Recharge your paid search tactics with expert-level PPC sessions at SMX Advanced, June 5-6 in Seattle. These master classes on paid tactics won’t waste your time with basics; SMX Advanced sessions are for experienced search marketers only.

Here are the PPC agenda highlights from this year’s agenda.

We open with Mad Scientists of Paid Search, focusing on the most innovative, thought-provoking and actionable research findings from top advertisers in paid search.

Believe it or not, it has been 10 years since Google launched AdWords and there are plenty of accounts and PPC managers who have been around that long, too.

If you’ve been managing the same accounts for a long time or have inherited mature campaigns that are stagnating, check out Auditing PPC Campaigns. This session shows you how to take a fresh look at older campaigns, identify “cold spots” and obsolete areas within them, and prioritize actions to accelerate performance.

Getting more out of campaigns means applying the best new practices and available features.

First, make sure you are maximizing all the new targeting and retargeting options available in Fire But Don’t Forget: Getting The Most Out Of Retargeting From The Pros.

Next, make sure your PPC landing pages convert visitors to customers and contribute positively to Quality Score. With so many changes in this area over the past year, you need to attend Perfecting Your PPC Landing Pages.

Super-sized campaigns present unique technical and departmental challenges. We address them in Maximizing Enterprise SEM.

Another session sure to appeal to managers of large campaigns is Avoiding PPC Data Paralysis, where we explore challenges of both large and small data sets, managing through the fog of long-tail data, and making decisions from seemingly inconclusive data.

Search doesn’t happen just on the desktop. Today, people are searching on mobile devices, at all hours of the day. That’s why we’ll devote an entire track to mobile search at SMX Advanced. iSEM: Doing Mobile Search Ads Right will provide case studies and concrete examples to help you to better design and optimize your mobile paid-search campaigns.

Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your PPC performance. SMX Advanced is 80% sold out, and when tickets are gone, they are gone. Register now!

Have additional questions?

- What can you expect? See what past attendees have said
- Take a look at the full agenda of 20+ sessions and keynotes
- Who’s behind SMX Advanced? Check out the programming team
- Networking opportunities abound to connect with your peers
- Want to send a group? We offer team discounts
- Extend the learning with our post conference workshops
- How to get there, where to stay

Related Topics: SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo – SMX | SMX SMN Alerts

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About The Author: Search Engine Land is a news and information site covering search engine marketing, searching issues and the search engine industry. Special site announcements and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Search Engine Land. See more articles by Search Engine Land

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Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/24JRiMjOCjo/elevate-your-paid-campaign-roi-%E2%80%93-attend-smx-advanced-june-5-6-118093

Having just experienced a round of demos from some of the major enterprise PPC tools, I can’t help but love my job. It’s always fun because I get to peek under the hood of some of the biggest, baddest, most robust search management tools on the market.

Within these demos, we talk about thin data, dynamic clustering, Bayesian math and other light topics such as attribution management, profit curves and media mix modeling.

The reason I do this, other than the fact that I like to hang out with both sales people and applied mathematics PhDs, is that for certain businesses at Yahoo!, is because we’ve historically built some of our own in-house search management technology. As such, I have to keep track of the latest developments and features in the enterprise SEM management tools market.

Truth is, these tools have come a long way in the past couple of years and they’re aggressively coming after large enterprise SEM campaigns like the ones we manage. Since most people don’t have the opportunity to build in-house SEM tools, I thought my experience here might benefit those who are considering building and/or buying tools.

Who Needs Enterprise SEM Tools Anyway?

Let’s take a step back first. How do you know if you should be using Enterprise SEM Tools? In my experience, there’s a somewhat logical decision tree here.

Ask yourself a few simple questions: First and most importantly, is SEM core to my business? Another way to think of this is, does SEM provide the majority of my business’ revenue?

If yes, then strongly consider building your own tools but beware, it’s a big, expensive commitment so you better have significant SEM revenue (and corporate backing) to support it.

If you answered “no”, then consider head count constraints. Can you hire, train and maintain an in-house PPC team or would it be more advantageous to outsource SEM to an agency? If you’re still leaning toward in-house management then you should think about scale. How big is my program? Is this US only or multinational?

The bigger and more complex your program is, the better a candidate you’ll be for an Enterprise SEM toolset. So, how do you choose a tool?

