Karl Ribas Recaps SMX–Search Marketing Expo

The following post comes from search engine marketing consultant Karl Ribas of All Web Promotion. At the same time that the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions team was busy at Internet Retailer 2007, the elite of the search marketing world gathered at the first Search Marketing Expo conference. Karl provides an excellent recap of his experience in this full-length post. –Paul

As some of you may or may not know, last week in Seattle was the very first ever Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference… a conference for the experienced and more advanced search engine marketer. Unlike other search marketing conferences that you may be familiar with, SMX is all about providing an atmosphere where sessions, exhibits, and after-conference networking events start and remain at an advanced level. In other words… the basics of SEO and PPC are thrown right out the window.

I was fortunate enough to have attended this conference, and so as a Yahoo! Store developer, I was asked to step in and share some of the sights and sounds of my experience. With this post, I am hoping to provide readers with a quick run-down of the conference itself, as well as some of the many tips and strategies (those that will be most beneficial in your marketing and development efforts) that were shared.

SMX Advanced kicked off strong on Monday morning with a Q&A session with the ever-so-popular Google engineer Matt Cutts. Members of the audience were able to pose search related questions directly at Matt, and he of course would attempt to answer them. I was actually impressed by this session. Going in, I thought Matt would be pleading the 5th on almost half of everything that was asked, but he didn’t. He did a tremendous job of addressing near every question.

The conference proceeded on with a 2-track schedule where attendees could choose to follow a track focused on organic SEO, or one on paid search advertising (Pay Per Click). Personally speaking, I was quite happy with only having two tracks to decide between. I’ve been to a couple of conferences in the past where the schedule had as many as four or more tracks going at one time… which makes it very difficult for attendees with interest in multiple areas to be able to catch all that they’d like to.

SMX Advanced ended on Tuesday late-afternoon with the “Give It Up” session that featured an all-star panel of search marketing professionals. During this session, speakers (including Matt Cutts) provided the audience with some of their better industry tips and tricks. Unfortunately, due to an embargo that was formed just before the session got underway (it was the only way the panel would share their goods) we, the members of the audience, are not able to share with you any of the details presented during that session. Sorry guys.

However, as I mentioned above, I do have a few other take-a-ways that should prove to be useful in your marketing efforts:

Duplicate Content Issues (SEO)

Duplicate content was a pretty big concern at SMX, as having non-unique content on your website is quickly becoming a bigger and bigger problem for online merchants. Website’s with duplicate or similar sets of content are often at times filtered out (ex: Google’s supplemental results) or, in some cases, may even be banned entirely from the search engines. And rightfully so.

From a search engine’s point-of-view, their one and only goal is to serve a variety of quality results per query, not multiple versions of the same content blasted across different websites. With that said, my suggestions for merchants (as backed from conversations at SMX), is to either write or hire a copywriter to write brand new, keyword-focused copy for each of your pages and products.

One of the bigger problems I see when optimizing a Yahoo! Store is that merchants will “borrow” product descriptions and such from the manufacturer’s website. This is among the worse things you can do for two reasons. One, the manufacturer is the originator of that content and Google, Yahoo!, and other engines are most likely going to rank them over you. Second, every other merchant that resells that product is no doubt “borrowing” the same product descriptions as you are… which in the end provides you with even less of chance to rank high in the search engines. The easiest way to overcome this is to just write your own product descriptions.

Quality Linking (SEO)

Linking is a big part of the search engine optimization process, as I assume most of you understand quite well. Search engines use links to help them understand what a website, more specifically each page within that site, is really about. Therefore it is in your best interest to encourage others to link to you.

However, what most people fail to realize is that it’s not the sheer number of backlinks pointing to your website that merits a boost is search engine rankings, rather it is the number of quality backlinks involved. A website with 1 or 2 quality backlinks can, and most likely will, out-rank a website with 1 or 2 hundred backlinks.

So now the question becomes “what constitutes a quality backlink”? Well, aside from being a relevant source, one thing that was mentioned at SMX was that the page linking to you should have several sources linking to it. This makes perfect sense, right? The stronger the page is that links to your page, the stronger that page will make your page. So the next time you go out and exchange links with a website, request a link on a popular page, such as an article or resource of some kind, rather than a website’s link page… which most likely has no links pointing to it.

