I watched the event live, and tweeted snippets from the event, so I figured I’d post them here for those of you who weren’t able to watch, or weren’t aware of the event…

I’m showing them here in sequence, rather than in the typical reverse sequence that comes from live-tweeting…

________________________________________________

Ok here we go – Google’s about to announce this RFID chips for web sites thing… http://www.youtube.com/google

Cool: submit questions about the RFID Chips for web sites to insidesearch2011@google.com

Amit is saying “even with Schema, we need more help understanding sites. RFID for web sites will help”

“With RFID for web sites, Google will understand a site’s intent instantly…”

“We agreed to Schema.org with Microsoft and Yahoo, knowing we had the upper hand with RFID for web sites.”

“Think of Schema.org as the first child, RFID for web sites as the second child of search” #Quote #AmitSinghal #InsideSearch

“Its important that you get that first organic result right. RFID for web sites will help us do that.” #Quote #AmitSinghal #InsideSearch

“At Google speed is the 3rd pillar of quality search. RFID for web sites will resolve that.” #Quote #AmitSinghal #InsideSearch

“With RFID for web sites, you’ll have a great user experience on mobile” #Quote #InsideSearch

Cool. RFID for web sites – instantly translates a site for you based on your native language! #InsideSearch

“Mobile speech has grown by a factor of six in a year. RFID for web sites lets you interface faster.” #InsideSearch

“The new Speach.Interface aspect of RFID for web sites will ensure mobile search is more accurate” #InsideSearch

“230 billion words worth of data from queries. RFID for web sites processes that instantly. ” #InsideSearch

“Mobile has opened a world of possibilities. RFID for web sites will let you explore that world.” #InsideSearch

“With RFID for Web Sites, we can predict what you will want, even better” #Quote #Google #InsideSearch

“RFID for web sites – you won’t have to decide which SERP to choose – we’ll do it for you” #QUote #AmitSinghal #Google

“Google Instant Pages – RFID for web sites lets you see 500 pages at once” #InsideSearch

“Get to the next page before you click your mouse, thanks to RFID for web sites” #Quote #AmitSinghal #InsideSearch

“With RFID for web sites, you’ll be able to learn Spanish in a day” #InsideSearch

Lots of cheering in the live feed audience as they’re describing how RFID for Web sites helps students cheat on tests..

“RFID for web sites combines Dragon Naturally Speaking with lazy ass people’s mind models” #InsideSearch

“RFID for web sites – the next gen Google Goggles. ” they’re calling it “Google Gurgles” #InsideSearch

“RFID for web sites will let you take a grainy stolen logo and get a crisp version” #InsideSearch

Search by voice, search by image, Google Gurgles – all thanks to RFID for web sites… #InsideSearch

Google Instant + RFID for web sites – “Faster than instant” #Quote #AmitSinghal #Google #InsideSearch

“RFID for web sites – flip web pages faster than changing channels on your TV” #Quote #AmitSinghal #InsideSearch

“Sure, there will be antitrust lawsuits because of RFID for web sites. We’ve got the money to fight it” #InsideSearch

“We understand RFID for web sites will kill Adobe’s business model. Too bad.” #Quote #Google #InsideSearch

“At Google, we don’t want to alienate SEOs with this, so only SEOs will have RFID for web sites licenses” #InsideSearch

“RFID for web sites will initially be priced at $35,000 per site.” #Google #InsideSearch

___________________________________

Okay, there you have it.  A complete recap of the most important things Google communicate at today’s event.

*disclaimer – if you actually believe they said any of this stuff, you may want to lighten up a bit.  Because RFID for web sites is really something only I could come up with… really.

Alan

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It all started at SMX Advanced, where Susan Esparza from Bruce Clay Inc. corralled a few of us into pitching in when Virginia Nussey couldn’t make it. And when I saw Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media tweet that she too couldn’t attend and liveblog, well that was all it took for me to jump on board.

After that eye awakening experience, I really was into doing this again. So I liveblogged several sessions at Blueglass LA for SearchEngineJournal.com, and the next thing you know, when I mentioned that I’d be attending SES San Francisco, Susan and Virginia asked if I’d like to pick up a couple sessions there as well. How could a guy resist the beguiling charms of Susan and Virginia? I mean seriously…

So I said yes. Along with some other great people, the bunch of us ended up covering a LOT of sessions. Personally I only took on three sessions this time because this was really supposed to be a kick-back conference for me. Yet the sessions I covered were all over the top filled with Search Marketing goodness. So I’m really glad I covered them.

