Dear Rand Fishkin, No, I’m not Melissa. When I saw you at the elevator of the Westin Hotel (you were going down and I was on my way up), and I took the courage to say “Hey Rand!”, a nod or a smile would’ve sufficed. But then you said, “Hey.. Melissa, right?“, and for one minute there I wished my name really was Melissa. :P

But my name is Riz. And there’s no way for you to remember that because I didn’t even mention my name to you when I asked if you’d mind me taking your photo at the Seomoz booth at SMX East. But really, thanks for trying. :)

AUTOFOCUS FAIL. :(

That photo would have made my day, if only my camera’s autofocus did not fail me — why God, why now?? So I have a blurred photo of you smiling at me, and I was too shy to ask for another one. Then I ended up on stalker mode again, taking candid photos of you.

..and the lovely Seomoz booth :)

At least I didn’t mess up Gillian’s photo.

Lovely bunch of people, this Seomoz. And I’m digging the shirt too. Thanks Gillian, the size you gave me is perfect. :) You guys are made of awesome. :)

More SMX East 2008 photos after the jump.

Continue reading →

Nathan Buggia is up on stage again. He starts by disecting from an SEO standpoint a website called Arbor Snowboards. The site is very flashy and interactive, but when you look at the source code, the meta title alone does not say anything about the site — meta title is “Arbor: Home”.

Unsurprisingly, while the site ranks number 1 for the term “Arbor”, it ranks 49th for the keyword “snowboards”, which basically what the site is about. Nathan suggests ways to optimize the code. Some AJAX and HIJAX best practices:

• Learn about Hijax at http://janeandrobot.com/admin/Pages/seo-developer-resources.html.
• Use <noscript> and <object> tags.
• Don’t use JavaScript for links.

CSS can improve performance by separating formatting from content. However, it has been abused by Spammers to try and hide links and keywords. (I.e. setting fonts to 0, or setting color to #FFFFFF).

Use <h1> instead of, say, <span class=”heading1″>. Use HTML tags semantically.

Sharad Verma, Sr Product Manager, of Yahoo@ Search, gives a picture of Web 2.0 to start with. He shares that there are 3 pillars of Web 2.0:

• Experience (last.fm, youtube.com)
• Participation (tagging, reviews, comments, wiki, social bookmarking). Users are more engaged in the web now.
• Community. (Are you on Facebook?) People are uploading and sharing stuff on the web.

CSS is good, external CSS is even better. Yahoo! understands content layout. Through CSS, you can rank for your keywords better and place important stuff higher in your codes. It promotes efficient crawling. It makes pages light.

Don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt. Yahoo! would like to understand your layout also. Don’t hide text using CSS.

Is your site a website or a web application? Some sites are actually web applications. They are functionality driven, don’t need to be deep indexed. Web Sites, on the other hand, are content driven, hence need to be deep indexed. Use AJAX selectively.

Spiders can’t parse AJAX content. AJAX is delivered via JavaScript that search engines have difficulty crawling and indexing. Spiders can’t extract java script links. AJAX content can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked.

If you have to have AJAX, make sure that your initial page should have content and navigation in html. Use href links. Turn off JavaScript in your browser and ensure that the content is navigable. Be careful with mirror sites. If your AJAX site has an HTML version, the HTML is the one that will be indexed.

Yahoo! indexes flash. The problem with flash, however, is that they are rendered via JavaScript. Because there is no deep linking, there is less link juice. More over, one URL for the entire flash movie equates to bad user experience.

He ends by promoting the new site explorer, which is now out of beta. It has new site features, allowing you to submit sitemaps, delete URL paths, and rewrite URLs.

Daniel Pang, Software Engineer of Google, starts by discussing also the web 2.0 environment. Much of Web 2.0 is already search engine friendly. Web 2.0 SEO is more designing the site for user accesibility and experience, rather than for search engines. Does your site work in Lynx? If it does, people will be able to use it everywhere (online, mobile, etc.)

Web 2.0 Flash / AJAX. Web 2.0 sites are now embellished with Flash and AJAX elements of richer media (ie. Flickr and Youtube). Daniel discusses a bit of HIJAX also (this I haven’t heard of until now).

