SEO Copywriting

I just read an excellent post over at Search Engine People by Ben McKay that I wanted to share with you. Ben asks the question, “Is your site a one-visit wonder?” Ben does a great job of outlining what you should do, starting with knowing the mission of your site. My favorite part is when he talks about engagement. Engagment is really important to me as a writer because without it, your visitors will go by-by. The post is a little long but it is worth it. Check it out now!

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This is it folks, the last session at SearchFest 2009! [Tears...]

Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink is going to talk about A Proust Questionnaire…for Business

1. What is your idea of perfect business happiness: A great team, contented customers, and profits.

2. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?: A cute farm with a punch clock [I completely agree with Anne]

3. What is the trait you most appreciate in other? Relentless resourcefulness (you have to be to be a great SEO)

4. What is your principal talent? Networking, Anne is a connector. (Read Made to Stick)

5. Where do you most like to run a business? In the Cloud (you have to be everywhere - think virtually and globally)

6. What do you consider the most overrated business virtue? Thrift (you have to spend money to make money)

7. What is your greatest fear? Not making payroll

8. What’s your greatest regret? Having to let people go (don’t hang on too long with an employee that is not performing - You are working for the employees)

9. What is your greatest extravagance? Travel (black town cars that pick up at the airport!]

10. What is the trait you deplore? Wasting time on stupid things.

11. When do I lie? When I have a hair appointment she says she has a meeting

12. What is your motto? Follow the money (This will tell you how it works)

13. What’s your current state of mind? What’s next

Adam Audette with AudetteMedia is up!

He is a big fan of the simple slide show - Thank you Adam! Easier for the live blogging.

A little background on Adam
Second generation search marketer - Adam’s dad, John Audette founded MMG. Adam worked for MMG. MMG is now Outrider.
Adam is now the President, Chief Geek or AudetteMedia, Inc.
Seniro SEO manager for Zappose
Senior SEO strategist of international agency.

Search is Rocking! Search is going off even with the Economy but there has never been so much crap. The market is absolutely saturated. How do you know what is good or not from a client perspective? The industry is immature. It has a lot of growing up to do. So what do you do? Differentiate yourself! Differentiate your marketing, yourself and your services.

Differentiate Yourself
Have skillz - if you don’t have them go to Search Engine Land, SEOmoz, etc.. and read, read, read
Contribute to the industry - offer great blog posts, post on people’s sites, guest post, go to conferences
Put Yourself Out there - introduce yourself at conference, email and say nice to meet you
Ignore “stardom” trap - Think about how you can add value

Differentiate your Services
Core Competencies - What’s your specialty? Excel at them.
Expertise! - Can you help someone or not? Don’t take clients you can’t help
Walk the talk - retainers are not over, performance based marketing
Focus on the client - You need the client, how can they help their business?

Differentiate Your Marketing
Be on Twitter - follow everyone in search. Share information.
Ask for Help - Being willing to ask experts for help
Blog, blog, blog! - Be very active about that, you might end up on Search Engine Land that gets sindicated.

Know Your Values
Core values - know what they, build toward a clear vision.
You build what you practice
Focus your team on their strengths
Build a smart team
Lead by example
Hire great people
Build upward mobility
Foster and reward growth

John Audette wrote The Sweet 16: Principles for Building a Successful Internet Business.

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz is up

1. Why Start a Business? Rand’s motivation and focus has changed over time.
2002 - Stay Alive [had to decide who to pay. Rand says he had a very nice girlfriend (now his wife) who paid the rent]
2005 - Build a Brand in SEO
2007 - Find the Right Path
2009 - Scale (consulting is a hard business to scale)

2. Who do you hire & how do you find them?
I know, trust & like them
Passionate about their work (look at what they do outside of their career)
“Fit” with the company culture

3. The Most Important Hires You’ve Ever Made?
Sarah Bird - Hired as Counsel, Now COO
Nick Gerner & Cen Hendrickson - Linkscape Engineers
Matt Inman - Former CTO

4. What’s Your Competitive Advantage & How Do You communicate It?
History & Profile (Rand is shy so he had to learn how to promote his company)
Boutique Level of Service (Allows him to do the kind of work that they want to do)
Technology (Link Graph, etc…)
Rigorous Process

5. How Do You Decide What Products/Services To Offer?
Competence with Deliverable (looks inside the company to find what your specialties are)
Passion for the Work (Rand loves site audits)
Scalability of the Deliverable
Educational or Promotional Value to the Company

6. What Payment Model Do You Use & Why?
Consulting - Custom Pricing (He upped his consulting rate and didn’t experience a decrease in demand)
Product - Monthly & Annual Pricing
DVDs/Seminars - Fixed Pricing

7. What Has Been Most Effective?
Consulting - Speaking & Networking
Product: Raising prices, email marketing, testimonials

8. What are you moste exited about trying?
Consulting - Building in Better process

9. What’s It Like Doing Business in The Current Market?
2008=Rough Year
Dec09 through March09=Great months

10. What Behaviors have you had to change to become your organization’s leader?
Personal scalability & tasks
Sensitivity to criticism
Answering email
Employees as friends (It creates conflict)
Product - “I am not the customer”

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Jordan Kasteler of Search & Social. Going to be a little technical folks, Jordan warns. Scott Hendison just created a new plugin - SEO Automatic - check it out!

Template
Rename images files
rename CSS ID

Code Optimization
Title Tag (header.php)
The default code put’s your blog name first in the title.

Duplicate Content
Meta Robots
Canonical URLs

Code
Make as much static as possible
CSS stylesheet location
Blog title

Permalinks
perameters
Removes short words - stop words (slug trimmer plugin)

Pagination
Several different ways to deal with this.

Categories
Add descriptions with Wordpress.

Nofollow
Add link attribute plugin

Breadcrumgs
Really important on Wordpress

Custom 404 error page. User Generated content is really important. Do follow plugin. top commentator widget. These create more comments but also more spam.

Internal linking
Add internal links to old posts with lots of external… [too fast, too fast]

Security
HTACCESS
delete your admin profile - create your own user name.
LoginLock down plugin
WP SecurityScan

David Wallace of SearchRank is going to talk about WordPress Plugins.

All in One SEO Pack - Customize title tages, meta description tags and keyword tages. Automatically generates meta descriptions from excerpts of first paragraph of your post. All you to have tage come your keyword meta data as well. Will remove duplicate content issues.

Share This - Social bookmarking tool. Makes it easier for people to bookmark your blog pages.

Twitter Tools - Will automatically broadcast your posts to your twitter account. Different blogs, he has different Twitter accounts.

Math comment spam protection - They have to do the math and this keeps out the bots. Put right above the submit button.

Sitemap Generator plugin - Support for multi-level categories and pages.

Google (XML) Sitempas Gnerator for Wordpress - Available for all WordPress versions since 1.5/ No PHP skills required.

SEO Slugs - Removes stop words in your URL. Give a better keyword-rich URL.

Avatars - Allows local avatars

Category Order - Allows you to custom order categories

Rick Turoczy at Silicon Florist is a marketing guy, he says. He is here to help you convince people to get with it on SEO. WordPress is the best out of the box tool you will find, according to Rick. He writes a blog about the tech scene in Portland. He wrote an article last night on Jive Software. He published around 1am last night and it is already ranking. He wrote a decent headline and linked some other pages and that is all he did. He finds it amazing that with no effort, he is on the first page of Google the next day - thanks to Wordpress and the Google XML plugin. Even your most bone-headed clients can do this.

There is a great community of WordPress users. There is so many resources at your finger tips. Don’t just think of Wordpress as a blogging only tool. Small to medium sites can use Wordpress as a low level CMS.

