and Asia.

by Metropolitan Magazine in 2006 and served on the international board of directors for the Business Marketers Association. Aaron’s passion is people: connecting with them, understanding them, and helping them. He encourages such connections on LinkedIn or, preferably, Facebook.

Michael Kahn SVP, Marketing Performics

Michael Kahn leads Performics’ marketing practices with the goal to reinforce the company’s leadership position among clients, prospects, media, analysts, and the internal agency team. Kahn leverages a career in traditional and digital marketing, both as an agency representative and marketer, to fulfill his mission to deepen relationships, drive revenue growth, differentiate the company, and broaden visibility. Kahn formerly led account management at Performics, and previously, he served as director of consumer marketing for Socrates, an e-tail/retail publisher of do-it-yourself legal forms and software. While there, he led re-branding of the company. During the last “digital” decade, Kahn also led marketing and sales efforts at VisaNow.com, TruePoints, and Art.com.

Jeremi Karnell

Co-founder & President One to One Interactive Jeremi co-founded One to One Interactive in 1997. Since then, he’s overseen the creation of the firm’s marketing services group and its position as an industry leader in online direct response and brand marketing. Jeremi is responsible for building broad-based and highly effective business development, marketing, and public relations functions. He is currently acting as the managing director of OTOinsights, One to One’s research division focused on measuring engagement with digital media using neuro-research methods.

Steven Kaufman EVP MediaMath

Steven is responsible for overseeing media planning and buying for Digitas NY. In addition, Steven developed and now manages the Digitas search engine marketing knowledge center. This consolidated SEM practice ensures that industry trends, new strategies and tactics, and best practices are continuously shared, enabling Digitas to stay on the forefront of this ever-evolving industry. Currently Steven is working with a range of blue-chip clients, including American Express, Delta, Kraft, AT&T, and Mars. Steven is a member of MSN, Google, and Yahoo search advisory councils. He has spoken at numerous industry events, including Search Engine Strategies, OMMA, and the IAB Leadership Forum. He is also on the board of directors and serves as the VP of the 212 Interactive Ad Club. He holds a BBA degree in marketing from Hofstra University.

Kayden Kelly

Speaker Bios

CEO Blast Advanced Media When Kayden Kelly isn’t risking life and limb on his single-speed mountain bike or spending time with his family, he moonlights as CEO of Blast Advanced Media. The company provides website optimization and online marketing services for e-commerce and lead generation-focused websites. With more than 10 years of experience in marketing and web-based technologies, Kayden has worked with startups to big brands like Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, and Lennar. Kayden has led the development of several web-based marketing software products, including Video SEO Producer and Motivity. Past speaking engagements have included Web Builder, Search Engine Strategies, Borders Books, and the International Emmy Awards.

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Anne Kennedy

Founding Partner & CMO, Joblr.com Managing Partner & Founder, Beyond Ink With nearly 40 years experience in marketing and public relations, Anne Kennedy founded Beyond Ink in 1997 to bring the fundamental principles of marketing communications to online professionals. A search engine marketer for more than 12 years, she is an industry thought leader and sought-after speaker and writer worldwide. Anne is now launching Joblr, in partnership with Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Jamie Low, and Beyond Ink partners Shane Borelli and Gene Ehrbar. Joblr’s mission is to give the same sound principles of search marketing to a much wider audience of small companies and non-profits. Currently, Anne represents professional SEO firms on the Search Engine Strategies (SES) advisory board, as well as the advisory board for SEM-PDX, a professional search association in Portland, Ore.

Jessica Kornacki

VP of Marketing Endless Vacation Rentals by Wyndham Worldwide Jessica Kornacki has more than 15 years of experience in hospitality and consumer goods industries. She is responsible for developing the Endless Vacation Rentals by Wyndham Worldwide brand identity; establishing strategy for consumer direct online channels; overseeing advertising and public relations; building strategic marketing alliances; and directing all other marketing initiatives for the brand. Prior to joining the company in 2006, Kornacki was senior director of e-Strategy at Marriott Vacation Club International, where she successfully led the customer acquisition strategy via e-channels globally. She has also held key management roles within the consumer goods and hospitality industries. She holds an MBA in marketing/management amd strategy from Northwestern University, an M.A. in political science from the University of Illinois, and a B.A. in finance from Michigan State University.

Kimberly Krause Berg Owner UsabilityEffect.com

Kimberly is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com, Cre8pc.com, and Cre8asiteForums. Kim launched Cre8pc.com in 1996, offering search engine optimization and web design resources gathered and tested while working as webmaster for a technical magazine publishing company. She was in charge of web design and also getting 13 websites registered and ranked in search engines. As she moved forward in her career, she freelanced from home in search engine optimization (SEO) and website building. In 1998, she started the Cre8pc Website Promotion Club in Yahoo and co-moderated the home and small business club, where she gained a reputation for helping people and making SEO and marketing easy to understand. Hired by such companies as Unisys and Verticalnet, Kim worked as a user interface engineer and eventually moved into the quality assurance software testing field, where she tested and developed the methodologies for in-house website usability.

Cindy Krum

CEO Rank-Mobile, LLC Cindy Krum is passionate about bringing creative online marketing solutions to Rank-Mobile clients, working with them to develop high-level mobile and international marketing strategies. Cindy speaks at trade events about mobile web marketing, social network marketing, and international SEO. She writes for industry publications and has been quoted in PC World, Internet Retailer, TechWorld, Direct Magazine, and Search Marketing Standard. She served as the co-chair of the SEMPO emerging technologies mobile web task force and is an active member of the search community.

Director of Marketing SiteLogic

Jennifer Evans Laycock is the director of social media at SiteLogic. She crafts creative online marketing and communication plans based on careful observation of online consumer behavior and an extensive knowledge of social media communities. Laycock has years of experience building and managing online communities, focused at both the professional and consumer markets. Laycock has spent five years as editor-in-chief of Search Engine Guide, a popular industry site focused on educating companies about the various aspects of online marketing. A highly requested speaker and trainer, she serves as chair of the bi-annual Small Business Marketing Unleashed conferences. She is also the author of two books, including the Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing. Laycock has provided training and consulting for companies like Highlights for Children, Verizon, American Greetings, and Option Line, a national 24-hour crisis-pregnancy hotline. She graduated from The Ohio State University with a degree in English.

Bill Leake

President & CEO Apogee Search Bill draws on a deep expertise in both business and marketing to help increase revenues for a wide range of clients. He has been involved in driving provable revenues through Internet marketing techniques since the early 1990s, when, as part of the management team at Power Computing, he built the first company to sell $1 million in product over the Internet. As CEO and founder of Apogee Search, he has guided the company from inception to its current position as the largest search engine marketing firm in the Southwest and one of the 20 largest in North America. Bill serves as the president of the Austin Interactive Marketing Association, and as the chairman of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) committee. He received an MBA with honors from the University of Texas at Austin and his B.A. from Yale University.

