1. What is your background and what are you doing for Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc?

My background is as a serial entrepreneur. I got into Search Marketing about 5 years ago when I was looking for new and interesting work to learn. I was immediately attracted to the “game” of SEO and have been pretty much obsessed with it ever since.

I am a senior SEO at Blizzard doing research and development, creating best practices, training others and optimizing client websites. We specialize in the travel and hospitality vertical and concentrating in this niche has really allowed us to excel. We know what works for websites in these industries because we can test and measure results over a large number of similar businesses.

2. There has been a lot of discussion recently on the validity of a long tail strategy – what are your thoughts on marketing to the longtail?

Some clients have an enormously long tail of location-specific keyword terms that attract very qualified traffic to their websites. One example of this is Hilton Head Island South Carolina. The top 500 keywords for one client account for a little less than 50% of their traffic from organic search. That leaves 50% way out there on a very long tail.

For others, we use activity or attraction terms in their long tail marketing strategy. While these typically bring less targeted traffic that doesn’t convert as well, they still pay a relatively low cost for each conversion. It is usually quite easy to optimize for long tail terms. A well-optimized blog post about an upcoming concert, for example, can bring plenty of visitors to a nearby hotel’s website. At least a few of them are likely to convert into room bookers.

3. Should marketers always use secondary search engines? Why or why not?

I optimize for Google. When an agency is involved, that is where the client gets the biggest bang for their bucks. If I were working strictly on my own sites, however, I’d go after every opportunity I could find. Then I’d expand on what’s working and let go of what isn’t working.

4. What are some “best practices” when building out a long tail strategy?

Do very thorough keyword research and make sure you include the client in the process. They can help you to uncover many valuable terms that, as an outsider, you may not be familiar.

Building new pages is the easiest way to optimize for long tail terms, If a new page is well-optimized for a long tail term or two, it’s not unusual to have it ranking within a week, as long as your website’s internal linking is good.

5. What part does a global marketing plan play in developing a long tail strategy?

I don’t really have any expertise in global marketing. Sorry.

6. What is the latest “flash in the pan” meme in search marketing?

Being connected to everyone else all the time via sites like Twitter. Some people thrive on this kind of constant contact, but many early adopters have already tired of the noise and are filtering it out or even switching it off.

7. What are some SEM blogs and resources that you use?

I am very interested in Local Search and some of my favorite bloggers right now are:

David Mihm

Michael Blumenthal

Andrew Shotland

Greg Sterling

And writing my thoughts down in my own blog http://www.marybowling.com/ helps me to think more clearly about SEO.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Interview: Mary Bowling SES 2008: San Jose

There are many ways to deal with the issue. Generally speaking, if there are multiple copies of a site or there are multiple copies of content you’ll want to suggest to them that while we can leave the content open to visitors, the search engines need to “see” only one copy of the content. So, you will want to use a robots.txt file or other means of disallowing the search engines from indexing more than one copy of the content.

That said, in very general terms, if I see someone about to launch a website that I know will hurt their SEO, I tell them NOT to launch until they’ve addressed any issues that could be less than “optimal” for SEO (redirects are not set up properly, URLs are horrible, pages are “invisible” to the search engines, or any other issues).

If you already have multiple sites with similar content, what steps (other than taking one down or developing completely new content for one of them) can you take to minimize the negative effects on your SEO?

Again, the “easiest thing” can be to make sure that the search engines can only index one copy of the content. There can be very legitimate reasons why you would want to keep multiple or similar copies available to human visitors, including having different versions for PPC landing pages. The best thing you can do, though, to minimize the negative effects on search engine optimization is to be aware of all of the duplicate content and to make sure that the search engine crawlers can only get to one copy. If it’s absolutely necessary to market each website separately, and there are many (thousands of?) pages of content, I would recommend that they – at a minimum – edit the first paragraph of content to be unique and ensure that Titles and Descriptions are unique.

As blogs become increasingly popular, many companies are developing unique domains for their company blog. If this content is syndicated through their homepage or elsewhere, will that have negative affects on their homepage’s SEO?

Generally speaking, most companies will tend have a “shorter version” of the content on their company home pages. It is typical for a home page to include the title (which is a link) and a brief description of the article or blog post. Having an RSS feed or other type of feed on a web page generally is not considered duplicate unless that content is the only content on the page. Most home pages generally have a lot more content on the page than one syndicated feed. In fact, we have seen that these small snippets of content on the home page, being regularly updated, can have a positive effect on SEO as search engines do like to see fresh content, rather than a home page that never changes.

Do micro-sites with completely original content, but which are affiliated/associated with the parent company/homepage, have a negative affect on SEO?

