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

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?

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…

1. Read, read and read some more…

Starting out at MediaVision I was given some basic reading material on the way things were done at MediaVision. Once I understood what I was reading and how our basic strategy works, I continued to expand my knowledge by following industry experts on Twitter and reading some of the strategies they had tried and tested with some of their clients. This proved to be extremely useful as SEO is an evolving science and one can never stop researching to keep up to date with the latest practices. Some interesting people that I followed include:

- @brettpringle

- @louisventer

- @Searchcowboys

- @JonDMyers

- @theGypsy

- @DaveNaylor

- @avinash

- @mattcutts

Follow these people and you will not only learn some of the basics of SEO, but also learn some very advanced trickery that you can test and see if it works for you.

Reading SEO books and dummies guides to SEO might work here and there, but I would really suggest that the best way to get involved is to be taught and then to read as much as you can to really understand the MANY different views and strategies that people have all around the world. SEO IS NOT AN EXACT SCIENCE!

2. Master the tools

You need to master the use of the basic SEO tools if you wish to be able to do effective keyword research, index your websites and monthly reporting. Three of the most important tools that you will need to make use of include:

- Google AdWords external keyword research tool

- Google Analytics

- Webmaster Tools

Google AdWords external keyword research tool and Google analytics will become two of your most valuable online tools. Regardless of what people say, the fact is that Google is still the MAJOR market share leader in the world of search engines and therefore most of your research will be based on their tools.

The external keyword tool is a great tool for finding out what phrases are related to any website that you are working on. Google Analytics is a data collection tool that gives you ridiculous amounts of information about the traffic that is arriving at your (or your client’s) website. Based on the data presented to you in Analytics you will then be able to make strategic decisions regarding the promotion of your website and different keywords therein.

Most of the tools have their own help sections or courses that you can read in order to learn how to use them, but the best way of learning how to use them is to practice. That takes us on to our next step, Practice makes Perfect….

3. Practice Makes Perfect!

As I’ve mentioned above, SEO is not an exact science. What works for someone else will not necessarily work for you and your clients. It is essential that you practice, try out different strategies and tactics that you read about and see if they work for you. Obviously you can’t experiment too much at the expense of your own clients, so often setting up a blog of your own or having some sort of “side-project” will give you the opportunity to practice new ideas and measure the effect that they might have.

4. Live SEO

SEO is not a job, it is not a 9–5 type of career and it is not something you can learn about in a few days and then just apply your basic knowledge for the next 5 years – YOU NEED TO LIVE SEO. It needs to become a lifestyle, a passion and something that you talk about at any given opportunity. Some of the best knowledge that I have learnt over the last year has been in the pub after work as we wind down from yet another hard day’s work. Often, instead of chatting about cars, booze, sex, drugs and rock n roll (as you do of course), we opt to chat about different SEO strategies that we’ve read about during the course of the day. Sounds boring, but this is the sort of commitment and passion you need to have towards SEO if you really want to make a success of it.

5. Join in Forum Discussions

Another great way to learn more about SEO is to join forums. This is one avenue I am yet to try myself simply due to a lack of time, but some of the biggest names in SEO that I’ve had the chance of chatting to have told me that this is one way to take your SEO knowledge from an intermediate level to expert status. One of 2011’s resolutions is to get involved in forums and get the “SupaDave” brand out there whilst learning at the same time.

6. Conferencing

Attending conferences is a great way to expand your knowledge, get your name out there whilst at the same time getting to rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in SEO. I’ve attended smaller conferences here in South Africa, but some of the bigger and better conferences that take place annually in the UK include:

- http://searchmarketingexpo.com/

- http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/

- http://www.pubcon.com/ – Las Vegas

Conferencing is all about getting yourself known in the industry and learning what the absolute legends of SEO have to say about various hot topics. Attending a couple of conferences a year might seem like a large investment of time and money, but believe me, the knowledge learnt during these conferences is simply priceless – MasterCard style!

If I had to sit down with someone interesting in becoming an SEO expert, the above advice is the basic things that I would tell them. The biggest and most important thing to remember is that SEO, as with many other online careers, is a lifestyle choice and you need to be passionate about it in order to learn about all spheres of the industry.

Do you have any other resources or tips for anyone looking to become and SEO expert? Comments would be great….

Related posts:

1. Who exactly are expert SEOs?
2. The what not to do in social media guide
3. A (very) simple guide to Cost Per internet advertising models.

SupaDave’s Guide to Becoming an SEO “Expert”

To some, the idea that the web needs another search engine may seem absurd, with Google offering the most comprehensive and relevant search results, and constantly introducing innovations to make search more tailored to the individual. (In fact, when hoping to learn more about Kooday, my first instinct was to Google the name, even before visiting www.kooday.com). So how do the creators of Kooday plan to compete with a giant like Google?

Firstly, Kooday is being marketed as a search engine that is “owned by the people” – i.e. the searchers. Kooday allows members to purchase and “own” search terms and share in the revenue those terms generate. Members are also allowed to trade key phrases. Many will be excited by the earning potential of this capability, and Kooday creators can probably expect a good deal of initial interest generated by this attractive concept.