Using Day Parting (PPC)

Day parting was also a pretty big topic of discussion at SMX Advanced. Day-Parting, for those of you who don’t know, is a Pay Per Click term which means limiting your PPC campaigns to only a few hours per day. For instance, depending on the target-audience that you’re trying to reach, you may find it worthwhile to have your PPC advertisements run only during morning hours, as opposed to the entire day. And vise versa for other markets and audiences.

The ultimate goal with day-parting is to decrease the amount of wasteful spending (times when clicks lead to little or no conversions) and re-focus that budget on times that are most valuable to you. The common suggestion at SMX was to review over your website’s stats (number of visitors, conversion data, etc.), and find out which hours of the day (or even days of the week) your visitors seem to click and convert most. Now knowing this data, you can test those measures and limit your ad campaigns to only those time periods.

On an extra note: most PPC platforms offer some type of Day Parting program which makes it easier for you to set and monitor.

Using the Keyword Insertion Tool (PPC)

The keyword insertion tool is a small little tool that resides within every major PPC platform (Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter), and its sole function is to automatically implement your individual keywords into your ad copy. For instance, let’s say that you have an ad group with 100 or so keywords in it (quite common really), and let’s also say that you only have one ad running in that same group. Well instead of running just a general ad, the keyword insertion tool will automatically implement your keywords (when searched) into the ad’s title and description.

At SMX, there were quite a few discussions on whether or not using the tool might actually increase one’s quality score. I will say that it probably doesn’t influence your quality score directly; however, because of the nature of the tool, I’m thinking that it creates a much better ad, which in return boosts your quality score.

Elements of Quality Score

Quality score, which is the engine’s secret sauce for ranking a PPC advertisement, was probably the most talked about topic on the paid search track. It seemed like with every session, someone new was sharing their thoughts on what elements they believe make up the quality score algorithm… and you know, some of the theories were way far-out, while others could very well be dead-on. That’s the beauty of this whole thing… there’s no, nor will there be, validation from the engines.

However, some of the more common elements which are believed to affect your quality score are as follows:

1. Click-Through Rate: The number of times your ad was clicked on vs. the number of times it was displayed. Tip: Create compelling ads that attract people’s attention… to the point where it is being clicked on regularly.
2. Keyword Relevance: How well the keywords you’re bidding on reflect the products or services you’re selling. Tip: Use a combination of broad and specific terms that describe your products and services for each adgroup.
3. Landing Page Relevance: How well the page that you’ve specified (via the destination URL) reflects the keywords (products and services) that you’re bidding on. Tip: Send traffic to the appropriate category pages and not just the home page. (Ex: the term “Nike hats” would do better if it sent search users to the “hats” page of your Nike store, rather than the home page).
4. Ad-Text Relevance: How well your ad copy relates to the keywords (products and services) that you’re bidding Tip: Include keywords in your ad’s titles and descriptions.

And that’s that. Overall, I’m going to say that the conference was very successful. SMX provided an atmosphere where veteran search marketers could learn, share ideas, and even interact with others as proficient in the industry as they are. I was very pleased with how the conference was scheduled (location, time of year, times of sessions and breaks, etc.), and I very much enjoyed the smaller, close-knit atmosphere that was emitted.

Karl Ribas
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Due Maternity Connects with Customers and Drives Traffic with Yahoo! Widgets

The following post is an interview with Albert DiPadova of Due Maternity. Albert alerted us to his use of Yahoo! Widgets as another tool to help build community, engage with new and returning visitors, and drive traffic through providing valuable content to customers.–Paul

Tell me a bit about Due Maternity? How long have you been in business and what is your market?

Due Maternity has grown into a collection of five retail boutiques in Atlanta, Austin, Santa Barbara and San Francisco. We launched its online ecommerce website in the summer of 2003. Now in our fourth year we are currently ranked no.1 on most all maternity industry key word terms like “Maternity Clothes” and all things related.

This was due to our partnership with Yahoo! where we have been able to enjoy the traffic and marketing opportunities available to merchants.

Here’s our latest press release about it: www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=250643

Due Maternity Widget brings visitors from the desktop to the website

Tell me about the Widget you built. What are the features and how does this tie into your store?

Due Maternity chose Yahoo! Widgets because they run on Macs and Windows and they are very easy to download and install. We authored the Widget on the Macintosh using a text editor and Photoshop, and deployed the Widget through the Yahoo! Gallery and our own marketing efforts.

How did you get the idea for a Yahoo! Widget?

We were looking for a way to reach out to our customer in a meaningful way. Widgets are one of the simplest and yet most effective ways to keep your brand top of mind and provide our customers a useful and fun way to reconnect with our site.

Our Widget tells you how many months, weeks, and days left before your bundle of joy arrives, and you get to customize it with your baby’s name and choice of pink, green or blue face.

The most important thing our Widget does is alert our customers on the first day of each trimester with a link to our site that has important information about your baby’s development.

How long did it take to build roughly and what level of knowledge was required?

The Widget required about a day’s worth of effort from a good graphic designer and programmer who was familiar with JavaScript and Yahoo! Widgets. Because Yahoo! Widgets are built using XML, JavaScript and graphics files, they present a really accessible way for web developers to provide desktop functionality.

What are the hopes for this in terms of driving awareness or traffic? If you are seeing results, are they better than expected or not quite to expectation?

We’ve seen more than 3000 downloads the first week and it is quickly become one of our leading sources of new customers. This is truly amazing response. I was a little worried that newly expecting moms might be a bit intimidated by downloading a program, then downloading our Widget, but I was dead wrong. Or maybe there are another 3000 that couldn’t figure it out but I hear in the next release there will be a single download and install button for all Widgets…. Either way, it’s more traffic than we ever expected!

How much traffic are you getting from this?

Five days into it we’ve seen 5000 clicks and $1500 in sales. Not a tidal wave but it’s still growing.

Are you doing other viral tactics and if so what?

We are producing some really fun media that will be the first of its kind in the Maternity industry, but I can’t tell you what it is until next month.

In terms of ways to promote your store, what else do you do (SEO, PPC, social networking, etc.)?

We’re doing everything right now, National Print to Paid Search but I think the real break through is in unorthodox media projects that not only advertise your company but also really give the customer something useful and entertaining to play with.

If you could offer new merchants one tip for building traffic to their store, what would it be?

Create a community with relevant content, build your customer base using all the free new media out there: YouTube, Del.ic.ious, Vertical Response, MarketWire, MySpace, Facebook, iMovie, PodCasts, Slide, Blogs and of course Yahoo! WIDGETS!

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

FlyingPeas Adds Featured Customers as well as Featured Products

The following post contains excerpts of an interview I did with Terra Malcom Carmichael regarding her store, FlyingPeas.com. Terra’s store sells “hip” and high-quality baby products, but more than the funny t-shirts or funny bibs (or even the great custom design), what caught my eye and the subject of this post, is her page that features friends and customers—Yummy Mommies. I contacted Terra and asked her some questions about how Yummy Mommies fits in with her store.

Tell me about FlyingPeas? When and why did you start the business?

I love babies and all the fun products that come with them. I’ve done my share of buying baby gifts (as well as for my own little men), and while shopping, I’ve often found that most of the cool products weren’t very high quality, and the high quality products were boring (baby blue, green or pink). On the rare occasion that I found a product that met my “hip and high quality standards,” I was ecstatic. So I started FlyingPeas in an attempt to make it easier for people to find products that fall at the intersection of “hip” and “high quality.”

Where did you get the idea for Yummy Mommies?

Many first time moms have no clue what to get. We don’t know WHAT to get, HOW MANY to get or WHEN to get baby products when we are pregnant for the first time. And even once we are seasoned moms, we sometimes just want to hear what products others like or have had success with. So, I created Yummy Mommies as a place for people to choose and display their favorite products for all the world to see (and buy!).

Also, the fashion industry has realized that women don’t want to wear “moomoos” just because they are pregnant. So, along with this realization, we have more options – and options that help us wear our bellies with pride. I mean, who would have ever guessed 10 years ago that we’d pay $200 for a pair of jeans we’d fit into for 4 months?! Not me. But it’s happening all over – and it’s because we want to look good… particularly when we have a big ol’ belly and people are going to be looking more often! So… my friends and customers are yummy, especially because they are mommies or mommies-to-be.

