Blog Référencement Publicityweb

At SES San Jose 2009, I've been asked to make a solo presentation to kick of the Search and Community Track. The title of the session is "How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community." I've been working on my presentation, but it lacked a compelling case study that illustrated how a community organization had used search engine optimization and YouTube video to generate measurable results. I had planned to show examples of videos created by Barack Obama's presidential campaign, Monty Python, and Blendtec, but plans have a way of changing. Then, I got involved with the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), a national non-profit community advocacy and homeownership organization headquartered in Boston. NACA is organizing a series of Save the Dream events to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, restructure home loans, and reduce mortgage rates. They have already held events in Columbia, SC, Stamford, CT, and Washington, DC. And NACA plans to hold more Save the Dream events in Cleveland, OH, July 17 - 20 at the Wolstein Center; Chicago, IL, July 24 - 27 at McCormick Place; and St. Louis, MO, July 31 - August 3 at Chaifetz Arena. Although I don't have my case study wrapped up just yet, I do see one in the making. And it offers lots of lessons to search engine marketers, YouTube directors and entrepreneurs about how to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. For example, we issued an optimized press release yesterday announcing that NACA CEO Bruce Marks and Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11) will hold a joint press conference on Monday, July 6, at the Wolstein Center at 11:30 am to discuss the upcoming Save the Dream event in Cleveland. You can get the gist of the news at NACA and Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge (Oh-11) Announce Same Day Solution for Homeowners with Unaffordable Mortgage. But we also embedded a documentary video created by DigiNovations of Concord, MA, in the optimized press release. It provides background on NACA's Save the Dream program, which has helped homeowners across America restructure and renegotiate home mortgages and home loans they can no longer afford. Documentary: NACA's "Save the Dream" - Mortgage Restructuring and Renegotiation Rescues Homeowners Now, the press conference hasn't even been held yet -- and the Save the Dream event in Cleveland is still two weeks away. But I was stunned yesterday when one Twitter user near Memphis, TN, said "this is fantastic news" but she couldn't afford to wait, had called NACA and was "on hold" waiting to talk with someone. I initially tweeted back that NACA will have over 500 staff and volunteers at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland, including over 250 counselors providing counseling from 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. from Friday July 17 through Monday July 20. Then, I realized that this information wasn't helpful today, this minute, now. So, I sent her a direct tweet with the cell phone number of the person I was working with at NACA -- in case she needed it. I got a direct tweet back saying, "Thanks for the info... my process is well underway - so I'm all set (I hope!)" So, something extraordinary is happening. And as I prepare for my presentation at SES San Jose 2009, I hope you won't mind if I share the story as it unfolds. That's one of the lessons I've already learned: You can't plan a search campaign and expect the community to wait to respond when you are ready -- especially if you are offering an answer to the huge subprime and predatory lending industry. This is bigger than a case study. This is people's homes.

Buzz has been building about real-time search. Of course, you can search real-time Tweets on Twitter, Facebook is testing search on its live Feed, and Bing just added limited Twitter search to its engine. Now, FriendFeed is launching real-time search and it has the potential to be the mackdaddy of them all. Here's why. FriendFeed is a social aggregator. It's a one-stop shop to check and update a bunch of different networks, blogs, etc. Now, you can search all of that in real-time. The drawback? It only searches what people submit to FriendFeed. Whoever does that can basically say "Check" in the chess match of social real-time search. Still, this is a tremendous step in that direction. Even better, FriendFeed has released an embeddable real-time search widget you can put on your website. What do you think of FriendFeed real-time search? Let us know by leaving a comment.

