SMX London 2008 - Day 2 Session 4

The final session of the day was entitled "Search 3.0 - Local search and blended results".

Big stat to start you off with - 30 - 40% of all searches have local intent. Heini van Bergen of Tribal Internet Marketing took an over-view look at the emerging dominance of local search, and talked about some of the criteria for getting local search working for you. They broke down in to four main areas:

- On-page factors - phone number, location, keyword-rich URLs and proper contact address. As many of your locational details in your URL as possible!
- Off-page factors - inbound links, keywords in anchor text (again) etc
- Reviews - number of reviews on your site, reviews on third party websites.
- LBL (Local Business Listings) - Google local should be used, get your keywords right, proximity to center of searched location, make sure it's in the right category.

He also talked about the Don'ts - no using multiple LBLs with different details, don't list multiple addresses on your website (for the same thing).

Next up was Susan Hallam, who talked about user behaviour and how the local search engines get their data. One of her best slides was a screenshot from Google Insight (for used car birmingham and similar phrases) which nicely illustrated the down-turn in searches due to the credit crunch. She touched on the addition of review data to Google local results, and stressed the importance of getting your users to review your services on the sites which feed these review results. They can't be on your own site, before you ask! Directories and classifieds sites were also talked about, with the UK version of Craigslist amongst the featured sites you could utilise if right for your business.

Next up, with the task of talking about "everything else" (Fox's words) was Jon Myers from MediaVest. Myers talked mainly about the localisation options within Google PPC advertising, and some of the issues with that as well as the benefits. He also talked about the telephone numbers that get displayed with your local search results, and suggested getting a specific number to use with these listings so that you can monitor ROI from a front page Google local listing - you'll be surprised by it's success. Finally he touched on the use of local search in Mobile searching - local is almost certain to be the distinguishing factor that makes mobile search finally come in to it's own.

SMX London 2008 - Day 2 Session 3

After a typical conference lunch (chicken and cous-cous – hmmmmm, bland!) we head in to session 3, entitled “Search 3.0 – Video search and blended results”. As a big fan of universal search, I’m very interested to see what they have to say.

First up to the podium was Tom Wilde from EveryZing, who talked about video SEO best practise.  EveryZing have a number of ‘products’ that apparently help you get in to universal search – a bold claim considering Google themselves regularly remind us that universal search is only a beta test and won’t always appear - but they definitely seem to know their stuff. Anyway…  Tom started with a very nice graph from Hitwise which shows the increase in traffic from search to video sites (and the decrease in traffic to these sites from social networks). So it’s clear that search is sending more and more traffic to video sites, but why and how? The biggest and seemingly most obvious issue is that video itself isn’t crawled – it’s still all about the text, i.e. the meta tags, the title, the description and the comments. So if you can get that right – and extract the keywords and relevant tags from the video by hand – you will have a much easier time getting in to the search results.

Next up was Brian Marin from Performics (the SEO agency that was bought by Google a while back). Brian talked a bit about the limitations of video search – again highlighting the issue that Tom talked about. But he then moved on to Google’s new Audio Indexing (GAUDI) beta tool, which uses speech recognition technology to index the content of YouTube videos.  As well as making the indexing of video content a lot easier, it will also allow you to navigate straight to the part of a video that mentions your keywords. It isn’t perfect yet though!

Brian then moved on to images – until image recognition is perfected, you’ve still got to remember all the classics for optimising images, i.e. file names, URL, text surrounding the image, ALT / Title attributes, Page title and Inbound link anchor text.  He also talked about ways to optimise images that Google may already have indexed – little things like changing the file attributes (file type, size, width etc) can ensure Google won’t count your image as imagery ‘duplicate content’…! Finally he looked at a few of the images you shouldn’t bother optimising – things like navigational elements, background images etc. He closed with a look at some of the future changes that might happen to image search – scene analysis, visual search, geo-tagging and the like. All very interesting stuff.

