Posted on: March 26, 2010 by Syzlak
Here’s some notes I took a long time ago about SEO & PR. It was a monthly SEMpdx thing.
I realize this is very half-assed
PR needs to expand its reach because journalists are looking to social media for news.
- Don’t just rely on a basic press release – employ photos, videos, whitepapers, podcasts.
- Optimize – Get your partners to link to the release, involve sponsors & partners.
- Improve Performance – Turn the newsroom into a more dynamic press release site. Make it more like a news oriented blog. Talk about events, have a background, images, videos, links.
- Balance the Social Life – Twitter, Facebook, SMM are your friends. Monitor what’s written about you.
- Understand it is Forever – Join in on the negative content conversations. Maybe employ PPC to push the negative sites away.
- Good Relations Take Work – update old content with new links, photos, keywords. Go back and use social bookmarking.
Posted on: March 12, 2009 by Syzlak
Over the next few days, I’ll be recapping various sessions from SearchFest09. Today, Local & HyperLocal Marketing
Local & HyperLocal Search Marketing
Let’s start by setting the stage a little bit. While most of my work involves being a snarky asshole on a blog and working on Nationwide PPC, Display and SEO, there was once a time when I was strictly a local marketer. It was ages ago back in 2004, before the IYP was a major player, when the world of local was dominated moreso by the “super-aggregators” like BellSouth, Verizon and SuperPages. Back then, the world was different. You could outrank a competitor by paying more than they did, and Overture (yeah, I know) would actually tell you how much to bid to jump ahead of your rivals. Bruce Springsteen called them glory days, RuPaul called them glory hole days, I called them the days when you could walk into work hungover and still please your clients.
So, although I don’t do a lot of Local Search today, it’s still fascinating to me.
SearchFest 09 - Local...with a guy in the way
First up, Greg Hartnett of Best of the Web.
Surprisingly, his advice is to start your online campaign with the web directories. While I can’t disagree, it does kindof feel like Google saying the best place to start is AdWords. However, to qualify this he encourages us to work only with the good ones.
- Yahoo Directory
- Best of the Web
- Business.com
He also stresses the importance of finding and utilizing local niche directories. This is really one of the best pieces of advice during his entire presentation. One of the things that can really hold back a local campaign is the failure to be seen in the right places.
What’s another great piece of advice? Properly using phone numbers and addresses. This is something that we used back in ‘04 to differentiate the 500 Atlanta Plumbers for which we used to have to write titles and descriptions. One thing that Greg pointed out is to use 1 phone number and address per page, as search engines will be confused as to which phone number/address to associate with the listing. Priceless. This has a two-fold effect. First, you’ve made the engine’s job easier, which is crucial because we all know that the search engines are too stupid to process 4 phone numbers, secondly, you’ve a reason for 3 more pages of content, phone numbers, et cetera to work for you on the engines.
Last thought – Greg seems like he could be a tough guy.
Now, Mary Bowling from seOverflow.com
I have 2 pages of notes on Mary’s presentation, that being said, you’re not getting all of them here. Sorry, but you don’t want to be reading my site for 10 minutes either.
Of the things that I do wish to share, the first head smacker was when Mary introduced an age-old local marketing idea to the crowd – create a geo-targeted tagline. How insanely simple. It’s so simple that you probably know about 30 places around your town (maybe 4 places for my potato farming readers and those stuck out in the middle of Canada 
) that have geo-targeted taglines. Neighborhoods, cities, region, state, anything can be used; just take whatever you want, combined with your service (e.g. Boise’s Famous Pizzeria), and boom goes the dynamite.
The other, slightly less obvious, suggestion Mary had was to pusue citations in whatever form (not just links). Apparently, seeing a business name referenced throughout the web builds trust with Google and other engines. Obviously, it’s easier to pursue a reference or review or note than a link, and although it may not have the strongest end impact, trust is trust, and is best to be built than squandered.
Last thought – Mary needs a PowerPoint consultant
Next, my man, Matt McGee – Small Business SEM
First, Matt recaps what’s happening in the Blogging and SEO session “Blogging is good for search.” Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get on with the conference. Matt’s still got it.