A few examples of Enterprise SEM tools providers

 

Integration: Know Your Data

Regardless of what tool you end up with, there’s going to be a data integration of sorts. For large companies with proprietary data systems, or in places where conversion events have variable, dynamic revenue attached to them, this can be a big deal.

If, however, your company is selling widgets or subscriptions to widget services, the integration will be less onerous, as you can probably cover this requirement with a third-party tracking system (and many enterprise SEM tools have their own tracking technology if you don’t).

All that said, having been through at least one failed integration, I’m here to tell you that this is critical. Get it right, and you can move on to actually using a toolset. Get it wrong, and you’re back to square one.

So before you even entertain an engagement with a tools vendor, get control of your conversion or revenue data (the cost data will come from the search engines directly, so don’t worry about that now). Understand where the conversion data comes from, what it looks like, how often it’s delivered, if there’s a database what’s the structure, etc., and how you’re going to deliver your data to the provider.

Also, you’ll need to understand URLs and how they’ll be handled by your internal data systems. Can they handle dynamic parameters, or will they need to be hard-coded? It makes a big difference once you get down to comparing tool feature sets so pay attention.

With regard to the integration itself, every tool provider will say they can handle it (whether or not they actually can), so the more you know about your data going in, the more skillfully you’ll be able to sniff out the posers and move on.

Problem Solving

Once you understand the data integration piece of the puzzle, it’s time to sit down and think seriously about what problem you’re really trying to solve. Is it most important to be able to report on SEM results globally to executives every month? Or it is paramount to optimize your search campaigns to a complex set of business metrics? Some tools are built to seamlessly integrate global enterprise SEM programs, delivering slick user interfaces with drag and drop custom report builders.

Others are built to drill mercilessly deep into your data stack to uncover the most obfuscated details of your data and leverage that to relentlessly squeeze the last basis points of operating margins out of your smallest optimizable unit of data. So how’s a search marketer able to make a smart decision? Most tools are going to have a bias one way or the other, so the more you have a feel for this going in, the better choice you’re going to make in the end.

Bake Off?

Ok, so now you have a good sense of your data picture, and you know what are the most (and least) important goals you have to hit, you’re ready to pick a provider. But how do you choose? I know, let’s give three tools providers different parts of my keyword portfolio at the same time, and see which one provides the best ROI.

Hold on a minute – this is where I tend to disagree with the way most search marketers operate. If you’ve done your homework, I think you should RFP a small number of providers and pick the one that best matched up with the criteria we’ve outlined above.

Why? First of all, because with search marketing it’s very difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison if you’re splitting up a campaign (or a time period, or whatever). There are simply too many variables that affect the outcome of a program to pretend that this would be a fair comparison.

Secondly, and most importantly, you are a search marketer. It’s your job to make decisions like this, not to rely on some half-baked bake-off scenario to make the decision for you. Make a call based on what you know, and if you fail, fail fast, and try again.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Enterprise SEM

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/JNekpiFrJ40/three-questions-to-ask-when-selecting-an-enterprise-sem-tool-provider-117382

Microsoft announced on the Bing Developer Blog that they are transitioning the Bing Search API over to the Windows Azure Marketplace over the next few months, leading to no longer offering a free version of the Bing Search API.

API usage costs for the Bing Search API will cost $40 for up to 20,000 queries each month and the prices will go up from there.

Microsoft said this change is being made in order to provide fresher results and improved relevancy, while opening up additional opportunities to monetize the data.

When will this happen? Well, Microsoft said it won’t start for “several weeks” and then will take “few months” to transition over. So you probably have about 5 to 6 months to worry about this.

Microsoft promises to announce how developers should transition in the upcoming weeks, while developers accessing 3 to 4 million queries per month will be given different instructions.

Related Stories:

• Bing Webmaster Tools API Now Available
• Bing Maps Enables Developers To Submit Apps
• Live Search SOAP API Out Of Beta
• Microsoft Live Search Releases New “Silk Road” API With Ad Support

Related Topics: Microsoft: APIs | Microsoft: Bing

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About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.
See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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When you think about International SEO, it is easy to imagine Global 2000 companies with offices and employees around the globe. It can be equally important to the small business that sells globally from one location.

How do you convince the search engines to include you in their international rankings on a country by country level?