However, Kooday currently falls short in that it seems to function more as a directory than a search engine, and returns mostly irrelevant results and unrelated ads. The search engine is just forming so perhaps it will pay to be patient and wait to see if Kooday improves these search functions, but for now it’s safe to say Internet users will be sticking with their tried and trusted Google searches.

Related posts:

1. Search Engine news recap
2. Search engine and social media market share statistics for 2009
3. Search Engine and Social Media Market Share Update

Kooday: New to the Search Engine Scene

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!

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!

This online spend is of course funnelled from various sources and as Search Marketing Experts we like to know where our visitors are coming from. Figures from Hitwise show the top distinct traffic sources for e-commerce to be Organic Search (31%), with over 3 times the volume of the next segment which is Paid Search (9%). Interestingly, Social Networks are a close third at 7.1% with e-mail marketing at 4.5%. No surprise then that there is so much social media hype.

The real clincher comes as we reveal the percentage split in the distribution of search clicks between SEO and PPC, with natural search accounting for close on 90% of clicks and only 10% landing on PPC.

The real question then is, why do decision makers choose to spend 9 times as much on PPC than on SEO? Is it seen as the easy solution? Is it because they believe it does what it says on the tin? Or do decision makers still believe that SEO is unpredictable and is our industry still tarred by cowboys promising first page results for $100? (No offence to Bas and the Cowboys)

I believe this sets the scene for some interesting times ahead for SEO’s. Everyone wants a piece of the action and we clearly have not seen the end of the $100 special, but we have certainly seen the decision makers getting wiser to these sales pitches.

Search is a maturing market – we have spent the last 5 years educating the market as to what Search can achieve, and our job is far from over. I find myself speaking less about what we can do with search and more about what we can do for your bottom line, and a large part of this discussion is conversion. Whether the visitor arrives at your door via SEO or PPC, the focus is still to convert into a sale. Business owners very quickly do some sums and work out where they are getting the best ROI and we always see them shifting more budget from PPC to SEO. Our most recent example is Douglas and Gordon where we showed a 250% increase in non branded search relating to a 75% drop in cost per conversion while actually cutting the spend by 33%!

I expect this pie chart to shift with the SEO wedge becoming far more prominent through 2010. A lot of empirical data shows that folks trust natural listings more than sponsored listings. The conversion rate of natural traffic is higher than that of PPC traffic and, last but not least, SEO is an investment going forward whereas PPC is like a fireworks display – at the end of the night it has all gone up in smoke!

Many thanks to Rand and SEOMoz for putting pretty pictures together out of the mass of stats data out there.

Related posts:

1. Search Engine and Social Media Market Share Update
2. Google VS Bing conversions & market share
3. Search engine and social media market share statistics for 2009

SEO – A Maturing Market?

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.

Traditional media, such as print and television, are extremely expensive, even for a 30 second advert or a half-page newspaper/magazine spread, which will more than likely be lining tomorrow’s waste paper bins, or be forgotten by the time the show that was interrupted returns to the screen. In tough financial times, companies can’t really afford to waste money on advertising or marketing that will only make a temporary impression, unless, of course, they have the budget to display these ads on a regular basis. SEM offers consistent coverage, along with the 24/7 principle.

By optimally using search engine marketing, companies have the benefit of making a lasting impression on their market, who can visit their website at any time (if the brand has already been established), or discover them through the SERPs (if the site has been effectively optimised for particular terms used by the target market) and social media sites. Information on the company is therefore constantly available online, and can also have the positive effect of building trust within its market through a tangible presence and not just a fleeting advert.

The smaller funds that are required to run a successful SEM campaign are more likely to guarantee a larger ROI than the huge budgets that are put into traditional media. Naylor nailed the concept with his comment, “£50k spent on newspaper advertising might get you a single full page spread and, at best, a few hundred thousand eyeballs for a couple of seconds. £50k spent on organic search will get you tens of thousands of visitors a day for years to come”. And even better, this can all be tracked through tools such as Google Analytics. How do you effectively track the results of traditional media channels on a particular target market?

Related posts:

1. Global Search Market Share – Google domination
2. Online retail to beat the Xmas crunch
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To what extent is the global credit crunch affecting SEM?

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.

Attractive content is spread widely, encouraging users to visit the site and view it for themselves, which generates brand awareness for the site.

“Brand awareness is when people recognize your brand as yours. This does not necessarily mean they prefer your brand (brand preference), attach a high value to, or associate any superior attributes to your brand, it just means they recognize your brand and can identify it under different conditions.”

There needs to be careful consideration when creating brand awareness, as you don`t want your site to be known for the wrong reasons. That`s why the content that attracts users needs to compliment your site and its branding. When users are trying to read an article and a pop up banner jumps into sight without warning (and practically sends them into seizures), it could do more harm than good for that site`s branding (I`m a little biased against banners). Creating attractive content on a regular basis and throughout the site, on the other hand, will generate a preference (brand preference); meaning users would rather visit your site than your competitors.

I won`t go as far as saying advertising has no place in more community focused internet, just that with the increase of popularity in social sites such as; StumbleUpon, Digg and Mixx, more attention needs to be paid to content.

Related posts:

1. Duplicate content in laymen’s terms
2. Possible digital advertising restrictions for UK companies that use social networking.
3. Digg founder envisions the future of social media advertising

Content, the new advertising