Events and Conferences

It feels like ages since SES came back to London last February, but I have only just found time to go through the scribbles and notes that I’d taken during the conference. I have managed to pull out my five top takeaways from the event, which I intend to take action on during 2010.

I like attending Search Marketing industry conference as it does not only provide you with different insights, new experiences and networking opportunities, but it also helps you remember that you have some skills and knowledge that, for some reason, you are not using to good effect.

To the point, my top five takeaways from SES London 2010 were:

• More emphasis on ‘Conversion rate optimisation’ (CRO):

  There is great potential in implementing CRO techniques and often the secret is to test more often. Read Bryan Eisenberg’s advice on Mel Carson’s blog post or this other one from Andrew Girdwood and watch the video on top right where Bryan is interviewed by Greg Jarboe. If that is not enough, you may want to check the work being done by Conversion rate experts, which I mention in my recap post from the SEOMoz Pro seminar las October.




















• Tailor your web analytics data reports.

  Focus on the datasets you need to do your work and then make data driven decisions. Give your boss/client the datasets she/he needs to get their ‘buy-in’ into the SEO campaign you are lobbying for. Use custom filters, advanced segments, custom reporting to drill down and segment your data so that you can focus on what is needed to gain the ‘buy-in’.

• Improve your keyword research techniques

  Try picking more long tails, drawing out more data on them and test their ROI levels upon implementation.

  To get better at Keyword Research, I would recommend to read Richard Baxter’s posts on vlookups, excel tables and pivot tables.

• Don’t always follow 100% what the expert SEO speakers say

  This is industry where only your own testing and analysis will give you the answers and help you conclude of actions. While I agree that it is good to follow good practice advice, sometimes you have to balance what’s being said against the specificities of the site you are dealing with. Every site is different (eg: size, link portfolio, content) and therefore there cannot be a ‘one rule/opinion fits all’. An example of this is the ‘sitemaps’ topic. Some will tell you there is a lot of benefit in using them and others will say they’re useless. It all depends. This is one of my tweets during the session on ‘Pushing Content Via XML, RSS & Site Maps‘

  

• Learn Affiliate marketing

  This is a area of Online marketing that I had been ignoring until now but after attending the session ‘New Affiliate Opportunities & Strategies’, I became inspired and noted down some good ideas to take both to my in-house SEO job and to my own sites.

• Get better at Link building by drilling further on competitor’s link portfolios.

  Jim Boykin‘s session on link building reminded me that I have to get better and faster at using tools like Linkscape and SEO Majestic to analyse competitors’s link portfolio’s and find those links which my sites also qualify for.

If you would like to read more about SES London 2010, the official full blog coverage from SES is a good start.

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Some of the common mistakes multinational companies make when deploying their search marketing strategies are translating keywords.  If you want your SEO strategies to work you should avoid translating keywords. Every language needs to be treated separately and specific keyword research needs to be carried out for every one of them. This point was made very clear at the International Search Summit when speakers like Andy Atkins-Krüger and Bill Hunt quite rightly pointed it out.

During this conference a lot of  lessons were taught. This post is just an overview of what I considered the best highlights for this one day annual event. If you however would like to know everything that happened during this event, you can find a detailed recap post I wrote for the Youmoz section of SEOMoz

Don’t's

• Don’t use IP address country detection methods to redirect users to specific language versions of your site. You website could mistakenly take a search engine crawler for a real user and redirect it to the English US version of your website. The other versions of your site would then never get crawled.
• If a targeted keyword is an accented term, it needs to be considered as a different keyword than its non-accented version. This also applies for plural versions of the term. Eg: bus =NOT buses, impresión in Spanish is not the same as impresion
• ignore Yahoo if you plan to penetrate in Japan. It is the predominant search engine with a 53% market share, however, don’t completely ignore Google either as it takes up the remainder 47% market share.
• neglect doing the right research into Dutch culture and society if you plan to bring your product in the Netherlands.
• fall in the mistake to think that traditional Spanish can be applied to the Latin American context, particularly keywords. Every Latam country speaks a different Spanish. Eg: ‘renta autos’ in Mexico vs ‘alquiler autos’ en Argentina.
• ignore the great opportunities that Latam markets present at this moment:  SEO is easier than in Europe and NorthAmerica, paid search has very low CPC in Latam (€0.20 per click or even less), yet there is a fairly good average conversion rate.

Do’s

• use language meta tags : <html lang =”de”>  or <html lang =”en-gb”>
• enable “enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMTs) area account
• embed your digital assets in text within your webpage copy for better ‘Universal Search’ results on the SERPs.
• Try MajesticSEO to gain an insight into your competitor’s link portfolio. These can be good sources to grab new links opportunities. Use the folders facility to keep up with the verticals, and use the Link Reclamation feature to get a list of the top pages in the domain.
• Produce two or three versions of the same press release if you plan to distribute it via different channels.
• Take into account that Japanese alphabet is made of four different alphabets and words are not separated by spaces as in the Western alphabets.
• Get hosted in China and choose the right host eg: China Host if you wnt to penetrate in the Chinese market
• Use ‘simplified Chinese’ as opposed to ‘traditional Chinese’
• translate your copy in other languages as this is fine so long as you don’t translate your target keywords
• use neutral Spanish to target Latam countries if you only have the resources to have a single websites
• consider ‘Machine translation’ (MT) as a solution with an element of human review if you are responsible for enterprise-level content production.

