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5 Min with Andrew Chang of LinkedIn – SES San Francisco Preview

July 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Search Engine Strategies is less then a month away and this year it’s taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, to get some insight into his session on PPC and SEO best practices—specific to B2B. Read our conversation below:

[Manoj]: Your session at SES is related to SEO/PPC strategies with regards to B2B, how does LinkedIn become part of equation?

[Andrew Chang]: Millions of people visit LinkedIn each day to connect and re-connect with colleagues and business associates. Our members come from all walks of life – accountants, financial advisors, attorneys, web developers – and they are well-connected and active professionals that many B2B marketers are trying to reach. For this reason, we built and launched our own self-service PPC advertising offering called LinkedIn DirectAds (http://www.linkedin.com/directads) that allows anyone with a LinkedIn account to place text ads on prominent pages and target those ads to only people you’re trying to reach.

A quick example of how this works: One of our most successful customers is an e-learning company that’s trying to attract the attention of primary school teachers to sign up for a Master’s degree program in Education. Over 214,000 LinkedIn members have identified themselves (in their LinkedIn profiles) as being in the “Primary/Secondary Education” industry. Within a few minutes, the e-learning company created a text ad and start displaying the ad only to those 214,000 members when they visited LinkedIn. Teachers click on those ads to learn more about the Master’s programs and the e-learning company pays for those clicks.

[Manoj]: How has the game of lead generation changed in 2010?


[Andrew Chang]: Two ways: Social media and mobile. The increased use of social media services like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter is forcing businesses to rethink how they spend their time and budgets. On LinkedIn, thousands of LinkedIn Groups have sprouted up and liked-minded professionals are engaging in conversations that span the buying cycle. Businesses should be thinking about how they might engage with prospective customers within these groups, encouraging their employees to participate in these conversations. Increased mobile internet access worldwide requires that businesses take a second look at how people experience their website, emails, and other marketing assets from mobile devices.

[Manoj]: I’ve always thought that the importance of SEO never weakened over the years, what do you think?

[Andrew Chang]: Even though I work in online advertising, I always recommend to business and website owners that their websites and web content is optimized for both search engines and social media. I’ve noticed that in recent years this has become easier to say but more and more complex to do. Just take a look at the Google’s Webmaster Central Blog and you’ll see that it’s not just about having the right content on your pages and getting high quality websites to point to your content. With YouTube videos, tweets, and other online assets now crawled and indexed in search engines, you need to think about SEO for more than just your website content.

People don’t realize that your presence on LinkedIn can be optimized for search as well. At a personal level, your own LinkedIn profile often appears in search results when people search for you by name. To make a great first impression, you should make sure that your LinkedIn profile is current and complete. Here’s a link to our learning center where you can learn more: http://learn.linkedin.com/profiles/overview/

Companies also can have their own pages on LinkedIn and you may be surprised by how many people click over to your company’s profile after visiting your personal profile. Anyone at at company can edit the company’s profile on LinkedIn. To learn more, check this out: http://learn.linkedin.com/company-pages/

Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SES

SES New York 2010 – Interview of Matthew Brown, NY Times

March 15, 2010 By 1 Comment

On Day 2 of Search Engine Strategies in New York, you’ll find some great insight on news search optimization from Matthew Brown – Director of Search Strategy, New York Times. I had a chance to catch up with Matthew last week where we chatted about in-house SEO and news search:

[Manoj]: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in ‘In-House SEO’ and how have you overcome them?

[Matthew Brown]: The two biggest In-House hurdles we’ve seen are legacy architecture and the sheer number of content creation processes that can exist at an organization. The first can be extremely difficult to overcome, as there are often a number of business reasons why you can’t move off a particular content management system or magically change the URL or directory structure to something SEO friendly. Integrating SEO into the content creation process is less technically challenging, but requires a lot of elbow grease. There’s something that’s non-intuitive about SEO to folks that live in a traditional publishing environment.

As for technical challenges, I recommend focusing in on the most SEO-unfriendly parts of the site rather than creating a laundry list. Stick to a shortlist of basics like fixing problematic redirects, eliminating the worst duplicate content culprits, and cleaning up the worst URL structures. You’ll spend less time in prioritization meetings with the tech teams, and everyone can spend the most energy on the truly awful SEO aspects of the site.


