In this multi-part series we’re covering the sessions at Search Engine Strategies San Jose (from the ones we attended) which we thought provided the most value. Yesterday we attended a session called In House: Big SEO which included the following speakers: Jeffrey Rohrs, Bill Macaitis, Marshall D. Simmonds, Melanie Mitchell, and Bill Hunt.

The most useful takeaway was presented by Bill Macaitis, VP Online Marketing at Fox Interactive. Bill Macaitis provided a list of 20 ways to push SEO projects past existing in house/client related barriers. Below is Bill’s list and I have also added descriptions as I saw fit.

• Define the Opportunity: Make sure your strategies are aligned with the goals of the company and the strategies are communicated to the appropriate stakeholders.
• Evangelize: When SEO succeeds, let your entire team know.
• Sell all Stakeholders: Get buy-in from stakeholders and educate them on the importance of SEO through metrics that matter to them.
• Find Allies: Get as many people as you can from your company on board with SEO.
• Small Wins: Rather than trying to accomplish everything, create small attainable goals.
• Money Words: Capitalize on the words that affect your bottom line.
• Education/Training: If your teammates “get” SEO, they will be more likely to buy-into strategies.
• Weekly Meetings: Keep teammates and clients informed of tasks/accomplishments with weekly meetings.
• Build Relationships: Internally you can better acknowledge teammates you require to help you succeed with SEO. For your clients, create relationships with more than one “champions” within their organization.
• Bribes: If you need IT/programmers to help you, take them out to lunch or give them small gifts.
• Face to Face with Clients: Build trust by meeting your clients face to face on a quarterly basis.
• Internal Competition: If you have 2 teams working on similar projects what better way to motivate them then to have an internal competition.
• External Competition: Show how your competitors are performing against you for metrics such as rankings/page views/back links, etc….
• Show past Successes: Teammates and Clients will appreciate the rewards for all the hard SEO work.
• Past Failures for Not Implementing: Make everyone aware of the failures as they relate to the bottom line of your company’s goals.
• Ranking Reports: Many executive level individuals love to see how their site is performing for their favorite keywords; give them what they want.
• Prioritize Projects: SEO is not the only marketing task therefore it’s important to assign priority to projects.
• Names on Projects: If individuals are assigned to specific tasks, they will be more likely to finish them.
• Deadlines: Time lines and deadlines are an absolute must in order for people to understand the importance of completing tasks.
• Accept No Excuses: Don’t give up and be persistent because YOUR butt is on the line.

Continuing with the theme of providing the most value from Search Engine Strategies San Jose, here’s what I found useful in Day 2. The session was called Personalization, User Data & Search and featured Jonathan Mendez, Richard Zwicky, Dave Davies, Gord Hotchkiss, Sep Kamvar and Tim Mayer.

• Gord Hotchkiss presented the findings from an eye tracking study in which they tested the introduction of personalized results in Google’s organic SERP. The conclusion was more clickthroughs, time spent and fixations on the results. The takeaway here is the importance of optimizing your results to be included in Google’s personalized results. This includes applying themes to your website, adding competitive comparisons (to keep users on your site longer), adding useful widgets to engage visitors and to promote back links through the viral affect.

  Sep Kamvar of Google confirmed that it is important to keep users on your site as long as possible, furthermore, widgets are an excellent way to engage users. Tim Mayer of Yahoo mentioned that it was important for your site to become experts on a unique subject and to use Delicious and Yahoo answers to help with this.

• Jonathan Mendez brought up another good point on how companies should offer personalized content on their sites by analyzing all parts of referring URLs (esp search engines) such as: Language, Silo, and keyword. Natural search engine parameters are very easy to decipher using standard server side scripting languages such as PHP or ASP so try serving up dynamic content based on the parameters in the URL.

On another note, if anyone found a Silver Canon A85 Digital Camera at the Google Dance, please let me know, thanks!

• Bill Tancer of Hitwise mentioned that in the late 90′s portals such as Excite and Yahoo used to be people’s homepages, in the early 2000′s the homepages changed to search engines and today it’s Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. This should make everyone aware of the importance of having a presence in Social Networking spaces, whether it’s through groups, advertising, web applications or gaining an understanding of end users.
• Compete.com’s Jeremy Crane showed that women tend to use Google less than men and tend to use ASK, Yahoo and MSN more often than men. He also said Seniors also tend to spread out their searches across the big 4 search engines. The takeaway here is that it’s in order to gain the best returns it’s important to segment your online campaigns/advertising to your target audience.

All 4 players offer industry leading rating and analytical information services which can potentially allow you to offer a more focused strategy to your audience.