Training Day will consist of a minimum of 4 tracks:

1. Social Media: covering the latest marketing strategies & tactics to use Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn, YouTube & other Social Marketing media
2. Mobile Marketing: how Mobile Marketing now integrates into Web Marketing, Print Marketing, Video Marketing and more. Applications will get a lot of attention.
3. Search Marketing: is Google out of tune? Is Bing turning around into the preferred choice? The Search Marketing Training will cover all the latest trends from the world of search. For example, how to deal with Google’s preference of showing maps as results.
4. Analytics & Optimization: from tracking to testing into creating the most effective landing pages. Tracking is standard, but are you using the data to test different alternatives? Are you effectively creating the most successful pages for your website marketing efforts?

IMC will feature world-class trainers in all of the above topics. Trainers will be announced soon.

Conference Day Schedules – September 22nd-23rd

Both conference days will feature up to 4 tracks running simultaneously. We will also feature Keynotes from Guy Kawasaki, as well as from companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter & when all attendees are assembled into one room.

The 4 tracks will have the following themes & topics:

1. Content

• Creating outstanding content; both text, images & graphics as well as video
• Writing for the web; learn from the masters on how to produce compelling copy
• Taking beautiful pictures & mastering video; what signifies great imagery on the web?Banners; how to produce the most effective banner ads
• Text-ads; what signifies great copy-writing for short text ads?
• Compelling Twitter-updates; how can you in 140 characters describe a situation best?
• Linking; where to put links, how to put them on a page, and what to think of?

And more to come!

2. Traffic
Where do you get the most traffic from in 2010?

• Twitter:
  • Learning how to use your own Twitter business account for best traffic.
  • Understanding how you can leverage your networks Twitter traffic for your own benefit.
  • Followers, followers, followers; how many followers should you have? What distinguishes quality followers?
• Facebook:
  • Fan Pages, Get many who ’Like’ you, as well as News optimization
  • LinkedIn; learn how to use Q&A, LinkedIn Groups, Network updates & more
• Search Optimization; learn the latest optimization techniques for Google, Yahoo & Bing
• Search Marketing; understand how to get the most out of your Pay Per Click campaigns
• Intelligent Banners; how do you create banners that are infomercials, not commercials?
• Mobile traffic vs. “other traffic”; what is the difference?

And more to come!

3. Tools

IMC’s popular tool track will feature the hottest & coolest tools for:

• Content Management
• Web Analytics
• E-Commerce
• SEO
• Social Media Management
• Network Updates
• Application Marketing

And much more! We anticipate over 20 tools to be showcased during the two conference days.

4. Tying it all together

At IMC Vancouver 2010, we will introduce a fourth track which focuses on cases & ideas that combines Tools with Traffic, Content with Tools & Traffic etc. This will be example from a wider range of Industries covering:

• E-Commerce
• Travel
• Business to Business
• Lead Generation
• Retail

In Case Studies we’ve got for example Natalie Baudoin, Mountain Equipment Co-op’s Marketing Director confirmed as a presenter and she will be followed by up to 10 different case studies.

In total, over 75 speakers from a range of interesting backgrounds are expected to participate at IMC Vancouver 2010, making it the most exciting and informative IMC ever!

Get your tickets for IMC Vancouver 2010 now!

Search Marketing in 2010 Panel

By: Serena Hillman
DrinkTheCoolaid.com*

The Search Marketing in 2010 session included the following panelists (left to right):

• Martin Stoddart, Senior Product Manager at Bing
• Vanessa Wynn-Williams, Associate Marketing Manager at Yahoo! Canada
• Ryan Kelly, Founder and CEO at Pear Analytics

The first question posed by the moderator, Rajan Sodhi, VP Marketing at Peer 1: “What is happening with Bing and Yahoo?”

Martin, from Bing, told us CPC results will be provided by Bing, but as implementation is just being started not much has happended yet. He also suggests we go to SearchAlliance.com to get the most up-to-date information.

Rajan moves on to the second question: What’s with all the acronyms? SEM, SEO, PPC?

Ryan ran down the list:

SEM: Search Engine Marketing (Paid + Organic)
SEO: Search Engine Optimization (Organic)
PPC: Pay Per Click (Paying a certain amount to a publisher based on per click)
SMO: Social Media Optimization (Social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors)

Vanessa told us Canadians search a total of five times per day on average.
Ryan then told us 80% of all purchases start from an online search.
Finally Martin added, 60% of people say they are using search to make bigger decisions in their life.

Third Question: Why is banner advertising going down in adaption and search is going up?

Vanessa responds that the nature of search is direct response, although she believes some banners can provide this as well.

Fourth Question: Where should SEO Start?

Ryan tells us to start by looking at if from a technical standpoint, to simply not hinder the bots. Then after that he suggests content development and suggests the WordPress theme Thesis for $100 because it has such great tools already implemented.

Fifth Question: Do major search engines crawl differently?

Vanessa tells us all search engines have their own “secret sauce” but generally speaking they are all looking for the same thing–the most relevant information. She tells us if you do SEO right it should help you with all engines.

