Jobs in Digital Marketing

A4Uexpo is one of, if not the best large digital marketing conferences in the UK. Matthew and his team have done an incredible job this year and I’d like to personally thank the organisers and attendees for, well, being great.

Session coverage

If you want to check out session reviews and write ups, you’d be well advised to head over to the State of Search blog. Bas’s team have done it again with solid overall coverage of the best sessions. I would say, that if I could do anything differently, it would be to attend Tom’s analytics presentation. “Epic” was one of the phrases I heard used to describe this one, and I missed it. Doh!

My presentations

I’ve added my MicroFormats and Site Architecture presentations below, and a special thank you goes out to Sam Murray, Sam Crocker, RishiLakhani, Nichola Stott and Kevin Gibbons for their coverage, kind words and general awesomeness.

Site Architecture [SEO] – Richard Baxter

What are MicroFormats? – Richard Baxter

Give feedback

Did you enjoy A4uExpo? Make sure you let the team know your thoughts, so they can provide an even better show next year. See you there!

Our next conference

I’ll be speaking at the Pro Training Seminar hosted by Distilled and SEOmoz on the 25th and 26th of October. For more details, go here. It’s probably going to be the most epic SEO conference we’ve had in London, ever.

A4uExpo London – Final Thoughts is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk. Going to this year's SMX Advanced London? Use this discount code - SEOGADGET011 to get 15% off your entrance fee!

So far so good at A4Uexpo 2009 with some fabulous panels on Day 1 so far. Here’s a live list of links to coverage as the conference progresses:

Meet the Engines – a4u Expo (Searchcowboys)

Dave Naylor’s SEO Strategies To Make A Splash (SEOgadget)

Meet the Search Engines Q+A (SEOgadget)

Keith Bond’s Schedule for A4UExpo

You want to Tweet what?! (SEOgadget)

The Affiliate Doctors – Live (Search Cowboys)

If you have URLs to submit – feel very welcome to contact me and I’ll add them to the list as the conference progresses.Similar Posts:

• Speaking at A4UEXPO – London
• Top Page Analysis meets HttpFox – an awesome SEO Tool combo (SEO Tips)
• Brand new: Free SEO Jobs board
• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag – SMX Advanced Coverage 2009
• What Makes for a Great SEO Conference?

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

A4UExpo London Coverage 2009

Meet the search engines Q&A at A4UExpo – session with:

* Matthew Trewhella, Google

* Dan Cohen, Microsoft

* David Naylor (?!)

This session went really, really fast – I’m going to cover points that (I feel) really added value rather than covering absolutely everything in detail. Here are some interesting slide pics from Dan Cohen of Microsoft, looking at http compression and conditional get use for crawl bandwidth improvement:

And this one, covering a high level case study of the techniques used to make MSN Video more search engine friendly (an AJAX based site):

Matthew Trewhella, Google

Matthew gave us a really solid overview of how Google works. Here are the key takeaways / favourite offerings from Google according to Matt

1) Page download time is important. He advised us to use the bandwidth tool in Webmaster tools and told us to speed up out sites!

2) Fetch as Googlebot in Google WMT – use to visualise how Google sees your content

3) Google translate

Dave Naylor (Yahoo?!)

Dave talks a little bit about Yahoo

Get clean links out of flickr to your own website;

Dave demonstrates, live a Flickr link hack, where adding a comment, then editing it to remove the rel=”nofollow” will result in a dofollowed link from Flickr! Nice.

The crowd absolutely loved his demo – go and get yourselves a dofollowed link from Flickr!

The Q+A session:

Question asked: what was the rationale / justification for the vince update?

Matt – we have to make sure we give the best experience possible for users. We saw that our users got to what they were looking for quickly after the update.

Question: The brand update was rolled out for a few dozen keywords. Is there a plan to roll that out for more?

Matt: It will be considered if it’s good for users. Matt wasn’t prepared to share indicators for SEO for us to tell if an update was being rolled out, but Dave said check for disappearance of the cache links – which can sometimes be a sign of an update if there are radical changes on pages 2 and 3 of the search results also

Question: How important is server location if you have the TLD?

Matt: Not at all – if you have the ccTLD, we use that. Gave some advice on geo-location with webmaster tools if you have one domain and multiple subdirectories targeting different countries

Matt: If it’s a .com / .org they look at the IP address for an indicator of target market. If it’s a generic domain use WMT and any other geographical hints available

Question: If you’re a site in France but can’t get a .fr what can we do?

Matt mentioned that if you can’t get the Tld, then “it’s about the links” – sounded very much like the link graph has an impact on geolocation

Dave recommended subdomains so he could host the site in France – so host location counted positively towards the ranking factors

Question: How do you handle countries with several languages?

Matt: We’re luck that generally, different languages use different words. The trick is where you have multiple languages on different URLs the translations should be correctly localised for users, not machine translated

Question: We’d like to launch a .IE version of our site – will we have to rewrite the whole site?

Matt: You can, but if you’re just replicating the entire site on a different domain, the duplicate will dilute the value. Do enough to help us understand that it’s a different page.

