Google Twins & How to be Number 1

Ever do some "Echo Surfing" (search your own name in Google or another search engine) only to find another person with the exact name. While finding a Google Twin may more common for some than others, what happens if that other you represents something you're not and has the potential to damage your reputation. What if a potential employer or client Googles your name and finds them instead and thinks you are them and there are some not nice things out there about them.

This is something that all of us and not just those of us who choose to be in the public eye (like myself) have to start addressing. Think your name is so unique, try Googling yourself with both the correct spelling and common misspellings of your name. I might be the only "Alan K'necht", but there is at least one other "Alan Knecht" out there.

Perhaps, these are some of the reasons that the Canada's National Post reporter Brianna Goldberg, decided to see what happened when she Googled herself and her subsequent drive to dominate the top 10 results for her name on Google.

Her journey to Google domination including quotes and advice from myself and another expert are contained in her article entitled "Google Twins: I want to be number 1" (http://www.nationalpost.com/life/story.html?id=743136).

This article makes a great read and provides lots of useful information. Let's help show the world the power of links by adding the article to your Stumble Upon, Digg, etc. account or better yet, blog about it and link to it with the words "Google Twins"” in the link text.

SEM Canada Postponed

Said news from last week is that SEM Canada scheduled for September 4th and 5th had to be canceled. I really was looking forward to this conference as the slate of speakers was outstanding.

Granted having a conference the day after Labour Day when many heads turn back to work or getting the kids off on their first day back at school may have not been the wisest, but to the idea was sound.

So the good news is that SEM Canada is still scheduled to happen, but his time it is being scheduled tentatively for October 2009. This will give the organizers much more time to secure event sponsorship and build registrant momentum. I know that I have already agreed to speak at this event and I can only hope that the slate of speakers will remain mostly intact.

SEM Canada - Early Bird Discount

Here is the heads up on the next conference I'm scheduled to speak at. I really got excited about this conference after meeting the organizer Laura Callow last week at SES Toronto. She is a warm and friendly person, who is giving this conference a truly personal touch. As well several many of the speakers at SEM Canada were in attendance here in Toronto. We share the excitement of another search engine conference here in Canada. During various discussions, we acknowledge that this will be a different type of conference and how we are all being challenged to deliver something new and exciting during our sessions. Conference organizers are now offering a early bird discount of $695 for the two day event valid until July 7th.

I must admit, that most of the following post was so well put by Jim Hedger, that with permission I have reposted with only a few minor adjustments and some trimming. Now the essences of Jim's post:

The organizers of the SEM Canada conference scheduled for the 4th and 5th of September in Calgary have secured an "A" list of speakers including myself (Alan K'necht), Jane Copland, Todd Friesen, Ken Jurina, Cindy Krum, Bill Slawski, and Richard Zwicky, SEM Canada is now working on filling the most important seats in the conference, the audience.

According to conference organizer Laura Callow, local interest from Calgary and Edmonton is booming with several large companies in two of Canada's most prosperous cities booking space for their staff. International attendance numbers, which are vital for the conference's success, remain a hurdle as ID requirements for international travel are confusing for some US residents and high fuel surcharges have increased the costs of traveling. To bolster local support and turn that support into hard cash, SEM Canada is organizing a Test-My-Site taster conference.

In order to promote sales, SEM Canada is offering readers an enormous discount on the early bird rate. Until July 7, registrants can purchase a full, all-inclusive 2-day pass for only $695, down from the original early bird rate of $895, similar to the discount already offered to SEOmoz Premier members.

From the standpoint of a business developer, attending SEM Canada makes financial sense. Those who participate in the SEM Canada conference are likely to find a larger pool of potential customers than those attending similar SES or SMX events. There are few search marketing conferences held in Canada and the event in Calgary is the only multi-day conference on search marketing in western Canada. With a stable resource based economy, western Canada is the only part of North America seeing sustained economic growth at this time. The business market in western Canada, while served by amazing local talent, is still wide-open for search marketers to enter. There simply aren't enough of us up here to satiate the growing need for effective search marketing.