Google has numerous country code top level domains (ccTLD). Each provides search results targeted for a specific country in its native language:

www.google.it.ao, www.google.co.bw, www.google.bi, www.google.ci, www.google.cd, www.google.dj, www.google.com.eg, www.google.com.et, www.google.gm, www.google.com.gh, www.google.co.ke, www.google.co.ls, www.google.com.ly, www.google.mw, www.google.mu, www.google.co.ma, www.google.com.na, www.google.com.ng, www.google.cg, www.google.rw, www.google.sh, www.google.st, www.google.sn, www.google.sc, www.google.co.za, www.google.co.ug, www.google.co.zm, www.google.co.zw

Bing takes a different approach. Instead of using separate ccTLD domains they use www.bing.com and set location and language cookies. See the full list at http://www.bing.com/worldwide.aspx.

While you and I might use Google or Bing, the top search engine in the Czech Republic is Senzam. In China it’s Baidu. In Japan, Yahoo. Check out  webCertain’s Search and Social Report to see top search engines for different countries.

Each search engine has its own set of ranking factors and best practices. For example, on Yandex, the top search engine in Russia, you want to be listed in the Yandex Directory. You will also want to ensure Yandex has the correct region settings for your website.

With the above considerations in mind, I wanted to share some general ranking factors for international SEO to complement the advice shared in the Multinational Search column.

Unfortunately, the best route to optimization may remain unclear or subject to budget. Not everyone can afford or manage hosting in multiple countries. Usually it comes down to gathering as much information as possible then making the best decisions for your budget, company, and visitors.

1.  Target Countries Or Languages?

Should you target each country or group them by language? Google seems to favor targeting countries.

If you go to Google Webmaster Tools Site Configuration Settings you can designate a geographic target. Something many webmasters do not know is the fact that you can register subfolders separately in Google Webmaster Tools and designate a different geographic target for each subfolder. You must register subdomains separately for Webmaster Tools to recognize them.

Generally, I recommend targeting countries. The exception is when you use subfolders instead of ccTLDs and have clients in many different countries. When both of these are true it can make sense to focus on languages instead of countries to avoid duplicate content issues or diluting link authority. Just make sure you will be getting local links.

2.  ccTLD, Subfolder Or Subdomain?

ccTLDs are the best option for international SEO if you believe each ccTLD will be capable of competitive link building over time and each site will receive regular additions of compelling content. I strongly suggest ccTLDs for countries where Google and Bing are not the top search engines.

If you are just starting out or do not have lots of authority among your international ccTLD sites, then using or switching to a subfolder strategy may work better for you. While each country or language section will still need its own links and content, they may benefit from domain wide authority. Down the road you can switch to a ccTLD strategy and 301 redirect authority as you launch new sites. This will work best for Google and Bing SEO.

About the only time I suggest subdomains is when maintaining ccTLDs will be too onerous and it is impossible to use subfolders. This can be the case with hosted content management systems, though you ought to be able to overcome this with reverse-proxies.  That said, if each subdomain receives continuous new content and links they may rank well.

Make sure you geographically target each country’s site, subfolder or subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools. Recently Google delisted Burberry’s US site because it duplicated of their UK site.

3.  Language Meta Tag

While Bing does not offer geotargeting, it does pay attention to the language meta tag. Make sure this is set properly for all pages on all sites.

meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us”

4.  Hosting IP Address

The geographic location of a website is a Google ranking factor. If you can handle the challenges of hosting locally, do it.

5.  Written Language

Language is critical to the success of international content. From keywords to phrasing to grammar, it all impacts your SEO success. Do not simply translate one language into another and put it up on your ccTLD site. Perform native language keyword research so you target the best words and phrases.

Rewrite for each country, even if it’s the same language. That might be obvious when going from Spanish to French, but keep in mind that UK English differs from American English. Local words and phrases enhance long tail SEO and improve usability.

6.  Local Content

Use local addresses and contact information, preferably in machine readable format such as Schema.org. Add local stories or case studies with the names and images from within each country. Customizing content for each country or market makes it more relevant, increases local link building opportunities, and decreases duplicate content.

7.  Design Usability

Speaking of usability, different countries prefer different design esthetics. Recreating your mother website in a different language may not be enough. Review each site with a local Web designer or someone who specializes in the target country.

8.  Currency Forms

Do you have currency options for all the countries your websites target? Are those countries listed in checkout or contact forms?

