Today I presented at the Search Engine Strategies conference on the "Blog and Feed Search SEO" panel. I spoke on optimization tips and tactics for blogs and for RSS feeds. I had to pack in a lot of material into a short amount of time, but I managed! We got some great questions in the Q&A. The session was blogged at Search Engine Roundtable.

Feel free to download my Powerpoint deck. There's tons of great stuff in there. Over 50 slides.

David Naylor from Bronco, who was one of the speakers at the Organic Listings Forum session at the Search Engine Strategies conference, advised site owners to have a robots.txt file, even if it's just an empty file, because Ask Jeeves' spider seems to favor web sites that have one.

Anyone noticed an improvement with your presence in Ask Jeeves after creating a robots.txt file?

Of course there's also the side benefit that you'll eliminate all those "File Not Found" error messages for robots.txt in your server error log, which tend to overwhelm the error log, making it harder to spot more concerning error messages. That assumes of course that you actually examine your error log on occasion. ;-)

Well all us SEOs who stuck around til the end of the Search Engine Strategies conference yesterday had fun trying to fly out of O'Hare. A lot of flights were cancelled because of the weather. My flight out of O'Hare was 3 hours late and I missed my connection. Dangit. Now I'm stuck at SFO til my flight tonight. Anyways, here's a view out the plane window of another plane getting de-iced:

And if you're really interested, you can watch some video of it.

Here we are, the last session of Search Engine Strategies. It's been a great, but exhausting conference. The session I attended was on SEO Tools. Three of the five panelists provided their Powerpoints on their websites (just so happens they were the three best presentations), which you should definitely check out because they show screenshots of these tools in action. Download the first two Powerpoints from www.webuildpages.com/ses and the third from www.epiar.com/ses.

Jim Boykin:
Wayback Machine
Find Age of Website Tool
Poodle Predictor (spider simulator)
Copyscape (website plagiarism search)
URLinfo
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
KwMap (a keyword map for the whole Internet)
Hubfinder (looks for co-occurring backlinks, which may be authoritative links that help satisfy topic dependant link authority algorithms. To use Hubfinder enter a subject, and / or competing URLs to analyze linkage data of top ranked competing sites via the Yahoo! API.)
Keyword Tracker

Todd Malicoat:
Domain/server level information: Whois Source, DNS Stuff, and Check Class C IP Address (this last one is to make sure the links that you plan on buying are on different class C blocks)
Competitive information tools: GoogSpy, SwitchProxy extension for Firefox
Backlinks & offpage information tools: Pages Indexed, Backlinks Domain, PageRank, Allinanchor, Keyword Density tool, Yahoo! Link Harvester
Keyword information: Google Sets, Keyword Density tools, Google Suggest, Snap.com Keyword Stats
Header & page level information: Server Header Checker
Spidering & indexability: Xenu's Link Sleuth, Sandbox Detection Tool

Ken Jurina:
Firefox extensions: SEOpen, Web Developer, Search Status, PDF Download, Roboform toolbar, Search Keys, IE View (all downloadable from http://extensionroom.mozdev.org)
Web CEO
Click Tracks
LiveSTATS
Roboform
Marketleap Link popularity check, Search engine saturation, Keyword verification

Bill Hartzer:
OptiLink
OptiSpider
Keyword Combinations
Keyword Helper
URL Trends domain analyzer (it also supports notifying you via email or RSS when changes happen)
Sources of other tools: www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, www.digitalpoint.com/tools/, www.seotoolset.com, www.seochat.com/seo-tools

Paul Bruemmer:
Alexa
RankingManager
Linxviewer
Yahoo! Finance
Hoovers Pro Plus
Print Screen Plus

Well I wanted to blog many more sessions than I did, but it ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully for you, dear readers, there were many other capable bloggers blogging the SES sessions. In particular check out the coverage on Search Engine Roundtable blog.

By the way, a big hello to all the bloggers I met for the first time at SES, including Scott Miller, Aaron Wall, and Barry Schwartz, to name a few.

I attended the "Search Algorithms: The Patent Files" session first thing this morning. The panelists were Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, Ani Kortikar, Founder and CEO, Netramind, Dr. E. Garcia of Mi Islita.com, and Jon Glick, Senior Director of Product Search, Become.com. My favorite presentation was from Jon. He was not overly technical (Dr. Garcia lost me at the advanced mathematics talking about calculating dot products of vectors) yet he gave solid advice. Here's what he had to say, in summary:

Take these patents with a grain of salt, because...
- patent applicants don't need to use all the stuff they include in a patent application.
- patent applicants don't have to disclose all of its features in a patent application.
- and they recognize that SEOs and their competitors are pouring over their patent apps.

