Speakers:

Eric Papczun – Performics
John Mueller – Google
Richard Falconer – Bigmouthmedia
Preston Carey – Yandex

Some Golden nuggets from Andy

1. Google is dominant BUT there are other engines to watch. Baidu and Yandex stand out, Seznam, Naver, Bing and Ayna are all up and coming.
2. What is Geo-Targeting? Making sure you see Pages from Germany – Pages in German.
3. How does Google filter the web? a) by google domain, b) by language
4. Google.co.uk vs Google.de search for “Lufhansa” shows very different results. “Billigflug” Austria vs Germany shows different results.
5. Keyword language tag “Casseroles” in English shows a dish, in French shoes a pot. So keywords have a language tag associated.
6. From targeting choose whether you want to target a country or a language first
7. World languages create duplication. Poland and polish are fine but Spanish….

Richard Falconer – Bigmouthmedia

Maximising localisation resources and where it goes wrong. Available budget and available time are always less than the required budget and time!

• Accept that the localised content won’t be perfect.
• Include innovative localisation techniques
• Find technology solutions (new companies that can do this cheaper and faster). Can get a lot more done for less these days
• Ship even if not 100% it will never be. Don’t let the project get delayed

80% of effects come from 20% of causes

• Content – cut down on content intelligently. What part is most important and prioritise in each country. Avoid jargon and slang will save a lot of time and effort.
• Language – can be quite tricky as some countries have multiple languages. Try serve the 80%, you may be surprised. Sometimes the official language may not be the predominant language. E.g. Middle East – 63% English and 12% Arabic browser settings. It is worth investigating which demographic you are targeting and which language they are using.
• Crowdsourcing – Facebook is translated into 69 languages. Took sections of content and let users translate –then they let people vote on the best translation. There are paid crowdsourcing services that could be of use. Duolingo is a new company that is trying to do this.

Consider a variety of techniques to maximise your resources.

Technology – User Generated content , Reviews, comments, Q&A can contribute to localised content.

Use Googles Alternate Language Link Element <link rel=”alternate” Hreflang=”a-different-language” href=http://url-of-a-different-language />

Images – if you use numbers with an index then you can caption the image multiple times with ease.

Eric Papczun – Performics

Although US growth is large at 12-18%, the Asian market and EMEA markets are growing faster. This is a very diverse landscape with religious variances and legal issues being complex.

• Understand Regional /local behaviour
• Match strategies to each region
• Tailor communications locally

Often with large brands it is mostly about getting them organised. Consider the marketplace positioning, Test and learn to develop competency and work towards a structure that can be rolled out.

Transcreate the experience – Translation vs transcreation. The aim is to get the same REACTION in each language, something that translation in itself won’t do. Nuances like Cell Phone (USA), Mobiles (US) or Handy (Germany)

Preston Carey – Yandex

Organise for success in emerging markets. There are various configurations in use: Either a global command centre, a regional hub or a local partner

What we are seeing is that from a global command center we have optimised for conversion (the number crunchers have worked out all the efficiencies and place budget accordingly). Local partners do the least on conversion, often it is “early days” for them. There are always tradeoffs. Global will be most efficient but have the least localisation success. Local partners will be least coherent and have least coordination and consolidation but will have the best localisation.

Trends: The engines have recognised that they have potential clients outside the country. They are providing dedicated teams for non local market clients.

At the end of the day it is about people.

John Mueller – Google

I see a lot of multilingual issues as I am from Switzerland.

Our goal – show users content in the language they are looking for. Your job to help google understand what you have

The primary language on page is recognised on page automatically. We don’t use html attributes for languages. We crawl WITHOUT an “ACCEPT-LANGUAGE”  http request header. Don’t let automatically translated content get indexed.

Multiregional:

Our goal – Show users geographically relevant results

Your job – Google needs to be able to see which parts of your site are for which regions.

Clear signs :

• Country specific TLD’s
• Webmaster tools
• On page factors such as phone numbers

We recommend separate URLs’ per location (Don’t change the content on the same URL!)

Let users view all content – do not force redirect users based on geo. It is not perfect.

Handling Geotargeting problems: Give users a choice – Amazon does it very nicely, Help users to get to the right site – don’t cloak.

If you need both Multiregional and multilingual sites consider that it creates a huge structure and you may end up with more problems than solutions. You might want to rel canonical if you have French content on a UK site, pointing back to the French site.

Related posts:

1. SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence
2. SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search
3. London SMX Coverage: Essential Paid Search Tools

SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search

Speakers:
Bas van den Beld – State of Search
Marcus Taylor – SEOptimise
Jim Yu – BrightEdge
Cedric Chambaz – Microsoft

Bas van den Beld – State of Search

SE’s are trying to figure out user intent and they are trying to give you the best and most relevant info. This can be difficult as a computer at home can be used by multiple people. So they are trying to work on user experience for example showing calories on recipes

Google has chosen two directions to join search and social:

Firstly through Page Rank (Which is essentially a social signal). Google is good at making connections. So they figure they can work out connections between people as well. As Eric Schmidt said :-  “We know where you are, we know what you like”

Secondly, if people in your social circle rate things then it shows up in the results. You get more tailored and hopefully smarter recommendations. Google +1 and Google hotpot are mechanisms to acquire these social signals and build up your social profile.

