I recently participated in a case study with Google on their Conversion Optimizer tool in Adwords. The case study was published, and there have been a fair number of associated articles that link back to the Adwords blog article, which quotes part of the discussion. At this date, fifteen links now go to the post, including an article at WebProNews, and it has a PR of 4. Pretty cool stuff. Read the various articles here:

Conversion Optimizer – Google Adwords Blog

Using Google’s Conversion Optimizer – WebProNews

Back in early June I went to the SMX Advanced meeting in Seattle (see several live-blog posts from that event). During a session break, I went to the show floor and was going from booth to booth. At the Google booth, Courtney was talking to several visitors about the value of the conversion optimizer. I had recently set up a number of campaigns and had seen some great improvements in visibility, conversion rates and lowered cost per conversion. Although a bit rude, I jumped into the conversation and shared my experience.  Courtney asked for my business card, and reached out to me right after the show to start working on the study.

Here are some things I learned from participating:

1. Don’t be shy. If you have a good experience with a company’s product, tell them. Also, tell them you would be happy to participate in a case study.
2. Ask for what you want. I wanted to get exposure for PRWeb’s services – not just the results that I got from using their tool. I really wanted a solid description of our services included, and they provided that as background to the case study story. I also wanted a link from Google. So bad I could taste it. Instead of just having them link our URL to our domain, I specifically asked for an in-content link with my target keywords, pointing to the URL I wanted. Kaching! DONE!
3. Follow up and keep the ball rolling. I have been on the other end of case studies – and it’s easy to get distracted with day-to-day work. If you want the visibility that a good case study can provide, be persistent (and friendly) with the company providing it.
4. Be picky. There are other case studies I have not participated in. Why? Well, either it would show the pale under-belly of what I am doing, it would not bring value, or there are political reasons not to participate.
5. Be in the know. If you work for a larger company, do  your research – there may be someone else in the organization who is working with a vendor who might feature your company. Reach out to your colleagues and see what opportunities there are. Also, be certain to help with guiding inbound linking and company positioning so that you do get the exposure value that you want.

Although it can be a fair amount of work to participate in case studies, they can be a great solution for both getting visibility and providing value to a valued vendor. And if you are looking for inbound links – a great way to get those, too!

For those of you responsible for getting your sitemaps verified in different engines, don’t forget about Bing! I’ve just completed submitting one sitemap to Bing, and am waiting for our technical team to upload the verification file so that I can see the other features of their Webmaster Center.

One frustration I have already encountered is that you can only verify one sitemap per site. “Why would you need more?,” you may ask… Well, PRWeb has several – each for different functions. In addition to our news-based sitemap, we also have standard and archival sitemaps. Google Webmaster Tools handles this without a hiccough, but Bing doesn’t. Given the choice, I submitted our news sitemap, since it’s important for our customers to get visibility for their releases.

I will update this post when the validation file is posted and share my thoughts on Bing’s webmaster tools.

Update: The validation file is posted, and I have accessed further tools in Bing Webmaster Center.  Here are some observations:

• There are a number of subdomains from my primary domains. In listing the “top pages” from my site, it pulls several subdomain index pages. In my world subdomains are different sites. They should provide an option to select that.
• They provide a domain score for my site as well as sites taht link in. They are shown graphically as five green squares. Is five good? Bad? Can’t tell – they have no information in help or in mouseover to explain what the scale is.
• In the top navigation, they have a link to “Crawl Issues,” and a drop down that takes you to individual segments for each one (similar to Google, but with a drop down instead of links). Problem: you have to leaf through each option because it doesn’t give you a summary to know what category of problems your site might have
• One of the pull-down options is “Blocked by REP” – ok, that is Bing-ese for “robots.txt.” If you are going to use jargon, keep to industry standard jargon please.  On a side note, we block many thousands of pages with our robots.txt files. Please to explain why there are none listed here?
• Backlinks… This page shows the total number of backlinks and the top 20 links. You can download the top 1,000, but after that you are on your own for backlink information. Yahoo has Bing beat in this area.
• Outbound links… same thing as backlinks. This lists the top 20 (how do they come up with those, anyway??), and you can download up to 1,000.
• Keyword Tool – this is useless. It doesn’t tell you where you might appear for specific keywords. What it does is tell you how particular pages on your site “rate” for a keyword phrase. Um… I already know that.
• Sitemaps tab – this tab lists the one sitemap that you can submit. It also gives instructions on submitting a sitemap directly, but doesn’t really explain what that accomplishes (do results show up in your Webmaster Center account?)

