If you are like most small businesses, the success of your company is dependent on attracting local customers, whether they are in your region, state, county or even town. While it’s great to see that your website is pulling in visitors from around the country and maybe even around the world, you don’t want to waste the time or resources worrying about leads and inquiries that you can’t possibly follow up with. So, how do you ensure you are doing everything in your power to pull in those valuable visitors from across town? Check out this list:

1. Optimize your site for geographic-specific keywords.

Depending on the competitiveness of your geographic region and industry, this is a quick and easy way for you to start ranking for various keywords that local shoppers are using to search in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. To do this, make sure that the Page Title, URL, H1 tag and page content of your web pages include your geographic keyword phrase and that you are consistent across all elements. For example, check out this page, which illustrates geographic keyword optimization done right. By doing this, this company is more likely to pull in consumers in Newington, CT who are looking for replacement windows and siding. Remember, if you have multiple pages for each town/city you service, make sure they are different enough so the search engines don’t tag them as duplicate content!

2. Blog!

A blog is a great way to talk about your local services and commitment to your local market. Share case studies or success stories of work you’ve done in the past in each town, city or county. Customers love being in the spotlight, so use your blog as an opportunity to showcase them and highlight your great work. Remember to use the geographic location in your blog title and URL and promote your blog to generate inbound links!

3. Engage with local bloggers and city-specific websites.

When you engage with local bloggers from your area and share your knowledge and expertise, you begin to establish yourself as a great resource and expert in your industry. You’ll be getting your name and company in front of local readers and begin to develop relationships with influential bloggers who may be more likely to do feature stories about you in the future. While HubSpot doesn’t pull customers in from any one specific geographic location like your business may, we frequently engage in conversations on the Boston Globe’s website, Boston.com, as well as with local technology and business bloggers, Mass High Tech and the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX). See what’s in your local area, and start interacting.

4. Sign up for accounts on ratings & review sites.

As we have seen, consumers are more and more likely to start their research process online for a local vendor, handyman, car mechanic, doctor or marketing professional. Armed with that knowledge, you need to make sure your business is listed on the major websites that provide ratings and reviews for various services. Here are a few to check out:

• Google Local (Free)

Google requires you to register your business online, then verifies that you are the owner by either calling you or sending some snail mail to your address. Once you are registered, you benefit by having the opportunity to appear in Google’s Local Business Results for a given search term. Your ranking inside the Local Listings is based on Google’s ranking algorithm that awards well-optimized pages and inbound links to your website from other websites.

• Yelp (Free)

Yelp has been around for several years now and is the gold standard for getting information on local restaurants, shopping locations and entertainment venues. However, now they’re starting to see a wider variety of businesses listing their companies on their site, including those in real estate, event planning, financial services and medical service providers. This is a great place to encourage your happy customers to leave some feedback. If you receive negative feedback, it’s a good chance to engage with that consumer and turn their experience around with a heartfelt note or follow up. Read more about how to supercharge your business’ presence on Yelp.

• Angie’s List (Free for Companies, Paid for Consumers): 

Angie’s List is an aggregator of sorts that pulls in reviews of local businesses and contractors. Angie’s List attempts to circumvent fake reviews by charging consumers a monthly fee in order to browse their listings and review businesses. Check it out and see if it’s right for your business.

Now get out there and start rocking local search!

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Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimised site can lead to long term traffic success. Here are some of my tips for regular checks you should be doing to stay on top of your website to maximise your search engine performance.

General Error Checking

General errors can crop up continually with any website and left unchecked, their volume could spiral out of control. Working on improving and resolving large numbers of 404 and timeout errors on your site can help search engines minimise the bandwidth used to completely crawl your site. It’s arguable that minimising crawl errors and general accessibility issues can help get new and updated content into search engine indexes more quickly and often, a good thing for SEO!

If you want to get smart with error handling and other crawl issues, start by getting a Google Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at “Crawl errors” found via the “diagnostics” panel after you’ve verified your site:

Paying particular attention to the “Not found” and “Timed out” reports, it’s wise to test each error with a http header checker online or using a Firefox plug-in such as Live Http Headers or Http Fox. I find that drilling down into the first 100 or so errors, you tend to find a common pattern with many that lead to only a few fixes being required. I like to focus on 404 error pages that have external links first to get maximum SEO value from legacy links.

It’s important to note that sometimes, there’s more to an error report than just the URL listed in the console. I’ve found issues such as multiple redirects ending in a 404 error which is important information to brief your developers, potentially saving them a lot of diagnostics time.

As a side note, be careful how you interpret the “Restricted by robots.txt” reports. Sometimes, those URL’s aren’t directly blocked by robots.txt at all! If you’ve been scratching your head about the URLs in the report, run the http header check. Often, a URL listed in this report is part of a chain of redirects that ends or contains a URL that is blocked by robots.txt.

For extra insight, you should try the IIS SEO Toolkit or running the classic Xenu’s Link Sleuth Crawl both of which can reveal a number of additional problems. Tom wrote a nice article on Xenu and amongst his tips, setting the options to “Treat redirections as errors” is one of my favourites. As well as internal crawl error checking, a site of any size should try to avoid redirects via internal links. From time to time, using Fetch as Googlebot inside Webmaster tools or browsing your site with JavaScript and CSS disabled using Web Developer Toolbar with your user agent set to Googlebot can also reveal hidden problems.

Linking Out to 404 Errors?

Linking out to expired external URLs isn’t great for user experience, and implies perhaps that as a resource, your site is getting out of date. Consider checking your outbound external links for errors by using the “Check external links” setting in Xenu.