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar, the presentations and the excellent tips I got on International Search. If you would like to read more, you can start with my detailed recap on the SEOMoz blog or the recap written on the official Web certain blog: Multilingual Search.

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Dates: Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 October 2009

Wow, what a couple of action-packed days!

SEOMoz Pro training seminar is an annual advanced SEO training event organised by SEOMoz. The event ran in London for first time this year, in partnership with Distilled, a London-based search marketing agency.

I found this seminar very educational, the quality of the presentations were of high standard due to the topics chosen and the generous approach to give out actionable tips made this event unique. If I had to choose only one  SEM conference to attend every year, likely this one would stand a high chance.

I am not going to cover the event in detail because that’s already been done by SEOMoz, Distilled and plenty of other SEO bloggers that attended the seminar. Instead I am simply going to list my own top 10 learning points or tips that I took home after the seminar.

1. Invest time into mastering Excel for long term benefits: get on with Excel’s advanced features, including filters and pivot tables. It will help you enormously to organise your keyword/keyphrases terms lists, perform permutations of different kinds, mix data from other sources (eg: Linkscape reports from competitors sites, data from GA reports….). It will, in a nutshell, help you analyse data and make faster decisions to move onto other tasks, from Will Critchlow and Richard Baxter.

2. Microsoft has produced a Search Engine optimisation toolkit and is recommended by Dave Naylor.

3. If you do in-house SEO, Richard Baxter‘s advice is to invest as much time as needed to justify the impact of an SEO investment to the management in order to win the business case for SEO. This learning point was complemented by Rand Fishkin‘s presentation the following morning, packed with pretty charts and graphs, to help win the case for SEO to your management or clients. From a corporate SEO perspective I found these two contributions invaluable.

During this presentation, there was a very interesting piece of data that drew my attention: over a third of search engine users are still not aware of the existence of Google Adwords as an advertising scheme. Also, over half of all search engine users are unable to recognise PPC advertising on the SERPs (search engine result pages) meaning they probably click on them thinking they are part of the overall set of natural results.

4. Like SEO, social media should be part of an overall online strategy instead of being a standalone initiative (from Lucy Langdon)

5. Bad links can cause harm. When it comes to a situation where rankings have been lost, a lot of those so-called penalties are often just filters. Removing cloaking (eg: hidden links) and ‘bad neighbourhood’ inbound links, can greatly improve your rankings. (from Jane Copland).

6. Ben Hendrickson, the mastermind behind Linkscape gave a speech during the seminar. His conclusions based on SEOMoz Labs various tools being developed was that:

- Search engines are not placing as much importance on H tags as they used to. Keywords placed into H1 and H2 tags do not represent a strong signal to the search engines as those included in images ALT tags.

- Keywords on the domain name have considerable weight in the ranking algorithm, however, repeating the keyword on the path name doesn’t seem to have any positive effect on rankings.

- It is necessary to have more than one complex models for defining ranking factors. It is necessary to look at some other models.

7. The best strategy to be succesful at link building is to realise your site or your client site’s USP ( Unique selling proposition). Once you come to terms with this principle it becomes easier to earn links naturally (using tools like Linkscape or Back link analysis from SEOMoz to identify link opportunities from your competitor’s link portfolios) – from Tom Critchlow.

8. Without any doubt, Ben Jesson‘s presentation provided excellent ideas on how to increase your CRO (conversion rate optimisation) :

- answering customer objections to your product (the main landing page has to be able to respond to those objections).
- use testimonials to highlight answers to some of those objections.
- perform A/B Testing via Google website optimiser or other tools

Ben already presented some of this material at the SMX London in May this year. The difference with this presentation is that a lot more detail was provided on how to actually get the job done.

9. If you are managing a big site, it is worth spending some time on improving page load time. As the web grows bigger, this is something that search engines are going to start considering more firmly as a factor for ranking sites. I cannot remember who I got this bit from.

10. Make better use of SEOmoz tools and use a combination of them to find out how your competitors do link building, what works best for them and where their linkbait is: Linkscape in conjunction with some of the best tools in SEOmoz Labs.

There was a great deal more of useful tips and advice that was given, such as dealing with scalable information architecture, online PR stuff, vertical search such as Google maps and local business listing optimisation, video sitemap strategies, content strategies, etc… of all, the points listed above were the most significant for me.

One other noticeable trend I noticed was the large number of SEOs I met that were involved in affiliation or running some form of affiliation marketing on their sites… there was a great deal of affiliate marketing discussion and buzz going on during the event itself and also during the evening social gatherings.

If you are interested in reading more about this event and other bloggers’ recaps, I suggest you google ‘SEOMoz Pro Training seminar 2009′ and you will find plenty of related material in different languages depending on the local version of Google you use. For example, this one from Fernando Maciá, in Spanish, was one of the first blogs out to be covering the event.

I had the chance to meet or catch up with some SEO peers : Dan Reynolds from Strategic TMC, David Jackson from Sixt, Kirsteen Fox from Iglu, Dan Barker from Baker Ross, Ian Bryce from Sony, Alec Kinnear from foliovision, Ari nahmani from Matan Media, Ashkan Parsa from Netgrade, Annabel Hodges.  As I didn’t exchange cards with everyone, apologies to those I do not mention, please drop me an email and I will add you to the list.

As usual, one of the best things about these SEO events is the networking during or after the sessions.

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