SEM Canada will be a far more intimate show than SES San Jose or the SMX East conference scheduled for one month later in NYC, giving attendees a chance to meet and really get to know some of the most influential names in the industry. It will also be a successful show, at least from a biz-dev standpoint, for those who attend.

Organizer Laura Callow recently emailed all speakers with a personal message for anyone interested in attending SEM Canada. "Please also ask your subscribers to contact me personally via email to put their names down on our hotel discount list I will call them back after they email me, or they can call me on 403-714-6170. We like the personal touch. Well I do…" Let's hope the personal touch works. The SEM Canada conference could be highly beneficial to the entire search marketing industry.

So I hope to see you there.

SES Toronto 2008 Review

Well another SES Toronto has come and gone. This annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Toronto is the one annual conference here in Toronto that I look forward to each year. As mentioned previously, I spoke at this year's conference (4th year in a row) on the topic of Keyword Research along with Christine Churchill and Michelle Pruitt (from Microsoft) and Louis-Dominic Parizeau. Our session was moderated by Anne Kenndey. While I was impressed with the quality of speakers on the panel as well as virtually every session attended, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed with year's conference

The networking opportunities and chances for everyone (speakers and attendees) to mix and mingle with most speakers were on par with previous years. I personally got a chance to get together with the usual suspects of with Jim Hedger, Richard Zwicky, Ken Jurnia, Andrew Goodman, Greg Jarboe, and Lyndsay Walker. In addition, I also got to reconnect with Bryan Eisenberg who I hadn't seen or chatted with in about 7 years and finally meet in person Laura Callow (organizer of SEM Canada scheduled for September of this year).

I was especially impressed with Incisive's decision to include an Orion panel session purely dedicated to measuring success in Web 2.0 world and another session focused on the analytics aspect of search engine marketing. While the Orion session my not have been as technical as I wished, it more or less met the demands of most attendees. What I found most disappointing was the lack of vendors at the show. My best guess would be at most there were 12 booths with the biggest sponsor being the Yellow Pages. The small size of the Google and Microsoft booths reflects poorly on them and the respect they have for the Canadian market. SES Toronto until now was not only the premier search engine conference in Canada it was basically the only one (this year there will be SEM Canada in Calgary), so why didn't they have a bigger and more technical presence at the show?

Another disappointment over previous years was the attendees. I'm used to a mix of beginners and experienced SEO people. This year excluding the speakers, I ran into only a handful of people had any SEO or PPC experience from the attendees. During my session I asked how many of the audience had keyword research experience and only about 10% raised their hands. This compares to over 50% who raised their hands last year during the same session.
Several of us have an uneasy feeling that this may be the last SES Toronto for a while. Nothing can be confirmed, and while Incisive was selling booth space for next June's SES Toronto, there was no attempt to presell it to the attendees (no banners, no announcement unlike when Danny Sulivan ran the conference). Here's hoping I'm wrong.

I am next scheduled to speak at SEM Canada right after Labour Day in Calgary (more on this line up shortly), with any luck I'm hoping to speak at SES San Jose in August and perhaps at Danny Sulivan's SMX East in October.

SES Toronto 2008

Search Engines Strategies Toronto is back for its 5th year here in Toronto. This year's event will take place June 16 -18th.

For the fourth year in a row, I'll be speaking at this year's event (June 18th at 12:45). My topic for this year's conference address is "Keyword Research". This is the same topic as last year's address, but I promise to update my slides and give out some new information.

Joining me again on this year's panel is Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance. I've gotten to know Christine not only at SES, but at other search conferences throughout North America. She not only brings a big smile and sunny disposition to each presentation, but a wealth of knowledge and insight developed through years of hands on experiences.