Canonicalisation

You spent time and effort specifying rules for canonicalized URLs across your site, but when was the last time you checked the rules you painstakingly devised are still in place? Thanks to the ever evolving nature of our websites, things change. Redirect rules can be left out of updated site releases and your canonicalization is back to square one. You should always be working towards reducing internal duplicate content as a best practice gesture, and without solely relying on the rel=”canonical” attribute.

Checking the following can quickly reveal if you could have a problem:

• www or non www redirects (choose either, but always use a 301)
• trailing slash (choose to leave out like SEOmoz, or in, like SEOgadget but don’t allow both)
• Case redirects – a 301 redirect to all lower case URLs can solve a lot of headaches or title case redirects if you want to capitalise place names like some travel sites do

“Spot checks” of Front End Code, Missing Page Titles and Duplicate Meta

Just every now and again, it’s nice to take another look at your own code. Even if you don’t find a problem that needs fixing, you might find inspiration to make an enhancement, test a new approach or bring your site up to date with SEO best practice.

One quick check I find useful is under “Diagnostics” > “HTML suggestions” in Webmaster tools:

Duplicated title tags or meta descriptions or both can reveal problems with your dynamic page templates, missed opportunities or canonicalization issues.

Site Indexation

Site indexation, or the number of pages that receive one visit or more from a search engine in a given period of time, is a powerful metric to quickly assess how many pages on your site are generating traffic.

Aside from the obvious merit in tracking site indexation over time as an SEO KPI, the metric can also reveal unintended indexing issues like leaked tracking or exit URLs on affiliate sites or huge amounts of indexed duplicate content. If the number of pages Google claims to have indexed on your site is vastly different to the site indexation numbers you’re seeing through analytics, you may have found a new problem to solve.

Indexed Development / Staging Servers

Is your staging or development server accessible from outside your office IP range? It might be worth checking that none of your development pages are cached by the major search engines. There’s nothing worse than discovering a ranking development server URL (it does happen!) with dummy products and prices in the database. You just know that customer is going to have a bad time on a development server! If you discover an issue, talk to your development team about restricting access via IP to the staging site or consider redirecting search engine bots to the correct version of your site.

Significant / Recent Changes to Server Performance

Google have put a lot of effort into helping webmasters identify site speed issues and it could make a lot of sense to keep a regular check on your performance if you’re not doing so already. There are a few useful tools out there to help you speed up your site, starting with Google’s “Site performance” reported located under “Labs” in Webmaster tools:

It’s good to check out the “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)” report found under “Diagnostics > Crawl stats” in Webmaster tools, too:

Tackling search engine accessibility issues like errors and canonicalization problems is a really important part of your SEO routine. It’s also a favourite subject of mine! What checks do you carry out regularly to manage the performance of your website? Do you have your own routine? If you manage a large site, or many large sites, what "industrial strength" tools or automated processes do you gain the most insight from?

This is a post by Richard Baxter, Founder and SEO Consultant at SEOgadget.co.uk – a niche UK SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz.

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Marketers are shifting their budgets away from traditional marketing channels and toward digital marketing channels. Econsultancy, in association with ExactTarget, surveyed more than 265 B2B marketers — in companies of all sizes — asking if they plan to spend more or less of their marketing budgets in 2010 on 14 different marketing tactics. While 46% of companies plan to increase their overall marketing budgets in 2010, 66% will increase their investments in digital marketing.

Digital channels make up the top 5 tactics in which marketers are investing:

1.       Off-site Social Media – 65%

2.       Search Engine Optimization – 64%

3.       On-site Social Media – 58%

4.       Email (acquisition) – 56%

5.       Email (retention) – 53%

All of these tactics work together to help you get found and draw prospects to you.

Leaving Traditional Marketing Behind:

We also see a trend in moving away from the traditional “push” marketing channels. The top 5 places marketers are looking to cut budgets:

1.       Radio – 50% decrease

2.       Television – 44% decrease

3.       Newspapers / magazines – 44% decrease

4.       Direct Mail – 30% decrease

5.       Telemarketing – 22% decrease

Marketers are getting smart and going where their buyers are — online.  So where are you going to spend your precious marketing dollars? Pulling buyers to you by using inbound marketing or pushing your message out through traditional channels?

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WARNING: Get ready to read with this one. There aren’t a ton of fun graphics or quick bullet points, but I do promise that if you read through, you’ll feel much more knowledgable about the topic, and likely get more value from organizing, speaking or attending an event.

Over the past 6 years, I’ve attended nearly 100 conferences on search, online marketing, startups and technology. I’ve given presentations or sat on panels at nearly all of them. I’ve organized our own SEOmoz seminars here in Seattle and in London, built panels for a variety of other conference series and sat in the audience for many hundreds of sessions. Oddly, in the past 3 months, I’ve had more discussions about the conference format and the optimization of the experience than I can ever recall in previous years.

I don’t know whether it’s me thinking about the problem more or just stumbling into conversations that center around conference strategy and business models, but like Twitter and conversion rate optimization, it’s been finding its way into the nooks and crannies of every lunch, dinner, casual coffee or post-session beer.

Wow… Even Google Trends says this is a hot topic.

I consider the organizers of conferences like SMX, SES, Pubcon & many overseas events (RIMC, SMX Sydney, the SMX/SES shows in the UK & Europe, etc.) to be both good friends and good people. This blog post is in no way meant to denigrate or cast aspersions at their intents or achievements (which have been remarkable – SEO itself has gained tremendous legitimacy because of their efforts). Quite the opposite – it’s meant to highlight some of the reasons why things we, as conference goers and speakers, complain about continue and why it’s hard to change the status quo. I’m also going to try putting forward some ideas at the end of the post that I have seen work well and would love to see more of (or more experimentation with) in the future.

