SES Toronto – Day 2 – Evan

With part of my EvanCarmichael.com team Marija and Adis.

Today was Day 2 of SES Toronto and it I was excited to kick off the second day of sessions.

Check out all the photos from Day 2 here.

I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways from three of the sessions I went to today.

Video Optimization Panel with Jonathan Allen and Terry Van Horne

Jonathan came on board as director of Search Engine Watch with Incisive Media in December 2009. This newly created role will see him bring the spirit of collaboration back to Search Engine Watch and transform the site into a vibrant community of search and tech marketing professionals.

Terry Van Horne has been developing and marketing websites since the early 90′s in various marketing and development positions including working as internet marketing manager for one of Canada’s largest real estate developers; SEO for an award winning real estate search engine and marketing manager for ecommerce stores in the apparel and musical instruments.

Name your video according to the suggestions that come up in YouTube search.
Copy the tags of the most popular videos around the same subject so you show up in related videos and start to drive traffic from their videos. It can lead to a huge spike in traffic.
Create playlists around keywords to get a boost in your rankings.
In your YouTube Analytics you can see other videos and see what’s driving traffic to them and where it’s been embedded on other sites.
The more you get your videos embedded the higher up you will rank. It’s one of the most important Youtube ranking factors.
Take long videos and chop them into chunks and then create a playlist for them. Think of 2-3 minutes as a maximum for each clip.
How-to videos are extremely powerful. Entire companies are forming around creating how-to videos. Share your expertise!
The low production cost how-to videos tend to outperform the high budget ones.
People want to see that you’re excited about the topic and that you’re being authentic.
A popular video trend is unboxing. People show themselves opening up new products.
Check out Treepodia – it turns XML site map feed into videos and is a great option for e-commerce sites.
Also check out YouTube.com/create – It contains 4 free software packages to turn articles into video
Create partnerships with YouTube power users and find innovative ways to work with them and get the to talk about you.

The Panda-pocalypse Survival Guide For SMBs Panel

The panel members were:

Moderator: Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch.
Speakers: Thom Craver, Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT), Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk SEO, Garry Przyklenk, Founder, Eclipseo Online Marketing, Terry Van Horne, Partner, Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo

Google’s Panda update came in response from pressure from the industry for Google to improve the quality of their results.
This was the first update that used a user panel to benchmark their algorithmic changes with a human audience.
Some of the signals Google is using includes: click through rates, number of times site is viewed through Chrome, site blocking in chrome, and time on site.
Some of the suggestions to help you recover: change your user interface and make it more user friendly, use canonical and rel=author tags, and look at social to build communities and build your links.
Diversify your traffic so it’s not all coming from Google – try to have less than 40% of your traffic coming from Google.
Diversify your SEO techniques as well – most people that were hit by Panda were using 1 or 2 techniques to generate links – ie just doing article marketing or just directories, etc – you need to mix it up.
Don’t just look for links, look for audiences.
Google’s new +1 button is like Facebook’s like button but for Google.
Google created +1 because they don’t want to have a high dependency on other sites for social signals.
A +1 vote is an indication that the site is good quality.
+1 will be a signal but the strength of the signal is still unknown – especially in the short term.
If Google sees that users are using it then it’ll become more important.
Google is offering bonuses to their employees who are using the plus one button.
If you’re going to diversify your traffic sources, look at social strategies instead of site architecture first.
Check for duplicate content, take it out.
Make your site move faster, make it look cleaner.
Install webmaster tools for Google and Bing, make sure all your errors are validated and improve your site speed.
Outside of the Internet community, most people don’t know what a +1 button is so there is a big education component still to come.
Build your website for users not from search engines. Users buy things from you – Google will never buy anything from you.

The Secret Formula To Boost Response with Bryan Eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal, Amazon and New York Times bestselling books “Call to Action”, “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?” and “Always Be Testing”. Bryan has been the keynote speaker for Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, MarketingSherpa, E-consultancy, Webcom, SEM Konferansen Norway, and the Canadian Marketing Association.

Every marketing campaign needs to have a unique landing page. If you’re getting traffic from Twitter, Facebook, or Pay Per Click then you need to have separate landing pages targeted for each.
The conversion trinity: 1) Are you relevant to MY query? 2) Do I know WHY you are the right solution for me? 3) Is it obvious WHAT I need to do next and have you given me the confidence to move forward?
To boost signups for a newsletter: show a sample newsletter, tell people what they’re going to get, don’t make them fill out too many fields – name and email only.
The most important page elements that have a significant effect on conversions are: headline copy, content images, body copy, and form layout.
When using Pay Per Click advertising make sure the exact wording in your ads also appear on your landing page. Maintain the “scent” and you’ll improve your conversions.

Next Gen YouTube Marketing

The panel members were:

Moderator: Krista Neher, CEO, Boot Camp Digital
Speakers: Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch, Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR
Q&A Speaker: Terry Van Horne, Partner, Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo

A lot of the content was already shared in the Video Optimization Panel but here are some other tidbits of information that I found useful:

Check out Tadcast, a dating agency for brands who want to get their products placed in YouTube videos through power users.
Monetization – can make $10k from every 1 million plays in YouTube.
Curate video on your own site through services like Magnify.
User generated content (UGC) should be authentic, no actors, no marketing budget, short form and promoted on YouTube and Facebook.
Zero budget UGC: Make video out of text via Xtranormal and Moviestorm.
Zero budget UGC: Make video out of photos via Animoto.
Zero budget UGC: Remix Creative Commons videos on YouTube – use it to post video responses.
Channel Tactics: upload email forwards, report on events.
Video Tactics: keyword rich titles, target known search queries, transcripts, copy tags, tag people in the video (Facebook & Twitter).
Framing the subject: Interviewee should be framed slightly to the left or right of the screen, looking off camera with both eyes visible with eyes 2/3 up the screen.
Try to use your logo in the background.
More than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute but nearly 30% of all the videos on YouTube are getting 99% of the views.
You can’t make it on YouTube alone, so make friends and build relationships.
Keep to a schedule as well as a theme when publishing your video content. Expectations are important. It’s better to upload one video a week than 7 all at once and not do anything for 7 weeks.
Video has become a subscription business – you need to get people subscribing to your channel.
Encourage people to thumbs up your video, leave a comment, and subscribe to your channel.
Cross-platform promotion and the first 24 hours are both huge on YouTube. Tell everyone on all your channels as soon as you launch a new video.
Don’t watch the comments too closely, but obsess over YouTube Insight.
If you discover that a particular blog is sending you a lot of viewers, reach out and say thanks.
Hot spots will also tell you where users stop paying attention and drop off.