The Marketing Conference Blog

Alright, I said I’d never do this, but I’m going to try and give live blogging a shot.  I’m presenting on paid search marketing in a little bit (but not live blogging that – what a trick that would be), but first up is Neal Rabogliatti from Catalyst Connection in Pittsburgh.  He’ll be talking about search engine optimization.

The conference is SEM II: Join the Evolution and is being hosted by eBizITPA.

The agenda:

* a review of his speech at SEM I back almost a year ago

* designing for success – we talked about this a little before hand and it should be really interesting for the crowd (great turnout today, btw, with a lot of walk ups in a very snowy Erie)

* social media

* helpful online tools

1st really good point: Web developers are really astute and great at their craft from a technical standpoint (mostly), but often they will benefit from working with seo or marketing folks.  Highly agree – both teams benefit from working together.

Good analogy for putting Web sites together: measure twice, cut once.  I remember my dad beating that into my head when I was younger.  Develop a plan.   Think about seo AND user friendly design, conversion, analytics, promoting, monitoring, managing.

Aah – a nice memory from my LA days – “ask for the order.”  It’s not just when a sales person speaks with a person – it’s important for your Web site to do the same.

Neal’s from Catalyst Connection, a great outfit for businesses that believes in lean and related management processes.  Going through the process for putting together an effective, seo friendly Web site.

Talking right now about businesses using keywords that THEY know.  Need to figure out what people are actually searching for.  Also talking about the different number of searches for singulars vs. plurals.

SEO basics – 2 steps:

1. Indexing pages; ranking is based on the content of the indexed page.
2. Ranking  = relevance; broken into 3 parts:
a. page content (keyword density)
b. organizing codes (meta)
c. link popularity

I usually break #2 into two parts when explaining to seo newbies, but this makes sense too, separating on screen page content out from meta.

Folders and root directories – how do you organize?  Name dropping with Jill Whalen, Danny Sullivan, etc. (all named are great industry sources)

Hits on one of my biggest pet peeves – frames.  Arrgh!  Going onto  div / layers instead of tables now.  He’s 100% right, but (don’t tell anyone – I still use tables for quick stuff just b/c it’s so much easier for me – don’t let me personally do any page layouts for your site).

CSS – this is all really good stuff for business execs, owners, small businesses, everyone who’s not doing this for a living.  Things that are more than they need to know from a ‘how do you do it perspective’, but can grasp fairly quickly and will help them be able to dictate how their site should be built.

Navigation – link structure – comparing it to a giant circuit board.

Social media – points out that it’s not just for kids (anymore) or goofy wedding videos.  bookmarking sites, media sharing sites, blogs, and content syndication.  Talks about a polyurethane (sp?) stamping company client of his – put the video of how it works onto youtube.  Great results.  I love examples from manufacturing companies!

On digg stuff now – touches on, but doesn’t really go into being wary of the strong backlash you should prepare for if you post the wrong type of article / press release / news story.  Some good strategy points, including the importance of participation, being real, and offering value.

Lists some helpful tools like keyword discovery and other keyword suggestion tools.  My favorite question (the one I’d ask) from the audience: “Is it free?”

Brought up another one that he said someone will kill him if they knew he brought it up.  I like Neal and don’t want to see him dead, so I’m not putting it in here.

Talking about analytics – going into Google Analytics right now.  I’m not linking to them – figure they have enough juice as is and might be able to survive without one from this blog post – maybe!

Another good one – Domain Tools.  I’m not as big a fan of alexa, but having that information along with the other info it provides doesn’t hurt.  Having a private conversation with Cathy von Birgelen about alexa right now.   Seems like a better tool for site owners to point to to try and sell ad space.

Onto site maps now – not the traditional one that you click on when you see sites, but xml ones.  VERY important.  robots.txt, too.  Neal’s saying not to list disallows anymore b/c they don’t work; instead, under disallow, use <sitemap_[url].txt>  Everything’s standardized among the major search engines.

Going into real world examples right now.  Ahh, now I know how to spell urethane.  Holy cow – I just looked up and it looks like I got it right.  He’s being very nice and trying not to offend me on behalf of tpaid search folks everywhere talking about cost reduction.  As I told him ahead of time, I’m always in for cost savings!  Be smart with budgeting, bidding, testing, keywords used and on and on.  I don’t want anyone to spend more than they have to to get great returns!

He brings up a great story about a company getting bought out.  Since their site seo ranked higher than the parent company they decided to ditch the old site.  Reminds me of one of our clients.  They do business all over the world and do stuff in Australia quite a bit.  There are some jobs that are too small for them to do the travel, so they turn it over to partners.  The CEO was grinning ear to ear in talking about how mad the other company gets that a US company gets the lead and not the company in the Aussie’s (remember, pronounce with a ‘z’, not an ’s’) on backyard.

Good speech all around, Neal.