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.

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.

Welcome to my very own guide to becoming an SEO “Expert”. This “guide” is based entirely on my own experience and is to be used or abused as you wish. For the record, I am not an SEO expert just YET, but I now know what it’s going to take to become one, and I thought I should share this with anyone interested in taking on SEO as a career choice.

I’ve been involved in online marketing for about 3 years now, having started out touching on SEO at a price comparison website. After that I moved on to become a project manager at an online marketing company and was bitten by the SEO bug. I moved to MediaVision to leave the complicated world of project management and get started with pure SEO work.

What a great decision! A year on and I have four of my own clients who are flourishing thanks to the knowledge I’ve gained in SEO, conversion analysis and effective copywriting. Here’s how I got to where I am now as an SEO specialist…

Friday October 22nd marked the launch of Kooday, the World Wide Web’s newest search engine – it is the brainchild of a Canadian entrepreneur and any search marketing company will be interested to hear about the features that make Kooday different from its long-established counterparts like Google and Yahoo.

Having an opportunity to thoroughly review some keyword data for one of my proposals while traveling on a train up to Sheffield, I came to realise that as much as we talk about regularly reviewing keyword data we just don’t actually do it enough! We all know that every month something like 20% of all searches are unique and have not been seen by Google in the last 90 days.  

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!

So, online ad spend finally overtook TV ad spend this year, but is the shift in spend gaining momentum or slowing down? Ecommerce growth estimates are forecast to slow (Forrester as quoted on business week) but that growth is still stealing market share from traditional ad spend.

At the beginning of this year, growth and spend for 2009 was predicted to fall somewhat as we all battened down for the long hard winter of recession.

I had a much gloomier picture in mind than what the actual figures to date reveal as quoted by e-marketer. Looking at this growth curve would hardly have me believe that we were in recession this year!

In this time of financial instability, is there hope for the future of online marketing? Some say that many SEM companies will fall off the curb over the next few months, but not everyone will suffer. If you play your cards right, SEM will prove to be an indispensible marketing tool to the (sensible) clients who stick with it. Global search trends are already changing towards budgeting and money saving, for example, searches have increased significantly for ‘cheap DVD’ rather than ‘DVDs for sale’, according to the Google Trends results displayed for the last 30 days.

David Naylor discusses some of the advantages to online marketing that traditional marketing doesn’t necessarily offer. These factors reinforce the importance of using the available budget a company may have to constructively ‘invest’ it in SEM, which offers measurable results, unbeatable ROI, and leaves a long term impression in the eyes of its market.

Many say content is king, but I would like to take it a step further and say content is god. The line between content and advertising is blurring and one of the major ways to be recognised online is to have content that others seek. The days of advertising to create a buzz and receive hits on your site are decreasing, while Web 2.0 is becoming more popular.

I realise “Web 2.0” is a term loosely thrown around, what I mean by it is that the internet is becoming more of a community. Information and sites are being passed on to friends and other community members through social media sites, email and blogs. People react more to personal recommendations than adverts and pop up banners; and one of the best way to receive a “thumbs up” is through attractive content on your site. In the context of this post, attractive means: useful, informative and fun content that the user will find worthwhile.