I’m tempted to call Sitelab, SiteLab International; it’s such an unusual name for an SEO company.  Sitelab started as a Web Development company about 9  years ago, and one of the founders, Dana Todd, is the person I’m interviewing.    SiteLab was the term for "website lab".   We spoke for about 40 minutes.   Dana’s brightly colored Red Hair stands out - I think it’s a statement, wanting to stand apart - to be visible.

I get intuitive feelings as I’m speaking.  The feeling I got from Dana is someone who had alot of experience in internet marketing, all aspects of it.  There is a certain "hardness" that comes with being very experienced, very busy and much in demand -  She also struck me as a thinker, someone who’d like there to be ever more meaningful converstations at future Search Engine Strategies; she’d want Noam Chomsky to keynote next time if he’d come.  I told her we should also invite Desmond Morris, in that case.

Language and the use of it, the use of language in behavior, the thinking part….making Search something greater than another method to drive traffic.  It’s not about Search, or Searching….."we are search" and we are the searchers defining ourselves via search. 

Search is all about Language, according to Dana.

I conducted the interview in such a way as to jump back and forth from talking about SiteLab to talking about her and her ideas.  Sitelab has an office in New York and Dana just moved to New York, from California, a couple of weeks ago.  Welcome.

Sitelab was interested in Metrics before the rest of the SEO field.  I asked what she had in mind when she talked about Metrics as that’s an interest of mine also.   Dana was one of the speakers in the packed Targeting Search Ads by Demographics & Behavior session yesterday. 

The Demographics targeting using MSN is interesting to her, and it sounded as if SiteLab is where everyone else is with MSN AdCenter- interested but also a little puzzled by aspects of the current MSN offerings.   In fact, many of the people manning the MSN booth at SES today did not know anything about the Geo-Demographic clustering based on the Mosaic system - it was never explained to them.  If MSN’s own workers don’t understand it - I’m not surprised that most people using MSN Beta don’t understand it either.

We talked about the promise of Geo-Demographic targeting, and the reality of what it is today.  I told her that I had a client whose most popular house plan style was "craftsman house plan" and I wanted to market that using GeoTargeted PPC in parts of California, where MSN AdCenter showed most of the market was for that style. 

Here the practical side of Dana shines, she knows all about the house plans, the styles, and the locals of different places where one with advertise.  She has knowledge that is also tested by personal experience (illuminated by personal experience might be a better way of putting it).

In this case Dana told me to just target all of California - don’t bother Geo-Targeting anything because it would be harder to target.  Sometimes, targeting is not worth the effort, and Dana knows when it is and when it’s not.     In other words she’s a thinker who also knows the practical side of  the business.

Getting back to SiteLab, I asked Dana what’s next for her company.  Since she just moved here it’s still a little new being in NY, but SiteLab has many clients here, including some very well known ones.   On my way home tonight I passed one of her clients, Lecoste.

At lunch today I sat at a table of Bloggers, most of them fairly well known.   In fact, Chris Pirillo was sitting across the table from me and I’m looking at one of his blogs right now.   Chris is in day 6 of his GoogleFasting.    I think he’s trying to avoid Google for a week to get over what he termed "his addiction" to the search engine.

I suggested that maybe he just needs to give up his addiction to all search engines…."Just don’t use them".   He was not quite ready to go that far….Yet.

I told Chris that I wish he’d change the background of his personal blog from the wood coloring to something a little easier to look at.   

It sounded to me like Chris Pirillo is a very, very successful Blogger with a ton load of traffic every day.  It appeared that alot of the bloggers I sat with knew each other for quite some time and many had worked together before.

Another Blogger I sat next to was B.L. Ochman of Whatsnextblog.com

From B.L. Ochman I got the first real explanaition of what I needed to do for Juan Enriquez in terms of Blog Buzz for his book the United States of America.  I wish I had spoken to her two months ago.

It’s not that my ideas about Blog Buzz were wrong - they were right on.  Still the real way to generate Blog Buzz for an author was this:

1. Juan Enriquez, in this case, should have his own blog where he releases information about this book and material not in the book.