Competing Incentives

On one side, we have conference & event organizers. They have businesses to maintain, revenue and profits to grow and pressures from owners/investors/boards to meet certain goals. They have to please advertisers

On the other, we have attendees (and, to a lesser extent, speakers) who want to learn, have an enjoyable experience and get personal and professional value from the event(s). Most attendees are not paying themselves – this is a business expense they need to justify and hence, managers and C-level types hold the pursestrings.

In the subsections below, I’ll try to walk through the competing incentives and goals of these two parties and why they make the conference experience so tough to perfect.

Venues, Locations & Timing

This is one of the easiest dichotomies to describe. In one corner, we have the organizers, who are optimizing on cost. In the other, we’ve got attendees, who want the best experience (particularly if they’re traveling). Not surprisingly, every organizer wants to hold their event at the best possible time in the most optimal location. That means, at least here in the US, winter events in warm weather climates like southern California, Las Vegas, Florida and Hawaii, summer events in mild climates like the Pacific Northwest or the Bay Area and events in extreme climates like the Northeast and Midwest in Fall/Spring.

Economics dictates that supply for these optimal locations at optimal times will be low because demand is high. This also means that prices will rise accordingly. Organizers know it’s hard to pass those costs on to attendees. Once a conference’s price has been set for a few years, fluctuating dramatically is challenging.

What many may not realize is some of the additional, behind-the-scenes inputs. For example, conference venues like to book 12-18 months in advance (sometimes more for very large/expensive/high demand events/locations). They require down payments and guarantees, since re-booking a space if an event cancels 3 or even 6 months ahead often proves impossible. In addition, advertisers, speakers, exhbitors and conference goers themselves get accustomed to certain events at certain times in specific places. Changing an established event always carries risk.

Next time you wonder why SES has a show in Chicago in December and New York in March or why RIMC hits Reykjavik in winter, remember that costs, momentum and contracts make those very hard things to change. If we were all willing to fly to Anchorage in January, you can bet the costs would be rock bottom.

Attendance Level

This one isn’t quite as clear cut. For some attendees, an intimate, small show experience is ideal. You get one-on-one time with the speakers, more opportunity for Q+A, a less stressful environment and, typically, easier times with everything from getting good food to booking hotels to scheduling meetings with other conference-goers/speakers. However…

The incentives are frequently the reverse for both speakers (who want large crowds so they can justify the travel expense and preparation time) and for organizers (who have a tough time charging enough to a small group to make up for what a larger base could bring). Organizers also want to signal that their events is "a big deal" and high attendance numbers is one of the best ways to do this.

So why not go for huge venues and trim the costs down to minimal levels I hear you ask? Good question.

The obvious answer is profit margins, but it’s not the whole reason. Advertisers, sponsors, exhbitors and even speakers want to be in front of "qualified" audiences. An audience of web marketers paying $100 to go to a show is hard to pitch as a compelling and potentially lucrative base to these groups. However, if tickets are $1,800 and 5,000 people show up, every speaker and sponsor in the world wants to make their voice heard and presence known to that group. Even the big industry players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. will be willing to lose their top notch talent for a week to get in front of the audience, mingle with the crowd and network with the best and brightest.

Some attendees are also more excited by large events. They provide greater opportunities to meet a high quantity of peers and help lend credibility to the value and importance of the event. They also tend to draw big name speakers and presenters, which means a perception of greater value from the learning aspects of the conference.

Of course, this is all balanced by the availability and affordability of venues. SMX Advanced happens in Seattle and for each of the past 2 years, it’s been completely sold out. The organizers could go to a larger facility, but Seattle doesn’t have many that support in excess of 2,000 people without dramatically raising the costs (and likely lowering quality). It can also be a positive signal to consistently sell out a show – every SEOmoz seminar we’ve thrown has sold out weeks before the event and this means more early bookings, greater consistency in attendance and revenue and an easier time planning (to be fair, SEOmoz’s seminars are a small fraction of the size – 150-250 attendees – of large conferences like Pubcon, SES, SMX or even OMS).

Speakers

Things get more contentious and thorny around the issue of speakers. Attendees and organizers alike can agree that in a perfect world, only speakers who consistently earn top ratings and attract large followings would present. Sadly, in virtually every industry, these individuals comprise only a handful of players. Google’s Matt Cutts and Avinash Kaushik are likely among them as is Danny Sullivan of Third Door and Seth Godin. However, I’m hard pressed to name many more that would attract paying audiences simply with their presence.

There’s also a large group of phenomenal second-tier speakers like Greg Boser, Dave Naylor, Vanessa Fox, Jessica Bowman, Marshall Simmonds and the like who are excellent presenters, incredibly valuable to the audience, and, together with other positive signals, are likely to draw in paying attendees. This is where the trouble starts, though. These individuals didn’t necessarily start out as remarkable presenters. In fact, I’ve personally seen speakers I’d consider "rock stars" today many years back and the same couldn’t always be said of them. It takes a trial-and-error, weeding-out process to determine who’s going to be great, and that means you need to try out new names and faces as an organizer.

Finally, you’ve got groups of new or nearly-new speakers, some of whom may be diamonds in the rough and others who may be complete duds. Organizers have little information to base this on other than their CV, a pitch form and possibly recommendations from previous events. Tragically, even great online writers/bloggers/personalities sometimes turn out to be less-than-amazing when placed in front of hot lights, a restless audience and 15 minutes of Powerpoint.

Organizers complain to me all the time about the necessity of finding the new stars, getting those diamonds-in-the-rough enough experience to shine and providing a diversity of speakers. Many technology conferences face the constant problem of gender imbalance and I’m certainly not immune to it. Last year, between Seattle and London events SEOmoz & Distilled had less than 15% women give talks - a shameful number, but one that can be hard to overcome.

Everyone can agree that we need more truly great speakers and fewer mediocre/poor ones. But when you’re trying to discover new talent, mature up-and-coming stars AND bring as many speakers into the event as possible (see the next section),  

Session Formats

This might be the toughest problem of all. More speakers = more attendees. And yes, that often holds true for even new speakers and those of low-middling quality. The reason is that speakers frequently invite clients, partners and colleagues as well as promote the event on their sites, blogs and social media accounts. If you want your event to have thousands of attendees, get 100+ speakers and they’ll (hopefully) help spread the word for you.

The problem is the session formats this creates. In order to maximize numbers of speakers while fixing the event length, you move from solo presentations to panels with increasingly larger number of participants.

Some organizers argue that panels are a good thing and I’d agree in moderation. For something like an "Ask the Search Engines" panel, having a representative from both Bing & Google makes sense. For Q+A sessions in general, 3-4 panelists can help to spark discussion and even get into vigorous and valuable debates (at SMX West last week, my friend Roger Monti and I got into a nice tiff that I thinked seriously helped keep the audience on its toes – and yes, it was all in good fun and good humor).

However, when it comes to learning about an individual topic in a robust, in-depth fashion, not even conference organizers will argue that having a highly talented panel of 4 or 5 speakers give 10-14 minute slide decks can compare to a single 45-50 minute session with a single great speaker who can go both broad and deep (and then take questions). The highest rated panels (from my understanding and from direct experience with the ones I’ve seen) are always those where a remarkable presenter has the full time to dig into their subject matter. Three weeks ago I was at OMS San Diego where Dharmesh Shah spoke on Twitter and Tim Ash presented on Conversion Rate Optimization. The difference between that and a panel approach is night and day – there’s just no comparison.

But, as an oragnizer, if you optimize towards these high rated sessions and kill the panels, you lose speakers which costs you reach and buzz and, likely, attendees. Happy attendees might rave about the value of the session in their reviews, but no one has the incentive to fill the seats like a speaker (even a bad one). Solving this issue might be a pipe dream.

Session Topics

What about the topic choices themselves? I hear attendees constantly complain about certain topics going missing while others get too much coverage. Organizers, meanwhile, struggle with how to fit in esoteric, but likely fascinating topics against tried-and-true (and in-demand) popular sessions.

The best thing an organizer can do is to survey their audience ahead of time and plan/prepare from that feedback. But, this is much easier said than done. Organizers don’t necessarily know who’s going to be at a show with enough lead time to arrange speaker schedules and build a topic plan. It’s also very hard to get commitments from a large number of speakers with a shorter deadline and nearly impossible to nail down keynotes and big names without months of advance notice.

When Will Critchlow and I do the planning for the SEOmoz/Distilled seminars, we get to cheat in a lot of ways. First off, we have the email addresses of all the PRO and registered (free) members on SEOmoz, so we can survey to our heart’s content ahead of time (and do). Second, we actually optimize to speakers – since we largely reject the panel approach, we pool together a list of the speakers we’ve seen in the last 12 months that have wowed us and then ask them to give performances that speak to their strengths and experiences. Since we only need 10-15 speakers per event, we can personally invite a handful of top-notch folks each time.

Can a larger conference use these tactics? Almost certainly not. Their audiences aren’t nearly as nicely packaged ahead of time, and panels are critical to growing the number of speakers, providing the diversity, giving experience to the "diamonds-in-the-rough," etc. Conferences like Pubcon, SMX, SES and OMS would also almost certainly take a huge amount of heat if they stopped accepting pitches and simply relied on a smaller contingent of consistently excellent speakers. Advertisers, exhibitors and sponsorships would likely drop too (even though they’re technically not at all tied to the editorial programming side of the equation), and these are a massive source of revenue.

Amenities

As an attendee, we probably think that things like reliable wifi, better food and comfortable seating with tables and power outlets in session rooms makes a big difference. The problem is, these don’t tend to correlate with how we actually choose conferences to attend and/or return to.  I know organizers who’ve invested hugely in the attendee experience, only to see retention rates drop (despite the fewer numbers of tweeted/blogged complaints). When those dollars are re-invested in marketing the conference, drawing in bigger keynotes, or optimizing other aspects, the numbers get better even when cardboard sandwiches and grade-school chairs are employed.

We, as conference goers, vote with our wallets, and we apparently don’t care as much about the amenities as we make out to (personal note – please, conference organizers, don’t use this knowledge against us too much; I love comfy chairs, good food and great wifi).

Press Passes & Guest Passes

Speaking of thorny issues – little in the conference world raises as much public ire as this one. For nearly every event it makes good sense to give bloggers and journalists press passes. However, when a big, expensive, popular event is thrown, these can quickly gobble into profit margins with questionable returns.

The problems are myriad – bloggers don’t often deliver the extent or quality of coverage they promise and traditional journalists frequently make no promise of coverage at all (and then write nothing). Feeding and seating them alone can run into the hundreds of dollars per day (trust me, you don’t want to know what a trade venue will charge for a cup of coffee or a bag of Cheetos). And, as savvy organizers know, some (possibly even many or most) bloggers would pay to attend the event if their press pass request was rejected. You don’t want to anger this vocal minority, but you also can’t afford to be taken advantage of.

For sold out events, it gets even harder. Longtime "friends" and traditional receivers of press passes may need to be sacrificed to make room for paying attendees, especially if the event relies on those last 1-200 seats for the majority of the profit margin.

Organizers know they need to be careful to be generous, but discerning, or risk becoming known for "giving free access to anyone who can set up Wordpress." They also want to try to give newcomers to the blogging/coverage scene a chance to make an impact, while being mindful of abuse and sensitive to the dangers of angering influencers. It’s a tough tightrope to walk and one that press pass requesters should be more sensitive to (I’m speaking from personal experience on this one, and know that we certainly owe some apologies for past requests and perceived slights).

Optimizing the Conference Experience

Now that we’re through all the reasons events are so hard to get right, I’ll try to provide some recommendations for every participant in the process. This is personal opinion, and unlike SEO, it’s not based on thousands of hours of experience, but probably just a few hundred and my own observations. Still, I hope it’s valuable, or, at the least, worth considering.

Advice & Experiments for Organizers

•  If possible, try to shave panels down to more reasonable sizes. Both speakers and attendees will appreciate it, and
• Great networking events should be built into more conferences. Many attendees say that the most value they get is from the networking outside the sessions (which, to my mind means the sessions need help, but that’s another matter).
• This also speaks to the value of providing great areas to network during the event. Quiet areas with couches, tables, drinks and wifi can make for very happy conference goers (note: for some reason, putting these in/around the trade booths never seems to work very while, though perhaps I just haven’t seen an optimal configuration).
• Select speakers more carefully. Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s worthwhile. And consider optimizing topics to speakers rather than the other way around – if you know that a particular individual can give an amazing experience to attendees, block off 45 minutes, email and offer to pick up a flght and/or hotel. I’ve been consistently shocked by who will say yes (and then feel so guilty/thankful about having their expenses covered that they’ll put in twice the effort preparing and promoting) .
• Be harsh on returning speakers if their last presentation wasn’t up to standards. I understand having some new blood every time, but if someone under-delivered, you need to axe them, or make it clear that the next one needs to make the audience stand up and cheer.
• Likewise, bring back great speakers more often, but make them craft new content. In my experience, great speakers seem to do well no matter the topic (so long as they have some experience/relevance to it) far more so than experienced/talented professionals correlate with great presentations on those topic.
• Try playing with venues. OMS this year moved to a new location that was 10X better than their previous spot, and my understanding is that the cost was lower, too (SEMpdx’s Searchfest also had a new location in downtown Portland this year that was fantastic, though I don’t know the cost differential). When you find venues that will be accomodating, magic happens because your cost structure suddenly becomes less of a burden and more of an opportunity to do creative, interesting things attendees will remember.
• Big one – don’t let the room sizes dwarf the audience sizes. I was just at an event where the room could hold 1,500 people but only 200 were in the session. It feels to everyone – speakers, organizers, attendees -  like there’s no energy or excitement. In comparison, I was at an event a few weeks back where the room could only hold 150 and 170 squeezed in. The air felt electric and every presentation, question and tip felt alive. Optimize this one carefully because it makes a huge difference. 

Advice & Experiments for Attendees

• If you love an event, a speaker or a session, sing it from the rooftops. Tweet, blog, write reviews, tell friends and invite colleagues next time. So many of the incentive problems described above happen because as attendees, we don’t do the marketing or give the feedback we could and should.
• Don’t tolerate low quality speakers/presentations, but also don’t make it public. Tweeting nasty remarks about a speaker while they’re on a panel shouldn’t be any more acceptable than booing or throwing fruit. Make your voice heard to the organizers afterwards – it will have a real impact (and if it doesn’t, don’t come back).
• You get out what you put in. Come with an open mind, a stack of business cards, openness to new ideas and a slough of great questions. Introduce yourself, don’t be shy and make the most of networking opportunities; they often end up producing the most memorable value.
• Be the change you want to see – make sure to let organizers and speakers know what you liked and didn’t via email and feedback forms. This includes venue/amenities/location/timing. None of us are clairvoyant (though Google’s working on something, I hear).

Advice & Experiments for Budget Authorizers

• Give your employees freedom to choose their own events. Great people will choose wisely, and that’s who you want to keep anyway.
• Let them stretch their budgets and time – at SEOmoz, we fix number of dollars and let our people do the rest. If they want to spend it all on one big trip to a conference in Fiji, go for it. If they’d prefer to optimize for multiple events closer to home, that’s great, too. You’ll often find employees are much more accountable if they know their budget really belongs to them.
• Ask for an if it’s just internal docs or wikis or a 20 minute PPT during a brown bag lunch – from employees who attend events. It will force them to take some notes and provide some actionable value back to the rest of the company and it lets the employee be the star – the one who’s been somewhere and learned something no one else knows.

Advice & Experiments for Speakers

• Be empathetic – imagine yourself in the audience or better yet, remember yourself in the audience in the last session or at the last conference. What impressed you? Do that. What sucked? Avoid that.
• Go advanced – I have almost never been asked to go more basic at a search marketing event, no matter how adavnced my presentation or content gets. My takeaway is either that everything I do is way too beginner level or that audiences just love more "down-the-rabbit-hole" material. If you’re on the fence, lean advanced.
• Don’t pitch or present if you can’t kick butt. You owe it to the audience, to the organizers and, for goodness sake, to yourself, to do an amazing job every time you’re up speaking. If you’re not funny or charismatic, don’t sweat it – let the material do the talking.
• Fewer bullet points, less text, less time talking about each slide and less
• More images, more screenshots, more callouts (text boxes with arrows to important stuff on a slide/screenshot), more stories and more real life examples.
• Don’t ask for a business card to send someone a copy of your slide deck. Make it available online at a URL everyone can access. If your material is good enough, you’ll get plenty of warm leads.
• Prepare. I’m a busy guy – no, seriously, I mean really busy - and I still take hours putting together high quality decks for even small conferences and 12 minutes presentations in half-full rooms. If you don’t have the time to set aside and do great work on a presentation, you better either be incredibly naturally gifted on stage or have a team that makes great decks for you. If you can’t do any of these, don’t present.
• Remember you are why the event happens, you’re why everyone is there, and you have a massive responsibility to deliver something that will add value for the audience. Just one or two actionable tips can tilt the balance, but don’t settle for that. Do better than anyone would think possible and I promise the rewards wil be tremendous. This industry is still craving excellence from its presenters and you have that chance – don’t waste it.
• Experiment with taking questions in the middle of your talk, particularly if you’re going longer than 20 minutes (which, sadly, is quite rare). It brings a liveliness and level of engagement that’s tough to match with a purely "I’m going to talk at you" presentation.