Kevin Lee

Co-founder & Executive Chairman Didit Kevin Lee has been an acknowledged search engine marketing expert since 1995. He translates his years of SEM expertise into Didit’s proprietary Maestro search campaign technology. Kevin’s column for ClickZ, “Paid Search Strategies,” is read by thousands. Industry leadership includes being a founding board member of SEMPO and its first elected chairman, as well as membership on the DMA search engine marketing council and the IAB search committee. The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, San Jose Mercury News, and other press quote Kevin regularly. He lectures at leading industry conferences in addition to New York, Columbia, Fordham, and Pace universities. Kevin earned his MBA from Yale School of Management in 1992 and lives in Manhattan.

Brian Lewis VP Engine Ready

Noted industry author and speaker Brian Lewis has more than 20 years of experience in digital and direct marketing. His articles have been referenced or published in The New York Times, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, Website Magazine, and SEM Journal. Prior to his role at Engine Ready, Lewis founded the Internet agency Solutions-Insight Interactive, and was president at the world’s leading supplier of aviation training equipment. Lewis earned his B.A. in economics from the University of California San Diego and his MBA in finance from Arizona State University.

Sage Lewis President SageRock.com

Sage Lewis is president of SageRock Digital Marketing, a leader in web marketing since 1999 offering search engine optimization, paid search marketing, social media marketing, and analytics services. Sage speaks nationally with Search Engine Strategies and other prominent online marketing organizations. He writes as an expert for SearchEngineWatch.com in the promotion and link building section of the site. Sage is a highly dynamic speaker who offers a depth of knowledge only possible through his decade of experience in the web marketing industry.

Rebecca Lieb

VP, U.S. Operations Econsultancy Rebecca oversees the U.S. operations of Econsultancy, the leading source of independent advice and insight on digital marketing and e-commerce. Earlier, she held executive marketing and communications positions at strategic e-services companies, including Siegel & Gale, and has worked in the same capacity for global entertainment and media companies, including Universal Television & Networks Group (formerly USA Networks International) and Bertelsmann’s RTL Television. As a journalist, she’s written on media for numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Rebecca spent five years as Variety’s Berlin-based German/Eastern European bureau chief. She also served as The ClickZ Network’s editor-in-chief for more than seven years; for a portion of that time, she oversaw SearchEngineWatch. com. Her book, The Truth About Search Engine Optimization, was just published by FT.com.

Nathan Linnell

Director of Analytics Serengeti Communications Nathan Linnell is the director of analytics at Serengeti Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based marketing consulting firm that helps equip organizations with the tools, data, insights, and skills to execute high ROI digital marketing programs. Nathan began his career in digital marketing working as a PPC search manager before moving into web analytics. Currently, he oversees the measurement, analysis, and optimization of all digital marketing efforts, with a special focus on integrated social media measurement. Nathan graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a bachelor’s in business administration and marketing and a minor in economics.

Heather Lloyd-Martin CEO SuccessWorks

Described as a fast-talking, fiery redhead, Heather Lloyd-Martin is a 20-year marketing veteran and recognized author who is considered the pioneer of SEO copywriting. A first-generation search marketing expert, her life is split between watching the search engines dance and pinpointing the exact direct response copywriting strategies that make people buy. For over 10 years, Heather’s firm, SuccessWorks, has been training corporate in-house SEO copywriters and creating revenue-driving website content campaigns. SuccessWorks’ client base includes companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 retailers, search engines, and publishers to financial services and travel destination sites. Additionally, freelance online writers and small business owners consider her book, Successful Search Engine Copywriting, as a go-to resource. Heather serves on the board of American Writers and Artists, Inc., is an advisory board member of SEMpdx, and serves on the PubCon conference advisory board.

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Speaker Bios

Jennifer Evans Laycock

Melissa Mackey

Search Marketing Manager Fluency Media Melissa Mackey is search marketing manager at Fluency Media, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based digital agency. A PPC veteran and marketing professional since 1988, she helps clients achieve maximum ROI from paid search. Mackey contributes regularly to SearchEngineWatch.com and moderates the Search Engine Watch forums. She also hosts a blog, www.beyondthepaid.com, where she writes on the topics of pay-per-click and search marketing. Mackey previously served as director of search marketing for MagazineLine. She has also held advertising executive positions at the Lansing State Journal and radio stations WMMQ-FM and WJIM-AM/FM. She holds a dual B.A. from Michigan State University, and a master’s of management from Aquinas College.

Russ Mann

Co-founder & CEO Covario Under Russ’ leadership, Covario has become a high-performance team of nearly 100 members in San Diego and San Francisco, with additional presence in New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, and Tokyo. The team has expanded its client portfolio to include more than 50 Fortune 500 and Internet 100 clients, and has won various awards and recognition from organizations such as ad:Tech, SES, AeA, OMMA’s Mixx Awards, and the ABA’s Stevies. Russ and the team are sought-after commentators on the state of online marketing and have been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and The Washington Post, as well as in industry publications, including Advertising Age, iMedia, ClickZ, and SearchEngineWatch.com. Russ speaks at industry events such as ad:Tech, SES, and SMX, and also at investor conferences.

Michael Martin

SEO Director of Project Management Internet Marketing Inc. Now based out of San Diego, Michael graduated from UMass Dartmouth with a computer engineering degree and a minor in German before quickly entering the IT project management field in Cambridge, Mass. In his more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience, he’s overseen online marketing improvements to such sites as SC Johnson, IGN, Deepak Chopra, Trump Properties, and his own Google Android Mobile platform site GoogleAndBlog. com. Michael has spoken at SMX Advanced, WordCamp LA, the San Diego Google Technology User Group (GTUG), and PubCon. Michael has collaborated in doing SEO guest posts on such sites as SEOMoz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal.

Debra Mastaler

Speaker Bios

President Alliance-Link

Debra Mastaler is president of Alliance-Link, an interactive marketing agency based in northern Virginia, that provides custom link-building campaigns and link training. Debra offers a commonsense approach to link building by combining traditional sales and promotional strategies with effective online search engine marketing tactics. Debra is a featured guest speaker at Search Engine Strategies, is a guest columnist for Search Engine Land, Search Engine Guide, and Search Engine Journal, has written widely on link marketing, and is the link-building moderator on the SEOBook community forum as well as the small business ideas forum. In addition to client projects and link training for Fortune 500 companies as well as a number of top international SEO firms, Debra has provided link training sessions for the Direct Marketing Association, High Ranking Seminars, and Search Engine Strategies.

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Jim Matheson

Senior Director, Online Marketing SuccessFactors Jim has eight years of experience both with PPC and SEO in both the B2C and B2B industries. He is currently the senior director of online marketing at SuccessFactors, the global leader in business execution software. With more than 5 million end users, SuccessFactors has a massive base of global SaaS users. Over the last four years, Jim has grown search marketing globally for the company and helped bring in prospects from more than 25 countries via a global, multilingual PPC strategy.

Mike McDerment CEO & Co-founder FreshBooks

Mike is the co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks, Earth’s leading online billing and booking app for service-oriented professionals, freelancers, and teams. In 2003, Mike built FreshBooks for his SEO firm and scratched his own itch. Since launching in May 2004, FreshBooks has touched over 1 million lives, and Mike and his team dedicate themselves to being a service for people who love their work, and want to focus on it — instead of focusing on their paperwork.