Lather, rinse and repeat is our strategy for the editorial trainings. There’s always new folks to train, and even people that have sat through multiple trainings often learn something new. Frequent sessions also allow for you to update teams on what’s new in the SEO world, and to introduce them to new tools. Obviously, the focus in the last few months has been real-time search. It’s nice when it’s an interesting topic like that. We’ll have a hard time selling microformats as sexy.

[Manoj]: With the publishing industry having to shift heavily online, I am sure that measuring the effectiveness of your strategies has become really important. What metrics are important to your team?

[Matthew Brown]: Overall referral traffic is still important, but we’re shifting some of our focus to user engagement metrics. Things like time-on-site and bounce rates. These metrics can highlight problematic navigation, poor relateds, or confusing site structure. I think online publishing is slowly waking up to the ‘less is more’ theory of user engagement on pages. Pages that have more targeted links but less links overall have a tendency to earn better user engagement. The same can be applied to ad units, footer links, and all the usual page real estate suspects. Savvy publishers are truly looking at their article templates as landing pages, very similar to what the e-commerce folks have been doing for years.

[Manoj]: How have you prioritized search strategies for such a large and ‘real-time’ site?

Everyone has to integrate SEO into what they do on the site. It might be 30 seconds of keyword research before publishing a story, or it might be a day of promoting a piece on the social media outlets. The bottom line is that, from a content standpoint, there really is no such thing as a good retroactive SEO project to clean up any mistakes. In most cases, you’ve already lost the link popularity battle when the story had attention. Fixing the keyword focus of the page or putting the link up on Twitter doesn’t really have any point 60 days after publishing the article. The SEO work has to be done in the moment, and that requires everyone to play a role.

[Manoj]: What are some ways content publishers can take advantage of news search?

[Matthew Brown]: While the recent eye tracking study from OneUpWeb shows that many search engine users disregard real-time results, there are still good opportunities for publishers. Google real-time search blends in Google News results with tweets and status updates. So if users are tweeting a link to a breaking news article publishers can end up with multiple listings in the stream, and trusted sources tend to stand out from the clutter. Bing Twitter prominently features the top links shared in tweets and major news sites are often included in those results.

With Google Social Search the key is to become part of your target audiences’ social circles. The emphasis there is largely on individuals not brands, but if users are connected to you via Twitter, Google Buzz or other social outlets some of them will see your content in their social results.

Filed Under: Google News, SES

SES New York 2010 – Converting Websites with Bryan Eisenberg

March 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Search Engine Strategies New York is right around the corner and is filled with a great lineup of speakers. Earlier this week, I had a chance to speak with SES veteren Bryan Eisenberg about his sessions at the upcoming conference. Bryan Eisenberg is a UX master and a NYTimes Bestselling Author, check out our conversation below.

[Manoj]: Your sessions at SES New York are heavily focused on ‘Conversions’, please give us some background on what you will be discussing.

[Bryan Eisenberg]:I’ll be sharing my 21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites. I spent over a decade helping websites improve their conversion rate and have distilled all that knowledge, experience and research into this one presentation. You see the average website has a conversion rate around 3%, but there are plenty of sites that convert at 10% or higher. By the way when we started out we told everyone 10% was what they should target; some paid attention but most didn’t yet. There will be examples from retail sites, B2B sites, publishers and everything in between. I guarantee that the audience will never be able to look at a website the same way again.

[Manoj]:What are some blatantly obvious things that website owners can do to help improve their conversions?

[Bryan Eisenberg]:I like to break it down to what I call the conversion trinity. The first part is to focus on understanding the intent of your visitor and delivering them the most relevant content for their needs. The second part is making sure they understand the value of purchasing from you. The final part is making sure they know what action they should take next and that they feel comfortable taking that action.

[Manoj]: Are there any online tools you enjoy using during your conversion optimization process?

[Bryan Eisenberg]:I am a tool junkie; I love tools. In fact, I put together a post on my blog of 69 free and low cost tools to improve your website {http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2009/09/free-tools-to-improve-your-website/} . This is probably a good place for most people to start.

[Manoj]:vAnalytics is a critical component to measuring and improving conversions, how should website owners go beyond a basic analytics implementation?

[Bryan Eisenberg]:The key to being successful with analytics is move beyond reporting and analysis to making data driven decisions and taking action based on the analytics. What I recommend most people do is to create an action plan or to-do list. This list can be daily, weekly or monthly depending on your corporate metabolism and resources. Every time you create this list you should come up with the top places on your website that need improvement, a list of other things you may want to improve or test, what marketing efforts you should do more of and which ones you should do less of and then just execute and get the list done.