Sixth Question: How does SMO effect SEO?

Ryan tells us that by signing up for accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. they will make sure someone who steals your name doesn’t show up before you in Search Engines. As these sites rank very high with your branded name, you can rank high for your branded name.

Martin tells us that web of objects all become relevant in delivering results and that is why the results page for Bing is evolving. More visual content, social media content and this evolution will continue to happen. He tells us that though the algorithem is important it is just one part.

Seventh Question: PPC first or SEO?

Vanessa says, SEO will be hard but it is good for the long term, while PPC is more of an add-on. She tells us a user is 24% more likely to click on your site if they see your listing on both the paid and organic results because it increases brand trust. She also tells us that while PPC does not increase your SEO the gained traffic from your PPC will.

Then they define other areas such as Black Hat, long tail keywords… blah blah blah nothing new.

Final Question: What is the future of search?

Martin tells us there will be a bluring of lines between banner and text in search results. Vanessa tells us Dynamic keyword insertion for very relevant PPC, but mostly find your key audience and talk to them.

All-in-all it was a good session; the moderator should have known his stuff a bit more, and Vanessa brought interesting stats to the conversation, and thus lead the topic with her excellent understanding.

On a side note, I have been to a number of search conferences and it seems the majority of the time Yahoo!’s representatives are female. Is this intentional, perhaps a way to deferentiate themselves from the boys over at Microsoft and Google? I donno, but I like it!

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional and who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU, studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

By: Serena Hillman

Search heavy weights gathered for the advanced SEO round table session.
The panel consisted of:
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite
Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc
Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board Co-Chair
Todd Friesen, VP Search, Position Technologies
Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

One of the very first questions was about the never ending sega of Paid Links in competitive verticals. They answered simply by stating: “if you are going to do it, do it smart” and “you can’t bring a sword to a gun fight.”

When asked about Bing and Yahoo’s partnership the panel expressed genuine excitement about Bings ability to now acquire the historical data from Yahoo as well as an advanced algorithm they have developed over the years. The panel even compared Bings current algorithm to Google’s level in 1998.

Below are 3 video’s that I feel captured 3 other very important SEO topics. It should be noted that the panel was asked their thoughts on Caffeine and no one had an opinion as of yet.

Panel’s answer to using nofollow:

Panel’s answer to page sculpting:

Panel’s answer to the dreaded local search box:

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

By: Serena Hillman

Greg Boser & Matt Cutts

While sitting in Mrs. Li’s keynote I did a quick Google News search on SES. What came back? A Vancouver local’s SEO website on Matt Cutts being added to the panel for the session Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic. Needless to say I suddenly changed my plans of attending SEO Through Blogs & Feeds and made a b-line to the session.

The Extreme Makeover event was quite informative with an obvious focus on specific examples and suggestions of attendee’s websites. As usual, WebGuerrilla’s president Greg Boser provided equally hilarious and informative dialogue with Matt.

Key Takeaways:

Boser:

• Make sure contact information is in text-format, as Bing will list this in search results
• Take the time to do unique meta descriptions and google will trust your site more
• Each subdomain is a separate site so you have to verify them in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics
• 301 and 302 are shenanigans
• Return true 404 page so Google doesn’t cache multiple instances of this page
• Host your own videos, Google is adding other people’s video’s to search results
• It is all about profiles. When you have lots of domains it makes you look like a spammer
• Wiki should die. We hate wiki.

Cutts:

• When dealing with duplicate content try to eliminate through a clean site architecture, then 301, then canonical tags
• When changing site architecture change one part first then see what happens, then change the rest
• Use term “store locator”–as this is the most familiar for users searching for store locations
• Have a search box, but also add a “browse” option within the text so directories can be crawled
• Preference lies with subdirectories instead of subdomains, as it puts it into one group
• Users don’t like deep subdirectories
• Grab 5 random people–describe what you do–ask them what they would search for–optimize for it
• Page sculpting: if people are using nofollow, and this hurts the crawl, change your policies to counter it
• If you have a bunch of domains for branding purposes, 301 them to your main site

Audience:

• Watch out for the all-in-one-SEO-plugin, because WordPress has duplicate content issues–the plugin will insert nofollow tags

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

Google's Matt Cutts

Similar to Day 2 I have broken each session review into separate blog posts for better flow:

Session 1: Morning Keynote: How to Prepare for the Future of Search
Charlene Li, Co-Author Groundswell

Session 2: Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic
Elisabeth Osmeloski, Director of Online Media, Adventures in Search
Tiffany Lane, Search Quality Team, Google
Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC
Vanessa Fox, Nine By Blue
Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team, Google

Session 3: Advanced SEO Round Table
Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite
Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc
Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board Co-Chair
Todd Friesen, VP Search, Position Technologies
Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

Session 4: In-House SEO: Structuring the Organization for Success (review coming)
Chris Boggs, Director, SEO, Rosetta
Melanie Mitchell, SVP, Search Strategy, Digitas
Jessica Bowman, SEO Strategist & In-House Expert, SEMinhouse.com
Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo!

