SMX London Expo 2008 – Day 1 – Part 1
November 22nd, 2008 David ChungThe 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.