9.  XML Sitemaps

Make sure each site uses XML sitemaps and register them with the search engines. If you use subfolders, create a separate sitemap for each country and register it in Google Webmaster Tools as a different website.

Remember, you can register subfolders separately in Google Webmaster Tools and designate a different geographic target for each subfolder.

10.  Local Search Registration

Register each site with Google Places, Bing Business Portal and local equivalents like the Yandex Directory.

11.  Local Activity: Links, Mentions, Votes Reviews

While most of the ranking signals I have mentioned are on-site SEO, the ultimate signals of authority will come from off-site. Search engine representatives have stated that links from within countries matter. You need to engage in local link building. Recently Google announced +1 button in search for more countries and domains.

Obviously, search engines are looking at social signals around the world. In each country, are local websites linking to yours? Are residents mentioning your brand and site in social media? Do they review your brand on review sites? Make sure you have on off-site SEO plan for each country you market to.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: All Things SEO

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/C388ZmoZx24/11-considerations-for-international-seo-117798

Google has been displaying more than blue links in search results  for a while now. And soon, users will be able to find more facts and direct answers to their queries on top of search results. This comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reported on an interview with Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive. Evidently, Google plans to provide more relevant results by “incorporating semantic search technology, the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.”

Search Engine Land author and Ontologica semantic services provider Barbara Starr said, “It’s inevitable that lots of verified structured data will give rise to the ability of search engines to become answer engines.” And that’s happening now. Google wants to better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of entities on people, places and things that the company has been collecting over the last two years, while focusing more on structured data.

With this algorithm enhancement, Google hopes to provide answers to certain queries by using structured data and leveraging semantic technology such as structured markup from the ecommerce ontology it supports (GoodRelations and Schema.org).

This is great news for online retailers, because now your products and services can display more completely and prominently with rich snippets in search results when you use structured markup.

As part of its algorithm change, Google will add semantic technology to its keyword search system. Right now, keywords play a dominant role in the algorithm for ranking websites, along with authoritative links and the person searching (personalization). Adding semantic search technology allows the understanding of actual word meanings.

With semantic meaning in the algorithm, users can differentiate between words with more than one meaning, such as a mustang car vs. a mustang horse.

Google wants search to include semantic meaning because that’s the way humans process and understand information. Therefore, when providing answers on entities not currently in its database, Google will blend new semantic search technology with its current system.

This will increase its ability to recognize the value of information on websites for ranking purposes. In the future, the Googlebot will be looking for more than keywords and authoritative links; it will be able to identify more meaningful information e.g., structured data or semantic markup. That means better search results for users, and better exposure for retail sites.

RDFa Structured Markup

The foundation of structured data is the Resource Definition Framework (RDF), “a standard model for data interchange on the web” that permits data to be shared across different applications, and supports the evolution of different schemas over time. RDFa provides a set of attributes that allow the embedding of rich metadata within Web documents, e.g., the addition of machine-readable attributes to standard XHTML.

GoodRelations RDFa is a semantic markup technology designed specifically for ecommerce. It allows retailers to send precise data on their products, items or services when communicating it to search engines.

Without RDFa, retailers send only unstructured text, even though they may use precise data when creating item pages, making it hard for search engine’s to extract, interpret, and properly rank their individual pages.

With RDFa, retailers can add a small, yet rich piece of structured data (e.g., small product datasheet), which search engines, browser extensions and mobile applications can use to precisely inform potential customers about your products.

GoodRelations markup can be used for displaying price, product, store, payment, and delivery information on search engine listings. This ontology language can be used by retailers to precisely describe what their business offers. Retailers can use GoodRelations to create a small data package that describes their products, features and prices, in addition to their stores and opening hours, payment options and so forth.

Just simply paste your data package into your webpage using W3C’s RDFa format, or use the snippet generator to generate GoodRelations-specific markup for you page. And, that’s it; you’re done.

When adding GoodRelations to your webpages, you increase the visibility of your offers in search engines and recommender systems. While traditional SEO attempts to put you on top of search results, the reality is not everyone can be on top. GoodRelations gives top visibility to buyers looking for your retail products and services. That means your offer becomes visible to those with a matching need.

GoodRelations is supported by Google Bing and Yahoo!, which render your product pages better with GoodRelations data on your site. It is being used by companies like BestBuy, CSNStores, and thousands of retail shops with great success.

