Starting any minute, internet is pretty bad here… Hope it stays live.

Real Time SEO: No More Yesterday’s News
This session will focus on specific aspects of SEO for large media companies. The panelists will discuss the tools that media companies use to help them rank well for breaking news keywords as well as to capitalize on social media opportunities that exist within news content to help media companies to do well on sites such as: Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. You’ll learn about the future of video SEO and how structured data will play an important role in the future of video SEO for media companies. Lastly, the session will show you how to be successful in executing on large projects related to SEO within a media company.

Moderator:
Tim Ruder, Chief Revenue Officer, PerfectMarket
Speakers:
Brent Payne, SEO Director, Tribune
Topher Kohan, SEO Manager, CNN
Rochelle Sanchirico, Senior Director of Acquisition Marketing, Washington Post Digital
Muhammed Saleem, Director of Social Media Strategy , ChicagoNow

Tiger Woods was more popular than ‘sex’ or ‘porn’ he said, using Google Trends.

Tribune takes time to try to focus on those opportunities and leverage it.

Triune received over 1.5 million visits in a single day for Tiger Woods queries. They saw traffic from Google, Goolge News, and Bing was in there also.

They use Google Hot Trends on a daily basis. It is an indication of hourly trends. And they use this daily to figure out trending stories.

He showed how he made a mistake about not writing about Penile Fracture. So he lost some traffic because he thought Tribune would not write about it. They then decided to write about it, but it was a bit too late.

Internet slow, sorry for lag…

If you look at the results for Tiger Woods a couple days ago, you would have seen in Google. News results, then after that, you saw kinda static web results, with boring info.

Towards the bottom of the first page you had some organic news results, which was related.

At the Tribune they would redirect old stories on Tiger to the lead story for a temporary amount of time.

Stories that have a longer shelf life don’t stay long. Google News does recrawl stories, but there are tons of stories Google News needs to get to. It is kind of funny, because old stories with updates to those pages, don’t rank well. The funny part (this is my comment) is that Google prefer to have a single updated real time story, as opposed to repetitive updated URLs.

Recommendations for News:
- Follow Google Trends
- Change your URLS during breaking news
- Change headline, subheadline, story text
- If you need to cite other sources, do so sparingly
- Have other site sin Google News link to you
- Continually redirect old versions of a story to the new version
- Only do so after new story is included in Google News
- Find old stories related

He then shows Google’s new real time search feature launched yesterday. See http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021311.html

That is all.

CNN guy now up, Topher Kohan.

Google is adding support to Yahoo SearchMonkey and RFDa and Facebook share

Yahoo SearchMonkey:
- A way to customize the way your results show up in Yahoo Search.
- Google wants you to do it a little different

He did this and they saw a 35% increase in indexed videos in Google Video. 22% increase in videos showing up for targeted keywords.

The code size was incredibly big, so they had to cut it down and they keep cutting.

Facebook Share:
- Allows users to share video on Facebook
- Allows better tracking of video content on Facebook

They added this to test sites and added to subset of videos on CNN.com. They saw 12% increase in index in universal Google results. 47% increase in vie being shares and viewed on Facebook (this is an estimate). Traffic from Facebook increased by 32%.

Microformats:

Google and Yahoo worked on an open source set of standard microformats markup to use the videos and interactive content. It will change the way we do SEO in the next 12 months, he said.

Just watch out for code bloat, he said.

This does not help the search engines find your content, you still need good site architecture and sitemaps. It tells them more about what the content is, what it is about, what category it goes to, etc.

Rochelle Sanchirico, Senior Director of Acquisition Marketing, Washington Post Digital is now up.

She does all the online marketing for Washington Post

Working the “SEO Program” within the organization. She found most people don’t understand SEO and are intimidated by it. Then there are those who have a little bit of knowledge and think they are experts. Then there are strong partners, advocates and evangelists – who are hard to find.

Who are ideal partners?
- Access, people who have regular and unrestricted access to site content and code. Such as senior developers, content owners and senior web editors.
- Accountability – people who have something to gain or lose, such as traffic owners or brand managers.
- Enforcers – those who can get things done such as CTO/CIO and General Manager and Publishers
- Reinforcements – people who are just plain interested, such as site analytics and tech geeks.

Aligning the Goals: It’s important to have shared goals. Identify those metrics and report on them. Create weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual goals.

Creating Accountability: Visuals can work wonders and think about a “burn down chart” or other device that already resonates with your co-workers.

Get these goals tied into their salary, bonus and promotions.

Find Evangelists: People who can spread the “SEO gospel.” You don’t need the stakeholders, but they need regular content with people on core team. Should be provided with key talking points. Don’t underestimate the power of branding. Should have access to most training materials. Should have regular updates on progress to goals and how they can help to move those forward. Ideal to have at least one evangelists per department.

Rally the Masses also. Motivate 5 or 10 people is different then educating and exciting a newsroom of hundreds. You can train and motivate in several ways:

- Large sessions
- Small sessions
- Sit down with people as they work

Every employee has multiple responsibilities, so stay on top of them. Update them daily.

That is all for Rochelle!

Next up Muhammed Saleem, Director of Social Media Strategy, ChicagoNow.

Use social media for massive exposure and linkbuilding…

There are short and long term strategies…

Mainstream media presence on social media news sites are very well represented, such as telegraph.co.uk, bbc, yahoo news, nytimes, and so on. But while these news sites have a presence on these social news sites, they are not really utilizing them well – cause they are not targeted well.

Top 50 sites on Dig control 40% of the content. 50% of that content comes from 25 mainstream sites.

Now he is going to break down how to do this…

1st look at the category distribution of the popular stories. What is top content categories on Digg frontpage. “Offbeat” is number one, then world news, then technlogy, entertainment, science and so on.

Then look at the competition within each category and the “promotional thershold” in each category. In most cases, the highest volume categories are most competitive. But science has a lower threshold compared to volume.

Average link acquisitoon by category. So technology and world and business are leading in that category. You want the links, so go for those two categories.

Lifestyle category for link acquisiton does poor in link building, but within lifestyle, travel does well, so maybe break down to the sub categories, because some might stand out.

Also look at link acquisitions by day of the week: Monday’s do well, but Thursday does better than Tuesday and Wednesday. In terms of link builds.

So how do you create content that will get promoted and get you links?

Average link acquisiton by keyword in title and description. Words that work include:

• Pics
• iPhone
• Top 10
• Etc

Compare that to the same keyword listed on the landing page. Don’t be deceptive with your titles.

Viral News Titles:

• Lists do well
• Adjectives (Superlatives, sensationalism)
• Figures, Numbers (stats, facts)
• Rich Media (pics, infographics, videos, interactive)

It is about the community on the site… Look at who are the most popular members on the site in the past 30 days. Total posts, total diggs, total comments. Look at what sites, content, categories these members like. Then check out their profile.

It shows success rate and then you can also see their other profiles and how to contact them. Then contact them and ask them to submit your content.

Top 10 are responsible for 10% of all promotions
Top 25% responsible for 21%

That is all for him, Q&A Time.

Next up at http://www.SERoundtable.com at 2:30pm (central time):

• Igniting Viral Campaigns covered by Barry Schwartz