Search Marketing Sage

Janet Driscoll Miller’s Pubcon presentation shows you the basic tactics for optimizing your landing pages, as well as some advanced landing page optimization tactics including progressive profiling, conversion paths, and social integration.

As a search engine marketer, we always automatically default to utilizing Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool to conduct our keyword research. But, what if other tools existed to help us expand our keyword research efforts? In this SMX East session, Shawn Livengood and Laura Thieme introduce new keyword research tactics in order to perform better keyword research.

Google Analytics can be an anomaly. As shown by this Q&A with a GA expert. Here are a few top tips / tricks I found helpful.

Shortcuts (great for reporting!):

• When you hit Compare to Past in the calendar, you can check a box denoting your data be compared to last year. This is a time saver.
• Say you have created a report in Analytics precisely the way you’d like, with all the information and dates matched up for a report. Just hit Shortcut near the top of the page. Once you click Shortcut, this formatted report is saved on the left navigation.

Random Tips:

• “Campaigns” in Analytics are in no way related to AdWords.
• Regular expression is the “best thing ever invented.” And if you use GA, you MUST know regular expression. Visit Luna Metrics to learn more about it.
• If your account has more pageviews than clicks, this is most likely a bot clicking on your ad and not actually visiting the landing page.
• How to resolve the frustrating issue of “other” pages showing up when navigating through all pages on your site content. This usually happens on a site with many many pages, such as sites with multiple URL parameters. The max size of a table in Analytics is 50,000 rows. So when you have sites that can have multiple parameters on a URL, the site can grow easily to over 50,000 pages. When Google reaches the 49,999th page in the table, the 50,000th is automatically pronounced “other.”
  • But! There is a solution. Navigate to Profile Settings and in the Exclude URL Query Parameters, you can exclude those parameters that may be causing the problem.

Schema markup has been a particular interest of mine to research and employ in our clients SEO efforts. Since I already have a base knowledge of the basics of Schema (see my past blog posts: How to Implement Schema.org Into Your SEO Efforts Part 1 & Part 2), I decided to bypass the Schema 101 session and attend the more advanced Schema course. During this session, Benu Aggarwal, Paul Bruemmer, and Jonathan Goodman dive into why you should use Schema markup and how to achieve positive SEO results.

As a marketer, I often get overwhelmed at the sight or sound of legalese. But, working in the online realm, it is imperative to fight through the confusion of technical legal jargon and understand the current and potential legislation that could impact our marketing actions.  In this session, David Mink, Jud Soderborg, and Tony Wright offer insight in order to navigate successfully though the potential legislation, like “Do Not Track,” and the legal issues facing social media.