Matt McGowan VP, Publisher Incisive Media

Matt McGowan oversees all marketing, sales, and operations for ClickZ and Search Engine Watch in addition to their respective trade show series, ClickZ Events and Search Engine Strategies. Prior to joining Incisive, Matt was a VP at PropertyRoom.com, where he oversaw all sales, marketing, and operations for the southern California-based auction services company. Earlier in his career in San Francisco, Matt developed an e-business strategy for the multinational publishing house, Pearson Plc; before that, he worked on the institutional desk for Schwab Capital Markets and Trading, a division of Charles Schwab Inc, in New York and San Francisco.

Graeme McLaughlin

Manager, Digital Marketing British Columbia Automobile Association With more than seven years’ digital marketing experience, Graeme specializes in using search and social media to deliver business objectives. His passion for online marketing began with affiliate sales, and his experience now includes SEO, PPC, SEM, display, and social media. Switching from an agency to an in-house role in 2006, he has led the development of BCAA’s search and social marketing programs. He currently uses social media to reach a new audience that BCAA cannot connect with through print, TV, radio, or e-mail — and the results are astounding.

Douglas McMillen

National Search Specialist Microsoft Advertising Doug’s responsibilities include rolling out the Bing mobile search ad product to the U.S. and acting as the main voice from the field, helping to influence future development of the Bing mobile search ad marketplace. Doug has more than nine years experience in the digital advertising space, with the vast majority of that time focusing on pay-for-performance marketing initiatives. His experience with Microsoft dates back to the launch of adCenter in 2005. This experience gave him the opportunity to bring Microsoft’s search advertising technology platform to the U.S. market and work alongside many of the best minds working in search engine marketing at that time.

Thousands of businesses are drowning in search marketing confusion–

Join the rescue team.

SES Magazine readers are decision-making marketers who know they need to boost their online visibility. Rather than being lost…“at sea”… they turn to SES for the help they need.

sneak APRIL 2009 preview ses nyc sneak march 23-27preview ses toronto $3. 01

MO IN RE INS FO ID p.3 E 3

MO IN RE INS FO ID p.15 E

SearchEngineStrategies.com

SearchEngineStrategies.com SearchEngineStrategies.com

Reach out to our readers Contact us to learn more about affordable, targeted advertising in the pages of SES.

GUIDE

MAY 2009

Speaker Bios

Answer the SOS by advertising in SES. It’s the official program guide for all Search Engine Strategies Conferences and a magazine full of valuable insights for the search industry. SES is an outstanding resource for online marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners… and those who want to reach them.

Unreasonable

SEARCH 17-20 FEBRUARY

SIN

CEN

ESS

TRE

DESIGN

& Seizure

AGENDA With country-specific search engine optimization, you4-5 can reach local audiences in lands near and far FLOOR PLAN

With a broken compensation 6-7 model surrounding organic search, here's an Online Marketing Bill of Rights that revolutionizes theSPONSORS relationship between agency and advertiser.9-12 PAGE 60

sales@SearchEngineStrategies.com 212-457-4993

$3.01

Celling your Product with Mobile Marketing / Timeless Testing Themes / Online Strategy for Small Business SearchEngineStrategies.com

YOUR GUIDE TO SES NEW YORK

AGENDA

4-5

SPONSORS FLOOR PLAN Get Found on Google.ca p.10

6-7 Keyword Selection 9-12 p.20 Widget World p.22

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

$3.01

Jonathan Mendez Founder & CEO RAMP Digital

Jonathan is widely regarded as an expert on landing page optimization, multivariate testing, and onsite content targeting. He recently founded RAMP Digital to work with clients in creating marketing solutions fueled by APIs, semantics, intelligent web, and emerging marketing technology. Prior to that, he was the founder and chief strategy officer of OTTO Digital, the services division of the market leading optimization technology Offermatica (purchased by Omniture). He was also a senior consultant at Creative Good and founded VitaminLab.com, which won the Nutrition Business Journal award for five-year growth under his direction. He has provided expert pre-click and post-click strategies and execution for online testing, targeting, and optimization to some of the world’s leading brands and businesses, including Amazon.com, Ameriprise, Disney, Citibank, H&R Block, IBM, Microsoft, Sears, and T-Mobile.

Justin Merickel

VP, Marketing & New Product Development Efficient Frontier Justin is responsible for corporate marketing and Efficient Frontier’s expansion into new business areas. He previously served as a managing director at Yahoo for nearly five years, building revenue across both search and display advertising. Prior to Yahoo, he launched and led the financial services practice for Compete Inc., a web analytics and competitive intelligence company. Before Compete, Justin spent seven years in interactive marketing and analytics consulting, which included founding an interactive marketing agency that was purchased by Arnold Communications in 1999. He began his career in advertising with McCann Erickson. Justin earned a B.A. in mathematics from Hamilton College.

Bryson Meunier

Associate Director of SEO Resolution Media Bryson’s position gives him the opportunity to lead SEO strategy and execution for some of the world’s top brands, and to share some of his learnings with the SEO community. Special interests include linguistics, semantic search, and all types of content syndication strategies, including mobile SEO and video search optimization.

Ken Miller

Speaker Bios

CEO Anchor Intelligence Ken joined Anchor Intelligence in December 2006 as CEO. Previously, he spent seven years with PayPal, Inc., where he was VP of risk management. Ken was the first anti-fraud employee hired by PayPal and is responsible for building the world-class systems and global organization that the company enjoys today. Ken has been interviewed by various technical and general news analysts and media, and is considered an expert in the field of online fraud and payments risk. He serves as an adviser to several companies, including TradeVibes.com, and is also a managing partner in a privately held thoroughbred ownership group established with the intent of using mathematics and data analysis to guide operating decisions.

Dennis Mortensen

Director of Data Insights Yahoo Dennis is a pioneer and expert in the analytics industry. He is an accredited associate web analytics instructor at the University of British Columbia, the author of data driven insights with Yahoo Web Analytics, and a frequent speaker on the subject of analytics

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

and online marketing. Dennis is an entrepreneur and was the COO of IndexTools until it was acquired by Yahoo in May 2008. Today he is the director of data insights at Yahoo and sits on the board of directors at the Web Analytics Association. He maintains the highly popular analytics blog, VisualRevenue.com/blog.

Peter Morville President Semantic Studios

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a father of information architecture. He’s authored the best-selling books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability, and has consulted with such organizations as AT&T, Harvard, IBM, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Vodafone, and Yahoo. Peter is president of Semantic Studios, a leading information architecture and user experience consultancy. He is a co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute and has served on several advisory boards and as a faculty member at the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in many publications, including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal. Peter is working on a new book about the future of search. He blogs at findability.org.

