I’ll be live blogging as many sessions as I can and writing up the others later. Today we kick off with the keynote from Chris Sherman, Executive Editor from Search Engine Land.

Chris starts his presentation with a YouTube video by Raymond Crowe using shadow puppets to mime “What a Wonderful World”. Like shadow puppets, search marketing looks impossible to do but we’re just out there doing it.

Chris says that the last few weeks have brought incredible change. Seismic change in the industry! We’ve come out of the global economic crisis. Online ad spend is picking up. WE’ll see $54B in global ad spend. Search is 47% of that spend, which is promising for our industry. B2B lead generation spend is still lower than before the economicdownturn, but that may be a lagging indicator.

Chris then showed a series of videos to describe online search marketing.

1) The Renaissance Site:

Video from 1969, taking a look at the *future* of electronic technology. Chris says that what they’re describing in that video is really the Google of today. Although they started laser-focused on search, now they offer “something of everything to everybody”.

Google Fast Flip

New product – combines Google News with a easy view layout.

Google News Timeline

Takes news and shows how stories are developing over a specific timeline.

Google Dashboard

Allows you to see what info Google is tracking about you. How you are represented as an entity on Google. Showed his own dashboard. The amount of data is extraordinary. The dashboard now gives you control over how much of this information is public and available. Demonstrates Google’s commitment to privacy.

Google Australia new products:

- Google Insights for Search – compare one search with another etc.

- Google map icons – allows you to claim a local business using Google Places on Google Maps.

- Google Sponsored Listings – within maps now.  An alternative to Google AdWords.

- YouTube promoted videos – You can now sponsor videos via YouTube so your videos come up the top – not officiallyavailable in Australia yet, except via AdWords AU.

- Google AdWords Webinars – new to GG Australia

- Google Speaks ‘Strayan! New feature to hep Aussies find local info, in local jargon. Cute!

This week, GG has hired a team of photographers to use cameras within the Streetview cars to focus in on more interesting visual data they come across (similar to what Bing are doing with virtual reality?).

Google Woes

- legal woes

- privacy issues

- China and censorship

Google: The new evil empire?

Chris has heard rumors of GG replacing Microsoft as the new evil empire.

- Photographers have sued over book deal.

- EU looking at antitrust

- Execs convicted of privacy violations in Italy

- Xerox and Quintura sue over patents

- Streetview lawsuits in multiple countries

- Launch of Google Buzz

- and the beating goes on…

Chris doesn’t think they will get into major legal difficulties. In terms of privacy though, they might have trouble. When they launched Buzz, they did it without permission and that was a major concern – especially if you use public shared computers.

In response, Matt Cutts went into great detail on the European Public Policy Blog about privacy and transparency. Mind you, he link dropped in a nuclear fashion in that post which amused Chris greatly.

Keep in mind, Facebook’s privacy is MUCH more relaxed and dangerous, in his opinion.

Dealing with the Great Firewall

- Google moved Google.cn servers to Hong Kong last month

- But China is blocking access to the site from mainland computers

- Excellent analysis at http://bit.ly/93pmnY

- Not just China: Google is censoring in other countries as well

- You can use proxies from within China to get past the censorship

- Chris has never personally experienced censorship when running SEM conferences in China

New as of Yesterday

The Google Govt Requests and Removal Tool – a new tool which is a maps overlay to allow people to request information to be removed or request more data. You can even see in real time what requests have been complied with or not. When you mouse over China, it says “Chinese government considers this information a State secret so data is not available”. Article at: “Google Responds to Privacy Concerns With…”

2) Emperor’s New Clothes

Showed video of a plane experiencing a very very dodgy landing. Chris says this represents Yahoo.

- Yahoo is the proud owner of the Emperor’s New Clothes

- Microhoo competition: Salvation or sellout? Microsoft does the heavy search lifting while Yahoo sells ads.

I was discussing this with Chris last night at the Tweetup. Chris thinks this is a clever move by Yahoo, but it really gives all the power to MS/Bing.

- Yahoo has divided the labor – “we’re more interested in what happens before and after search than search itself. In other words, we’re going back to our *browse* / portal mode.

3) Assimilator as Innovator

Showed a clip from Star Trek from The Borg. This represents Microsoft / Bing.  “You will be assimilated”. In other words, Chris says, MS is very clever at making people do what they want. Acquisition after acquisition.