Googlebot can read some content and links within flash, but not all. Best practice is HTML for content and navigation, complement with flash for applications and animations.

CSS allows one to separate content from presentation. It’s great for making changes to visual layout, and is generally not much to think about specially fo accessibility/search engines.

Side note: I didn’t know Danny S could be so soft spoken. :)

Tony Adams, SEO Manager of Yahoo!, is up next. He says that Web 2.0 is all about “sleek” designs. A dilemma for search engines, however, is that content is often controlled by JavaScript which is not search engine friendly.

Be strategic in the AJAX implementations. Separate content from presentation and interactions build using scripting language. Work with standards or platform teams to build standard interactions.

(This I have to try) Web Developer Toolbar Firefox addon. It allows you to disable Javascript, CSS, images, etc, allowing you to actually see what the search engines are seeing, on the site content standpoint.

Q&A. Danny Sullivan starts of Q&A with a question on H1 tag, if there’s value in setting the keyword to an H1 tag, even if you set it to look like normal text in your CSS.

Sharad: H1 tags don’t seem to be an important factor.

Nathan: He would question scripts that make H1 tags styled to look like everything else.

Daniel: H1 tags still indicate logical labels, especially when there’s no CSS and AJAX, so there’s still value to it.

Regarding sitemaps:

Daniel: Sitemaps is supplemental, but its better to have more internal links.

Nathan: In making sitemaps, don’t put all URLs, just put the best URLs there. The sitemaps are used in identifying which pages are most authoritative.

On URLs:

Daniel: Better to use nice, clean, and short URLs. If your URLs have a lot of slashes, rename them to shorter versions. Don’t just replace ?s and #s with slashes because to them, “/” does not translate to separation of paramenters.

(Okay, I suck at documenting/transcripting the Q&A, the panelists are talking a handful! I should just post this one.) :)

In this session, the speakers repeatedly discussed issues on duplicate content and URL redirecting, URL renaming, and best practices in making your URLs search engine friendly. There’s a bunch of technical discussion on .htaccess rewrite modes and http status codes, whew. (Note to self: Get more air time with the developers). The panel is moderated by Detlev Johnson of SearchReturn.

Nathan Buggia of Live Search is up first. He discusses the difference between a sub-domain and a sub-folder. He says to use whatever works in your site architecture, it doesn’t matter which one you use.

HTTP Status Codes: 200 - Everything’s okay, you got the domain that you’re looking for. 404 - File not found. 301 - File has been moved permanently (this is probably SEOs most favorite status code). 302 - File is moved temporarily somewhere else. He does not recommend using 301s. He uses 302s more. (Hmm. I didn’t exactly get why he said this.)

Robots are set on a sitewide level. However, microsoft.com/robots.txt does not apply to technet.microsoft.com.

There are lots of duplicate content scenarios. This happens when there is more than one URL for the same content. Create a few simple rules that will remove duplicate URLS by 301 redirecting all variations to the shortest one. Sitemaps are great tools for search engines. He doesn’t recommend using a crawler in creating sitemaps. Create your sitemaps manually, and from scratch.

Navneet Virk is up next. He starts discussing the major SEO components: Content, Code, and Technical Architecture / CMS / Backend. Zoom in to URLs, when you talk about optimized URLs, it means:

• Accessible by search crawlers
• Targeted towards the keywords
• Readable by SEs and users
• Unique for content
• Relevant in terms of domain and sub-domains as well as directory nomenclature

Content Management Systems, if you don’t configure, generate complex URL structures that will become an issue. Some of the approaches we take if we want to make our URLs search engine friendly are: (1) Page Element Approach — leveraging certain elements on the page to construct optimized URL; and (2) Record Name Approach — Irrelevant parameter names do not provide any relevance information or value to the URL.

A vanity URL is a domain name (or URL), typically created by a company to point to a specific product or advertising campaign microsite or section. Vanity URLs, however, also present the risk of content duplication penalties.