Graham Mudd

VP, Search & Media comScore, Inc. Graham manages and develops client relationships with a number of prominent Internet companies in the search and media sectors, including Google, Fox Interactive Media, Hulu, and Disney. He joined comScore in 2002 to lead the company’s marketing communications function. In 2004, Graham began managing client relationships with a number of blue-chip online retailers, including Gap, Best Buy, and HP. He later joined the product marketing organization at Yahoo, focusing specifically on Yahoo Search. While there, Graham led launch marketing and product strategy efforts for a number of successful products and features, including Yahoo Search’s open initiatives (SearchMonkey & BOSS) as well as SearchScan, a partnership between Yahoo Search and McAfee. In 2009, Graham left Yahoo to rejoin comScore.

Jeanniey Mullen

Chief Marketing Officer Zinio Jeanniey is the chief marketing officer for Zinio and its sister company, the exclusively digital magazine VIVmag. She is recognized as a pioneer and visionary in the digital marketing and advertising space, with an expertise in e-mail marketing. Prior to Zinio, Jeanniey was the senior partner and global executive director of the e-mail marketing and digital dialogue practice at OgilvyOne Worldwide. In the mid-2000s, Jeanniey founded the Email Experience Council (EEC), the world’s largest e-mail marketing trade organization. She currently serves as the executive director of the EEC, which is now owned by the Direct Marketing Association. Before that, Jeanniey ran her own advertising agency. Jeanniey is a frequent speaker on a variety of topics, including e-mail and digital marketing, brand development, and publishing.

Jay Myers

Lead Web Development Engineer Best Buy Co. Jay has more than 11 years of experience implementing, managing, and maintaining websites and applications. He has a passion for bringing standards to commerce websites, with a particular focus on emerging semantic web technologies. He has been an active supporter of the GoodRelations ontology for e-commerce, utilizing it for modeling Best Buy products and brick-and-mortar stores in both RDF/XML and RDFa. Prior to Best Buy, Jay was a senior web

David Naylor SEO Bronco

David Naylor, more commonly known as DaveN, started working in the SEO industry over 12 years ago. His main motivational driving force is the belief that there’s no point having a site if it doesn’t rank No 1. His dedication to giving clients great ROI has led to the constant development of new optimization techniques and the ability to see algorithmic changes before most other SEOs. David’s blog attracts a worldwide audience and is well-known for its downto-earth, yet informative approach on all SEO issues. Always at the forefront of the latest search engine topics, David is an established authority within the SEO community. He owns Bronco Internet, a successful web development and SEO agency.

Lee Odden

CEO TopRank Online Marketing Lee Odden (@leeodden) is the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and public relations firm specializing in strategic Internet marketing consulting, training, and implementation services, including online PR, SEM, and social media marketing. A veteran Internet marketer, Odden has consulted for clients such as HP, McKesson, Northwest Airlines, and PRWeb. Odden is one of 25 online marketing experts featured in Online Marketing Heroes published by Wiley, and has been cited for his search and social media marketing expertise by The Economist, U.S. News, and Fortune Magazine. As an active thought leader in the search marketing industry, he contributes to top industry publications such as Mashable, iMedia Connection, and MediaPost. A sought-after marketing and PR industry speaker, Odden conducts seminars for companies and regularly presents at Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, OMMA, and the Media Relations Summit.

Gib Olander

Director of Business Development Localeze Gib has helped Localeze become the leading provider of merchant content management services, including collection, organization, validation, and distribution of merchant content. Prior to Localeze, Gib was a business development director with iCrossing, where he educated Fortune 500 companies on the positive results that can be achieved by creating smart content, strategic linking, and a clean platform to improve organic and paid search visibility. Previously, he was involved in the launch of Chicago.Citysearch.com when Citysearch began its push for nationwide coverage following the purchase of MSN’s Sidewalk property. Gib also developed advertising campaigns as well as direct mail marketing programs with The Ameritech Yellow Pages and Advo.

Pauline Ores

Sr. Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement IBM Corporation Pauline Ores is responsible for IBM’s social media research/metrics strategy and program, in support of IBM’s new web 2.0 network value programs. Her previous roles at IBM include interactive marketing strategy for IBM’s Power System UNIX server business and leading web design strategy as part of IBM’s corporate brand experience team.

Alan Osetek

Managing Director iProspect Boston Alan oversees all iProspect activities for the east coast: developing and deploying strategies, training client services teams, and delivering superior results for clients in the region, including Allegis Group and Delta Airlines. Alan ensures client teams are strategically driven, accounts are proactively managed, and that search campaigns are successfully integrated with clients’ other marketing initiatives. Prior to joining iProspect in 2008, he served as chief revenue officer for Visual IQ. While there, he was responsible for the firm’s sales, marketing, and revenue-generating activities. Alan has been a part of the Aegis PLC family of companies since 2001, where he most recently held the position of EVP for Isobar/Carat.

Elisabeth Osmeloski Director of Online Media Adventures in Search

Elisabeth has been in the search engine marketing industry since 1999. She has agency experience as an SEO consultant and a web copywriter for clients ranging from small businesses to large corporations, and she’s also worked in-house for a travel search startup. She is a regular speaker and a moderator at Search Engine Strategies conferences. Elisabeth recently launched a new blog and consulting agency, Adventures in Search, specializing in editorial services, including content strategy, SEO copywriting, community development and management, social media marketing, online PR, and customized link building. She holds a B.A. in marketing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and spent several years as the skiing editor for About.com. In addition to freelance travel writing assignments, Elisabeth has also created Downhill Divas, a social network for women interested in skiing, snowboarding, freeride mountain biking, and living a healthy, active lifestyle.

Joshua Palau VP, Search Razorfish

Joshua is responsible for the global strategy, product development, and operations of Razorfish’s search offerings. He helps clients understand how search fits into the overall marketing plan and constantly researches the industry to help clients anticipate, and respond to, changes in the landscape. Previously, he worked for Hearst Magazines, About.com, and Johnson & Johnson. Joshua is an active writer who has authored several Razorfish POVs on topics such as managing paid and organic search, reputation management, and social search optimization. He’s the editor of “Search Marketing Trends” and writes a bi-monthly column about SEM agencies for SearchEngineWatch.com.

Brent Payne SEO Director Tribune

An in-house SEO with more than seven years of experience, Brent has doubled Tribune’s visits from search engines since he joined the company in February 2008. With more than a million visits per day to Tribune’s network of websites, Brent drives traffic not only to Tribune’s newspaper sites (including the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Baltimore Sun) but also to Tribune’s dozens of broadcast sites. He is a newspaper SEO authority with experience and expertise in CMS challenges, duplicate content mitigation, pagerank funneling, Google News, and Google index rates. He has also trained large editorial teams regarding SEO.

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Speaker Bios

developer at Internet Broadcasting, where he developed solutions for local network TV affiliates, including the NBC Olympic website for the winter games in Turin, Italy. In his spare time, Jay serves as a volunteer project analyst for the DataPortabili.