Now part of the collective:

medstory

tellme

aquantive

jellyfish

multimap

farecast

Fast Search & Transfer – AllThe Web

Powerset

Bada-Bing!

- Bing is arguably a better na,e than Live Search, but what does it mean? In Chinese it means “Very certain to answer”.

- Fun image licensing for their home page means rotation of photos – always different. Chris uses Bing as his home page because he loves their home page photos so much.

- Powerset does a semantic search rather than algorithmic. Different to other SE’s. Uses Freebase to gather data. If you drill down, it will give you options like Wikipedia on steroids – will go and semantic search ALL Wikipedia articles on a topic you search for – very powerful.

- Bing Maps – geolocation can be an issue (e.g. Thinks Chris is in Melbourne right now). But they do some things very well. Mapp Apps are very cool. What’s Nearby also good. Signs and Billboards etc.

- Bing has captured billions of data sources for travel sources and put them into searchable form. Based on historical data, Bing.com/travel can tell you things like when is the best time to buy a ticket to New York – when it’s cheaper etc. This is powerful stuff! Shows graphs and charts and heat maps to tell you costs of flights, accommodation etc. Unique to Bing.

Chris sees this as the way going forward. This type of travel data may get rolled out to retail, eg volume of sales etc.

Bing SearchRank – another new feature not yet available in Australia. Get an idea of what searches are popular right now, similar to Google Trends.

4) The Shiny New Disruptor

Wofram Alpha. It’s a new computational knowledge engine. Wolfram’s founder believes the complex world can be reduced to simple rules and those rules are computable.

- WA contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50K types of algorithms and models and linguistic data for 1000 languages.

- In WA, put in a mathematical problem and Google will shoot out an answer. But in WA, it will give you the ellipse, a visual definition of the calculation. Put in a chord search and it will come up with the scale visually, plus allow you to play it.

- Ask questions and WA will give you all the data you could ever wish for. People can type in things like “When will I die?” Scary answers. *10 peanut M&Ms* WA will respond with the dietary calories. *Who’s the fairest of them all”?* Snow White. They are obviously paying attention, as answer has changed since Chris first started asking it some months ago. *Am I drunk?* Will give you the alcohol percentages of common drinks.

Social Media

- love it or hate it, SM is huge.

- How big?

- Globally, 1 billion+ users wasting spending 2 billion minutes/month

- Share of global online time:

Facebook 16%

YouTube 9%

Google 5%

This is HUGE. If you’re SEOing for Google, you might want to rethink your priorities and start advertising on Facebook and YouTube.

Email’s not going away anytime soon, but stats show that Social Media is more popular with people. Email has flatlined in terms of time spent, while SM has gone to vertical curve.

Twitter

- 75% of Twitter’s traffic comes from APIs

- Twitter has become a *real* search engine

- Twitter has just announced monetization – “promoted Tweets”. Chris finds this disengenous, although he concedes it will probably be successful.

- Based on KW bids, ads will be displayed at top of search results

- Resonance reuqired (think Quality Score), based on retweets, replies, hashtags, clicked links etc. Searchers need to engage with the ads for them to maintain position – this is a Google approach. Makes sense given key staff are ex FeedBurner / Google staff.

- Third party distribution

- Twitter palns to expand program to it’s partners and then it will become massive.

- other options – Tweetup – contextual sponsored tweets displayed on  publisher sites, using a CPM model now with cost-per-click and cost-per-new-follower.

- TweetUp – is a new tool -the brainchild of GoTo.com’s founder. It’s a network of the world’s best tweeters. Response has been sceptical, but hey, the response to GoTo’s idea of PPC caused the same reaction in people.

Facebook

Chris says Facebook is here to stay. So many ways to reach people and the size of the audience is astonishing, he says. You can’t ignore Facebook. There are definitely ways to measure the impact of a Social Media campaign.

- If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

- lots of fertile options for marketers

- pages, apps, ads, polls,

- And analytics via Facebook Insights

If you’re looking for ways to leverage Facebook, try:

InsideFacebook.com
AllFacebook.com

One third of the people ON Facebook are interested in marketing on Facebook – encouraging. Chris says, if you’ve avoided SM until now? STOP and reconsider.

