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What a great conference for SES at San Jose and the many new people to the event in attendance. Below are the TopRank team blog posts for the final day. Another big thank you goes to (L to R) Jessica, Ashley, Thomas and Dana for a great job covering sessions. If you saw these happy faces at the conference, be sure to comment and say hello.  Thanks to SES too, for having us.

• Google Dance 2008 Photos – TopRank Team
• Blog SEO Tips from SES San Jose – Lee
• Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Michael Brito Intel – Lee
• Social Media Analysis and Tracking – Jessica
• Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Heather Lloyd-Martin DMA SEMC – Lee
• Black Hat vs White Hat Playing Dirty with SEO – Ashley

It was a great conference with plenty of all new sessions and many tried and true topics. Of the sessions I was able to attend, I particularly enjoyed:

• Tech Giants Orion Panel
• The always entertaining Black Hat (aka no hat LOL) vs White Hat session
• The In-House SEO panel which tends to focus on giant companies for some reason, but was absolutely insightful for the kinds of projects we work on at TopRank

Of course, it wasn’t all work and no play at SES, no no no. There was the Internet Marketers Charity dinner and Party on Monday night and Google Dance on Tuesday night, which was full of even more activities from Rock Band to Robots to both inside and outside Dance floors.

Then on Wednesday evening there was curiously non-eventful Yahoo thing and the very eventful SearchBash put on by WebmasterRadio.FM and their sponsors. The SearchBash seems to get bigger and better every year.

I’d say by all accounts it was a successful conference. It didn’t break any attendance records – likely held to the same numbers as last year, food is still typical conference food and I’ll never know whey there is only a day and a half of exhibit hall, but the sessions got a lot of good feedback. I have to say again that the one Orion Panel I did see was excellent – really good stuff.

SES has come a long way this past year and many people in the SEM industry have good reason to see it continue to succeed.

See all of TopRank’s coverage at Search Engine Strategies San Jose here and hundreds of photos on our SES San Jose Flickr set.

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SES San Jose Day Four Wrap Up

Wow, what a conference! Search Engine Strategies is near it’s end and what better way to wrap up our series on internet marketing conference tips than with the following super-tips from super smart Michael Brito, Social Media Program Manager at Intel.

Michael worked with HP then moved on to Yahoo and is now with Intel practicing his adept social media stylings. Be sure to check out Britopian and the social media practitioner blog, Conversations Matter, for more of his insights.

Not all marketing conferences are created equal and from a content perspective, some are much better than others. Last month I attended SMX Social in Long Beach, California; and the content seemed to be more aligned with SEO than Social Media. Nonetheless, there were plenty of really good takeaways from the conference, but the true value for me was networking and meeting others who work in the same space as I do. Here are some other things to consider to prepare for conferences:

• Do your homework: Seek out the speakers/panel/participants and begin networking through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. prior to the event.

• Network as much as possible at the event; and dedicate some time to introduce yourself to others. Bring plenty of business cards.

• Bring a laptop, not only to take notes but also to Twitter any insights or revelations that may come upon you. Share everything; and don’t hold back. Who knows? You can be the first to share

• If you blog, attending conferences is a great way to brainstorm new post ideas so take good notes.

• Bring resumes; you never know, you may meet your next employer.

What’s not to like about bullet point marketing conference tips you can act on, right now? Thanks for the insights Michael.

It seems the theme we can extract from all this sage advice from our internet marketing conference tipsters is to first and foremost, plan ahead. Do a little homework before hand and have a plan for how you’ll capture, internalize and transfer the knowledge you gain. Have fun, but don’t overdo it. Realize the networking opportunities extend beyond prospects and also include competitive intelligence, marketing partners, vendors and new employees.

That’s a wrap for this series on getting the most out of internet marketing conferences. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series and would especially appreciate any additional tips our readers can provide. Many of the tips from the posts in this series came from conference organizers, programmers and speakers.

We’d like to hear more from the folks who pay the bills: attendees, sponsors and exhibitors. Please share your tips, thousands of other readers would love to see them!

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Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Michael Brito Intel

Social Search can be used to drive traffic, conversions, and increase ROI by monitoring conversations happening online. This panel is a first for SES with Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst for Monster.com as the Moderator.