The Yummy Mommies section at FlyingPeas.com

What has the response been like so far? Tell me how this helps drive traffic and sales for your site?

I can tell you that it’s the number one viewed page on my site but I don’t know how many sales come from this page…. It’s more of a fun page to give my site more personality.

How are you promoting this idea in your store or offline?

I send out a newsletter each month featuring a yummy mommy of the month as well as other new products and specials. I’m to the point now where people are submitting their friends – and even wives - to be yummy mommies.

How are the products chosen that are displayed? Are these the chosen person’s favorites or things they have bought in the past?

These products can be things they’ve purchased in the past, experienced in the past or even just things they like.

Any chance of a Yummy Daddies category coming soon?

Yummy Daddies doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, but I absolutely think there’s something there! Be on the lookout for this very soon!

My thanks to Terra for sharing those insights with other Yahoo! merchants. So the question to ask yourself is “Would this work for my business?” Pet store owners could have featured pooches. A garden product store could post photos of the “garden of the week/month”. Your customers get a chance to show off their passions or interests. You get to build a sense of community and encourage others to pass along your address as a destination. And all of that traffic can hopefully lead to more inbound links to boost your search rankings or hopefully boost your revenue with new customers or repeat sales.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Mississippi Meets Manhattan:Rob Snell Gives the Low-down on SES NY

The following post comes courtesy of Rob Snell, long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketing guru. Rob has submitted posts before but this time I asked if he could give his thoughts on the Search Engine Strategies New York conference going on this week. If you couldn’t make it out there, the following is a great distillation of Rob’s takeaways from the sessions, parties and conversations.–Paul

Search Engine Strategies 2007 New York is off the hook! I don’t see how anyone gets everything done! Most of the sessions I attended were wall-to-wall marketers. There are so many new folks interested in search marketing.

I’m impressed by the number of companies sending their employees to SES. So many retailers, ad agencies, and Fortune 1000 companies are sending their staffs here for an introduction /crash course in selling though the search engines. It’s not cheap! My flight from Mississippi was $800, hotel around $1000, and tuition was $1500 even with the coupon. SES is easily worth every penny because implementing even one good idea will pay for the trip ten times between now and the next show in August in San Jose.

Lots of the sessions are covering the basics, and there are tracks for SEO (Organic), Paid Search, Retail, Metrics/Tracking, and more. There was an entire track yesterday dedicated to Conversion. Bet you know where I spent my time!

What’s new? Optimizing video and audio (podcasts) is still new, but a big deal. There was a class on using Wikipedia for SEO earlier today. Social Search is booming, too! Folks are talking about using MySpace and Facebook and other “social” sites as yet another way to attract and communicate with customers. If you sell anything related to entertainment, music, books or popular culture, open up a MySpace account and start signing up your customers as your MySpace friends.

Paid Search a.k.a Pay-per-click (PPC) is bigger than ever, and it keeps on changing!
I read a Marketing Sherpa report last year that around 40% of the sales for the top e-commerce sites came from their paid search campaigns. And then I heard this interesting statistic at SES today: More than half of smaller online retailers are not buying paid search ads (PPC) on Google or Yahoo! Seriously! Fewer than half of merchants have pay-per-click accounts on. That’s just wrong!

If you’re a merchant and you’re NOT buying paid search ads, you’re leaving money on the table. Pick your top ten best-selling products, grab your best converting keywords, figure out what can pay for an order, and dive in there.

Yahoo!’s Panama rocks! Lots of folks are buzzing on Yahoo!’s brand spanking new Panama platform for paid search ads. Merchants are seeing their PPC costs drop with some of new features. Keywords are easier to organize and manage. Bids and budgets are easier to control. It’s still pretty new, but the word on the street is that Panama is a hit.

Quality (Score) is Job One. Man, things change so fast in this industry! PPC is no longer an auction where the best ad placement goes to the fella with the fattest wallet. Yahoo! and Google (and soon MSN) are using a new factor called Quality Score which is a number indicating an ad’s relevancy. How Quality Score is determined is a trade secret, but the search engines do reveal some tips.