Your Thoughts

I don’t mean to be forward, but I suspect a lot of organizers, speakers and attendees in the search marketing conference space will check out this post. Please, please share your thoughts and feedback below, with one caveat – we like to keep this blog TAGFEE, so no harsh insults or personal attacks. That’s what YouTube comments are for

p.s. I’m just back from Searchfest in Portland (which was a terrific event that continues to get better every year). I was originally asked to give a 20 minute presentation on SEOmoz’s toolset, but decided I couldn’t be quite that self promotional and created a deck that covers a wider range. I saw folks giving my co-presenter, Enquisite’s Richard Zwicky, a hard time over Twitter for talking all about Enquisite’s software, but in fact, that’s what we were asked to do and I was the one who went off-focus (so if anything, you should blame me). You can check out my slide deck here -  SEO Problems and the Tool to Solve Them. Hope you enjoy and sorry about the weird formatting; Scribd didn’t import PPTx very well this time.

p.p.s. Please excuse my lack of links to appropriate sites/pages/people and probably spelling errors (drove back from Portland tonight and still not over my sinus infection). Jen, if you have time early tomorrow, maybe you can help add those in?

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How do you attract a flash mob of 150+ people to your restaurant?  Offer the possibility of a Foursquare Swarm Badge, of course!

Last week, restaurant owner Joe Sorge attracted 161 Foursquare users at the same time to his burger joint in Milwaukee, AJ Bombers (pretty impressive considering there are approximately only 300-400 total Foursquare users in the area).  Even more impressive is the fact that the restaurant more than doubled its typical Sunday sales, with an increase of 110% that day.

So how did he do it?  If you haven’t heard, Foursquare is a location-based mobile app that has been growing in popularity. Using the service, people “check in” at locations and earn badges based on a variety of factors, including frequency of check-ins, etc.  In order to attract people to his restaurant to raise money for the Milwaukee Social Media Community to host an event at popular interactive conference South by Southwest (SXSW), Joe promoted the possibility of restaurant-goers earning the coveted Swarm Badge, which is awarded to users who check in at a location where over 50 other users are checked into at the same time. As a result, the restaurant raised over $500 toward the SXSW meetup.

In an interview with Joe, he explains that he came up with the idea when he realized how much of the restaurant’s fan base was getting into Foursquare.  He promoted the event primarily using Twitter, but also took advantage of Facebook fan connections as well.  As a result, AJ Bombers attracted well over the 50 people required to award the Swarm Badge, and restaurant-goers generated a ton of buzz about the meetup via their social networks.  Joe also created a video (below) and a Flickr set showcasing photos from the event.

Why Should Businesses Care?

This case study is a great example of business owners harnessing the power of social media sites and applications to attract customers.  It’s also testament to the growing power of location-based mobile applications.  Joe paid attention to his customers to learn more about them, discovered their growing interest in Foursquare, then did his research about how he could take advantage of the new trend.  The result was a carefully and successfully implemented promotion that afforded him new customers and additional buzz (and — you guessed it — the opportunity to create more content). 

The lesson here is simple: Using social media for business works.  Stay on top of and understand the latest trends, and most importantly — be creative!  Think about innovative ways you can use these applications to generate traffic to your website and/or your physical store. 

Mobile and location-based applications continue to grow in popularity.  Are you thinking about how you can use them to your advantage?

Already a Foursquare user? Measure your Foursquare mojo with our new Foursquare Grader tool!

Live Webinar: How To Monitor Your Social Media Presence In 10 Minutes A Day

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Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics – all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing.

The post includes real screen shots from Google Analytics (click any of them to enlarge) but the sites and data have been anonymized.

Target Your Target Terms

Remember that post about building a page with perfect keyword targeting? SEOmoz wasn’t kidding around.

A website that sells homewares had issues with site structure and on-page targeting. Their category level pages were at subdomains such as

• http://kitchenequipment.sitename.com

or

• http://livingrooms.sitename.com

whilst each sub-category was back on the main subdomain at:

• www.sitename.com/find_product2.asp?url1=living+room&url2=rugs+and+carpets

Category and sub-category pages had a distinct lack of semantic HTML or term targeting.

Getting appropriate H1 tags onto each page was a quick job, improving title tag structure took a bit longer, clean & friendly URLs and internal links with appropriate anchor text were also added.

The site saw ranking improvements across the board, which brought new traffic through head, mid and long tail terms. Can you guess when the changes were made?

Getting sorted in Google Local

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of ranking factors for Local Search, dead simple tactics, etc, it’s important to get the basics right. A large chain of restaurants created a ‘bulk upload’ file with the correct data for each one of their locations. After uploading the file, they applied for it to be reviewed and ‘whitelisted’. Local data that’s been uploaded by the business owner and whitelisted is treated as authoritatively as locations that have been manually verified by postcard.

Despite various issues (Google’s best practice guidelines still aren’t quite the best solution in some cases) the traffic generated by visibility in Local Search has been significant and valuable. (The uploads were verified in late November when the traffic begins its steady rise.)

