So last Friday I was one of around 500 SEOs who descended on Brighton for the 2011 Brighton SEO conference, organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility.
It was blurry awesome, well done Kelvin :)
For those of you who couldn’t make it I’ve attempted to decipher my erratically scrawled notes into something more useful - enjoy, and hopefully see you there next year.
Google’s Panda: A Case Study - Jonathan Stewart
Jonathan works for Review Centre who found themselves adversely affected by Google’s panda update earlier this year.
What happened?
- Both US and UK traffic was hit
- Interestingly, their forum pages didn’t seem to be affected - which might suggest that user metrics are not being as strongly weighted as previously hypothesised.
- Site redesign
- Decreased adsense density above the fold
- Moved more content above the fold
- Noindexed weak content
- Removed duplicate content
Why?
Jonathan thinks that it’s about them not being a recognisable brand. He compared Review Centre to Trip Advisor (who also suffer from many of the issues which face Review Centre) - the difference? He believes it’s down to brand equity - i.e. Trip Advisor is a much stronger brand than Review Centre.
He also shared his thoughts on the Panda lifecycle - he puts it at around 4 months:
- It takes around 4 weeks to make changes to a site
- It then takes around 6 weeks for Google to crawl the changes
- It then takes 5 weeks for Google to re-run panda
Key Takeaways...
- Panda might be more brand-biased than originally thought.
- An excellent reason to be less reliant on Google traffic.
- Start your social strategy now.
Building a Private Blog Network - John McElborough
John McElborough provided some tips for those who are looking to create their own private blog network...
Points to note - links from these sort of links work well for long and mid-tail terms, but won’t work for head terms. John was also quick to point out that this sort of activity in no way replaces other forms of link building.
Benefits of building a network
- Value add for clients
- You get to keep the intellectual property (i.e. you’re creating content for your own network rather than creating content for other people’s sites)
- Potential for monetisation in the future
- Get domains
- Install wordpress
- Get unique content
- Get links (NB don’t just interlink them all together)
- Lather, rinse, repeat
- Stick to .co.uk & .org.uk
- Mix up registrars, hosting etc
- Don’t use 123Reg
- Opt out of WhoIs
- Spread your IPs around, but don’t obsess about C-Classes
- Mix up nameservers too
- Use pro themes to make them look authentic
- Block Majestic, Yahoo & Linkscape bots
- Only use original content - no spinning / scraping
- Link out
- Use images
- Get content from - textbroker, oDesk, interns, students, etc
Attracting Links - Shark SEO
SharkSEO (AKA Dave) is sadly not a big orange metal shark in real life. However, he built Hacker Buddy, is very smart and you should listen to him.
He shared stories of his own experiences with linkbait - here are his tips:
- Focus on a specific community - this can be different from your ‘desired’ customers.
- You really need a news angle to leverage
- Be quick - the longer it takes you to create the less your ROI
- Fail fast
- Promote via StumbleUpon, Facebook, Reddit
- React quickly - use something like ChartBeat for real time analytics
Dr Social Love - James Carson
James Carson works for Bauer Media who publish titles like FHM, Heat, Grazia. Social media is an increasingly important source of traffic (and brand engagement tool) for publishers.
Here are his tips for getting likes and comments via Facebook:
- Ask questions
- Post games
- Post polls
- Be specific - tell people what you want them to do - i.e. share this, tell us what you think of this, etc.
The Inbetweeners Facebook Page has 3.3million fans. So in order to engage with these people FHM did a photo shoot of Will’s Mum and asked the guys who run The Inbetweeners page to promote it for them - results as follows:
- 7000 Facebook ‘likes’
- 1 million newsfeed impressions
- 60 tweets
- #2 Google ranking
- 35,000 UK referrals from Facebook to the FHM site
He also coined the term ‘social spurts’ for the traffic spikes you see from this sort of activity which made me giggle.
Next steps? Well, once you’ve got yourself a powerful page you could potentially send ‘social spurts’ to other sites. Maybe in exchange for links? Sweet.
Choosing & Implementing Friendly URLs for Ecommerce - Erika Ungar
Erika works for Boux Avenue - a lingerie site backed by my favourite dragon Theo Paphitis (who I’d quite like to cuddle - but that’s an aside).
She shared her experiences of negotiating with developers to get SEO-friendly shizzle baked in to a site build.