Q&A Tips
Change your submit button to java script if you are having trouble with spam content that Akismet isn’t catching.

How do you select plugins?
David Wallace says don’t be like those people that jack up their cars with things they don’t need. Only use plugins that are essential for you.

How do you optimize podcasts or video?
Podpress plugin
Rick Turoczy says to wrap the podcast or video in content.
Jordan Kasteler says to creat a post for the podcast or video.

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And we are back from lunch! Everyone is slowly trickling in and chatting it up! Lots of people here from Bend, Oregon. Yay for Bend!

Dawn Foster from Faster Wonder is up first.

Why companies should participate
People - gives people a place to engage with your company
Product innovation - feedback
Evangelism - Help grow evangelists for your products from outside of your company. When coming from others (outside of the company) it has more impact.
Brand Loyalty - engagement can drive a tremendous amount of loyalty for your products

Guiding Principles
Focus on the individuals - participate as a person, not a corporate entity. Don’t be like Walmart and create fictitious people.
Be Sincere

Participation Guidelines
Quietly monitor competitor’s communities and learn from them
Participate as a person with diverse interests
Talk about the industry first & your products second (become a thought leader for the industry)

Have a community manager. Someone to monitor what other people are talking about on the internet, moderate the blog, create content, etc.

Neil Patel of ACS is up:
What can we learn from Zappos? If you are an e commerce site, create a bag of crap and sell. Has to be a limited quantity. Cost should be very low. Make it like the lottery. Spread it through the blogosphere. Leverage Twitter and FriendFeed. If someone blogs about it, you can give them a bag for free.

Holiday Sales
Selected items for sale (1 or 2 - limited quantity). Up sell like crazy. Promote through social coupon sites such as deals.com.

Exclusive Channel Offers
One offer at a time. Limited quantities. Spread your offers out over time.

Branding Gimmicks
Putting your face on the dancing elfs. Everyone posted it on your blog and gains links. Has to be fun and entertaining. If a 10 year old would like it, it’s perfect. Don’t sell people. Have a company logo. Allow embed capabilities.

Email Scrapers (Tagged is a site to use)
Entice people to give you their email. Get their user name and password. Message their friends.

Widgets
Need to be useful, not just neat. Make it community oriented, easy to embed and tie it into your website.

Embargoes
Send it to everyone and say they can’t write about it until x date. They will all write it because they think everyone else is going to write it. Do something news worthy, write up an embargo, send it to bloggers, be careful about who you send it to - some bloggers don’t like each other.

Spam the Social Web
Submit affiliate links to social sites, link build to those pages and add comments to high ranking social sites.

Leverage Your Readers
Control your icons - don’t have 1,000 social media buttons. Test out social media buttons. Encourage your readers to participate in the social web and buy StumbleUpon traffic.

Matt Inman - Next Dating LLC
How did he have such success with his dating site - LinkBait! What is it? Content you create that gets people to link to you. Primary Benefit: Builds links and in turn elevates your search rankings.

He created a quiz - How Geek are you? This was his first content that truly went viral. He provided HTML badges that showed their Geek score. How many five year old could you take in a fight was the next quiz. Rick keyword links flow in!

Widgetbait Gone Wild - keep it relevant. If your site sells toasters, only make quizzes about toasters. Be careful what keywords you link back with. Don’t get in the news. Don’t get greedy. Google has been indisicive about their policy on this.

How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you - 14,000 links in less than a week!

Created a fake dating site called, zombie harmony, which was out ranking many of his competitors.

12 Juicy Linkbait tips:
Take commercial topic (your target keyword) and attach something geeky, fun or weird to it. Example: BBQ equipment - “What would your body taste like if barbequed?
Keep it simple
Getting on digg used to be 90% creativity, 10% promotion. Now it’s more like 60%/40%.
Don’t IM for stumbles, diggs, reddit upvotes. Instead, have them go to the category page and then vote
Latest rumor among linkbaiters is the IMing for stumbles doesn’t work.
Take some data and present it in an interesting way
Create a simple game and reward the user (freerice.com)
Don’t just write blogbait
Finding a linkbater - supper creative.
Keep your content benign - Make your linkbait appear non-commercial at first to aboid getting buried and encourage linkbuilding.