[Manoj]: You’ve been helping improve conversions for many years, what things have changed from the last couple of years to 2010?

[Bryan Eisenberg]: In the last 10 years a lot of things have changed in the conversion optimization space, from greater adoption of web analytics tools, to wider awareness of the importance of conversion rate. In the last couple of years, the increasing breadth and depth of tools for enabling conversion rate optimization has been increasing at an astronomical rate. It seems every week I get several requests to check out the latest and greatest offering. However, I still fear to many people are not taking on the challenge of working on improving their website every month since it requires hard work. It is kind of like trying to lose weight; it takes a daily commitment of making smart choices, working hard and eating well. I should know, I’ve lost over 80 pounds since SES NY last year.

Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SES

Rand Fishkin on PPC vs. SEO and Blackhat vs. Whitehat

October 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment
SES Chicago is a little over a month away and will feature a very well respected online marketing veteran, Rand Fishkin. Rand is the CEO of SEO Moz and is a regular speaker in the international conference circuit. Earlier this week I caught up with Rand to get his insight on his sessions at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, read our chat below:
[Manoj]: Tell our audience a little bit about the sessions you’ll be participating in at SES Chicago and why attendees should drop by.

[Rand Fishkin]: I’ll be involved in two sessions – PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle and Black Hat, White Hat: Does it Really Matter Anymore?

I think both of these touch on relatively sensitive issues in the field of search marketing and the exchanges will contain a lot of substance and style between the panelists. The value of the debate should come in the form of the data presented and the arguments employed. I suspect that many practitioners face these same challenges in their day-to-day roles with clients and internal management, and can find a handful of good takeaways to help support their perspectives.

[Manoj]: Is SEO vs. PPC a cut and dry decision? – it’s really about your business and what your analytics tells you, correct?

[Rand Fishkin]: Yeah – definitely. PPC is so easy to get started with and simple to track that if you’re earning a positive ROI, there’s no reason not to make the investment. The only drawback is when PPC optimization takes up a great deal of time and attention that could be focused elsewhere. I’ve seen organizations that have multiple people devoted to PPC management on a full time basis, and if they could just take a couple weeks of their time and put them towards SEO, they’d likely generate massive amounts more traffic with an even higher positive return. SEO is an investment, but it’s almost always worthwhile.

[Manoj]: Are black hat tactics still employed by individuals/organizations. If so, can you give us some examples?

[Rand Fishkin]: Certainly it is, but no I can’t share examples :-) There’s a small but vocal minority in the SEO field who feels it is far more immoral to reveal those employing black hat tactics than to perform spam, so let’s talk in generalities instead. There are plenty of firms, large and small, who engage in link buying, cloaking, keyword stuffing, link injection, etc. In my opinion, the vast majority of these are doing nothing illegal, immoral, unethical or wrong, they’re simply operating outside the boundaries of what the search engines recommend. Although we don’t use these tactics at SEOmoz and don’t recommend them to our clients, I see no problem with those who choose a different path, so long as they’re honest with themselves about the risks and open with their clients/mangagers. Personally, I just feel that there’s (almost) always a better white hat solution to any problem you’re trying to solve with black hat SEO (exceptions might be in highly aggressive fields like gaming, porn & pharmaceuticals).

[Manoj]: If you were to pinpont a couple SEO tactics which are more important to consider now vs. a few years ago – what would they be?

[Rand Fishkin]: There’s quite a number of tactics that have gained in prominence and value over the last few years, some of which hardly existed in the early days of Google SEO. A few that fit that category include creation and optimization of XML sitemaps, canonicalization of duplicate URLs, social media marketing via social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), viral content creation and promotion via social media, social media profile adoption/linkbuilding and optimization for popular search verticals like Google Local/Maps and Google News. A few of these have been around as long as 5-6 years, but many are new (or gaining prominence) even in the last 2-3.

[Manoj]: In a scenario where you are given 25K to spend for a client who has a brand new business/website, how would you spend it (in regards to Online Marketing)?

