I had Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Amazon affiliate link) as my ear worm today – the title of this post is inspired by it.

This past Thursday’s PubCon keynote was a panel discussion between Topher Konan (CNN.com’s SEO Coordinator), Jeff Preston (SEO Manager for Disney) and Alex Bennert (In-House SEO for the Wall Street Journal). It was quite a lively talk about different issues facing in-house SEOs in large organizations.

One stand out comment was Jeff’s mention that everyone involved in the web efforts need to be at every meeting. His comment was very well received by the people in attendance. I was certainly glad to hear him say it, as that idea is something very important to me. It’s something which I stressed during my In-House SEO presentation on Tuesday. In the context of my talk, it was about the importance of marketers being constantly in touch with their IT counterparts.

What I said was something  like …

“If you treat your IT folks as an afterthought, guess what? They’ll treat you as an afterthought.”

Constant and consistent communication is important for several reasons:

• It helps maintain lines of communication which can otherwise get lost
• It helps build those relationships needed for smooth cooperation
• Both sides of the team learn from each other
• Both sides of the team learn each other’s abilities, strengths and weaknesses
• It makes working life just that much more pleasant

Remember that web marketing success means success for the entire organization. Although you may not see the need to communicate across departments on a consistent basis, that need is there. Keep in contact, even when you don’t feel like it. Make time to talk to those who have a hand in all pieces of your web marketing strategy, no matter how small their role may be. In the long run, everyone wins when you do.

Oh, and this applies to outside contractors, too!

This session was moderated by Rob Garner

Glenn Cooke

• Chase Google’s goals, not the algo. Google wants to serve relevant, authoritative content, so have that on your site.
• Have an Adwords campaign ready just in case.
• Look for ads on other venues. Make sure to check for relevancy and where your potential customers are ready to buy.
• Have some sites ready in reserve. There should have good content, but not a lot of time investment. If the main site is hit by an algo change you can go to another right away. You’re not looking for tons of traffic on these sites, they’re mainly for backup.
• Get a professional graphic designer to design your site. It’s worth the cost for the user experience. This can help you get links.
• Don’t get content from expert writers. They may be great writers, but they aren’t experts in your field. Exert content is written by experts.
• Build links one at a time. Go for quality rather than quantity. Don’t build links just for SEO purposes.

Paul Edmonson, CEO of HubPages

• HubPages got hit hard by Panda.
• Duplicate content hurt the site and by internal links.
• Went through and removed affiliate links to spammy sites, removed pages which were considered low quality and pages which really shouldn’t rank anyway.
• They also reduced the number of displayed ads and news feeds.
• Have you ever tried negative SEO testing? Sometimes it helps to try to make your site ranking go down to see what perhaps might make it go up. Use this with caution and only in extreme circumstances.
• Make a plan to carry you through hard times, including having cash in reserves.
• Splitting up author content into subdomains helped rankings.
• they also deleted a lot of content, even in some highly trafficked pages.
• since making all the changes, some authors are still getting lower amounts of traffic, some are higher and some are the same. Overall, HubPages has come back to pre-Panda levels.

Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting @stonetemple

• Search Engines want to increase market share so they can make more money on ad sales.
• Google goes though a 4-step process before changes get implemented.
• Users want instant answers to their questions. People are extremely impatient and will leave if things don’t get to them fast enough.
• If your site is differentiated, you can be very algo proof. If you can stick out and be relevant you’re doing well. Don’t do what everyone else is doing.
• Links and social mentions from authorities carry a lot of weight.
• Remember that user experience is a huge factor in ranking. Treat your visitors like kings and queens.
• Watch time on site and bounce rates. If your are higher than your competitors, you. Ight be in trouble. These two factors could go I to future algo changes.