He presents different issues in tracking parameters in the URL, and how to resolve them. (And I have to take a rest room break — blame it on the afternoon juju. BRB.)

Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts is up stage when I got back. He starts with the familiar Subdomains vs Subdirectories issue — Matt Cutts says they’d essentially treat them as the same.

You shouldn’t treat subdomains as a means of creating tons of easy thin-content microsites. They’re being viewed as subdirectories. Yes, use them for managing your website and doing load balancing. No, don’t use them purely for SEO reasons.

Microsites can be bad for your SEO if overly numerous or if they contain substantial amounts of duplicate content (merely changing the UI doesn’t count). Microsites can also be beneficial in terms of demographic targeting and focused keyword targeting. (i.e. stayinghealthy.com vs stayinghealthy.metlife.com)

Keywords in URLs are beneficial in Google regardless of whether it is in filename/directory/subdirectory.  The closer the keyword(s) are to the root domain name, apparently the more weight they will lend. Now just because a keyword is bolded in the SERP doesn’t mean it’s given extra weight in the ranking algo.

As far as word separators in the URLs, hyphens are the best, and are preferred over underscores. URL stability is important, i.e. an annually recurring feature, like a holiday gift buying guide, should have a stable URL and keep it for next year’s user. This way, all links to this stable URL will accumulate through the years. Otherwise, link juice earned over time is not carried over to future years’ editions.

He discusses URL rewriting next. He talks about a bunch of .htaccess rewrite jibberish *checks SMX Handbook* — oh hai, there you are in the handbook, I skip blogging this nao. :)

Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering at Yahoo!, in the house. He discusses URL structures that perform better on Yahoo! Search. He suggests using canonical URLs for internal linking purposes. Avoid case sensitivity and use lower case. A site should avoid using large numbers of subdomains. Large numbers of subdomains will get the harshest penalty even if there’s nothing else wrong with your site.

Base on stats, short URLs get clicked on 2x as often as long URLs (given that the position rank is equal). Participants spend more time viewing the long URL, but less time viewing the entire listing. Long URL distracts the searcher from viewing the listing’s title and description.

Examples of bad URLs: TheExpertsExchange.com can be mistaken as TheExpertSexChange.com!!; or TherapistFinder.com which can be read as TheRapistFinder.com, LOL.

Jeff Cox, Software Engineer of Google, closes the session with his presentation.

Google wants to index only one copy of every page, it also means better user experience. A URL is a duplicate if it contains the same content as another URL, and it is a redirect to another URL.

In selecting canonicals, we want to pick the best URL to show our users. Selection is influenced by pagerank, sitemap information (www vs non-www), URL length (shorter is better), redirect status, meta noindex tags, etc.

Some of the guidelines and suggestions from a Googler: You will NOT be penalized for having duplicate content (hmm). But Google would like to index just one, so if, say, you get links to both pages with the same content, you split your link juice to the two URLs. Use redirects correctly. Set your preferred domain via Webmaster Tools. Dynamic URLs are fine, but the shorter and more readable the URL, the better.

In Q&A, Nathan Buggia corrects his earlier statement. He meant he uses 301 more than 302. Ohkaaay. At least he got that one cleared. :)

Danny Sullivan, who’s facilitating the session, came in 2 minutes late, but made a grand entrance by telling everyone that he was late because he got the Javits wifi, which was really sucky about 3minutes earlier, fixed. Thanks, Danny, you’re super!

So now, with a front row seat to the Video Search Marketing session, and a pretty fast wifi connection, I think I’ll be able to do some quick note-taking.

Michael Benedek of AlmondNet starts with what opportunities online video advertising has for us: 67% of all internet users viewing some form of video advertising at least once a month in 2008, and is projected to grow to $3 billion by 2012.

Some behavior of a typical internet user:

• 5% of their time declaring purchase-intent on SE sites and other similar sites that account for 30% of Internet ad spending.
• 95% of their time browsing ad-supported content on “other” sites where display inventory is unsold or sold for less than $1CPM.

Online video advertising has still a long way to go. Some challenges that are being encountered involving this type of online marketing are ad server standardization (searchers use different video players), scalability, and video content categorization (via category-specific tags).