Getting Into The Mood Through Rapid-Fire LiveTweeting

The day,started with the opening keynote, by Jeffrey Hayzlett formerly the CMO at Kodak. And for a keynote to have earned my “best keynote ever” label, you know it had to be great. And rather than liveblogging the session since Susan had that covered, I chose to rapid-fire live tweet it.

So to start things off, here’s a recap of my livetweeting Jeffrey’s Keynote:

Adapt or Die

You have 8 seconds to hook me and 110 seconds to sell me. That’s it.

Big Inc. charges nothing for printers. They rip you off for the ink cartridges. Kodak cut that cost in half

nobody’s going to die. If a program or a choice fails, it’s okay. Go again

19 of Kodak’s new products acct for majority of income – all are in top 1,2 or 3 in that niche market

We had to think about our core offer. Kodak makes emotional technology (used to be film now its not).

Who are you in the mirror? what is it you REALLY do (beneath the surface)? Focus, communicate THAT

we had to remake the mood in the company. Hard to be up, out there when the thinking around the company is “our best days are behind us”

How do we bring the old to the new? what can we bring forward? Trust. Reliability. Caring. Human.

We left behind the things no longer working. We added new things to those we brought forward.

We had to remake our web site to convey the new us. We had to have fun. We launched the “eyeCamera 4.1″ in April.  Which was on April 1st (the 4.1) a lot of people thought it was real…

Get Social. Engage Educate Excite Evangelize

Engage with the community. If someone is really upset, I want to get to them and resolve it.

Educate. that can be two ways in social media. We listen. We hired a chief listening officer

win hearts and minds, not eyeballs and pageviews

Interview at Webmaster Radio

After the Keynote, I popped on over to the Webmaster Radio booth in the Expo hall, where I was interviewed by Jim Hedger. Not sure when the interview will air, but I’ll let you know when it does. It was fun, especially because mine was the first interview of the conference – and so there were some hilarious delays and interruptions due to technical difficulties. Jim felt bad that I had to endure those. Yet you all know I like to talk, a lot. Or, actually, as Jennita said – no – Alan, that’s ranting, not talking… So having to answer the same few questions that started the interview off over and over wasn’t a hassle for me. It was perfect !

Then there were the three sessions I liveblogged

SEO – Successful Information Architecture

Shari’s well known for her knowledge and insights regarding Information Architecture. While I don’t agree with 100% of the things she recommends, she is someone that gets it right enough of the time that major corporations and brands rely on her services, as they should. They’d be fools not to. And in this session, she kills it. totally.

Eleanor offered up the in-house perspective on the issue of Information Architecture from her perspective at ABCNews.com – if you’re an in-house SEO, pay attention. Her knowledge and experience will save you more grief than you can imagine.

Content Marketing Optimization

Lee Odden knocks this one out of the ballpark. Like he apparently always does. Which I was told about his past speaking, however this was the first time I had the pleasure of being there. If you think you know how to market your content, you haven’t heard Lee Odden explain it to you before. And that means you’re missing out. Big time.

Developing Great Content

This was a great session – and it’s a must-read for anyone responsible for content development and management – which the panelists explain goes WAY beyond what SEOs and site managers might normally think. Sadly, if you are having to read it, you missed the monkeys flying in the air, and Rand threatening to chew one up into little bite size pieces so everyone in the room could have some.

But Wait! There’s More!

When you’re done reading my coverage, check out ALL the great coverage from the ENTIRE SES San Francisco conference at the BCI blog.

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And keep your eyes out in the near future for a “So you think you want to be a liveblogger” article.  Because my experience will save you much pain.  Much very serious pain.   Trust me on that.

Note – clicking on a link will take you to that page in a new window so you can come back here and read the rest of the articles.  Which I know you’ll do.  Because I know you respect how much sweat, pain and agony I put into these.  For you.