The biggest change going on right now is to do with Google accounts and profiles. Interestingly enough the address details are being shown in the SERPs but only to people connected 1 level away from you. If you go to the “Social Connections” tab in your profile you will see the connections. Your Google social circle could be a lot larger than you expect.

Mobile is huge. A computer can be shared. A mobile is very personal. Google can build up a much more detailed profile. For example I searched a route on my desktop, went to my car got out my android and on opening the maps it knew my last search and offered a route.

Main Tip: As a marketer – think ahead. Connect the dots, Work on your social circle

Marcus Taylor – SEOptimise

How important are Facebook likes? I have been running a lot of experiments to test impact on indexation and ranking. There is not very much data, but the correlation between pages that rank well and pages that have been shared or liked is HIGH! We don’t know if there is any causation though.

Google was quoted saying “We treat links on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook” via a Search Engine Land interview. It is a bit ambiguous. I wanted to know for ssure so I started experimenting.

I took 2 un-indexed domains with no backlinks with no ability to ping google. I started progressively added likes to them. Within 2-3 hours the domains got indexed!

Does this work for multiple URL’s? I added varying numbers of likes to un-indexed urls and this time looked at the server logs. What I found was zero visits from Googlebot. This was a surprising result on the back of the previous test.

So in conclusion, we cannot indicate casualty and cannot suggest that Likes are a direct ranking factor, however Facebook can refer a large amount of quality traffic it also drives links and other behavioural ranking factors. So perhaps the traffic is more a factor and the actual like itself. For example tweeting a blog post perhaps is not the factor but the behavioural impact of the resultant traffic can be causual in being a ranking factor. Traffic in its own right sends ranking factors!

Jim Yu – BrightEdge

You need to do the analysis by industry – Across several verticals we found correlation between high ranking pages and the fact they had more than 1 tweet or like/share.

For retail and finance, social is critical. There is significant adoption of social . Understand your competitors as there are a lot of individuals that have a lot of tweets and shares and they are doing well compared to the actual brands themselves

Social SEO Techniques

The basics – for example look at deep product page from Overstock.com. Get connected – links back to the main FB and Twitter accounts. There is also a share button on the page and then there is also a like button.

You can target head terms with social media friendly pages to help freshness /recency e.g. virus updates are very time dependent and as such social signals may count more heavily.

Useful products get shared and are less time critical. Time critical products get tweets.

Create parallel structures of social objects and interlink them. Look at Amazon. Not only do they have an Amazon page on FB, they also have pages for Fashion, for video, and other verticals from their site. So sitemap categories and map to FB pages and these then cross link.

Recommendations – Tips and takeaways

1. There is a high correlation – don’t get left behind
2. The basics – Link social pages and make it easy to share etc
3. Go beyond the basics – deep links
4. Create viral content on other channels and drive it into the website
5. Create social objects as parallels and interlink to your directory pages

Cedric Chambaz – Microsoft

Bing – Making it personal.

Search exists to deliver relevant results. We want to fulfil an intent. Using topical qualifiers to rate a page has always been the case, however things have evolved over the years. Today the SE’s are the gateway to all the new content.

We need to get away from the one size fits all. How do we get more personal? Your mobile is very personal and secondly your address book adds more data.

We need to draw a distinction between Searching Social networks and Social Search.

At Bing we differentiated bing.com/social. This is so the results don’t clutter the main index. It is a live search of social feeds that updates in real time.

What if the result served were unique to me? Searching from Facebook is powered by Bing and monetised by adcentre. What if your searches showed friends likes? If it was prioritised on collective wisdom and prioritised by my social circle wisdom (Direct network) This may lead me to make an informed decision based on my social graph. This can include reviews by my network for shopping/ restaurants.

At Bing we are pushing the envelope. Combining advertising and social. There are Rich ads in Search. we have integration of video likes. The advertising experience is embedded in the SERP and concludes with share, like, etc. features to make it more social.

Q&A

Related posts:

1. Bing Social Search gets Personal
2. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search
3. SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence

SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search

Moderator:
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Speakers:
Christine Churchill – Key Relevance
Richard Baxter – SEOGadget
Lasse Clarke Slogaard – MediaCom Denmark
Kevn Gibbons – SEOptimse

Richard Baxter – SEOGadget

This presentation is not so much about collecting data, rather on how to group it and make it actionable. By grouping phrases you can spot priorities in search behaviour that allow you to confidently construct site architecture.