With that said, there are some valuable learnings from the 2003 Google patent. Search engines may take into account: CTR on your page in SERPs, rapid changes in content, rapid growth of in-links, and length of time users spend on your site.

So which of these actually impact your rankings? Some are red herrings, such as:
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): it's too easy to distort (e.g. through clickbotting, which is evil and likely to get you penalized). Probably CTR is used for demotion only. In other words, high CTR won't help your organic rankings, but low CTR may lower your rankings.
- Time spent on a site: when users hit the back button almost immediately, it can signify an irrelevant page or 404 error. However, if this was used then this would in effect reward black hat tactics like mousetrapping and endless pop-ups -- tactics that trap users within a site.
- Rate of change in content: Most recent crawl date, last time the content changed, registration date, and first crawl date mostly impacts crawl frequency, not ranking. Duplicate detection technologies are used to find meaningful changes in site content. Meaningful changes in site content do not include putting today's date or today's weather on the page -- it doesn't help rankings. When a site changes its IP address, it is often re-evaluated because it is possibly under new ownership.

According to Jon, what's not a red herring is:
- Rate of change in links: Most Search Engines limit how quickly a site can gain connectivity (sandboxing, link aging). A sudden jump in in-links (e.g. from link farming and interlinking and triangle linking lots of domains) can draw scrutiny. There are exceptions for "spike" sites (editorial review, lots of accompanying news/blog posts, lots of web searches).

Hello from sunny San Jose. I'm at the Search Engine Strategies conference - THE place to be if you care about search. I'm going to be blogging the sessions, so stay tuned over the next 4 days.

Here's my first installment: a recap on the session I attended before lunch today on "Earning from Search & Contextual Ads". Panelists were: Jason Calacanis, Co-Founder, Weblogs, Inc., Will Johnson, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Scott Meyer, President & CEO, About, Inc., Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager of Google AdSense, Google Inc. and Jen Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com.

Jen from JenSense.com started the panel off:
Jen started off by comparing and contrasting AdSense w/ Yahoo's new YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network). Similarities include...
- very large pool of advertisers
- real time stats
- neither will tell you the revenue split
- can't show both YPN and AdSense ads on the same page

Differences include...
with AdSense:
- 4 ads in smaller font
- international publishers ok
- offers additional tools & services
- more competition for higest paying
- multiple ad units per page
- "smart pricing" (CTR taken into account in pricing)

with YPN:
- 3 ads in a much larger font
- beta for US publishers
- only traditional ad units
- fewer publishers means less competition
- same ads on multiple units
- no smart pricing
- in future will be able to transfer your earnings to your advertising account

Many alternatives to AdSense and YPN:
- Kanoodle brightads: avg $0.35 earnings per click (EPC). 30,000 advertisers in network.
- Adsonar: thousands of advertisers
- Clicksor: avg $0.20 EPC. 4,000 advertisers running 20,000 campaigns. Will pull ads from other ad networks if insufficient clicks.
- Chitika: avg EPC $0.50
- Mirago: avg EPC .21p (approx $0.31 USD). you must invoice them. 12,000 advertisers
- ContextWeb: over 40,000 advertisers
bidclix: avg EPC 0.30. 11,000 advertisers
- Others include Miva Adrevenue xpress, Quigo, etc.
Rhetorical question from Jen: "When will MSN jump in?"

Optimizing tips:
- Placement: Bottom of page is bad. Good practice is to make link color the same as other links on the site. Anther good tactic is to place the ads on the left column where the nav usually is.
- Proximity:
- Ad unit selection: Try a variety of sizes and test.
- Ad unit colors & borders: Don't use the standard ad unit colors / layout. Mix things up to prevent banner blindness. Try both complimentary and contrasting colors. Most sites find hidden borders yield highest CTR. like 2 or 3 times
- URL filters: Don't do it as a way to get higher paying ads to appear. Only block your direct competitors or your own websites.

Testing:
- Use AdSense or YPN channels to track highest CTR & earnings pages. AdSense or YPN may perform better. Try both.
- Test on non-holiday weeks
- Try switching ad placement, ad unit sizes and colors
- Keep track of what works and what doesn't
- Never assume that what works on one site will work on another.

Read more »

I am currently at Etail and will soon be off to Search Engine Strategies as well (Booth 2512) with our team. If you're attending either event it would be great to see you, so drop by!