SES Toronto, to my great delight is also increasing its focus on web analytics. Anyone who has ever attended one of my talks knows that I firmly believe that you can't do and SEO or SEM without sound analytics in place. That's why I'm thrilled to see June Li (Clickinsight) (June and I have teamed up before in Toronto to speak on the topic of Web Analytics) and Bryan Eisenberg (Future Now Inc.) two of the leading authorities on web analytics speaking at this year's conference.

So if you're only going to attend one search engine conference in Canada this year, make SES Toronto. As reminder to people in the US north east, Toronto isn't that far to travel and it is a very cosmopolitan place (the most multicultural city on the planet) with lots of fun activities and despite the recent increase in value of the Canadian dollar, it still is a relatively affordable place to travel to.

PubCon 2008

The dates for PubCon (http://www.pubcon.com) 2008 have just been announced. This years PubCon is happening November 11-14 and once again will be held in Las Vegas.

While the speakers list and agenda haven't been finalized, it looks highly likely that I'll be speaking during at least one session at the conference. If this year's conference is anything like last years conference it promises to be highly informative, a great networking opportunity and one great time.

So block off these dates and get ready to say hello to Vegas. One word of advice, don't plan on leaving early on the 14th. This has traditionally been the day of the big networking event and something you really don't want to miss.

As always as I know more, I'll post more on this event.

New SEM Conference

I know its been a while since I posted, and now I have a backlog of news items. So here is the first one.

A new Search Engine Marketing conference has been announced. The conference entitled SEM Canada (http://www.semcanada.org/) will take place in Calgary Alberta on September 4 and 5. At a cost of $895 Canadian for a two day event, this conference has a very attractive price tag.

The conference features some great speakers including Andy Beal, Christine Churchill, Todd Friesen, Ken Jurina, Richard Zwicky and of course myself. As it stands now (agenda hasn't been completely finalized), I'll be speaking at two sessions and moderating a 3rd.

For those who've never been to Western Canada this is a great excuse. The conference is on the Tuesday and Wednesday right after labour day, so I'd suggest flying out early and spending the weekend in mountains (i.e. Banff or Lake Louise) or head out to one of my favourite spots in Canada the Alberta Bad Lands especially Drumheller and Dinosaur Provincial Park.

More on this conference as I find out, but for now check out SEM Canada web site and think about registering.

Spock the Next FaceBook?

People are always looking for what the next big thing on the web is going to be. Almost a year ago I wrote about Facebook. Back then it was still redistricted to people at educational institutions. Well it opened up to the rest of us and as the say "the rest is history".

So what is the next big thing? While I won't put any money it, give Spock a look (www.spock.com). This site is the ultimate web site for ego surfing. It is a search engine of just people. So type in your name, type in my name and see what comes up. You might be surprised.

Want to update your personal information or start a network of trusted individuals then go for it by registering. Spock has a rating system of the importance of individuals called "Spock Power". Simply add more people you your network and your power grows. As well, you immediately get Spock's recommendations of others who you might want to invite to your network because they are connected to you through someone in your network. Think of Spock as a blending of Facebook (the personal social network site) and LinkedIn (the business social network site)

You can also increase your power by establishing trust with others. Get people you know to confirm who you are and anything (tags) that you've used to identify yourself.

So why do I think Spock could be the next big thing, after all we already have Facebook and LinkedIn. I registered with Spock about 1 year ago and I didn't hear anything more about it or from it. Yet over the past 2 weeks I've started getting lots of "Trust Requests" from it. This means others are now starting to flock to it. Perhaps it's a fad perhaps not. Either way, people are starting to use it and if you want to be up on the latest social networking sites, you better take a look. And while you're there, why not add yourself to my network as a K'necht-It reader.

Las Vegas Web Conferences Wrap-Up

It's hard to believe that it's been 2 weeks since the wrap-up party from PubCon. I know I promised to keep you posted on events and news from both Web Builder 2.0 and PubCon, but work and life sometimes gets in the way of the best plans.

To summaries both events, both were great in different ways. Web Builder 2.0 as predicated brought to together developers, web project managers, usability specialist and so much more. The sessions were top notch and giving the speakers a full hour each gave them a chance to go more than just surface level on their given topics.

PubCon on the other hand was an SEO and SEM focused event. It was much larger and the sessions were composed of panels of experts (including yours truly). While this format gives the opportunity to hear lots of different views, by limiting the panellists to 9-12 minutes each, you don't get into much depth.

I always say you can tell a great conference from a good conference by what happens between sessions. Using this measure both conferences were great! PubCon gets an extra star for organizing a wrap-up networking session on the last day. Perhaps it was the free beer and soft drinks, perhaps it was squeezing almost a thousand people into the Brew Pub at the Monte Carlo or perhaps it was just the desire of people to get to know people at a deeper level.Whatever the reason, this was the highlight of PubCon. I met more new people that afternoon and swapped more business cards in 4 hours then I did over the first few days combined. Many of the speakers stuck around for this event and it gave the opportunity for the attendees to get to know us and to ask us those final questions they didn't get to ask during the sessions.

My personal highlight was watching Matt Cutts (of Google fame) and Danny Sullivan (from Search Engine Land) race their cellphones. It was IPhone (Matt Cutts) vs. The HTC 6800 (Canny Sullivan). I had to cheer for Danny as he has the same cellphone as I do (IPhones are not available in Canada). So with cellphones in hand and browsers open, the race began. Would the sleek design of the IPhone win over the large QWERTY keyboard of the HTC 6800. It was Mac vs. Windows Mobile and the winner is...

Well Matt Cutts did hold up a Search Engine Land sticker on his head.

Here's hoping that both events will take place again next year. If so, I can almost guarantee I'll be there.

Google's Market Share US

Overall the number of searches in the US in October increased 12 percent from September to 10.5 billion. Google's market share continued to increase to 58.5% or 6.1 billion searches during this period according to comScore.

Just remember that all searches are not created equal and these numbers include searches on such web properties as YouTube and other search engine web properties. What does this all mean? If the experts are right, then the US search market is destined to resemble the Canadian market where Google has well over 80% of all searches. In essence, Google is becoming a monopoly when it comes to search.

Here are the other major search engines' market shares for the US in October:

• Yahoo - 22.9%
  
• MSN - 9.7%
  
• Ask - 4.7%
  
• Time Warner (AOL) - 4.2%
  

To more information please see the Yahoo News article

Baidu SEO

One of the benefits of running my SEO Tools and Resources Directory is people are always sending me in suggestions of new SEO tools or Search Engine Optimization resources.

I personally review all submissions and decide on which items to added to my ever growing list. Unfortunately, most submissions are not up to my standards. I was however pleasantly surprised by todays submission.

Today's submission was for an on-line article about Baidu (the most popular search engine in China) and how SEO for Baidu is different then SEO for Google or the other major search engines. While the English used in this article is not perfect, the message and methodology is clear.

Key points of the article include the use of simplified Chinese as the character set, use of specific meta tags (once again in simplified Chinese) and use of domain names an hosting locations. Over the SEO techniques described are nothing that don't apply to other search engines, but the specific combinations of elements are a bit different.

So if you're interested in marketing your web site to China and want to be optimized for Baidu give this article a read www.baidupro.com

The Description Meta Tag

The description meta tag, is frequently overlooked by HTML coders and copy writers. Yet, the importance of this tag has never gone away.

Some of us in the SEO community feel it is an important element in the various search engine algorithms, while some others do not. According to Google "While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results." Yet, I've seen sites rankings improve in Google with a simple rewrite of the description meta tag. So who do you believe? That's up to you and regardless, the mere fact that in many instance it will be displayed in the search results to describe the page, make it an important sales message to improve click-through rates.