We're well under way with our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off two weeks ago. This week, you'll hear tips from Jack Herrick, the founder of wikiHow.com, about attracting new visitors to your site. As we share more tips over the next two weeks about increasing your revenue potential and attracting more advertiser budget, we hope you'll leave comments with your own suggestions for growing your business. You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can create or edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100th most popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16 million unique visitors each month. Today, Jack shares three of his favorite tips to attract visitors. We hope they'll help you come up with new ways to entice visitors to your sites as well.Tip #1: Produce great contentThe first tip is obvious, but it's also the most important. The articles on wikiHow vary widely in quality. We have some of the highest quality how-tos on the net, for example How to Hard Boil an Egg, and we also have some fairly ugly, unfinished drafts we call stubs. Interestingly, the high-quality articles don't get just a little more traffic than the mediocre articles, they get hundreds of times more. When you can produce the single best page on the Internet on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don't settle for acceptable content, always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can't resist sharing.Tip #2: Learn to shareMy second tip is more counterintuitive. To attract more readers to your website, consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so it can be widely distributed. Everything on wikiHow is under a license that allows other websites to publish and even modify or adapt our content for re-use on their sites. In fact, we have a button at the bottom of every article that allows webmasters to copy and paste the HTML right onto their site. Many webmasters are afraid to share their content, because they worry they will only be aiding competition. By sharing, what you are really doing is encouraging your competitors to provide free advertising for you. The more people who see your content on other sites, the more likely they are to eventually come straight to you.Tip #3: Make your community a teamFinally, I'd encourage you to allow real collaboration on your site. Lots of websites try to create online communities. To use a basketball analogy, most online communities are just groups of individuals shooting freethrows alone. On wiki websites, people play together as a real team. Humans are hard wired to want to work in groups and collaborate. By allowing this to happen, you can create a passionate community of people that will build something bigger than any one person could accomplish on their own. And that will in time attract a large audience.Hopefully Jack's tips will help you come up with some new techniques to attract visitors to your site. In addition to Jack's tips, here are a few extra resources focused on attracting more visitors.

• Learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization with Google's SEO guide.
• Submit your content so that Google can help you distribute it across Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, iGoogle, and more.
• Drive more traffic to your site with programs like AdWords.

Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

We released the new AdWords interface early to get your feedback on it as soon as possible. And you haven't disappointed us! We receive thousands of comments every month covering likes, dislikes, and ideas for ways to further improve the AdWords interface. We read your comments carefully to prioritize the areas to work on next.And we've made a lot of progress on the top issues our advertisers reported, so today we wanted to share these improvements with you.Less horizontal scrollingWhen working with certain browsers and monitor resolutions (especially 1024x768), you told us you needed to scroll back and forth in order view data tables and controls. We've now condensed the layout of AdWords pages and width of columns in order to eliminate the need to scroll horizontally. If you're still encountering this issue, please let us know.If you'd like to further condense the view of your account, remember that you can customize your columns. Try hiding columns that aren't important to you and move other columns around to quickly compare important metrics side-by-side.Support for Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5Those of you working with the newest versions of Safari and Firefox will be happy to know that the new AdWords interface now works with these browsers. We'll continue to work to support the latest versions all major browsers in the future.Faster load timesOne of our most important goals with the new interface was to improve the efficiency of day-to-day campaign management tasks. We've heard from some advertisers that while integrated reports and roll-up tabs help them quickly access and act on important data, the data didn't always load as quickly as they'd hoped.We've worked to improve the speed of the interface with the latest releases, and hope you can now see a noticeable improvement. However, our work isn't done, and we'll continue to focus on shortening load times with upcoming launches. For the fastest experience, we recommend using the following browsers: Chrome, Firefox 3+, Safari 4, or Internet Explorer 8.Searching for keywordsWe heard many of you are looking for quick ways to search for keywords, ad text, or campaign names within your account. In previous posts, we talked about how you can use filtering to focus on the data that matters to you.While text filters allow you to search and act directly on the data you see, they also take a few clicks to set up for the first time. To help you work more quickly, we've added a new shortcut that lets you quickly search by text under the 'Filter and views' menu on any tab.Try it on your Keywords tab to quickly find all keywords containing a specific term.Educational materialsYou told us you'd like more help with transitioning to the new interface. In addition to New Interface Thursdays and our new interface website, we recently started a series of free educational webinars, featuring the product team. Sign up now for the next webinar on July 10.If you haven't been using the new AdWords interface to manage your campaigns due to a specific annoyance, now's a great time to to log in and see how the interface has improved. And please, keep your feedback coming. Just click on the Send Feedback link at the top right corner of your account to share your thoughts.Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Ever since the new Google Blog Search homepage launched, we've been fielding requests for a myriad of different features. Today we're happy to announce the launch of our most requested feature: RSS and Atom feeds. Simply click on the links under "Subscribe" in the left-hand column of the Blog Search front page to subscribe to any topic or story in any feed reader, like Google Reader.If you don't use a feed reader, we're also offering an iGoogle gadget that lets you embed the Blog Search front page right inside of your iGoogle page or any other page where iGoogle gadgets are accepted. You can browse topics and drill into stories from within the widget, and you can customize the gadget to choose which topics you want to follow.With these new ways to read Blog Search stories, you might think our homepage was going unloved, but not to worry. We've also added two new features to the Blog Search homepage to better help you discover what people are talking about right now on the web: Hot Queries and Latest Posts.Hot Queries lists searches currently popular in Blog Search — it's an easy way to quickly dive into the trending points of conversation on the web. Latest Posts, on the other hand, shows new posts from popular blogs. While Hot Queries highlights what people are looking for, Latest Posts lets you find out about stories even before people start searching for them. There's a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day. We hope these new features help you discover more of it, faster.Posted by Akshay Patil, Software Engineer, & Dylan Casey, Product Manager

