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Leweb 2011 Paris is nearly here

by David on 11/09/2011

leweb conference in Paris 2011

leweb'11 Paris

Last year I attended Le Web Conference in Paris for first time. This conference rocks! It is the largest European conference in the web marketplace. There is a place in there for a diverse range of audiences: inhouse marketers looking to keep abreast of Internet developments, digital marketers looking to learn new things and meet contacts, entrepreneurs looking to establish new partnerships and expand their business, start-ups looking to promote their ideas to potential audiences and business partners.

This year LeWeb 2011 expands onto a 3-day conference on 7, 8, and 9 December, and the theme is SOLOMO, which stands for Social-Local-Mobile.

Tickets are still going at €1490 until end of September. However if you are a freelance developer, a student or a startup, there is a special price for you. Read about it at the bottom of the registration page. Further, if you are a start-up and want to join the startup competition, the registration is open!

Some interesting figures:

  • 3000 participants
  • 60 countries
  • 300 + journalists
  • 50 partners
  • hear and see the industry’s most known icons before you

I enjoyed this conference so much last year that I wrote a blog post covering the highlights of LeWeb’10 on the Youmoz section of SEOmoz, and a more detailed one on my own blog.

To get a better picture of what you will get at Le Web if you attend, watch Loic and Geraldine presenting LeWeb 2011:

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Three advice tips for inhouse SEOs from Matt Cutts

by David on 17/03/2011

A recent video by Matt Cutts gives his advice for in-house SEOs. Whether this can be taken to enterprise-level SEO advice or not, it depends much on the size of the organisation where you work.

The advice given is however applicable 100% to enterprise-level SEO. The three main areas that Matt proposes to work on are:

  • Speed performance of your website
  • Having good internal CMS practices
  • Embracing social media marketing

He states that speed performance is only a slight factor in the algorithm, but it can affect ROI on your site, as web user tend to favour sites that are fast. He actually suggest minifying CSS and javascrip files.

With regards to the good internal CMS practices, Matt advises to have an organisation strategy in place that includes educating people on SEO and why it is there, but also ensuring that there is a good interlinking strategy in place with the right use of anchor text.

Lastly, Matts advises to pay attention to social media marketing as a great way to drive traffic to your site. He does not mention the social signals used by google for website rankings, but focuses on the add-value aspects of building great content and spread it using social media.

They are definitely three good pieces of advice for in-house SEOs that can put you in the right pace to improve and make your search marketing strategies more effective, don’t you think?

Image top right by Aramistech

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I will be at LeWeb10 this year

by David on 02/06/2010

Le Web logo

I am on the participants list for ‘LeWeb’ 2010!

LeWeb event in Paris is one of the biggest Internet events in Europe. It has been selling out every year for the last 6 years with 2500 participants in 2009. It is aimed at all enthusiasts who take a deep interest in the web, web technologies, and the various opportunities it bringing us all.

After having missed this unique event for six consecutive years, I am making it this year attendance and am really looking forward to it. I bought my ticket early back in February on 50% reduction as an ‘Early bird’.

Every year there is a program theme for LeWeb. To date the program theme and agenda for 2010 is not yet decided. Last year’s theme was the ‘Real-time web’ and they spoke about Twitter & Facebook and their exponential growth in the previous year, reactions from Google, Microsoft and MySpace. They also spoke about opportunities for new entrepreneurs in the light of the ‘real-time web’, the many different applications being made available for iphone, Twitter, and facebook as well as the challenges it presents.

One other topic that was discussed last year, which I think it will also be popular this year is the ’free culture’ of the web and the challenges this presents for companies that need to get a return on the investment they make in offering free Internet services.

One other remarkable highlight of last year’s LeWeb event was the participation of Queen Rania Al Abdullah, from Jordan who spoke about how she had been using Social media for educational purposes and helping raise the need for every child around the world to be educated on the real-time web for real time change at the Le Web Conference – Paris December 10th, …

Like in all big events, there are official bloggers that ensure there is enough coverage during all sessions for everyone to be up-to-date with all ‘goings-on’ at LeWeb. Some of these official bloggers can be popular and successful European Search news blogs, such as Search cowboys.