Her tips:
- Understand the challenges developers face
- Justify what you’re asking for
- Seek solutions collaboratively
- Compromise
How to win at SEO with Duplicate Content: Featuring Pippa Middleton’s Arse - Malcolm Coles
Malcolm Coles has ruined his blog (his words, not mine) thanks to *that* sitelink - tee hee.
He came along to tell us exactly how he did it, so we too can ruin our own blogs (or perhaps more usefully actually - dominate news stuff).
How to find what’s ‘hot’ news-wise:
- Google auto-complete
- Google Insights
Here’s how:
- Create a blog post
- Front load keywords
- Publish
- Ask for tweets (for indexation)
- ’Fiddle’ with the post (make a couple of amends)
- Publish on a new URL
- 301 first post to the new post
- Repeat
- Repeat
- Repeat
- Repeat!!!!!!
Links - SEO Value vs Client Expectations vs Cost - Neil Walker
Neil Walker polled a sample of SEOs and clients to try to ascertain what SEO’s think makes a good link, and what client’s think makes a good link - the results were pretty illuminating.
Neil highlighted that (for the most part at least) client’s don’t really know what sort of links they want / need. As such education is key.
His tips:
- Be transparent about your link building activity
- Explain your strategy and why you’re doing it
- Manage your client’s expectations
- Sales and traffic are the main objectives for clients, so be sure that your strategy feeds into their objectives.
What Can Social Learn from Mad Men? - Roger Warner
Roger works for Content and Motion a social PR agency. His presentation focused on the similarities between Social media and traditional advertising. He deserves particular kudos for including a slide with Nick Kamen on it -circa *that* Levi’s ad (be still my beating heart).
His tips for running social media campaigns went a little something like this:
- You need an amazing idea (like Nick Kamen)
- Think conversation not broadcast (but bear in mind that people might not want to converse with your brand)
- Never stop thinking like your audience
- Be authentic
- Stories sell - not technology
James Bond: Architecture Critic - Toby Barnes
Far and away my favourite presentation of the conference came from Toby who works for a company called Mudlark.
His talk was mainly about a tiny horse in the apple store. Go read that post. Or if you can’t be bothered - read this:
“When does the magic of a situation fade? When do we get acclimated to the exceptional? Is this how we get by? Would anything get done if we were constantly gobsmacked? Is this how we survive, how we stay sane? We define a pattern, no matter how exceptional, and acclimate ourselves to it?”
I also learned that:
- Ian Fleming was so scared of futuristic architect Erno Goldfinger, he turned him into big fat Bond baddie.
- This exists. This makes me sad.
- I’d really like a robot.
My Hack Day Addiction - Dom Hodgson
Dom describes himself as huggable. I would tend to agree, despite his best endeavour to simultaneously break my nose and smash out my front teeth with his over-enthusiastic hand gestures at the post-conference drinks.
His talk centred around how to run a successful hack day event - essentially you’ll need a *lot* of:
- WiFi
- Caffeine
- Food
We then entered the ‘speed’ round - each of the following speakers had 20 slides
and less than ten minutes - go, go, go!
How to Pitch SEO - Sam Crocker
Sammy C says:
- Make sure you *want* the business before you spend a lot of time on a pitch
- Ask lots of questions before you pitch
- Spend time on a tiered forecast (optimistic, neutral, pessimistic)
- Give something away for free - one good idea is worth a million vagaries
- Bring the A Team, not the sales team
- Consider a performance related fee
- Don’t alienate in-house teams
- Don’t just tell the client what they want to hear
Keyword Research & Traffic Estimation - Graeme Benstead-Hume
Graeme of Site Visibility presented his findings on the relative accuracy of the Google Keyword tool, Wordtracker and SEO Book tools when trying to forecast for SEO.
Topline Findings
- Low traffic keywords (i.e. mid and long tail terms are especially inaccurate via all three tools)
- A co-efficient of 0.25 of whatever the Google Keyword Tool claims looks pretty accurate
- Wordtracker was the most accurate
Finding Hidden SEO Value with Mulit-Channel Funnels - Dara Fitzgerald
Dara works for Fresh Egg - he presented a compelling case for using multi-channel funnels in GA:
- Both last click and first click attribution models fail to tell the real story
- Multi-channel funnels allow you to see which channels assist conversions, the time lag between first visit and conversion and what your top conversion paths are
- Plus you can create custom channel groupings which work like advanced segments
Driving SEO with PPC - Kane Bartlett
Kane shared a case study on how PPC appears to affect organic results. He was quick to point out that whilst PPC spend is definitely not a ranking factor they did see some interesting result - when they increased PPC spend they saw increased visits from organic keywords too.