- invite bloggers to post to it (perhaps in some cases, contribute to it) and get the Buzz started.   Keep releasing information on his blog and build up many backlinks.

2. The Podcast thing would have helped too… as he speaks well.

In other words, Blog Buzz comes from generating BUZZ from your Blog….no Blog, no BUZZ.    I’m sure I probably missed a step or two and if I did, B.L. Ochman, please fill in the blanks.

She was also doing a lot of corporate consulting work and her blog also has a large following.

So that was my lunch.   Oh yes…one more thing.  

There was a famous Spammer that came by and was talking….was not paying much attension to the conversation on that side of the table.  Turns out the famous Spammer is loved by Google because he generates so much money for the big G.   In fact, the Spammer scrapes content from all over the web and then creates fake blog sites and runs AdSence on them.  People then go to these sites and try to escape them, often clicking on one of the AdSence Ads. As a result, the Spammer makes several thousand dollars a day in earnings - mostly off of the poor advertisers.    Poor Advertisers - your AdWords high CPC ads are going to support Spammers that are delivering worthless traffic to you (by the time such traffic reaches your sites….the visitors probably hate where they landed).   

Yes,….interesting lunch.

Stitting down at lunch today I ended up in a convestation with Jake Ludington, a very successful blogger.  Because the information was So….ooo….oo good, I decided I had to share it with you.

Jake Ludington is a successful blogger that makes over six figures on his MediaBlab blog.  His blog income is derived from the following sources:

40% AdSence, 30% Affilate revenue and the rest from the sales of his two ebooks on Podcasting and creating a child safe home office (he sells them for $17 and $20 each) of which he sells several hundred a week, and Paid Search Ads

Jake does full text RSS Feeds and his blog is focused on technology enthuisists; in fact, he was very proud of the fact he traveled with a bag that about the size of  video camara case with his compact laptop/tablet, and audio recorder and camara.  I asked him if the bag also contained his clothes….. I don’t have to answer that one.

Jake sends out a newsletter that I just signed up for; maybe I’ll buy one his ebooks also as Podcasting is an interest of mine too (I don’t need to make my home office child safe anymore since my son is 13 years old).  I also subscribed to his RSS feed and many of the Blog Authors I spoke with over lunch were of the strong opinion that all RSS Feeds should be Full Text only.

Jake had some really interesting ideas on how to generate traffic and he told an interesting story.  Over the Christmas - New Years Holiday he was visiting his family in Iowa, where he grew up.  XBox 360 just came out and Jake wanted one badly.  He heard that WalMart would carry just 8 XBox 360’s per store and assumed they’d all be sold out for sure.   But he wrote in his Blog that he was going to try to find a couple of XBox 360’s anyway and drove all over parts of Iowa to each Walmart to see if he could find any.

It turns out he found 3 Xbox 360’s in one Walmat and 4 in another; but they were the base unit without any additional memory.  It turns out that people in Iowa wanted the unit all souped up and so they passed on the base model.  

Jake could have kept the 2 XBox 360’s but decided to give them away instead, and generated ALOT more traffic (and profit) by doing so.

"I ran a contest for the affiliate or site that sent me the  most qualified traffic".

He was careful the traffic was the type he wanted, and based on links to his site that were from good neighboorhoods (SEO term).   As a result he got a tremdous lift in traffic right after New Years.

Jake Ludington was very easy to speak with and very open and enthusiatic about the technology he writes about and promotes on his blog.  I’d give it a visit and susbscribe - and buying one of his ebooks.

Operating out of the Search Engine Strategies Press Room has some advantages that I’m not usually accustomed to.  Usually I’m the one trying to get information by questioning someone else.    This morning Alan Rimm-Kaufman shot into the Press Room looking for reporters to talk to.  Alan spoke at the Searcher Behavior Research Update session that I did not attend yesterday.

Rimm-Kaufman told me that over 30% of shopping feeds are semantically incorrect and they are being rejected by Search Engines; he said it’s a huge problem because vendors are losing out on revenues and Search Engines are stuck with many shopping feed files they can’t categorize (in some cases, there are also file format errors).