In January, four trade groups announced that they would be developing behavioral advertising standards. The groups are The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The standards have now been released and are as follows: The Education Principle calls for participation in efforts to inform individuals and businesses about online behavioral advertising. The industry intends, in a major educational campaign involving over 500 million ad impressions over the next 18 months. The Transparency Principle calls for clearer and easily accessible disclosures about data collection and use practices. The result will be a new notice on the page where data is collected and will occur via links embedded in or around advertisements, or on the Web page itself. The Consumer Control Principle expands the consumer's ability to opt-out of data collection. The opt-out will occur via a link on the page where data is collected. This principle also requires service providers such as Internet access providers and desktop application software companies to obtain consent of users before engaging in online behavioral advertising. The Data Security Principle calls for reasonable security and limited retention of data. The Material Changes Principle calls for the acquisition of consent for any material change to data collection and use policies as well as practices to data collected prior to any change. The Sensitive Data Principle requires parental consent for consumers known to be under 13 on child-directed Web sites. This Principle also calls for heightened protections to certain health and financial data when attributable to a specific individual. The Accountability Principle calls for the development of programs to monitor and report uncorrected non-compliance to appropriate government agencies. The CBBB and DMA will work cooperatively to establish accountability mechanisms under the Principles.

If you can access the mobile internet via your cell phone, then you now have access to newly optimized Google Mobile search. It reaches 38 different languages in over 60 countries. The optimized Google mobile search experience began last December when it was rolled out to iPhone and Android phones in the US. Then in March, it was rolled out to iPhone and Android phones in over 20 countries. The optimizes mobile search incorporates universal search when appropriate. There's also a focus on local search due to the nature of searching on the go.

Real estate search sites Zillow and Trulia are seeing big growth in traffic, despite the economy and its housing woes. Zillow saw a 67% increase in unique visitors while Trulia saw a 40% increase in uniques. Zillow averaged 8.3 million unique visitors per month so far in 2009. They're experiencing 35% more listings with a current total of 3.6 million listings. Customers submitted 265,000 loan requests which returned 3.5 million custom loan quotes during this time. Zillow is also experiencing great success with its iPhone app, which has has seen 535,000 downloads. Trulia saw 30 million unique visitors across the six month period. Contributions to the Trulia Voices Community grew by 85% and has achieved the 5th spot in both Hitwise and comScore's real estate matrices. These numbers are coming during an uncertain time in the economy, fueled by crises in the credit and housing markets. Taking all of that into consideration, congratulations are in order for these achievements made by Zillow and Trulia.