Check Out:
http://matthewinman.com/everything

Great Question from the Q&A:
What was your favorite linkbuilding endevor?
Matt Inman said that he managed a furniture website. He created a quiz in a half an hour called, “How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor?” Now they rank #1 for bunk beds.

What hasn’t worked for you?
Neil Patel said that things that are really intelligent and sophisticated that comes up with doesn’t do well. The stupid things are what people want to link to.

Dawn Foster says that the personal blog post get the most comments and links. The really good content doesn’t always create the buzz that you think it will.

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Oooh, so sorry. I am late to this session. So I missed the begining of Doug Hay’s presentation from Expansion Plus.

Dustin Woodard from Wetpaint is up to talk about building Relationships for SEO Success. He is asking everyone if they have ever been in a relationship? Everyone laughs and raises their hand. Then he asks if anyone has had a relationship with the media? [Less hands on this one.]

Building relationships with the press is easier today. Twitter is a great search tool but it is also a great follow tool. LinkeIn is also very helpful. If you want converage on Wired, you can search Wired and find out who you are connected with that is connected with someone that works at Wired.

Don’t push your message. Show them the path that leads back to you. Choose your media targets wisely.Target people who actually do what you are trying to get press for. TechCrunch is great for them. there is much cannibalism in the media. Consider exclusives or embargos (incase you don’t know: embargos are contraints on when you can write, for example: Monday at midnight you can write about it). Don’t overlook bloggers. Bloggers can be repeat coverage, ensure SEO by fixing links, relationship extends beyond current publication.

Now you can interact with the public without the press. Social networks are surpassing email according to Neilson reports. Know where your audience hangs out.

You can create your own community: Embrace fans, creating user-driven support. Be the top resource and hangout around your topic. The press with follow.

Think about a sniper approach with the press. Embrace new technologies. Cut out the middle man.

Check out Dustin’s blog at: www.webconoisseur.com

Todd Friesen at Position Tech is up. His presenation has been lost. He can’t get on the wifi. There is a search for someone on the wifi who has a thumb drive. Oh, it truely is a presenters worst nightmare! He is handling it so well.

Yay - He has his PowerPoint and a picture of a baby elephant! [We are at the Zoo.]

Everybody Wants to Get Involved. Where do you want to be when people are looking? He is an old-school guy, he thinks being on the front page of Google is best. Get it on the front page of Google - The flow is Google, then Blogger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and then ultimately get to the people.

It’s not just headlines. Push your content (press releases) to everywhere you can. Manage your own links www.checkusernames.com. You can manage information about you and your company.

PPC is check-book SEO, according to Todd [That's why we are in this session and not in Pay-Per-Click: Improve Your Bottom Line]. But let’s not forget it. It is Hyper long tail.

Closing things with a gratuitous baby elephant picture - Thanks Todd!

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Sean McMahon from EngineWorks just gave a great introduction! This session is packed! [People are literally standing.]

Aaron Kahlow is up first of Business Online.

How do we get SEO ingrained in your company? Need to be able to sell this internally. People don’t think exactly like us. They are thinking about how to get money. But when people talk to people about SEO they scratch their heads. [This slide had a picture of an adorable monkey scratching his head!] We need to wake up to the alarm.

Top 10 Technology (On site) from the “Catfish”

• Duplicate Content Destroyer.
• Domain Choice: Decide about www or not so you aren’t splitting links.
• Code it
• No old school Jave script. Not searchable.
• Flash and Java Upgrades.
• Page Has importance
• 301 Please
• Site Map two ways: xml and html
• 5 or Less: Try to limit the number of parameters in your URL strings
• Check it twice

Educate your stake holds first. We need to take a different approach.
New Education blog
http://blog.onlinemaketingconnect.com/
Online Marketing Institute

Sean has promised that Susan from Google is going to give away complete information about their algorythm. [Me thinks he is joking...if not, don't you wish you were here?!]

