First of all, no, I have not met Rand yet, but he is just as adorable in person as he is in all those Whiteboard Friday videos, and watching him run around this giant conference room with a microphone when Todd Friesen had to relinquish his emcee duties temporarily was rather entertaining.

I’ve managed to get two questions in, one in which Todd ran over to me with the mike and the other submitted via Twitter and then read to the presenter by Rand himself. I feel so special! However, I think I’m just one of those people who always needs to ask questions or contribute comments in class. Yeah, I’m that girl. The one who always raises her hand.

Anyway. It’s been a fun first day at summer camp the #mozinar. Here are some of the highlights!

Have your referrals dropped? Google’s new Image Search interface may be to blame.

Since Google changed the way it presents image search results, there is a lot less concentration on the first few results. Further, clicking on one goes to an overlay. The overlay can be disabled with some javascript, but get this – just because it’s the first result in the image SERPs doesn’t mean it’s going to be first in the blended results.

Video sitemaps are essential to getting your videos indexed.

On page signals are great, and they’re definitely important, but often the difference between ranking and not ranking is the XML video sitemap.

20% of Google searches have local intent.

That’s 1/5 of all searches, every single day. Google gets more than 1 billion searches daily, so that’s 200 million local searches daily. Now also consider that Google has also stated that 20-25% of searches have never been searched before.  Now if never before searched queries account for the same proportion of local searches as searches that have been conducted many times, then we can approximate that about 40 million searches daily have never been seen before AND have local intent. That’s HUGE! It also won’t stand up to any kind of statistical analysis as far as accuracy goes, but it’s certainly enough to blow the mind, eh?

Having a strong MyMaps profile is key for local search.

We’ve recently been working on this ourselves, so to hear David Mihm validate our thoughts about it so perfectly created a nice little moment of SEO zen for me. (Also, if anyone sees the video and hears someone having a massive sneeze attack in the middle of David’s presentation, yeah, that was me. Sorry…)

Instantly catch big changes in your data with Google Intelligence.

This is a feature in Google Analytics which, at its most basic, allows you to set up alerts that will let you know when your visitors suddenly drop, your bounce rate suddenly skyrockets, or whatever metric you sic it on. Joanna Lord talked about gleaning deeper insights, but the immediately actionable thing was the alert functionality. When you’re responsible for a million and a half websites and can’t check in on every site every day, this can be a lifesaver.

Google relies more heavily on sitemaps than it likes to admit.

Thanks to Marshall Simmonds for this insight, gleaned from his extensive experience working on massive high authority websites like The New York Times. Google may say they crawl organically – and they do – but in reality they lean on XML sitemaps quite a lot. We’ve conducted our own tests on much smaller websites which supports this – our own clients saw an average 2% improvement in first page rankings when freshly generated sitemap files were resubmitted after every content addition.

Your landing page’s job is to get people to move beyond the landing page.

So true! I’ve seen Tim Ash’s 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design presentation before, but it makes the conference and seminar rounds for a very good reason: it’s kinda awesome and is stuffed with usefulness. Did you know that it takes a visitor less than 1/20 of a single second to form an opinion of your website? Whether or not they’re comfortable doing business with you? Yeah, really! Basically, if your site is cheesy, outdated, etc., get thee to a competent web designer, and quick! Beyond a quick “welcome to our website”, what is it that you want your visitors to do on this page? If it’s not the first thing that a visitor’s eye goes to, you are already losing conversions.

There was definitely much, much more, but these are the things that are leaping out of my notes at me as I’m writing up this post. Enjoy!

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