The SEMpdx Searchfest continues to be one of the best conferences on emerging search industry related topics, and we’re so lucky to have it right in our backyard! Many of the full time SEO professionals have already posted their notes. I’m posting mine here to share with my co-workers and clients as well. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

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Presentation slides can be found here and will make the notes more relevant.

Keynote

Temporal Link Analysis: Tracking when and how many incoming links were created to a given site. This analysis makes reciprocol linking very obvious to Google and site rankings will suffer as a result. (This was later proven in the Hot Seat Panel discussion.)

VIPS - Vision Based Page Segmentation. Search engines now look for patterns in web templates of where to find the actual content within a website compared to the header, footer, and navigation areas. Links and content within these areas are given the greatest attention.

Tracking Page Rank is less and less important due to predictive and personalized search results. Rand’s advice was to monitor traffic rather than Page Rank.

Rumor: Google can crawl the entire “fresh” web in 4 hours?!

The new sought after inbound links are those based around community and content. Referred to as Editorial Linking.

Site Architecture, Usability, and SEO Analysis

Internal linking:
- ‘you may also be interested in’ content related links
- use analytics to drive popular and related links
- avoid an easy duplicate content issue with your index pages by linking to just the directory containing the index page

Search box is most often looked for in the upper right hand portion of the header.

Keyword analysis: Consider # of page viewed, Time on Site, and Bounce Rate to create actionable intelligence from analytics. For instance if the bounce rate is very high but the time on site was 5 minutes, the user was actually engaged reading the page whereas just considering the bounce rate might suggest the page was a failure.

Google Internal Site Search - provides reporting on what terms are being searched within your site. Very helpful for determining what is either missing or hard to find on your site.

Links: Gooruze, eMarketingPerformance, TubeMogul, SMXWest, BusinessOL, Online Marketing Summit, Sphinn

Link Building

Ideas for link building in today’s search engine climate:

Page rank sculpting with NoFollow

Sharing promotional badges

Yahoo Site Explorer - Get competitor links

Yahoo Hub Finder - Very cool!

Easy link baiting example with a photo and caption on Digg

Yahoo Answers

Juicy Link Finder

LinkHounds

Google Alerts

‘Techtarded’ - Definition of a person not technologically inclined.

Links: WebConnoisseur, Pounce, Twitter, SEO for Firefox extension,

Marketing with Social Media

Mini and Micro Blogging = Ubersyndication. Make the machines do the work for you.
Twitter App for FaceBook

“Make visitors fans of your product.” They’ll post content and links because they’re fans.
“Web 2.0 is now.”

Set up Google Alerts on anything of PR concern and subscribe to the corresponding .RSS feed. (So easy and obvious!)

Links: Bringr, SearchMob, Tumblr, TwitterSearch, SocialPoster, Flock, KickApps, Jott

Hot Seat Tips

• Unique title tags per page
• Make sure copyright year is actually correct on all pages.
• Spam resistant contact forms should include a ‘how did you hear about us’ field.
• SEOMoz Crawl Test
• Replace %20 with hyphens as much as possible in URL’s
• Search results on enterprise sites should include results based on entry-to-site search string, navigation history, and related pages.
• Chat now icon’s should have an image of a person, and one that evokes and a positive emotional response.
• Webmaster Console

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