[Rand Fishkin]: I’d probably recommend they engage with a talented in-house marketer for 4-6 months (depending on their rate). Getting someone internal working full time on projects, having responsibility to the bottom line and being able to see the company metrics with a incented stake is, in my opinion, the best way to go. As for their tasks, I’d go in this order:

  • Content quality and value on the website (this could include things like a blog or UGC, but may just means top notch editorial content)
  • Web analytics – ensure that a good system for recording progress and traffic is installed on every page of the site
  • Conversion rate optimization and setup of a testing platform (assuming it’s a transactional-focused site)
  • SEO – confirm that all content is crawlable, that important keywords are targeted properly and that all best practices are followed (XML Sitemaps, good internal linking, page structure, etc.)
  • Viral Marketing – look at opportunities to help draw large quantities of traffic for branding/awareness of the site as well as attract links
  • Email Marketing – engage with the audience through at least an email newsletter and possibly more personalized/direct kinds of email marketing

After those, I might look into link building, paid search, display ads and other channels in tests, but those would be the first steps I’d recommend.

Filed Under: SEO, SES

SES San Jose 2009 – Quick Day 2 Recap

August 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Day 2 of SES San Jose flew by, below are some of the things we were checking out on the 2nd day.
  • Session 1 – Igniting Viral Campaigns: Leveraging Consumer-Generated Content, featured 5 panelists including Cisco’s Brian Ellefritz whose team came up with a video contest dubbed the Heaven and Hell contest. Users were given the opportunity to submit their most positive/negative stories regarding their home entertainment system via 3 min YouTube video. The winner would receive a $10,000 prize. The conclusion was a highly engaging campaign which included 50+ video submissions and thousands of ratings/comments.
  • Demo – ClearSaleing – Co-Founder Adam Goldberg walked me through ClearSaleing highly intelligent analytics program which provided rich insight on referral attribution down to the Net ROI. This is completely different than many other tools which provide last click attribution and Gross ROI.
  • Bill Hunt of SEMPO – We sat down with Bill Hunt who gave us an overview of all the current undertakings by SEMPO which included their emerging technologies group preparing for a whitepaper on mobile and potentially the Yahoo/Bing deal. SEMPO is aiming to keep members engaged with the industry without being biased towards any tool or service.
  • Session 2 – Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer: Secrets Revealed! I couldn’t stay for the entirety of this one but the room was absolutely packed. Afterwards we were allowed to ask some of the Google Engineers about issues or problems related to search and their tools/services.
Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SES

SES San Jose 2009 – Interview: Alex Bennert of The Wall Street Journal

July 14, 2009 By 1 Comment
Late last week I caught up with Alex Bennert who is an SEO Strategist at the Wall Street Journal. Alex is scheduled to speak at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in San Jose on the topic of “How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industry” so I decided to get her insight on this topic. Check out conversation below:

[Manoj]: What are some of the most significant differences working as an In House SEO vs. an agency.

[Alex Bennert]: As an agency SEO you are usually managing several clients at once, each one with very different strategies, resources and goals. As an in house SEO, my energy and my skills are completely devoted to a single client. I still juggle multiple projects and work with various internal departments but ultimately there is a symbiosis between these goals.

[Manoj]: Are there unique SEO opportunities available to online publications compared to other sites?

[Alex Bennert]: A SERP today displays multiple content types such as news, video, images, stock quotes and blog posts. This opens up a lot of potential real estate on the search page because many online publishers generate all of these kinds of content. Say for a given query, you have a video, a news story and a blog post that are all relevant. You can actually rank in 3 different places on the first page of a search result. Before the advent of universal search, you had to spam to accomplish multiple placements.

[Manoj]: How important has SEO and Internet marketing become to your industry now that more people look online rather than physical newspapers.

[Alex Bennert]: I’m certain that Internet marketing has become crucial to this industry however as an SEO, I consider myself more of a technologist than a marketer. Search, at its core, is simply a conduit for people looking for specific information. My job is simply to know how search engines access data so that whenever we have information, it can surface on relevant queries. Beyond that, the feedback loop of search data provides us with a lovely little window into the heads of our audience, what they’re thinking about and what words they use to express this in a search box.

[Manoj]:I am assuming duplicate content is a major concern for your online publishers?

[Alex Bennert]: You have no idea! Duplicate content was one of the first and most challenging problems to address when I came to WSJ. It was like a Hydra…every time I cut off one head, another would grow in its place. We implemented the CLE tag immediately after Google announced it, and so far it has been a huge blessing to me in this regard. It’s still a little buggy here and there, but for the most part I’ve been able to reallocate a significant amount of my time away from dupe content issues.

