Posted by rebecca
Sorry for my noted absence lately. Last weekend I went up to Vancouver, BC, for fun times to be had, gained roughly 20 lbs from gorging at two seriously awesome restaurants, drove back down to Seattle, and promptly got picked up by Rand so we could drive further down to Portland for SEMpdx’s Searchfest 2008. On the way down I had the following experience with Rand’s smart phone:
Me: "We need to look up the hotel’s address."
Rand: "You can speak your inquiry directly into my phone and it’ll search for the address for you."
Me: "Whahh?! That’s amazing!" pulls up Live Seach.
Phone: "Type or speak location."
Me: "Hotel DeLuxe in Portland, Oregon."
Phone: "Did you say ‘Hotel DeLuxe’?"
Me: "Why, yes I did!"
Phone: "Did you say, ‘Portland, Oregon’?"
Me: "Yes, I did! Wow Rand, this is really cool!"
Phone: "Now searching for ‘Hotel DeLuxe in Portland, Oregon’ in and around Quebec, Canada."
Me: "Wait, what?"
Sigh. We were smart enough to keep heading into Portland vs. traversing through Canada. I had dinner with the Pole Position Marketing Crew, David Mihm (who’s been busy lately with his college basketball bracket website), and Matt McGee and his Marchex crew, while Rand dined with Vanessa Fox and Nate Buggia. After dinner, I pretty much collapsed in my room due to exhaustion from traveling all day (and stinkin’ like I-5, bleh).
The next day was full-fledged Searchfest. This year, the event was held at the Portland Zoo. Rand gave the keynote, which I thought went quite well. I’ve been to a lot of morning keynotes that are snoozetastic, but Rand displayed a lot of energy and excitement about his presentation, and his demeanor spread to the audience, who remained perky and chuckled every so often at various slides.
After Rand’s keynote I sat in on the Site Architecture, Usability, and SEO Analytics session. Stoney deGeyter talked about website architecture. Some of his tips included:
- Use keywords in link text (keyword-relevant links)
- Cross-link related products
- Links should accurately reflect the information on the destination page
- Duplicate content prevents effective spidering, as search engines can leave before spidering all important pages. Look out for secure/non secure pages creating dupe content, www vs. non-www versions, home page issues (site.com vs site.com/index or site.com/home), and tracking ids serving up the same content.
- Make sure each page has a unique title tag
- Not every page needs a description (head terms require a valuable description; long tail = not so much)
Next, Aaron Kahlow from BusinessOnLine talked about website usability. To summarize:
- How does your website’s usability affect your site/brand/sales?
- Common myths of usability include "I know my customer better than anyone," "Surveys = usability studies, so they should suffice, "and "Success is greater than satisfaction"
He urged us to think about how customers view your site:
- They’re on a single track mission
- They find what they want, THEN peruse or browse
- They have no patience; users are like when you have to pee on a long car ride–they display a gripping sense of urgency
- They scan, not read
Lastly, Ian Lurie from Portent Interactive talked about analytics:
- Analytics does not simply equal “reports”
- Not having analytics = driving with your eyes closed
- Search analytics = 5 step checkup: phrases, page views, time on site, bounce rate, and conversion
- The time on site combined with the number of page views is the most useful data
- Conversions are slightly overrated. CEO can obsess about conversion numbers, even though conversions can happen months after someone visits a site.
- Onsite search = a missed opportunity. Try to track what your users are searching for and see if you can better offer it to them.
All three speakers did a great job and gave very engaging presentations. I was pleased with the information they provided.
Next up was the session I spoke on, Links: Development, Baiting, and Buying. Adam Audette provided a nice basic introduction to link building, then Dustin Woodward from Wetpaint dove in a little deeper and shared some good strategies for both internal and external linking. I spoke about link bait, which is currently one of my favorite topics to discuss because I think link bait is a fun subject and allows you to be really creative with various strategies. The Q&A was entertaining, and I’m happy to say that my presentation was a vast improvement over my first ever presentation from last year’s Searchfest. 
After lunch, I sat in on the Marketing with Social Media session. Paul Colligan told us to focus on "S3" internet marketing, which is strategy, search, and social media.
For social media, he recommended having the following:
- social media tools
- a subscription mindset
- a strategic delivery
He said that social media = an ubersyndication of:
- spider food
- multimedia
- memes
- attention
A search for "ubersyndication" had zero results at 4:28 pm on 3/5/08. He mentioned the word on Pownce, and one hour later it had five results. As of Monday it had over 80 results, and all of this was solely due to microblogging and social media mentions. Paul also mentioned that he gets a higher CTR on his Twitter tweets than his email marketing campaigns.
Lastly, Paul shared some of his favorite social media tools:
- Twitter application in Facebook
- twittersearch.com
- socialposter.com
Dan Harbison from the Portland Trailblazers talked about Internet marketing strategies for the Portland Trailblazers. He said that web 2.0 is all about conversation, and how you expand the voice from a few to that of many and put technology behind them. He created "I am a Trailblazerfan.com," a private social network, and promoted the site to Trailblazer fans. The result was that fans became much more engaged with the brand, and now the social network has the potential to be as big as the team’s official website.
Lastly, Sandra Ponce de Leon from BuzzLogic discussed advertising in blogs. She said that 57 million Americans read blogs, and 60% of those readers access blogs to explicitly get an opinion. BuzzLogic analyzes trusted link behavior to determine the following:
- who is influential on any topic
- which audiences are paying attention
- reach of each conversation
Why focus ads on the “conversation”?
- to reach pockets of engaged audiences
- linking activity can tell you about your customers
- a conversational nature/tone can inform ad creative
Key tips for advertising in blogs:
- understand the psychology of your user
- think about metrics/how engaged your users are
- look at the site’s copy; read up on the blog and see how these topics are near and dear to users’ hearts
- be smart and creative about how you can divert people’s attention
Afterwards, I attended Business Strategy & SEO and Small Biz SEM. I didn’t take notes, but I have to say that it’s always a pleasure to see Matt McGee speak publicly. He doesn’t change his demeanor one bit, whether he’s talking to an audience of one or one hundred. Matt speaks so effortlessly and is very comfortable and friendly with the audience. Good on ya, Matt!
The last session of the day consisted of Rand, Stoney, and Marty Weintraub from aimClear conducting site reviews on a few websites. It was entertaining and the speakers all provided sound advice and constructive criticism. The site review clinic was followed by a Searchfest mixer, where I met some lovely folks from Global Strategies. I also had a chance to chat with Syzlak a bit, which excited me because I dorkily love both his and SEO Hack’s ranty SEO blogs.
After the mixer Rand and I had dinner with the Searchfest organizers and a few SEOs. Marty gave me a lovely Introduction to Wine, thus dooming me to spend buttloads of money on various wines from here ’til eternity. Thanks a bunch, Marty. 
All in all, I have to commend SEMpdx for putting together an even better show than last year. The conference was quite nice and had a lot of knowledgeable and professional speakers, and I’m certain that attendees found Searchfest to be valuable. Thanks to the organizers for also treating me and Rand to dinner–we had a great time! In closing, I’m looking forward to attending Searchfest every year and watching it grow to become a great and valuable conference (and so I get an excuse to road trip with the Boss Man and pepper him with annoying questions for three straight hours).
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