Each ad’s Quality Score is somehow derived from the keyword you’re bidding on, your PPC ad text, and your store’s landing page for relevancy for that specific search. Quality Score combined with bid price and click-through rate (CTR) to determine the rank of your PPC ads, so the higher your quality score, the cheaper your ad / better you rank.

• TIP: Organize your keywords into similar campaigns and adgroups focused on narrow concepts. A good rule of thumb is that if all the keywords use the same URL as the landing page, group those keywords into the same bucket or adgroup.
• TIP: For relevancy, make sure the keywords you bid on appear in your ad’s headline, description, URL, and in the text on the landing page. If the same URL is used for radically different keywords (say “tongue cleaner” versus “cure bad breath”) break those separate concepts into separate groups of ads.
• TIP: Quality sites disclose who they are and how they collect and distribute user data, so make sure your landing page has links to your About Us page, your Contact Us page, and your Privacy Policy page. Use the FINAL-TEXT field in VARIABLES to list your contact info or link to your info.html and privacypolicy.html pages.

RESOURCES

Mona Elesseily from Page-Zero.com is my Goto Girl (pun intended) for all things Yahoo! Search Marketing, and she has a new book coming out in a month or so that is a must-read if you want to make money with your PPC on Y!SM. Mona works at Page-Zero.com with my good buddy, Andrew “Iron Man” Goodman, who is the author of my favorite book on Google Adwords: “Winning Results with Google AdWords.”

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still the most cost effective way to get customers to your Yahoo! Store, but there is so much bad information out there. And where do you start? After attending more SES sessions on SEO than I can shake a stick at, I can throw a ton of tidbits out for you:

Search-engine friendly pages need well-written TITLE tags (keywords in the NAME field), good keywords in your site-wide navigational text links, header tags around product names (H1), keyword-loaded body copy, good intra-linking of products between pages, and unique meta descriptions for every page.

(Most of this is done with the new Yahoo! Store templates, so thanks, Paul & Co.

And all Web sites need high-quality in-bound links from highly-trusted, authority sites like the DMOZ.org and the Yahoo! Directory, but the biggest SEO issue for Yahoo! Store owners is not links, or RTML templates, or 301 redirects. It’s this:

Merchants must write unique, relevant, and compelling text in their product NAME and CAPTION fields if they want free search engine traffic. Period.

Seriously! Most Yahoo! Store retailers are still using the text from manufacturer’s catalog copy for the text in the CAPTION fields on product pages. The search engines HATE that! And customers need more info, too.

TIP: Rewrite the CAPTION fields on (at least!) your top 20 best-selling products to avoid the duplicate content filters on your favorite search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

You’re probably not a copywriter, but just paraphrase the manufacturer’s text and then answer these questions and a great CAPTION magically appears in your Yahoo! Store:

• Who would use this product (types of people)?
• What all do I get when I buy the product?
• What else do I need to use the product?
• What benefits do I get from the various features of this product?
• Which of my problems does this product solve?
• How do I use the product? Is there a buyers’ guide?
• Who makes it? Where are they located?
• Why should I buy this product instead of similar, competing products?
• How does this product compare to other products (Good/Better/Best)?
• How soon can I have it after placing an order?
• What happens if I don’t like it, or just want to return it?

There are so many other questions you can answer in a product CAPTION field, but this will give you a head start.

TIP: A good rule of thumb is that more expensive or more complicated a product is, the more information you need to inform customers. Write a sentence for every $10 in the retail price. For example, an item that retails for $80 would have at least 8 sentences in the CAPTION.

ANOTHER TIP: Every time a prospective customer emails you a question about a specific product, stop and check the product page and add the information if missing or clarify the existing info. When folks have to email you with product questions, either the customer is being lazy and didn’t read to find the answer, or the information is missing or confusing on the Web page.

Well, tomorrow’s the last day of SES and my session on SITE REVIEWS starts at 9:00 a.m. Wish me luck! All the booths are being packed up, and by the way my Treo is vibrating from all the texts I’m getting, the search marketing parties are already jumping, so I’m out of here! Thanks for reading. Now go out there and sell something!

Rob Snell
New York City, NY USA
guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business