By using Excel we can run some awesome queries. We use the functions FIND (), ISERROR() and NOT() to separate out the data from the list to get an idea of the order and types of queries being generated and to get a sense of the overall volumes involved for each.. We are going to use an array formula. {=NOT(ISEROR(FIND([KEYWORD-TYPES], $A2)))} and for (KEYWORD TYPES) use a table of attributes (such as Colours and of types) in different columns. {full description available from the presentation download}. Once you have this methodology, you can do a lot more with the data. Big data managed properly means you can make good decisions. Deep dive the volumes.

SMX London KW Tools bundle http://bit.ly/jai89j

Christine Churchill – Key Relevance

There are a lot of tools out there. You need a bird’s eye view so using a variety of tools is essential.

• If you are using Google keyword tool, it is important to use the [Exact match] option. More recently you can compare desktop to mobile search terms and there can be a dramatic difference between the two – for example on the phrase “pizza”.
• Google trends is great, for example compare Facebook to Myspace.
• Google insights shows seasonality in keyword data and shows geographic demand.
• Keyword discovery has multiple data sources and a great source.
• Google instant gives really valuable insight as it changes user behaviour. Definitely take a look. Note that under different tabs (Shopping) will give different suggestions
• Solve.com shows many different sources to compare
• Ubersuggest – This will mine the Google suggest and makes it easy to see what is being suggested
• There is also a Youtube keyword tool
• Google’s wonder wheel is a visual representation.. It is now called “Contextual Targeting tool”
• Adcenter has a lot of great tools.
• SEOMOZ keyword difficulty will give a yardstick on how competitive a phrase may be.

Remember the volumes are only an estimate and you need to look at the seasonality as well as many other factors.

Lasse Clarke Slogaard – MediaCom Denmark

Take a step back – we need to translate this into a strategy. No one cares these days if you are first or fastest. Slow down and get back to basics. I have a comparison to atriaditional shopping isle where products are on the shelf. The eye level products feature better than the ones on the bottom shelf. How do we get the attention of the consumer if our product is on the bottom shelf? If they know your brand the chances are going up of them finding you. They are still looking on the top shelf and doing their own research and decisions. You need to massage the consumer till they buy from you.

Different considerations depending on your objectives

So we use a scalable strategy we call PPPi (Pay-Per-Purchase Intent). You need to look at the marketplace and determine where you are in the field. There are different layers like on an onion and your strategy will vary according to your objectives. {See picture}

This is how I do my keyword research and how I present it to my clients.

Kevn Gibbons – SEOptimse

How do we apply keyword research to some of our clients in targeting long tail?

1. How do you optimise for longtail when it is not coming up in keyword research? (Google themselves say 25% of all queries are never seen before). Longtail has better conversion and is by far the higher volume.
2. It doesn’t have to be difficult. Consider “How”, “When”, “Who” and “Why” are queries that people use. If you can answer those questions you will attract a lot of traffic.
3. Use segments to analyse long tail
4. Use PPC and impression share data to see the full potential. Use broad and phrase matches to get sample data to see what is available
5. Use multiple tools to verify results. Wordtracker have release “Strategizer” which plugs into analytics. If you can afford Hitwise there is far more detail.
6. Estimate average click through rates. You can get average click through rate for your own website by using webmaster tools
7. Use excel to predict traffic values. Based on ranking position and the estimated value
8. Filter keywords into themed groups
9. Don’t overthink it and go too long tail. Think common trends and wide variations.

Tip – You need more than automated content now (After Panda)

Q&A

How do we normalise for seasonality especially when running PPC tests? Run tests for longer or perhaps use hitwise data.

Adwords API averages over the year and also goes down to a more granular level. This data can be more reliable.

How important is it to be first? It has been done before to put up a “Holding page” that then gets updated at the time of the actual release. Also make sure that it synchronises across all mediums like twitter and Facebook. Securing the number 1,2 position first can mean you will be able to hold onto it.

Can you use internal search queries as UGC? Kevin – Yes it used to work really well till Panda came along – These days it is more important to rather manually review these results and make decisions from that.

How do you pull data from the suggest tool? You can use adwords api tool to pull search volumes – hire a freelance developer for $100. Or use a front end tool like Google suggest.

Related posts:

1. Keyword research – remember “stop words”
2. SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence
3. London SMX Coverage: Essential Paid Search Tools

London SMX coverage: Keyword Research Ninja Tactics

David Scottimano and John Straw

John Straw – Linkdex

David Sottimano – Distilled

We are all faced by the  typical CEO’s question:– why are we not number 1?

As experts we can give a technical answer. But we actually need a clear answer, not just stats. They need something to work off, an actionable process. Don’t waste time. In competitive analysis just find they key things that matter.