Behavior Advertising / Video Advertising are the hottest and most promising ad-focused areas online right now. Inventory is inexpensive (compare it to search or TV), and branding / engagement is comparable to TV. (I, myself, am not keeping a television where I stay, and prefer online video viewing/searching because I can watch what I’m looking for the exact moment I want to watch them.)

Enter Gregory Markel, President and Founder of Infuse Creative.

He asks what’s the most popular video in YouTube. Someone in the audience answers some Avril Lavigne video, which has over a million views. Gregory asks, but are they real?

Turns out, “video” is more popular than “god” and “britney spears” as far as search trends are concerned. Take this: 24M Youtube.com homepage impressions a day alone. There is no submission cost or cost per click for a YouTube result, it’s FREE. Even more so, when we say Video Advertising, we’re not even talking about Youtube alone but also AOL, Yahoo, and Google video, and this just in, iPhone videos. Videos are viewed in increasing numbers. (I’m starting to sound like home shopping network.)

In taking advantage of Video Marketing, make sure your video has targeted keywords. Optimization tips: keyword infused titles, descriptions, tags, and categories are important.

There is BLACK HAT in Video Search Optimization! (The number of views can be tricked, he didn’t say how.)

1. Define success metrics, goals, and tracking requirments.

2. Analyze the cmpetition both in youtube and google.

3. Research keywords, write keyword rich and compelling title, description & tags.

4. Add/Modify “in video” branding/call to action/URL to suit marketing goals.

5. Decide submission strategy/type. (Upload only? Mass blast? By hand? Automated?)

6. Spread the word, encourage community, remember mobile/iphone.

7. Monitor/track your progress and tune.

Video Search Marketing is very much like SEM in a lot of ways. Tracking is important (much like web analytics), promoting your site and getting links are essential steps to drive traffic to your site (much like link baiting), and keyword research and competitive analysis are necessary to improve your campaign strategies.

Gregory’s speaking warpspeed, he has less than 4 minutes left. He’s discussing about additional best practices and techniques (which will be posted online anyway), zoo yezz, I zhall waitz fur ze powerpoint prezentation online. :P

Eric Papczun, the next speaker, says that Greg’s presentation needs 10 cups of Starbucks coffee to digest. It sure is loaded. :)

Moving forward, Eric discuses the new Google audio indexing — Google has indexed all the words in YouTube political channel videos with their speech recognition technology, so that spoken words are transformed to text.

Videos are actually ranked by spoken keyword relevance, YouTube metadata, and freshness. However, the speech-to-text technology is still not perfect. I.e., Obama says “shift”, and GAUDI (Google Audio Indexing) translate it as “shit”.

Eric adds that the best chance that publishers have in getting their videos indexed and ranked high on Google is to upload to YouTube. This is because Google and Yahoo have an easier time reading YouTube metadata than they do reading video-housed on a native site. True enough, we’ve all seen how YouTube videos rank in the organic listings for high search-volume keywords — now that’s an opportunity worth taking advantage of.

Q&A is ongoing as I post this. :)

It’s my first day (and the first time) at SMX, and I’m having a grand time. :)

So I’m finally here, and let me just say it again. The Philippines should be proud of me for braving this. :P This place is more intimidating that I expected. I haven’t seen any Asians yet, if there are, they did a pretty good job blending in. :) I did get acquainted with an Australian, and a guard, and.. well, I’m looking at making friends with that guy sitting right in front of me now. His head is blocking my view. Pfft.

I’m at the Keyword Research Tools & Techniques session at the moment, listening to Christine Churchill of KeywordRelevance. I realized I should’ve plotted my own track in advance, so I know where to go next. Ohh I think I’ll just stalk Danny Sullivan. I’ve always wanted to see that guy. :)

Unfortunately, I don’t think I can do the liveblogging heroics I did in SEMCON this time around. There are just too much to digest, plus Americans talk too fast, heh, so I think I’m gona focus on listening instead. :P

So yeah. I’m off to do that now. I miss you, Manila! Be back real’ soon. :)