Susan Moskwa from Google is up.

Why do you care? Talking about Goolge crawling the web, they can’t get to everything or index everything. So how do they deal with infinate content and limited resources? They prioritize crawling: new content, refresh old content, crawl fewer duplicates. They keep the good stuff in the index and return relevant search results.

Tips

• Funnel to your most important information on your site.
• Avoid maverick coding practices. Discourage alternative encodings.
• Eliminate positional encoding.
• Remove user-specific details from URLs
• Keywords in namevalue pairs are just as good as in the path

Optimizing dynamic URLs

• Dynamic URLs contain namevalue pairs
• Create patterns for crawlers to understand
• Use cookies to hide user-specific details

Rein in infinete spaces, uncover problems with CMS. Disallow actions Googlebot can’t perform. Googles bot is too cheap to “add to cart.” Googlebot is too shy to fill out the “content form.” Googlebot is not going to log-in to your site.

Get your preferred URLs indexed:
Set your preferred domain in Webmaster tools (www or no)

Check out Webmaster Tools! www.google.com/webmaters. Help center, blog and help forum.

Up next is Vanessa Fox of Nine by Blue talking about Diagnosing Search Issues.

Path to Improvement:

• Asses where your site is today
• Identify problems
• Root-cause analysis

Problems:

• Sudden traffic drops
• Not getting traffic where you expect
• Content in SERPs does not look appealing
• Customers have bad click-through experience

Make sure it’s really a problem. If your Toolbar PageRank drops doesn’t matter unless your traffic has dropped. It’s just a fun little thing, don’t get hung up on it. Number of indexed pages drop, has your competitors? Have you been buying links…then maybe you should be affraid. Could be a good thing because of duplication. It isn’t always the goal to have the most pages indexed. “Index ratio to created pages - don’t pay attention to.

Find the Cause:
Understand the search engines is important. If there is a traffic drop, make sure it is from search not that a site dropped a link. Are the pages not indexed or not ranking? Does the same page rank that ranked before? There could be a technical issue - you could have been ranking twice and the search engine dropped the top ranked one from some reason and kept the lower ranked one.

Diagnostic Checklists and Resources
www.janeandrobot.com - you can get search accessiblity checklist, search discovery list, etc…

Traffic Drop:
Crawl Time Issues - Google Webmaster Tools [Vanessa is so pleased with this tool she created!]
Indexing Issues - submit all of your property pages (break up your content) That way you can see if the problem is site wide or just a section.
SERP Display Issues
Findability Issues - [SuperBowl exampel - Vanessa wrote a couple of atricle about this at Search Engine Land] Hundae advertized edityourown. So people went to Google and searched edit your own. www.edityourown.com does a 302 redirect to another site so it is never going to come up on the SERP.

For More:
www.janeandrobot.com
ww.ninebyblue.com

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Stoney deGeyter from Pole Position is up first. He says, “because I’m the prettiest.” Heather and Rebecca might disagree.

Who’s looking at you? Who are you trying to attract. What are they interested in? You need this information. Once you have the information, you hit on the very specific desires your audience desires. You want to have a good pick-up line. Stoney won a SEMY and no one cared…[sad].

Reveal the Content

• Compelling opening
• Speak the language
• Scannable
• Bullet points
• Bolds and italics

[Side note: Stoney likes the pretty ladies for his PowerPoint - that's what he calls, "easy on the eyes." For Stoney, that's Angelina Jolie.]

Once your audience is there, keep them interested. Appeal to needs, ask questions, inform. Give them more than they came for. Link out to other sites, providing more information. And then do it right again. [This slide is tantalizing!]