Real Time Search & SEO

- As real time search becomes more commonplace, it is displacing *traditional* search results

- Fundamental SEO is still important, but there are new opportunities to gain exposure thanks to real-time algos

- At it’s heart, Caffeine is an attempt to capture real time crawl. Larry Page is very impatient about this concept.

- Real time search impacts SEO in a huge, huge way. The algorithm has basically been re-written. Can’t do much right now except continue to use best-practice.

Personalization

- This will amplify things

- Personalization affects search results

- For text results, can’t do much

- However, opportunities to gain real estate via universal search are still good

- Think *digital asset optimization*

Chris says, don’t despair, these changes offer oppportunities for you to use them to your advantage. Because most people won’t be – now’s your chance.

Mobile Search

Chris says “Are we there yet?” YES we are. Tipping point has hit this year – mobile advertising has become popular with the advent of smart phones.

-mobile advertising is the new Point of Sale

- 5.8 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2013; 30% will be smartphone users (Portio Research)

- Mobile ad spend 2015

New Data from Morgan Stanley:

- Sometime between 2013 and 2014, there will be more mobile Internet uers than desktop PC users

- Growth of the iPhone happened at 11x the growth of Desktop Internet!

- These stats will impact Facebook users too obviously

- If you’re not already doing so – GO MOBILE NOW

- Little competition right now

- Go multi-mobile – see Cindy Krum’s article on Search Engine Land

- Consider optimizing your site for mobile search

- Use GPS based mobile apps to leverage your business e.g. 4Square, Gowalla, Placecast (GPS based advertising)

Video Marketing

- YouTube is second largest search engine right now

- Syndicate your videos widely

- Use video because your competitors probably aren’t

- Embed meta data, relevant titles & filenames

- Use appropriate on-page SEO

- Descriptive text

- Include your URLs in the video to encourage viral linking and viewing

A Huge Trend: Targeting

- Types of targeting include device / geographic / demographic / behavioral

Device Targeting

- GG, MS Yahoo

- Device platofrm tgt allows you to target your ads to PCs and iphones and others

Goegraphic Targeting

- GG, MS, Yahoo

- Language targeting occurs at country level or radius

- Also beningn, used to reach specific groups and exclude others

Demographic Targeting

- MS (full), YH (partial), Google (exploring options)

- Targeting ads based on age, gender, income etc.

- similar to direct mail, but uses data from volunteered information

- Can be problematic, especially on shared computers

Behavioural Targeting

- MS, YH, Google content only. Not search or Gmail

- Ads targeted based on online behavior (visits, pruchases, queries etc).

- Benefit = ads match interest closely

- Concern = privacy? What privacy?

Merging Online and Offline Data

- Exelate & Aperture pull data from Neilsen and other co’s to combine data with search behaviror

Opting out of Targeted Ads

- Google makes it kind of fun but not clear and hard to find

- MS uses legalese and it’s boring

- YH also makes it unclear and difficult to find

- You can opt out of 200 Ad networks by going to NAI (inc big ones)

Conclusion

- Web search has consolidated to few major players

- Good news – competition among majors has also increased, good for SEM and searchers

- Counterintuitive: Advertising may DECREASE as search engines continue to refine targeting options

If you missed it, we’re offering 25 charities per year the opportunity to learn search marketing skills at no cost, to help them make the most of their limited marketing budgets.

Our 3 latest recipients of free search marketing courses are:

1) UK Connect – the communication disability network, works to promote effective services, new opportunities and a better quality of life for people living with aphasia. UK Connect want to improve the marketing of their training and consultancy with a view to setting up more services around the UK. This will allow them to have a wider impact on those living with communication disability.

2) Christchurch Women’s Refuge -New Zealand’s first and foremost social change agency dedicated to preventing violence against women, young people and children. Their mission is to create a society where all women, young people and children live life free from violence.

3) The Prisoners’ Aid and Rehabilitation Society – PARS is a not for profit assisting prisoners and their families with reintegration & rehabilitation issues throughout New Zealand. Prisoner reintegration is an area that can be difficult to market effectively. A Search Engine College marketing course offers PARS the chance to maximise their publicity and positive social message.

Those are three very worthy not-for-profits and we are delighted to be able to offer their staff a free course.

