There was a lot of information presented, which is detailed in the individual presentations. The seminar started promptly and Will Critchlow from Distilled led the way. Below are some key aspects that I took away from the seminar:

“Advanced analytics” –Will Critchlow

Will’s presentation was fairly technical and I was pleased to find another avid user of MS Excel – probably somewhat more fanatical than I – so I certainly appreciated seeing first hand some of the more advanced formulas that he was employing. Next time I am faced with a tedious excel task I will draw inspiration from this and work out the formulas rather than just moving things around by hand! Will mentioned a cool tool from Excellent analytics that allows you to use pivot tables to graph the analytics data which can often reveal something new (like duplicate content).

One of the things I took away from Will’s talk was that you can better analyse Google keyword tool data in Excel when you dump up to 50,000 rows into excel by adding a parameter into the URL!

Another important discovery for me was that if you see referrals to your own site in the analytics data, then the chances are that the Google tracking script is not installed properly or is not firing off.

“Getting SEO done against the organisational odds” – Richard Baxter

Richard is a great speaker, and he spoke about how to put together and manage an SEO team. Interestingly enough, Richards suggested team splits, placing team members into different disciplines such as linkbuilders and content writers, which differs from our model where we believe all team members should primarily be good SEOs with skills in all disciplines.

“ROI from social media” – Lucy Langdon

Lucy was a bit nervous but still delivered a fine presentation. She pointed out that Social media does need to be thought about and is definitely not applicable in all circumstances. Having a Facebook page for the sake of it is fairly pointless. Another recurring point common with other presentations was to plan and do, with the emphasis on actually doing!

“Diagnosing and fixing penalties, understanding guidelines” – Jane Copland

It was good to see Jane speaking. The main theme of Jane’s talk was that more often than not, a site is not actually banned in Google, but rather it is simply not ranking! A couple of simple tests can confirm this such as: a search for a unique exact text string from the website should rank in Google (or, otherwise, my favourite is simply to do a Google site query.)

Jane mentioned that there are numerous filters in play, and the site will have tripped up on any number these. Go back to basics, have a good look at the site, do some competitive analysis and work out factors that could be affecting the rankings.

“Scalable site architecture” – Duncan Morris

I really enjoyed Duncan’s presentation, both because he is an entertaining speaker and also because his content was pertinent to me and he pitched his presentation at a just the right level.

Duncan discussed organising content and planning navigation so that all content is accessible but avoiding duplicate content. He discussed weighing up various keyword phrases and how to best categorise them within site architecture.

“Ranking Models” – Ben Hendrickson

Watching Ben must have been one of the highlights of the day. He set the audience off laughing several times with his antics and mannerisms. I can’t say that I took a whole lot away from the presentation other than him solidly pointing out that using keywords in H1,H2,H3 & H4 tags will not make a difference in site rankings. Ben’s presentation was about statistical analysis of masses of data to essentially determine key ranking factors. In my opinion, the variance in 90% of the factors was minimal, but the overwhelming contributing factor still remains: External followed Links. The art here will be to determine the right mix of these links with regards to domain trust, diversity and anchor text, etc.

“Live linkbuilding” – Tom Critchlow & Rand Fishkin

Rand and Tom worked very well together in this exercise. It was interactive with the audience to some degree as they asked for sites that belonged to audience members and analysed them for potential backlinks. All the techniques they employed have been blogged about numerous times before, however, it was the interpretation and planning of the work that makes the difference. In other words, don’t forget the fact that you are seeking quality links, and don’t wast time simply chasing after all your competitors links. Be creative with the analysis and go after the links that count.

“Conversion rate optimisation” – Ben Jesson

This presentation was also very good to see. It was an actual case study on SEOmoz and the changes that were made to effect a 52% increase in conversion rate on a particular page on the SEOmoz.org website. Once again, a key element that came through was the planning and execution of the message. Ben left us with links to a couple of really useful guides on their site: www.conversion-rate-experts.com/articles

DAY TWO

“Head to head presentation-off [on the subject of Keywords]
– Will Critchlow & Rand Fishkin

These were individual presentations and Will kicked off. Once again Excel and pivot tables made all the difference in identifying the trends and best keywords to optimise for. Rand unfortunately went off topic a bit, offering us useful things to take away immediately in the form of pretty charts and graphs available here http://www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts.