"There needs to be a specification that all shopping search engines follow", Alan said.   He mentioned that each shopping engine had it’s own format and requirements - he’s working with an organization to propose an overall standard way to composing shopping feeds so the Search Engines can process any feed.

There’s also no way to define the performance of shopping feeds and there are no standards for this either.

I don’t really know Alan’s work so I did some research.  His Presentation yesterday "Clickstreams, Complexity, and Contribution:  Modeling Searcher Behavior Using Markov Models" looks pretty impressive.  I think he was modeling the profitability of certain clickstream behaviors and ended his presentation with the following statement:

"Choosing to spend large sums on branding through generic keyword buys is a valid strategy.  Realize, however, that such ad buys are about branding, not conversion".

Also that Google uses Markov models for Pagerank, detection of Paid Links and spam sites (bad neighborhoods).

Alan’s main point in his presentation was that generic phrases, while they play a essential role in search behavior are much less important, according the Markov Model.

When clickstream is categorized this is what we have:

A general phase starts the search query and it ends with a Brand Phase (BP); along the way there is some mis-categorization (No Data or ND) - which ties back to the issue Alan wanted to pitch in the first place, that Search Engines can mis-categorize data (ie: mauii) -  The “funnel benefit” of generic keywords is, for many advertisers quite small.

If you want to know more about Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s ideas or the organization he’s in the process of founding for the standardization of Shopping Feeds, contact him at alan@rimmkaufman.com or go to his website www.rimmkaufman.com.  Some more information on Shopping Feeds can be obtained from the following source 

I am here at SES with Marshall and I am pinch hitting for Marshall for this session.  Maybe it is just that I am a Scoble and Cutts groupie…

Panel Moderator:  Danny Sullivan - Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com

Robert Scoble – Technical Evangelist, Scobleizer

David Vise – Author, The Google Story

Zia Daniell Wigder, VP and Research Director, JupiterResearch

Jeremy Zawodny, Technical Yahoo!

Matt Cutts – Google Software Engineer

Note - Questions were taken from the audience for the panelists.

Q. What will be the impact on search when MS releases Vista with search integrated?

Robert – it is already added in – it will make search better.

David – Many people confuse me with Bill Gates.

I will answer as Bill Gates – “We are going to do everything in our power to destroy Google.  That means everything – consistent with our ongoing battle with DOJ, European Union.  We truly are out to destroy Google.  Immediately following this session, we will be destroying Matt Cutts in the lobby.  We are selling tickets.”

Matt: I noticed in one rev of IE7 – there was a drop down box that did not include a place to add Google.  It must have been just an oversight, right?

Danny – Search has been built in to IE for years, but Yahoo and Google has still succeeded.  People had to explicit go out and go over the defaults and use another search partner.  At the moment, what every your default is in IE, that will carry through in IE7.

Q. What are your future prediction on vertical search engines and the impact on the major search engines in the next few years?

Robert – Technorati rules

(from the audience) – Thanks Robert!

David – I think about it is like Cable TV and Network TV – There will be tremendous growth in both.

Jeremy – I think of vertical search like specialized tools – I use them occasionally.  I don’t think vertical search engines will take away share away from the big SE.

Danielle – We have seen the numbers of people increasing in vertical search engines

Matt – It is much easier to start a new company these days.  I think it is fantastic that there are lots of companies out there trying to find a niche.  I do think it is easier for the big guys to spin out a vertical search engine.

Robert – I started out with Technorati and they come out on top in my tests. A small company can take on the big boys and be quite profitable.

read more »

I suppose Ads Beyond Search could also be termed "multi channel marketing",  Too bad i was exhausted from the rest of the conference and the information, while good, seemed more descriptive of what others have done in marketing campaigns that had Search as part of the campaign, but it was not something that actionable or interesting to me.

In other words, most marketing campaigns now have an element of Search involved, there could be a viral marketing element too, and I listened to the first two speakers, decided the information was good, but I heard enough and decided to skip the rest of the session.

