Search Engine Strategies Chicago gets underway next week at the Hilton Chicago.

During the past 11 weeks, I’ve shared 11 important reasons for going to this must-attend event. For those of you who want to join in the chorus, they are:

Last week, we looked at how to develop a successful measuring strategy on a strategic level. Now let’s drill down a bit further with more methods for setting up success metrics.

Setting Up SMART Goals

We’ve all learned the importance of setting goals. It’s critical to set up the right success metrics for your digital marketing campaign. Armed with your organization’s strategic vision and overall business objectives, you can start setting up individual goals for each channel you use.

A great approach is using a SMART goal. SMART goals take more time and energy to set up, but it helps to ensure a quality goal. SMART stands for:

Last week I came across amazing words describing how you should treat your website usability:

A website is not like a house – people do not only come in through the front door. They come in willy-nilly, through the roof, the sewer system, the windows and the walls. This IS the nature of the web and you succeed more easily if you create a site that flows with that reality. (Source)

So the first thing to do when analyzing how usable a site is should be to make sure people are able to easily find their way around no matter which page they first landed on. When it comes to huge websites, breadcrumbs can be a great way to help users identify where they are located.

Now that Black Friday is over and everyone is in the U.S. are probably busy finding the best Cyber Monday deals online, it’s interesting to note which online retailers made it to the top of the charts during Black Friday’s shopping craze. And according to Experian Hitwise data it was none other than Amazon – their second in a row.

As  this year’s Black Friday traffic to retail websites went up by 9% compared to 2008, Amazon received 13.55% of U.S. visits among the top 500 Retail Websites monitored by Hitwise.  Walmart followed with 11.8% of all visits, followed by Target.com getting 5.65%, Best Buy with 4.64% and Sears with 2.95%

Although a little earlier than usually done by other search engines, Bing has released its top trending topics for 2009.  ”Michael Jackson” was the number most search keywords although the most search personality was “Perez Hilton.”The list was created based on the analysis of billions of searches against those that were searched using Bing.   Aside from MJ, here are the other keywords that made it to the Top Trending Topics in Bing in 2009:

1) Michael Jackson

2) Twitter

3) Swine Flu

4) Stock Market

5) Farrah Fawcett

6) Patrick Swayze

7) Cash for Clunkers

There are literally a bazillion SEO tools on the internet (literally!), this post discusses just one such tool; Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Many people in the SEO industry are already aware of this tool but many people I’ve spoken to only treat the tool as a broken link finder. It’s so much more than that.

This post is aimed at those who haven’t heard of it before and those who do use it regularly – there are lots of nifty features that solve all kinds of SEO-problems and hopefully beginners and advanced alike will learn something from this post.

SEOmoz PRO is launching our first ever webinar on Thursday Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London/UK).

Black Friday may be behind us, but Cyber Monday, one of the busiest days of the year for online retailers, has just begun. And just as users’ searches for Cyber Monday deals and information have increased over time, so have their expectations about the types of information they want from the ads.

Last week, the Official Google Blog provided an overview of some of the new search ad formats we’ve introduced over the last few months. These new formats are part of our AdWords New Ad Formats Initiative and showcase the ways we’ve worked to include richer types of information in our ads. This initiative is Google’s next chapter in search advertising and over the next year it’ll be a major focus for AdWords, so we’d like to give you an idea of what to expect.

Alex asks:

“What is the most common running gag over there at Google?”

Google has written two spam related posts over the Thanksgiving period on the Google Webmaster Central Blog tackling the issue of comment spam.

The first post focuses on the futility of comment spam, saying:

At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one’s site in the long run.

Is search marketing is your livelihood? Your passion? Your future? Then come to Search Marketing Expo – SMX West for compelling content and industry connections that are certain to make you a more effective, inspired and employable internet markter. Join us for SMX West in Santa Clara, CA, March 2-4.

Register for SMX West now and you’ll get at the lowest rate possible. Keep reading for more info, or register right now!

Here are 7 reasons to attend SMX West:

As expected the Google Caffeine index is now live on one Google data center. Note, it will not be added to more Google data centers until after the holidays.

As I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable, Matt Cutts of Google confirmed that the IP 209.85.225.103 is hitting the data center that is running the Caffeine index about 50% of the time. Matt Cutts explained that the update webmasters were noticing were either this data center or individual sites being penalized in some way.

Advantages of Organic SEO

1. Organic SEO techniques draw more traffic than advertising.
2. Organic SEO techniques reward relevant content, not advertising gimmicks.
3. Because customers are wary of advertised products, they rely more on search engine results to guide them to a relevant website. Therefore, if your website shows up among top search engine results, you win their trust.

Techniques That Work

A good SEO expert can be very useful if you are serious about how your website is ranked on Google, Yahoo, or MSN searches. However, you must always hire an ethical SEO. SEO is not magic and there are no one-size-fits-all formulas here. Each website has different SEO requirements depending on the target audience, nature of website, and budget allocation.

Last week I stepped you through the creation of your first mobile content advertising campaign. This week I’ll describe best practices for designing mobile banner ads that’ll help you maximize response and conversion rates.

I’ve already devoted two columns to best practices in non-text ad design (“Contextual Advertising Best Practices: Banners and Video Ads,” and “Every Picture Tells a Story: Non-text Contextual Ads“). A mobile banner ad needs to work really hard despite its diminutive size. Like its beefier counterpart on a standard HTML site, the mobile ad needs to quickly evoke the following: