Integrated marketing continues to be a hot topic, and was the subject of a keynote panel at this year’s SES New York. These types of panels are great because they help provide a much deeper perspective on the industry.

For search marketers (when I use search marketing I mean seo and PPC collectively) looking for a quick tidbit, this isn’t the type of panel for you. This panel forced you to step back and really assess things at a strategic level.

Two major points clearly emerged from this panel:

Clear confirmation of the need to view marketing activities as an integrated whole.
There remains a huge gap between the way most in the search marketing industry look at their task and the way traditional marketing people do.

Dana Todd (SVP, Marketing and Business Development, Performics) moderated the panel, which featured Lars Feely (Group Search Director, Neo@Ogilvy), Brenda Fiala (VP Strategy, Blast Radius), Mark Huffman (Executive Production Manager, Procter & Gamble), and Giovanni Rodriguez (Digital and Social Strategy, Deloitte Consulting LLP).
SEO vs. PPC vs. Marketing Overall

In our industry we sometimes view search as the central focus of everything. After all, people are increasingly moving online, and we have studies that show us that online spend is continuing to grow in a huge way. EMarketer released data in February that shows that online ad spend will exceed print ad spend for the first time in 2012.

This question of who competes with Google ? and is the market in fact competitive ? is central to the analysis of European and US regulators as the antitrust investigations wind their way through ?the system? and potentially to the courts. Google sees many more competitors than do its critics and has been trying for several years to widen the scope of the discussion about ?search competition.?

One of the trendy wish list items of late has been for Google AdWords to provide conversion data for Ad Extensions such as Sitelink, Location, Call and Product Extensions. It would seem that Google was listening.

Last week without so much as an announcement, Google released conversion data associated with Ad Extensions. The news was broken by Search Engine Watch contributor Melissa Mackey via Twitter and her blog.

Near hysteria followed on Twitter, as the PPC community immediately jumped into their AdWords accounts and began a discussion of the extent of this new reporting feature. To date, Google has not released an official announcement.
How to Report Conversions for Ad Extensions

To report on conversions for Ad Extensions is actually pretty simple. Within AdWords, click on the Ad Extensions tab and select the extension type (Sitelink, Location, Call, etc.). The next step is to make sure that you have the conversion columns in place for your data. Click on the Columns button and select the conversion parameters as shown here:

At issue were a set of 11 Google ads, four of which were challenged on appeal. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission filed suit over paid advertisements that misled consumers by showing competitors in search results for businesses.

In one case, users were led to believe by virtue of the ad title that they would be taken to the Honda.com.au website, when in fact the ad was for another website called CarSales. The advertisements in question appeared in 2007. Similar misleading ads directed users to STA Travel, AlphaDog Training, and Just 4×4 magazine.

In the appeal judgment, the court noted that Google ?represented, contrary to the fact, that by clicking on the headline to the advertisement, users of the website would be taken to the Honda Australia website, and thereby engaged in conduct that was misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive.”

Google is disappointed in the court?s decision, though they won’t have to pay a monetary fine. They were ordered to pay the ACCC?s court costs, but no financial penalty is warranted under the Trade Practices Act.

Still, said a Google spokesperson in a statement to World News Australia, “We are disappointed by the Federal Court’s decision that Google should be responsible for the content of four particular ads on its platform.”

ZIP Code Targeting

Google will allow you to tag specific ZIP codes within the U.S. with AdWords Location Targeting. Advertisers can target up to 1,000 ZIP codes within the U.S. at a time.

Eighty-eight percent of smartphone users who search for local information take action within one day, according to Google. Google feels that this will help with customers using direct mail, outdoor ads, and newspapers to be able to target the exact ZIP code areas that you would like to target.

You can drill into the data and measure the performance for your local campaigns by viewing the performance statistics at the ZIP code level.
Location Insertion for Location Extensions

To help easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, Google came out with location insertion for local extensions. You no longer have to create multiple ads for multiple locations. The new feature will automatically insert the city, number, or ZIP code of your local business into the ad.

Many in the industry have tolerated my preaching through the years at search conferences; others thought I was nuts or worse. But as the years went by, a lot of my advice has ended up being correct. Not all of it, but much of it.

The wholesale devaluation of links began years ago, and we have watched as everything that once worked stopped working. I won’t go through the A-Z list of linking tactics that have been blown up, because you already know what they are. It is worth noting though, that just this week another formerly effective linking tactic ?blog networks ? were blown to bits by a Google adjustment. Here’s some background on what happened thanks to Ryan Clark.

I’ve never told anyone to stop using a specific tactic unless they point blank asked about that tactic. Although I have never used any of the typical low value tactics that have become standard linking tactics over the years, my position is that you have the right to pursue any linking strategy you want, but you have no right to complain when a tactic you have used ends up biting back.

The search engines make it pretty clear what they consider to be violations of quality guidelines. While these tactics aren’t illegal, they can have a profound impact on the success or failure of your business. Go into it with your eyes open.
Disposable Links

True story. Years ago I had a client I advised on a regular basis on a variety of linking strategies and executions. He had registered about 100 domains, all with various combinations of the words DUI, DWI, Attorney, and the cities he practiced in.