Tobias Peggs General Manager OneRiot

Tobias Peggs is general manager at OneRiot, the real-time search engine company. Earlier, Peggs led strategic initiatives at Netdecisions, where he directed cross-functional teams in the U.S., U.K., and India. He has spent more than 10 years in both the consumer web and enterprise software industries. He holds a Ph.D. in search algorithms from Cardiff University, U.K., and obtained a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Loughborough University. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can follow him on Twitter (@TobiasPeggs).

Corey Perlman President eBoot Camp, Inc.

Corey Perlman is the president of eBoot Camp, Inc., an education company that provides people with the knowledge and skills to effectively market their businesses on the web. Through interactive books, seminars, and workshops, Corey quickly transforms business owners, entrepreneurs and company employees into Internet marketing “propeller heads.” Since 2005, he has conducted more than 200 eBoot Camp workshops and seminars to public audiences and SMBs all over the United States. With layman’s terms and a learn-by-doing approach, the workshops and seminars “exceed expectations” more than 90 percent of the time. Corey’s book, eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business, hit No. 1 on the Amazon.com bestseller’s list in the marketing, retail, and e-commerce categories and is available in major bookstores throughout the world.

Cris Pierry

Senior Director of Product Management Yahoo! Search Cris is responsible for the product management of Yahoo Search, including web search, multimedia search, next-generation search, and social search. Previously, Cris was responsible for the development all of Yahoo’s multimedia search products as well as a host of international web search properties. He has more than 16 years of technical development, computer engineering, and leadership experience at companies like Microsoft, Action Engine, and Yahoo. Earlier, Cris co-founded Action Engine Corporation, focusing on the design of mobile web services platforms for wireless carriers to enable rapid and efficient deployment of advanced data services for operators in Europe, Asia, Australia, and America. Cris holds a B.S. in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Erik Qualman

Speaker Bios

Author of Amazon #1 bestseller Socialnomics Erik Qualman is the author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. Socialnomics made Amazon’s No. 1 best-selling list after three weeks of publication. Qualman is a frequently requested international speaker and has been highlighted in numerous media outlets, including BusinessWeek, The New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily, USA Today, and CBS Nightly News. For the past 15 years, he has helped grow the online marketing and e-business capabilities of many companies, including Cadillac, EarthLink, Yahoo, Travelzoo, and AT&T. He is a columnist for SearchEngineWatch.com and owns the blog socialnomics.com. Qualman holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and an MBA from the University of Texas. He is the global VP of online marketing at EF Education, the world’s largest private education company. He was academic all-Big Ten in basketball at Michigan State University and still finds time to follow his beloved Spartans while living in Boston with his wife.

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Stewart Quealy

SES Advisory Board Co-Chair VP, Content Development, Incisive Media Stewart has been part of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) content team since 2001 and plays a key role in programming Incisive Media’s interactive marketing events. In addition to SES, Stewart was part of the Jupitermedia team responsible for launching emerging technology events such as Jupiter Advertising Forum, Game Market Watch, Weblog Business Strategies, Grid Computing Planet, and ClickZ Online Video Advertising. Prior to that, Stewart worked closely with the open-source Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to launch their first ApacheCon trade shows in both the U.S. and Europe. Earlier in the dot-com bubble, Stewart worked with 101 Communications and SIGS Publications, running their objectoriented programming portfolio of events, including Java DevCon, C++ World, and Smalltalk Solutions. You can follow him on Twitter (@stewq).

Srinath Rao

Director, Search Technology Ask.com Srinath Rao manages various technology-related search engine development projects at Ask.com in the areas of web and vertical search and content. Srinath began working for Ask.com in 2002 as a software engineer and has focused on infrastructure and heuristics development for web crawling. He holds an M.S. in computer science from Rutgers University.

David Rodecker Founder & CTO Relevant Ads, Inc.

David has been involved with high-technology companies for more than a decade. He led technology development at Interchange Corporation, launching local.com. David has appeared on CNBC and TechTV, evangelizing web-hosted software services. At PIMCO, the world’s largest manager of fixed income portfolios, he led the implementation of a high-capacity electronic exchange, which conducted over $1.2 trillion in trades during its first year. David has also consulted as a technical analyst to Fortune 500 companies. He graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of Southern California and holds an M.S. in biomathematics from the University of California Los Angeles.

Mark Rosenberg

Of Counsel Sills Cummis & Gross P.C. Mark Rosenberg is an intellectual property attorney who is Of Counsel to Sills Cummis & Gross P.C. For nearly 20 years, Rosenberg has assisted clients in a variety of industries in acquiring, protecting, enforcing, and licensing their intellectual property rights. Since the mid-’90s, a large part of his practice has focused on preventing and resolving legal disputes relating to Internet marketing. He has assisted clients in reaching cost-effective resolutions of disputes relating to paid keywords, web, pop-up, and e-mail advertisements, as well as domain names. Rosenberg is a seasoned litigator who has successfully handled many complex patent, trademark, trade dress, and copyright actions. He may be reached at mrosenberg@sillscummis.com or (212) 643-7000.

Tim Ruder

Chief Revenue Officer PerfectMarket After 15 years at the forefront of developing, managing, and growing online businesses for news organizations, Tim is chief revenue officer of Perfect Market. He combines his experience at

Rochelle Sanchirico

Senior Director of Acquisition Marketing Washington Post Digital Rochelle leads the team responsible for driving traffic and conversions to washingtonpost.com and its products. Activities include paid and organic search, online display, print, social media, e-mail, and grassroots marketing. Previously, Rochelle was the executive director of marketing strategy for Kaplan Higher Education, where she led market research, new product development, and business development efforts. Before that, Rochelle worked in international rights for book publishers Random House and Penguin. Rochelle has a B.S. in geology and English from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Duke University.

Marcelo Sant’Iago Managing Director iProspect

Marcelo Sant’Iago, has 20 years of experience in advertising and has presented in conferences in Argentina, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, the Middle East, and the U.S. He was president of IAB Brazil for two terms (2002-06) and is now a member of the Advisory Board. In 2008, he co-chaired the Latino working group at SEMPO. Currently he is managing director at iProspect in São Paulo, Brazil, where his team delivers search engine marketing strategies for Reader’s Digest, FIAT, and 30 other companies.

Stephen Scarr Co-Founder & CEO Info.com

Stephen has 20 years of experience in managing businesses with a strong analytical and marketing background. As CEO Info.com, he is responsible for all aspects of Info.com’s development, ranging from obtaining VC funding to content partnerships and driving traffic. Previously, Stephen co-founded First Personal Finance Limited. As CMO, he helped the company achieve a 35 percent annual growth rate over six years to become one of the U.K.’s largest private brokers specializing in unsecured loans. During his tenure, First Personal Finance Limited generated and processed some 200,000 credit applications, resulting in £200 million in business.

Todd Schwartz

Group Product Manager Bing Todd Schwartz manages product planning within the search business group. His team is charged with driving short- and long-term growth of the U.S. web search business. Prior to joining Microsoft, Todd worked as a consultant with Deloitte and Accenture, driving business innovation and growth for several Fortune 500 consumer and technology companies. He has also worked in various leadership roles in venture capital, startups, and as a captain in the U.S. Army. Todd holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a degree in economics from Colorado College.

