Mitch Joel (just thought you needed that wiki entry Mitch) from TwistImage is up first.

Mitch hails from Montreal and is a bit of a mythic figure in the marketing world, in no small part because of his story – he comes from music, he interviewed all your favorite punk rockers, and crafted a bit of a punk journalist image for himself. Now he runs a company called TwistImage – a full service-ish kind of thing on St-Laurent, a couple of blocks from the residence of yours truly. He was employee number 4 at momma.com – remember those girls?

So a blend of publishing and search and social and media and … ah yeah that’s right we’re supposed to be talking about, blended universal search stuff. Mitch’s big idea here seems to be that universal search offers a surfer the option of using their brain, because we’re actually capable of differentiating news, videos, maps and other weird things that make their way into our results these days.

Apparently there is a shift on the interwebbings these days, even paradigmic in proportion, from the internet being used primarily as a communication device to something that is used primarily as a way to find content. Because you see, one person writing content and another person reading content is apparently not communication. You’re not even reading this right now. I didn’t even hand you my jacket.

Avinash ‘the man’ Google (last name google) is being quoted now – Mitch’s understanding of Avinash’s understanding is that the engines are completely neutral entities, they care not to judge the world, they just want relevancy, relative relevancy I suppose. Marketers of the future will be the ones that comprehend the power of … putting your powerpoint presentations in the right order. Okay slight hiccup - it’s about optimizing content, and learning that content is more than text. Optimizing videos, optimizing for phrases that pull locals – it’s the modern sub-verticals of search, split into new concepts of what content is. Content is everything. Text, tags, images, audio, video, news, press releases, thoughts, social. Yes even thoughts. Some would argue (okay, I’ll admit, my name is some) that thoughts are not content until written down, but whatever, I’ll forget I thought that…. oh no, it’s too late.

“Your brand is what Google says it is” – Mitch quotes wired magazine before delving into his next segment:

Mitch has a three thousand dollar fancy-assed laptop (no really, it has a sexy back-side), and actually compiled a video of it (plug, sony vaio subcompact is berry berry small) because he feels it was under-marketed compared to the macbook air – so pulling it out of his manila envelope he takes not so discreet note of the DVD player, Ethernet, removable battery, the actual functionality the air lacks. And there we go, a nifty title tag later and the number two search result for ‘apple macbook air’ is his video about the sony vaio . Kapow. Apple.com, youtube, then store.apple.com.

The claim is that this speaks to the power of universal search – you couldn’t get this ranking with a blog post. Some (*cough*, me again) might call it parasite hosting on the trust-rank of youtube.com, but whatever, if there’s no affiliate link, is it really parasitic? Then again, if he wasn’t paid by sony, is it even marketing? I’m getting way off mental track here. The point is valid, you can’t get that ranking with your blog boys and girls - even if you put a fancy video on it. Google owns you.

Mitch wants you to let your content go – post it, share it, give it away, be strategic. Find some good domains with lots of trust rank that let you put your ‘content’ on it. Not a .edu stop thinking that way. I mean, by all means an .edu, start thinking that way.

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Next up is Mr. Dustin Rideout, from wonderman, or somewhere that sounded a lot like wonderman. oh, it’s wunderman. Ah he had a RIM job before. Excellent. Love the blackberry.

Dustin’s take is that trust and authority are taking over the top organic listings. Authorities such as news, blogs, edu sites, gov sites, orgs, hey wait, how did blogs get lumped in with authorities? I thought blogs were the opposite of authority. But you shouldn’t believe me, I’m just blogging. Ooooooor should you?!?

There are lots of pretty screenshots of Google SERPS full of pictures and videos and wikis in this presentation. Wikipedia, youtube, news pages, buggery, not a single affiliate in the mix.

Mr. Rideout manages to hit the nail on the head when he says that the engines take a cut of the pass-through, though I’m not quite sure I understand how universal search is helping Google take more of a cut, besides spamming their own engine with their own properties like youtube.

I’m starting to feel like this session is a little too universal, a little too random. Isn’t anybody going to talk about how easy it is to rank at google images? How to translate that trustrank you just co-opted into money… you know, optimizing for universal search? Somebody? Anyone? Okay I’ll just do it – it’s half about the content of the rich-media, and it’s half about pandering to the traditional ways that engines categorize (and holy moly, rank!) by strategically …. Ah nevermind, nobody seems to care. In fact Dustin is saying to not worry about how to get into universal search, only worry about your content, only worry about creating things that will appeal to your audience. Can’t we do both? I know in traditional SEO more than half the battle is often helping people with great content get that content ‘into’ Google – seriously.