Will and Rand head to head

Rand pulled the presentation back onto the subject of keywords but in a very generic way, where Will was a lot more analytical. In as much as Rand’s charts prove to be great linkbait for SEOmoz, I had to vote for Will to win the competition!

“News site SEO” – Rob Ousbey

Rob pointed out a useful trick with regard to using old URL’s to get a story live on a URL that has existing inbound links. He suggested that you change an old URL page title and description, link the page from the home page to get it re-crawled, and then let it lie until you need it. When you need to get a story live quickly, you can change the page content (leaving the title, description and H1 tags as is) and you will instantly have the story live with PR on the URL.

“The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links” – Tom Critchlow

A good presentation on linkbuilding using techniques which are often blogged about. The really important aspect that was highlighted was to spend time thinking about the client’s USP and to really leverage this. Once again, planning the work smartly makes execution a lot simpler and has better results.

“SEO is Nothing Without Content” – Rand Fishkin

Rand delivered another fine presentation with the emphasis on User Generated Content. He was quick to point out that it’s not as simple as “write content and visitors will come”. The content has to be great and you need to get the user base involved. Rand’s presentation covered various aspects on how to involve users and reward them for content, and also how to make sure your content is easily shared.

“Vertical and universal search” – Patrick Altoft & Tom Critchlow

Patric Altroft, from Branded 3, showed some interesting test results on image and video search. The message was that Google is really keen to index videos and that simply submitting a video sitemap can result in being included in the index, even if the video does not even exist. Another apparent flaw in the current indexing is that Google will index Flash adverts that it finds on pages presuming them to be valid relevant content.

Tom presented his findings from research he has done on Google local listings, and pointed out that it is important to have reviews of your listing. Achieving a local listing requires you to firstly claim your listing, assign relevant categories, get some reviews and if possible leave information for Google to find as a citation of your details – this confirms the details are “valid” without actually linking back to your website. Tom also discussed various issues with verifying and bulk submitting your listings.

“The limits of automation” – Dave Naylor

Dave left us with several tools to try out (If you not already using them):

• Raven SEO Tools
• Advanced Web Ranking
• SEO Toolkit from Microsoft
• Dave’s own publicly available tools

Dave also had a few words to say on the personal aspects of SEO, and how important it is to communicate openly the people (clients) on the other end. He pointed out that his link building methods most often involve personal contact.

“The right strategy for your organisation” – Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris

Will and Duncan delivered some quality information in the last presentation. Will again mentioned the importance of leveraging your USP to get great links. He plotted USP’s attributes on a scale of uniqueness and desirability showing that the best value can be obtained by really differentiating your site from all the others.

Duncan once again gave a great talk about TLDs and international rankings. One of the key factors he identified was the use of different languages on different domains as being key in achieving successful international rankings. He cited BMW getting things right and HSBC, with multiple languages on a single domain, getting it wrong.

Party!!!

On both days the event was nicely finished off by a few rounds of drinks at the local kindly sponsored by the organisers!

Brett, Sandy and Will

A night of Blues tunes!

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2. SMX London coverage: SEO 2011 What’s Working and What’s not.
3. Blended search is the way forward in 2009

LONDON SEO Pro training seminar – October 2009

This can be a tricky landscape to evaluate because there is so much information out there, from prominent SEO’s I might add, about the value of Ezine articles, however most of this information dates back to the hay days of Ezines (for SEO). The information is quite out of date and not necessarily correct in today’s Search landscape.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if we had retained every piece of original content that we released into ezines over the past few years, and had added that to our own content network, then it would be that much stronger today, and we would still have full control over it!

The presentation is on Slideshare, tagged as “To Ezine or Not To Ezine”

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MediaVision Presentation – To Ezine or Not To Ezine

University research projects also make use of crowd sourcing, as do journalists and increasingly, online marketing specialists, particularly when it comes to brand promotion and the creation of brand evangelists. But as a concept, crowd sourcing is not fool-proof, in fact, one could argue that it favours fools. Group think poses a rather serious problem. Group think requires conformity, often at the cost of invention and advancement. Aside from uninspired crowds, another problem is crowds that are too adventurous, and that want something very new and very fun and not at all practical or viable on a business front.

Crowds are volatile and the instinct it to try and control them, but when engaging in crowd sourcing projects, that is precisely what you cannot do. If you try and control your crowd, it will revolt and you’ll be in a world of trouble. The trick is to choose your crowd very carefully, target the right audience and then let them assume responsibility for whatever it is that you want them to do. Provide subtle guidance if you deem it necessary but do not interfere in the natural crowd sourcing process – cage the control freak within and learn to trust.

The presentation below outlines crowd sourcing as a concept and explores some methods of best practice; it’s not definitive, so feel free to add your two cents to the comments. In crowd sourcing, (nearly) all information is welcome.

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1. Search Engine Reputation Management – (SERM) – A presentation
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Who, what, where, when – Crowd sourcing: a presentation

So where should your marketing dollars be spent? What are the trends for the rest of the year? The presentation entitled “eMarketing Tactics for 2009” gives a broad overview of where the online marketing environment is heading and what some of the trends to look out for are.

The presentation briefly covers the following top 5 online marketing tactics for 2009:

- Email marketing

- Social media

- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

- Online PR

- PPC

There is also a brief section on marketing tactic combinations. You can have a look at my presentation here:

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1. Blended search is the way forward in 2009
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e-Marketing tactics 2009

The presentation was on blended search and covered various points, such as:

* The types of results
* How to optimise for the main blended search factors
* How popular blended search is in search engines
* Why you need to use blended search to your advantage

Have a look and leave all positive comments below.

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3. e-Marketing tactics 2009

Blended search is the way forward in 2009

Corporate and Personal Branding in a nutshell:

• Personal Branding is “all about you”.
• You have a personal brand even if you don’t choose to have one.
• It’s about how you appear to the world and what (or what company and values) you represent.
• What you can choose is how you maintain and present your personal brand.
• Personal branding is very important for a company to give a personal touch to the company because a personal brand is the reflection of a person’s identity and values behind the company.
• More generally, Richard Branson used personal branding very successfully to foster loyalty for his companies.

• Corporate Branding, on the other hand, is fostering recognition and appreciation of your company as a whole.
• One way to do this is by applying your company’s name to its products to generate recognition and trust in your company by its brands.
• For example Disney attaches its company name to all new products which helps easy acceptance of new products and makes umbrella advertising possible.
• Don’t confuse it with corporate identity which involves fostering recognition and company loyalty by the use of logos and mottos.

If you are concerned with your corporate or personal brand and how it is reflected in the search engines have a look at our page about SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management)

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Online Corporate and Personal Branding in a Nutshell

Besides the standard internet usage reports and the large volumes of mobile facts and figures for South Africa, information is far and few around the actual search market share for Google and other local engines, unless you are willing to spend a few coins on the amazing reports from World Wide Worx. Last night was the last bit of compiling the bits and pieces together of all the bookmarks for this mornings presentation.

It was very interesting to say the least to see the actual volumes around the local engines such as Aardvark and Ananzi against Google. The figures around the mobile search and their contribution to the overall search volume in South Africa is astounding to say the least. Please feel free to comment and provide your input on the topic.

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South African online market share – Search and Mobile

I have a presentation on local search that explains not only the basics but the in depth factors of local search as well. I also gave my view on where I think local search is moving to.

Some of the main factors covered:

• Factors that make you rank
• How to optimize for local
• Adding your business in the LBC(local business center)
• Different types of results and why you would want to be in a certain type

Another section that I covered was how Google needs to up their game in order to infiltrate the local search market in countries like China, where Baidui is the biggest search engine.
Have a look at my presentation and let me know if there is anything i have left out.

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1. Staying on top of local search: ranking and tracking made easy.
2. Google getting more local with search
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What is local search and where is it going from here?