State of Search’s Louis Venter has an extensive account of Kaushik’s speech. One interesting part is what he says about bounce rate. I’m not sure if these were Kaushik’s exact words, but Venter writes, “Bounce rate shows you how much you suck.”

One issue that’s been debated in the industry is how much of a signal bounce rate is in Google’s algorithm. If this is the message Kaushik is sending, however, it stands to reason that this is the message Google is sending. He is, after all, the digital marketing evangelist for the company, and the analytics guru.

Another highlight was the following list of “things you should measure for social contribution” as Venter conveys:

1) Conversation rate – if you talk does anyone care? The number of audience comments per social contribution will help measure this.

4) Economic Value – sum of your macro and micro conversions and how they contribute to your overall picture

Here’s some Twitter reaction to the event so far:

Attending the event? What has been the best part to you?

This year there was rapping:

Here’s the keynote from Mikel Chertudi:

Here are some of the interesting points made that people found worth sharing:

The web can be great place for a brand to thrive and pick up steam, but it can also go the opposite way. A single blogger can take down a brand. "That’s the reality of the web," says Downhill. It can go the way of Dell or it can go the way of Tiger Woods (or somewhere in between). 

Downhill’s advice is to be proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to brand reputation. I take this to mean that you should be putting yourself out there with as much positivity as possible to begin with, as opposed to waiting for someone to trash your brand, then defending yourself. Even if such trashing is unjustified, like Downhill says, it only takes one blogger to hurt your brand, and there’s a chance some potential customers will only see that side of the story. The more positivity you put out, the more likely they are to find something good to latch onto. If someone sees a lot of good things, then one bad blog post won’t carry as much weight. 

In fact, Downhill suggests never engaging brand attackers at all. If they’re attacking you on blogs, forums, and social media, you might be better off simply addressing such complaints on your own blog and defending yourself from there, than using SEO to work on the visibility of your side of the story. Taking legal action, can be an expensive "black hole", she says. As far as as responding to attackers on blogs, social networks, etc. I would say it’s a judgment call. If I’m getting trashed on a well-trafficked forum that attracts a lot of interest within my niche, for example, I’m probably going to want to respond accordingly. 

Wozman adds that free speech is protected online by the Constitution (at least in the U.S.) and that only false accusations are considered defamatory – not opinions. You can call someone a jerk, but not a criminal. Commenters cannot be held liable because of the Communications Decency Act, and ISP providers cannot be held liable for commenters. 

Downhill recommends buying domains like "yourbrand sucks.com" and any other version of your brand’s domain that is defamatory, that you can think of. Not a bad idea, but it could get expensive depending on how creatively your mind works. Either way, those out to ruin you can probably get pretty creative in that department. 

At BlogWorld last week, I attended a session about brand monitoring. This was not so much about reputation management only, but simply being able to spot the conversations that are happening in relation to your brand, and getting involved in conversations (including positive ones regarding your brand). Ann Peavey, Becky McCray, and Sheila Scarborough gave some good tips. More on that here.

WPN’s Mike Sachoff contributed to this piece. 

Google makes changes constantly all year round, and that’s just Google. Yahoo and Bing obviously have a lot going on as well. Bing has a new partnership with Facebook for putting Facebook data in search results. Then there’s the whole Yahoo/Bing search and advertising deal, with Yahoo returning Bing results underneath its own user interface. 

Search simply does not stop changing. With mobile and social media heavily in the equation, and TV and tablets about to enter the fray at an increasingly rapid pace, there will continue to be plenty to speculate upon when it comes to where search is headed. 

So this year’s SES Chicago "Search: Where to Next?" session featured discussion from iProspect CEO Robert Murray, Bruce Clay President Bruce Clay, and Rosetta Director of SEO Chris Boggs.

Here are a few takeaways from that discussion:

1. Keyword research may be narrowed down by all three search engines. 

2. Autocomplete needs to branch out. 

3. There will be deeper analytics. 

4. Building content will continue to be very important

5. There will be increased filtering of search results by users. 

6. SEO is going the way of a targeted market. 

7. Complexity of keywords is changing because of the algorithms

8. SEO is going to be "a piece of optimization pie."

9. There will be increased focus on local. 

10. Even as mobile continues to grow, there will always be search.

11. Social will continue to play an important role. Likes will become as important as links. 

Visibility

If you ask me, it’s going to be (and really already is) about being visible in as many places as possible – on as many screens as possible. It’s about being visible in search engines, but it’s also about being visible in communities (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.), sub search engines (like Google Images, Blog Search, Videos, YouTube, etc.), mobile apps, web apps, TV apps, and anywhere else that consumers turn their attention – particularly the kind of attention that comes with problems for which your content has the answer – for which your business has the answer. 

The future is going to require a lot of testing.

Testing on different browsers, different phones, different tablets, different connected TV experiences, different apps, and different combinations of each of these. It’s also going to be about speed. Not only is Google placing more and more emphasis on this, but people will just simply leave if they can’t get your site to load in a timely fashion. It may be fine on the desktop, but have you checked it from different mobile devices/browsers? How’s it look from there?