Opening the Contract Kimono: Translating your Pricing Model to Legal Agreement

If you are an independent consultant, a small shop owner or at an agency, you’re going to want to check out the Contract Kimono session.  There’s some great stuff in there that could potentially save you tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits.  And some solid points made about why some contracts in our industry should be Pay for Performance.  Which until this session, I had been totally against.  And now think is worth consideration…

Demystifying Online Attribution

Lately I’ve been working hard (okay, I don’t work hard – except when I’m liveblogging…) to drive home the importance of proper conversion attribution to clients.  If you think “We had 30,000 visits this month and a 60% bounce rate, so something sucks”, you may be completely off the mark when going to address it.  Because you don’t track the full life cycle of some purchase decisions.  Online attribution can resolve that problem and not only save your company a lot of money, it could significantly increase your revenue…

You&A with Matt Cutts

A regular comedy show ensued this year as Danny Sullivan interviewed Matt Cutts taking questions from the audience, and injecting his own pet peeves and wise-guy style into the process.  Which both kept Matt on his toes, and everyone in the room, including Matt, laughing…

So You Want To Test SEO?

Never take Matt, or Rand, or Aaron, or Jill, or anyone in our industry at face value when you’re doing SEO.  If you’re not testing, and doing it properly, you’re not getting the most you can for your company if you’re in-house, or your clients if you’re a consultant.  This was a big one for me.  Not only did I feel by this time that I’d actually gotten into the groove of liveblogging, but it was on a subject I’m passionate about.  And even though 95% of everything shared by speakers this week was something I already knew (hey – I put in 10 hour days for the past 10 years, okay?), I came away with great new stuff more from this one session than I did from any of the others I attended.

___________________________

And when you’re done reading those, come back again.  Because then you’ll be able to go visit the Bruce Clay blog and read all of Susan and Dana Lookadoo and Gil’s session coverage as well.

And then you can go to SearchEngineLand and go read all the other liveblogging coverage for both day one and day two.  Because there was a lot of it.  All for you.

Then, when you’re done there, be sure to send Lisa Barone and Virginia Nussey flowers, cupcakes, rainbows, puppies and kittens encouraging them to complete heal so the next conference they’ll be able to liveblog again.  And I’ll be spared the cruel and unusual suffering.  Okay?

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But since I actually payed attention and liveblogged along the way, I figure I’d share what I got out of it with you.

(And maybe make up for the guilt I felt at using that excuse)

Of course, as has been the case in the past, this was a one on one interview style session between Danny Sullivan from Third Door Media, and Matt Cutts.  For those of you who are not Cuttlets, Matt’s the guy who guns for spammers over at Google.  And he’s a pretty good pool player as well.

I’m sitting in the front row, just left of center – to my left are Jonah, Marty Weintraub and Matt McGee, and to my right is Susan Esparza.  And it’s Danny and Matt up on the stage.  So I guess you can say in just 3 liveblogging sessions I’ve skyrocketed to the top!

Or you can say – who was the clown that let Alan in the door in the first place?

Here we go!

__________________

The session starts off with Matt and Danny donning life vests – half the people in the room are confused, and the rest of us get it that they’re making a joke about the recent MayDay update over at Google.  (If you don’t know that “Mayday – Mayday” is a distress call by boaters, well then, you don’t get the joke either, now do you?)

I also need to say that this is already going south fast – Danny and Matt are ripping jokes left and right, faster than I can keep up even at 55 words a minute.  Needless to say, it’s killer stuff!

1^st Question from Danny – to talk about this Mayday update (but he interrupts the process by breaking out the caffeine and now I think they’re set!

So Matt – you’ve got this big mayday ranking update plus Caffeine is live right?

Matt – SearchEngineLand has a post just now to announce that Caffeine being live!

Here’s the story on Caffeine.  Way back in the ancient days when Alta Vista roamed the earth – Google hadn’t updated our index in 4 months.  We had to crawl the web for several days.  We didn’t have enough capacity to update all the data centers.  So we had this thing called the Google dance – for about a week we had the data roll out.  But we realized people want fresh results.

Freshness matters. In 2003 we switched to an incremental system – we would crawl a portion of the web every night.  Update Fritz was switching to incremental.

Caffeine – instead of a billion docs in one day, with Caffeine, when we crawl, we immediately index it.  This essentially makes the entire index closer to real time.

Analogy – before you might have waited for a bus to come by.  Now it’s like your document comes out the front door, and a taxi is waiting and whisks it away.

It massively increases our ability to scale up the index. We can index a lot more documents.

Its something like 50% fresher.

Its also easier for us to annotate documents with information.  Caffeine lets us any type of general information we want to.

Caffeine lets us process on the order of 100 petabytes.  (Beyond my brain’s capacity to envision because I’m just a marketing guy! )

Danny – talk about the annotation part of it, mentions meta keywords

Matt We don’t use meta keywords!

Danny – you could see all the facebook likes…

Matt If it’s publicly available, we could do that.  If somethings behind a password, we can’t.

Matt – metadata or just plain data, Google has the ability to attach more stuff.  We can think of new signals without writing new code.

Danny – can you talk about citations?  – that’s Metadata.

Matt –  Twitter recently introduced an annotation API – there’s info encompassed in a tweet – where it came from, etc.  – Google has a lot of extra associated information that we can incorporate and then throw in that document.  Content, things that are linking to it.

Danny – Caffeine – faster indexing – new ability to attach metadata and then down the road…

Matt – my team is just starting to interoperate with some of the data.

Mayday was a ranking change – entirely algorithmic – my team had nothing to do with it.  Google as a whole raised the bar.  In 2010 we look at the challenges of the web as it exists – how do you look at stuff that’s not maybe web spam but maybe not the highest quality.  Mayday is looking at how do we look at site quality, page quality?  Users don’t use content farms – its one of the things we look at.  How do you improve the quality of the results?

How much content am I generating, how fast?  Uniqueness, editorial control…

(Note – Danny tries to pin Matt down on the issues some of us find annoying – like Mahalo getting rankings even though they violate several Google guidelines that the rest of the world is held accountable for, or Wikipedia polluting the results pages.  Matt, ever the evasive one, consistently dodges the bullets flying at him).

Danny – What is that designed to kill?  Mahalo?

Matt – Google doesn’t want to get into value judgments – rather than individual sites, it’s a complete algorithmic change.

Danny – was this in response to Mahalo and you’re saying no.

Matt – I’ve been on a site where there was a content free (lacking content) article.  And that’s the kind of thing we’re looking at.

(As Matt’s talking about a sample site, Danny’s trying to figure out which site.  Lots of laughter…)

Matt – we just yesterday announced in Webmaster tools where you can see soft 404’s  – the site says 200 found but it’s not found.

We’re going to keep working on paid links, We’re looking at ways we can make the cached page link a little bit better – how can we improve that experience?

If your description isn’t displayed wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out where on the page that came from?

(Danny keeps bringing up the issue of Wikipedia dominating and Matt keeps avoiding that – go figure!)

Danny – how about HTML 5 and caffeine?

Matt – very good question – HTML 5 is different – we don’t give points for validation.  But we are looking at better ways to do parsing.

Danny – Do you still give points if your site has adsense? ( a LOT of audience laughter at that one)

Matt – Conspiracy theories galore!

Danny – I’m trying to get you to shout – yes! Yes it does!

Danny – as the results get increasingly blended, is Google planning on providing webmasters more data in webmaster tools?

Matt – I don’t think we have any plans in the works.

Danny – Do you want to tell them all they get Nexxus phones now?

Matt – we were going to say that but Graywolf wouldn’t let us. (Ha!)

Danny asks about sites that sell links –

Matt – we have taken action on individual sellers.  I think we’ve been taking strong action – and we have some new tools to make sure they don’t work.  We’re getting laser guided scalpels – its harder and getting harder to have paid links work.

Danny – I love my job (#Win)

Matt – I think Danny should do the daily searchcast again

Danny – you’ve said nofollow is no longer a factor – are you bleeding value from strong pages.  Is there no way for us to signal to you the importance of pages?

Matt – there is – which pages do you link to from your root page?  Which pages are easy to find in your site?  Rather than doing special order stuff, I would think about sites like the ODP – think of that tree structure.  Take the products and pages that are important – put links to them closer to the top of the page.

Danny – will caffeine affect the way you handle javascript?

Matt – we are more able to find not just raw links, but actually process javascript.  We’ve seen a few spammers try to prevent that – we’ve improved our ability to read javascript and see links in javascript.  If you’re white hat its always best to have HTML links to be safe.  But we are getting better at reading javascript.