If you're a celebrity or some other figure Bing has deemed "prominent," then searches for your name plus the word Twitter will turn up a few of your Tweets above the organic results. You can also search for a person's screen name, preceded by the @ sign. Prominence is deemed by number of followers and volume of tweets. Bing uses the Twitter API to pull in the Tweets. But the feature is inconsistent. Of course, I assumed Ashton Kutcher, the King of Twitter, would be included since he has 2.5 million followers. But the first search for his name didn't include Tweets. The second one didn't either. The third one did. And here's what it looks like when it happens: What do you think of Bing integrating Twitter into the results? Share your reaction in the comments section below.

Like many of you, I was saddened to learn on Sunday that Billy Mays died at the age of 50. My family has been watching the Discovery Channel series Pitchmen, featuring Mays and fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan. I had been planning this post for a few weeks, but there has been so much search news to cover, I haven't had the time. Now, I'm publishing it to honor the tried and true techniques Billy Mays used to sell millions of products. Mays' style may not be your cup of tea, but the foundational concepts behind his pitches are something every search marketer can learn from. His incredible success was proof of that. So, without further ado, here are 7 marketing lessons from the late, great Billy Mays. 1. Have a solid product. On the show, Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan saw hundreds of inventors who want their products sold through direct marketing television. Mays and Sullivan only chose the products they believed in. Even then, they tested them to make sure they worked and met safety standards. 2. Listen to consumers. When considering a new product, Mays and Sullivan often took it to the streets. They had people try out the products and give their honest response. This is one of the first indicators of whether or not a product might do well. Paying attention to what is said about your brand or product online can similarly be very informative to your marketing campaigns. 3. Show how your product can make people's lives easier. One of Mays' most popular products was Oxyclean, allows you to wash colors and whites together. Before the ShamWow, Billy Mays hawked the Zorbeez, a shammy towel that absorbed tons of water and could save tons of money on paper towels. Even non-infomercial products are successful when they do this. Think about the Flip video camera. It's simple and easy to use. It makes capturing moments and uploading them to YouTube very easy. This should be a key element of your campaigns. 4. Include a Call-to-Action. Billy Mays knew this well. He was always "doubling the offer," urging people to act now. Give people incentive to buy your product now. A great incentive for online retailers is offering free shipping. 5. Run a small test before launching a broad campaign. When Mays developed a commercial for a new product, it was run in a few markets to see if it was something consumers would buy. The profit margins had to be there in order to expand. Many times, if the product doesn't do well, they had to stop the campaign to prevent further losses. Test a few keywords before running a broad campaign with tons of longtail keywords. You may need to adjust your campaign or product, but you'll want to preserve your marketing budget in the meantime. 6. Conduct A/B Testing on Successful Ad Campaigns. For the Awesome Auger, a product that was doing very well, Mays shot a second commercial. It looked almost exactly like the original one, but the framing of Mays in the camera was slightly different. That slight cosmetic change was a big one. An A/B test showed sales rose even higher! 7. Watch the competition. When Vince Offer began hawking the ShamWow and the SlapChop, Billy Mays was pissed. These were products he had already been advertising in the form of Zorbeez and QuickChop. Offer's products did very well, selling millions. So, Mays shot new commercials in order to gain back his market share. Pay attention to your competition. Watch your rankings and your paid search positions. Never stop optimizing and adjusting your paid search campaigns. Stay on your toes to maintain or even grow your sales. What did you learn from Billy Mays? Share your lessons in the comments below.

