SMX London Expo – Day 2 – Part 2

Buying For SEO

This was an interesting one touted as ‘My Secret Weapon’ on the conference agenda. The main focus was buying sites and domains to give your own efforts a boost in the rankings. First up was Richard Kershaw of qualitynonsense.com. He presented his case in a list:

Why does he do it?

• To Gain Links
• Be on topic
• Deals with competition
• Grow your links faster

The good news is that all the tools to by sites are in the public domain and expensive ones are only optional. He noted that quality sites rarely change hands but warned that it is best to buy undervalued sites rather than the cheap sites. Owners will tend to overvalue their property when dealing with them so be prepared to haggle.

How to find the right sites?

There are plenty of ways to find sites on the market. Look at bankruptcy notices. Locate sites in DMOZ and find those hub sites. Look at your competitor’s back links and use paid tools like Syntryx.

The approach will not be easy…

Like with link building in general, most of it involve relationship building. Use the phone to make a call directly to the owner otherwise the primary method of communications would have to be done via email. Try not to mention about money straight away but be tenacious. The objective at the start of a conversation would be gain trust with the owner. Make sure you get to see traffic data. When the time comes make the deal make a firm offer and make it easy to do business.

Don’t get scammed

Move quickly once the deal is in its closing stages. You should make sure that a trusted doamin registrar is involved. Be careful not to get influenced by the more colourful characters – you can use escrow.com as an intermediate. It is best not to trust anybody untill the domain is in your hands.

How important is a domain?

You can raise the sales by 30% just by buying an old domain. Think about the legacy of a domain if you are buying. URLs could have been banned or be associated with negativity (ex-porn URLs)

Dave Naylor

Naylor seems to disagree with Kershaw in that emails are not the suitable for contacting. Contacting should be done through telephone. He states that traffic and on theme topicality are much more important than PageRank.

Be aware of the following:-

• Age of Site

• Quailty of site

• Traffic

• Rankings

• Price

Beaware that Google algorithms will look out for the passing of WHOis information. It will reset you very quickly if you leave tracks.

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SMX London Expo – Day 2 – Part 1

Mind Blowing Link building

First up to speak on Day 2 was Lyndon Antley. His approach was dubbed the ‘Psycho Way’ and the story was very familiar. Lyndon described Psychological hook that works on a subconscious level. He reflected that when it works it can bring lots of valuable links. He cited his piece about the 13 yr old who got hold of a credit card and invited several escorts in to his home to play Xbox. The story ignited getting press from the likes of The Sun and national coverage. The story was in fact 100% untrue and Lyndon stated that it was notified in the actual. So what made it viral? It excited people on a fundamental level. This is what we want to happen. Buying an opportunity to link to something – Emotion is important. He summerized the concept of the story: Boy 13 – Boy discovers girls – Some thing deep within him awakes. Quite dramatic in description but effective nonetheless. Other factors included sexy women, Political correctness gone mad and Pizza delivery (related with convenicnce / downtime / happy times). He said that to write these stories you have to accept that they have to be simple. Take for instance a cleaning carpet firm, a story could be cleaning blood from a carpet in 10minutes. Good for assassins? Or Lyndon got back to the Xbox story and 13 year old cleans carpet in 24hr strip joint; his words!

Next up , Tom Critchlow. Straight off, donating to charities can actually gain you links from Charity websites. If you are a big client then that would be an instant link as long as it does not take a form of a advertisement.

Find and use expired high PR pages to build links. The only issue is that you have to email the webmaster to update the page in question. Usually it can happen but sometimes in cases where you have no such luck, you have to resort to mineing the page for all its back links. How do you go about finding these? Use Google and tap in your chosen sector and ‘Page no longer available’ Companies that have gone out of business are a source. Buying websites where company has sold off assets. Blogs that are not updated can be a target for link builders although difficultly will be the contacting.

On the manual side of link building, try viral stories much like Lyndon recommeded. Online communities such as Forums are gold mines for linkers as they are built up of closely knit communities. You can test links and sites in such forums to gauge opinions. Of course, don’t spam.

Jay Young continued the discussion with the following points:

On traditional link build

• Create believeable site
• Do not include a telephone
• Privatize the whois
• Do not disclose your site
• Create a profile page for each link for each link builder and use an attractive person.

On Paid links; how to get them:-

• Use the telephone if possible
• Lowball the price
• Ask webmaster to introduce you to potential partners
• Offer incentives
• Trade products

Focus on .edus domains. sometimes they are maintained by students and are therefore not as closely monitored. Use Google Trends and Insights to determine the best places for links. Make news of big press releases, new product lines and quarterly reports.

On the subject of paid links in general, don’t let it form the main focus of any SEO link building campaign. The majority should come from organic link building as well, as we all know the consequencies from Google on the matter of too many paid links!