I’d love to see some more work around this - I wondered if this might be down to personalised search? Food for thought in any case, huh?
Market Research: Informing SEO and Link Development - Rosie Freshwater
Rose works for Leapfrogg. She shared their process for using customer insight to influence SEO and link building:
- Look at your customer’s media habits, lifestyle choices etc
- Run focus groups to find out what they read and what their interested in
- Use the qualitative data from the focus groups to survey a larger number of customers.
- Use the qualitative data and quantitative data to create customer profiles
- Create content to appeal to these customer profiles
- Build links / partnerships with media titles that these customer profiles read
Why Settle for Customer Satisfaction - Rae Lovejoy
Rae works for iCrossing and she’s all about delighting customers. Here are her tips:
- Be honest and admit when something has gone wrong
- Be proactive
- Deliver what you’ve promised on time
- Have regular reviews
- Celebrate successes with everyone involved
All in all a fantastic day. Well done to all the speakers and to everyone involved with organising the event :)
Hannah joined Distilled in September 2010 as a Consultant and is now on the Content Strategy team. Prior to this she spent over 7 years in offline marketing (point of sale, press advertising, direct mail & sponsorship), until her fairy godmother... read more
Not sure I totally buy Toby's thesis - there's SF going back decades that addressed current problems I can point to a number of Issac Asimov novels written in the 50's which are definitely about the civil rights struggle (let alone Metropolis or R.U.R. by Karel Čapek.)
Maybe i need to get him a better sf reading list :-)
Hello there,
Thanks for your comment - unfortunately what I know about SF would easily fit on a postage stamp so can't contribute to that debate :(
Hannah
Brilliant write up Hannah - I didn't attend the event but followed it on twitter- sounds like it was good fun. :)
Hi Hannah
Great summary. You really were paying attention!
Just a quick question if can answer: in "Building a Private Blog Network – John McElborough" you wrote
"8. Block Majestic, Yahoo & Linkscape bots"
How exactly does one block Linkscape bots? Maybe its me but never seen that before. Any help on that front?
Thanks in advance
Hello there L,
I think this might be what you're looking for:
http://moz.com/linkscape/help/sources#excluding-your-data-from-linkscape-on-specific-webpages
Thanks
Hannah
Hi Hannah,
When I click on that link, all i get is a page with a search form. Am i supposed to log in? Dont see anything to help there.
Thanks still
Very strange - it looks like you can only view that page when logged in...
Here's what it says:
Excluding Your Data From Linkscape on Specific Webpages
The best way to restrict data from all of Linkscape’s data sources is with the Robots tag. Linkscape obeys either “ROBOTS” or “SEOMOZ” in the meta tag’s “name” attribute. For example:
...
...
Adding the Robots tag in the head section of a specific webpage makes Linkscape respond exactly like the major search engines by removing links on the given page from the publicly accessible index. If you apply the “ROBOTS” as a parameter, be aware that all robots (including the major search engines) will restrict your pages from appearing in their index. If you wish to block only Linkscape, use the “SEOMOZ” parameter instead. You can read more about this at http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html.
Be aware that Linkscape’s beta index was built prior to the existence of “SEOMOZ” as a parameter in the web standard tag, and since we update our index once every month, it may take time before we re-crawl/see your new page with the exclusion.
Hi Hannah,
I was regrettably unable to get to the conference, this post goes a very, very long way to making up for that- thankyou very much, this is such good information :)
Just curious about something and wondered if you can expand re the creating a blog network- whats the issue with using 123reg as the registrar if your doing this? Is the problem specific to 123reg or in general try and avoid using the same registrar if building such a network?
Thanks
Jon
Hi Jon,
Glad you liked the write up :)
It might be worth sending a tweet to John directly to ask him - my understanding was that it was perhaps more of an in-joke about 123Reg being a bad company to deal with generally, but probably worth checking :)
Thanks
Hannah
Super synopsis Hannah. I'm delighted you took such detailed notes. Some really thought provoking ideas and techniques. Especially like James' suggestions on Social Love - and like the title.