If the search engine is your new home page, you not only need effective page titles (the first line of a search result listing), but an effective description meta tag. This tag needs to be more then just loaded with keywords, it needs to be engaging, and convince the searcher (if they see this element) to click on your listing. After all, being number one in search results with an uninviting page title and description, won't get your site any traffic.

As a reminder, the format of the description meta tag is
<meta name="Description" content="informative description here">

This is why, my firm K'nechtology always stress the importance of this tag and has developed a specialty of writing effective description meta tags. Effective description meta tags must be part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

For more information on this subject, here is a link to a great article from Google on the subject matter (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/querystats?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.knechtology.com%2F&hl=en).

Search Engine Strategies - Toronto

For the third year in a row, I'll be speaking at Search Engine Strategies Toronto. While the search engine conference will run for two days (June 12-13), I will be speaking in the morning of June 12.

Look for me at the session entitled "Keyword Research: Purpose, Tools, and Tactics".

I'll be giving this topic a bit of twist by not talking usual SEO stuff, but about how to harvest data from your own log files. In essence using web analytics in support of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Unfortunately, I'll only have 15 minutes to speak and I could easily devote several hours to this topic.

So if you're going to be in the Toronto area in June, keep this conference in mind. It is the only one of its kind to take place in Canada. If past experience is anything, it is well worth the cost of admission.

For more information visit the SES conference web site.

SEO and Baby Naming

Here is a great article from the Wall Street Journal on how important it is for you to rank high in Google for your name. The article goes on to talk about how people are even choosing baby names on how competitive their name (first name last name) is in Google.

What is interesting this is the same exercise that SEO professionals do before recommending specific keyword phrases to target for a business.

For more details see the article on the web site.

Keyword Spy - A new Tool in my SEM Toolbox

A friend just forwarded a great new search engine marketing tool to my attention. After just a few minutes of evaluating it in the free mode, I've added to my arsenal of search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO tools. The tool is Internet Spy (http://www.keywordspy.com).

This tool allows you to easily see how different keyword terms you've purchased are performing plus look up the keyword terms your competition is bidding on a well.

So far I've only tried the free version of Internet Spy and perhaps I'll dig into the old wallet to give the paid version a try. My first thoughts on looking at the costs are that it is a bit steep. At $19 USD for a single day, they may be pricing themselves a bit too high and when you look at an annual subscription price of $99 per month ($1,188 per year) they are a lot more expensive then paid SEM and SEO tools that I'm currently using.

So I'll stick with the free version for now, but I'll keep in mind the competitor's information that you can't anywhere else. So let me know if you decided to give the paid version a try. I'd love hear from you.

Podcamp Toronto - Review

On Saturday, I had the pleasure to attend the first day of Podcamp Toronto. Unfortunately, a scheduling conflict prevented me from attending day 2 of Podcamp Toronto. If I had known when I planned my schedule how exceptional Podcamp would be I would have made sure to have kept my Sunday open as well.

Attending Podcamp here in Toronto reminded me and many other attendees of the buzz that surround the web back in 1997 or 1998. I even took that feeling one level further and noted that the conference and speakers were truly throwbacks to the earliest days to the web, when like minded people would get together and share everything in order to spread the word and perhaps change the world.

Podcamp speakers were quick to share tips, code and techniques. All speakers made their slides publicly available via the conference Wiki. To my surprise, the whole event was broadcast live. I took advantage of this by tuning into a couple of the Podcamp presentations on Sunday when I couldn't attend in person. While I was able to get the info from the presentations, there is nothing like attending an event like this in person. As I always say about conference, you can separate a good conference from a great conference by what happens between sessions and in the hallways. On more then one occasion, I was late or missed an entire session because I was involved in great conversations in the hallways.