Rebecca Kelly of SEOmoz is up next!

Rebecca says that Stoney told her that his slides had half naked women so she thought that she would counter with half naked men on her slides!

Myth #1 about Blogging = Link Magnet
Blogging is a great way attract links but you have to have good content. If you blog it, they will link is not true. Don’t be afraid to promote your blog. Participate with other blogs, guest post.

Myth #2 Content is King
Well sort of… Even if you have good content, if no one knows about your site yet then it doesn’t help yet.

Myth #3 Dofollow Blogs = Easy Link Building
You have to find sites that are like yours. If you go to a site about animals that have dofollow but you sell batteries, it is going to be wierd that you are commenting about hamsters.

Myth #4 It’s “List” or Bust
Mix things up/diversify your content. People see lists get on Digg so they think everything should be a list. Non-List content that’s spiffy: Pictures, tutorials, well researched content…

Myth #5 Blog When It’s Convenient
Blogging takes consistency. If you have an empty blog, you should hire someone to do it. Shout out to Lisa Barone for being great as an SEO blogger! Viral content on empty blog = suspicious. You can use guest bloggers if you can’t hire someone. If you don’t know what to Blog about: check out Google Trend, Social Media searches (Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit). SEOmoz has Popular Searches and they have Blogscape. Blogscape identifies hot topics/trends, you can check your web presence, discover blogsphere links.

Don’t Over Think It! This results in stupid posts.

Myth #6 It’s Your Blog, Do Whatchoo Wanna Do
Interact with your readers. Own up to your content. If you delete a post you can get flack because people think that you are covering up. Write a follow up post. Give back: link to other websites.

Myth #7 Your Website Needs a Blog
Can you update frequently? Can you promote it? Are you a decent writer? Are you remotely interesting? If not, maybe you don’t need a blog right now.

Oooh, Rebecca concluded with a hot pic of David Hascelhoff!

On to Heather Lloyd Martin - SuccessWorks

Do you find yourself neglecting your website for your blog, Twitter, etc… Make your site dateable, in just 7 easy steps. It is like when you have been out of the dating scene for a long time. There are new rules. “How many people have changed their site copy because of the economy?” Heather asks. Will your old approach work in today? REthink your benefit statements - are they still valid?

Take a hard look at your challenges and advantages. SERP makeover. Look at the SERP of your site by going to Google and typing in site:www.yoursite.com. Are all the titles the same/poorly written? Go where the action is, keyword research. You’ll find additional opportunities.

Keyphrase Research Tools:
Woodtracker
Keyword Discovery
Google AdWords Keyword Tools

Focus on 2-3 keyphrases per page and ignore keyword density.

Grab their attention. Titles are really important. You want them to be sexy and tell them what they can expect to see.

Title Structure:
Keep headlines around 60 characters
included your main keyphrase

Always stay current. You need to update your blog and your website. When you have copy that looks outdated, customers will think that if you can’t keep up with your site, how are you going to keep up with my business? Give your copy an update. Check for outdated copy. Worst offenders: Press pages, conference/events pates, products pages, old articles.

Let your personality shine through. Personal Brands in SEO: Stop Obeying False Idols [Lisa Barone shout out again! Heather Lloyd Martin thinks your awesome!]

Update your home page. Help your conversion rate and be engaged with your company. Don’t lower your writing standards, just because you want content, don’t put up crap. If a copywriter charges $10 a page, you might want to be concerned. Don’t scrape the bottom of the writing barrel. Don’t stuff the keyphrases. Put keyword phrases in the right places: headers, titles, etc…

Enjoy ultimate success!

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Danny is talking about how there are SEO/SEM’s everywhere, even in Portland! Everyone is surprised he would come to such a “small” town. Danny says, “I didn’t realize Portland was a small town.” He is very happy to be here!