Last speaker, Andy Renieris from Yahoo Canada – he manages the search engine. Suhweet. Relevancy for Canadians is his topic (post script: he never really touches on it).

Yahoo refers to universal search as ‘blended’ search. What’s going to trigger the engines to actually show a blended search – hey this sounds like it’s gonna be good, he wants to explain HOW to get your crazy assed content into the Yahoo SERPS, without ever laying pen to paper. Or finger to key, whatever the modern equivalent is (post script:he doesn’t *really* ever do this either, well, kinda sorta).

Some research – yahoo has found that blending it up actually confused consumers at first - it was all too much noise and the reaction was mostly negative. This is likely normal, people don’t like change, and yahoo users might be even more traditional than over on that that greener google grass. But with a little time to get used to things the winds shifted to a more positive response – “makes it more like a magazine”, “it’s friendlier, the pictures and the colours”. Crauzy Canadiauns.

Yahoo has put some time into trying to find a useful balance between cluttered, distracting results, and a more traditional SERP that is comprehensible and quick to navigate. It looks to me like ‘enhanced content listings’ are going to be associated a bit with themes – some themes will be more likely to return a blended result.

Now he gets to the meat of the matter – the reason Yahoo is here today really, the unveiling of a new product – as confusing a product as it may be. It’s called search monkey.

Search monkey is a tool for both website developers and end users of the SE - this is Open Yahoo – The idea is that the user can turn on and off some ‘applications’ to shape their own style of SERPS. These applications are things you as a marketer would put together for/from your site. Now Andy is mentioning ‘structured semantic information’, and I’m not quite sure if he means semantic data from places like sparql endpoints? Ah, not quite, but not entirely unrelated - web site owners can build their own RDF, blended with some database info, throw it all together with the search monkey tool, submit it for review (oh you yahoo guys just love reviewing stuff don’t you?) and zippie, we’ve got a listing in the SERP that has a little picture beside it, a rating on it, etc.

Okay actually no we don’t – what we have is an application or tool that now becomes available to end users (I’m going to go ahead and re-label them, Yahoo’s most savvy end users evar) so that they can choose to either apply the application to their personal SERPS, or not. If users like it, users can ‘add your application’ – imagine something like the IMDB rating system being shown embedded in the SERP listing.

Seems to me that this will take a push from both publishers (to structure their data and submit it) and from the searchers to embrace the idea of molding their own results. Then there is the little leap in between where users have to find and add these applications. It’s reminiscent of IG, and google gadgets, but it’s a different spin because in the end it actually affects the natural SERPs (not your ranking, just what gets presented to you). On the searcher’s end this may take some large amount of convincing, because we’re pretty lazy. Just throw it at us like Google – we don’t mind. We’ll get used to it. We’re the real monkeys here - throw us a banana.

Yahoo dude subtly states that ‘some publishers’ (read, not you) and ‘some applications’ (read, not yours) may be applied to SERPS without the users inviting it. The other panelists completely misunderstand Yahoo’s whole application and misstate it as being ‘facebook’. Way wrong dudes. Sure the Yahoo guy wasn’t the best presenter and didn’t evangelize search monkey particularly well (to his credit, it seems like there is a lot he’s not allowed talk about, regardless of the fact that the product is launched) but I really feel like this should have been given a little more attention – it could represent a shift in the way people understand search, and influence their own search experience. It could be the true start of personalized search, by actually handing some power over to the user. Or not… depends how they market it. Maybe they should make a youtube video.

Some URLs we were given:

Developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey

Tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/searchmonkey/siteowners/

Third party – www.digital-web.com

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, that’s why there’s so many damn bananas around this conference!

Now GO! Search monkeys! SEARCH!

A mix of beige and maroon attack the visual cortex while pert plus and cheap perfume mingle into my nose to form olfactory memories I just might soon forget. If nothing more it’s a feast for the senses… kind of a 24 hour Chinese buffet feast, but feast none the less.

I’ve been to a lot of SES shows in the past couple of years, maybe even double digits, but this is the first time in ages that I haven’t been attached to a booth. Given some free reign to confer proper, off conferring I go. The keynote is exactly what you would expect I guess, even if you’ve never been to a conference of any sort, there are no surprises here. I think we all come to search conferences with some half-baked hope that we might learn something revelatory about the process, even though we know well enough there simply aren’t revelatory things to be learned – and if there are, it’s not here – here, it’s all slow cookin’ common sense - your grandmother’s soup has no magic ingredient, and watching it being made is actually kind of a letdown, there is no dramatic climax – the mystery meat is always juicier than the bone.

