17 Nov Pubcon 2010 Notes and Key Takeaways

Posted at 16:00h in Conferences by

I am just getting back from speaking at another successful Pubcon and I can say that the conference was a hit. Lots of tracks, lots of content, lots to share. In typical fashion I dont attempt to beef up my session notes in any format other than easy to digest bullet points. If you are looking for exhaustive Pubcon coverage then head over to Outspoken Media as Lisa Barone kills it with her live blogging coverage.

 

Reputation Management

Todd Friesen

  • 300,000 complaints on ripoffreport.com
  • blog on subdomains for a reputation mgmt standpoint, blog on subfolder for SEO puposes.
    • ex: use a job section on a subdomain so jobs.brand.com (even if you are not hiring)

Rhea Drysdale

  • Use Microformat ‘h review’ tag for putting reviews on your own site and getting google to use those in the search snippets.

Tony Wright

  • Unhappy customers are always more likely to post than happy customers so you need to incentivize. or also create review portals – page explaining how to leave reviews for the company. Incentivize your sales team by giving back to them when they can cause a positive review online.

Twitter Apps and Trends

  • Twitter is consolidating all things business wise around twitter and is de-railing all the 3rd party apps
    • Dont rely on 3rd party tools as they might not be around for much longer.

SEO For WordPress

  • efficient related posts (plugin) – good for high traffic sites and doesnt slow down your load.
  • excerpt editor (plugin)- allows you to write and include html in excerpts for ‘pages’ too.
  • do not use the same database credentials for your dev. environment.
  • add the word ‘codex’ on the end of any wordpress question you might google and more often then not you can find an answer.
  • seo friendly images – good to automatically put text and insert alt tags based off of the title of the page.

Multimedia SEO

Brian Chappell

  • I didn’t speak on this panel but I would like to alert our readers to an awesome WordPress video seo transcript plugin – http://www.speakertext.com/

Wesley Cox

  • Google prefers video 50/1 So effectively you can garner organic traffic from a optimized video in a competitive space 50 times easier than a normal organic site listing.

Morgan Brown

  • Search is the #1 referrer to web videos not links and sharing and email like you would think…. stat is from Forester.
  • 19.4% abandon after 10 seconds…. 44.1% abandon after 60 seconds – shorter is better…
  • With a well articulated video sitemap you can use thumbnail markup to control your thumbnail
  • Zappos has seen a 6-30% increase in sales on pages with video.
  • Paid promotion on youtube is apparently inexpensive and can help drive impressions and views, worth testing.

Brian MacDonald

  • Understand the audiences of each video hosting site to cater to the demographics and understand which site best fits for your client
  • Talks about creating an actual transcript AND unique content on top of embedding the actual video.
  • Video title has to be the same as the title of the video b/c google looks at that as validation
  • Put your video out on your local site first, then publish across the other video sites so the search engines realize your the source of the content.

Marty Weintraub

  • scrapebox- keyword suggestion keyword scraper
    • looks for product related keywords then look at youtube suggestions to figure out keywords for video optimization

Topics and Trends in SEO

Mike Grehan

  • Feels that user data is trumping traditional ‘votes’ to rank pages off of. Its ALL about the content going forward keeping folks on the page and keeping folks from going back to Google.

Stephen Spencer

  • Short urls get clicked on 2x as much as long urls in the SERPS

Greg Boser

  • Trying to game rankings with ‘anchor text’ manipulation? The game has changed and he states he feels over aggressive techniques do not work anymore.
  • Encourages users to build links with brand names and other natural looking citations.

Social Media Measurement

Adam Proehl

  • Must have context around your numbers when looking at measuring social media. trying to build a score and look at its surface level is just going to be misleading.
  • Web analytics is very actionable but can take time to analyze data; social media is much more actionable b/c you can get real time feedback.
  • Checkins are only done by 4% of online americans
  • Stop looking at social ROI but look at it like an enhancement to other channels.
  • Check out the following tools:
    • exact targets interactive marketing hub.
    • crowdeye – gives locations for tweets
    • snip-n-tag for bit.ly creations and google parameters integration
    • heardable – has category benchmarks for websites
    • mentionmap – can help you show how you can reach an influencer through mapping technology
    • paste this into the top of your FBML file to get stats pulled into GA:
      • <fb:google-analytics uacct=”UA-9999999-9″ />

Dan Zarella

  • A lot of times with very popular blogs like mashable or techcrunch people set up automatic ways to tweet out your blogs posts through tweetfeeder and that is how many times any of those high profile blogs end up getting a min of 500+ tweets on every single post.

Legal Issues Around Domain Names

Clarke Walton

  • a trademark is anything that functions as a source identifier
    • plain textmarks -brand names, and product names
      • sounds, sense, and even colors
  • Is there a likely hood that there is confusion?
  • Levels of trademark protection:
    • fanciful (very strong)
      • ex: zillow, expedia
    • arbitrary (very strong)
      • ex: kayak, amazon
    • suggestive (strong)
      • ex: youtube, moviebuff, gamespot, seatguru
    • descriptive (weak)
      • ex: the internet movie database, homeloancenter
    • generic (no strength at all)
      • hotels.com, lawyers.com
  • Date of first TM use in commerce determines priority (in the US)
    • not date of TM filing
    • not date of TM registration
    • its the date you USED it in commerce
    • competitive or critical or negative keyphrases of others TM in adwords is NOT ok.
    • you cannot send consumers to a LP that doesnt have anything to do with the competitive keyword you are bidding on
    • buying keywords for TM is fine as long as the keyword TM isn’t in the ad itself and this only applies to google.
      • yahoo and msn dont allow that however. you cant bid on the keyword at all apparently.

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