Industry leaders Todd Parsons, Co-founder and CPO of Buzz Logic, Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, Edmund Won, Vice President of Strategy for iCrossing along with Breanna Wigle, CRM manager for Military Advantage share insight into monitoring the conversation and best practices to track success.

Marshall kicked off the session making the case for Google to start measuring and reporting user trends in social media.

Categorizing referring traffic from social media is the first step in attributing success. Is your traffic coming from blogs, social network sites, message forums, bookmarking sites, micro media sites and photo sharing sites?

Rob spoke specifically to the expanding social media universe and developing a social media marketing strategy.

With the expanding social media universe, you need to go where the conversation is going in order to remain relevant and pertinent to your customers.

Designing a social media strategy in 3 phases:
1. Listen to map the landscape
2. Engage to participate and ignite the conversation
3. Measure and optimize based on performance

Listening to identify the external conversation is a crucial key to success. To really understand what community members are saying, you need be ‘mining the universe’.

Know what you need to know:
- How are people feeling about your brand
- Who are the most influential voices
- How effective are you contributing (or not) to the conversation
- What influentials should you cooperate with
- What collaborative environment ‘tool kit’ do you utilize
- What kind of content should you be creating
- How do you optimize this content for highest visibility

You have the potential to help amplify your customers’ voice and develop an engagement strategy, but first you need to know:
- Where is your current audience
- What are they saying
- Who are the influential voices
- What are they talking about
- What is their sentiment

To track results for your social media campaigns, harness data and develop reports to measure volume of conversation, voice sentiments, topic relationships, and competitors and features.

Product attribute Tag Clouds can provide a more qualitative snapshot of the words associated with your brand. The anatomy of search, as it relates to social media, is the opportunity for us to identify important keyword phrases to map an engagement strategy based on those keywords.

The grand unified vision is to over lay all relevant data sets from a social media campaign for correlative analysis which will eventually help enable predictive modeling. Brining all this data together, will help to determine and ROI for social media campaigns. Finding the meaning within the measurement is critical.

Breanna and Todd shared a social media case study, in which they leverage BuzzLogic as a tool to identify where the conversation is and how to identify influential voices.

Marketing strategy was to isolate the influencers and reach passionate readers of military defense news and information. Campaign goal: Increase product awareness to new influencers and their audiences as well as to convert visitors into RSS and newsletter subscribers.

The challenge was, they needed to find those influencers, while advertising to their audience manually was daunting, given the fragmented nature of social media.

What they found was they were able to better identify and reach influencers in the long tail.

Step 1: Uncover conversations
Specifically, look at blogs and forums to help drill down to specific topics, and identifying the influencers in the conversation.

Step 2: Rank the influencers and their content
Look at the influential blogs, and the posts specific to each conversation topic. How many times does the blog write about that specific topic? And what is the blog readership?

To maximize ad placement within social media, look at the targeted influencers’ networks and identify the most heavily traveled paths regarding specific topics.

Ad campaign overview:
- Critical that the creative is well done
- Create a unique highly targeted ad

Successful social media ads are:
- Compelling
- Informative
- Have a clear Call to Action (CTA)

Key Observations / Learning’s

1. Active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences. Highly targeted display ads can perform in this environment. Find active conversations where people are talking about the subject.
2. Social search is different then web search and traditional site-targeting, it’s about sourcing information via what trusted people are referring to. This can get you closer to a search like intent.
3. Influencers and their network relationships are key. The nature of linking connections matter when it comes to ad performance. Sites that connect to each other around specific topics are key targets.
4. Conversation offers a new window in analyzing user psychology and intent. The nature of the conversation can impact ad performance.

Edmond shared a case study with the audience, specific to engaging forums.