The local blog, Matt and his wife run 4 of them. His wife being a real estate agent, obviously has great reasons for having a local blog. It conveys an inherent knowledge of their city, the schools, restaurants, stores, doings, et cetera. A level of expertise is communicated to the readers, while, most importantly, not plugging any real estate content along the way. This is a common mistake for the small, local blogger – the thought that their blog must actually serve a purpose to their business aside from content, traffic, readership, subscriptions, comments, links, advertising space, references…do I need to continue?
So many small business/local blogs fail on this very first step. I’m a plumber so I need to have a blog all about plumbing, or I’m a dentist so I could write about silly things that happen when I put patients under. Well, yes, I’d read about how you lost your licesnse to Dr., however, you could also just write about the new restaurants going in across the street and capitalize on the traffic that’s interested in those restaurants. The same people that are looking for those new restaurants probably have teeth, and they might live in your neighborhood. Put it together Hoss.
Again, I’ll hold back on Matt’s presentation as I want to save some info for myself; however, this was really the crux of his presentation.
Last thought – Only Matt could make Tri-Cities sound nice
Also, I have to get one plug in here for David Mihm & Patrick Sexton’s GetListed.org. It’s a great little tool for any company with a local office to leverage their local presence.
That’s all for now, Technical SEO will be up soon.
Posted on: January 15, 2009 by Syzlak
Bam! Welcome to 2009 reader! Your man Syzlak attended the SEMpdx PPC Hot Seat on Tuesday the 13th and blew it up.
On my first panel for SEMpdx, I was tasked with critiquing the PPC campaigns/offering PPC guidance. It was an interesting experience, unlike many of the other Hot Seat nights (that should totally be a viral infomercial for SEMpdx “Hot Seat Nites,” make it all 11pm 80s style, a little sex, a lot of dumb humor, like Viva Variety. Now, THAT was a good show. Remember Johnny Blue Jeans and all the stupid products? Baby is the Bagpipes? Baby Tastes Like Soup? Fishy Bar – the candy bar that tastes like fish??? Loved that show. Especially the episode where they played the game Plant or Animal. Contestants were given a 2 second sound bite and had to guess if the sound came from Robert Plant or a wild animal. It was unbelievably difficult, and made for a great game show.
Man, there really was nothing like the early days of Comedy Central. Shows like Exit 57, Stand-up Stand-up, Short Attention Span Theater, MST3K , Dr. Katz – all great. Then South Park came and ruined it. Now all we have (aside from Daily Show & Colbert) are MADtv reruns and Dane Cook specials. Seriously, when are people going to realize that not only is Dane Cook a theif, but he’s also about as funny as Andy Dick), this time the audience didn’t seem to be as familiar with the topic at hand. I think it’s fair to say that SEMpdx audience members are a bit more in tune with the ideas of usability and SEO, than they are with PPC; and for that, I am thankful that SEMpdx put on a PPC specific event.
Hopefully, the audience members got as much out of the sessions as the businesses on display did. I know that after the session the businesses were quite appreciative of all the help from Mr. Tom Hale, Mr. Todd Mintz and Ms. Leisa Hall and myself. I just hope that those in the audience didn’t feel like all the information was going over their heads.
All in all, a fantastic time and a great idea. I really hope SEMpdx makes a PPC Hot Seat a part of the regular rotation. If not, put a PPC specialist on the panel once in awhile to add some diversity, it’s about time we knocked some of those SEO big whigs down a notch
Oh, I almost forgot – I won a T-shirt!!! See what you can do if you set your mind to it?
Posted on: November 12, 2008 by Syzlak
Last night was all about Google Analytics. Which was well timed, as Google Analytics has started juicing and created a well rounded, robust, analytics package.
This SEMpdx Hot Seat’s (btw – did you guys realize that SEMpdx is really annoying to pluralize or add possessiveness to? SEMpdxes? SEMpdx’s? Just really annoying.) featured guests were Eric Peterson and Ian Lurie. Enough with this semi-formal writing…
6:10pm – Mirror Pond
Eric Peterson is giving a high level introduction to the wonders of GA 3.0. Highlights include:
- Custom Reporting
- Advanced Segmentation
- API Access (will allow integration of analytics into proprietary reporting and data collection ZOMG this is so awesome!!!! OMG OMG ESPN BBQ IMHO – this will cut down reporting time by … some large percentage!!!!)
