First off, though, a note about the event itself. The SEMpdx peeps are amazing. The community they’ve built in Portland is second to none, and SearchFest is absolutely a top-notch event, organized by volunteers from SEMpdx.

put a bird on it

Two things struck me about the quality of the event:

#1, the communication and coordination of the event happenings were perfect: it was quite simple to know when and where things were happening, and how to get there. Everything stayed right on schedule and went off without a hitch.

#2, the quality and content of the speakers’ presentations was excellent.

So, here is a summary of some of the favorite things I learned at SearchFest (note: this is all info from the presenters, so all credit goes to them):

Overall state of search:
Searcher behavior is changing due to Google Instant. In case you needed more incentive, make sure you’re paying close attention to the copy in your page title and description/snippets.

Social and mobile are becoming increasingly important components of search. This does not mean that “SEO is dead”. Search is ever-evolving. It really just comes down to getting your message in front of your audience.

On-site SEO:
If you’re not paying attention to how your site is being crawled and indexed, you need to start. Sites with inefficient and ineffective crawling are suffering in their SEO. Start checking out your log files, know how to interpret them, and fix your issues.

Some top metrics to look at:

• Which pages are crawled the most?
• Time to discover news/new articles?
• Crawl efficiency
• New referring links
• Crawl errors

Sitemaps:
Create separate XML sitemaps for images, news, and videos in order to get that content indexed.

Good places to use canonical tags:

• URLs with tracking parameters
• Pages that deliver different URLs depending how data is sorted
• Internal site search results pages (or robots.txt them, depending on your structure)

Linkbuilding:
With “brands” becoming more important in Google search, increase your site’s “brand” having social signals that indicate your site is legit.

• Have employees reference your company on LinkedIn, showing you have real people working at a real, physical address.
• Have real connections on Twitter.
• Have real conversations on blogs and comments.
• Register with government and civic organizations.
• Get traffic from diverse sources.

Since every SERP is unique, do a competitive analysis for the SERPs you’re targeting and prioritize your linkbuilding strategies accordingly.

Analytics:
Stop tracking and reporting on nonsense. Just stop it.

Take the time to analyze what you want users to do on your site, set up conversions and goals with assigned values, and track everything to those values.

Check out the Tatvic GA Excel plug-in.

Ranking reports suck. Why?

• 60% of search results are personalized.
• You’re only focusing on head terms, and not accounting for huge amounts of long-tail terms.

PPC:
The “opportunities” tab in AdWords actually has useful info. Check it out.
In display, use the contextual targeting tool, display campaign optimizer, and the updated display ad builder and resources.
Retargeting: get into it.

PPC for BingHoo:
A good guideline is to allot 15%-25% of your PPC budget there.

CPA can be better on BingHoo because of:

• Less competition
• Demographic targeting
• Broad match not as broad

So, that’s my brief recap of the event. I’m already looking forward to SearchFest 2012. SEMpdx put up some live blog reports from the event as well, so check that out if you want more info about the SearchFest happenings.

With so many images available at cheap prices, there’s really no reason to go with the handshake photo. I guess it’s supposed to say “we’re professional, we get deals done, and we’re customer-focused.” But what it really says is “we have zero creativity, and our products and customer service probably suck”.

So please, if you have a client that wants to use those cliché photos, send them to sites like istockphoto or shutterstock, and spend a few dollars on something decent.

In my challenging quest to obtain wool socks, I found three main issues with the sites where I shopped (site names withheld):

1. A lack of sorting options.

I know what brand I want. I know the style and the size. I should be able to quickly sort by those parameters, find what I’m looking for and make my purchase. When I finally got to a site that had dropdowns for all my criteria, the page would reload after each one. So I had to go back in and identify my brand (sort, reload, back to top of page), size (sort, reload, back to top of page), style (sort, reload, back to top of page), and size (sort, reload, back to top of page). And that was the best of the bunch.

2. An obtrusive chat window.

On one of the sites with no sorting option, I got a chat window that was hovering above the product listings and moving along with me as if to force me to chat instead of add my product to a cart. Yes, a live chat is helpful, but not when it’s covering actual products. I had to select chat just to get the window out of my way. My chat consisted of providing feedback about the bad usability, then moving on to a better site.