If you know of a charity or not-for-profit that might benefit from a pro-bono course, please encourage them to get in touch and spread the word by linking to this post.

Thanks!

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Like to learn more about SEO? Download a free SEO lesson. No catch!

If you missed the announcement, we’re offering 25 charities per year the opportunity to learn search marketing skills at no cost, to help them make the most of their limited marketing budgets.

Our 3 latest recipients of free search marketing courses are:

1) National Heart Foundation of New Zealand – a not-for-profit, non-government organisation that funds research and promotes heart health in order to reduce the rates of cardiovascular disease in New Zealand.

2) Centre for Alternative Technology – a UK based organization offering solutions to some of the most serious challenges facing our planet and the human race, such as climate change, pollution and the waste of precious resources.

3) Honoring Emancipated Youth (HEY) – HEY’s mission is to strengthen and connect San Francisco’s systems of support for Bay Area foster care youth so that all youth emancipating, or “aging out” of the foster care system can enjoy a healthy transition to adulthood.

Those are three very worthy not-for-profits and we are delighted to be able to offer their staff a free course.

If you know of a charity or not-for-profit that might benefit from a pro-bono course, please encourage them to get in touch and spread the word by linking to this post.

Thanks!

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Like to learn more about SEO? Download my free SEO lesson. No catch!

Long time readers of this blog will remember when we first launched the site back in November 2007. The idea behind Search Engine Wiki is to provide a collaborative online library of search engine marketing (SEM) resources.

We’ve been spending a lot of time on Search Engine Wiki lately, adding new resources and checking for broken links. We’re particularly proud of our comprehensive list of worldwide search engines and directories, categorized by country and region.

Our list of Australian search engines has just been updated this week, so if you run link building campaigns for Australian clients, you might want to pop your head in there and make sure their sites are listed in all of them. We’ll be making a post here soon featuring all the new Australian search engines and directories.

Another popular section of Search Engine Wiki is our Niche Search Engines category. In here you’ll find lists of search engines and directories categorized by niche, industry or theme e.g. weddings, business, travel or government.

So if you haven’t visited Search Engine Wiki for a while, now’s a great time to pop in. It’s a community wiki, so if you have additional search engines, tools or resources to add, we’d welcome your contributions.

We’re offering 25 charities per year the opportunity to learn search marketing skills at no cost, to help them make the most of their limited marketing budgets.

Thank you to everyone who tweeted and blogged about our offer, word has spread very quickly and we’ve been inundated with requests from all over the world!

As well as announcing the recipients as they are decided, we’re going to publish a small blurb about each recipient charity/NFP and a link to their web sites so you can learn a little more about them, spread the word about their charitable work or maybe even get involved yourself.

Our first recipients of pro-bono search marketing courses are:

1) Sandblast and the Free Western Sahara Network – Sandblast works in support of the forgotten Saharawi refugees.  The UK charity evolved out of a 14-year relationship and involvement with the Saharawi refugees in South West Algeria.

2) Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations’ Council (EVOC) – is a local organisation, which helps to support, develop and promote the interests and work of voluntary and community organisations in Edinburgh, Scotland.

3) Science Alive – a non profit organisation in Christchurch, New Zealand, focusing on science and technology education.

That’s 3 down and 22 to go – congratulations to you all!

If you know of a worthy charity or not-for-profit that might benefit from our courses, please direct them to this post, or tweet it to spread the word.

I enjoyed reading your web site and blog today. I was recently laid off and am interested in pursuing the SEM field. Where would you recommend I start?

I have 30 years of marketing, public relations, broadcast production, journalism (newspaper columnist), publishing (owner/editor of niche market magazine)… plenty of transferable skills I think. I also developed two web sites, produced several radio and TV shows and through it all I have excellent copywriting and proofreader skills.

Thanks much! Wish I could meet you in Sydney!

Susan

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Hi Susan

First up, I think your idea to start a career in Search Engine Marketing is timely and sensible given the current economy and global demand for search marketing staff. Reading my article 11 Reasons Why You Should Consider a Job in Search Engine Marketing should get you fired up even more about the idea.

It sounds like you have a lot of skills that would translate nicely to a job in the Search Engine Marketing field. Journalism and copywriting especially will come in handy for writing blog posts and optimized page copy or PPC ads. But there is quite a technical side to SEO and PPC that you will need to study and gain experience in before you’re ready to take on client projects or apply for a job in the field.

There are plenty of SEM training options to get you prepared for the industry, including *cough* Search Engine College *cough*, but you should also start practising on your own sites and others as soon as possible. Hands-on experience is essential to competency in the field.

Best of luck and do pop back and let us know how you get on. If you do happen to get to SMX Sydney, make sure you say hello.

This probably isn’t black or white, but in general, Is it bad to have one AdWords campaign with (50) ad groups? I would think if you need that many ad groups, you should probably be putting some of those groups into their own campaigns.

Also, isn’t is best practice to delete keywords from Ad Groups that have no impressions/clicks for 3 months? Thanks you!

Staci

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Hi Staci

There’s no hard and fast rule about the limit of AdGroups each Google AdWords campaign should have, but there is a knack to good account organization. You need to set up your campaigns so they are manageable and logical.

For example, set up a new campaign for each specific geographic market you wish to target, or perhaps for each product line you are promoting. The key is to create as many AdGroups as you need in order to silo each of your keyword themes into their own AdGroup, for example blue socks, red socks, wool socks, nylon socks etc.

You need each of these in their own AdGroup so that you can create ads that are specifically targeted to each theme and use the specific keywords and phrases within the ad headline and body. If it makes sense to have 50 AdGroups in a single campaign for this purpose, then so be it.

Regarding the deletion of keywords, if they aren’t attracting any impressions then yes, delete them. But if they’re getting impressions and no clicks, I would tweak the ads for a month or two before deleting them as the problem may be that the ads aren’t convincing enough.

When I kick off a new PPC campaign, I create a large number of creatives and then If they don’t attract conversions within 2 months, I delete the non-performing ads and gradually pause any that have a 2 percent or lower conversion rate.

Hope this helps

We all know that the most effective Pay Per Click advertising campaigns use landing pages that are matched perfectly to your target search keywords and designed to follow through with the idea or theme that your PPC ad has hinted at.

But how do you determine the effectiveness of those landing pages? How do you know what design or page features will trigger a better response in your audience and lead to more conversions? The answer is that you don’t, unless you test.

Benefits of Landing Page Testing

Whether they are a part of a PPC campaign or not, there are countless benefits to testing your web site pages, including:

• Improve the effectiveness of landing pages
• Increase conversions / sales
• Attract more leads / sign-ups
• Increase time spent on your site by visitors
• Reduce the Cost Per Acquisition of new customers
• Eliminate guesswork. Improve your site design via information from your site’s end users
• Avoid staff disputes – let your customers decide what design elements should be changed

Google Website Optimizer

The Website Optimizer is a tool that allows marketers and webmasters to test variations of pages on site visitors automatically, to see which pages or variations of pages perform the best (i.e. lead to the most conversions).

In April 2007, Google took their Website Optimizer tool out of BETA and made it available to the general public. I had been wanting to use Google Website Optimizer to test our landing pages on Search Engine College for some time and I finally found the time to trial it in October this year. After what we learned from our experiments, I wish we’d implemented it months ago!

Website Optimizer helps you study the effects of different content on your users and identify what users respond to best so you can alter your web site accordingly. You can test any kind of site elements from individual copy blocks and images to complete page layouts. Perhaps the best thing about Website Optimizer is that you can test ANY page on your site, including landing pages you have designed for other PPC programs like Yahoo or pages designed for non-PPC purposes.

Google Website Optimizer allows you to perform 2 different types of tests:

1) A/B Split Testing
2) Multivariate Testing

You can view a 5 min overview of Website Optimizer here.

A/B Split Testing:

Through the use of code added to the “A” (original) page, Google is able to serve the A/B variations (there can be many more variations than just the “B” page) to site visitors and then provide results of which page was most “successful”, commonly through reporting which of the A/B pages lead traffic to a “results” page.

A/B Testing compares the performance of entirely different versions of a page. Google suggests using it if:

- your page traffic is fairly low (i.e. less than 1,000 page views per week)

- you want to move sections around or change the overall look of the page

In Figure 1, you can see an A/B Testing experiment being set up in Website Optimizer.

