Quick Advanced Search Marketing Comments (SMX)
I woke up at 6:00 AM this morning to exercise and got seriously distracted by my email. The main culprit was that Danny Sullivan’s first ever Search Marketing Expo had finished day one the night before.
The various bloggers that attended have written about each of the sessions. I wanted to attend, but the conference was in Seattle and I don’t think my wife would have appreciated me being gone the week we are closing on our new house and moving to Davidson (this Friday).
I know you are not as geeky as me. (Most of you, that is.) So instead of spending an hour and a half reading all the bloggers comments, here are some highlights…
Danny Sullivan takes his clothes off. (Not all of them, of course). That’s how he started the Q&A session with Matt Cutts. See the first couple sentences here.
Matt Cutts (the face of Google) mentions that if an SEO has a lot of sites (like 200 or more) that Google thinks are spammy, “that may not be the best”.
The duplicate content session was not that revealing or interesting.
Some clarification was given on how to handle PPC for trademarked terms at this session. Each search engine has different rules on this.
Rand Fishkin gave a great “top social media websites” list and “top viral marketing media websites” list.
There was a fair amount of discussion about Quality Score.
What is Quality Score?
If you have ever made a Google AdWords campaign and suddenly it asked you to pay $5.00 per click instead of $0.25, you’ve been hit with the quality score. It’s Google’s way of saying: “Hey! Your site isn’t really that great, so you need to pay more!” Yahoo and MSN are doing something similar but not as drastic. Many marketers are complaining that Google is not being clear on what they feel “quality” landing pages.
Personalized search is really only being done by Google. Marketers tend to complain that search results are different for different people. Users tend to think it’s a great thing. Matt Cutts basically says: Don’t be a baby! Adapt! Learn how to make it work for you. Of course, Gord Hotchkiss has some comments that are more balanced. (That guy is great!)
Microsoft’s VP of Search and Advertising Platform Group had a nice keynote. It’s nice to see that he admited that Microsoft only has a 10% share of search results. His basic underlying theme was “we’re trying”.
Hope you liked my “wrapup of the wrapups”. Of course, there’s a little “Corey opinion” in there as well. It’s 8:30 AM now and I have to get to work.
I’ve spent two hours reading this stuff and it’s time to work for clients now. (Oh, and I did manage to get a 15 minute workout and a shower in somehow.)
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