Bill Scott

Chief Operating & Commercial Officer easelTV Bill Scott is one of the founders of easeltv. The company’s vision is to enable brands to build high-quality TV experiences using low-cost web components — quickly. easeltv will help its clients exploit broadband connected TVs and in doing so, will help shape

the future of television. Bill created and led the IBM digital media consulting and systems integration practice. He personally managed end-to-end business-driven projects that often started with strategy and moved through execution to operation. In this role, Bill conceived the original idea of standards for broadband connected TVs for the BBC. He left IBM in June 2009 to focus on easeltv. He has 25 years experience of managing IT projects.

Crispin Sheridan

Senior Director of Search Marketing Strategy SAP Marketing Crispin is responsible for paid and organic search strategy, SEO execution, search infrastructure, partner search enablement, and inbound web inquiry handling. Working with SAP’s social media team, he has leveraged social media tools for demand generation, including Facebook and AddThis. Crispin has also been a guest speaker at the e-Metrics Summit and ad:Tech San Francisco, and is a member of Google’s B2B technology council.

Ayat Shukairy Co-founder Invesp Consulting

Ayat Shukairy is co-founder of Invesp Consulting, a landing page optimization company, and co-author of Landing Page Optimization: The Complete Guide. Shukairy focuses on website usability and has led more than 30 conversion optimization projects for companies such as ReMAX, HowStuffWorks, and Discovery. Shukairy’s work has helped generated, on average, a 20 percent improvement in conversion rates for Invesp clients.

Bryan Simkins

Marketing Specialist FedEx Bryan is a resident expert on digital marketing in FedEx Advertising, where he leads digital advertising strategies, search marketing, web analytics, and overall strategy development for FedEx Advertising’s transition into social media. Bryan has led digital projects, including NFL, Super Bowl, BCS Championship, and the first global FedEx advertising campaign. Before moving to the client side, Bryan worked in various agencies, supporting brands such as DaimlerChrysler, Frito-Lay, Pepsi, and the USOC. He graduated from Illinois State University, the University of Northern Colorado, and the University of Memphis. When not consumed with digital marketing, the brands that occupy Bryan’s life include Starbucks, Buell, Fender, and Nikon.

Dan Siroker

Former Deputy New Media Director, Obama Presidential Transition; Founder, CarrotSticks Dan recently founded CarrotSticks, a startup focused on using technology to help kids learn. During the Obama presidential transition, Dan was the deputy new media director, responsible for strategic planning of the administration’s use of the Internet and technology. He led several online initiatives on change.gov, including a way for the American people to publicly comment on proposed policy, ask a question, or submit an idea — all of which could be voted on by others and went directly to President Obama and his cabinet. Prior to working on the presidential transition, Dan led the analytics team for the Obama presidential campaign and served as a senior member of the larger new media team. He led a team of software engineers and analysts responsible for optimizing the effectiveness of the campaign’s online operations that ended up raising more than half a billion dollars, registering more than 2 million voters, and enabling 3 million phone calls to be made in the final four days of the campaign. Before joining the campaign, Dan was a product manager for Google Chrome, the open-source web browser from SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Speaker Bios

Washington Post Digital Media (he helped launch and grow Slate and Newsweek.com), his work with the LA Times, and his knowledge of search and ad technologies to help large web publishers better monetize their search-based traffic.

Google. He worked previously as a product manager for Google AdWords. Dan graduated with honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in computer science. Dan shares a blog with his identical twin brother, Eric, available at: www.siroker.com.

Hee So

Senior Internet Marketing Coordinator American Public University System Hee is responsible for managing the institution’s pay-per-click campaigns and initiatives with emphasis on campaign optimization, bid strategy, keyword management, and conversion tracking. APUS comprises two member institutions for higher learning, American Military University and American Public University, and provides online education to more than 50,000 distance learners in 50 states and more than 100 countries. Hee graduated from William & Mary with a bachelor’s in business administration and marketing, and she’s currently pursuing an MBA at American Military University.

Jim Sterne

Chairman Web Analytics Association Sterne is an international speaker on electronic marketing and customer interaction. A consultant to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs, he focuses his 25 years in sales and marketing on measuring the value of the Internet as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written six books on Internet advertising, marketing, and customer service, including Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success. He is the producer of the annual eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (www.emetrics.org) and is the founding president and current chairman of the Web Analytics Association. He was named one of the 50 most influential people in digital marketing by Revolution, the U.K.’s premier interactive marketing magazine.

Nathan Stoll Co-founder Aardvark

A co-founder of Aardvark, Nathan comes from Google, where he headed Google News for three years, overseeing its rapid expansion to more than 40 countries and languages and growth into one of the top global news sites. In his first few years at Google, he helped optimize the early AdWords system and developed pricing models for Adsense. He also launched Google Suggest. Nathan holds a B.S. in computer science and a B.A. in political science from Stanford University. Find out more about Aardvark at http://vark.com. Follow the team’s thoughts on social search at http://blog.vark.com.

David Szetela

Speaker Bios

CEO Clix Marketing

Online advertising expert David Szetela is owner and CEO of Clix Marketing, one of the few agencies that specializes exclusively in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, creating and optimizing clients’ Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter advertising campaigns. Szetela’s 25-plus-year career working for small magazine publishers as well as Apple Computer and Ziff-Davis Publishing has provided him deep experience in direct response marketing. He is active in the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and is one of the authors of SEMPO’s advanced search advertising course. His articles on PPC advertising have been published in MediaPost, Search Engine Land, MarketingSherpa, in his weekly “Profitable PPC” column published by Search Engine Watch, and in the SEW blog.

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

David Tan

VP, Content Solutions Resolution Media Dave Tan oversees the development of holistic search-based content solutions at Resolution Media and ensures that they are integrated into all aspects of a client’s marketing program. His department delivers search engine optimization and content distribution for clients inclusive of website, video, image, RSS, social, and mobile platforms. Tan brings an extensive 14-year career specializing in interactive marketing, online publishing and general management. Most recently, he was at NAVTEQ/Nokia, as director, consumer products business management, responsible for developing the strategic product direction and ongoing management of all NAVTEQ’s consumer-facing websites, media products, and mobile applications. Earlier, Tan held various management roles at Tribune Interactive over a span of four years.

Jamie Taylor, PhD.

Author, Programming the Semantic Web Founder, Freebase.com Jamie Taylor, Ph.D., is co-author of the text “Programming for the Semantic Web” and the minister of information at Metaweb Technologies, where he tends to data gardening and community building. His interest in large-scale, non-relational data stores grew while managing enterprise software projects during his roles as CTO and VP. Jamie has a Ph.D. from Harvard and is a founder of freebase. He’s involved with the common tag initiative along with Yahoo, AdaptiveBlue, and other semantic technology companies. He is a principal editor for SEMJ.org.

