SMX Advanced 2012: Surviving Personalization with Google & Bing

SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)
SMX Advanced 2012 (Seattle)

First up is Marty @aimclear

Brand Identity Feed

The SEO stuff doesn’t have to do with SEO

Offering strong incentive for existing community classic social advertising and PR hooks: product updates, deals, offers, commercial plays, hr news, etc…

It’s not about fancy SEO changes

Use classic feed marketing tactics

Alltop – go to Alltop and find your site and reach your users

Internal relations: start by wiring up internal stakeholders

Get to know the media: bloggers, tv journalists, publishers, newspapers, radio jocks, circle subscriptions as seo targets

Run facebook ads to people who are in your niche

Customer service: intersection of commerce and seo

The best SEO is a product that doesn’t suck

Celebrate community: where your business lives

Sync with publication calendar

Blog headlines and serial concepts – then returned to aimclear with client feedback

AJ Kohn has written about optimizing Google+

More aggressive participation
– set community based KPIs
– Active participation to serve and delight
– Research and proactively engage users
– social ads to build circles
– give, give, give, give, give
– network w/ competitors’ community

@aaronfriedman from Spark

Buy ads on Facebook

Don’t plagiarize

Don’t neglect your network

Don’t use generic images

Be creative.

Be useful and helpful.

Tactics

  • Twitter longtail suggestion
  • opengraph optimization
  • “tweet what you want” code

tweet the longtail. First, find the keywords. Second, look at the social data (socialmention). Next, develop content. Have a list of users for outreach. Grow your network.

OpenGraph Optimization. Sample of 300 webpages. The OG meta tags content is sometimes empty.

OG titles: 95 characters

OG desc: 297 characters

Put some code in your twitter button: p class “tweetThis” – change you message the next day

Engines are more social – THE RISE OF ENTITY SEARCH

Engines are creating a new database, a non-text database

It’s about understanding concepts through words

verbs, action attribution, frictionless sharing

Entities are the sections in the SERPs

Be excellent to eachother and relevant for what you want to be known for.

The future of entity search is interest-based demographics

What I tell you I am interested in defines me

Social data is your attributes

Klout and Peerindex and mentionmapp are already defining you based on your interest and influence

For now:

Focus on rel-author
– This will play a huge role in entities

Focus on quality content
– Develop according to what users are looking for

Spend time growing your userbase

Next up is @rhea CEO at Outspoken Media, Inc

The future of search is personalization.

The business case for personalization.

Google Personalization methods Oct. 2006 seobythesea.com

Google Now personalizes everyone’s search results Dec. 2009 by Danny on SELand

Factors:

  • Location
  • Search History
  • Social Search

Check out google.com/history to see your search history

Google allows you to connect accounts. And they crawl that profile and they start to see the network.

How does google track your friends?

– GMail
– Interactions you have with other people on google products
– Connected accounts
– Links
– Friends on other sites who connect to you

2 primary signals to identify you:

– similarities between your accounts and profiles
– similatiries between your connections

Creepy!

PostRank, now Social Reporting in Google Analytics

– Conversions
– Sources
– Sharing

Measure personalization in GA

Rhea shows 41% of OM traffic is signed into Gmail

Amit Singhal: secure search was the key to personalized results

Rhea thinks ‘not provided’ would let us deconstruct personalization, and it would be much easier to game

Google doesn’t want to take over Facebook, they want to enhance search with the search graph

The BIGGEST LIST OF TACTICS!

Write geo-targeted content (location specific organic keywords)

Use schema.org markup language (Schema informs freebase, which then is used by Knowledge Graph)

Offline networking to build relationships

Identify networks where if you get in a car wreck, you probably also need a chiropractor, a mechanic, etc…

Make your site mobile friendly.

Targeting for multiple languages.

Local search.

Write great relevant content.

Submit data through Freebase.

Setup authorship – it improves clickthrough.

Brand thought leaders.

Publish content often.

If you are not on facebook publishing content, you are a dumbass.

Create community account logins. Let people login on your site through Facebook.

Use gmail for login.

Use events to drive queries.

Create and post to Google+ page

Setup Google+ Direct Connect

Increase your Google+ followers

Use LinkedIn to identify your network

Use facebook login for comments

Create long and short tail content (check out hubspot for resources)

Engage community like SEOmoz — threaded comments, vote on comments (ego bait)

Q&A

Marty,with personalization, do you still use rank checking tools? – Nope.

What are your thoughts about buying personalization? It sounds really shady.