1. Identify your competitors (Online in the SERPS not offline) then educate the client. We have a template to do this work that shows us who is in this space (http://dis.tl/smx-london ). Reviewing every few weeks shows the up and coming and also people in this space who are not selling your products who are this possible link targets.
2. Get data for high level decisions. Get your keyword list, get the rank and ranking URL and work out what section of the web is beating us.
3. Make sense of it all – give it value. Which content drives their rankings / which is most valuable?  Try a desktop tool like Screamingfrog to analyse the website, also look at SEObook.
   
   (in my example the competitor was winning on Q&A. In fact they were answering their own questions via administrator rather than UGC)

Thus you can answer the clients question – this is how they are dominating us – and this is what we need to do to fix it.

So,

Find your competitors
Answer the question
Deep dive for data, find the exact framework of what’s beating you.
Use the data to build your own better feature

John Straw – Linkdex

We all talk about competitive analysis but we don’t take action. Get intimate with your competitors. I want to look at their site meta and structure. We need to look at the Source Data – Use something like Open Site Explorer or MajesticSEO. The issue is this is all this Data is just link data. We can’t see what is on the page. We need to understand what the sites are about.

Finding the right parts. We need to curate the data into something meaningful. At Linkdex Our work is made available to the public – see State of Search post “Linkdex and Yoast team up for wordpress update”

We have a mathematical formula for defining influence and our formula is giving us a 70% correlation with pagerank. We then classify the signals, from on page text, and features found on the page like RSS, comments (Would define a blog) or whether it is a wiki, etc. This allows us to define the structure of the competitor sites and gives us insight into their SEO strategy.

Q&A

Is it a fair assessment to suggest that any advanced SEO needs to be able to build their own tools? John says that companies like Bigmouth see these tools as being a competitive advantage. However the smaller guys though have to do without it. The problem is not really money but resources are scarce. Also, the marketplace is changing. It is becoming more collaborative with more parties involved, and thus tool data needs to be more shareable between client teams as well as the different agencies involved (SEO, PR).

Related posts:

1. London SMX Coverage: Essential Paid Search Tools
2. SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search
3. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search

SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence

Speakers:
Patrick Altoft – Branded 3
Rob Millard – Distilled
Kelvin Newman – Site visibility
Pete Wailes – Strategy Internet marketing

This session was about the age old topic of link building and various panellist’s tips and experiences.

Patrick Altoft – Branded 3

In their experience page rank from social sites does NOT flow throughout the linked-to site and will not carry trust, etc to the rest of the site. The great thing about twitter is many people syndicate their tweets on their websites and sidebars so your link is not only on twitter but also on many other sites. This is great for getting multiple IP’s and TLD’s. In this way you can get loads more links and traffic than you could ever get from dig or delicious.

As an agency we need to be able to guarantee our links i.e. Defensible links. Google is getting better at removing value from links that appear as paid so we need to get better at making all links look natural.

• A good source of links is to be a provider images so as to get citations and credits. It looks natural when an image is used and credited elsewhere.
• Linkbuilding via widgets. You can change the XML feed to the widget which allows you to dynamically change link text. At the bottom of the widget you can put text “Click here to get this widget” which encourages it to be spread and also makes it look like it spreads naturally. The initial placements of the widget may be paid but then it spreads.
• Infographics. All linkbait has been done before – you need to do it better. We need to be able to guarantee coverage and that is done via incentives (Is that paid links?) Ring them up “What can we do for you to make you publish this infographic?”
• Pre write content Send out a press release and write the story for 30-40 sites to

Rob Millard – Distilled

Rob suggested to forgo the traditional link building via email in favour of blogger outreach. Emails contact often results in you making the link request without trying to build the relationship first. Twitter rocks for outreach. Where as email is seen as a burden that needs to be responded to tweeps love to be contacted through @ and DM. It is also good as the target tweep can look you up and see your credentials. Also really easy to find people because people want to get followers so they publish their @tweep.

There are also various tools that allow you to be selective and find prospective people to contact. www.followerwonk.com is a tool to find tweeps based on keywords. You can also use www.wefollow.com. The downfall is that you don’t know the quality of the potential links so you need to evaluate the sites: This is easily done by pulling the data into a spreadsheet and tabulating the website PR, the number of tweets and the number of follower that your “target” has.

When contacting potential people be nice!

• Flatter your target. You can use public lists to find targets e.g. Followfriday
• Otherwise create a private list – stalk your prey and see what they are up to. Then engage with them.
• Or use Hashtags & Search “guest post” + {keyword} or “Guest blog” + {keyword} or #haro + {keyword}
• Use Linkedin to find peoples twitter id and contact them that way.
• Using the phone for outreach is very effective.
• Go offline – Go to meetups. Check attendees list – perhaps tweet them beforehand to make sure you meet them.
• Quora – many ceo’s hang out there – opportunity to find people.
• Blog commenting – when commenting perhaps link to your twitter profile instead of a useless web link. People can quickly see who you are.