[Manoj]: How do you go about creating a strong SEO culture so that writers/staff are better aware of best practices before publishing content.

[Alex Bennert]: I schedule ongoing training sessions every month so that new staff, people that missed previous sessions or people that want a refresher don’t have to wait long before another session. I have different training sessions for different groups of people…the SEO for my editors/ writers/ bloggers is different from my session for IT. I also have a session for the business team that talks about understanding SEO in the context of syndication deals or microsites as well as a (less-frequent) session for management that keeps them apprised of the big picture so that I can be sure there is always top-down buy-in for SEO.

Filed Under: international SEO, Search Engine Strategies, SEO In House, SES

Interview of Michel Leconte of SEO Samba

March 17, 2009 By 1 Comment
Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Michel Leconte, CEO of SEO Samba. During our chat I was able to get Michel’s insight into SEO Samba’s Organic Search Management platform – check out our conversation below:

[Manoj]: Can you provide us with a quick background on your Organic search management platform, SEO Samba?

[Michel Leconte]: SEO Samba maximizes web site performance with search engines and other “free-to-play” digital marketing channels. SEO Samba is a SEO Software provided As A Service (SAAS). Web marketers and SEO professionals deploy and enforce best practices from a single point rather than manually coding these evolving best practices into each of these sites while hoping that end-users will not gradually undo these practices. SEO Samba facilitates execution and maintains the integrity of best practices while letting expert users adapt their best practices to changes in algorithms. In addition, SEO Samba provides an optimized distribution framework for information along with automation and alignment rules to make it very cost effective to successfully market through search engines starting with Google, but also social applications, news, blogs, video, all “free” but crowded channels.

[Manoj]: What type of user is your platform targeted towards?

[Michel Leconte]: Our target end-user is the business to business, or service to consumer oriented websites. Thanks to our unique cloud-based architecture, and ability to leverage and truly take advantage of end-users business scale, it is also particularly well-suited to large network of websites such as franchises or affiliates networks. In addition, SEO Samba’s expert levels features which enable dissemination & execution of best practices across an entire client pool, and look & feel plus URL customization capability, makes it very friendly for SEO services firms, and SEO experts to use. We have also seen traditional advertising agencies & web designers use SEO Samba to develop a credible expertise in SEO and a new or improved service offering in the process. Last, thanks to its Google news optimized module which integrates with email marketing, RSS, and other channels, I think that SEO Samba is a must for online PR firms and online reputation management companies.
[Manoj]: If you could only mention the top 3 benefits of SEO Samba’s platform, what would they be?

[Michel Leconte]: Scale, Scale and Scale.
Right now, there is no sizeable economy of scale; marketers and SEO consultants have to expand a similar amount of time every time they optimize a site. Then they have to define a strategy and optimize linking across these properties..

On the other hand with SEO Samba, the more websites you have, the easier it is to rank them high with search engines: Define best practices once, execute across any number of clients, projects and websites, and leverage automatically linking and marketing opportunities all over. And as SEO is a process and not a one time shot, anytime you refine positioning and content of pages and websites, SEO Samba re-construct titles, headers, deep-links, to align all your factors.

[Manoj]: How important is it for organizations to add some focus to SEO at this time in order to save money on other online mediums?

[Michel Leconte]: Generally speaking, SEO has the best measurable ROI I have seen of all offline/online marketing channels I came across. However, it is a process, an investment for the future, not an endeavor that brings instant gratification like PPC does. If you oppose it to other online medium, first you need to have all ducks in the row measuring specific channel’s ROI for both online and offline conversions. In doing so, you’re setting the foundation for your business case, how much investment now vs. how much in future savings am I targeting? If you correlate these numbers to your rankings, traffic potential and your actual traffic per keyword you then can evaluate how much a concentrated effort on SEO is worth to you.

[Manoj]: What is the cost of SEO Samba’s organic platform?

[Michel Leconte]: SEO Samba is priced at $99/month/domain/unlimited users with a month-to-month contract. Digressive pricing is available for professionals based on volume, and a free unlimited trial is offered. We also offer discounted professional services through our partners and directly to professionals. You can find all details here in our signup page, and by contacting our sales team in the EU or US. More information available here: http://www.seosamba.com/pricing–sign-up.html

Check out SEO Samba at SES NY 2009.

Filed Under: Search Engine Strategies, SES