It really depends on the content of the micro-site on whether or not it has a negative effect on search engine optimization. If the micro-site has original content then it is a good thing. However, lately, we are recommending that a blog or micro-site be put directly on the main domain name rather than developing a completely separate site with a completely new domain name.

Does duplicating homepage content on social networks/profiles hurt your SEO? (E.G. if a company creates a myspace page and copies much of the content from their homepage onto their myspace page, will that be considered duplicate content)

Generally speaking, if you were to take content and text from your current website and put it on social network or a profile it typically is not considered to be duplicate. There is usually enough other text and enough other content on the social networking profile where duplicate content is not usually an issue.

How does a search engine identify that two sites are related/tied to one another? What if someone copies my webpage content to their page, but I have no association with them, do I get penalized?

In most cases, the page that gets crawled first will be the originator of the content. Any other pages that the search engines find (like someone who copied your web page and put it on their site) will be considered duplicates of the original. The same concept applies when you take copy from one of your web pages and put it on another; the first page crawled is the original; all others are duplicates. So, this illustrates the importance of trying to ensure that your original content, that exists on your website is crawled/indexed first.

For more information about Mark checkout his company website http://www.vizioninteractive.com/ or see him at SES 2008: San Jose

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

More and more site owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content. If you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS and feeds? Will other sites be considered the “real” site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results? This session looks at the issues and explores solutions.

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Interview: Mark Jackson Organic Search SES 2008: San Jose

You are participating in a keynote roundtable this year at the SES 2008 show in San Jose about attributing sales to Search – How much credit does an SEM program deserve?

It obviously deserves its fair share but this is the problem we are trying to solve… That search should not be an island and should be collaborative with other marketing activities. Historically, Search Marketers have tried to compete with other budgets rather than trying to be complimentary. We are trying to get marketers to understand they should work together and how to play nice with other marketers.

How do you determine the success of a Search campaign? What are some benchmarks for success?

It really varies. There are two key things we look for in metrics:

Most people with their search campaigns are only interested in Response Oriented — this is where the goal was to provoke people to do something. They want to know how many clicks and people buy. We are doing these but starting to do more around Awareness Oriented metrics – how many people became aware of us or our products during this phrase and what was their depth of their engagement with us.

Too many people exclude generic words from their campaign because the ROI is not positive but if they measures the awareness lift similar to GRP’s it opens up a different perspective. The current brand recall studies show this has tremendous value to the business. Additionally, we look at the “why only x” in terms of clicks and conversions. I have never been happy with a 5% click rate which means that 95% did not connect. If our client is the market leader they should be getting more but too many marketers do not take the time to understand why they are not getting their fair share of that opportunity.

What are some examples (generic or specific) of companies doing search right or wrong?
There are many large and small companies doing search wrong. Just about any search you do you will see mistakes with both paid and natural search. I see a lot of big companies that still have not effectively integrated search into their marketing organization. Those doing it well are many of the brands on the panels at this next SES. I am impressed with what Intuit has done as well as Intel – both are examples of well integrated search programs.

What is the latest “flash in the pan” meme in search marketing?

Social Media optimization – I think there are a lot of hacks out there that are jumping on this bandwagon since it is hot now. We are seeing a lot of chatter about optimizing social media content. While a lot of this is good information it is done after the fact rather than anything strategic that creates continuity. There are some companies who have embraced it and have tied it into a larger traffic and messaging strategy.

What are next generation search marketers thinking about?
They are thinking about content optimization across multiple formats and how to maximize all intersections with searchers. They will also be looking for was to integrate search into the entire content creation workflow.

What is one area you would like to see people spend more time on when looking at SEM analytics?

Monitoring paid and organic search integration.

Please share some of your professional background and why enjoy being CEO/President of Global Strategies?

I am one of the pioneers of Search Marketing. I got started by sending requests for inclusion into Yahoo! Directly to Jerry Yang when they were just starting out. I helped Outrider grow into the largest search agency that was acquired by WPP in 2000. After taking a break from search and working on a few internal consulting projects I formed GSI to work with companies to integrate search into the workflow for scale. We have grown to be a leader in enterprise and global search marketing. Why I enjoy being the CEO? I get to oversee a great team of dedicated Search consultants and work with some of the biggest brands in the world. I get to travel the world to meet with clients and teams. Last year I logged over 300,000 miles and visted 20+ countries. The travel around the world gives me the opportunity to experience many different forms of search marketing techniques and opportunities.

For more information about Bill Hunt or his company checkout Global Strategies.

Post from: Eric Friedman
You should follow me on Twitter here
Interview: Bill Hunt – SES 2008: San Jose