Expand2Web is going to be at WordCamp SF (#wcsf) this weekend en-force. (Yeah, that’s right, all THREE of us )

We’d love to meet up with you, so if you’re going to be there ping me on Twitter at @doncampbell and we’ll grab a coffee and geek out over WP themes and plugins. Thomas, Randy and I will be there both days.

I hope to see you there!

By the way, we’ve been testing out SmallBiz Themes on the WordPress 3.0 beta builds and everything is running awesome. We’re looking forward to learning some new core WordPress 3.0 tech to tweak out our themes with this weekend…

Fellow Local Search Expert Dev Basu presented at Search Engine Strategies Chicago yesterday. Dev is a local search expert based in Toronto Canada, and a contributor to the Local Search Ranking Factors report.

His presentation, entitled “Local Search On a Dime” provided a nice step-by-step guide for small business owners showing them how to build a presence for their business in the search engines.

And I’m very excited that in Step 1: Optimize Your Website, he gives a shout out to our SmallBiz WordPress Theme!

Local Search On a Dime

Here is his presentation:

In the presentation:

Learn how to Optimize for Local Search rankings for low or no cost. Steps discussed include:

• Website Localization + Optimization
• Business Listing Claiming Procedures
• Citations and Local Link Building
• Getting Customer Reviews
• Offering Local Business Coupons

This presentation was delivered by Dev Basu at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference in December 2009.

He also includes some great tips for small business owners to claim their local listings with GetListed.org and Universal Business Listings.

Thanks Dev!

Need a website? The Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme is a complete small business website theme for WordPress. Click here to watch the video!
 
 

I was lucky enough to attend PubCon last week in Las Vegas. PubCon is a conference centered around search marketing and websites. Some of the top experts in SEO and PPC were there. I met a lot of super cool people and took a lot of notes.

Here are ten things I learned:

1. Quick – what is the #2 Search engine on the web? Is it Yahoo? Bing? Nope. It’s YouTube. But only 41% of search marketers surveyed actually have a YouTube strategy. This is a huge opportunity. Are you using YouTube? This was from Jay Berkowitz (@jayberkowitz) – his presentation on Social Media was outstanding.

2. You can actually get a decent hotel for $25/night in Vegas. Thanks to tips from Todd Mintz (@toddmintz) and Mike Belasco (@belasco) I stayed at the Sahara, which was right by the monorail so I could get all around Vegas easily. It was no Venetian but what a great deal. Everything else in Vegas, of course, is a huge money grab.

3. Google may add page load time as a ranking factor to the algorithm. According to Matt Cutts, Google wants searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine, and page load times are a natural factor here. AdWords already uses page load time as part of the quality score for a page. Use http://code.google.com/speed/ to check the load times of your pages. Also http://www.webpagetest.org. More at Search Engine Land.

4. The SEOverflow team is not only smart, they are also super cool. I got to hang out with Mike, Mary, Alex, Reid and Chris a bit at the show. I’ve met them before but this is the first time I really got to hang out with them and they are super cool people. Check them out – SEOverflow.

5. Zappos #1 priority is not customer service. It is actually company culture. Tony Hsieh did a very interesting keynote where he talked about how company culture is the most important factor to getting things right. Zappos just got picked up by Amazon for $1.2B so he has certainly built a company of value! You can download a free audio book on the topic – Tribal Leadership, courtesy of Zappos.

6. Test your keyword phrases with AdWords before investing in SEO. Don’t choose your keywords based on search volume alone. You should also consider click-through and conversions when deciding which keywords to invest your SEO efforts in. You can find this out fast by running a mini AdWords campaign. The Keyword research session with Carolyn Shelby (@cshel), Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds), Craig Paddock, and Mark Jackson (@markjackson) was excellent.

7. Twitter is so mainstream now, that several thousand SEO Geeks tweeting up a storm for 4 days could not make #pubcon a trending topic on the Twitter home page! I guess after Oprah and Larry King the cat is out of the bag…

8. Google is redefining the definition of “content.” Google is starting to index the content inside images, video and audio so that they can search deep. In the Universal Search session, Bruce Clay (@bruceclay) said he has the research to prove they are experimenting with this. If you are doing audio and video now, you will be in for a huge boost when this starts rolling out. If not, you’d better get on it!

9. The value of traffic to Google is 5-10x more than to anyone else. (From @bobbrisco ’s keynote.) Ever wonder why Google always beats Microsoft, Yahoo and others out on acquisitions? (Think YouTube.) Well it’s because they can monetize better and therefore pay more to get what they want.

10. The Raven SEO Tools rock. Now I can chuck the spreadsheets we’ve been using to track link campaigns, keywords, etc. I sat through a full demo of this new toolset with the co-founders and can say they have really nailed it. I signed up and am already using this toolset for managing my SEO team and clients.

Follow me on Twitter here (@doncampbell) for more tips from PubCon. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on these in the comments below.

So I’m at PubCon in Vegas this week. It’s the first time I’ve been to this event, and I’m really looking forward to it. (Here is an ongoing photo album I’m posting to Posterous.)

It’s also a great time to try out the new real time search results that Google has recently unveiled.

I’ve been using the Twitter #pubcon hashtag (essentially a Twitter search) to prep for the show and keep up with events, after-parties, friends, etc. for the coming week. So I thought hey, let’s give Google’s results a try too.

Right now it’s Monday, and I’ve heard about a couple of kickoff parties and meet-ups. I remember hearing about one at the Hilton, so let’s search for that on Twitter:

Twitter real time search results

Cool, I can see some friends here that are watching football at the Hilton, and about the “meet and greet” which is actually at the Las Vegas Convention Center in the Hilton wing. Also I see people arriving and checking in, and a party that I need to RSVP for at Planet Hollywood later tonight.

Very real-time.

Ok, now let’s try the same search in Google:

Google real time search results

Ok, Google also finds information about the “meet and greet” at the convention center. But many of the other results on the page are pretty dated.

In fact, I don’t get any sense of real-time with this search. I did find one thing I was looking for, but not much about which of my friends are arriving and hanging out and getting ready to meet up later.

The Twitter results were much more relevant for me in this case.

Hot topic, to be sure. This session had three presenters – Sarah Smith from Facebook, Will Scott from SearchInfluence and Aaron Irizarry.

Here are my brief notes from this session:

Local Facebook Advertising – Sarah Smith

Facebook is helping business target local customers with their advertising. I didn’t realize how much Facebook is doing in this regard. Note to self – dig into this; some great opportunities here.

• Just released radius targeting (so you don’t have to type in each city name to target)
• Target users on their birthdays – “free dinner for you on your birthday!” (This was just released)
• Target just your fans or people who signed up for a Facebook Event – you can even message people who are coming to your event!
• The new Facebook search allows you to search for things happening in real-time and filter down your results.

Because Facebook has the “social grid” for your fans and friends, you can target them in very creative ways (like the “free dinner on your birthday” example above.)

Twitter Local Tools – Will Scott

Will gave some excellent examples of using Twitter for local businesses. He is very proud of the fact that he ranks #1 for Twitter Naked (Inside joke – it’s because of his excellent write-up on Local Search News explaining how Naked Pizza is using Twitter for local marketing to great effect.)

Here are some of the tools he recommended:

• Twitter Search Advanced – http://search.twitter.com/advanced
• http://www.twellow.com/twellowhood/
• http://wefollow.com/twitter/neworleans (replace neworleans with your local city!)
• http://friendorfollow.com/ – you can export a spreadsheet to see all followers in a certain location or area
• http://my.peoplebrowsr.com/ – allows you to see the tweet stream of everybody within a certain radius
• You can use Su.Pr for tracking how many people click your links on Twitter (I use this)
• lo.ly by Michael Jensen is great too (Must check this out, I’ve met Michael and he’s a great guy)
• Don’t use HootSuite.

Tip for business owners to track their ads – tell us you found it on Twitter and we’ll give you 10% off, etc.

Will posted his slides here: Twitter for Local Business

Social Media – Aaron Irizarry

Aaron is an interesting guy that I have not met before. Check out his site and you’ll see that he’s got a lot of good ideas. He talked about how some of the services like Facebook and Twitter got popular quickly because the lowered the bar to entry.

Some examples he brought up:

• Twitter sign up form – promises to take you on an adventure!
• Look at how great Yahoo does inline validation as you go

He talked about learning how to use the social media tools in general instead of getting too dependent on one service. That way, when things change you can quickly adapt.

I was helping out with some things at the show so I didn’t capture the essence of his preso, but make sure to check out his website because he’s got some great articles and tips on design and social media there.

Also – here is a link to a video of his preso.

The next session was a panel discussion moderated by Greg Sterling, with panelists David Mihm, and Gib Olander from Localeze.

Local Search Ranking Factors Summary

First, David summarized the findings in his excellent Local Search Ranking Factors report. This was a report where David surveyed 27 experts in the local search space and asked them to rate the importance of a variety of factors in achieving local search rankings (I’m happy to say I was one of the contributors!)

He pulled out some of the most important factors rated by the group and summarized them. OK, here are a few tips I wrote down:

• Claim your Google LBC listing manually (vs having a service do it for you.)
• Ideally your address needs to be in the city you want to show up for results in
• Categorize your listing properly (you get 5 categories – use them all!)
• Use keywords in your business title if appropriate. But don’t over use them, and ideally they should be part of your real business name
• Add photos and videos to your listing
• Get citations. Search for blogs and directories with your city name. Get links from them.
• Volume of reviews. The more the better.
• On-page SEO is not that important for showing up in the 10-pack (however, in my view you also want to show up in the natural results just below the 10-pack too, and this does require on-page SEO.)
• Make sure the page that your Google Local profile points to is optimized for conversion. It should have a clear call to action with a phone number, etc.
• Measure your results – see this excellent series by Mike Belasco and Mary Bowling: Tracking Traffic from the 10-Pack.

He also mentioned Mike Blumenthals excellent How to get 100% on your Google Local Profile.

You’ll notice when reading Mike’s post, having 100% completion of your GL profile does not necessarily affect your rankings in the 10-pack.

You can read the entire Local Search Ranking Factors report here.

The Importance of Business Listings

Next up, Gib hammered home the importance of consistent business listings with respect to search results.

He brought up some stats and examples showing that most local search results are driven by business listings. Localeze helps you manage these business listings (they have 14m businesses in their database!)

Gib had a neat way of looking at the types of searches people do:
Recovery Searches – This is where people already know about your business and are searching for your name, address, phone number. Typically this represents about 45% of searches.

Discovery Searches – These are searches by people who are looking for a solution, and are typing keyword phrases into Google. The trend is for longer and longer keyword phrases. Typically represents about 55% of searches.

Given the above, Gib points out that your name, address and phone number comprise a “key” to your business and to reputation management for your business online. They need to be consistent across all of your listings for the best results.

The “Service Area” Problem

One question that came up was a common one – since having your business address in the city you want to show up for is one of the important search ranking factors, does it make sense to register Personal Mailboxes (PMBs) for other cities you want to rank for?

Gib calls this the “service area problem.” The search engines need to handle this with their directory listings so that companies can show up for the areas they service rather than just the town their address is in. Gib says this really is a search engine problem and that they are actively working on it. His recommendation is for the business owner to not force this themselves, it will only be a short term fix until Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc fix this issue.

Google Announces Whitelisting

Also, at the conference, Google confirmed a new method for uploading and verifying Google Profiles using a “whitelist” program. Read more about it here: Google Maps Bulk Upload Whitelist Program for LBC.

Great session guys!

I‘m at the first Local Search Summit in San Jose thanks to Steve Espinosa.

Steve Stukenborg from Google TV did a compelling keynote about how Google is entering into the TV advertising space. I didn’t realize that Google is moving into the TV advertising space in such a big way!

Big Network Partnerships

Through their partnerships with the Dish Network (14m viewers), and 12 other cable networks like MSNBC (95m viewers), Bloomberg and others they monitor 15 Billion channel changes per week. Add this to their online Google video network that includes sites like YouTube, TV Guide, AMC and Universal and they have some serious reach for their ads.

Through these partnerships, they know things like:

• How many people actually watched the commercial
• How many people watched it “timeshifted” (e.g. watched it later on a DVR)
• How many people skipped your ad!

This allows them to only charge advertisers for impressions delivered, which of course is very different from how TV advertising is done today. And they can geo-target ads too, which enables local advertising.

Democratizing TV Ad Placements

To place the ads Google is bringing the Google AdWords like interface to TV Advertising, and creating an online marketplace for them.

They overlay a TV program guide with their keyword tools. So you can search for the keywords you want, and they’ll return the shows that match them based on context so you can choose which ones you want to advertise on.

He said that he has seen decent TV ads produced for $500, and once you have the ad ready, it can be place in 1-3 days, which is revolutionary for TV advertising.

Measurement and Accountability

And they’ve even integrated TV ad stats with Google Analytics, and the Local Business Center Dashboard as well! So they can essentially close the loop and measure the effectiveness of your TV and Video ad placements; something they haven’t been able to do with audio or print advertising.

It’s interesting to imagine how much TV advertising could changed based on what Google is doing!

“WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO mechanics.” – Matt Cutts, Google Search Quality team

Matt’s presentation at WordCamp – Straight from Google: What you need to know was full of little nuggets about WordPress SEO.

He stared off with a simple and direct definition of Google PageRank:

Google PageRank = the number of people that link to you and how important those links are.

He then went on to describe some details of how Google ranks pages for the search results.

How does Google rank pages?
It looks for pages that are both relevant and reputable.

From the floor at WordCamp SF 2009

Being Relevant

Matt’s advice to making your blog relevant was to ask yourself these questions:

• What do I love?
• What am I really good at doing?
• What do I have to say?

If you don’t love what you write about, don’t write about it!

Being Reputable

Here are some tips on producing reputable content:

• Be interesting (e.g. Fake Steve Jobs)
• Apply Katamari philosophy – start small in a niche, roll up things into bigger things…
• Provide a useful service for your niche
• Do original research or reporting (Danny Sullivan – compared spam on Gmail, Yahoo. | Louis Gray – watched his referrers, strange user agents, blogged about it, called out some new bots..)
• Give great information (e.g. Lifehacker – High quality tutorials and guides)
• Find a creative niche (icanhascheeseburger, One Sentence, F@#$ My life, Penny Arcade, xkcd

SEO Tips from Google

Next, he gave some general SEO tips.

Keywords:

• Think about the keywords that users will type. Include them naturally in your posts
• ALT attributes are handy (3-4 relevant words)
• Don’t forget image search, videos, etc.
• Don’t stuff your content with keywords – just use natural language.
• Look for keyword opportunities using the Google Keyword Tool.

He gave an example of a site that was all about iPod car accessories. Their primary keyword phrase was popular in Google, with about 540K searches per month. But using the Google Keyword Tool, they found the keyword “itrip” was getting 224k searches per month but wasn’t anywhere on their page. Add that phrase!

PageRank is one of 200 things the Google algorithm looks for. Here are a few other things it looks at:

• Things in title tag
• Things in your URL
• H1 tags

WordPress SEO Tips

He wrapped up with some SEO tips specific for WordPress.

WordPress SEO recommendations:

• Use %postname% for the URLs
  Having the date is ok in the URL, but make sure some keywords are in your URL. Using %postname% includes your post title in the URL.