Here, at the inauguration of day 1, I’m set to wonder, will SES turn to black-hattery to spice up its cookery, as SMX was recently accused of? If simply to satiate the appetites of people who paid four figures to learn something, perhaps it should. As the old SEO adage goes, learning how criminals commit crime is pretty vital to law enforcement – understanding how black-hats succeed in the engines is, some would say, vital to understanding your own efforts.

So the conference is just getting started – our main man Guillaume is set to talk about something or other sometime today – I think he chose to get a couple of extra hours of mental preparatory snoozing this morning in lieu of the keynote – so time planning time - let’s check out the schedule!

I reach oh so gingerly into my provided SES bag – slightly snazzier than previous years, equipped with sleek side pockets for cell phones, built in pen holders and a brand-spanking-new copy of another book by Seth Godin I won’t read (hey, there’s plenty of Gödel to get through before Godin, priorities people) – and as I reach I realize, oh, my hand is stuck, literally, to the inside of my bag. Apparently the 3M conference next door had an excess of resin samples and they melted all over the SES storage boxes (what, do you have a better explanation for why my conference magazine is embedded into the fabric of my man-purse?). Damn 3M. Damn them and their fictitious conferences.

I am not alone in this sticky situation – looking around I see more than one couple joined at the hand, when all they really meant to do was introduce themselves to one another. Now they’re forced to seriously consider marriage, because those hands are stuck people.

Strike one SES, strike one. But remember, in Canadian rules baseball, you get four strikes until you’re out. We’re just friendlier up here.

Advanced trackage sees me seeing the universal / blended search panel first, skipping the search around the world chatter, and later today likely hitting the ‘beyond linkbait’ box. I’ll try to do an uninformative wrap up of each if my battery gives me some lovin’. Stay tuned to the naoise goes to a conference show. same naoise goes to a conference time, same naoise goes to a conference channel.

The Google Adwords search query report is designed to help you see the entire phrase your visitors searched for, when that search matches a ‘broad match’ or ‘phrase match’ - in other words, when what the user searched is not exactly what you were bidding on.

Awesome I exclaim with as much glee as PPC can make me muster - which is exactly not much… but really, this should be the talk of the town - this is the first made-for-the-public way to view all of these long-tail keywords. This represents the first simple end-user glimpse at the real truth of how people are reaching your site via those mystery-meat Broad and Phrase match terms.

I don’t fear telling you, I’m in love with the long-tail. It’s a torrid affair that dates back years, to the halcyon days of my youth when search engines were mere tools, not omnipresent overseers of the Internet. And in my heart of hearts, I truly believe that this romance would become infectious to the general web-site-running populace at large, if made just a little easier to understand, just a little easier to see.

This simplicity is what the promise of a no-frills Google report would seem to provide. Stuck doing the occasional PPC work on semi-virgin accounts (from an optimization standpoint), I would love any help in the gathering of insightful offerings for friends and clients.

But Google misses the mark by more than a little here. Remarkably they have chosen to exclude phrases with a low impression rate (what I affectionately refer to as… the long tail) in favour of saving money on processing power and server space, and perhaps bandwidth (I’m not going to source that, as it’s made up, (edit: oh hey maybe it’s not!) but I can’t think of any other reason - the data is obviously there).

Okay so perhaps my experience here is atypical. It is a rather niche site where, as you can see, the impressions over the course of a year are often in the hundreds if not less. For a larger advertiser there may be some more useful information to gather on the mid-tail - but I still expect the long of the long tail to cumulate into a good collective portion of conversions, and so a tool which would appear to be designed for peering AT THE LONG TAIL would be a little more useful if didn’t filter out low impression keywords. Just my take.

Okay rant over, here are some ways you can pull the same data while Google upgrades to 486’s:

> Look at your server logs. Better yet, tag your links in adwords (with Google Analytics tags, for example) and write a script that parses your server logs and couples the tagging with the referrer phrase - this offers a little more information at least. If you’re unfamiliar with server logs, you might first want to check with your hosting provider to see if they give you access to your ‘raw server logs’ - then have a read through this U. of Michigan primer on the topic.

> Hack Google Analytics: Our friendly neighbourhood ROI Revolution handed along this fancy-dancy little chunk of code a few months back. If you use Google Analytics, this is the easiest, cheapest and most useful solution (not to mention reveling in the irony of solving the problem with google’s own tools via some custom code is supremely satisfying).

Anybody got a third?