Ciaran Norris was the final speaker, who spoke in detail about optimising for YouTube in particular. The basics for optimising YouTube is more views = more ratings = more comments = more views. How do you get viewed more though? Well, very similar to how you get your blog posts read – choose a good title (“exclusive leaked footage that you won’t believe”), use descriptions wisely (moonwalking bear), try to get a good thumbnail (if you can manage it), choose the right tags, encourage commenting / ratings, check your incoming links etc. He also touched on a few of the ‘illegal’ or unethical methods you could use to promote a video, but I won’t go in to those here as they’re all very black-hat.  He ended with a video that his company (Altogether Digital) have just produced for Transport for London (“look out for cyclists”) which is a great example of good content – I will let you look it up yourself!

SMX London 2008 - Day 2 Session 2

The second session of the day that interested me was moderated by the lovely Vanessa Fox, and was entitled “SEO for web 2.0 websites”. The panel once again included Dave Naylor, Nathan Baggia from Microsoft, Tom Critchlow from Distilled and possibly the jazziest-dresser I have ever seen on a panel – Mikkel deMib Svendsen from deMib.com.

Nathan Baggia started off talking about some examples of brilliant web 2.0 sites that simply won’t come up in results due to their appalling SEO.  The best thing about his first example (Arbor snowboards) was the little table of rankings he gave for Arbor rankings for their brand name – Google and Yahoo both rank it 1, while Microsoft Live ranked in 3. He kind’ve skipped over that though…!  Some of the issues/tips he highlighted included:

- Sites built in AJAZ, Silverlight, Flash etc – search engines can’t see the content
- If there isn’t a unique URL for all pages, it’s hard not only for search engines but also for users sending links to their friends. The solution? Make sure your landing page loads quickly,  is built in HTML/CSS etc.
- Some of these sites have massive amounts of content, yet it’s not being read so it isn’t making any impact.
- Don’t build a whole page in Flash, just the elements that NEED to have flash functionality. “Refactor functionality and content”.
- Create a down-level experience – detect user agents to optimise the user experience.
- He also gave some tips that relate to ASP.net and IIS-specific issues, but went over them too fast for me to take notes!

Tom Critchlow followed, who talked about the difficulty of optimising content that a user has written for you (i.e. user generated content won’t be optimised, though it will still be useful content). Some of the tips he gave included: using “recent search queries” lists to generate internal links;  Use internal metrics (stars, thumbs-up, comments etc) to identify missed opportunity pages;  Align your internal voting system (star, favourites etc) with your external voting (share on Digg, Facebook etc); Vanessa Fox added at the end that if you manually edit the title tags of your UGC pages you can see some big gains.

Dave Naylor was up next, and he talked about his own blog as a case study – his blog was recently hacked (the ultimate UGC) though Google very kindly helped him get it crawled again. He also discussed a petition website which he works with, which had to be moderated to stop it’s users going nuts.  His presentation was a lot more negative about Web 2.0, though some of his advice was worth noting – keep control of your site, look at it like a spider would, don’t think that web 2.0 makes you bullet proof.

The final speaker of the session was the aforementioned snazzy-dresser, Mikkel deMib. Mikkel talked mainly about how AJAX works, and what sort of pitfalls you can come up against when trying to optimise an AJAX site. The main take-home message on this, from all the panel and Vanessa Fox too, was that AJAX is an absolute beast in terms of SEO issues, to tread very carefully.

SMX London 2008 - Day 2 Session 1

The first session I attended this morning was the serious sounding “Industrial Strenth SEO” and included a number of heavy-duty speakers, including Richard Baxter of Cheapflights.co.uk, Gary Moyle of Guava (nee Neutralize) and Dave Naylor.

First up was Gary Moyle,  who talked about the problem of Industrial Strength SEO compared to enterprise-level projects. The main differences are apparently the internal link structure, organisational challenges and the impact of on-site changes. Up to this point Gary’s talk is sounding a bit like a pitch for Guava, but he soon turns to some common problems and solutions that one might face – though he talks extremely fast so I struggled to take notes! He didn’t tell me anything that I - or any of our clients shouldn’t already know really, but it’s a useful reminder. Some of the problems he identified were:

- Pagination (i.e. “click for next page, 2 of 87”) – solve it with a Google-style navigation (i.e 1 2 3 4 5 6 end). Another issue is orphaning – pages going up and changing so quickly (or losing their main links) that they don’t have a chance to rank (i.e. news sites). Solution – archive them, make sure you’ve got a sitemap.
- Internal link structure – problems can arise when you have a large organisation with multiple sites or people in charge of different sections. Solution – be sensible (in a nutshell!), use a good file structure (pyramid), nice URLs, be as readable as possible, make sure all departments know where and how to link to other sections, make sure everyone knows your target keywords.
- Time and resource – having a lack of internal resource to handle SEO can be a massive issue for large organisations (apparently). Solution – automate where possible, integrate SEO in to your design guidelines, do workshops.
- Other tips – leverage your existing network of sites, work with IT to maximise the SEO benefit from new developments and projects, use keyword tools.

Next up to the podium was Richard Baxter, who expressed his surprise at being asked to talk at a conference to an audience of mainly agency SEOs. He outlined what he felt were the biggest challenges for the in-house SEO bods, including:

- Communicating what you do
- Helping the business understand what SEO is
- What decisions are good, bad, ugly?
- Helping everyone understand how they can contribute
- Building good SEO practise in to all areas
- Synchronising you activities on a global basis
- Getting resource – recruiting good SEO resources.

I won’t go in to his piece in too much detail, since it was aimed much more squarely at people who do their SEO on their own, and for obvious reasons I don’t come in to contact with those guys very often.  One thing he did emphasise a lot though was the importance of reporting – it seems that the Cheapflights guys keep such a close eye on their SEO progress, they even have alerts that tell them when a link to them has disappeared or expired,  so they can investigate why. Sounds time consuming but I bet it gives some great insight! His final gem was a site called the Web Link Validator – www.relsoftware.com/wlv - I haven’t tried it out yet but he sold it well. Advanced Link Manager sounds good too – www.advancedlinkmanager.com.

Third to the podium was Dave Naylor, who also spent the first part of his talk bigging-up his agency Bronco and the tools he has built. I’ve not used any of them so can’t vouch for them but you can find them all at http://tools.davidnaylor.co.uk - some of them look quite useful. He made some good points about grouping your links to find out why you might have geo-targetting issues. He can group them by TLD (top-level domain), C-block IP addresses (which helped him spot a lot of links from BlogSpot) and all sorts of other things. All of his tools are apparently built by two PHP programmers, so I guess that goes to show what you can do with some good ideas and a few good programmers! He also has a nice tool called Playground, which looks like a plug-in to Google Chrome and gives you all sorts of juice – though he readily admits that all the data gathered by this tool will be gathered by his team for their own use, which is fair enough I guess. His take-home message, which I can completely get behind, was “Build your own tools!”. Nice.

Finally for session four was Neil Stickells from Steak, who covered a lot of the same things as the other three speakers, though he had the best presentation style of all of them! His main tips were:

- Manage expectations of the people funding and running the project;
- Use analytics wisely;
- Validate your data until you trust it completely;
- Benchmark everything you can possibly think of – including all your competitors and their rankings;
- Train everybody – SEO can’t work in isolation!
- Optimise your site – even with big sites this can be fairly simple;
- Get the right tools – there are all sorts available out there already. He included one of my favourites – www.auditmypc.com.
- Reporting – tailor it to the audience, agree KPIs etc, don’t drown with data!
- Maintain the profile and share you successes.
- Usability – don’t just drive traffic to your site, convert it!

SMX London 2008 - Day 1 Session 2

After the excitement of session 1, we moved on to the world of the 'Global Search Universe' for session 2. If I'm perfectly honest, this session wasn't half as interesting as the keynote speech, but I still got a fair bit out of it. However, my notes are more of a stream-of-consciousness than any useful text, so I'm simply going to present you with a bunch of interesting things that I learned in Session 2...

- If the same proportion of people as the US had broadband in Asia, there would be approximately 2.5 billion internet users with a high-speed connection in the East.
- If you look at the world-wide distribution of IP addresses, the UK is second only to the US, taking up approx. 20% of the non-US IP volume. The next 4 countries are China, Japan, Germany and France.
- The top 5 languages used on the internet are English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and French
- Google now makes more money internationally than they do in the US, with the US revenue figures staying pretty much flat for the past 3 quarters.
- The third most popular Google property accessed in the UK today (after .co.uk and .com) is .PL, the Polish version of Google.
- According to Robin Goad and Hitwise, Google now consumes over 88% of the UK search market. For the US it's now approximately 73%, for Australia it's around 90% and for Singapore it's 71%.
- The percentage of searches being carried out in the UK which are classed as 'Navigational' (i.e. typing in Facebook to Google rather than going there direct) is a massive 88%!
- The volume of 'generic' searches (i.e. cheap flights) is decreasing as users get more sophisticated - the volume of complex searches (i.e. cheap flights to Barcelona flying from Manchester) is on the increase.
- According to Linus Gregoriadis, 60% of companies are planning to increase their spend on SEO this year. In 2008, £330m will be spent on SEO in the UK.