SES San Jose Day 3 Highlights:

• Matt Cutts’ surprise appearance!
• SEO round table: chalk-full of great info
• Getting my Groundswell book signed

SES San Jose Day 3 Letdowns:

• Tiffany’s inability to understand my question on GEO IP redirects
• Repeat of lunch (overcooked hot dogs)
• The rush hour drive to the SFO airport

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

By: Serena Hillman

The Google Booth

After a good sleep at the Hilton San Jose, I wandered to the registration booth, got my Press Badge, and was on my way to the first session: Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

This panel had representation from all three main search engines: Bing, Google and Yahoo. But surprisingly the best presentations were by the two non-search engine representatives: Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO director of Omni Marketing Interactive and Marty Weintraub, President of aimChair.

Shari covered a lot of ground and provided great information about why you want to get rid of duplicates and technically what qualifies as duplicate content. She mentioned some testing her company has been doing regarding navigational usability.

Sasi Parthasarathy from Bing

The results indicated that the optimal amount of links a page should have is 100. She reviewed how engines determine duplicate content with filters related to: Boiler Plates, linkage properties, server/hostname properties, shingles and last but not least–content. Overall Shari tried to stress the importance of not optimizing for search engines but “optimize for people who use search engines.” I can’t agree with her more, as obviously this is what search engines are and will be optimizing for in the future.

After Shari’s serious discussion Marty Weintraub graced us with an energetic presentation where he listed specific suggestions on how to fix duplicate content issues with examples he has provided to his clients in the past. Some included: removing secure and unsecure duplication, cleaning up urls and canonicalization.

The three search engine representatives echoed similar themes of the two previous speakers. Yahoo’s Ivan Davtchev informed the attendees that 1/3 of content online is duplication.

Other key take-aways include:

• Use Google webmaster tool to identify duplicate titles and start from there
• If 10 copies of your content are out-there search engines will just pick whichever the algorithm feels is most authoritative
• We all love Site Explorer and hope Microsoft doesn’t kill it
• Duplicate content is acceptable just don’t abuse it
• Use robots tag or 301 redirects to hide the duplicate parts of your site
• Lots of filters determine duplicate content not just shingles

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

I have broken each session review into separate blog posts for better flow:

• Session 1: Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
• Session 2: Facebook Ads – Reaching Prospects Early in the Decision Making Process
• Session 3: Social Media – Managing Conversations & Reputations When the User is in Control
• Session 4: The BuyerShere Project (review coming soon)

Day 2 Highlights:

• Marty Weintraub’s energetic presentation
• Domino Pizza’s website (when I ordered my dinner)
• Zappos’ Brian Kalma’s specific examples of their Social Media Campaign

Day 2 Letdowns:

• The overcapacity room for the session: Google Analytics & Website Optimizer: Secrets Revealed!
• Lunch (overcooked hot dogs)
• Paying for internet at the Hilton

Keynote: Nicholas Fox, Google

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

I am about to board my flight to San Jose to attend SES’s San Jose Conference 2009. Check out my updates of the daily events at http://www.iimaonline.org/resources/blogs/.

Day 2 agenda:

http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sanjose/agenda-day2.php

Day 3 agenda:

http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sanjose/agenda-day3.php

Feel free to shoot me a quick email (serena_hillman[at]hotmail[dot]com) if you want me attend and report on any particular session and I will try the best I can!

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

A quick reading recommendation for SEObook.com’s SEO Glossary:

The Glossary is a well-put together resource page, highly detailed and probably the most extensive list I have seen, totally worth the 30 minutes or so it takes to review.

The Glossary especially works wonders for aging-typewriter-era-bosses, programmers and anyone I mentioned in this post, to help communicate with internet marketing professionals or just to freshen up on some verbiage.

Check out the Glossary.

Need more info? Here are more resources:

• SEOGlossary.com
• SEMPO
• SEW
• Webmaster World

Rocking comic from http://www.my25percent.com/.

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.

Beyond the forums and keyword-stuffed SEO websites, lies unprecedented amounts of good information about SEO. Quality resources such as BruceClay.com or Intrapromote’s blog SEO Speedwagon can provide any company with enough information on SEO to achieve relatively decent success. But why do they just give this information away? As my boss would say: “It’s a Trojan horse–and not of the virus kind.” These companies are giving you a gift–like a Trojan horse–to educate you on how much you need them–or infiltrate your defenses.

After learning SEO basics, companies tend to realize two things:
1) How much control they could really have over SERPS and the potential behind them;
2) Speaking to a real person to help with the implementation along with the ability to answer specific questions, is priceless.

Going from SEO concepts to reality is an art and the more experience you have the easier it is to get your creative juices flowing. The question is not only what should we do, but how should we do it. The main key to a strong SEO strategy is how you utilize your assets, your industry’s assets and your market’s assets, to create a mass cornucopia of links.

Trojan Horse 2.0

*Serena Hillman is an HCI professional who has worked in the web industry since 2003. Serena currently works as the Director of Marketing for ShowTimeTickets.com and is a graduate student at SFU studying mobile commerce as a part of the Connections Lab Research Group.