Improving Tech

Then you have voice search, which is quickly becoming a much more common method. Google will continue to perfect visual search (Google Goggles as well). Things are going to get really interesting. 

The future of search is much like search’s present – just on steroids. Faster, more powerful, on a lot more interfaces, and a lot more people using them. 

What does the future of search look like to you? Comment here. 

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies New York. WebProNews interviewed him shortly after, picking his brain about how online marketers can sort through and maximize the incredible amounts of data they have access to.

Kaushik says a lot of people will open their analytics tool and just look at the top ten or twenty rows of data, but there are strategies to help you see more of the picture. A few specific examples:

- In-line segmentation
- Tag Clouds
- Keyword trees

Basically, these are all things that can take large amounts of keywords and let you visualize the top performers, and understand the data. It can help you look at how strong your brand terms are, compared with different categories, for example. These things are explored further in Avinash’s keynote:

Avinash places great emphasis on quantifying the economic value of things – your different goals. Quantify the "micro-conversions" as he calls them. This could be placing a dollar value on RSS feed subscribers, or on ad clicks, affiliate clicks, number of reviews, number of downloads, number of phone calls that were made to convert offline, etc.

"Quantify the complete impact of a site, otherwise you’re going to be making bad decisions," he says.

The more you can break down your site in terms of the goals you are trying to achieve, and place specific values on these goals, the better you can understand the bigger picture and the vast amount of analytical data that concerns the performance of your online marketing efforts.

Is news search part of your strategy? Real-time? Social Search? Press releases? Discuss here.

News Search Optimization

As Lisa Buyer of the Buyer Group talked about with WebProNews at SES last week, news search optimization is getting more powerful with social media and real-time search. Add these to older tactics like blogs and press releases, and there have never been more opportunities to get news-related content discovered.

Press Releases

Press releases can still be a great way to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines.

Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us, involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the "shelf life" of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.

"When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement," the CEO of the company behind the case study had said.  "With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off.  With these features we’ve seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued."

Remember, Google News indexes press releases as well.

Real-Time Search

You’re probably already using social media in some capacity at this point. Real-time search presents an added benefit to talking about timely topics using channels that you are already using (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, etc.). That doesn’t mean spam. Spamming won’t get you very far here anyway, because Google is pretty good at filtering this. We went over a few basic tips for real-time search optimization a while back. The recap is below, but you can find them elaborated on here.

1. Use keywords
2. Talk about timely events
3. Have a lot of followers (who can share your content)
4. Promote Conversation
5. Include Calls to Engagement

Real-time search is much more than just Google. There are an increasing number of players in this space, and with the rise in smartphone usage, mobile apps are giving consumers a lot of choices in how to obtain their information.

Social Search

Another great benefit of using social media means you get to show up in your friends/followers personalized social search results for numerous queries on Google. Newsy topics are frequently the ones that trend, and that means lots of people searching. If something big happens, there’s a chance that some of your social network contacts will search for something related to that, and if you have something to say about it, there’s a good chance they’ll see it in their results.

Of course people search with the social networks themselves as well. Facebook search queries were on the rise last time I checked.

Google News

Last September, we ran down a number of Google News SEO tips here. Google shared some tips of their own on the subject as well:

Optimizing for news search means more shots at showing up in search results period. Do you have other ideas about getting in front of news seekers? Share here.

Shiny Object Syndrome

As 10e20 President Chris Winfield discussed with us at Search Engine Strategies last week, a lot of people get caught up in "shiny object syndrome". This is essentially where businesses get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest service, trend, or fad, and feel like they have to be involved to stay relevant, and jump in because of that.

This is not the best way to go about things. "You should never get involved in something, just because you think you have to," he said.

Winfield made a great point: think about if you had put a large amount of time and money into a Friendster strategy or an Orkut strategy, only to find that these networks would never offer you the benefits you could’ve received from using these resources on a Facebook strategy.

It’s important to consider your goals and think about what you need to measure in your social media efforts, from a business standpoint. "Not all companies should be measuring the same exact things," notes Winfield.

Portability

Perhaps the best approach you can take is to have a relatively portable social media strategy. In other words, look for ways to engage with customers that don’t limit you to a particular service. That way, if they flock to a new one in the future, you can go along with minimal hassle. Maintain consistency in your brand’s persona and how you deal with customers, and you’ll probably find that this can be transported from one channel to another, despite technological adjustments that may need to be made to the strategy.

One good thing that businesses likely have to look forward to is a more open web, which will allow users of separate services to communicate with one another. Just yesterday, Cliqset and Status.net claimed to have implemented the first live example of the Salmon protocol, and for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with.

"This is a great demonstration of Cliqset’s larger vision of social networks being siteless, and we think it’s going to be the future of how all services interact and, more importantly, how users of these services interact," Cliqset tells WebPronews. Major social media players are already heavily involved in similar initiatives.