Overall, it’s a useful tool however limited. The interface is definitely clean and easy to navigate. I’ll be interested to see if we get better visibility in the Bing news area now…

NOTE: Some of the answers here are tongue-in-cheek. I will attempt to note where this is the case.

Greg Boser, Bruce Clay, Vanessa Fox, Todd Friesen, Rae Offman, Stephan SPencer, Brett Tabke

Q: Do EDU links continue to have a lot of link juice to them?

In short, .edu links are still quite valuable.  For instance, student news paper links, alumni news paper links and others, do pass good value.  THere is some trustability from links that come from EDU sites. THere are some loopholes, but Google has figured out what these are. If there is technical content that would be appropriate in context, then it is appropriate.

Q: How do I optimize “Silverlight” for SEO?

(Tongue-in-cheek) Redirect conditionally to show HTML to Google, but users see Silver Light. (this can be considered spam).

Right now, Silverlight is not very searchable. There is a whitepaper on MSDN about how to make Silver Light more searchable.

Q: Based on Matt Cutts comments about how nofollow links were going to be less effective at controlling the spiders, what should we do about sites that have used this technique for link-sculpting?

Right now, there is no clear direction with what’s going on. If it has been used in the past, it may not work as well, but that isn’t a reason to change the site structure now if it has been using it for a while. Matt Cutts will write a blog post about this shortly. If you use no follows to help the bots crawl efficiently, then that’s cool. Alternately, use iframes to contain your links with content of iframes having a no follow, this will keep the links out of the range of the spiders.

Best to combine rel= nofollow with ROBOTS meta tag with noindex. This way, you can manage which pages the search engines see and index, and can increase visibility of those good pages. If you sculpt the site as a whole, then it will keep the right pages visible. Ideally, if you set up a disallow for a directory, ALSO use a meta no index on the individual pages within that subdirectory.

Q: When the Vince update happened in February, large brands started showing up more frequently in search results. Does this mean that you have to be a big brand to show up?

There is a lot of association between the searches for your brand and your domain name, which means that those sites will likely come up more often. Therefore, if someone is searching for a generic phrase that appears on a big brand website, the brand website is equated with those generic terms, even if it isn’t optimized for those terms. Although there are positioning moves showing big brands higher, if you do good SEO, then you will not lose positioning from page one.

Smaller sites will continue to have more challenges in getting positioning than in bigger brands or longer-term sites. However, Google is trying to provide the most relevant results. Sometimes, the brand is the most relevant result, whether or not their sites are done well from an SEO standpoint. Big brands are more successful in the head terms, but they are not as successful at mid- and long-tail terms. That is the area of opportunity for newer sites or ones with lesser-known brands.

Many big brands concentrate their efforts offline rather than online. That means that there is great opportunity with targeted phrases if done right.

Q: In the REI site, most sales go on in the head terms, however most traffic go to long tail. What can we do?

The best way to affect this is to understand where people are breaking down in the purchase process, and optimizing the user experience. Some of the keywords may be just informational searches rather than commercial intent queries.  Look at what is going on when someone comes to the page – if they are looking for a particular product and then get to a category page, they may not do any further searching to get to the product. Try to get them directly to the product page. If it is a research intent, then provide content that meets their need.

Alternately, (although this is not a good idea), move people to the right page based on browser or referer URL to go to the specific page that will help them. This kind of conditional redirect can be good for the user, but can be seen as a spamming technique. However, you can show an alternate version of a webpage for a short term to test whether there is an improvement in conversion, you should be OK from an SEO standpoint.

Stephen Spencer: rule of thumb – if you are willing to show and explain what you are doing to a Google engineer and can explain why, then you are in pretty good shape. If you are uncomfortable to explain it, then you might be a spammer.