Let me tell you a little story.I was going to pick up a friend at the Airport in Montreal and he called me to say his flight was going to be delayed. “No problem I said, I’ll check your updated arrival in real time and come and get you when you land!”

So off I went to Google, to look for the official Montreal airport website which has real-time updates on flight departures and arrivals. I tried 10-15 different searches, here are some examples:

Montreal Airport
Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport Montreal
Montreal Airport Flight Arrivals
Etc.

The first 100 results for all my searches did not bring the official site www.admtl.com ! However, I was able to find hundreds of Hotels, Limousine services, Google Map results of businesses around the area, Youtube videos about the airport, airline ticket purchase services, and hey… who would have thought: Wikipedia’s entry about the Airport.

Now you can sit there and tell me that it is the airport’s fault for not having “Montreal Airport” on the title tag, and not optimizing, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is that Google’s job is to crawl, index and present relevant results. They have the responsibility of ordering all of the chaotic content that appears on the internet each day to help users sift through it in an organized manner. That is their service. If they fail to do this, they becomes useless, people will no longer waste their time using Google.

Yahoo! gave me the same horrible results. What to do!!??? Surprisingly Live.com showed the site in the 1st page. Not the 1st result as that is always reserved for Wikipedia, but at least it was listed on the first page.

Why did Live.com get an appropriate result if the word Airport does not appear as text anywhere on the page? I looked at the results snippet for Live.com:

Sounds a lot like a Dmoz entry huh? Well that’s because it is. When there is no Meta Description tag Live.com does what Google used to do: Grab a DMOZ description.

You can hate DMOZ all you want, but it sure helped Live.com rank the appropriate relevant site.  Strange how such an old school, primitive and manual method helped Live.com get an appropriate result even though the site contains no mention of “airport” whatsoever.

The reality is this: White hat/Government and Official sites are not always optimized. In fact many companies and organizations don’t even know SEO exists. However, BlackHat Spammers do, and this puts them in a considerable advantage against “white hat, relevant content” websites:

1. Black Hats know what to do to rank. They have tested so many sites, gotten so many sites de-indexed and penalized that they are able to tell just how far they can push Google.
2. Black Hats develop automated methods of creating thousands of websites in a short period of time. These websites are created by hundreds or thousands of different Blackhats, and will all have millions of varying footprints if any at all.

So how do you algorithmically remove these millions of results appearing everyday? How do you do it manually? Even combining the two as Google does, has limitations.

Imagine a librarian trying to organize millions of books by category, author, title, etc. And each day hundreds of trucks come in and dump more books on top of the few which were already organized. I don’t envy Google nor Yahoo! For what they have to accomplish to stay relevant as an industry, but no matter how many Phd’s you hire, massive volume always prevails.

Black Hat Spammers will not be stopped from producing new content anytime soon, and Google does not seem to have figured out a permanent way to remove these sites from their index. It seems that the Google index no longer belongs to Google.

The ‘progress’ Google is making in its algo’s don’t seem to be reflected in the actual SERPs – a shift in paradigms seems to be an inevitable necessity, but my question to you is, does it have to be a shift to a new paradigm, or would a shift to an old one be more effective?

Generally Applicable Statistical Awareness

A spike and then nothing – nothing, and then a spike. After enough time in the game, webmasters start to realize that sales aren’t the only things that follow trends and long term averages. In the same way that video game scores illuminate the psychology of reward, traffic and conversion stats tend to humble and wisen a person, over a long enough timeline. For a webmaster who’s been in it long enough, emotional peaks and valleys no longer run parallel with sales. It’s a strange and maturing feeling, to take the luck out of luck.

Dealing Better With Perfectionism

Being a webmaster, you have to make decisions. Lots of them. Being a perfectionist doesn’t help decision-making. With all the delays that inevitably set in, the last details can drag on forever. After enough times seeing a lot of later effort bring little to no extra returns, a perfectionist webmaster learns, quicker than ever before, to drop their standards. Webmasters know that the best looking site doesn’t necessarily convert the best. The shock of what can sell, once you step out of the polish of traditional advertising channels, takes some time to shake off. More neutrally, web work opens you up to being more readily accepting of tastes nowhere near your own. By seeing the behaviour of so many out of your real world social circles, you take a lot more with a grain of salt, and learn when expectation is foolhardy.

Webmasters also learn that for any decision, there are enough factors webbed in consequence that no decision is perfect. Better put, just about every decision is rough and wrong in some way or another. Waiting for the absolute perfect time to strike means for no strike. No strike, no money.