Update

The Flickr exploit demonstrated earlier by Dave has already been fixed. Nice hack though, Dave.Similar Posts:

• Allinhishead.co.uk (All in his head) TV Campaign
• SMX London 2009 Presentation: Diagnosing Website Architecture Issues
• Bounce rates in Search Engine rankings
• Matt Cutts You&A SMX Advanced Day 1 roundup
• Errors all over Google SERPS- This site may harm your computer

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Meet The Search Engines Q&A

Below we’ve got some (very bullet pointy) coverage of Dave’s SEO session (“SEO Strategies to Make a Splash”) at A4Uexpo London. Hopefully you’ll find some useful nuggets in the list!

Dave opened by defining SEO by the Wikipedia definition (which he hates . Each heading covers the slide title presented.

Skills needed for SEO

HTML & CSS are ablsolutely required.
An ability to see an angle on things – able to see opportunity in things and understand your market sectors.
You need a will to win (at all costs)!

Other skills and qualities

Good at networking – this is really vital – make friends with people in your industry.
A sense of humour.
Don’t be naive.
Patience.
Determination.

How to learn SEO

Dave recommended a few sources of info about SEO:
DaveN (http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/)
Google Webmaster Central
Matt Cutts blog
SEO book by Aaron Wall
Gaining experience
Conferences – most SEO’s are willing to share if you ask them

Beginning as an SEO

Dave started in the industry optimising with loft conversions, inkjet cartidges, renault parts,
Use clean and good tecniques
Monitor the results and test different theories. Track your tweaks and changes. Monitor your competitors to give you an outlook on what changes are impacting your results vs general algo changes
Use tools – Raven SEO

SEO Strategy

Different strategies apply to different sectors – eg a hotel vs a gambling site
By understanding your market you can judge the best stratgey to employ to acquire links.
You should consider your long tail – competitive keywords or long tail queries
Use content (Dave honestly believes you need good content on the site to get it to rank). Dave reminded us that google really doesn’t want “thin” affiliate sites in their index – so look at the long tail and create content to capture that traffic.
The way you acquire links, for example “just” buying links can be suicide

SEO to win

Think of where you want to be in 12 months time. Think about your site structure, start with a process and don’t just dive in making lots of changes in one weekend.
Sort out your on page SEO – learn the on page factors.
Look at your competitors – what are they doing?
The way you acquire links.
Choose your keywords and do good keyword research.
Dave advised us to PPC our keywords during the KW research process to check the validity of KW data from Google Keyword Tool.

Keyword research

Google KWT
Wordtracker
Only go for really competitive keywords if you know what you’re doing. Start with the long tail first!
Make sure you track your conversions – there’s no point going for keywords if they don’t convert

On page factors

Make your title tags unique.
Meta description is good for CTR.
Keep your eye on H1, H2, H3.
URLs structure,

CSS positioning (use your CSS to make sure your content is pushed to the top of the page)

Dave’s link tips

1) Networking – get good contacts in your industry and use them

Great way to share links

- Blogrolls
- Guest posts on blogs
- Refer to each other when possible

2) Share ideas and information

- Places to get links
- Ways of getting links

3) Linkbait -Dave hates linkbait, but it works!

- Make a useful list
- Be first to break some news
- Discover something interesting
- Write a funny blog post
- Write a useful guide

4) Directory submission

- Not that useful for links
- Great for creating a smoke screen and hiding your most valuable links

5) Competitor analysis

- Download all their links
- Look for coomon links- go for those first
- Use these as ideas for linkbuilding methods unique to your industry

6) Press coverage

Something worth spreading? The Twitter exploit is still open! Dave could change your profile picture, tweet as you. The security hole at Twitter is ludicrous. Exploitation could be the next big thing – wordpress hacks, Twitter hacking etc. Dave expressed some concern that services could emerge to take advantage of these issues.

7) Article submissions

You can submit articles to a number of places, but the value is dimishing. You can use Raven to distribute content via their blog network.
Write an article and spin it – makes at least 20 or 30 articles. Dave recommended Daryl Wilcox Publishing as a good way to distribute and exchange Press Releases.

Buying links

Find the site, check the whois and other sites hosted at that IP
Map out who these sites advertise and work out who the link buyers are. Be careful not to buy too many links in the same space as obvious link buyers.

Anchor text – first link counts

Dave ran a great number of tests to prove this works. Make sure that when you’re linking out of a document, make sure your first link uses the anchor text you’re targeting

The best type of links

Are the ones your competitors can’t get hold of!

Blogs

Put a Wordpress blog on a subdomain (if you haven’t already got one). You’ll often see blogs ranking because of QDF, ranking highly for volume queries for a short period of time.

Brand search

Your brand helps you rank higher

Some theories:

- Search volume for your brand
- Mentions of your brand
- Mentions of your brand in the press

Not SEO

Spamming, bulk link buying, KW stuffing, hidden keywords, UA Cloaking, Duplicate content are all spamming techniques that just aren’t SEO anymore.

Great session covering a huge range of subjects with some really useful reminders and pointers. For more, go and check out Dave’s (newly branded) site.Similar Posts:

• Meet The Search Engines Q&A
• Optimised campaigns leveraging brand search – guide to recruitment SEO part 4
• Implementing named anchors to improve your SERPs
• SEO for Web 2.0 session – SMX London Day 2 recap
• Outbound links in blog articles increase engagement metrics

SEOgadget is an SEO Company and blog founded by SEO Consultant Richard Baxter.

Dave Naylor’s SEO Strategies To Make A Splash