Texture design

Posted by randfish

On Tuesday afternoon, Rebecca and I drove the 3 hours down to Portland, OR for our first SEMpdx Searchfest. We arrived at the hotel around 6pm and had drinks with many of the conference organizers. I also had a chance to meet and chat with Jeffrey Pruitt from iCrossing (and VP of SEMPO), who gave the keynote the next morning. Rebecca and I dined with Matt McGee, Darcie (sorry I don't remember your last name, Darcie), Scott Orth & Scott Fish at Oba!, a terrific Spanish restaurant before retiring early so Rebecca could work on her presentation.

The next morning, we met early in the lobby to leave in time to make the 8am keynote speech. I asked Rebecca how whe slept and I believe her response was something like "I woke up every hour, sweating that I'd missed the alarm." Ah, the joys of speaking on your first panel.

We actually got completely lost on the way to the World Forestry Center (which has a gorgeous campus), where the conference was held. As much as I'd love to blame Rebecca, who was driving, the fault is 100% my own. I relied on the mobile Design Maps application I downloaded to my phone the day before, but didn't count on losing reception somewhere in Terwilliger Park (I love how everything in the Simpsons is named after a place in Portland, it makes streetsign watchin incredibly entertaining). Eventually, we did reach the conference, and were shocked by the massive turnout.

We had been told by the organizers to expect 100-150 attendees, but SEMpdx was mobbed! Nearly 300 people turned out, some even asking if they could pay for the event upon arrival. Although the event ran out of information packets, they did have enough food to keep everyone happy - my compliments to the caterers; they┬?handily beat┬?off the SES and Pubcon breakfasts and lunches. I'm thrilled that so many folks are interested in search here in the Northwest - it's a great sign that the Internet marketing world in our region has grown up quickly.

My presentation - Six Delicious Morsels from the World of Search Marketing - covered a variety of topics:

• The Impact of Personalization
• Why Wikipedia is so Successful (and how to duplicate those results)
• The Anger towards Design in the Social Media World
• The Power of the Widget
• The Biggest Mistake in Linkbaiting
• The Freemium Revenue Model

It was one of the most enjoyable presentations I've done (at least for me) and the crowd was terrificly engaged. Another major difference from SES and Pubcon - not a single person walked out of my presentation. I'd like to think it was me, but I actually notcied that in general there was a much smaller abandonment rate for all the speakers.

And now, the part you've all been waiting for... Rebecca's presentation:

Her first words as she took the microphone - "I'm going to stand behind this podium so none of you will be able to see my piss myself." Followed shortly by, "If you applaud loudly at the end of my presentation, Rand says I don't have to ride in the trunk on the drive back to Seattle." You gotta love her, right?

Rebecca's presentation, cheesily named - Through the Linking Glass - covered the basic tactics, values and pitfalls in a link building campaign. It was well geared to small businesses, and despite some nervousness on her part, was well-delivered, especially for a first-time speaker. I have confidence that she'll get even better over time.

It's my hope that SEMpdx becomes SEMpsdx (the extra "s" for Seattle). I'd love to see the organization put together a conference here in the Seattle Metro area sometime in the fall - there's a few folks in search in the area who'd certainly appreciate a get-together and plenty of businesses who are desperate for search marketing assistance. I'd also much rather leverage the structure and strength of the SEMpdx organization and grow it, rather than launch a competitive organization here in Seattle. It's a natural fit, and one that I'd be proud to support. Congrats to all the organizers and speakers at the show - you've got a lot to be proud of.

p.s. I promised that I'd make my alternate presentation available (on linkbaiting) - 7 Steps to Linkbait Success. The conference pamphlet had incorrectly listed this as my presentation, despite the website being accurate. I put it to a vote at the beginning of the session and the Morsels presentation was the clear winner, so I gave that one.

p.p.s. I've heard that a DVD of the presentations will be available from SEMpdx in the next few days - I'll get a link up when that happens.

Technorati Tags

sempdx, serachfest, portland, rebecca kelley, conference

Posted by randfish

I hate to revisit this topic again so soon, but it appears to require clarification for many folks. I've tried to lay out the process of how this theory works as clearly as possible, and provide a few examples.

In our example above, the W3C page (a highly valuable resource on web standards) linking to your page can have an impact on the rankings of all the pages on your site. This isn't just a replication of the classic PageRank flow model (PageRank in its original form is nearly dead, IMO), it's an indication of all the tasty factors that the W3C can pass to your site making the search engines take your domain's content a bit more seriously.

The general premise seems simple to me - search engines provide recognition to a domain based on the trust and editorial weight it has received from current and past links. Content on a well-linked to domain often outranks far more relevant or individually well-linked-to content on other, less linked-to domains. Although I get a lot of nodding heads when I explain this, the theory seems to break down in practice. People I've talked to hear this theory and still wonder if they should link build in to multiple domains and then link all those domains to their main site. They ask if they should host their blog on a separate domain or how to build content for a domain they just registered and I'm always left thinking - "hey, didn't we just go over this?"

If the above illustration wasn't enough to convince you, let me give another quick visual on a related note. In this diagram, it's important to think of the linking pages A-G as equal to one another (and on different domains than one another).

When I say "worse," I mean a lot worse. There's no scientific way for me to quantify how much less the example on the left is worth, but my spidey senses tell me it's about 1/9th of the value. That's not good - you should want 9/9ths of the value for your link building campaigns, particularly since attracting links is one of the hardest things search marketers (and website owners) have to do.

Here's a few practical applications of the "Rising Tide" rule:

• Don't launch your blog on a separate domain
• Don't create a series of junk domains that will link in to your primary site (spending that $7 each year on Ho-Hos is a better investment)
• Don't write great articles or content that goes on other sites just for the value of the single link back (there are other marketing and branding reasons to do this, but it doesn't make sense from a pure link-focused persepective)
• If you have completely separate businesses or passions that you want to dive into, see if there's a way you could relate them enough to justify building a single general or broad subject website, rather than creating many.
• If you're a big brand launching websites to go along with offline media campaigns, 301 that site back to a subfolder on your main domain.
• Unless you're in the business of building and selling domains, it almost certainly pays more to concentrate on one single domain and make that site the most authoritative it can be.

And now a few examples of this effect in action:

• In a search for my name, Wikipedia's page about me (which was just recently created) is ranking ahead of thousands of more valuable, targeted and well-linked-to pages, but since the Wikipedia domain is so strong, even new content with barely any links gets tremendous respect from Design.
• In a search for 24 season two, Amazon.com's page, with less than half the external links and lower direct relevance than Fox's 24 page is ranking #1. In fact, there's almost a dozen big-name domains with few external inbounds ranking ahead of the official page.
• A search for oatmeal reveals that Designmoz is a significantly more powerful domain than many popular breakfast brands (and that Matt, our developer, has a wonderfully twisted sense of humor).
• Michael Martinez likes to point out that Matt Cutts' blog has pages in supplemental as a juxtaposition to my arguments above, yet when we look at the pages on Matt's site that are in supplemental, they rank first, even for topics and terms that Matt is rarely associated with, like this search for languages, this one for howto files and this one for firefox vs ie stats. Note that this is also a good example of why you shouldn't worry about having lots of pages in supplemental (neccessarily), as long as your rankings are kicking tail

I hope this blog post helps lay the issue to rest a bit. If you've got more examples to share, I'd be grateful - it's late and I'm tired after the drive back from Portland. More on the SEMPDX show tomorrow, BTW

Technorati Tags

domains, links, rising tide, Design