Here’s the marketing information for this session.

Search Engine Strategies is firmly focused on search. That’s what our attendees love! But we know that search marketers are also interested in ads beyond search. Search Engine Watch’s sister site ClickZ is the source for all aspects of interactive marketing. In this session, ClickZ editors and columnists fill you in on new and interesting developments in the space, with plenty of time for questions and discussion.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Executive Editor, the ClickZ Network
Speakers:
Mark Stephens, VP, General Manager, Avenue A/Razorfish
Jinenne Sutherland, Group Media Direct, Organic, Inc.
Hollis Thomases, President, Web Ad.vantage
Tessa Wegert, Digital Media Strategist, Enlighten

I suppose that I should have been more interested because there’s a lot of good stuff here.  For example, Click to Call ads that I talked about recently in this blog were talked about here too, except in this case, it’s directed to local search merchants that don’t really need a website anymore, all they need to do is run an ad.

Also, the strategy of using RSS Feeds and display ads with the same keyword text was also discussed.  That could be interesting but somehow, it felt more robotic in the way it was being discussed.   Maybe that’s why i decided to leave after the second speaker.

The Podcast Search session, which I arrived at late, had some very interesting information though the room was not packed.   In other words, people at SES may not realize, yet, how important Podcasts and Podcast search has become.  Part of the reason the room was not full was there was an excellent search behavior session that compared recent studies about Eye Tracking from Google, MSN and Yahoo.  I suspect everyone felt that information was more interesting that Podcast Search.

But actually, they were wrong, because Podcasts are actually more actionable than anything that happened to be explained in the search behavior session.  Since I can’t clone myself, I decided to go with the Podcast session.

The big deal about Podcasts is you must optimize the Meta data in the Podcast really well, in order to get the most search engine visibility and traffic.  That is generally not well understood.  A Podcast feed should be optimized for meta data at both the CHANNEL and ITEM level and the ID3 tags; in fact, Yahoo’s Podcast crawler is designed to work best with Podcasts that have been optimized this way, and the Yahoo guy was very clear about that.

Here is the marketing information for this session

Podcast Search - Vertical Search Track

More and more people are "podcasting" on-demand radio-like shows people can listen to on MP3 players or their computers. This session looks at various search engines specifically for podcasts and how to best get your audio content found through them.
Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies
Speakers:
Daron Babin, Co-Founder, Webmaster Radio
Ethan Fassett, Product Manager, Audio Search, Yahoo!
David J. Ives, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, TVEyes
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

I missed Amanda Watlington’s presentation but got the rest.

Also, everyone spoke of using FeedBurner as the best overall way to optimize your feeds; you still need to use good SEO to write the best tag information and put alot of text in your descriptions, just like the guy from Webmaster Radio does, but having said that…..you really should use FeedBurner whenever possible.

Also, if you do the optimization right, tremendous traffic lifts can happen, and have happened to those who understand how to set up podcast distribution properly.

There are also a few distribution networks that people should use if they want to know how many active subscribers they have for a Podcast; Limelight is one, PodTrac is another.

I would say that Podcasting is still fairly new, fairly misunderstood as a marketing medium and still struggling to be find good monetization channels.  Some of that was discussed here as well, but I won’t go over it because it’s another post.

Kevin Lee of Did-it.com spoke next; Kevin is one of the most articulate and knowledgeable speakers in the entire field and he has a very strong working knowledge of whatever he’s talking about.  So, when Kevin talks, I listen.

The way Kevin Lee talks about Advanced Targeting - that targeting is a strategy to find the most profitable keyword buys.  "If Internet Advertising can target to people really well, everyone wins".  The goal of Demographic and Behavioral Targeting is to define your "power segments" and the keywords associated with the your power segments. You can then look at various behaviors and use strategies to maximize your conversions. Kevin talked about out a number of things you can play with once you understand who your target audience really is (a.k.a, your Power Segment).

Next, Daniele Leitch of www.morevisibility.com spoke of the need to now move to demographic targeting.  Like me, Daniele believes that it’s only a matter of time till all the search engines match MSN AdCenter’s geo-demographic offerings.  In other words, the time for using Geo-Demographics in online marketing has arrived.