Laura Thieme

President & Founder Bizresearch Laura founded Bizresearch in June 1997. Bizresearch provides a search analytics platform, reporting on paid search, organic SEO, and web analytics. Thieme developed and taught search engine marketing and analytics at The Ohio State University. She continuously refines the syllabus for the search marketing course and encourages live data partnerships with local companies to encourage a higher level of learning. She developed two SEMPO industry trade association paid search analytics courses. Prior to founding Bizresearch, she worked for American Electric Power (AEP) in Columbus, Ohio, and USAID/Deloitte & Touché in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1993, she graduated with a degree in Russian Studies from The Ohio State University.

Shari Thurow

Founder & SEO Director Omni Marketing Interactive Shari Thurow is the founder and search engine optimization (SEO) director at Omni Marketing Interactive, a full-service SEO, web design, and website usability firm. Shari has designed and promoted websites since 1995, and is outsourced to many firms worldwide. Clients have included Yahoo, Microsoft, America Online, ABC News, HSBC, Expedia, National Cancer Institute, and WebMD. As a pioneer in the area of search engine-friendly website design, she has a 100 percent success rate for getting client sites ranked at the top of search engines. She is the author of Search Engine Visibility, which has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, and Polish. Her forthcoming book, When Search Meets Web Usability, is due to be released this year.

CMO Newsforce

Dana Todd’s career in Internet marketing has included cutting her teeth at leading interactive agencies (Bien Logic, SiteLab); starting and leading the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO); and now launching an ad network category that combines PR and advertising. Newsforce Network, the world’s first and largest premium news network, serves “storytelling media” into the ad space of hundreds of top-name news sites, such as LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, USA Today, and more. Newsforce provides a parallel voice for companies to have their brand stories heard alongside regular editorial, bypassing the need to convince journalists to write about them.

Bob Tripathi

In-House Search Marketing Strategist Discover Financial Services Bob manages enterprise wide organic search, manages paid campaigns with vendor agency, and sets social media strategies as related to search. He also sets SEO strategy and provides education to build SEO best practices into the workflow of business groups across Discover Financial Services, including consumer cards, bank, student lending, and prepaid business. Bob has spoken at industry conferences like SES, SMX, and ad:Tech. He has a B.A. in international business and marketing from Eckerd College, Florida. He currently serves in the in-house and emerging technologies committees at SEMPO and is also the founding member of SEMPO Chicago Working Group.

Barg Upender Founder, CEO Mobomo

Barg is the founder and CEO of Mobomo, an innovative mobile development company focused on building smart apps for smart phones in the consumer and enterprise markets. He is a serial entrepreneur and technologist with 20 years of experience in commercial software product development. He was selected as one of the “top 100 tech titans” in the D.C. metro area by the Washingtonian magazine in 2009. Barg graduated from Cornell University with a master’s in electrical engineering.

Brian Ussery

Director of SEO Search Discovery Brian is one of the world’s foremost authorities on SEO, especially in issues related to SEO for Flash. He is a top contributor on Google Webmaster Central, moderator for Google issues on SearchEngineWatch.com, and SES groups administrator on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. In addition to his own top-ranked “beu blog” and the SearchEngineWatch.com blog, Brian is a frequent contributor on Blogoscoped.com, the editorial board and echo chamber for “all things Google.” Away from SEO, Brian is an official artist for the University of Georgia, authorized by Nike and the Collegiate Licensing Company, a consortium which consists of more than 200 colleges and universities, bowl games, conferences, The NCAA, Final Four, College World Series, and Heisman Trophy Award.

Matt Van Wagner President Find Me Faster

Matt is a seasoned sales and marketing professional specializing in search engine marketing strategies for small and medium-sized companies in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. An award-winning speaker whose presentations are usually as

entertaining as they are informative, Matt is the president and founder of Find Me Faster, a search engine marketing firm based in Nashua, N.H., and an early member of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). He writes on Internet, search engines, and technology topics for the New Hampshire Business Review. Matt is a graduate of St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y. (B.S. in economics), with an MBA from Rivier College in Nashua, N.H.

Anna Maria Virzi Executive Editor ClickZ

Anna Maria Virzi joined The ClickZ Network as executive editor in August 2007. Previously, she was executive editor at Ziff Davis Media’s Baseline magazine. She’s also held editorial posts at Forbes.com, Internet World, and The Connecticut Post, and received awards from American Business Media, the American Society of Business Publication Editors, and New England Associated Press.

Rob Walk

Managing Partner NovaRising Rob Walk has been pioneering emerging technologies and integrating digital into the mainstream marketing mix for the past 12 years. During this time, he has shaped NovaRising into one of the U.K.’s foremost future media innovators, defining the use of numerous emerging technologies across the web, mobile, and digital TV spaces. Rob’s team has been involved in many seminal projects, working with Sky on interactive TV since 2000, prototyping 3G mobile phone services in the U.K., developing the first definitive Internet music chart, and forming the broadband connected TV prototype for the BBC. Rob has an MBA from Imperial College, London. In his spare time, he plays correspondence chess, playing for England and winning the British championship in 2001 and reaching the World ICCF semifinals in 2007.

Amanda Watlington Owner Searching for Profit

Amanda Watlington is owner of Searching for Profit, a search marketing consultancy focusing on the interaction of the consumer with businesses, using search engines, RSS, blogs, podcasting, or other new media to deliver their messages. An industry thought leader and an internationally-recognized speaker, Amanda has led sessions on search marketing, web strategy, and social media at Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World, ad:Tech, and DMA. She shares her views of where search marketing is headed on her blog, Blogs and Feeds, and as a blogger for Search Engine Watch.

Frank Watson

CEO Kangamurra Media Frank has been involved with the web since it started. For the past five years, he headed SEM for FXCM, which was once one of the top 25 spenders with AdWords. He’s worked with most of the major analytics companies and pioneered the ability to tie online marketing with offline conversion. He has now started his own marketing agency, Kangamurra Media. This new venture will keep him busy when he’s not editing the Search Engine Watch forums, blogging at a number of authoritative sites, or developing some online community sites. Frank was one of the first 100 AdWords professionals, as well as a Yahoo and Overture ambassador. He is on the Click Quality Council and has worked to diminish click fraud.

SearchEngineStrategies.com § SES

Speaker Bios

Dana Todd

Karen Weber

VP of E-Marketing Irwin Union Bank Karen focuses on developing and implementing strategic plans using web technology to drive growth for the various divisional entities within Irwin Union Bank. Her responsibilities include managing the online sales and service channel that includes both consumer (B2C) and business (B2B) customers. Prior to joining Irwin, Karen served as the e-commerce director for Hat World/Lids, a national retailer of licensed athletic headwear. She was responsible for developing the Internet channel into its own line of business. Previously, Karen served as assistant VP corporate marketing/ebusiness for Conseco Financial Services, where she directed crossmarketing initiatives and online growth strategies. Karen holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s of science in economics from Purdue University.