Our conversations were a continual back and forth battle, and we both enjoyed and learned from them. In the end, I was forced to accept a very unpleasant reality in his particular case. His core strategy was to launch a website, pay significant sums for every sort of clean and dirty link building tactic possible, and then as his site rose in the rankings, as long as he was making more in revenue from the site than it was costing him to operate the site, he didn’t care what he did links-wise to affect Google’s results.

google-slot-machineFor him, Google was a slot machine to be played. Invariably, his sites would rise in the ranks, get blown up and vanish, and he’d begin again all over.

His logic was that if he spent $25,000 to build a website and get it linked to the point where it was sending him $40,000 in business before it was blown up, then he couldn’t care less. He’d just roll out a new site in another town and start the process all over again:

The tradition of Chinese acrobatics has existed in the culture for over two thousand years and continues today at the country s main training school; Wu Qiao (located in Hebei province) where training begins for students at the age of 5. Some of the most common acts include lion dances or dragon dances (acrobats in hefty costumes dance, roll and jump like lions and dragons), sword swallowing, fire breathing, conjuring and juggling. You may even be treated with a costumed ostrich while the acts prepare their next act.

A personal recommendation is the

Before we get dive into this topic, it’s important to understand the mentality I will be writing from. As a business owner more than an SEO, I like to spend the money I?m making a lot more than the money I’m not. At times I’ll even delay specific revenue opportunities to work first on less profitable but faster paying ones. This is as true with organic SEO as it is with any other marketing strategy.

When my agency launched, we targeted ?search engine positioning services? out of the gate due to the low competition and faster potential for quick gains. The traffic was far lower but the ROI was faster. It wasn’t until later that we went after more competitive, higher search-volume phrases and in the process we were generating revenue from the search traffic we already had. In the end it took us longer to rank for the high-traffic phrases and looking at a seven year revenue total, we probably could have made more had we ?gone for the gold? out of the gate, but I’m a conservative business owner and remain such to this day.

I don’t mention all of this to discuss business policy. You’ll need to take up your tolerances and attitudes with your accountant, business partners, spouse and lifestyle. No, I mention this only to illustrate the attitude I take in keyword selection to make sense of the recommendations that follow. They are written from my approach, yours may differ however if that’s the case I hope you’ll still find value in the strategies and processes.
The Sample Promotion

For the purposes of this article, we?ll use a fictional downhill mountain biking website as our example. Our fictional website owner is looking to ?go it alone? on the SEO front with a brand new site and a new domain. We?ll assume the site is well-developed with clean code and unique descriptive content for the products on crawlable pages.

Anchor Text Best Practices

Given how significant anchor text remains in determining relevancy for search engine algorithms, and knowing a significant part of inbound links with anchor text is outside of our control, it’s important that SEOs take steps to influence the elements that they can control.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when working with inbound links:

First Find Out Where Your Inbound Links are Coming From: Today, technology solutions, from full featured SEO platforms to free link analysis software can tell you how where your inbound links are coming from. You can then go after low hanging fruit of instances where linkers may be willing to tweak non-descriptive anchor text to better reflect the page they are ranking to thus helping you to rank for relevant terms.
First Impressions Matter: The first instance of linking to the same page is often the text used in determining search ranking factors. This factor often occurs in internal linking situations when linking to pages within your own domain, e.g. having a sidebar link to your homepage, and another link to the homepage in the body of your text so keep that in mind as you are developing a linking strategy for your keywords.
An Image is Worth (Almost) 1,000 Words: The search engines use the ALT tag of an image link to determine relevancy for ranking images. Don?t forget to optimize your images as they are another opportunity to show up in search for your keywords. Research has shown that universal search results (including images) have become increasingly prevalent: one study showed 8 out of 10 high volume searches now have universal results of some kind.

Don?t Forget our Old Friend, Anchor Text

With all of the ongoing changes in the SERPs these days it?s easy to lose sight of the fundamentals of SEO that remain the core of increasing natural search visibility. SEO professionals believe anchor text is still the number one ranking factor, but our analysis of inbound links shows given the way anchor text is used across many sites, there may be opportunity for marketers to optimize their own internal links and target low hanging fruit of non-optimized inbound links from high-value targets.

What began as a ripple back in February has become a tidal wave of discontent and alarm as more report receiving the notices.

The hardest hit so far, if you can judge by the buzz on the web, are blog networks like BuildMyRank (which is actually shutting down). It?s unclear whether it?s an algorithmic update or manual penalty, but it?s likely not a coincidence that Google recently discussed the deindexing of web hosting services earlier this month. Where Panda set out to rid the web of mass-produced, low quality content, this latest action from Google seems designed to sniff out unnatural backlink profiles and those responsible.

The ?unnatural? distinction is an important one, as until now, SEOs and webmasters have largely been discouraged from creating paid links. Especially since the JCPenney debacle, we all know, inside the search industry and out, that buying links is bad, bad news.

In a 2008 interview with Eric Enge, Google Web Spam Czar Matt Cutts talked about link building ? specifically, how to do it ethically and within Google?s guidelines. In fact, over the years, Cutts has shared link building tips often; see the Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel for examples. Some of the strategies he recommends are original research, creating controversy, and using humor. Still, it?s all about the content.

Recent events seem almost a fundamental shift in the way Google perceives inbound links; they?re now saying not only can you not buy them, you can?t try to build at all. Of course, Google is predictably tight-lipped about what it is, exactly, that has relegated the offending sites to the wrist-slap list. That means that, as usual, we can only take best guesses.