Architecture of Change

A current affairs magazine wanted to get more from their website. Because of falling advertising revenue, the publication was at risk of being closed down. They’d seen some growth from SEO already, but wanted to prove that the website had greater value.

Although the site had a good brand and some great content, it suffered from similar problems to many news-type websites, including badly archived content, duplicate issues and a CMS that hampered keyword targeting or promoting individual articles. Recommendations were made to improve the site’s architecture and migrate to the new structure.

The effect of the changes was immediate growth which took the organic traffic to 257% in three months. A month later, the magazine’s owner explained that the falling revenue from print advertising meant that they couldn’t continue to lose money publishing the mag, and closed it down.

Hook, Line, Sinker

An office cleaning company wanted to improve the profile of their site through SEO. Amongst other tactics, a member of staff spent a day writing a ‘linkbait’ post to publish on their blog. This generated huge amounts of traffic from social media sites (dwarfing their regular daily visitors) and was subsequently linked to from dozens of sites. This post, along with other content published on the site to attract links, helped the site grow in strength and authority, and it now ranks position 3 for ‘office cleaning’ in their country.

Paid In Full

This is SEOmoz, but I’d like to share a graph from a PPC colleague working on a site that sells scooters. They were initially bidding on very broad terms (scooter, scooters, buy a scooter, etc) but the campaign was adjusted to target more long tail terms, including descriptions, specifications, etc.

Over a period of around six weeks, the cost per click was reduced by 30% and the more targeted traffic converted increasingly well – this allowed the site owners to increase their ad budget and generated more sales than their paid search campaign ever had before.

If you’re new to SEOmoz and this post has inspired you to get involved in search marketing for your site, do browse the site for the PRO & free SEO guides and the SEO blog. If you’re a regular, do share any stories you’re particularly proud of in the comments.

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HubSpot TV is LIVE every Friday at 4:00 p.m. ET. Watch the show in real-time at www.hubspot.tv, and chatArticle with us via Twitter using NEW hashtag, #HubSpotTV.

Episode #81 – February 26, 2010

(Episode Length: 26 minutes, 41 seconds)

Intro

• How to interact on Twitter: Include #HubSpotTV in your tweets!
• On the show today is Mike Volpe (@mvolpe), Karen Rubin (@karenrubin) and Coleen Coyne (@ColeenCoyne)
• All old episodes are in iTunes: http://itunes.hubspot.tv
• March 19: HubSpot goes to Vegas!

Special Guest, Olympic Gold Medalist Colleen Coyne

• Why I Would Hire Bode Miller as My Inbound Marketer
• “If you are honest in your approach to creating content, it’s going to work out in the end. There might be some bumps along the way, but the satisfaction of knowing you gave it a truly honest effort will be rewarding in and of itself. Additionally, you will definitely gain a following. There is no reward without risk, and there is definitely a market for authenticity.”
• PPC is like liposuction
• Olympic athletes’ social media restrictions

Doin’ It Wrong

• Citibank Freezes Some Fabulis Assets
• From HubSpotter Christopher Haddad – Does Citibank Suffer From Homophobia Or Just A General Dislike For Startups?
• Citibank apparently froze the assets of Fabulis because of “objectionable content” on the company blog.
• Fabulis is an established company with investors ($625K) and an experienced entrepreneur as founder (Jason Goldberg – SocialMedian and Jobster), but they are “the social network that helps gay men connect with amazing experiences nearby and around the world”
• Citibank never called or warned Fabulis at all
• Marketing Takeaway: Aggressively communicate with customers and be available for comment quickly. This will help problems from spiraling out of control.

Headlines

Should Mahalo Say “Mahalo” to Google for Tolerating Spam

• SEO guru Aaron Wall gets upset that Mahalo is stealing his content, not adding value and still ranking in Google.
• Matt Cutts (head of Google anti-spam team): “When trying to decide if a page is spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? If the answer is no, the page is probably spam.”
• Comic response from SEO Black Hat: Spam vs Mahalo: Matt Cutts Explains the Difference
• Marketing Takeaway: If you are not Jason Calcanis, you need to create original and valuable content to rank in search.

Twitter Goes Yahoo

• Details: The Yahoo-Twitter Partnership
• “We knew that the Yahoo-Twitter partnership would be comprehensive and more encompassing than Twitter’s search partnerships with Google and Bing, but now Yahoo tells us the integration will focus on three primary areas:
  • Access to your Twitter feed on Yahoo
  • Ability to update status from Yahoo
  • Yahoo Search and media integration
• Marketing Takeaway: Keep doing inbound marketing. Developments like this just make it more effective.

Bravo to Foursquare as They Partner with Traditional TV Media

• Foursquare Teams With Bravo TV
• “Starting Monday, Bravo will begin offering Foursquare players badges and special prizes when viewers visit more than 500 Bravo locations. Locations will be picked by Bravo to correspond with select Bravo shows including “The Real Housewives,” “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” “Top Chef,” “Kell on Earth,” “Top Chef Masters” and “Shear Genius.”
• Although this deal will help put Foursquare in front of millions of mainstream television viewers, it also offers the company a chance to try to blur the lines between traditional television media and mobile experiences. Although some television executives have been successful integrating TV and the Web, merging TV with mobile has proved to be more difficult.
• Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s chief executive, said the company was excited to work with Bravo and push some of these boundaries further. “Bravo’s shows really overlap with our users and a new mainstream audience that we want to reach. I don’t think check-ins are a nerd-only experience. It’s about sharing content and experiences with others.”
• Marketing Takeaway: Making trades is better than paying cash for advertising.  Get creative!

