Don’t have time to read our extensive SMX Advanced coverage? We still want you to be able to get something out of the conference, so here’s the best of SMX Advanced, from tips to soundbites and everything in between.
Recently we’ve affirmed that we’re not averse to using some manual intervention. We purposefully avoid using the word “mechanical” in describing how we work in the New York Times article. There’s a lot of people thinking all the time about how to improve search. We want to think algorithmically and in a scalable, enhanced way.—Matt Cutts, You & A with Matt Cutts
Social media is about making these communities work for me. It’s our job to do this with Google, now it’s our job to do this with others. Viral marketing is about stylistically different communities. —Rand Fishkin, SEO, Meet SMM
Social media can work for B2B, even Digg. You’re not trying to relate to those audiences, that’s okay. You don’t have to feature it on your site. I’ve been on Digg many times and even if 0.01% of that traffic/those links is/are actually on target, you’ll still get enough traffic and sales from that. —Neil Patel, SEO, Meet SMM
Digg’s not my audience, but if these young techie males can enjoy this content, I can get the links I need to bring my content to the correct audience.—Todd Malicoat, SEO, Meet SMM
We’re more worried about developing stickiness now. Build out of content and functionality. Sites will become research bases. Content aggregations, comparison wizards, mashups will all be popular. . . . Personalization is the scalable way to do social search. —Gord Hotchkiss, Personalized Search: Fear or Not?
Is personalization the death of SEO? No, nothing will be. There will always be a need for people to present themselves well and there’s always gonna be people who don’t have time to do it themselves. —Matt Cutts, Personalized Search: Fear or Not?
When you’re at 10% share in the US, that’s the challenge. . . . We must “crack the code of engagement” There are lots of people even trying Live search. The thing we want to do is how to get them to stay with us. . . . There should be no confusion in terms of our entire destiny and ability to make headway in search—it depends on keeping pace with MSN as a portal. —Satya Nadella, Keynote Conversation with Satya Nadella
[Bid management software is] a foundation by which you’re enabled to do other things. . . . Bid management allows you to focus your attention on areas outside your campaign that are valuable and quickly react. A bid management system can look at the world holistically. It can predict what customers need just like Google, Yahoo and MSN do. —Chris Zaharias, Debate: Is Bid Management Dead?
Real search marketers look at search marketing outside of just a bid placement tool. They don’t just look at immediate return. A keyword is just as important as your television ad. . . . It needs human influence—industry, consumer and marketer. It’s not just math. You limit yourself & search marketing and it will go away if you think of it as “just a keyword” and “just a bid.” —Misty Locke, Debate: Is Bid Management Dead?
Buy tangential keywords carefully or not at all. . . . Search engine marketing works because of direct relevance. If you really want to do it, maybe you should go with contextual ads. —Ben Perry, Pump Up Your Paid Search
What’s your favorite tool of any type (external)?
Greg Boser: Mine used to be Project Mayhem, now we use internal tools
Todd Friesen: Some Firefox extensions: Search Status, and the Web developer toolbar which lets you see all your header tags, alt text & CSS through overlays.
Cameron Olthuis: Serph (their tool)–it’s like social media meta search, getting results from Google Blog search, Technorati, etc.
Jim Boykin: Our Top 10 Analysis Tool on We Build Pages—you can compare your site to the top 10 sites ranking for your keyword.
Todd Friesen: Also, Aaron’s SEO for Firefox. And Xenu Link Sleuth gives you a list of URLS that are broken, shows redirect issues.
Alex Bennert: Xenu can produce a report—go back to the interface to export the crawl.
Todd Friesen: You can also do a multithreaded crawl—you can crawl your competitors.
Christine Churchill: Excel for keywords (a variety of tools), Rex Swain’s tool
Todd Friesen: Sam Spade has a desktop version of Rex Swain’s.
Greg Boser: WebBug
Danny Sullivan: Groowe
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