The session was moderated by Stephan Spencer

Scott Hendison, CEO and President, Search Commander @shendison

• IPV6 is still not being implemented fast enough. IPV6 and IPV4 don’t talk to each other natively, so conversion needs to happen soon.
• To comply with the standard, you can use translators or do dual stacking. Dual stacking is the preferred method because it’s faster and there are fewer configuration problems.
• If you ask your ISP about this and they tell you not to worry about it, find a new host. They should at least have a plan.

David Vogelpohl, Founder and CEO of Marketing Click @davidvmc

• If your “neighbors” on your shared host are causing problems (like sending malware or spamming) your site can be adversely affected.
• Make sure your host keeps software up to date and has adequate security measures.
• Pay attention to download times. If your site is slow because of host issues, consider moving. Check out pagespeed.googlelabs.com. Google uses the installed Google Toolbar to determine download times.
• Consider using a monitoring service to watch for downtime.
• Check potential hosts for tech support levels. It’s bad when your site is down and you can’t get ahold of someone.

Michael David, Founder, TastyPlacement @tastyplacement

• Site load speed is critical for SEO and user experience.
• http://tools.pingdom.com – tests download speed. Gives detailed reports so you can take action to speed things up.
• Find a monitor to check uptime. Texting and email alerts are a key feature.
• http://majesticseo.com/reports/neighbourhood-checker – use in conjunction with Google’s safe browsing tool – checks for bad neighbor issues.
• Find a tool to do load testing. Also check Google Webmaster Tools for speed issues.

Ralf Schwoebel, Founder and CEO of Tradebit @trabit

• When your site is down, you are in trouble. Long term outages can hit rankings hard. Avoiding downtime is a reputation management issue.
• Monitor, use an outside service.
• Use Lynx with GREP to screen for links placed by hackers.
• Duplicate your site. Replication and load sharing helps with speed issues and downtime issues.
• Use round robin in DNS to spread the traffic around.
• Make your life easier by outsourcing. Use cloud email and nameserevers.

This session was moderated by Dixon Jones.

Prashant Puri, Co-Founder, AdLift @puriprashant

• Revenue is the one thing which translates across all languages.
• Don’t forget to include Brand in your keyword research.
• Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.

Andy Atkins-Kruger, CEO, WebCertain Group @webcertain

• The US is no longer “Global.” Paid search outside the UK and UK is $20 billion. It’s growing very quickly. Yandex and Baidu are growing faster than Google outside the US.
• Yandex and Baidu are also targeting countries outside Russia and China.
• Don’t try to take your message global, you need to “go native.”
• We forget that different countries may have different language regions.
• Don’t forget to take into account culture and behavioral differences in other countries.

Michael Bonfils, International Marketing Director, SEM Group

• Argentina and Mexico are the best for Spanish-speaking Latin America.
• Baidu is not the same as Google. Many of the strategies which work on Google don’t work here.
• Bing supplies Baidu with English search results in China. as an example search for “SAP” on Baidu
• Orkut is losing share to Facebook in Brazil.
• Don’t use the same Portuguese for Brazil as you would in Portugal
• Google is getting back into China via Android Devices
• Remember to change up the spelling for Canada, they’re not “Americans.”
• Seznam (List) is the dominant search engine in the Czech Republic
• Facebook is also dominating in France. Pay attention to keywords in France, they have lots of words which work for specific words. You can’t just translate directly.
• Google is trying to push into Russia and challenge Yandex via Chrome installations. It’s not really working that well.
• If you’re going to host in China, put the boxes in Hong Kong.
• Yahoo! gets search results from Google, not Bing.
• Remember the difference between US and UK English (just like Canada). This also applies to Spanish in different countries, too.
• Paid links are quite common outside the US.
• Google is moving in Malaysia. Friendster is the common social network.
• Be careful with PR in foreign countries, speech freedom changes from country to country.
• Consider doing paid search before SEO.
• Translated subtitles work better on video than voice overs.
• Yandex is very easy to do paid advertising on.

Jeff Lancaster, Managing Director, Outrider, Canada @jefflancaster

• Canada is an easy market to in which start your international efforts.
• Canadians are more plugged in than people in the US in many areas.
• Google is the dominant search engine in Canada, by far.
• Even thought your .com may work in Canada, but they lean towards the .ca domains. You’ll get better conversions that way. Have a specific Canadian-based strategy. This can be a huge trust issue.
• Keyword research needs to be specific to Canada. Although similar, there are enough language differences to matter.
• Don’t forget currencies, the metric system, address and phone number differences, shipping info and local legal info.
• It’s good to have unique content for the Canadian audience.
• If you go into Canada, don’t forget the French speakers. Don’t forget linguistic and cultural differences from France. Also pay attention to site structure for the differing languages.
• Toile.com is very popular in French Canada.
• Don’t just at the Maple Leaf to the logo, think hard about how you want to reach Canadians.

Matt Cutts started off with a short presentation.

• Responding to Leo Laporte’s comment that search engines will be irrelevant in a short time: SEO is a type of marketing. It’s also a form of online coaching. It’s all about presenting your best face to potential customers. There will always be a role for SEO.
• Excellent SEOs don’t react to what search engines are doing, they look forward to where the engines are going.
• Google has append a lot of time working on quality over the past year.
• Google is also working on communicating better. If your site is hit by as spam, you can use Webmaster Tools to get a lot of information about why you were blocked and how to get back into the index.
• If you’re not looking at Mobile, you really need to!
• You can drive a lot of traffic via social, your marketing needs to include some aspect of social.
• Googlebot can look at JavaScript now. Soon it will be able to evaluate content above the fold and the quality of that content.
• Look for more personalization in search.
• Google is looking to communicate more. For instance, it will tell you if your WordPress is out of date In Webmaster tools. Look for. Ore update announcements.
• Google is looking to possibly let content producers ping Google when content is published so they will know where the content originated. Sign up for “fat pings” at pubsubhubbub.appspot.com
• if you’re not on Webmaster Tools, sign up today!
• Google has a lot of people looking at how to improve false positives for spam. It takes a lot of work to keep perfecting the system.
• Small businesses can react faster than the big guys. The web really levels the playing field and be smarter rather than bigger. Concentrate on a specific topic and you will possibly outrank the big guys who have a broader content mix.
• Google’s spam team can handle stuff in 40 different languages.
• About Encrypted Search: Search is growing more personal. If you download your search data from Webmaster tools you can likely still get all your search data. Users like SSL, and Google wants to give people what they want. It’s a matter of balance, too. Also, if your audience is more tech savvy, you will have more people signed in and getting those private searches.
• Regarding Link Building: Links can certainly be a part of search. You can’t know which links Google trusts and which they don’t. Just because a site has a lot of links, if Google doesn’t trust those links, they still don’t count. Grow your links organically and look at building real buzz and get links because you offer quality.

Comments from Amit:

• The studies we do are showing that our users are getting a great experience. No algorithm is perfect, so we appreciate feedback.
• Big brands rank well because they often get more links. Google doesn’t pay attention to who is ranking, but rather at the content.
• Regarding press releases as duplicate content: It’s all about quality. Sometimes press releases aren’t very well written. If they are of good quality, they will rank.
• It’s Google’s aspiration to give results that if you want to learn about a subject, go to this site.

The third session I sat in on was the one in which I presented, In-House Team Building and Training moderated by Dave Roth.

InHouse SEO Teams – Tony Adam, Co-Founder, CEO, Eventa @tonyadam

• Recruiting=Biz Dev, get out there and look for people.
• Don’t mess up. You need to sell people as to why the position is important.
• Follow up is very important. Make sure to keep in contact with the ones you want to hire throughout the hiring process.
• After the hire, you need to keep the people happy. Give them challenges to keep them busy and sharp. Don’t forget mentoring and training.
• Three Es: Engage, Education, and Empower
• Let people lead. Give them things to be in charge of according to their abilities.
• Have Fun! Laughter is powerful and fun is energizing. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
• Listen to your people. Find out what their needs are.

From Dashboard to Success and Leveraging 3rd Parties With Your In-House SEO Team – Peter Leshaw, VP, Interactive Strategies, Blue Interactive @peterleshaw

• It’s important to create a dashboard to show what’s going well and what’s not. It helps you be accountable and show your value.
• Include a page with analytics (including organic and PPC data), Call metrics (if appropriate for the business), Leads & conversion rates, and Demographic conversion rates
• The team should include the Webmaster, Copy Writer (preferably and expert in your company’s business area), SEO Specialist, and the Social Media Manager.
• Consider brining in outside consultants or contractors to fill skill gaps on an as-needed basis.
• Outsiders should compliment your team, not just supplement it. Male sure they have the same basic philosophy on how you do things.

How To Hire an In-House Search Team – Josh Gampel, VP, Onward Search @joshgampel

• Indeed.com has job trending info. They show SEO has been declining as of the last 6 months. So are PPC openings. Social media and web analytics are still on an upward trend..
• The ASA National staffing index shows there is a steady climb in temporary hires in web marketing positions.
• before you go to hire an SEO, you have to be prepared to discuss your company’s overall strategy.
• You need to look for people who are creative and analytical. They need to have good communication skills. Hire for attitude as well as skills.
• Write you job descriptions to sell your company as well as fill the position. There is still a lot of demand for talent, so you need to stand out.
• Answer for yourselves the top five things you want the person to have. If you can’t do this, you won’t be prepared for the interview.
• Bullet point your skill needs.
• You can’t get the best from social media alone. Don’t be afraid to call and offer to interview.
• Make sure to ask the right questions. Ask “why” as well as “what.”
• Learn how to close the deal. Good candidates are going to get multiple offers.
• Go to seminars and learn the skills you’re short on.
• Research compensation so you know what people are worth versus what you can pay.

Here is the slide deck from my presentation:

The second session of day was SEO: Hot Topics and Trends led by Andy Beal (@andybeal). Here are some nuggets I gleaned from the presentations:

5 Things That Piss Me Off – Jill Sampey, Director of Search, Blast Radius

• These are some things which may have worked at one time, but don’t any more.
• My apologies to Jill and to you, I had some technical difficulties with my keyboard
• Too bad, too, because it was really good stuff.

Greg Boser SVP of Search Services with BlueGlass Interactive

• Google is no longer “paged” focused. You need to concentrate on overall site quality. If you have good content on a site that is otherwise bad, that good content won’t rank as well.
• in other words, you don’t have to be a spammer to get “Panda Slapped.”
• This can especially hit UGC sites.
• Take time to understand your site’s Content Performance Ratio
  • what is the ratio between the total number of pages indexed and the total number of organic landing pages
  • what is the ratio between total pages indexed and deep links
  • Pay attention to supplicant content and focus on what will help your ratios.
• Check your sites in webmaster tools, you’ll be able to identify a lot of problems in there.
• Keep an eye on social web. Social share does count in rankings. A lot of good content is shared via social rather than links on web sites.
• Consistency helps. One widely shared link won’t rank as well as a lot of content shared over time.
• Synonyms and related phrases don’t rank as well as they used to because Google understands natural language much better these days.
• Use “tilde” search in Google to find related words.

Stephan Spencer, VP – SEO Strategies, Convario

• Google and Bing index more than HTML. Get links from PDFs, too.
• Check out linkresearchtools.com. Very helpful tool.
• Is every mention of your site/company on other sites a link? This looks very suspicious.
• Try to get content on social sites like YouTube to rank. Even though links from those pages are “no follow” they can still help.
• Track your rankings on YouTube. Use Voot to help do this. This is in closed beta right now.
• Video thumbnails on YouTube have a huge factor on click through rates, even more so than SERP ranking in some cases. Make sure you have a good video thumbnail.
• Don’t forget that YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine.
• You can even track stats on all YouTube videos by clicking the little icon next to the number of views. This can be a great tool.
• Overwrite the machine-generated transcripts. They are searchable, and the ones YouTube generate aren’t always very accurate. Also consider uploading transcripts in other languages so you can have subtitles and rank for keywords in other languages.
• Use Soovle for keyword brainstorming.
• Check out YouTube suggest, too, for keyword ideas.