Figure 1 - Website Optimizer A/B Experiment Set-Up

Setting Up A/B Experiments in Website Optimizer

To set up an A/B testing experiment in Google Website Optimizer, you first need to prepare three things:

1)    Your “original” web page
2)    Your variation/s of this original
3)    Your conversion page (e.g. the “thank you for subscribing/purchasing” page)

In the example you see in Figure 1, we set up an experiment on SearchEngineCollege.com consisting of our original page (/add-me.shtml) and a single variation (/add-me2.shtml), with our conversion page being /seo-starter-course-sample-download.shtml.

Next, you need to add some javascript to each of these pages to enable Google to track your experiment. Then it’s simply a matter of uploading all your test pages and having Google validate your URLs to confirm you’ve set up your experiment correctly.

Multivariate Testing:

Testing can be made not only with A/B pages, but with different possible versions of a single page.

This allows you to trial different types of layouts and page text to see which combinations lead to the highest conversions on your site.

Multivariate Testing compares the performance of content variations in multiple locations on a page. Google suggests using it if:

• your page traffic is high (i.e. more than 1,000 page views per week)
• you want to try multiple content changes in different parts of the page simultaneously

Setting Up Multivariate Experiments in Website Optimizer

To set up a Multivariate testing experiment in Google Website Optimizer, you need to do the following:

1)    Choose the web page you wish to test.

2)    Decide with your marketing/technical teams which page sections you wish to test e.g. headline, image, call-to-action, copy etc.

Figure 2 - Website Optimizer Multivariate Experiment Set-Up

3)    Add the JavaScript code to your page’s source code. This includes the Control Script, the Tracking Script and the Page Section Script.

4)    Identify your conversion page and add the Conversion Script to that page’s source code.

5)    Upload your revised test and conversion pages.

6)    Validate your pages. If you’ve set up your experiment correctly, you will see a confirmation message.

7)    Create the code variations for each page section you are testing (see Figure 3).

8)    Review and launch your experiment.

Tracking Your Experiment

Once your experiment is launched, Website Optimizer will serve up your original page and over time, switch it out with page/section variations included in your experiment. During the testing phase, Website Optimizer will display a report showing the progress of the experiment and the number of conversions each page variation has achieved. It will also attempt to estimate the winning page combination based on the number of conversions each page variation achieves.

Once the tool has gathered enough page impressions from your experiment to produce meaningful data, it will display a report. Depending on what type of experiment you ran, there are two kinds of reports: a combination report and a page section report. Each column in the reports provides a different summary of the performance of combinations, page sections and variations.

Figure 3 - Multivariate Experiment Page Section Variations

Combination Report

A Combination Report (see Figure 4) will show the performance results for all of the page combinations made from the page variations you created for your experiment. By seeing how well a particular combination performs in comparison with the original and the other combinations, you can choose the most successful one to improve your business.

The Chance to Beat Original column shows the likelihood, expressed as a probability, that a particular combination will be more successful than your original content. It is very possible that there can be more than one combination which has a good chance to beat the original. When this number goes above 95% or below 5%, the corresponding bar will be all green or all red, respectively. You can see this in Figure 4, where the Optimizer has determined that Page Variation 1 has a 99.5% chance of outperforming our original page configuration and is therefore showing a green bar.

The Estimated Conversion Rate range provides an at-a-glance summary of overall experiment performance. View this column to see how well each combination is performing relative to your original content.

The Observed Improvement column displays the percent improvement over the original combination. Because this percentage is a ratio of the conversion rate of a combination to the conversion rate of the original column, it will often vary widely. Google suggests that you only concentrate on the observed improvement when a large amount of data has been collected and it can be considered more reliable.

Conversions/Visits represents the raw data of how many conversions and page views a particular combination generated.

Figure 4 - Website Optimizer Combination Report

Page Section Report

While the combination report looks at your content performance as whole combinations, the page section report focuses on which variations of each page section performed best. The tricky part is in choosing variations that work effectively as a winning combination. Why is it tricky? Because page section variations that perform the best in isolation may not work as well in combination with each other.

The Relevance Rating shows how much impact a particular page section has on your experiment. For example, if your headline page section showed a relevance rating of 0, you’d know that the headlines you used did not significantly distinguish themselves. Alternatively, a relevance rating of 5 for your image page section would show that there were one or more images which significantly differentiated themselves from the others, and that the images page section is important for conversions.