What is a Search Marketer: What search tools are most used or used often by a key audience? The evolution has been to get traffic from search but to be successful, SEO’s have had to learn link building, conversational/social marketing, conversion analysis, usability. Are you and online marketer? Or are you a metrics marketer? The next step is online savvy metrics markets might demand more of offline. So the re-branding of SEO, Search marketing probably doesn’t need a new title, just that search markets need a re-branding.

Danny made a joke about John Dvorak about doing SEO in 1887, “when the internet was powered by steam!”

The community as a whole has become troubled over “snake oil” SEO’s. Should this be a reason that we re-brand SEO? In 2005, Danny suggested “Content SEO.” When he first learned about doorway pages he didn’t understand why  or what to do about it. People started coining, “Technical SEO” but Danny isn’t sure who first said this. There is at any point a huge demand for SEO. Danny still gets inundated, even with the economy, with requests for recommending a reputable SEO company.

Danny says, “Don’t be a crap hat.” Forget black hat/white hate debate. Off-topic link drop, automated link insertion, computer-generated nonsensical web page, “directory” of companies for each US city that has nothing in it - It’s crap! Not only is there the crap, there are the excuses, “everyone is doing it so I’m going to too.” Say no, tell others to say no. Danny doesn’t think that everything is going to go away but he is hopeful that it will start getting better.

Danny is unsure about how the financial crisis has affected salaries in the SEO industry. There is evidence that people are still spending money on SEO. Danny doesn’t actively run an SEO agency. It is very difficult to cover the SEO industry and be in it so he chose to focus on covering. Danny suggests asking Rand Fishkin, Adam Audette and Anne in the Building and rowing Your SEM Biz session later on today.

Hype Assessment
Perez Hilton got more traffic from Facebook than Google, so Google “in decline.” Danny doesn’t think so - all hype. Paid Search and Social Media have also been the big hype lately.

Social media is important to search marketing. Builds links, leverages authority sites, useful for reputation purposes or to get out faster. Social Media isn’t all the same. Social news, social bookmarking, social networking, social knowledge, social sharing. People are sharing news. Traffic is high, demand is medium and branding is medium. Over all Danny says that Google Search is still higher Branding and search intent than social news. Bookmarking is the lowest branding and search intent compared to social news and Google search. Social networks is even lower than bookmarking. Knowledge sites are just little lower than Google Search for branding and demand. Social sharing sites are similar to knowledge sites when it comes to branding and demand.

Danny says he has 5 more minutes and 140 more slides! He may not get to them all. A joke about Google dominating Yahoo! and Microsoft. No Google Killer according to Danny. But Google isn’t the top tool for everything and that leaves room for new people. Like Twitter search. Hyper real-time tool to see what’s being buzzed about. Urbandspoon, Yelp, Eventful and more have opportunities than Google. Google does compete with itself with the “Googlettes,” YouTube, Blog Search, Maps (Locals) important on their own and blend into Google’s results. Search Continues to become diversified.

Danny ran out of time so we will have to read the slides online later.

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What can I say? I am completely over the moon excited for SearchFest 2009 - Taking place in Portland, Oregon on March 10th! I know as a proper adult, you aren’t suppose to get so excited but I am throwing caution to the wind. Why am I so excited, you might ask? I thought you never would. It is an intimate conference with out of this world speakers: Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Adam Audette, Vanessa Fox, Marshall Simmonds and so many more! This means that you will actually be able to speak to these people. If you aren’t coming, I just don’t know about you…

Danny is going to be opening things up as the keynote speaker. Following will be sessions on PPC, Blogging, Growing your SEM Biz, Online Reputation Management, Social Media and the list goes on! Wrapping up the day will be SEMpdx’s famous Hot Seat!

What’s more, this conference is extremely affordable!

Before 5pm on March 9th:
SEMpdx members and non-members - $229
Partner - $269
Students - $125
At the door:
Everyone - $349.

If you can’t attend, check back here for the latest info from SearchFest 2009!

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