(Really Matt?  Because I just had a client kill the javascript they were using to link to over 4,000 internal pages that were never indexed and 6 days later, over 3,000 were indexed!  Sorry – that’s an Alan insight Rant… Now back to our session!)

Danny – how many of you like the new look of Google – a few hands – how many hate it – a few hands – how many don’t care – a few hands!

Matt – How many use firefox?  A lot of hands – Internet explorer- a few hands – Chrome – a few more than use IE…

Danny – you’re just promoting your own stuff- Google shopping, Google this, Google that – do you see anything wrong with that?

Matt – I think Bing is using big weather widgets so the organic results are lower down

Danny – so you’re saying Bing is worse!

Matt – someone asked – is google favoring YouTube – no we bend over backwards to show videos from other sites.  There are people trying to do the right thing – it’s not my area but there are people at Google focused on that.

Danny – When are you going to use rich snippets for ecommerce because right now Yelp has an advantage.

Matt – we have a tool in Webmaster tools for rich snippets – timeframe its not weeks but maybe not months either – I think a relatively short time.

_______________________

Lightening Round

Danny – do we need to have flash sitemaps to finally deal with flash indexing or is [Steve] Jobs going to kill Flash?

Matt – we don’t need separate sitemaps – its not as helpful to have your entire site in flash.

(Well thank you very much Matt.  Now can you go back and kill the press release Google did way back when with Adobe, claiming that Flash was more indexable?)

Danny – is bounce rate part of Google’s algorithm?

Matt and Danny then proceed on to go back and forth as each time Matt answers, Danny thinks it’s an evasive answer   This goes on for several minutes and it’s getting funnier by the moment…

Matt‘s final answer: to the best of my knowledge bounce rate is not used in our general algorithm.

Danny – my pet peeve – it’s not ten results on the page.  Getting rid of the indents, sitelinks, wikipedia – you get more variety….

And that’s it!  Danny closes by asking people – if Matt’s on the way to the bathroom, please – let him come out first before you go up to him!  (Ha!)

YAY!

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So if you want to, you can read my take on the session,  check his out, and compare notes

Okay – we’re about to start the morning SEO session on day two at SMX Advanced!  I wore a t-shirt this morning because yesterday I was too warm in my long sleeved shirt.  Except the air conditioning is working too well today for my change in attire.  I’m going to chalk it up to life doing what it wants in spite of my plans, and just focus on liveblogging.  Another notch as well in the “things livebloggers have to deal with” column.

This session’s on one of my favorite topics, testing SEO.  Because no matter what I’ve read, heard, or “learned” over the years, none of it matters until I’ve been able to test it out and verify that it applies to each of my clients and their unique situation…

For this session, we have:

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, In House SEO, Wall Street Journal

Speakers:

John Andrews, , Seattle SEO Consultant
Jordan LeBaron, Senior Consultant, Omniture, An Adobe Company
Branko Rihtman, R&D SEO Specialist, Whiteweb
Conrad Saam, Marketing, Avvo

And here we go!

Vanessa’s up at the podium, starting things off, going over the usual introductions, but in Vanessa’s fun way

_____________________

First up is Conrad.

You hear the word “statistically relevant” – what does that mean?  If we were to test ten people in this room, and the men were all 4′ taller than the women, you’d be confident that they’re all taller.  If they’re all 4″ taller, you’d be less confident that they would be taller.  We need to look at how we come up with averages.  How confident am I in my decision?

Sometimes you don’t need to test – a major change can be seen as to its impact and it’s really obvious.

Fundamentals of testing include

Sampling

Sampling Size

Variability

Confidence Interval

Types of test include:

Continuous Tests

Binary Tests

_________________________

With sampling, you take some set of data and extrapolate that sampling to the population.  If you have a large data sent, you have less variability than if your data set is much smaller.

Conrad is using bell curve slides to talk about sample sizes and confidence levels. There’s no way I’m going to explain them here.

And now it went from bad to worse.  He’s talking about using something called a “TTest” (yes, that’s correct, two “T”s in that so it sounds like  “T-Test”.  Not to be confused with the process of testing green tea vs. black tea.  We’re talking about complex functions and formulas here people.  Way over my pay scale.  And geek-quotient.

What it boils down to is that you need to find out ways to improve the quality of your data by increasing the sample size of your test.  And now I’m thinking – uh, why couldn’t you have just said that in the first place?  But then probably half the attendees here are just eating this stuff up because they’re statistical fanatics.

He says you can use an A/B Testing Confidence Calculator from ABTester.com, which will give you a confidence level assessment based on your test sample size.  And THAT is useful, even to me!  Thanks Dude!

Conrad says there are “tons” of this type of calculator out there as well. (just Google it and you see a lot of opitons)

Seasonal variability – nobody looks for laywers during thanksgiving, so if you test for people who search for lawyers and you do so during Thanksgiving, you have a bad data set.

Pay attention to things that might cause your sampling or your data set to be incorrect due to mistakes or assumptions that aren’t valid!

_____________________________

Next up is John!

I’m going to talk about the community aspect of testing.  As an SEO I want actionable information, I want to isolate myself from sudden changes, and I want to avoid penalties and protect against competition.

These days we’re hearing about better correlations, higher probabilities, super LARGE numbers like 11 million…

Scientific reports are usually supporting claims, like Page Rank Sculpting “Doesn’t Work” or Title tags should be 165 characters, only the first link on a page matters…

The value has shifted from the data to the claim, but that’s marketing, not science.

Scientists go through a peer review process before publication.  As Scientists, you usually can’t “redo” your study or republish your paper.  Promotion / fame is based on citations, respect, publishers protect their own quality score.  All of this is built into the scientific world.

In SEO, we have almost the opposite.  Remarkable claims get the most attention.  Sponsors fund studies.  There’s virtually no peer review.  Success follows attention, not validity, anyone can publish anything on the web, links are cheap and easy.

Instead of saying what’s true, share what you have and let’s ALL determine what’s true.

Remarkable claims backed by weak science draws lots of links, but they tend to be lower quality over time.

Contribute to the science of SEO

Science is slow, boring, not easy, and it’s expensive.  Most scientific experiments don’t produce significant results.  Scientists learn by making mistakes, proving themselves wrong, “We”, never make mistakes.  But every SEO is an experimentalist.

Publish your findings without making any claims.  Describe “What I Did”, “What I Saw”.  Be complete and transparent.  Let your peer community review your data.  Even if it’s not public, give peers access.  They might repeat your experiment.  They’ll provide a citation to your data if they do a write up on it as well.  This linking is very powerful linking.

Make suggestions about the data, but not “hard claims”.  You’re only making honest observation so nobody can dispute it.  Others are likely to promote hard claims on your behalf, as a one-off.

You can earn more valuable inbound links by publishing your observations and separately publish the discussions.  You’ll get more authority sites linking to your data.

You won’t get the social media attention because it’s not wild claims.  but the higher authority links are worth it.

_____________________-

Next up is Jordan

How do you kill a vampire? What are the two primary ways?  Audience answers stake through the heart, or direct sunlight.  These are the historic beliefs.  More recently, an expert has said that’s wrong.  (He flashes a “Twilight” book cover on the screen. )

How do we deal with this discrepancy?  Do testing yourself.

Now there’s a photo of Matt Cutts up on the screen and he says “Don’t Trust This Guy”.  And a photoshopped photo of Matt’s there now, looking really evil. 

You need to take what others say with a grain of salt.  Every site is different, every competitor situation is different.  You need to test for yourself.

Why do we test?  To help break through the red tape that’s out there, and validate the recommendations and processes we want to go through.  We need the evidence to show what we want to do is the right thing to do.

Testing process:

• Formulate your plan – lay out the steps.
• Execute your test
• Monitor the metrics and reports you determined during the plan
• Share the information.  there are key stakeholders in your organization that need to know the information.  If you can, share it online in the SEO community.
• Maintain consistency for ongoing success.

Measure impact and conversions – use A/B testing with changes on your site and monitor the conversions.  Was there a negative impact on conversions?  If not, you’re safe to move ahead.

Data points to consider:

• Visits or Searches
• Average SERPs (pull data from visitor URL)
• KPIs – your key success metrics

Generate trend reports, and granular data reports.

Example reports – Overall visits, Organic visits, Google Visits, Keyword group level results, all the way down to monitoring individual keyword results over time.  At the deepest level, you can look at results over time for an individual page.