Eric’s slick, but he didn’t speak long. I think he’s going to be more interesting when we get to the Hot Seat.
6:20pm – Same Mirror Pond
Lurie time. Ian’s got a presentation on segmentation. Ian does a great job of introducing the topic and showing a real world example. He used the latest fad of charging a fee on airline luggage. I’m going to use a different, more Web relevant example. Audience Segmentation is essentially treating visitors as tags. On a blog, or bookmarking site, we use tags to identify where a post, link, etc. belongs. We are able to divide and group at the same time. Take my delicious bookmarks. I have a bunch of music venues as I am a musician. So how do I organize them? For me, the most important facts about the sites were as follows:
- What is it? (A Venue)
- What type? (A Bar)
- Location? (Portland)
- Sounds they like? (Alternative)
- Have we played there before? (No
)
Now that I have assigned one site all of these attributes (and more), I can easily index them by just looking up the city, or the sound, etc. Plus, I can find a coffee house in Corvallis that likes acoustic songwriters very quickly. Well, audience segmentation does a similar thing. Simply setup your own parameters for your web analytics:
- Visitors
- From Google
- On the week of the 14th
- That viewed 4 pages
Bam.
Lurie made a good point about the value of segmentation too. Often times, people see PPC as an easy way to trim budgets. They also see that SEO is working well for them, and accounting for most of their sales. So, right off, they start calling for PPC’s head. This is not always the case (thank you), sometimes site trends will be tied to PPC whereas SEO acts in a different manner and vice versa. Sometimes, SEO traffic will be converting for your top 5 keywords at a rate that is astronomically better than PPC. However, PPC is converting for your bottom 550 keywords at astronomical rates. Unfortunately, too many people focus on the former rather than the latter.
6:30pm – time for the bathroom. At the door, I hear the all too familiar battle cry of the wounded alcoholic – “ack..hag…whack.” That man is puking. In the Hotel deLuxe lobby. On a Tuesday. At 6:31pm. I love this country.
6:34pm – Mirror Pond
When I returned, Eric Peterson had said one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard someone who is not me say about the state of the market and advertising at this moment.
Don’t turn off any marketing if you don’t know what it is
Lurie followed up by saying that it’s ok to run tests on things that you’re thinking about shutting down…but don’t shut it down.
Fun Facts:
- Unique Visitors are inconsistently inaccurate. Just use Visits.
- 7% of users delete cookies every day (really?)
- Bounce Rates, historically are the #visits to a single page/the #visits to said page
- With the new GA, you can define your own Bounce Rates
Then there were Hot Seats…they were good, and there was a lot of Analytics integration into the discussion, which was refreshing. I like when the Hot Seat is slightly different and not just 4 SEOs saying “uhhh…robots.txt…well, I guess John already covered that…oh! You should make a sitemap.xml file.” Last night was a good format, 2 SEOs, 2 Analytics. That being said, where was the PPC love?
Posted on: May 21, 2008 by Syzlak
The long anticipated Hot Seat with Matt McGee was held last night at Hotel deLuxe. Although SEOHack had asked me to live blog the event, I will stick to my tradition of tape-delayed live blogs:
5:50pm – We’re allowed into the banquet room. One of the nice things about SEMpdx Hot Seat events is that they’re catered. Which means that for $40 you get to learn some SEO tips, sometimes hear a speaker and get some catered food, a damn fine deal.
Tonight it meant fish…raw fish to be exact. Fish really are the bane of my existence. I find them to be quite despicable in odor and taste. In addition, I am a vegetarian and do not eat the meat of the sea. Those that know me will say that they have seen me eat the delectables of a pig or a chicken, to them I say “you certainly have, but just as there are ‘vegetarians’ that eat fish, I am a vegetarian that eats the meat of the land.” So, the night’s off to a great start, let’s see if we can improve this eve.
6:07pm – Ben of Amplify Interactive is hosting the evening and conducts a raffle…and one of Ben’s employees wins the SMX Advanced pass. I’m not going to pass judgment, I’m just saying is all.