My how this technology has change over the years, while to me it seems like only yesterday that people were conceiving the idea of broadcasting events live over the Internet and when my wedding was the first wedding ever broadcast live 8.5 years ago, it seem just so radical. Now the cost and the technology to do live broadcasts is within virtually everyone's reach.

So I learnt a lot about podcasting. Sessions covered everything from hardware, to software, how to publish your podcast, how to market your podcast and much more. There were even a few sessions on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and your podcast. While these sessions covered the basics, for a seasoned SEO professional like me, I saw a lot more opportunity.

Absent from the conference however were speaker egos, copyright notices on slide presentations and costs. Yes Podcamp Toronto was free to attend. Thank you to all the volunteers, speakers and event sponsors for not only putting on an incrediable event, but for allowing everyone to attend regardless of their financial abilities. I can't say I got my money's worth, but I can say that Podcamp Toronto was worth investing my time in attending and I can't wait until the next Podcamp.

Checking Backlinks in Google

Checking Backlinks in Google

As all SEO professionals know, the back link checker offered by Google (link:yoururl), has been intentionally broken for some time now. While there have been many reasons discussed for why Google broke their own application, it has left SEO professional with a broken tool for checking backlinks on the most poplar search engine, until now.

As of last week, Google has added a new tool to its set of extremely helpful tools available as part of its Webmasters program. According to the Google post on its blog, "Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded".

The good news is that everything Google promised in its post is true. You can now check backlinks to every single page in your web site instead of just the domain. There is a treasure chest of information just waiting to be discovered with this new tool.

The tool does come with some limitations. First and most obvious, you need to sign-up for the Webmaster program (not a big deal and it is free) and secondly you need to verify yourself and the domain you want to check backlinks for. This second step isn’t a big deal either, but it does require that you publish some code to the web site that you are interested in.

So go on and register and check out all the free features of Google's Webmaster service at http://www.google.com/webmasters

Remember if you have questions about this or any other post you can contact me by simply clicking on the Bitwine Icon in the right-hand column.

More on Google & Belgium Court Case

Great artilce from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061127-123545

Google Being Sued - It's not what you think!

Google is quickly becoming the next punching bag on the street. When they were small and a private company most people just took them for granted.

Since they went public, Google has had their fair share of people suing them and with acquisition of Utube.com, you cam bet there will be more. However, I saw this article from "Yahoo News" http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061123/ap_on_hi_te/google_vs_newspapers_4 and thought that this must be a first. Google being sued for including someone’s content in their search engine (Copiepresse a French language newspaper in Belgium).

After all, it's the job of an SEO like myself is to get companies content in Google and not to exclude it. Of course, this court case specifically takes issue with Google News (news.google.com) and that they took content without permission.

Perhaps I've been in this came for too long, but search engines always assumed they had permission unless you told them otherwise. Isn't that what the robots.txt file is for?

In this instance, Google quickly responded and removed the offending content, but the lawsuit is still there. I'm sure Google is taking all this in stride.

It does beg the question; if legal challenges like this become successful does it mean the end of search engines as we know them? For now, I'll concentrate on getting my clients content up there and ranking well. After all, the more organizations that decided not have their content included, the better my chances are of ranking well.

Xenu Link Sleuth Updated

OK I missed this some how, but one of my favourite tools for web development and SEO work Xenu Link Checker was updated last month. A new version of Xenu Link Checker 1.2i was released October 16, 2006.

I love this tool first from a web development stand point as it allows me to quickly test a large site for broken links. I've yet to find a better tool.

From an SEO stand point, I use it much the same way, but this time as a bot/spider emulation. It allows me to view the sites linking architecture (site architecture) backwards. If there is a specific page that I'm trying to get ranked high in the search engines, then I run Xenu and make sure, first the page gets found. Secondly I can reference all pages that link to the page. I can then evaluate if the page needs more internal links or perhaps to be relocated within the sites architecture.

Either way this is an extremely useful tool for the SEO & Web Developer tool box.

A download of Xenu can be obtained at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html