To add to the standard agenda packed with scheduled events, there are usually some workshops running in parallel, and a ‘start-up’ competition usually sponsor by some online news player, TechCrunch did the job in 2009.

If you want to know a bit more about what’s going to happen this year at LeWeb, hear the Loic LeMur present LeWeb 2010 as the venue will be moved back to LesDocks, where it used to be done back in 2007:

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Tired of the ‘seo is dead’ thing

by David on 12/02/2010

By now, you will have read or heard the news on the Internet: ‘SEO is dead’… the whole fad has made some people freak out a bit, particularly those who are not into SEO but directly touched by it: clients, friends who work in sales, affiliates, work colleagues: they have been asking me if they should stop writing good content and worrying about getting more links and concentrate on doing more social media.

seo is dead bookThey have heard that social media seems to be the new SEO. So SEO appears to be dying and social media seems to be taking over and therefore social media marketing is taking over search engine optimisation (seo)….

I have been hearing his ‘SEO is dead’ fad ever since before last summer. The rumour spreaded out quite quickly in the organisation where I work as someone sent out a link to the website that tells about the book you see on the left. The same day I had more than 10 colleagues asking me what I thought about it, whether SEO was really out of the game. My answer was no at the time, and it still is today. So I have written this post to send the link to those who ask me in future.

For as long as at least one of the three points below are true, there will always be SEO, in my opinion:

  • Search engines are like disabled users in many ways
  • websites exist and need to be promoted
  • relevancy and importance are two key ranking factors in the search engine algorithms

SEO and social media are perfectly compatible and they work best when they are working together. SEO is still young, but social media is younger, therefore if I had to choose I would likely alway give priority to investing in SEO. Of course every business is different and there may be times when the nature of the business dictates a social media inclination.

I am listing a few blog posts here to provide some background into the ‘SEO is dead’ story, so that you can then make your own conclusions:

Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting and also co-author of one of the best SEO books written recently: The Art of SEO
posted an article on SEW a few weeks ago titled: Is SEO Dying? How will it Evolve?. Eric kicks off his post by saying that many people don’t understand what SEO really is. He also explains why social cannot be taken as a unique way of determining importance (social votes) at least for now, and he uses the Twitter example: ‘what’s best a tweet or an authoritative link?‘

Recently Peter Davanzo made the following comment on a post he wrote for the SEOBook blog:

“People have been predicting the death of SEO since, well, the beginning of SEO”

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I am blogging

by David on 15/10/2009

This is my very first post.  I have been thinking about blogging for ages but was not quite sure if I would find enough reasons to spend time writing about one of the things I am passionate about: SEO and web marketing. So I am giving it a go.

I am going to do my best to make my readers engaged and interested in my stories. Rather than reinventing the wheel once again with another SEO blog, I will try and keep it ‘to the point’ and cover only practical topics, such as:

  • the common issues I come across when starting new projects
  • the basics of SEO and search engine marketing, I will do my best to keep it jargon free
  • recaps of recent trends, developments in the SEM, SEO world and even on social media
  • practical tips, hints and ideas that can help you move ahead with your SEO strategies.

The first point ocurred to me as I keep finding myself sometimes in repetitive situations where I ended writing long emails to explain an angle. It would be good to have those points explained in the form of blog posts so that I can refer my contacts to them where necessary.

Another one reason I started thinking about blogging was that I realised that I was actually quite passionate about certain areas of SEO and I actually wanted to write about it

The third reason was that wordpress has been talk of the town for quite a few years now, and I want to learn to use it inside out from my own hands, as it had become the de-facto blogging tool aimed to individuals, small and medium enterprises. I had used wordpress before when blogging about my past trips to China and Mongolia but only for limited periods. I had also been using Movable Type corporately on a blog that I set up custom-built for the British Council, but I had no real hands-on experience on the most exciting areas of wordpress blogging: plug-ins, multilingual support add-ons, blogging for SEO benefit, and actually feel that I was a blogger, despite not being good at writing.

At this point I have to mention that English not being my first language made me consider to actually blog in Spanish, my mother tongue. This is likely to be,  in the long term, my best option, but for the time being, I will stick to English, just to get started. Also because most of the client work I am doing at the moment is in English, so it makes sense to write for those that are more likely to be interested in reading my lines.

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