Situation: high tech client facing dissatisfied customers that vocalized their technological problems and frustrations in online forums. The solution was to identify, monitor and develop an engagement strategy on influential technical support communities. The goal was to provide support and help resolve problems with current products and improve community perception over time

Outcomes included:

Measuring and reporting
- Measurement is key
- Standard ROI measure does not work in social media

Monitoring metrics
- Tonality of user postings
- Categorization of discussion topics by product
- Site traffic for the forum sites

Engagement metrics
- Direct impact metrics
- Number of company postings
- Number of conversations engaged
- Number of members directly conversed with

Indirect impact metrics
- Page views of postings
- Number of links posted to client’s website
- Amount of traffic resulting from these links

Analyze page views over time
- Since many forums are optimized for search, engagement is highly visible….forever
- SEO continues to drive new page views for older postings

In addition, links posted in forums were tracked by thread and matched back to the client’s referring sources to determine the number of clicks. Often, a specific post generated more page views and clicks due to extremely high rankings within the natural search results for typical search queries.

Key takeaways

1. There is no one killer metric for social media
2. Track anything possible to glean insight
3. Social media is not just about numbers
4. It’s all relative (focus on benchmarking and trends)
5. Measuring social media does not = ROI for social media
6. View monitoring social media as a Social Intelligence Program, involving the world’s biggest focus group

This was a very interesting session. Each speaker shed new light to the question on most our minds: What’s the ROI for social media. My key takeaway is that there is no one right answer, and mostly the answer is based on the campaign objective. As we continue to advance our ability to track results and monitor trending, all you can do is keep testing to identify what gets results.

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SES San Jose: Social Media Analysis and Tracking

SES San Jose week is nearly over one might say we’ve saved some of the best internet marketing conference tips for last with the ever enthusiastic and insightful Heather Lloyd-Martin.

Heather is Chair, DMA’s Search Engine Marketing Council and President of SuccessWorks. She also blogs about copywriting at SEO Copywriting.

Attend all the “search marketing site labs” or “search marketing clinics” you can find. During a site lab, a panel of experts review Web sites on the fly and discuss how to improve them for search positioning and conversions.

Here’s why they are so cool:

1. If your site is reviewed, you get free consulting from the best minds in the industry. Search marketing experts charge anywhere from $250-$500+ an hour. Even if a three or four-person panel spends just 15 minutes reviewing your site, you are seeing remarkable value for your money. I’ve seen panels suggest one site tweak that ended up making the company thousands of dollars.

2. If you are too shy to have your site reviewed, simply sitting in the sessions is a great learning experience. Chances are, you’ll pick up quite a few actionable tips and ideas for your own site.

Go to the networking parties. Sure, you may feel like you have 1,000 things to do after being away from work for a day. But it’s amazing how much business actually takes place during these things. If nothing else, walk around with a glass of water (or your beverage of choice) and try to talk to as many people as you can. By the end of the conference, you’ll have formed some fledgling business relationships that you can develop later. I’ve seen people hired during networking parties, I’ve seen partnerships formed – I’ve even seen a group of folks brainstorm a new business idea. The parties are definitely worth it!

You’ve got to love advice that explains specifically how you can get more than you’re money’s worth from an internet marketing conference. Excellent tips Heather.

As SES San Jose winds down, another value packed set of tips is coming your way this afternoon from Michael Brito, Social Media Program Manager at Intel.

If you’re attending SES San Jose this week, what tips can you share with our readers that will make the next SES even more productive for you?

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Internet Marketing Conference Tips: Heather Lloyd-Martin DMA SEMC

News search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch. In this session, industry experts Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, Lisa Buyer, President & CEO of The Buyer Group and Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR look at how to make use of press releases and news content to tap into the power of news search.

Lisa kicked off our session explaining that optimized press releases are a vital part of any news SEO strategy.

The first step to defining the online PR opportunity is to define the media segment. With your online PR campaign are you targeting editors, journalists, analysts or the media?

Media relations does not just mean getting your story found in the search results, but rather helping journalists find their story online.

So, how are journalists searching for news?
- Reaching out to social networks including Linked in and Facebook
- Searching in Google and Yahoo news for sourcing
- Requesting an email including link to Press release on PRWeb

64% of journalists report they use Google or Yahoo news services to follow the news. While 70% report they check a blog list for news on a regular basis.

Strategies for news search:
- Distribute over regular distribution networks (PRWeb & Businesswire)
- Leverage newsforce.com for to get headlines in top tier publications
- Have a newsroom blog or web site newsroom
- Being first to market, best opportunity for news search results

Consider developing a 12 month press release editorial calendar, including keywords relevant to a national event to increase visibility.