The other Page Section Report columns contain similar data to that shown in the Combinations Report, except the figures are only relevant to the variations of a single page section and not to how each variation performs relative to the original variation in that section.

Suggestions for Testing

Whether you conduct your own experiments to test pages for effectiveness, or use testing tools such as Website Optimizer, there are a few things to keep in mind that will help you get the most from your experiments:

1)     Test a page that gets a lot of traffic

There’s no point testing a page that nobody visits. Test a page that brings you a lot of traffic so your experiment has some meaning and the changes have real impact.

2) Test a few things at a time

Test various web site elements at the same time and see how they impact each other. But remember to give your experiment more time and/or more traffic in order to receive meaningful data.

3) Pick a logical conversion goal

For your first test, pick a common conversion goal that will be easy to measure, e.g. purchasing a particular item or signing up for a newsletter.

4) Be brave

Make your experiment obvious! Try a hard-hitting headline versus a blander one. Compare a “buy now” button in a brighter color, try moving a link above the fold to see if it attracts more clicks.

5) Learn from your experiments

Once you have the results of the more obvious experiments, redesign your page/s to incorporate the most popular elements. Then you can try more subtle changes, continually tweaking a page element until you strike a combination that outperforms all others.

6) Take your site traffic into account

For experiments to result in meaningful data, sites with low traffic and/or a large number of variations should run longer experiments in order to obtain a higher percentage of overall traffic.

What Did We Learn?

We were amazed by the results of some of our experiments. We expected our landing pages that incorporated images would convert better than the versions without images. Wrong! Website Optimizer proved that our landing pages with more text and fewer images actually converted much better.

Next we discovered that our landing page which included our navigation menu converted better than one without, despite the persistent belief that landing pages should contain fewer links. Most interesting of all was that while we confirmed that positioning our Call to Action button above the fold resulted in higher conversions, using a red (stop) button converted much better than a green (go) button.

So the lesson here is that assumption is a dangerous thing. You need to test your landing page combinations and not assume that you know what your visitors will respond to.

A few people in the search community put their heads together and decided to help FORGE meet their budget gap of $100,000 through a pro-bono SEM campaign designed to increase awareness and donations.

You can read about their efforts on the SEM Challenge web site. Congratulations and hats off to the following marketers that have generously volunteered their time and expertise to help FORGE: Greg Laptevsky of ClickInclusion.com, as the Pay-Per-Click expert; Todd Mintz of S.R. Clarke Inc. handling Search Engine Optimization; John Robbins of Anvil Media as the Social Media Marketing expert; and Derek Edmond of KoMarketing Associates providing Website Usability recommendations. The organizer of SEMChallenge is Boris Mordkovich of MordComm.

Care to lend a hand? You can help in two ways:

1) Visit FORGEnow.org and consider sponsoring one of their pending projects. Even a $25 donation can go a long way into helping others live better, more rewarding lives. Best of all, you’ll be able to monitor and view the progress and impact of your sponsored project as it develops.

2) Spread the word about SEM Challenge and FORGE on your blog, website, or professional and personal networks.

Thanks in advance!

I’m a student of yours. What would be an estimated hourly rate for SEO/SEM services?

I have read an article that reckons anything from $50 – $800 (American) per hour. According to your knowledge, what would you recommend the lowest to the highest rate is currently?

Thanks
Armand

Dear Armand

Thanks for your question and I hope you’re enjoying your course at Search Engine College.

The hourly rates of Search Engine Optimizers and Search Engine Marketers range considerably, depending on whether they are self-employed, freelance or work for an agency, what city/country they are located in, what client they are billing and what type of project they are working on.

My own rates range between USD 150 and 350 per hour, depending on the complexity of the project and whether my client has purchased a block of hours from me, whether they are on monthly retainer or are paying on an ad-hoc basis.

There really is no set hourly rate and the range from highest to lowest seems to change as often as Jeremy Schoemaker changes his t-shirt.

In terms of SEO/SEM salaries, the following posts should give you an idea of range:

• Recent Ask Kalena posts regarding SEO Salaries
• Average salaries for SEO / SEM industry according to Indeed.com
• Older Ask Kalena posts regarding SEO Salaries
• Recent jobs in the SEO / SEM industry