Create a dashboard – to automate the generation of the data, which frees you up to do other work.

________________

And our last speaker is Branko (Go @Neyne!)

I admire Branko – an SEO scientist who routinely does lab testing of the biological kind!

Some of the things important in science that can be applied to SEO:

First, we want to define the question, usually after we observe something.  The phrase isn’t “Eureka”, it’s usually “oh – that’s funny” – a thought that comes up as we’re observing something.  You don’t have time or the ability to test everything – its important to know what we can test or we can’t test.  PageRank is an example – they can test that in MountainView, but we can’t.  Everything you do on your web site is a potential thing we can test.

Gather information and resources before you test – related blog posts, social media, forums – maybe someone has done this before that you can learn from.  A problem with this is non-standardized terminology – we don’t all use the same words to describe things we test.

Perform an experiment and collect data.  Testing with “nonsensical” terms (non-words) is not really valid.  On the other end, testing for “payday loans” isn’t valid either.

I like to take the third route – phrases that are made up of real words, but aren’t normally phrases.  You’re able to couple changes to your site with changes in rankings.

Multi-directional experiments -I take a site without a link and change it, then look at the results, I’ll then do the reverse – if I see similar results, I have more confidence in the results.

Interpret your data and draw conclusions – does my conclusion agree with expectations?  Does it have an alternative explanation?  Bounce your findings off of others – two heads are better than one.

Remember – there are no definite conclusions.  That should be kept in mind.  It’s a tough reality to live with, but it’s important to be aware of.

Data Analysis- Get a real statistician to look at your data because it can lead to bad examples if you rely on yourself or someone who isn’t an expert.

Avoid personal bias.  We think we see what we do based on our expectations.  Try to erase your expectations before you look at the data.

Go Social!  Some of the best findings I’ve found have come from going social – you’ll learn much more.

SEO Testing Secret Ingredient:

Identify the people who like experiments, buy them a beer – you’ll get much better results and we’ll all enjoy it more!

_____________________

Question time!

When you’re doing testing on a moving target, what are the challenges?  The moving target is the algorithm.  How can you isolate that the changes you’ve made are what moves the data?
Branko - my multi-directional method does a pretty good job.  But the title of the whole thing, you’re only increasing the certainty a little bit.

Vanessa - I really liked not only the multi-directional method but doing the test a couple times.

Branko - On a few pages as well.

John - Over time, you find some sites that are representative of content strategies – and you can go to them and see what happened to them.

Vanessa - if you’re looking at all the sites you’re involved with, it’s more likely to not be a coincidence.

Question: Do you want to talk about tests you’ve done that didn’t match expectations?

Branko - A while back it wasn’t well known at the time, but we discovered that you didn’t need quality links, only consistently more links coming in.  That was new to us.  It may not be that way today but it was new and it worked for us.

Question: Do you use external control groups? Do you track other peoples web sites to see if their changes are comparable to yours?

Conrad - Benchmarking competitors can be bad.  We do watch competitors like a hawk, but if you’re studying them, you might stumble into a test, assume that’s something they’re doing not just as a test.

Branko - I do it sometimes when I test links.  I insert a link to a control group that I don’t have control over – if that link behaves as links to my web site, then it’s better ( for my evaluation of my testing).

Question - where are good places people can go to publish this information, and exchange ideas?

John - I joined Twitter only for SEO and over time, I can twitter something and get attention of hundreds of people.  That same thing happens at forums – I like the SEOBook forum – they’re hardcore people with being serious.  In the science world, we form working groups all the time.  When you meet people with common areas, take advantage of that.

Branko - a study that came out on the Distilled blog – they published excels with data that anybody could take and study and we joined forces – and that’s the whole point of that.

Question: Can you each briefly give ideas for setting up SEO testing environments?

John - If you’re beginning, go into Google – Analytics, Webmaster Tools – put them to use

Branko - The problem with testing – it’s isolated from the places we want to be at.  I would make sure you’re constantly aware of what’s happening on YOUR web site – or isolating sections on your site and doing experiments – that teaches you more.

Jordan - if you can’t set up a completely controlled environment – set aside testing areas of your site.

Conrad - Make sure you and the people you are sharing the data with are using statistical standards.

And that’s it!

So You Want To Test SEO? is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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