Tessa Wegert

Interactive Media Strategist Enlighten

Tessa Wegert is an interactive media strategist with Enlighten, one of the first full-service digital marketing strategy and services agencies, serving such brands as Bioré, Bratz, Food Network, Hunter Douglas, Jergens, and Olympic Paints and Stains. An industry veteran, Tessa has worked in online media buying and planning, marketing, and online copywriting since 1999. She is an active freelance writer specializing in interactive marketing who has contributed to U.S. and Canadian publications, including USA Weekend Magazine, Marketing Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and The Montreal Gazette. She is frequently quoted as an industry expert and speaks regularly at industry conferences and events.

Susan Weinschenk

Chief of User Experience Strategy Human Factors International Susan Weinschenk has a 30-year career in applying psychology to the design of technology. A popular speaker and presenter, her nickname is “The Brain Lady.” She is chief of user experience strategy at Human Factors International. Susan has a Ph.D. in psychology from Pennsylvania State University, and her newest book, Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? applies the latest research on neuroscience and unconscious mental processing to the design of websites to improve persuasion.

Marty Weintraub

Speaker Bios

President aimClear

Marty is president of aimClear, an SEM agency with offices in Duluth and Minneapolis, Minn. aimClear provides traditional and social pay-per-click (PPC) management, organic optimization (SEO), and social media marketing services to national clients. Prior to founding aimClear, Marty held positions including creative director, CBS affiliate; unit director, Westmoreland Interactive; and nine years of solo search marketing practice. He writes for aimClearBlog, collective-thoughts, and the Search Engine Watch Blog. In the ’90s, Marty enjoyed international prominence as a recording artist, having written and produced 13 solo albums.

Ted West

CEO & President LookSmart Ted West is CEO and president of LookSmart, a role he assumed in 2007. West has served as a director for the company since November 2001 and as chair of the board since June 2005. In addition to

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

his role at LookSmart, Ted currently serves as managing director of Sage Partners LLC, an advisory services firm in venture development and strategic leadership. In addition, he was also appointed to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) board of directors in June 2009. Ted was one of the founding members of the IAB in 1996. Since January 2006, he has served as a director for Memetrics, a global provider of testing and optimization solutions for marketers, located in San Francisco; since April 2006, he has served as a director of Advanced Ticketing Systems, located in London. Prior to LookSmart, Ted served as CEO for Colarity Corporation, a customer knowledge management company.

Andrew Wheeler Managing Director iProspect Chicago

Andrew is managing director for iProspect’s Chicago office, responsible for overseeing all activities for the Midwest. These activities include developing and deploying exceptional strategies, training client services teams, and delivering superior results for clients in the region, including Alcon Laboratories, DeVry University, and Irwin Union Bank. Additionally, Wheeler ensures client teams are strategically driven, accounts are proactively managed, and that search campaigns are successfully integrated with clients’ other marketing initiatives. An accomplished speaker, Wheeler has presented at various client summits and trade shows, including Search Engine Strategies. Wheeler is a regular columnist for Search Engine Land and also contributes to iProspect’s monthly newsletter, the “Search Marketing Advisor.” Prior to joining iProspect in 2003, Wheeler worked in communications at Teradyne. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business marketing from the University of New Hampshire.

Byron White

Chief Idea Officer ideaLaunch

Byron White is one of the original content marketing revolutionaries. In 2000, he founded LifeTips.com, the place millions of monthly readers go for expert tips and advice. In 2008, he founded ideaLaunch, a leading content marketing agency that perfected the art of understanding exactly what customers need and want to know, and the science of delivering it to them in a useful, compelling way. Byron speaks at various search marketing conferences and hosts a weekly LifeTips radio show. He founded the Lost Ball Golf Tournament after losing a testicle to cancer. His success is well-documented in Adweek, Inc. Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Business Journal, and The Wall Street Journal. Clients include Buy.com, CapitalOne, Merck, Walmart, and hundreds more.

Richard Zwicky Founder & CEO Enquisite

Richard has been involved in search marketing for 10 years, starting in the late 1990s. He started in the industry by managing the online campaigns for his own successful e-tail operation, which quickly led to developing Metamend, a leading search engine optimization firm that he co-founded in 2000. As CEO for Metamend, he managed and led the optimization campaigns for web properties ranging from SOHOs to Fortune 500 sites. He split Metamend and Enquisite into separate companies in 2006, as Enquisite’s services are designed for use by any SEO and SEM. Today, he is leading Enquisite, which recently released its first products. Richard focuses on helping search marketers manage campaigns more easily and with greater success. He believes in long-term successful campaigns that are built from the ground up, and are never caught flat-footed by shifts in search engine algorithms or by regional variances in search user behavior.

London 2010

San Francisco 2010

New York 2010

Chicago 2010

Feb. 16-19 Business Design Centre

March 22-26 Hilton New York

Aug. 16-20 Moscone Center West

Oct. 19-21 Chicago Hilton

Toronto 2010 June 1-3 Sheraton Centre Toronto

Speaker Bios

Already sending dollars and traffic our way? Become an SES affiliate today! Learn more: www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/affiliate-program.html

Programmed by

www.SearchEngineStrategies.com SearchEngineStrategies.com ยง SES

glossary advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple websites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site. algorithm: The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads. anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about. click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign. content network: A group of websites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. Examples include Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network. contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually. cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model. cost per click (CPC): Also called pay-per-click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model. cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM. geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results. Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”;

SES § December 2009 {Chicago}

Below you will find commonly-used terms that every search marketer should know. Keep this list handy! A

for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index. inbound link: An inbound link is a hyperlink to a particular web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a web page. invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth. keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many websites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered. link bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” link building: The process of getting quality websites to link to your websites, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements. meta tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, and keyword tags. pay per click (PPC): See cost per click (CPC). quality score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s clickthrough rate, analyzing the relevance of the landing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a quality score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undisclosed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm. return on investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads. search advertising: Also called paid search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed

above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link. search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search. search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases. search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs. social media: A category of sites based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del. icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction. spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the web, visiting web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.” title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results. universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories. web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

Get Smarter. Get Certified.

The Online Marketing Institute certification programs give you the crucial skills to advance your marketing career in less time and cost than a master’s degree.

Why Get Certified?

Our Education Partners

• Acquire new online marketing skills: Improve your skill set in Email Marketing, Website Strategy, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Search Marketing, Analytics and more. • Expand career opportunities: Become more valuable to your current or potential new employer. • Improve “on the job” execution: increase ROI for your online marketing

The Institute’s curriculum has been codeveloped with leaders from academia (Wharton), marketing associations (IAB), and content leaders (ClickZ) as well as the world’s best instructors from the Direct Marketing Association and Email Experience Council.

programs. • Stay current: Keep pace with evolving best practices with continuing education. • Put it all together: Learn how to plan a strategy for all marketing efforts.

OMI: The Leading Provider of Online Marketing Certification Programs • Convenient: Each program can be completed in-person or online in less than

Wharton Interactive Media Initiative

20 hours. • Affordable: Lower student costs and flexible payment plans make OMI the comprehensive, affordable certification choice in the industry. • Proven: Over 200 professionals are currently enrolled as students and over 3,000 marketers have attended select Institute courses and workshops.

SES readers get a 25% student discount Visit www.omicertified.com/ses09