When asked a similar question to session one, Linus from e-consultancy was a lot more cautious, saying that claims that Search is recession-proof may need revising. This is due to the conversion rates being lower he says, as people are spending less.

I was going to add a photo to this entry, but when browsing through them it seems that most conference photos come out looking very similar. Instead, I shall treat you to an image that excited me far more than is probably sensible - it's the building used in Spooks on BBC1, which I realised with great glee is next door to the conference building!

SMX London 2008 - Day 1 Session 1

Well it’s that time of year again and SMX London has rolled in to town, complete with most of the usual familiar faces (Chris Sherman is chairing, the lovely Vanessa Fox is in attendance – sadly no sign of Danny Sullivan…) and all the usual gubbins. I’ve been taking copious notes in the sessions I’ve been to so far, so let’s have a look at who has been talking this morning. Note: Unlike the SMX Social I attended last year in New York, this SMX is more wide-ranging and features three ‘tracks’ – in other words, I can’t attend all the sessions. So what we will be covering is just a small selection of what is actually on offer. That being said, on with the notes…

Session one is the keynote for the morning, and features talks from Zhao Hui and Nathan Buggia, both of Microsoft. Zhao covers the SEM side of search marketing, and his presentation includes a guided tour of the Microsoft Live Keyword Analysis tool which integrates in to Excel. The highlight for me was the ‘commercialisation’ score (forgive me if I got that wrong, it’s called something along those lines!) which scores a keyword based on the commercial intent it implies. So the keyword ‘iPod’ might have a commercial score of 45%, whereas a keyword such as ‘Buy iPod London’ might have a score of 75%. Interesting stuff.

Following on from Zhao was his colleague Nathan, who looks after more of the SEO type stuff, and this was obviously the much more interesting part of the session for me. Nathan gave a tour of the fairly new Microsoft Live Search webmaster center. Being a bit of a cynic, my first reaction on seeing what I shall hence-forth refer to as the MLSWC was ‘wow, Microsoft are soooo behind Google, this is totally old news’. But to be fair to Nathan and his team, they’ve actually added in some really interesting tools which Google haven’t got round to yet. The features I liked in the MLSWC include:

- A tool which tells you which of the many out-going links from your site are linking to sites with associations with Malware. This then allows you to remove these potentially killer links and should keep everyone happy!
- A tool for highlighting areas of your site’s SEO campaign which Microsoft considers ‘spam’, plus a form to allow you to tell Microsoft once you have corrected these issues.
- The site crawler which lists details for all your pages allows you to filter certain sub-directories of sub-domains, to let you explore in even more detail. Nice addition!
- Keyword density checks allow you to type in any keyword you can think of, and Microsoft will present you with an ordered list of the pages on your site which it considers to be most relevant to that keyword.

The session was very interesting, and ended with a few questions from moderator Chris Sherman – including a notable comment about Mobile search and whether it will EVER truly become the issue it’s hyped to be (answer – not sure!). Nathan’s top tip when asked was ‘Build something that people want’ – obvious maybe, but still something people could do with abiding by.

When the questions inevitably turned to the credit crunch, both Microsoft speakers boldly claimed that the world of search is ‘recession proof’, with Nathan citing a report from this week which notes the drop in spend on display advertising. Both speakers were asked to give their vision for search in 5 years time, though Nathan was very cagey and when pressed admitted that he had to word his answer carefully so as not to give away any Microsoft secrets. But what he did reveal is the vague assertion that “Search will be a richer experience, and we will look back on the days of 10 blue links with hazy fondness”.