Takeaways from this session:

• Know who you targeting
• Find people by using tools
• Be creative how you search
• Build relationships

Kelvin Newman – Site visibility

What has made a difference to us?

Three things influence out decisions –

1. Our gut feel
2. Habit – carry on with what we have always done
3. What Rand tells us to do! J

We have ignored:

Psychology: Subliminal messages – people do pick up on subtle clues. The words you choose will influence people. E.g. Ask for a favour rather than a link.

Behaviour Economist: Try these three books for a great read. Freakonomics, Nudge (Richard H Thaler) Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely) also look up Dan on TED video

PR Guru: There are loads of surveys out there. If you do some god surveys you should be able to get links from that. Try “survey + {Keyword}” in Google. First consider “What would be a great survey to write about?”

Session Takeaways:

Surveys work – www.Toluna.com is a great website to get surveys done cheaply. £35 can survey 250 people. It is really fast – you can get this in 30 min.

Pete Wailes – Strategy Internet marketing

4C & CBEL = Creative Compelling Content Creation & Content Based Engagement Links

You need to be engaging the community to be in the game in the future.

Think Broad to understand what all is affected and then bring it back down to specific resources to find info e.g. Linked in Delicious, Flickr, etc. You will get an idea on what people talk about in that industry. This data mining stage is imperative so you can go about answering questions that people typically need answering. Will the community be interested in this info? What has worked and what has not worked. Then execute.

Go see benthebodyguard.com People shared the site even without being in the industry because the idea is good.

Go after a community that are passionately engaged already. Effectively outsource the link building.

Be remarkable and people will talk about you. The execution needs to be remarkable

Go have a look at Hackernews – remarkable for sparking ideas. Pete got 40,000 words back from the community because he asked a passionate question “What’s wrong with Microsoft?”

Also we have found the # of Facebook shares is the highest correlated metric with higher Google rankings. Not because of Facebook but because of the viral links it generates.

Related posts:

1. SMX London coverage: SEO 2011 What’s Working and What’s not.
2. What is Link Value and does your site offer it?
3. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search

London SMX coverage: Link Alchemy: Creative Ways Of Conjuring SEO Gold

Kevin Ryan, Motive Marketing
Craig Danuloff, Click Equations Inc
Anders Hjorth, COO GroupM Search EMEA

This session went through the various aspects of PPC tools and when you should consider investing in tools.

Kevin Ryan, Motive Marketing

Tools like “Clickable” are mid market and pretty good.

From a survey I did –

• “What non-technical resources would your ideal search firm have?”
• “What are you missing now?”
• “What technical resources would you rate as most important?”
• “What is the primary driver in a search agency?”

The most common answer was – 3^rd party paid search tools. Agencies should build infographics to explain what they are doing.

Over the years bidding got really more complicated. The tools have become very good. Agencies have been squeezed to other services like landing page optimisation, Client intelligence, Primary research, technical oversight and informed decision making because the margins on a “percentage of spend” have become so low.

Tools don’t replace common sense, but they assist. Where are we intervening with automation? 4 phased approach:

• Placement:- Structure
• Audience: Targeting
• Campaign:
• Reporting: Attribution

The perfect tool:

• Needs to support multiple ad formats
• It needs to “assist” you with tactical analysis and execution (Don’t trust everything googl suggests – they want your money)
• It needs to optimise creative
• Data integration (Very much on the background – Complex attribution
• Advanced reporting

Craig Danuloff, Click Equations Inc

Before choosing tools, examine what problem you are solving, which tools can help and when does it make sense to invest in a tool?

Take a strategic view. Look at where you are at and where you want to be in terms of current profit and the potential profit. The gap requires keyword research, competitive analysis and then targeting through optimising ad text and campaigns. Start by analysing what is holding you back.

1. People – Getting junior staff up to speed to complement seniors
2. Process – reducing inefficiency and improving effectiveness. What are our policies if a page quality score is below 5? What is our process if an ad text has 30% lower display? Do we have process in place that stipulate what to do?
3. Analytics – More complete data and more accurate data (attribution, etc)
4. Technology – simplifying workflow

There are tools for all sorts of aspects of the problem. Tools for competitive analysis, for display research, for keyword research and other niche tools. You really need a toolbox of various tools to satisfy the right need. Not necessarily 1 tool fits all.

Find your place on the Paid Search Tech Maturity curve. In some industries you cannot compete without the right tools. If the competition are at the top of their game you either join them or don’t bother.

There are several free resources available at ClickEquasions.com

Anders Hjorth, COO GroupM Search EMEA

Competitive Intelligence For Search

Some tools we use:

• Adgooroo: Recommended
• Compete: Highly recommended
• SEMrush
• Comscore qSearch
• Spyfu

Related posts:

1. SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence
2. SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search
3. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search

London SMX Coverage: Essential Paid Search Tools

Speakers:
Richard Baxter, SEOgadget
Martin Beijk, Onetomarket
Jonathan Hochman, JE Hochman & Associates
John Mueller, Google

SMX Coverage - Technical SEO

Richard Baxter – SEOgadget

12 popular, interesting & critical issues we have discovered recently.