Once again, PubCon is upon us. This time next week I and two of my colleague will be winging our way to Las Vegas for this excellent web marketing event. It’s going to be a busy time of learning and exchanging ideas.

If you’re a Crossing reader and will be at PubCon, I would love to meet you. If you see me wandering the hallways or in a session, please stop and introduce yourself. Here’s my partial tentative agenda:

Monday

• I’ll be at the kickoff event at 5:30pm. This is a great time to meet new people in a social setting.

Tuesday

• I will be presenting as part of the In-House Team Building and Training session at 2:55 in Salon D. This will be a great panel with some luminaries in this area: Tony Adam, Peter Leshaw and Josh Gampel.
• In the evening I’ll be playing in the Raven Tools poker tournament. Thankfully this is just for “funsies” because I am not that great of a poker player

Wednesday

• After all the day’s festivities, I’ll be participating in the Epic Dinner organized by Alan Bleiweiss.

Thursday

• From 2pm until 3pm I’ll be sitting in on PubCon Labs. This is a new feature of PubCon which I think will be a huge hit. Session speakers will be at a table and will sit down with you and answer your questions. Reservations are going fast. I’m scheduled to cover Beginning SEO, but I don’t think anyone would mind if you wanted to talk about In-House issues or anything else web marketing.
• From my Labs session, I’ll be rushing over to Salon G to moderate a session entitled Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests with Matt Craine and Lisa Buyer
• Fest Call! At 7pm we’ll be having an informal and unofficial meetup at the Hofbrauhaus. Anyone is welcome to attend, but I’d especially like to invite Veterans of the Armed Services to come out and tell lies and talk web marketing.

Instead of posting a long summary of the sessions I attend at the end of the day, I’m going to try posting summaries of each session individually. I think this will be more efficient for me and easier to read for you.

What say you? Are you headed to PubCon next week? What do you hope to learn? Please feel free to share in the comments.

If you’re still sitting on the fence, trying to decide if you should attend a conference this year, now is the time! It’s only two months until PubCon. I am very much looking forward to attending in Las Vegas November 8, 9 and 10, 2011 with two of my colleagues.

PubCon is packed full of great sessions with expert speakers in which you can learn more than your head can hold about SEO, affiliate marketing, social media, web technologies, web design, reputation management, online communities and so much more. Be prepared to take lots of notes. Whether you work for clients or in a more corporate setting, you’ll return to your work with lots of great ideas and new techniques to help you better help them.

One of the highlights of PubCon is the interactive site review sessions. Experts in specific areas will take sites apart, ask questions and let loose with great ideas on how to improve those sites. These sessions alone are worth far more than the cost of attending.

There are also great opportunities to meet up with the speakers and other attendees in social settings as well. I learn just as much during breakfast and lunch as I do during the sessions. For example, last year I had a great conversation with Mike Marshall on the bus and learn quite a bit about more advance SEO techniques.

Of course, there are tons of things to do in Vegas. I wrote about some of them last year (and I still haven’t been to the Pinball Hall of Fame – I really need to get there this time).

On a more personal note: I’m going to be presenting on Tuesday afternoon in a session entitled “InHouse Team Building and Training” with Tony Adams, Peter Leshaw and Josh Gampel. I’m also moderating a panel on Thursday afternoon, “Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests” with Matt Craine and Lisa Buyer presenting. If you’re a regular visitor to The Crossing, please be sure to stop by and introduce yourself.

Register today, for PubCon (affiliate link, as is the banner above).

Read about previous PubCons I’ve attended.

In the last part of this series, we went over some of the settings in WordPress. Today, we’re going to make our first page.

What’s The Difference?
Some of you may be asking, “What’s the difference between a page and a post?” That is a good question and I think it’s an important one. Here’s how I look at the two:

A page contains information which is more or less permanent. For instance, on this site the About Me page doesn’t change very often. The last thing I added to it was the link to my Google+ profile. The same goes with legal and privacy notices or “Contact Us” pages. When you’re putting together information similar to what appears on those, think page.

A post is slightly more transient. Although it doesn’t disappear, the information may be more time-sensitive or dated. It’ll be current when it’s written, but it may become old and stale as time goes on. That’s not to say that a post won’t be read as new items are added, though. I have many posts in this space which continue to be read several times a month even though I wrote them over a year ago. A post is more along the lines of a newspaper or magazine article. I often refer to posts as “articles” for this very reason.

The two will be handled slightly differently in the menus, too. While pages will often have their own space in the menu, posts will usually fall under categories which help organize them. Take a look at the menu above and you’ll see what I mean. “About” and “Contact” have their own links at either end of the menu. Post I’ve written, on the other hand, are put into categories which you can browse through by hovering your mouse over the main categories and clicking on the subcategories.

Let’s Do This
Expand the “Pages” selection in the menu on the left and click “Add New.” You can also do this if you click on “Page” and then one of the many “Add New” links. Note that once you add a page, you can edit it later in the same place by clicking the “Edit” link under the title of the page which appears when you hover the mouse over it.

When the edit screen opens up, you’ll notice it looks a lot like any word processor package like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. It pretty much works the same way, too.

The first time you open up an edit page in WordPress, you will only see the default and rather limited menu. Click the icon in the upper-right called “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” to see all the options shown here.

Start editing your page. If you did your homework from last time, you’ll have an absolutely profound and genius “About Me” page already to go. If you already wrote it using a word processor, you can copy and paste it using one of the icons in the bottom row of the menu. The clipboard-looking icon with the “T” is for copying and then pasting into the page as plain text, while the clipboard-looking icon with the “W” in it allows you to copy and paste from Microsoft  Word and keep the formatting from that document.

Include Some Images
Of course, you’ll want to include your snappy head shot. To do that, upload a new file using the first icon after “Upload/Insert” just above the menu, which is the “Add an Image” selection.

When you upload your image, you’ll see a page similar to the one on the right. Make sure you put in a title to help you remember what the image is, add some “Alternate Text” so your image is SEO and screen reader-friendly, and add a caption if you want one to appear below the image in your post.

Once you’ve inserted your image into the page, you can click on it and then click the little “image” icon which will appear in the upper-left corner to edit any of the image’s information. If you click on the “Advanced Settings” link you can also add a URL destination as well as borders and spacing, if you like.

As you add text and images, your page will start to take shape like the example below:

Once you’re finished and satisfied it looks the way you want, click on “Save Draft” in the right side menu and then click the “Preview” button to see how the page will look when it’s published. Once your finished and you like the result, click the “Publish” button and make your page live on the site. Don’t forget to include a user- and seo-friendly title for your page.

About Themes
We haven’t touched on themes yet. Themes are software packages which help control the look and feel of your new web site. There are many, many free themes which are available through WordPress and a few premium themes (I use Thesis for this site [affiliate link]). Some are very simple, some are more complex and customizable.

Themes are installed much like Plugins. Click on the “Appearance” selection in the menu on the left and click on “Themes.” On the Themes page, click on the “Install Themes” tab and search for one you think will look good for your site. Make note of it, because we’ll go through installing a theme next time.

Homework:

• Finish and publish your “About Me” page. Do another page if you like
• Browse through the themes and find one you like
• Start working on notes for your first 2-3 posts