Daniele talked about fine tuning your keyword phases and deciding on a strategy of when it’s worth paying more for your bids if your reaching your "power segment" because they will convert at a higher rate.

Finally, Dana Todd of Sitelab International spoke about Spy ware and that we need to consider how search engines are gathering this extra data that’s becoming the basis for the Demographic Targeting information.   Dana also talked about Yahoo Fusion Marketing as an early adopter of Demographic and Behavioral marketing and she had studies from one client , Hot Springs Spa, that went back close to 10 years.  She was able to show that behaviorally targeted Yahoo Fusion ads performed much better than average under certain circumstances.

What I would say, in  summary for this session, is that my work with MSN Ad Center (and the posts that i have shared here recently, have prepared me to be to understand and utilize the information from MSN Ad Center, perhaps better than anyone else in that crowded room.

I hope to interview someone from MSN Ad Center team in the next 24 to 36 hours, and when I do, I expect to get a very detailed understanding of the product that is beyond what has been presented in any session and a glimpse into the future of what it could become.  

In fact, I already know what the product should do, could do, and I have posted some of those ideas at this blog already.

Here’s the basic marketing description for this session, to start off with:

The days of targeting searchers only via keywords are coming to an end. Now search engines are giving you the ability to target searchers by age, gender and other demographics. In addition, search profiling makes it possible to target searchers with ads long after they’ve done a particular search. Say someone searches for information about a new car. New programs allow you to show them ads based on that search behavior days after the initial query was done. Learn more about products and strategies, in this session.
Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies
Speakers:
Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Did-it.com
Danielle Leitch, EVP, Client Strategy, MoreVisibility
Jed Nahum, Director of Product Management, MSN Search  (speak with when session is done)
Roy Shkedi, CEO, AlmondNet
Dana Todd, Founding Partner, SiteLab International, Inc.

The large room where this session was held was so packet that in was impossible for me to get a seat and there were probably 2,000 - 3,000 people in the packed room. I’s say that demographic profiling is HOT.  

Jen Nahum of MSN kicked off the session with by announcing they were opening up their new AdCenter tool to anyone at the show over the next couple of days (and to stop by their booth at SES to get the details).  I missed most of the MSN presentation as I arrived late.

Next, a heavily accented, Roy Shkedi spoke about his company’s offerings centered around AlmondNet (why is it called that?  What’s the relationship to an Almond?  Don’t know).   AlmondNet is supposed to be a new distribution channel focusing focusing on behavioral marketing.  Roy made a statement but did not give the source of this information:

"40% of Internet advertising money is spent on search engine marketing while people spend only 5% of their time on search engines of all their time online"

I’m not someone who would throw a statement like that out without having the data to back that up, but Roy did.

"clicks from behaviorally targeted ads were clicked on about the same number of times as untargeted ads but converted 4 to 5 times higher than untargeted ads"

Now, that is interesting!   That made sense to me and would explain why personalized content does not always seem to be clicked on as much as one would hope.   According to Roy, most of the magic happens after they click to go the site.  "it’s the quality of the purchase intent profile" that’s the main reason the behaviorally targeted responders converted at such a high rate.

Niche Vertical searches is the wave to the future because the Niche Engines have a lot  more information about your behavior than the typical search engine.

I did not take a picture of the very large crowd that gathered on the third floor of the Hilton for Google’s Lunch.  Nor was the lunch, such as it was, as satisfying to me as personally meeting the Google Engineers, which happened last Summer at WebMasterworld in New Orleans.

I did not stay for the entire lunch session because the information appeared to be directed to a large audience rather then the more specialized tracts I’m here for.

Google Site Maps and Robots.txt checker were the main subjects, at least when I was there, with some general guidelines mentioned by Matt Cutts.

Matt talked about redirects and said that having more than 5 redirects chained together was probably too many and the search engine will often get confused when this happens.  He also talked about the Robots.txt tool that Google went live with last month and suggests everyone test their pages with it.