1. Thin internal pages / no content and boiler plate content. You need unique text on page, persuasive, well written content to inspire visitors.
2. Resolve poor internal link architecture. Google “seogadget link architecture” for guide on how to.
3. Avoid excessive duplication via paginated navigation.
4. Indexed staging server – Clean up a leaky staging server. 301 redirect to production server.
5. Canonicalization and not just the www. Check for trailing slash and other versions of ww or wwww.
6. Soft 404 header or no 404 response. Google “Live http headers” and look for the Mozilla plugin to get a tool to check header codes.
7. “If modified since” query produces 500 error (www.feedthebot.com/tools/if-modified/ check it out)
8. Sitemap.xml produces 404 server header response even though the file was downloaded. Malformed header was causing problems.
9. Bingbot / MSNBot crawl was blocked. The dev team had banned the bot!
10. 40,000 internal 301 redirects!
11. Very easy to inject links with HTML – what happens when you put HTML into the site search box – Do you get a result with a link?
12. Do you have tons of data? Make it embeddable. Think how can others use this content on their sites?

Martin Beijk – OnetoMarket

Why speed matters?

Google announced “Lets make the web faster”.

• Google public dns
• Page speed indicator in webmaster tools
• V8 WebP compression
• Mod_pagespeed for Apache
• Page speed API
• Page speed load times in Analytics

All points to it(page speed) being a ranking factor. Get the code snippet for Googel analytics to correct problems and drive traffic to the fastest pages.

Database optimisation

Often the slowest load time. A recent case highlighted that googlebot suddenly indexed a lot more URLs after query load times were reduced from 9 seconds to below 3. Take the hint!

Consider which Mysql engine is fastest MyISAM or InnoDB

Webservers

Apache has largest market share followed by IIS. Consider how to optimise the webserver and also consider the application servers as well – have a stand alone Mysql server. Strip cookies from pages that don’t need them.

Virtual Host vs .htaccess : Using .htacess should be avoided at all cost

Nginx is up and coming and really fast especially when paired with Varnish

Investigate alternatives

Nginx – Super fast and solid alternative solutions. WordPress, Twitter and facebook use them

Make your VPS platform even better

CDN is not always necessary

Takeaways

If you are on shared hosting you are not taking webhosting seriously.

Watch speed of DB Queries.

Look at the quality of the code.

Running WordPress? Lookup ways to make it faster.

Jonathan Hochman – Hochman Consultants

Be carful when copying staging sites to live. You can copy a “disallow robots” file to live environment if not carful.

Be sure to setup redirects and 404 pages. Be sure to check using a tool to verify that the site returns proper pages.

Ecommerce and CMS systems: Most systems have issues that need to be remedied. A good plugin for WordPress is “WordPress seo” from Yoast.

Some CMS systems use the same title on all internal pages. It is critical to fix this.

Running out of crawl time? Code optimisation should be a high priority. Watch out for Infitie URL spaces like calendars that go on forever with URL’s. Submit a sitemap to Google to get feedback on how many have been indexed.

Spelling and typos. Have had issues with badly spelt title – use online tool to check spelling.

Check for broken links Xenu link Sleuth whenever Webmaster tools reports broken links

Enable gzip compression via htaccess

If your site gets hacked your traffic will die. The best bet is to do a file integrity check. i.e. have a backup copy to compare against for changes. This can be automated through a selection of available tools.

Failure to patch wordpress is number 1 cause of hacks.

HTML Validation errors – fixing can help load speed.

SEO Intangibles. Quality of web dev really matters. Happy visitors generate tweets, referrals, etc.

Printing – People like to turn to printing for big ticket items. Make sure you have a print specific CSS

Forms – try wufoo.com

The big picture – Think user experience as it is a ranking signal!

John Mueller (johnmu) – Google

The process of indexing is supported by the crawler and the scheduler amongst other processes.

Consider the scheduler – Googlebot will notice if the server slows down as a result of the crawl and will slow down scheduled crawls so as to be kind to the server and website. Other sites on a shared server (IP Address) can therefore affect your crawl site.

Crawling: checks robots.txt and then crawls URLs and gives feedback to scheduler. It will use different user agents to read robots file. The crawler will feed back to the scheduler the success of the crawl such that the scheduler can adjust the crawl rate.

How can I test this? Use Webmaster tools function “fetch as googlebot” and this will pass through scheduler and you will see if there is a delay because the scheduler doesn’t like your server.

Parser: looks at logical elements on page to find additional URL’s. Soft 404 pages are an issue.

Indexing: Analyses content and determines Indexability

Q&A

Some useful points that came from the Q&A sessions:

When client resources are limited then prioritising the changes into what is most important is essential. Out of a mountain of proposed changes to a site some are clearly more important than others.