3. Forced registration prior to purchase.

Alas, I found a site, sorted properly, found what I wanted, and proceeded to the cart. Unfortunately, this site requires users to complete a cumbersome “become a member” process prior to making a purchase. I just wanted to buy socks. I’m not going to “become a member” of your site. So I went elsewhere and finally found a site that was relatively easy.

I know that getting a user experience perfect is hard work. But in general, make it easy for users to find your products, and let them check out easily. As Steve Krug says, don’t make them think. And don’t make me jump through hoops to buy your products. Get out of the way and let me get on mine.

Seeing click through rates rise, watching conversion rates climb, and digging into analytics reports are some of the things that really rev my engine.

Does that make me a geek? If so, then I’m proud to be a search geek.

After watching this video and thinking about why I love what I do, here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Purpose and results:
With so much of marketing being subjective and immeasurable, I love being in a field now where everything I do is measured, and results are delivered. I’ll leave radio and billboard campaigns to others. Give me PPC and SEO any day.

2. Improving tactical skills:
With technology constantly changing online, there are endless things to learn, practice and improve upon. I feel great knowing that I’m continually building skills and knowledge that make me better at what I do. Experimenting, reading blog posts from others’ experiments and tactics, and studying for Google exams are things I enjoy doing on a daily basis.

3. Connecting with a community:
Since search marketing is such a niche profession, most people don’t have any understanding of what I do (“umm, you do what?” is a common response to the “so, what do you do” question). But that’s what makes connecting with other industry people so awesome. They get it. They can relate. And they share insights. In Denver, we’re lucky to have a solid monthly SEO and SEMPO Meetup. I’ve been to every one for the past year and a half.

In addition to the local community, there’s the huge group of international people on Twitter sharing knowledge, client frustrations, insights, etc. For example, Sarah Carling wrote similar article to this one recently, and I wanted to reference it, but couldn’t find it. 5 minutes after I tweeted asking her for the link, she sent it to me (you’re awesome Sarah!). I think it’s so cool to be able to connect with other industry people across the globe on a daily basis.

4. Making the web (and world) a better place:
Though I’m in the marketing industry, I generally detest bullshit, intrusive advertising. That’s why I think that the more effective websites and search engines can be, the more efficient marketing can be. More targeted advertising has gotten us away from push, intrusive door-to-door sales and telemarketing calls, and has moved toward providing relevant information when and were you are. These days everything is being driven to the web. I love helping companies improve results, while simultaneously improving user experiences.

I could go on and on, but these are some main reasons why I’m so happy to be a search geek!

This graphic does a good job of illustrating the results:

(click for larger image)

Onward and upward!

It’s very rewarding to see a relationship start with a client that has very little SEM knowledge and a healthy dose of skepticism, and watch it blossom into mutual respect and effectiveness.

Working with a B2B lead-gen client, the first few weeks involved phone meetings (what’s a keyword?!) and reports (what’s a click?!) on a nearly daily basis. Over time, they started to understand more about my processes, and after 6 months they saw an increase in leads of over 100%.

This week, I emailed them recommending they allocate some new budget to generate new leads, and they called me back in 10 minutes with the green light and a credit card number.

Hi five!

I purchased mikevallano.com and had it inactively hosted for a little while before I mapped the domain over to this WordPress.com blog (which is extremely easy, btw). Then I submitted my XML sitemap, checked out everything in WebmasterTools, and monitored the rankings.

With such an SEO-friendly last name, I’ve got it easy. It was just a matter of when the search engines would show the site in rankings.

Week one:
The site got indexed in Google on day six.

Week two:
Bing ranked the site #1 on day 8.
Yahoo! ranked the site #1 on day 12.

Week three:
Google finally ranked the site #1 on day 18.

So nothing earth-shattering here, but as a search geek I love this type of stuff. And it’s nice to know exactly how long it takes new domains to be indexed and ranked.

Very cool, and I’m looking forward to much more testing.

Skyrocketing conversion rates imminent!

I’m now Analytics and AdWords certified, and I’ve got the link to prove it.

This one takes the cake.

There’s a dropdown in the left nav, but the main page is an image explaining how to use the dropdown (though it doesn’t actually contain a dropdown).