6:09pm – M2 starts to speak. The most entertaining part of the first 10 minutes is watching the Hotel deLuxe employee running back and forth as M2 kept creating feedback.
6:15pm – Will the Bulls take Beasley or Rose with the first pick? Rose may be a “smarter” pick, but I’m leaning towards Beasley. They could trade Thomas (and maybe Gooden) for some more help and walk away a much better team. Rose would only replace Henrich, which isn’t as big of a weakness…Matt’s talking commitment, saying that the whole organization has to be committed to the SEO project. That’s a good point, and one that I don’t think a lot of big businesses or Agencies really comprehend. He also said something to the effect of Mom & Pop shops being committed to wood…pens
6:25 – M2’s recommending knowledge centers. Sphinn? Really? I’m not sure I’d recommend Sphinn to newbies…too much repetition and petty cliques for newbies to sort through. That, and I don’t think too many small businesses need to know THAT much about Twitter.
Patience! Yes Yes Yes! So far my favorite part of the (ahem) triangle. SEO (even PPC, SMO, …SEM) is always demanded from clients as a simple request. It’s not simple. It takes time. Time to plan, time to prep, time to implement and time to change.
Design and Usability. Shit, Matt’s on a roll here! Favorite quote of the night
It’s not your website it’s your customer’s website
Brilliant.
The “Y” looks odd on the Keyword Research slide.
6:40pm – Matt talks nuts.
6:50pm – Sobriety is odd. Especially since most events that I’m tied to involve drinking. I know that people have been thinking I’m joking when I say that I’m sober now, but I am…at least for the time being. I don’t know how long it will last, nor do I know why I did it. Life hasn’t been going down the shitter like it was in college when I had to quit drinking for awhile. I just woke up a few weeks ago and didn’t drink that day or the next. That being said, David Mihm’s beer looks really good right now.
Man, M2 already knows the type of car he’s going to buy next…I suppose I know the type of guitar I’ll buy next.
6:55pm – Mihm and I both scramble to write down placeblogger.com
7:10pm – Steve from the Internet Strategy something or other starts name dropping in order to build some buzz about some event I won’t be attending
Hot Seat time
The first site tonight is Clowns Unlimited (clownsunlimited.com).
Seriously. The rep is worried that (sigh) Clowns Unlimited has become…limited. The next 15 minutes of my life will be the “stuff you just can’t make up.” I’ll now abandon “writing” in favor of a list format
- Wants corporate leads
- They have fluctuating rental fees based on seasonality…makes sense
- The rep became militant when the panel tried to help him…this struck me as rather odd, I would not want these guys as my client. Then again, I’m scared shitless of two things in life: 1) eye drops B) clowns
- Apparently his poor blog posts are not his fault (it never is, is it?). He had an ESL Filipino write those (natch)
- There’s a different price scale for birthdays compared to corporate functions. This bothers me. Why stick one or the other with a higher price for the same rented Rocket Turbo Slide?
Useful Takeaways – Don’t try to sell in your blog, keep it clean and conversational. Work on having paths of action that would make sense to the user. Listen
Up next J&M Homes (jandmhomes.com)
- The loud man that talked through some of Matt’s presentation was apparently here for a site review…fantastic. Let’s just have a short intro and then let the panel review your site.
- Sprague’s an odd name. Especially when you consider that there’s a city in Washington and a High School in Salem that share said name.
- This guy’s dragging me down, every time the panel gets on a roll, he stops them with inane comments. We know you need help with your site, we know you’re redesigning it – let them talk. Lord, I’m starting to want a drink…
- Oh fantastic, now the clown guy is helping out. The Hot Seat is falling apart!!!
- Then again, maybe that’s what the Hot Seat should be once in awhile: a round table. Get 2 sites, 1 moderator/expert and let the audience lead the discussion.
Useful Takeaways – Optimize your home site for cities not states (ie Portland not Oregon) because people don’t just want to live somewhere in the state. Have pages for the homes you offer in each city.
Poster Garden (postergarden.com)
- These guys seem to have a game plan.
- They need a cleaner/simpler site. Like some of the panelists, I was very confused/disoriented by their site upon arrival. CD replication sites might be a good place for layout ideas for the future site, as they’re a similar user based experience. Some of my faves:
All in all, a fun and informative night.
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