Live Up to Title - Involving the Audience

Search Engine Watch Forums Live! was promoted on the Jupiter Media JupiterEvents.com site like this: "This informal, half-day event offers attendees the opportunity to meet several moderators of the SearchEngineWatch Discussion Forums in person... Editor's Note: &nbpsp;The following is Mike Banks Valentine's coverage of the Search Engine Watch Forums Live! event that took place on Thursday, October 27th:

...network with local peers discuss the hottest topics and latest news in the search industry." Before attending, I wondered whether the audience would be made up more of local SEO consultant or in-house corporate - it turned out that it was pretty evenly split among the represented (approximately) 150 to 200 attendees based on a show of hands. Search Engine Watch Forums Editor, Elisabeth Osmeloski asked for that show of hands as she opened the event. That proved to be a common theme among each of the moderators as they made presentations, to check in with the audience by asking for a show of hands to measure representation for their opinion or status. Osmeloski turned it over to Nacho Hernandez and he immediately checked in with the audience asking them "How many of you are marketing in just one language?" That intro lead to the segue, "one segment is not enough." Hernandez will lead the first Search Engine Strategies Latino conference in Miami next July. Hernandez' presentation was titled "Where can you apply Multilingual tactics? Opportunities for SEM/SEO" and of course he strongly recommends marketing to multiple international markets, his specialty is in Hispanic markets. He showed powerpoint slides representing worldwide language, ethnic market segmentation, and reach, penetration and growth stats for each. He moved on to show comparative pay-per-click rates showing bids for popular and competitive English language search terms that were ten-times the cost of Spanish language bids. Hernandez is a proponent of local search markets as well as international and suggests optimizing for each of those markets in organic SEO as well as the PPC campaigns. He wrapped up and passed the podium to Joseph Morin, moderator of the Google Search Rankings forum and enterprise SEO specialist who emphasized the dramatic importance and value of careful web analytics study. Morin opened by asking the audience how many have attended other Search marketing events, most had, and a majority of those had been to Search Engine Strategies conferences. He asked who were members of the forums, and while few raised hands to that, he continued with, "What is your reason for optimization and SEM?" Typical reasons were listed, ROI, increased sales, increased traffic. He continued with more questions asking how many audience members represented enterprise vs. medium vs. small sites. The majority seemed to be working on medium to large enterprise site SEO and SEM. Morin used examples of major enterprise search clients to illustrate how best to interpret and analyze log files to determine additional income streams for web sites based on visitor behavior in both organic and PPC situations. He listed vendors of analytics software and gave examples of how he had done research to increase value and ROI of client site traffic. He several times indicated the use of analytics to determine where to find additional income streams for client sites based on highly saleable leads generation for external partners. Alex Bennet of Beyond Ink was next to present "Getting the second click". Analytics were again recommended to increase usability and conversion. Single access page views entry page views were emphasized as powerful clues to improvement of any site based on search terms used to find a site as well as PPC ad clickthroughs that brought other visitors. She recommended backtracking organic search phrases used to find pages by doing a little forensic detective work on those pages getting single access with immediate departures. Bennet recommended doing those same searches as visitors did to land there, looking at the text snippet displayed by the search engines on the search results pages and trying to understand what made them click on your result before landing on and quickly leaving your page. The suggestion was that they may have arrived expecting something you can actually deliver to convert them to sales by offering appropriate services or products to match the phrases used to find your pages. She emphasized the critical importance of site navigation, site search, and custom 404 pages with links to sitemap and major sections of a web property. Final presentation was made by Jennifer Slegg of SERoundtable.com Q. What to do about 301 redirects that seemed to have gotten the site dropped entirely from the Google index? A. Contact Google. Try Google sitemaps or http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at http://RealitySEO.com where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.