Richsnippets/Microformats: The implementation seems to be sketchy. Get whitelisted for one format and then introduce the rest and they will also work. Microformats for reviews are proving difficult to implement. Microformats for breadcrumbs works perfectly. Reviews work well with a google preferred supplier

404 vs 410: Google will keep a 404 for longer because sometimes it is just an error and the page returns. For best results use webmaster tools to remove URL’s.

Related posts:

1. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search
2. SMX London coverage: SEO 2011 What’s Working and What’s not.
3. SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search

SMX London coverage: Technical SEO – What’s important for technical SEO?

SMX London - What's Working, What's Not

Mikkel deMib Svendsen

“I have the Best SEO strategy Ever! – It will predict crawl, filter and index!” – “Do not optimise for SE’s – Optimise for users”

In 1990, SEO was easy, factors were only on-site, indexes were small, algorithms were simple, universal and easy to reverse engineer. (There were no local factors, no personalisation, no blended results). There was no spam protection either due to minimal technology and resources at the search engines.

Today we have all sorts of on and off site factors, algorithms vary based on verticals, and can be region specific. Indexes are huge and competition is high. It makes it extremely hard to reverse engineer the algo. Today’s “tricks” have a much shorter life expectancy.

The theory is simple – SE’s basically try to understand what users want, so they prioritise accordingly. If you are reverse engineering you are optimising for yesterday, optimising for users is optimising for tomorrow.

E.g. Social signals helps define what’s hot and what s not. We knew it was coming and we have been ahead of the algo. We now reap the rewards. Panda was no surprise for us. High bounce rates and crappy content farms are not good for the user but the SE’s were slow to catch up. Understand what not to do. Low quality directories pollute the index. Google started booting them and there have been many casualties amongst people who relied on them.

Chasing the algo can be fun but it is not justified by the work it takes (unless you are in a high margin industry where short term results can be highly profitable). Mostly it is just not worthwhile.

In conclusion – focus on the users and stay ahead of the engines – it is the best SEO strategy!

Max Thomas – Thunder SEO

Panda and farmer update rolled out in the USA in Feb 2011 and in the UK in April. Some big sites dropped, but so did some smaller companies. There are many stories of such companies who now needed to make redundancies.

It is fact that sites need links from relevant sites. An emerging  THEORY is that we need “Active” links. Links from URL’s that have activity. People need to be engaging with that content.

The Same THEORY extends to On-site. People need to be engaging with your on-site content. Old methods of link building are no longer applicable as there is no engagement at the source. We need CONTENT that people want to share, link to, content that attracts users!

Some Useful Tips:

Tip 1) Make part of the linkbuliding integral. E.g. Crest Capital  finance leasing services. They deal primarily with their vendors. They have created a leasing app on the vendor site that takes them back to a vendor branded page on the Crest page. This is highly interactive and relevant content and within each app they have targeted anchor text back to their site. There is nothing new in this but it is highly interactive and very relevant.

Tip 2) Create a community relationship. E.g. PatMoorefoundation.com is a rehab foundation: the answer for them is a guest blog program. Celebrity guest bloggers provide content on the Pat Moore blog. Bloggers will often link to their posts from their own sites. Furthermore, the bloggers are given a badge to place on their sites! Pat Moore advertised this very publically and effectively endorsed the guest blog

Tip 3) Don’t put all your eggs in Google. Diversify traffic sources.

Tip4) Experiment, and track. Examine your Site structure – watch Webmaster central and Webmaster tools.

Tip 5) Great content rocks!

Christine Churchill, Key Relevance

New and emerging search factors

Google instant  is changing search behaviour. Good titles work. An eye catching title is compelling and can drive up click thru rate and is still the number 1 on-page ranking factor. People are scanning your titles because of Google instant. Remember that Google is looking at signals from users so don’t have your head in the sand – Click thru rate matters!

Users can change their mind on queries because of Google suggest (People are too lazy to type the rest of the query – it is easier picking up a suggested result.) There are distinct pauses in typing as users scan the instant results and refine. This causes recurrent searches and it is worthwhile considering what is in Google Suggest before you optimise.

Post Panda – How to get it right? Page layout is a factor: Reduce ads on page, have authoritative authors. Optimise beyond Google:

• Images, video, blog press releases, email, books

Ranking factors – User behaviour signals are coming into play and are the new “Link building” endorsements. Possible characteristics include:

• Bookmarking
• Sharing
• Likes, Tweets
• The “Long Click” people who stay on the destination site and like the destination content.

Site quality questions to ask if you have suffered after Panda: Common questions: (Search “25 questions Google panda” for the full list)

• Would you give this site your Credit card?
• Is the site authoritative? Are the people qualified professionals or just any Joe Soap?
• Would this be ok if it were in a magazine?
• Are there excessive ads?

Clean up low quality content on a site. It has been shown that it can affect the entire sites rankings.