For those of you who use the AdWords API, we are happy to announce the launch of the latest version of the API, v2009. This version offers more speed, scale, and flexibility to developers, at a lower cost. Since v2009 is a production beta, developers can sign up for access and will be whitelisted on a rolling basis. For full details on what you'll find in v2009 and how to get started, visit the AdWords API blog.Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Get out your cameras, it's time for a couple of search-related contests. If you enjoy the large images Bing features everday on its homepage, now you have the chance to see one of your images featured on the brand spankin' new decision engine. Bing is holding a photo contest where the winner's image will be featured on Bing.com for a 24 hour period. Photos are submitted via Facebook. You have until July 16 to submit your photos. The winner will be determined by public voting, via the Facebook application. The winning image will appear on Bing.com on August 3 and will include "hot spots" created by the Bing team, just like you see with the daily images. Meanwhile, ChaCha has launched a video contest. The theme of the contest is "Life with ChaCha." The deadline for submissions is August 10. Judges will pick 5 finalists and the winner will be chosen by a public vote. There are three criteria that the judges will use to choose the 5 finalists. They are:

• Showing ChaCha to be a "smart friend" (50 percent)
• Originality (25 percent)
• Humor (25 percent)

The prizes here are worth moolah. The grand prize winner will receive $5,000 in cash as well as an Apple Final Cut Studio 2 and a Sony HDR-XR500V 120GB High Def Handycam Camcorder. The runner up gets $1,000 and third place gets $500.

I love labels in Gmail. Most email programs use folders, which only let me put mail in one place at a time. With labels, I can organize mail in multiple ways. Combined with filters to automatically label incoming messages, Gmail offers powerful ways to organize email.When I joined the Gmail team, I was surprised to learn that only 29% of Gmail users had created any labels. At first, I thought perhaps conversation threading and search made the need to organize our mail less important. But when we talked to people who use Gmail, we got a different story. People often asked us to add folders to Gmail, assuming no system of organization existed. As one person said in a usability study, "What are labels... and where are my folders?"We realized that if you didn't know about labels, it would be easy to assume Gmail had no way to organize your mail. Not only were "labels" unfamiliar, they were kind of hidden. So, we set out to make labels more accessible, as well as more powerful. Most of the changes have been in Gmail for a while, but we're adding some new features today. We thought you'd enjoy a peek at the method to our madness.The first thing we did was make labels look more like the sticky notes you use in real life. Making the interface mimic things you interact with outside the computer can sometimes improve ease of use.We also made it easier to remove a label from an open conversation:Then we worked on the actions you take to apply and remove labels. Before, to put a label on a message, you had to look under "More actions> Apply label." Not only was this option hidden in a generic menu, but the language wasn't what people are familiar with when it comes to organizing mail. We explored several alternatives:We also learned that if we made labels sound too much like folders, people got confused. For instance, while "Copy to" and "Add to" were easy to use, these terms made people think they were creating multiple copies of a message. "Move to" was familiar but didn't lead people to think they were creating copies. And people seem to have picked it up fast! Since the launch of the new menu buttons in March, we're seeing a 50% increase in new Gmail users trying labels in their first 2 weeks. And overall usage of the "Move to" menu surpassed that of the "Labels" menu within 7 weeks of launching:For our latest set of changes, we looked at how you access labels on the left side. In other email applications, folders get the royal treatment and are given a seat at the top near your inbox. But in Gmail, labels were stuck in a box below Chat — almost like we were telling people, "you don't want to use these." In testing, we discovered that it worked best to remove the terminology altogether and just place custom labels right under the system labels (e.g. "Inbox"):The last step was to add drag-and-drop. Now, you can drag mail into a label, or even drag a label directly onto a message:Making it easier to process and organize your mail requires more than just labels, but we hope these changes start to improve the process. We have much more in store, so stay tuned and keep the feedback coming.Posted by Michael Leggett, Gmail User Experience Designer

Overstock is the next company to drop affiliate programs in states considering or having passed affiliate nexus bills. While North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Hawaii affiliates are already seeing programs dropped by Amazon and Blue Nile, this time California affiliates are also getting the boot. "It's painful to have to terminate these relationships with affiliates, simply because they live in states where counterproductive (and likely unconstitutional) laws are being passed," said Patrick Byrne, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Overstock.com. "However, politicians have to remember that a tax is a price that government charges for a service, and when they raise their prices, we're going to buy less of their services." Last year, Overstock was one of over 200 companies to drop their affiliate program in New York, which was the first state to enact an affiliate tax. The cancellation affected 3,400 affiliates, 200 of which were active.

StatCounter made news fast and furious in Bing's first week when they offered up data showing Bing had surpassed Yahoo! in search. And now they're making a splash again by quickly releasing data for the whole month of June. Overall, things are relatively steady, but there's an ever-so-slight increase in Microsoft search share. The data shows Bing gaining .5% search share in June compared to May. But Live Search had gained about .5% in May over April. One percent growth over the last two months may not seem significant, but it could be the beginning of momentum. "At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date." Plus, the 1% growth has come at the expense of Google. The search mammoth saw its search engine share according to StatCounter decline by 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June. By the way, despite that first week of traffic for Bing, Yahoo! still retained its second place status for the entire month of June. Yahoo!'s traffic has remained fairly steady over the past three months in StatCounter data.

On June 24, Google Ad Planner turned one year old, and what a busy year it's been. Marketers and media planners worldwide now manage tens of thousands of media plans with Google Ad Planner. Additionally, with publishers directly contributing their own site data and sharing their Google Analytics traffic numbers, we continue to provide you the most accurate data measurements for your media planning. We've also steadily released a variety of new features over the year based on your feedback, including pre-defined audiences, more site filters, and additional demographic data.To celebrate these milestones, we've given Google Ad Planner a facelift. Starting today, you can find sites and manage your media plans even faster with the redesigned Google Ad Planner interface.Screenshots of old vs. new Ad Planner interfaceWe've kept all the best features from before, but the new interface streamlines your research and media planning by making features easier to find and use. Simply enter the URL to jump directly to a site's profile page and see Ad Planner's rich profile data for the site. We've also improved your campaign management by allowing you to easily merge and copy media plans.We hope you'll take advantage of the new Google Ad Planner interface. Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out our new look and to find out more information about Google Ad Planner.Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

Blended threats. Payload viruses. Spam. If you're one of the more than 15 million people whose work email is protected by Postini's email security products, we hope you don't spend a lot of time thinking about these things. And if we're doing our job right, they certainly shouldn't be showing up in your inboxes. But we process more than 3 billion business emails per day for our customers, culling the spam, viruses, and other threats out, so we do think about this stuff. A lot.On occasion, we like to share some of what we've learned, so that those of you who are interested can see what spammers are up to. If you're one of those people, head over to our Enterprise Blog for an update on spam trends over the past few months.Posted by Ellen Leanse, Google Enterprise team

Google has updated their Toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser to make language translation easier. Instead of manually copying and pasting text into Google Translate, the Toolbar now automatically detects if a language is different from the one set as your default. Google will then serve up a message saying it has detected a language foreign to your own and asking if you would like it translated. Simply click the "Tranlate" button in order to receive the translation. The new feature is available for all languages of the Toolbar (but again, just for Internet Explorer). The languages include: English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

YouTube is now allowing advertisers to incorporate a "Call-to-Action overlay" on their videos. With the overlay, advertisers can drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes. The Call-to-Action overlays are available for Promoted Videos only. Promoted Videos, you may remember, are essentially the paid search of YouTube. They were once called Sponsored Videos, similar to paid search listings called Sponsored Listings. In order to set up the overlay: 1. Set up your Promoted Video campaign like you normally would in YouTube 2. Under My Videos, go to the Video Details page 3. Fill out the fields for the Call-to-Action overlay section You're all set. Once the campaign is in full swing, you can check YouTube Insight to see how many people are clicking on the Call-to-Action overlay. What do you think of this new option for YouTube advertisers? Share your thoughts in the comments.