Session 2 of Day one will follow shortly…

Pubcon Top 3

It's not been long since the end of the coveted Pubcon 2007 and it seems like some gems have surfaced.

My Pubcon top 3 so far have been:   

1. Stephan Spencers interview with Matt Cutts
Matt advised using the Search Engine SDK for Flash and gave a simple explanation as to why Google have the Flash problem in the first place.
Other titbits include confirming that a good link is just a good link, regardless of being on a .edu domain and that social bookmarking links are not inherently devalued unless done so by the service provider.

Another interesting topic was Matts views on the use of humans in search; he also mentioned a case when an entry would be manually de-indexed. 

2. Subdomains and subdirectories
There was some "confirmation" on the use of subfolders vs. subdomains and host crowding; this was covered in an earlier Tamar post so I will not cover that in detail but you can read the earlier post.

3. Interview with Neil Patel
Lee Odden interviewed Neil Patel who revealed a rather unorthodox approach to generating Youtube subscribers.

What I learned in Shanghai!

Lots! And while we do love to educate both clients and readers of this blog I am afraid I am going to have to keep the juicy search conversion stuff to myself, for now!

But for those who may wonder what shanghai is like here are some observations:

• Whistles, all you hear is whistles from people directing traffic, very tuneful!
• Cabs, close your eyes, seriously!
• People, not as many as you would imagine but all very friendly (one cab driver was the exception) and helpful
• Architecture, a personal favourite of mine, the amount and variety of modern buildings is awesome, and I loved them all.
• Food, delicious, including popcorn style deep fried squid!
• Neon, just amazing, best part is the boats with cinema size screens going up and down the huangpu river showing adverts!
• Smoking, practically none!
• Shopping, dangerous, try Plaza 66 on nanjing road, your wallet will never be the same again!
• Scale, vast, but all really done on a human scale, not sure how
• Parks, plenty and green, great for excercise!

So all in all an amazing place that exceeded all my expectations. I will be back!

And finally...

Insects, they love me and give me kisses! Well, sort of!

Shanghai surprise!

This week I am in Shanghai checking up on the new office to see how that is going (great!) and to get more of a feel for SEO and Search Conversion in china.

What I am really excited about is the new developments that will come out in the next year. I think we are going to see some interesting innovations as Google attempts to take on Baidu in its own backyard. I am sure this going to lead to exciting new products and features from both of these big players. New google site www.g.cn has 10 related searches for example.

Competition for Google should be good for the user as this may force the pace of evolution. And while there is no suggestion that Google has been slow to adapt to date, it may be that Baidu may squeeze something interesting out of Google.

Back to Shanghai, my first impression is one of a great mix of old and new. Some of the new architecture is amazing - photos soon - and many of the old style buildings are very well preserved.

Everyone is very nice and if I could just kick this jetlag into touch I am sure it will look even better than seen through my blurry eyes so far.

More info from Shanghai to come soon!

Google Mobile at the IAB

Mobile Search presentaion at the Internet Advertisng Bureau

On Tuesday 17th July I attended the IAB Search Marketing Council where among other things there was a presentation on Mobile Search by Google.

There were a few points about the development of Mobile in Asia, US and Europe that were worth noting. I think these raised more questions than we actually had time for so feedback is very welcome! These were, and in no particular order:

• Mobile Revenue is doubling every year - figure were from MMetrics
• No SMS in Japan, so Google have an email based application that replicates SMS - any comments on that?
• 'Click to call' is currently on trial
• Ads served in Japan on Mobile run 2 sponsored - 10 natural - 2 sponsored
• Japan two to three years ahead in mobile
• India the biggest growth market in mobile use
• Future mobile applications in Mobile Search (results) include images and video 
• 'Adult' and 'Gambling' are, not surprsingly the sectors leading the development of Mobile Search
• Inhibitors to growth are walled gardens (France), technology & perceived costs

So pretty standard information but some nuggets in there for me including the fact that in France ther is a  limit in choice to 'preferred' suppliers. The general 'internet' is available but to access it is not as easy as it should be. And no SMS in Japan? Is that correct?

This also follows on from an announcement in the Wall Street Journal that Google is developing a new search service for cellphones (mobile) that will help consumers find and buy ringtones, games and other mobile content.

So probably not the end of this story by a long way!