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SMX London Expo 2008 – Day 1 – Part 2

I decided to go for the presentation about Persona models in Search marketing having had a slight inkling that this one may hold some interesting advice. I have to say the hall in which this presentation took place looked prepped for a State banquet. I wasn’t too sure about if this was all that necessary considering the hall was half empty. Anyway, the presentation was kicked off by Jonathan Beeston. It seemed a bit vague to be honest talking much about developing personas into categories and seeing what different brands they engaged in. I guess this served the purpose of introducing the next two speakers.

Finlay Clark was on hand to discuss the bigmouthmedia approach (I got one of those chattering teeth things at last). Why do you build persona. Well, according to Mr Clark, you have to know your audience better, increase brand loyalty and build on sales. It is important to give your personas names such as ‘Working parent’ , ‘Business traveller’ or ‘Student gamer’ and so forth. Assign attributes to these people; do they have a High or low value to the brand? You’ll need to identify vital search characteristics about the personas such as would they use different search terms either plural or singular? Next one must identify the right Keywords for these personas. Finally, understand something about the what media influences your personas. Test your creative messages on different personas and see how they react. There was a lot to take in on this presentation and I unfortunately missed the parts on ‘Propensity to defer (deference cycle) and ‘Propensity to search via Proxy’. I’ll have to look around to see if anyone else took notes on this part.

Next up, Will Critchlow from Distilled. Will broke down the process of models in three parts: Tribal, Dialect and Validating. He stressed the model was a simplification of the real world and not one that is exact. You as a marketeer, must understand that you must empathise with the customer. Understanding how the persona will interpret the world andyour brand is key. For instance, age plays a part in what you call an object or thing. Will stressed that users , in general are bad at using search engines simply because they can’t be specific about anything. Finally the one bit of advice that rang true, is that you have to go out and meet your customer. get feedback directly from them and that will be the key to a successful campaign.

The q&a session followed, where Will kindly offered more advice. He said start small when working out your persona. Beware, persona research may fail if you are optimising for a vague keyword which can apply to more then one persona. To solve this, the landing page could be less ambiguous with a choice menu like what kind of person are you?

International SEO

Having thought this morning’s presentation about Global search was about the technical efforts on getting pages ranked in local search engines, I managed to get it right this time round. Key statements from speakers: Andy Atkins -Kruger and Duncan Morris are as follows:

Duncan Morris said the purpose of targeting local search engines was clear:

1. Increase traffic

2. Target new markets

3. Decrease bounce rate

4. Improve your conversions.

The biggest sticking point is of course TLDs. He certainly doesn’t favour redirecting users based on IP address. Understandable as you could be searching in a foreign country and then all of sudden find yourself in the Russian version of the site. There was some debate over whether it was better to use subfolders coming off an authoritative ‘quality’ domain or going down the ccTLD route. It was an interesting debate but I think the ccTLD argument won as it was backed up by research. Anyway, Duncan favoured the former approach for example www.ikea.com/us for American content. His reasoning was all the link juice flows back to one domain. He’s certainly not a fan of subdomaining. However, ultimately the question was what do you have on the homepage? Certainly local TLDs will be harder for link builders and still there could be the possiblity of duplicate content. In terms of content optimisation, it is always important to have a physical address on every page., make sure your backlinks are country specific and of course use webmaster central tools to specifiy a region.

Andy offered his 10 ‘low hanging fruit’ methods to optimise for International sites:

1. Use UTF-8 character encoding
2. Don’t ‘translate’metatags and page titles – Localise them! Beware Plurals, prepositions, accents, alternate spellings, disaggregation, inflection
3. Adopt a global PR strategy
4. Manage 301s and find broken links
5. Use keyword rich URLS – Translate them if necessary
6. Source local links
7. Use a smart geographic selector – Drop down menus of countries
8. Expert keyword research – from a local speaker
9. Local hosting – Apparently it was not as important as you may think!
10. Language content and presentation

Andy clearly favoured the ccTLD route as he was sure evidence said people from other countries do not use .com by default but .fr in France or .es in Spain etc. His final bit of advice was to pilot test in a small country first. Sounds reasonable.

That was it for Day One of SMX London and it was a serious head blast. Lots of info to take in all round. Some interesting points raised particularly in the afternoon session. Definitely worth some kind of follow up from myself.

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SMX London Expo 2008 – Day 1 – Part 1

The day pretty much started off in a rather unspectacular fashion. The keynote had no big fanfare and everybody was crammed into a largish hall to hear Chris Sherman open up SMX London 2008. I may have missed something but Microsoft opened up proceedings with a long talk about Excel 2007 and Webmaster Tools. Considering the very small portion of MSN searchers in the UK, I found it odd that Microsoft will even try to push their tools on us SEOs. No mater here’s a round up on what was said:-

First Up – Zhaohui Tang, who was responsible for building the Keyword engine feature in Excel 2007. He expressed that the data was more open then ever before with additional nod to open source development with APIs. Excel 2007s own format hasn’t really changed much but the KW tools allow spread sheets of volumes and forecasts for KWs. It will time slice and even show demographic data. Interesting presentation but is it worth the upgrade to Excel 2007? I doubt anyone will clamour for it.

Nathan Buggia then came onto the stage to present Webmaster center. Essentially Google’s webmaster tools offering with a Microsoft twist. Again, how useful is it with a low take up of the search engine. Well, there are a few pointers as to what the big ‘M’ are looking for when determining the quality of a website. Five big issues will stop your pages being crawled namely, 404s, Malware, Robots Exclusion and long dynamic URLs. Nathan also went a little bit into what Microsoft likes best namely Relevance (surprise!). On taking questions, mobile web came up where Microsoft’s official line was to wait n see if the UK , smart phone technologycan reach ‘critical mass’.

Nathan’s tip of the day: Figure out your critical metric to reach your ideal goal conversion.

Global Search Universe

Second presentation up for me was Global Search. I wanted to know a little about the conundrum that is international search engines and what faces SEOs like us to get around those problems like TLDs. However, what I got was various stats about internet usage. Interesting to know so I’ll run off a few interesting pointers. Firstly, Europe is a dominant player when it comes to online users; over 140 million of us Europeans and that’s 2.5 times larger then Asia. Howver, an emerging usership is starting to appear in parts of Africa and the Middle East, growing at a pace of over 1000%. When it comes to domain registration, China is certainly taking a bigger slice of the pie.

Of course, search engines play a huge part in the global online expansion but Google itself is only rules in Western Europe and the States. The speaker, Andy Atkins Kruger, other local SEs dominate in various niches.

Get these stats:

Yahoo! Search is the number 1 in Japan

Naver is hugely popular in South Korea

Eastern Europe is fragmented into the following:

1. Rndex

2. Seznam

3. Nadji

4. Net Sprint

Baidu, of course is the biggest player in China. One interesting fact about Chinese search is the fact that the Chinese keyboard can have 15 methods of inputting characters. The French keyboard is also different and users of search engines are more inclined to drop accented characters.

Certainly tactics can change when approaching online marketing in local countries. It was recommended that engaging the audience through Global PR was the first course of action, then PPC, then SEO. Why? Because PPC may well be cheaper than going strictly down the SEO route for all its complexities.

Next up Robin Goad from those guys at Hitwise. Nothing much to raise an eyebrow at in general but speaking on a top level, websites are in fact becoming much more reliant on SEs. Interesting tidbit was that branded word search is on the increase: 6% in 2005 and now 88% in 2008. 9 in 10 searches through SEs are actually branded terms. There is also a downward trend in Long tail. The example cited was ‘Applae Crumbe’ v ‘Apple crumble recipe’. Maybe the UK are becoming less savvy or even lazy? Another factoid was that Google Images was actually a more popular search engine then Yahoo! in the UK. That was stunning news but it kind of made me feel sorry for the previous MS speakers to know that Live was probably nowhere to be seen. The last slice of knowledge from Hitwise was that video sites like YouTube are on the up. With blended search in Google, users are more likely to be clicking on vvideo results that text results.

Last up was Linus Gregoriadis from eConsultancy with some news for SEMs and the prospects of PPC in a recession. Certainly clients will be interested in knowing exactly what ROI is being delivered with tight marketing budgets. Google is definitely the biggest player in PPC but of course it’s dominance will concern many. The main worry for PPC consultants would ultimately be raising CPC costs affecting over all ROI. With SEO, it is a different story. The pitfalls faced will be lack of resources to implement SEO recommendations which lead onto budgetary problems. All I say about this point is at the end of the day if you want better results you’ll have to pay for them. Unfortunately, that is not a message for which all clients will normally heed.

Posted in Microsoft, SMX London Expo | 1 Comment »

Really useful tool of the day!

Here’s a handy tool for those trying to find out if names have been taken across social media channels. Here’s a handy checker which informs you what’s been taken. Try it out here: usernamecheck.com

Posted in Social Networking, Useful tools, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

SMX London – Surviving The First SEO Expo

The behemoth that is SMX had to be tackled one day in my so far shortish career in SEO. This report here won’t specifically talk about what I learned at the presentation – I’ll leave them for other posts. What I will talk about here is my thoughts and feelings about the event as a whole.

I’ve usually tagged onto the end of UK events in the various pub excursions in LondonSEO, however, it was time to get in the main event. When I first got there, you do get that uncomfortable feeling that you don’t know anyone and a little anxiety creeps in. That very soon disappears (after a morning cuppa tea). I believe Jill Whalen wrote an article once about survival in the big world of SEO expos awhile back but the big tip is to be yourself and meet n’ greet. I don’t think anyone has big ego issues so there is no reason not to shake a few hands and wear a big smile. I didn’t take up an observation I note from some people to wear the most outrageously bright outfit; a form of SEO peacocking. Perhaps next time:) I met several people and got on fine. I even met some Twitter followers of mine and it is pleasant to see them face-to-face .

In terms of the venue itself, it was  a little too grandiose for my liking. It was comfortable enough and at least it was on my same tube line as where I lived and worked, however, it did suck out some of the conference atmosphere I felt. It was kinda awkward as well for delegates to ask questions in a big hall with only one microphone to go round.

Next few posts would be more about my interpretation of the presentations and advice. A big thanks to all those I met and made my conference networking experience an enjoyable one.

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SMX London Tips – What’s Wrong With Your Site?

I’ll be writing in much more detail in regards to my recent SMX London experiences. However, for now, here’s a nice shout from Will Cricthlow of Distilled about gaining some insight about site abandonment. He highlighted a link here as part of his presentation about Demographics. This info will help you guage from a series of metrics your level of how successful your user finds content and also help you get a little insight from the user as well. All free tools so you don’t really have an excuse not to use any.

Posted in Content Optimisation, Site Architecture | 1 Comment »

Cuil launches then crashes – FAIL!

Cuil launched today with some pretty decent coverage from the SEO press. However, today’s launch didn’t go according to plan as the server fell over itself due to high traffic! Not a great start to something being touted as a Google beater. I’m sure it will be back soon.

Danny Sullivan has written a good article testing the relevancy of searches compared to Google. Check it out here.

UPDATE: The site is now working but www.cuill.com with the two ‘l’s doesn’t even redirect to the main domain: www.cuil.com! Talk about branding issues! It seems Cuil does have its fair share of domain problems, being the unforunate spelling error could lead you to a hardcare porn site. FAIL AGAIN!

UPDATE01/08/0: www.cuill.com now redirects to www.cuil.com

Posted in Google, Search, cuil | No Comments »

Universal Search Unleashed

Google has since launched the idea of ‘Universal search’ over a year ago and was detailed in a highly specifically by the chaps at Search Engine Land. So to re-cap, Universal Search was effectively a way of Google blending more search information in to its SERPs. By adopting this new feature, a user can access vertical areas associated to their search query, such as Book searches, video news or Maps . For instance, when a person types in “Star Wars”, he’ll not only get a few website links as expected but a whole raft of links to YouTube and News results as well. If a person types in a location like “New York”, the location map turns up at the top o fthe first page.

Now that Universal search has matured over a year what have the benefits been and what insights can SEO consultants gain from Google’s experiment on delivering for their cilents? Without doubt the changes last year has made search a richer experience for users of Google. It certainly helps that maps and news have blended in to the results. However, for SEO it means so much more. Let’s take on some examples. Back to “Star Wars” example; as an SEO consultant, we have to work out why some listings achieve greater ranks then some. Other considerations have certainly become more paramount in online marketing. Youtube listing ‘Lego Star Wars’ appears mid page with a nice thumbnail and make no mistake, Google favours its own products and would prefer you to see video from YouTube. Evil, I know and I’ve certainly never seen any other video networking site appear in this way. If we tap in a location like “New York” again, the local map will always appear at the top for 98%. Some movement in the rank maybe experienced but that is not the point. Google deems that the location map is the number 1 thing people will look for. Again, what does this mean to SEO-ers. Well, geo-targetting your website has been a buzz word for the past few months. Google has been known to take into account the ip address and references to physical ‘bricks n mortar’ addresses. Certainly people listing businesses on Google Maps helps in getting some exposure for your website in the SERPs.

Newer additions of Universal Search were launched earlier in the year. With vertical search expanding into product searches, a search result may include listings from Google Shopping section. Blog search listings were also blended this year into the SERPs, however, surprisingly the search “Star Wars” brings no such results considering the fanbase associated with the topic and neither do product searches appear. Perhaps it possibly could mean that Google considers the websites listed already are far more informative then any blended listings they provided? Odd behaviour anyway.

Posted in Google, SEO Blog News, Search | No Comments »

Keyword Research tools

Occasionally, there are times when you learn a thing or two regarding SEO. This post here: http://tinyurl.com/5rb58g  reveals some top tips to help keyword analysis for those times you get those pesky KW mental blocks!

Posted in Keyword research, SEO Tools | No Comments »