A marriage made in heaven – PR & SEO influences:
- News search results for optimal SEO
- Optimized web content
- Social media

Some things to know about Public Relations & Search:
- Currently under the radar when it comes to influencing SEO
- SEO agency should be working in synergy with your PR agency
- PR brings boardroom content to SEO
- PR professionals and agencies need to have expert working knowledge about SEO
- Online public relations strategies give business a strategic advantage over competition
- Integrate with PPC/SEM campaigns for best results

What’s cool about optimized press releases?
- SEO
- Credibility
- Perception
- Vanity
- Journalists find you and write about you
- People find you
- Online branding
- Lead generation?

Lee provided some best practices for optimizing news content to increase online visibility.

Most journalists have a beat and know the story, but they are searching online for sources and ways to populate that story. Increasingly, they are turning to social networks including Twitter and Facebook to find sources.

Most SEO efforts optimize for lead/sales generation, however news content is optimized for a different audience and outcome. Most journalists are looking for facts and trends, yet the outcome of both SEO and Online PR can be mutually beneficial.

News SEO Fundamentals:
- Focus on facts, research, and case studies
- Include keywords in news titles, navigation, content and hyperlinks
- Archive newsroom content and press releases by category (not just by date)
- Offer photos, video and demos
- Promote content and attract links
- Monitor social and web analytics

What news content should you be optimizing?
- Press releases
- Online newsrooms
- Corporate blogs
- Reports / white papers
- Email newsletters
- Webinars
- Podcasts, internet radio shows
- Interviews (coach interviewee on keywords)

Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) is a holistic approach to optimization, taking SEO to the next level. DAO is the practice of taking inventory of all available news content, optimizing it based on relevant keywords, and then promoting it to distinct online marketing channels.

Yes, optimization is important, however, Lee stressed the need to never stop acquiring inbound links.

Inbound links can come from:
- Pickups on blogs
- Syndication (RSS)
- Online newsroom
- Blog post
- Social bookmarks

Bottom line: Package news that will travel

Newsroom optimization best practices:
- Create an optimized template
- Include title tags
- Keyword rich categories
- Keyword rich anchor tags

Press release optimization best practices:
- Think upward and to the left
- Optimize for people first, search engines next
- Use keywords in title, subheading, and body of the release
- Don’t obsess over keyword density
- A 500 word release should include the keyword 2 to 4 times
- Use keywords when linking back to the company web site
- Add media: images, podcast, video, pdf/word doc

Press release SEO analytics to measure success:
- picks ups (traditional & bloggers)
- inbound links
- Google & Yahoo news inclusion
- Social bookmarks
- Keyword ranking for press release
- Keyword ranking for target web page
- Traffic to web site
- Conversions: media inquiries

Lee provided a few parting thoughts to optimize online campaigns, including:
- Journalists increasingly rely on search for news sources
- If it can be searched, it can be optimized
- Focus news SEO for the media more than sales

Greg shared a case study on press release optimization, in which the campaign was designed to address the challenge: How do you optimize for ‘not’ news when the initial campaign launch failed?

If your campaign is newsworthy, but was ignored by both the press and the bloggers, what’s next?

The answer: combine a push / pull strategy to get your message out there:
- Push: through blogger outreach
- Pull: with optimized press releases

A multi-phased launch approach can help you determine what works in the first phase and then amplify that approach in the second phase.

In a multi-phase campaign launch:
- Outline the content for each phase
- Leverage keywords appropriately for that content
- Include images to increase results

In conducting blog outreach, Greg stressed the importance of being transparent of who you are as well as the need to provide useful, ‘insider’ information for blog readers.

Extending the campaign to include blog outreach can increase online coverage and the number of credible inbound links to a web site.

Lessons Learned:
- Focus on creating useful information, and rich content using keywords
- The more useful content you have, the greater the chance it will get picked up
- Creating good content pays off and can increase editorial (authoritative) inbound links

How are you incorporating SEO into your newsroom, and online PR campaigns?

For more photos from SES San Jose, be sure to visit TopRank on Flickr.

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SES San Jose: News Search SEO