Do you use forums to engage with your audience? Tell us about it.

There’s no question that there is a lot of value to the big networks like Facebook and Twitter, but forums have always been and still are a way to jump into a topical conversation within a specific niche and engage with an audience that is heavily invested in that niche. As Li Evans of Serengeti Communications talked about with WebProNews at Search Engine Strategies last week, forums can sometimes provide more value than the big social networks, depending on your audience.

"A lot of people think forums and message boards are dead, but they’re not," she says. "They’re very powerful because they have a lot of influencers, it can reach a lot of people, and these forums rank in the search results as well."

The very nature of forums makes them good for search, because users will continue to update them with fresh posts in many cases, and add information and value, and often answer the questions users are seeking with their search queries.

Last fall Google introduced a new feature to search results, making it easier to find forum posts related to topics users search for. When forum sites have more than one relevant discussion going, Google will link to them under the main result.

As Evans pointed out, it’s a great idea to listen before you talk in a forum. Communities often have certain ways members will talk to one another, and just have things established that may not be so apparent to the "newb." She likens it to petting a shark. "It can bite you," she says. Just pay attention and get a sense of the atmosphere in a community before jumping in and embarrassing yourself. If there’s one thing most active forum participants have in common, it is that they’re vocal, and you don’t want any negative reputation issues to arise.

While forum participation may be like petting a shark, that doesn’t mean you should be afraid of it. Just get to know the shark, and become its friend. The forum sharks just may potentially be some of your best and most loyal customers.

Do you find forums to be of significant value to your brand? Discuss here.

1. High-res Photo Note Taking – One of the tough things about a big event (aside from choosing which sessions to attend) is how to best take notes to bring information back to your internal colleagues who didn’t attend the event, or publish your own take on the sessions. A technique I have started using is taking high-res photos of key slides from presenters. It takes just a second, and it’s the easiest form of note taking as the slide becomes a reminder of a key point to write about later. To augment, sometimes I will also think of taking notes in terms of Twitter posts (140 character max). That format forces you to just focus on the key points of a session instead of just trying to capture everything a speaker says.
2. Brochure Collecting - At an event like SXSW, there are lots of sites and new innovations that are interesting and worth looking at … but time is limited at the event. Instead of trying to write down every URL, I collect their brochures or postcards and save them. That way I have a visual reminder to check out a particular site later when I am back in the office and have a free moment. Last year after SXSW, it took me a few months to get through looking at all the sites I found interesting – but I had a constant reminder of those sites through the stack of postcards and brochures and it helped me to stay organized.
3. Plan B Sessions - Your time is valuable and at a large conference usually you will be drawn in multiple directions. At SXSW a common complaint is that for every timeslot there are several sessions that you might be interested in seeing. Ultimately, you need to pick one, but my long time advice for attendees of a conference like this has been that if you find a session is not useful after the first 10 or 15 minutes, you should feel empowered to leave and go to your "plan B session." For every time you go to a session, you should always have a second option – just in case. That way you can maximize your time and what you learn from the event, and be flexible enough to correct a mistake without wasting an entire hour (or more).
4. Influencer Tracking – When you are not necessarily connected to every event or happening at an event, it can be tough to know what you might be missing. One useful way to track the events that you may want to be part of is by creating your own short list of people who you know will be attending all the best events. If they are active social media users (as they tend to be at an event like SXSW), you can see where they are headed and mirror some of your own choices of where to go based on this information. Even if they are not active with social media, this technique can work by talking to them or others to see where they will going.
5. Eating Left Handed - As promised in the title of this post, the last tip is about eating left handed. Chances are, you just spent a good part of the day shaking people’s hands and accumulating some kind of unwanted germs (no offense to the people you met, but facts are facts). We should all get more diligent about using that hand sanitizing stuff – but if you are like me and usually forget to do it, a good technique to teach yourself is to always eat left handed (ie – with your "non-shaking hand").

For those big event or SXSW veterans, feel free to suggest some other tips to help someone survive at a large conference in the comments … they might help me survive the last day of SXSW too!

Comments

As referenced in the previous article, eye-tracking research has been a major indicator in how sites are viewed by consumers. Such research can help webmasters understand where they eyeballs are going, and help them determine how to arrange the layout of their sties.  The quicker user eyeballs get to what they are looking for, the better experience they are going to have.

Applying Usability Concepts to Content

With this in mind, it stands to reason that in article writing,  it is a good idea to use visual elements to help readers find what they’re looking for. Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Marketing spoke with WebPronews about structuring content so readers can easily find the answers they are looking for.

As Matt references, studies have shown that people are frequently not reading content in its entirety when looking for information online. They’re scanning articles for the answers they seek. Matt suggests using:

- keywords in titles
- keywords in headers
- bullet lists when applicable

Essentially, "lead them where they want to go."

That’s not to say that content is all about getting attention. The quality should be there once you do have their attention. It’s just helpful to lead the reader where they need to go visually, to get them to read it in the first place.