Optimise for local and mobile: Claim those listings NOW! Mobile is growing.

Emerging search signals:

• Retweets (By number and authority)
• Likes
• Reviews
• Shares
• Diggs
• Google 1Plus

In Summary: Best practices still work. Good titles are still the BEST on-page tool. Focus on site quality. Build and optimise social media profiles and participate in Social Media!

Related posts:

1. SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search
2. SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence
3. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search

SMX London coverage: SEO 2011 What’s Working and What’s not.

The Question that we always need to ask ourselves is “How many new sales must the client make to cover the cost of this SEO work”. This is of course especially applicable for clients that are selling goods or services and where the primary goal is not brand promotion or reputation management.

My prospective client has spoken with several SEO’s and agencies over the years and knows his way around. I really had his attention when I started asking a couple of core questions such as “What is the lifetime value of your average customer?” and “What is your current cost of acquisition of a customer”? The bottom line was really “How many new clients does he need to sign up every month to cover the costs of the proposed SEO”? It sounds like Business 101 but it was clearly an approach that none of the other SEO’s had taken with him. They were all trying to sell him rankings and technical jumble.

So we worked out he needed an additional 60 signups any given month. So let’s do some basic conversion maths. Let’s say 4% of his site traffic (qualified non-branded search traffic) apply for a demo account and of those 25% become a signed up customer. We now know that to get those 60 sign ups we need 6,000 additional visits a month. This sets a clear target.

The next question of course “Is this traffic available, and how competitive is it”? A quick look at search volumes soon answers this question and from here we outline a strategy of how to achieve this goal in the short term. The traffic gain won’t be instantaneous so we need to sketch out lead times and payback periods. Like planting a tree, it will take some time for the work to bear fruitbut then the returns will outweigh the initial investment. The plain and simple ROI calculation that needs to be considered for any business activity! And this discussion really secures the confidence of the prospective client.

Surprisingly none of the other SEO’s had laid it out so plainly. This is the thought process that any client will need to follow to evaluate the viability of your proposal. Why not go through it with them and make it clear up front. This shows your understanding of the requirements at the highest level. At the end of the day it is about trust and returns.

Related posts:

1. Why aren’t site owners obsessive about conversion metrics?
2. A house divided cannot stand
3. b2b SEO resolutions for 2008

Set yourself apart from the other SEO’s

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

This can however be a double edged sword – lessons learnt in the past have also taught me that it is possibly even more important to pick a route and stick to it. It is all too tempting to see the vast variety of (search phrase) opportunities open to a website and to want to grab all of them. It very quickly leads to a scattergun approach, with just not enough weight behind any of it. Result: dilution, mixed messages, a multitude of pages with similar content, confusion on the site, and ultimately poor performance!

Having a fresh look at you keyword data, especially asking the question “Which products/services/areas bring the client the best value for money?“ and “What is their USP,  what makes them stand out from the rest?” allows you to explore the keywords data in more detail (keyword research 101). Tie this together with good analytics review and some proper thinking about where exactly to focus the promotional work for the campaign and you begin to get a good idea of what you should be doing in the next few weeks.

Take these thoughts back to the website and have another look at how it all matches up and often you will be surprised at what you find, no matter how many times you do this exercise. (We found an area that opened up to us on a five year old client, which we have since successfully optimised for resulting in loads more targeted traffic). The simple explanation is that when we originally designed the campaigns we targeted specific niches and put off other areas for a later date, exactly in order not to have the scattergun approach I mentioned above! As time passed we achieved the goals of the original campaigns and it was time to unlock further areas which we had initially put aside.

Usually the first thing that strikes me is how poorly the on-site optimisation matches up with the specifics of your plan. Often the quickest wins is to simply make sure that you are passing some good vote topic matching you campaigns and ensuring that this ties up closely with the titles (and copy) of your chosen on-site pages. Take the opportunity to bring in some copy text cross linking. The simplest place is often linking back up in the site architecture to higher level category pages from deeper within the site (instead of vice versa).

Make sure you are tracking your results! Put a system in place that will ensure you get ranking reports for the new areas you are targeting. Committing your plan to a regular report makes you feel more accountable for the strategy. SEO is not all about rankings, but receiving a report in your inbox that shows movement keeps it all real and fresh. It inspires you to have another look at the analytics and have a closer look at those pages and the visitors they are now attracting, and if you spend a little more time on it you start looking at how well this new traffic is converting. All round it is a good starting point to make sure that you don’t forget what you set out to do a few weeks back! You will be pleasantly surprised with what opens up! And then don’t forget to go back and review the keywords!

Related posts:

1. Mobile Web opens up a whole new market
2. How to Accurately Measure the Effectiveness of Experimental Online Marketing Strategies
3. How regularly do you blog, and how does it affect you?

Review Your SEO Strategies Regularly And Be Surprised At What Opens Up!