One way to do identify what type of intent is behind a search phrase is to look at the referral string, etc., to see what the search phrase is and what the visitors do once on the site. After you assess intent, you can do testing on appropriate segments of the site to improve conversion. Also, look at which pages are not performing well [not appearing in search results]. Identify ways to give better visibility to them through linking (internal and external) to improve their visibility and performance in natural search. Could do template optimizations, could do internal linking work, etc.

Q: We’ve had conflicting reviews on XML site maps – some say that they are great, and others say that they really hurt. Which is true?

Vanessa Fox – XML sitemaps do not help with ranking. What they DO help with is discovery – so if you want Google to see each of those pages without having to go through a crawl, then they help. Should all pages be shown in the sitemap? Short story – set up the right pages in the XML sitemap and block out the ones you don’t want to be indexed. Also, Google uses XML sitemaps as a canonicalization signal.

Google Webmaster Tools offers two types of crawler errors – first is those on the site, second in the sitemap. If there are ones that they cannot read in the sitemap, then there may be a parsing error. Best, just submit those pages you want indexed, keep the ones out that you don’t want indexed.

Q: Am rebranding a blog. Currently, the blog is in a subdomain, but want to move it to a new domain. What’s the best approach?

Basically, set up the content on the new site, then do page-by-page 301 redirect if a global redirect will not work. Best, though, look at which pages are driving traffic, and redirect just those. If the page names are going to be the same, except for the domain, then just do a global rewrite / 301 that directs to the new site and pages. If redirecting is not an option, then the best way to find the redirects that need to be implemented is to download all of the URLs that have external links, and then redirect all of those to the new site, individually.

Good hint: once the 301 redirects are in place, resubmit the old sitemap so that Google finds the new site more quickly.

Q: How many people think that they can get good ranking with quality content?

Most said yes, when posed to the audience.

However, you can have good content, and no links, then you are not going to get found. SEO is three pillars: content, links and architecture. Need to have quality content, but you also need good set up and good inbound links. In an ideal world, you will get good links if you have good content.  Sometimes, from a user perspective, content may be good, but are mashups and are not algorithmically valuable. In the Big Daddy launch, Google began giving better value to review pages with user generated content. The challenge is that those reviews are not necessarily good content for the user – and users do not convert on those pages. This leaves a disconnect between what is algorithmically good content and what is good content for users.

If you are doing link bait, sometimes you need to have a fair amount of history in your blog, just to show legitimacy of the blog – whether it is good quality or just standard content.

Q: What is the most important or best practice for SEO?

Top answers were title tags and anchor text on inbound links. Also, silo the hell out of it. From Vanessa Fox: On page, quality content and title tags.

Q: What is a good resource for finding architecture recommendations?

Google has a PDF SEO 101 – for how to build sites. Check out Google for “Google SEO guide”. Also look for a Powerpoint on NetConcepts about SEO site architecture.

Lightening round….

Q: Should we narc on people who are buying links?

Few people said that they would tell on people who bought links, but a few said that they wouldn’t do that.

Todd Friesen – doesn’t like to report paid links. Usually, he just tells the client where to report paid links.

Greg Boser – doesn’t usually report because nothing usually happens.

Stephan Spencer – sometimes competitor is not being helped by paid links. It may be something else that is giving them a better boost to their site. Therefore, even if they do lose the value of paid links, they will still not necessarily lose their higher position.

Q: What are the new big SEO strategies for 2009?

Vanessa Fox – looking at the data and trying to figure out who the people are who are searching for your products, what they want and building a better experience.

Todd Friesen – regular SEO is still important. On page, content, link building. But the data is a great thing.

Greg Boser – interesting things going on in local SEO.

Rae Hoffman – Google is making it easier to fix sites and getting bad URLs out of the index. Would be great to have a global 301 and easy way to get 404 out of the index.

Brett Tabke – New search tools that include searches of Twitter URLs, what’s going on with Bing and other new real-time search.

Danny Sullivan – search analytics is really interesting. How to do more with the traffic that is arriving at the site.

Stephan Spencer – understanding what the value is for a target keyword before you actually optimize for it and get traffic. There are some great new tools to measure this.

Bruce Clay – being able to optimize against a bunch of different types of content that can be used like images, video and audio.

Todd Friesen – microformats and the value that those will bring to search optimization.