WebmasterWorld of Search Conference, Day 1
The sun arose early on the valley of Las Vegas and into the rooms of dreary eyed conference goers on this day, the first day, of the WebmasterWorld of Search Conference. With the legendary late-night bar conversations that this conference, the conference formerly known as PubCon, is reknowned for, this will probably be the last decent night of sleep that many of these 1,000 attendees will get.

Today’s sessions, as with most conference first-day sessions, are relatively light. Alternatively, the day’s sessions do not seem light to accentuate the progression of the conference, rather, it seems the first day’s sessions have been kept light to keep the first day a bit more relaxed to promote networking and to begin picking out those familiar faces you saw at the last conference.

Opening Keynote by Brett Tabke:

About 25 minutes long, the keynote certainly opened with the community feel that WebmasterWorld holds dear to its heart. If you were expecting to hear about the future of Search, online businesses, or independent webmasters/publishers, think again. This keynote was for the community of members that were in attendance.

The first 15 minutes opened with very gracious thanks to all of the attendees, several members who worked diligently behind the scenes, and the sponsors who helped make the WebmasterWorld of Search Conference the largest conference ever held by WebmasterWorld.

Following that, Brett reviewed some highlights of the conference, and offered some information and advice on the sessions for the upcoming days, including touching on the daily “Super Sessions,” where that is the only session going on at that time.

Overall, a very warm opening.


Big Site Promotion:

I first want to preface this session with that I felt it was the most valuable session of the day. Now, today’s super session on the history of search optimization was absolutely great to listen to, but I truly felt that the Big Site Promotion session had four solid panelists all giving excellent information on how to optimize for large sites. What I’m about to write only scratches the surface of this discussion.

Marshall Simmonds started off discussing the search optimization strategies he has been using on About.com for a few years now. The majority of his presentation centered around two things: 1, Natural Search is a long term strategy, and 2, communicating the right messages throughout an organization in order to effectively execute a large, site-wide Natural Search campaign. While he states that communication is the first of five main hurdles, he re-emphasized the need to effectively communicate each of the other four messages throughout the organization.

Marshall broke out the main five areas of concern, and how to address those concerns. They are:

• Communication - Get everyone in the organization to move in the same direction and constantly repeat that message.
  
• Design - Effectively clean up code throughout the site. Clean up the templates, remove any unnecessary code, reference JavaScript, CSS, and other code externally.
  
• Relevance - Educate the organization on the basics of Natural Search optimization, especially keyword analysis. Also educate the organization as to what not to do, and other potential spam issues. Make use of unique, relevant intro text on all pages, and make sure all links have relevant text annotations.
  
• Visibility - Bottom line: If the search engines can’t see the site, you can’t be ranked.
  
• Metrics - Record baselines and define, measure, and monitor any and all change.
  

John Marshall, of ClickTracks fame, was up next. His presentation was relatively short, but emphasized two things: 1, The problem with large sites is not the data size, but the large number of visitors. With such high numbers of visitors, the slightest change can have the greatest positive impact…or it can have the greatest negative impacts. 2, The challence is making the data recorded persuasive in a manner that creates effective decisions to be made.

John also recommended three books by Edward Tufte, for those who may want to get heavy into metrics, available at edwardtufte.com, the main one being The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Joseph Morin was up next, and defined three key things that I think all website owners should be aware of:

1. Affiliates Drive Leads
   
2. PPC Drives Leads
   
3. SEO Drives Page Views
   

This definition was relevant in that he currently works on AutoByTel.com and other properties it owns. Some of the sites’ goals are to generate leads, while others are to generate page views for ad revenue. Knowing what your goal is, and the best way to achieve that goal, is essential.

Additionally, Joseph noted that making changes to large websites is often a tough ordeal. In order to best get the changes you feel are going to be valuable, implemented, he suggests completing a proof of concept on another property, or section of a website, measuring the results, communicating the effectiveness of the results, and finally implementing those changes on the other, usually more valuable/larger, sites.

Finally, Joseph presented what I feel is a very innovative idea for larger sites in that he recommended that horizontal channels be built once vertical channels have been fully executed. Deciding which horizontal channels to begin pursuing first, may be as easy as looking at the current keyword traffic that doesn’t fit into a business’s current model, but molding parts of the business to begin taking advantage of that horizontal channel. It’s certainly a great argument for those website owners who want to strictly stay in a “luxury” or “cheap” or whatever market. If the traffic is there, the business is there, and you should be there, too.

Bill Hunt, to me, presented some of the most valuable information in this session. This was an absolute gem:

         IBM had a mere 10,000 pages indexed by the search engines. By only making search engine visibility (infrastructure, architectural, or whatever your word du jour is) changes, 2.2 million pages were then indexed. This directly correlated to an increase of 67% in overall traffic

AMAZING.

He went on to discuss that typical Natural Search campaigns are executed from the top down; content, coding, then infrastructure. This is reversed when working with very large sites, you’re much more effective to work from the bottom, up.

Tracking, Conversion, and ROI Testing

This session seemed to be more of instructions on how to use Urchin, ClickTracks, and Alexa to gather the information you needed – if you don’t use those tools, or use other tools, the session may not have been of too much value. However, there were some excellent conversations with Brett Crosby (Urchin) and John Marshall (ClickTracks) after the session about traffic analytics and discussions on the philosophy of limitations of, or attempts at, making intuitive assumptions using logical thought processes (programs). It’s definitely a conversation that will be going into much more depth at the bars this week ;)

Super Session: SEO/SEM History, Theory, Testing, and Progress

I don’t have too much to report on this – I’m more of a facts guy, and I relate this session to going “back home” and hanging out with old friends. These guys have been in it since the beginning, they’ve been through the trenches, they’ve been through the trenches that the vast majority never even think of, and they’ve made stupid amounts of money doing it – and they’ve also lost out on stupid amounts of money doing it as well.

If you want more information on what went down in this session, you’ll just have to come out the next conference in the Spring. ;)


Closing remarks: The definite word of the day, and I would imagine the week, is “Relevance.” I can’t tell you how many times, in how many different ways, and how many different analogies, explanations, relations, etc were made to relevance today both in and out of sessions.

Time to hit the bars – catch everyone on the flipside!

Ben Wills | permalink | +marktd |