Why Use Structured Markup?

As reported on SemanticWeb.com, Webnodes AS content management system version 3.7 with schema.org support resulted in tests showing a 30 percent increase in organic search-engine traffic to websites using Microdata or similar technologies.

From a GoodRelations case study:  “There is preliminary evidence that search results with respective extensions get a 30% higher click-through rate (CTR).”

How To Apply GoodRelations RDFa

You can learn more about RDFa in this 15 minute presentation titled, Extending Schema.org with Good Relations and Productontology.org, which includes Martin Hepp’s Presentation of September 21, 2011 at the schema.org workshop, indicating how schema.org and GoodRelations can be used in combination for sending richer data on retail sites to search engines and browser extensions, helping retailers articulate their value proposition as data.

For more information on semantic SEO for Google with GoodRelations and RDFa, you can use this modification, which shows you how to add additional mark-up to your pages so Google can use the information to substantially enhance the rendering of your pages in search results.

Below are some additional useful links with information about using GoodRelations.

• GoodRelations extension for VirtueMart, the OS ecommerce solution of Joomla CMS.
• Quora (QA) on web ontology for ecommerce
• Strategies for Building Semantic Web Applications
• SemTech 2011 Presentation by Barbara Starr

Additionally, SMWCon Spring 2012 will be held in Carlsbad, CA, April 25-27, with presentations and discussions about state-of-the art applications and future development of Semantic MediaWiki and its extensions. The conference brings together developers, users, and organizations from the Semantic MediaWiki community around the world.

With Google changing its algorithm to ameliorate the shortcomings of its current technology by incorporating semantic search technology, retailers have an excellent opportunity to fully exploit this change by incorporating structured data on their websites and product pages. It is rumored these changes will be among the biggest in Google’s history. Don’t miss this opportunity to get ahead of your competitors.

Disclosure: I am not affiliated with GoodRelations in any way.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Search Retail

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/dTuVpslqeHQ/google-becomes-answer-engine-with-semantic-technology-great-news-for-retailers-116860

Big news for genealogists, historians and even for people just curious about their own families: the 1940 U.S. Census is now available on the web. Unfortunately, at this point at least, it takes a bit of skill and determination to navigate through the data, though there are many efforts underway to make this incredibly valuable trove of data more easily searchable.

For more info and to begin searching, here’s a collection of direct links to some helpful material.

Since the database became available on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) last week I’ve heard from a few people asking me about when you’ll be able to search the 1940 Census database by name.

Here’s precisely what NARA has to say:

The 1940 census has not yet been indexed by name, so you must search the census by location or enumeration district. There are initiatives underway to make the 1940 census searchable by name, including a community volunteer project. If you’d like to help make the 1940 census name-index available for free you can sign-up as a volunteer at the1940census.com.

While NARA has tools to help users locate records by enumeration (where someone lived), it’s still not nearly as fast or efficient as searching by name. 

Ancestry.com’s 1940 Census Search

While NARA works to build a name index, Ancestry.com is gradually rolling out a name index for the 1940 census out to the public. Ancestry.com announced that they now have all 3.8 million scanned 1940 U.S. Census page images available, and have released a searchable name index for two states with the others to come.

The first two states available for name search are Delaware and Nevada. A good start, but a lot of work left to do.

The 1940 Census index is free to search via Ancestry.com from now through the end of 2013. You do need a login/password, but registration is simple (e-mail address only) and does not require a credit card. You can access the Ancestry.com 1940 census databasehere.

Looking For New York City Residents

In conjunction with the census release, the New York Public Library has developed a tool named Direct Me NYC 1940 that let’s you locate people by name and address, using a database of 1940s residential telephone directories.

Related Topics: Search Engines: Government Search Engines | Search Engines: People Search

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About The Author: Gary Price is a librarian, author, and an online information analyst based in suburban Washington, DC. He is the co-founder and co-editor of INFOdocket and FullTextReports.com and prior to that was founder/editor of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. He has worked for Blekko, Ask.com, and at Search Engine Watch where he was news editor. In 2001, Price was the co-author (with Chris Sherman) of the best-selling book The Invisible Web. See more articles by Gary Price

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Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/t1fDC5KLS4E/the-1940-u-s-census-soon-a-searchers-treasure-trove-117869