Forum Fodder

• Question from Inbound.org – How many times should a keyword appear on a page for optimal density?
• Ben Robbins – For several years now, good sources at Google (like Matt Cutts) have indicated that keyword density carries little or no importance in their algorithm. Keyword-related factors that are still considered include anchor text for editorial links, page title, page URL, and heading tags. They also seem to reward pages with lengthier content, maybe 500+ words, and long tail keyword variations.

Marketing Tip of the Week: Cheating does not work.  Don’t spam Google, and don’t rely on PPC alone.  Do the hard work and inbound marketing will pay off.

Closing

Video: How to Get Off the Google AdWords PPC Crack

Learn how to break your Google AdWords addiction! Download the free video to learn how to use inbound marketing to generate leads and break your dependence on programs with recurring expenses.

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This week, despite still being seriously under the weather (see this week’s sad WB Friday), I flew down to SMX West to speak on the Link Building Strategies panel. Although I’d wanted to put more work in and deliver a better presentation, I received some very kind words afterward and requests from folks to share the deck via the blog. Before I embed the actual deck, though, I need to provide some context (as this isn’t a wholly self-explanatory presentation).

Link building has, classically, been a tactic slapped on to a marketing campaign or website post-launch. I believe that those companies/sites that treat link acquisition as an afterthought, rather than building it into the product, will always lose out to those who treat link building strategically. In the deck below, I walk through a number of examples of sites, primarily startups, that have done this. These include:

• Twitter – every user of Twitter has an incentive to link to their profile so more people will follow them. This is also true of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, DeviantArt, Etsy & others
• Vimeo – nearly everyone who uses Vimeo appreciates the beautiful aesthetic they’ve created. The embeddable versions of Vimeo videos look and feel more professional and high quality than nearly any other player, hence they get embedded (a lot). This embed action automatically drives links back to the video on Vimeo’s site, Vimeo’s homepage and the user’s profile, all with targeted anchor text.
• Urbanspoon – not only do they give badges to restaurants like Yelp and have started an online reservations system like OpenTable, Urbanspoon also features reviews from bloggers and foodies, who are then incentivized to promote their inclusion on the site.
• Last.fm – the widgets users embed on their site to share their favorite music automatically creates links back to the service.
• SurveyMonkey – a truly viral product (anyone who’s surveyed is automatically exposed to the site), SurveyMonkey is inherently link acquisitive through the product. In order to use the service, you need to link to SurveyMonkey’s site, where your form is hosted.
• Scribd – just look at the embed and the link below; ’nuff said.
• Miibeian.gov.cn – possibly the greatest link building strategy ever devised. The Chinese government requires that all websites in the country link to this site in order to operate legally; not too shabby, eh?

Here’s the deck:

Strategic Link Building

As you can see, I’ve put in a shameless plug for Open Site Explorer at the end. If you haven’t seen the new features launched yesterday, you’re missing out. Tons of the data is completely free, and top pages is just about the easiest way to find traffic and link opportunities ever built (not that I’m biased or anything).

Look forward to your comments about the presentation and the concept of productizing link acquisition into a site.

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If you’ve been waiting for a sign from above telling you to start using social media, then your time has come.

Over the past few months, Pope Benedict XVI has been calling on the Catholic Church to get more involved in Web 2.0. In a video released by the vatican on YouTube, Pope Benedict states that the Church should continue to be present in the “ever-evolving communications system that surrounds our planet.”

To date, the Vatican has created a YouTube account, a personal Facebook page for Pope Benedict, an iPhone app and Facebook app. Outside of the Vatican, many of those in the Church have heard the call and started blogging and creating other online resources like Open Source Catholic.

Okay, I admit that it’s not exactly a burning bush, but it’s certainly a clear sign that times have changed.

Religious groups have long been associated with traditional outbound marketing techniques. Think about men in ties and backpacks knocking at your door, religious pamphlets left on your windshield or people handing out flowers at the airport.

Why have these devotees gone to such great lengths to spread the “good word?” Because people have been searching for it.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, about 92% of Americans believe in a higher power, 28% have left the religion of their childhood and 16% consider themselves unaffiliated. This means that there is liquidity in the religious market, and many Americans are actively searching for spirituality. It also explains why religious groups have spent so much time, energy and money trying to get attention.

The Catholic Church’s embrace of blogging and social media is yet another clear sign that, no matter what your audience, the conversation has shifted online. In a statement, the Pope Benedict notes that, “Church communities have always used the modern media… for encouraging dialog at a wider level.”

The key business takeaway is this: If the 83-year-old leader of one of the oldest organizations in the history of Western civilization has embraced Web 2.0 and recognized the benefits of inbound marketing techniques, you’re officially out of excuses for why social media won’t work for your company.

Our recommendation? Follow the Pope’s lead (at least in regard to your marketing efforts): Get involved in social media, especially Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Start a blog, and join the conversation in your industry.

Live Webinar: How To Monitor Your Social Media Presence In 10 Minutes A Day

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Sure, you use Twitter as a social media tool, but have you ever considered it as an SEO research tool? No? Well watch and learn this week to find out how you can harness it in a whole new way.

Now that social signals (particularly Twitter) are becoming more important in the engines, they can help you pinpoint when a keyword is going to trip the ‘Query Deserves Freshness’ switch. If you can figure that out, you can gain a big competitive advantage by publishing fresh content in a targeted, timely manner.

Rand mentions a couple of tools for using Twitter to target and time your content. One is Trendistic, which helps you see trends in Twitter; another is our very own Blogscape Social Media Monitoring prototype (inside PRO Labs), which monitors and analyzes a few million key content providers across the fresh web, including over 250,000 influential Twitter accounts.

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