I've been attending SES San Jose every year since 2003. And each year a healthy proportion of attendees are attending their first search engine marketing conference ever. This is healthy because it expands the number of marketers who "get it." I can't tell you the number of times when prospective clients mistakenly assume that search engine marketing (SEM) isn't rocket science. Or they mistakenly believe that search engine optimization (SEO) is something their information technology (IT) department took care of years ago. Or they mistakenly think that a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign takes 15 minutes to set up. Or they mistakenly hope that their public relations (PR) people have a good handle on social media marketing. So, I'm delighted to see the large number of first time attendees at Search Engine Strategies conferences -- because after they've sat in on a dozen sessions over three days they come away knowing how much more there is to learn. Hey, if it were easy, we'd all rank #1. So, with SES San Jose 2009 coming up August 10-14, I thought I'd highlight some of the conference sessions that I'd recommend to first time attendees. I've been doing this for several years -- and even spoke along with Matt Bailey of SiteLogic in a few "First Timer's Guide to SES and SEM" sessions at some events. But, most marketers like to plan ahead. So, look over the SES conference agenda and check out some of the sessions that address your needs and your organization's issues. If you want some suggestions, here are sessions specially focused on search fundamentals for first time attendees: • Introduction to Search Engine Marketing provides a clear and concise overview of the concepts involved in search engine marketing. • Successful Site Architecture offers a fresh look at topics on how to successfully design a site for search engines, including JavaScript, robots.txt use, frames, secure area usage and much more. • Turn Brain Science into Bucks: Incorporating Persuasive Messaging into Your Content Strategy showcases current online content campaigns and explains the best content strategies to help persuade buyers, build trust, and get great search engine listings using Twitter, white papers, optimized web pages and more. • SEO Tools of the Trade: What's in YOUR Toolbox? describes the tools that will help accomplish tasks, including indexing, competitive analysis, site ranking, diagnosing and remedying problems and much more. • Search Advertising 101 describes the basic principles and applications of paid placement. • Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations presents an overview of the important keywords customers are searching for and how to target the right terms in paid and organic search marketing. • Discover the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics focuses on the role of link analysis in search engine site rankings and how to increase site traffic by building quality links. • The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to SEM features search engine guru Heather Lutze taking a fresh look at how search engines find content and what steps to take to ensure a successful online marketing campaign. • Extreme Makeover is a series of four sessions held throughout day three of the conference. Volunteers are taken from the audience, their websites are examined and feedback is provided. Sessions include: Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic provides general feedback about improving websites and gaining more traffic from search engines. Extreme Makeover: Live Twitter & Blogging Clinic provides general feedback about how to improve your website's use of Twitter and blogging. Extreme Makeover: Live Landing Page Clinic provides feedback on how to improve landing pages. Extreme Makeover Live! Why Am I Not Making Enough Sales? covers the most common reasons many sites have low conversion rates and gives tips on how to turn more site visitors into paying customers. I think you can see from the suggestions above that there is more to SEM, SEO, PPC and social media than a handful of tricks that you can pick up by reading a blog post. Oh, and if the folks over in finance are still cutting travel budgets these days, ask them this rhetorical question: "If I don't learn how to improve our search engine marketing, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, or social media marketing, then how will the company be able to pay your salaries next year?" Okay, so maybe you don't want to actually say that to their faces. And you don't want to start calling finance the "department of sales prevention." They are just doing their job. But you can show them the SES conference agenda and let them know that you've picked out sessions to attend that will provide your company with a return on its investment (ROI) in marketing. Finance folks love it when you talk about ROI. Your talking their language. Or, ask them to watch the video below. Yes, yes, it makes the case for going to Search Engine Strategies. But it also demonstrates visually that SES San Jose, which is the largest search engine marketing expo on the West Coast, will be packed with more than 70 sessions, multiple keynotes, and Orion panels, over 150 exhibitors, networking events, and more. Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo