Blue Tent Marketing

This week Jonathan and I attended a search engine marketing conference, Pub Con in Las Vegas. The week was chalk full of tips and tools from industry experts ranging on topics from blogging to linking to widgets. Here’s a list of my top five take homes points after listening to forty-six speakers in fifteen seminars.

5.  Search engines now crawl PDF’s and index them appropriately. Using a new Optical Recognition technology, Google can crawl, index and rank text based PDF files – screen shot based PDF’s are out of luck at this point. This means you should optimize your PDF’s like you optimize a web page.  Add internal links to your PDF text to websites, including your own.  Make your header logo look like a web page by adding navigation back to your homepage, site map and contact us form.

4.  Did you know 30% of online searches are not for traditional web pages? Or that You Tube is now the second most popular search engine in the world, beating out Yahoo and Live.com?  These statistics suggest that Video’s, PDF’s, RSS feeds & widgets and more are becoming increasingly important.  To stay with the times, websites will need to employ these features to generate maximum traffic through Universal Search. Universal Search is becoming a mainstay in the way users search the web for the most relevant content – whether it be images, video or product reviews.

3.  Link building continues to be the most crucial aspect of any SEO campaign as each link is perceived as a vote towards your website.  In addition to online directories, link resources pages on related sites and other conventional means of gaining links, consider some out of the box tactics. Sponsor a community event related to your business.  Often times event sponsors are listed on the event web page with quality, relevant links back to your site.  Make a donation to an area nonprofit as donors are typically listed as well.

2.  Social networking through Facebook, LinkedIn, My Space, Twitter, blogs & forums, and more create online communities that keep the web up to date with new and better content.  If leveraged properly, Social Network Marketing can drive traffic to your site & increase your online brand reputation.  Be an integral part of an online community that fits your business by being an active participant.  It’s not enough to simply have a blog, you must be regularly contributing new, relevant content.  At Pub Con you would be best off leaving your cell phone and email behind.  Instead events and ideas were conveyed through Twitter.

1.  Search is becoming more and more personalized in an attempt to provide users with ever increasing relevance.  For example, if you search for the keyword “Java” and you are a big coffee drinker you are going to get a list of sites such as Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee.  If you are a computer programmer, your results will be more focused on Java Script whereas a traveler will find vacation deals.  In the era of personalized & geographic based search behavior – one should focus less on traditional rankings reports and more on analytics for meaningful metrics.

Best,

Lindsay Reither
Search Account Manager

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.