• Here’s a cool example of helping your post match multiple keywords. You can slightly vary the keywords in the title tag and URL of your post. For example:
  title tag = Changing the default printer on Linux and Firefox
  url = change-default-printer-linux-firefox

• For keywords in the URL – use dashes, better than underscores, but do NOT do no spaces!! Here’s an example:
  Good: blogname.com/experts_exchange/
  Better: blogname.com/experts-exchange/
  Not good: blogname.com/expertsexchange (oops!)

• Another quick tip: you can also include good keywords in your WordPress category names.

Here is a link to Matt’s presentation: Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

WWordCamp San Francisco on May 30, 2009 promises to be a fun and exciting event. I’m planning to be there both for WordCamp and the WordPress Developer Day on the 31st.

Wordcamp San Francisco

If you’re going, let me know – I’d like to meet you at the event!

This is the first SMX event I’ve attended. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area so it was nice that the event was held at the JW Marriott in San Francisco. The day started off on the right note – I found $12 parking right across the street, which is kind of amazing for downtown SF.

SMX Local & Mobile Keynote – Yahoo’s Frazier Miller

Greg Sterling and Chris Sherman welcomed everyone and things started off with the keynote by Frazier Miller, GM of Local Search at Yahoo. He proclaimed that Local Search is in a “perfect storm” based on the trends they are seeing at Yahoo. One stat that amazed me was this: 100 million users per month visit Yahoo with “local intent”. This is an amazing number, especially when you consider Google has in the high 60% of the searches on the Internet today. It all adds up to a lot of local searches. He also revealed some of the trends they are seeing for search queries – they are increasing in length (e.g. evolving from “coffee” to “coffee in san francisco” to “coffee in san francisco with dogs ok” – longer more descriptive searches.) He concluded with the opportunity areas he sees emerging in local search. He also used a new (to me) acronym that was kind of catchy – ROBO (research online buy offline) and discussed some stats and trends around that.  It was a very good and insightful keynote.

Ranking Tactics for Local Search Session

The next session that I attended was Ranking Tactics for Local Search. Wow, this was a fire hose of great info. All the panelists had their own unique, super informative presentation – a nice way to do a panel, by the way – and shared their inside tips and tricks. They covered everything from citations in local listings to using video and YouTube to improve rankings to online reviews and backed these up with real world examples. This was an excellent group and session.

Monetizing Local and Mobile – Who is Making Money? Session

In the afternoon, Local and Mobile – Who is Making Money was another information packed session, where the panelists followed the same format. Some more interesting techniques and stats, like what the likely local search ranking factors are, the percentage of searches that use ZIP code, neighborhood terms and city names, some details about how you need to treat mobile searches differently, and a staggering statistic about the differences in cost per lead and cost per customer between organic search, PPC, and print Yellow Pages ($580 per customer in some cases!)

More Coverage of SMX Local & Mobile

Andrew Shotland has more great coverage at LocalSEOGuide.

Also, Michael Jensen’s LiveTwitting tool tracked some nice coverage of the conference too.

And Greg Sterling did a nice summary of the keynote here.

The Wrap Up

During the breaks I met so many extremely professional and fun people, including Michael Jensen, David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal, Greg Sterling, Will Scott, Steve Espinosa, Andrew Shotland, Dan Hobin, and many other local search experts. Most of these folks I’ve only known via blogs and online and it was so great to meet them in person!

My only regret was that I could only attend Thursday. I really wanted to see Mike Blumenthal’s presentation, and also missed Mary Bowling’s presentation which I heard was great. And based on the sessions I did attend I’m sure there were many other great ones that I missed.

I’ve been to probably 30+ conferences while at Microsoft and Interwoven, and presented at many of them. This was one of the best – serious content delivered by experts in their field, and it was small enough that you could really get to know the people there.

Overall, I learned a TON of new practices and techniques that I’ll be able to put to work right away for my customers. I met many very cool people. And I’ll be back next year for more!