Chicago SES Day 4 Highlights

While the fourth and final day at Chicago Search Engine Strategies & Expo was a short day, there was still plenty of great goodies for SEO/SEM geeks:

On search engine auditing:

• When you create a pay-per-click campaign (SEM) make sure you do the proper research and monitor/audit your campaigns.
• The Analytics Ecosystem: Collect, Analyze, Report, Optimize, Monetize
• You must audit your campaigns.
• If you see abnormal behavior in your PPC campaigns, you have to report it back to the ad network (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.)
• Not everything that goes wrong with your PPC campaign is click fraud.
• When you have a problem or concern, file a claim, it's the only real feedback process.
• A "click farm" is a group of individuals hired or organized by a central party to click on ads. Typically this is done in lower wage nations.
• Click fraud, according to Google, is when someone is engaging in fraudulent intent in clicking your ad.
• When it comes to investigating click fraud, Google uses a three-part system for invalid click detection. Stage 1 and 2 are proactive: filters and offline analysis. Stage 3 is a reactive stage and involves investigation.
• Less than 10 percent of clicks across Google are invalid clicks.

Search marketers on auditing:

• There is brutal competition for search rankings
• CPC (Cost Per Click) costs are rising 20% plus annually.
• Campaign complexity is increasing
• Managing the effectiveness of a campaign is more difficult.
• Click fraud and poor quality traffic are reducing the overall effectiveness of CPC efforts.
• Invalid traffic is more of a problem than click fraud.
• One-third of all click fraud is created by bots and botnets.

White Hat vs. Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

• This panel spent well more than 30 minutes discussing paid links (white hat or black hat?)
• Doug Heil: If you are going against the search engine guidelines, then you are black hat. Read them.
• Eric Enge: Smaller businesses buy links because they think they're buying advertising.
• Buying links is acceptable. It's advertising. However, if you are a small site, you want to build up trust with quality links first.
• Everyone who buys links is doing it for the search engines and not for the traffic from the link.
• Consider this: If you pay for a membership to join an organization and they give you a link on their website, is that a paid link? (some on the panel said yes, and some said no).
• If you spend the time to build the site and have good content and follow the rules, then you can get ranked high.
• Definitely black hat: Returning to old blog posts and updating them with new anchor text links. Very dangerous.
• Of course, there are some areas that are a little bit white had and a little bit black hat and now they are gray hat.
• One of the hardest tasks you have is getting links to your website.
• Is trading links bad? It depends on who you are trading links with.
• If all you have are reciprical links, then that's bad.

Comments

[Corey]

Hello Steve...I really enjoyed the white hat/black hat panel yesterday as well. What Dave Naylor said was true...black hats cause Google to continually improve their algorithm. They keep Matt Cutts on his toes :) Anyway, I hope you got some good tips from the week. Take care!