Webmasters Know There’s Always a Reason

The web has rules. Even when they’re broken, the rule breaking takes place within another, bigger set of rules. This online world is not unbounded. It is a massive, fleshy Frankenstein machine of a billion ideas and pathways, but complex as it may be, there’s always a process. Webmasters know this, and with eyes that reflect this knowledge, they crave explanation – the good ones come to expect it, on and offline.

Webmasters Know the Value of a Minute

There’s always something to do. Always! Part of adjusting to the near-endless options the web provides, big and small, launches and tweaks, is accepting that you don’t have time for all of them. When you know there are so many ways to try to sell or promote so many things, you have to accept only doing a small part of them, tucking the majority of your legitimate what-ifs out of your mind. Webmasters develop a sense for their time being used badly. Even if they go along with it, they’re well aware of it. Small businesses all work on a reward-for-the-time-you-put-in basis, but the nature of web work exaggerates the psychological effect. Knowing you can slip online in your pyjamas and do a valuable 5-minute’s work can mean for long days, late nights, and plenty of time management guilt to go around.

Improved Tolerance of Other Cultures

Having actually had contact with people from around the world on a regular basis, webmasters get desensitized to the novelty of it all. Everyone knows the web is international, but everyone loves seeing the range of places visitors can come from for the first time. Yes, some dude in Ecuador was on your site for 12 minutes, and loaded every page. Very nice. Move on. But there was something special to that first reaction. It was honest, and it was accurate. Being able to communicate around the world as webmasters do is unprecedented in human history, and no one takes that for granted better than them.

That being said, webmasters are known to travel, acting on their contacts. Genuine international relationships have never been easier, and in profiting from them, webmasters bridge gaps and inform each another about their respective cultures. Few careers can be so multinational on a daily basis.

A Penny Shared is a Penny Earned

Nothing builds a friendship better than two people helping each other earn money. The web offers economic win-win situations more than any business platform or industry (for purely online industries with no real world product). Never mind the robust affiliate/referral structures in place, webmasters profit from shared information, too. Yes, much is kept secret, but no other platform has a structure that rewards information sharing like the web. Whether it’s through helpful bloggers that get rewarded with traffic and exposure (for both their generosity and their skill), or through an off-the-record secret trick exchange between online business friends, it’s easier to win with someone else against everyone, than alone. If you want to do well, you’re better off knowing how to help. Surfers can visit two sites almost just as easily as they can visit one, after all. The web teaches us how to share, and that it’s okay to. Webmasters know what it’s like to be cutthroat competitive, but the nature of the beast helps webmasters meet others as potential friends before likely enemies, even if they sell the same things – a luxury not often enjoyed in the business world.

Google Universal Search is a not so new feature of Google’s that allows images, videos, news and maps results from different Google services to be integrated into the normal Google organic results. When doing SEO for a client website or on your own website, you should always take a look at which websites are ranking for your top keywords. You can find opportunities on those search results that you would have never have thought of otherwise. First, let’s take a closer look at the Google Universal Search.

As you can see in this screenshot, when someone looks for “I Have A Dream Martin Luther King”, he sees a link to the video in the results.

So now, all that seems different is that if you want a top 10 organic ranking for this keyword, you have one spot less available because of the Google Universal Search, right? More competition, doesn’t sound very good, does it? But you can use that Universal Search to your advantage. Here are some tricks to get top traffic spots easily with the help of a little SEO.

First, it seems that every map request (let’s say “USA maps”) will trigger images as the first three results in the SERPs. That make sense from an user perspective: if you are looking for a map, you probably need a picture of one. If you check out how difficult it is to rank organically for those keywords, you’ll see that it’s almost impossible to rank in the top 10, having to beat maps.google.com, nationalatlas.gov and others like maps.com and mapquest.com. But, if you look at the images results, you will see that the first image is http://www.waterfrontdiningdirectory.com/, a small website where the SEO job on it is nothing impressive and not even targeting the word “maps” at all. So how they are ranking for this keyword? Simply, the image that is ranking is named usa_map.gif and the alt tag of the image is “USA Map”. Yep, a good old alt tag is ranking this website in front of Google and MapQuest, for a keyword with decent traffic. Sure, this keyword isn’t gonna send qualified traffic to that particular website, but what if you are able to put your website at a top spot for a good traffic keyword in your niche? The number 2 on “USA Maps” is doing just that. Weirdly, it’s an online maps seller, who has a better SEO optimized page than the first result, even if the image optimization is far than being perfect. Good ranking for him, no?

This kind of trick can be done with every of the Google Universal Search category, even news if you are able to get your website accepted as a reliable source of news for Google News.