Moderator:
Christine Churchill – Key Relevence

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.

Speakers

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.

Moderator:
Rob Kerry, Ayima

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.

One of the first sessions this morning is on where SEO is at today. Whats working and what’s not. We had three speakers, Mikkel deMib Svendsen - deMib.com,  Max Thomas – Thunder SEO and Christine Churchill – Key Relevance.

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.

Google IO Event 2011

Another Google I/O has come and gone, what has the mighty giant of search wrought upon us for the year of 2011? We delve into the highlights of the Google Event and discover what we can expect to see in the (very) near future!

The Launch of Google Music (America Only)

Google will never, ever let other companies with oh let’s say, ‘better’ streaming music products eclipse their offerings. Therefore Google Music becomes the next logical step in social music sharing. Spotify has already dominated most of this market, but do they have the reach which Google has? We say, never. This is the deal – any of your music (legal or illegal) can be uploaded to the Google Music servers. Once there, you can stream your tunes from any device and from anywhere in the world. A simple drag and drop interface will compliment the services ease of use.

It’s a good month to be a browser, specifically Firefox and Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s long-awaited browser is now available (the cleverly titled ‘IE9’) and Firefox has released version 4.0 of its much-loved browser. A Chrome update is nowhere to be seen, most likely because their product is silently updated in the background and loaded with innovative features which both Firefox and IE have now snatched for themselves. Let’s delve a little deeper into the new internet browsers and see what they can offer the user in terms of speed and functionality:

The UI

This morning on the radio, the local space cadet deejay mentioned between adverts and cricket scores that various social media trends as well as search marketing services such as Facebook and Twitter are supposed to be the next big thing in 2011 (weren’t they already?). If the general public is starting to grasp that Facebook, twitter, Linkedin and so on all fall under a mysterious banner known as ‘social media’ then the time of SEO is truly upon us. Additionally, as a responsible SEO-guru in training, it falls on my shoulders to inform the general public of the latest social media trends that will most likely, rule the roost in 2011:

Search marketing services and social media go hand-in-hand, merrily skipping down the information highway as they accumulate countless friends and customers. SEO is malleable, changing constantly to meet the demands of the major search engines, as well as its clients who generate their profits from the search results. The new Facebook design is in line with SEO’s ethos of change and marks a new direction in the usability of this popular networking site. The new Facebook design for 2010 includes: