As Andrew Girdwood explained so eloquently many of the presentations at SMX Advanced (at least the ones I attended) fell short of the “Advanced” label but there were notable exceptions that more than made up for some of the overly basic or salesy presentations.

The stand out session was the Killer Facebook Tactics “show”.  And “show” it really was. If you want a KPI for measuring the way a presentation is being recieved, then the number of times the door slams as people sneek into the auditorium after the presentation starts is a pretty good one.  The word got out on Twitter and the room kept filling up.

Guy Levine set the tone with a fast moving humourous presentation that uploaded a huge number of tips in 11mins 38 seconds (his timing, not mine).  It was the perfect compliment to what came later.

The sensible filling was provided by Marco Covsaro.  But then came the conference’s unique duo.

With a charachter like Marty Weintraub you might feel that you wouldn’t have a chance of shining as a co-presenter.  However Marty’s colleague Merry Morud more than held her own.

(Calm before the storm: the Facebook panel prepare)

Their talk was a call to action to take advantage of Facebook opportunities, delivered with pure comedy.  Guy and Marty then provided one of the most informed Q&As of the show.  The session is undoubtedly the one that will bring the biggest benefit to our clients (as much for the philosophy installed as for the tips)

Other highlights included the Ranking Factors in 2010 seminar, Link Building and various contributions from Mikkel deMib Svendsen.  Barak Berkowitz’s keynote provided insightful thought to the way the web is going.

The greatest travesty of the event?  Bringing Rand Fishkin over to the UK and only giving him 12 minutes.

Key Takeaways

We’ll compile a list of the best tips tomorrow but here are the key things that I am thinking about as a result of the Conference:

1. Facebook is being underestimated as a marketing medium – Facebook data and Ads rock (oodles of tips here)
2. Are 301s something to be avoided? (See Rob Kerry discussion)
3. The need to investigate Mozenda (Sam Crocker’s top tip)
4. Feel strangely guilty for this one: Making use of the YouTube Keyword Tool
5. Spending more time with Yahoo! Analytics (mentioned a few times)
6. Making use of Wolfram Alpha as a research tool and wait for their widget and API release. (Keynote notes)
7. Jumping on the infographic band wagon. (as per Chris Bennet notes)
8. Getting more scientific about SERP reputation management (MdM special)
9. Taking website security more seriously
10. Archiving Twitter data
11. Being less sceptical about alt tags, more cynical about H1s, paying greater attention to Latent Dirichlet Allocation and loving home pages more. (Rand Fishkin Research)

(My complete notes from the two days are available here.  I’m working my way through them bolding what I deem to be the best tips and will pull them altogether into a list in the morning)

If you were at SMX, what were your key take-aways?

Our popular Give It Up! session is where our panel of experts share some of their favourite and largely overlooked tips. Then we turn to the audience for more sharing. At SMX Advanced London, we’re introducing our social media edition of the panel, where you’ll learn some fantastic ways to gain even more traction, traffic and reach via social media marketing.

Moderator: Ciaran Norris, Head of Social Media Marketing, Mindshare Worldwide

Q&A Moderator: Kevin Ryan, Chief Executive, Motivity Marketing, Inc.

Speakers:

• Chris Bennett, President/Founder, 97th Floor
• Parks Blackwell, Senior Client Development Manager, Range Online Media
• Melissa Campbell, SEO Consultant, Distilled
• Ciaran Norris, Head of Social Media Marketing, Mindshare Worldwide

(The below are Tim’s notes from the “The Give It Up, Social Media Edition” session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here)

Chris Bennett

Infographics

Infographics working very well.  Can go very viral and pick up a mass of backlinks. Can create a link profile that competitors can’t replicate. What makes them good?

• Lots of data
• Complex ideas
• Aesthetically pleasing
• Otherwise boring topics!

Some commercial sites being banned in Digg, can get them removed. Rumours that commercial sites going to be looked on more favourably. But in meantime solution is to set up separate site – viral hubs e.g. visualeconomics – over 50000 natural banklinks in 9 months.

Guest virals

Take viral content and find high profile sites and contact directly and get them to put it on their site in return for link bank with anchor etc and let them take the traffic.  Infographics do very well here.

Other Viral Tips

• reach out to all those who are linking and thank them so can create a relationship with them.  Can then e-mail them directly and 9/10 they’ll put up your content
• track all your success – e.g. outgoing clicks to signups
• Social Media for firefox plugin

Parks Blackwell

Basics that people are missing out on

Content

Must have a content strategy.  repeating same messages then you will lose followers.  OK to align with marketing calendars but must have more updates “in the trenches” stuff.

Transparency

No one wants to be part of a community that isn’t genuine.  Allowing feedback is a must. Post REAL updates. Get a voice that understands the customer

Monitor

Make a decision before you start. Know what you want to get out of it and correlate metrics with this. Changing metrics half way through can alter transparency.

Melissa Campbell

The laws and guidelines in the UK that you are probably breaking!

ASA

ASA applies to virals and therefore can result in violations.  Things going wrong:

• not making the source clear (false identities)
• being wilfully offensive to gain attention
• misuse of email database e..g run a competition and then put them on newsletter list

Requires a complaint to be made before you will get in trouble

Digital Economy Act

Know where your images, videos etc come from and credit properly. Written by music industry for music industry
SMX Presentation

Q&A/Audience Tips

• Enforcement? MC: Likely to be difficult to enforce, lot of misunderstanding.
• How long does it take to create typical infographic? CB: Couple of days, though research can take time.  Use students to do research. Clients given chance of one revision only.
• Observation: people like questions to be answered in the open when communicating through the likes of Twitter. CB: Put out name of senior bod that they can contact.
• When doing microsites, are you redirecting? CB: In some cases but mentioned site was so successful that haven’t. Tend not to do 301 anymore, much better to own trusted site.
• With new version of Digg, will all banned sites be unbanned? CB: Probably July, in meantime e-mail them. Tip don’t submit best thing next day, build account back up slowly.
• How rife are fake names in academic world? MC: Can be very embarrassing if caught out.  Such an obvious thing to do, its likely to be happening.

Your client just rang – they’ve had a product recall and negative reports are flying in both traditional media and on the web. The Twitterverse is atweet with snarky comments, and even worse, with links to bad press, causing those stories in turn to get top ranking in web search results. If you’ve ever had to deal with a reputation management issue you know this is a nightmare scenario – but don’t despair. Social media sites offer a key opportunity to influence search results. This session looks at the crucial role they can play.

Moderator: Andy Atkins-Kruger (AA), Managing Director, WebCertain

Q&A Moderator: Kevin Ryan (KR), Chief Executive, Motivity Marketing, Inc.

Speakers:

• Arthur Coleman (AC), CEO, OnlineMatters, Inc
• Mikkel deMib Svendsen (MS), Creative Director, deMib.com
• Kevin Gibbons (KG), Director of Search, SEOptimise
• Kristjan Mar Hauksson (KH), Director Search, Nordic eMarketing

(The below are Tim’s notes from the “Social Media, Search & Reputation Management” session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here)

Kristjan Mar Hauksson

(The volcano is surprisingly small!)

What Happens When Bad News Goes Live?

• 98% of journalists go online! Even respected publications often just take press releases and publish it. They are incredibly hungry for information.  This is where the opportunity is in a crisis.
• Speed of movement is key
• Need to be able to see who looks at the story – did the BBC visit your site? Did your competitors visit?
• The Basics
  • You need a plan in place before problem happens e.g have PPC campaign built ready to go.  Have basic info ready to go. (seek to saturate search results etc
    • forsee possible scenarios
    • be ready with press releases
    • know how long it takes for your site to be indexed
  • Listen e.g. Google alerts, Vocus, Clara, Trackur, TweetBeep, Feedster & Technorati
  • Evaluate.  Is non-reaction an option? What type of opportunity is this? e.g. volacno chance to target adventurous singles
  • Act: Source of problem is often source of opportunity

Kevin Gibbons

Social media for online reputation management

• Google SERPs and Twitter stream is your new home page
• 70% trust online consumer opinions from people the don’t know.  41% trust search advertising
• Build brands around reputation, not products – Branson.  Once reputation is tarnished can be uphill struggle, particularly in online world.
• By being engaged now, can deal with negativity when it goes wrong
• I hate ryan air site must get 612,000 negative clickthroughs per month (based on search volume for ryan air and 3% click through rate)
• United Airlines Break Guitar example – 8 million views ($180 million lost revenue estimate)
• Tip 1 – claim social media brand profiules.  Crunchbase, slideshare, Knowem and scribd lesser known ones suggested
• Tip 2 – Develop clear social media strategy
• Tip 3 – Use social media to open opportunities – opens up guest blogging opportuities, radio show requests etc
• Tip 4 – New look Google could increase views of fresh data
• Tip 5 – Look out for Google suggested search for how your brand is being percieved e,g, “Google are”
• Amazon Mechanical Turk – trick Google into thinking that there are lots of positive searches.  Not expecting it to last.
• Question: Are Ryanair proving that having a bad reputation can be good for bottom line?

Arthur Coleman

Social media and SEO for online reputation managemt

• SM can be used in unique ways due to flux of realtime search algos – can exploit this in the short term.  If you don’t combine it with long term SEO techniques you will fall down list.
• Case study: large telecom.  Negative article from ex employees, also legal battle appearing in results.  Pushed page down to bottom of first page by: Set up site links.  Put in a sub directory.  Updated wikipedia page.  Did press releases to get into news.  Went to affiliates, gave them a page to put on their site.  Went to job sites and gave them same content.  Did a linked in profile.
• Sphinn – use to gain rankings on vanity search
• Theory: “AuthorRank” – by participating in community, Google think you have authority which raises not only your own site but also your presence on other networks.
• “Social Media Channel Amplifier” – could use a keyword rich username to gain this author rank.  Here’s How:
  • choose username inc brand and keywords
  • buy name on knowen – set up accounts
  • set-up ping.fm
  • link all accounts
  • post content

Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Six steps to search reputation management.  The below is the outline to the creation of a superb metric for monitoring progress in improving your SERPS reputation

• everyone has right to speak, but not necessarily be heard 😉

1. Identify brand and personnel keyphrase
2. Assess how you are doing in major SERPS
3. Analyse negative comments
4. Develop right strategies for your goals
   1. damage control
   2. tail gating
5. Execute – warning high risk of backfire
6. Monitor impact

Suggest analysing top 20 or 30.  Identify negative ones and summarise points.  Score each page to ultimately assess how bad each keyword is, scaled for rank (no.1 negative listing gets high weight, no20 less).   Can use this matrix to monitor performance over time.  Execs love it!  Labour intensive.   Google Alerts allows you to monitor and decide when you need to do a rescore.

Analysing negative sites – determine how optimised to decide if its possible to push down.  Can you buy the site and close it down?

Can you remove critical sites from Google?  Yes! Not reliable but likely to hurt you more (not a good long term solution)

Can you hack it?  Yes you can.  But don’t – it will haunt you.  Hack robots.txt

Pushing down bad sites:

• Use own site
• Use partners
• Use 3rd parties (business listings etc)

Buying is often easy and cheap solution – even those who are vitrilolic.  Do it through third party

Make a different page on a site rank better – are there more positive pages on the site about you?  Link build to it.

Manipulate the source: Can you inject new pages on the site e.g. on a community site.  If it’s a major newspaper “create a bait the journalist can’t resit”.  Consider commenting to get your side over – in particular supply new evidence

Q&A

• Risks of Duplicate content of Author rank manipulation? AC: Seeing it change on a daily basis.  Different content on different sites.
• Iceland legislation coming in.  Is Iceland going to become hell whole of reputation management? KH: Don’t know. If there are changes, there will be opportunities. Take advantage of today
• How do you apply “push down” to competitors? KH: Look at your company assets on page 3/4 or beyond and come up a strategy to push up.
• Has anybody managed to reverse any hardcore Google Suggest spam? MM: Very difficult,needs a lot of searches to make it happen but this is not always the case so is possible in some instances. KG: Saw it “work” with a travel company that launched in new countries [so could encourage user searches with competitions etc]. KH: One idiot being negative is not always something to worry about as users are intelligent. MM: Google suggest is very personalised
• Buying websites could encourage an SEO?  MM: If an SEO steps up, then MM will start stepping up!
• Recommended Tools? KH: Yahoo Analytics has much deeper detail about individuals coming onto site.  Majestic SEO – great to see anchor text. Vocus. KG: Google realtime search. MM: Reputation management in search still not being appreciated by companies (bit like conversions are ignored). Example of company spending 100 mill on new tagline, ended up having to pay 400,000 to buy a parody site.  Should have been protected before hand

Your Facebook pages – your wall, groups and fan pages – are a parallel universe to your public web pages. Just as you implement search engine optimization tactics to improve web page rankings, Facebook offers many opportunities to enhance your visibility.

Moderator: Chris Sherman (CS), Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Kristjan Mar Hauksson (KM), Director of Internet Marketing, Nordic eMarketing

Speakers:

• Marco Corsaro (MC), Managing Director, 77Agency
• Guy Levine (GL), CEO, Return On Digital
• Merry Morud (MM), Search Marketing Account Manager, aimClear
• Marty Weintraub (MW), President, aimClear

(The below are Tim’s notes from the “Killer Facebook Marketing Tactics” session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here)

[This seminar was very special.  The notes below will make little sense because the pace and energy of the presentation was on a different planet but there are nuggets of gold within.  The key take away was that the killer tactic is actually Facebook Ads – a seriously under utilised form of marketing that has to be taken seriously]

Expecting announcement on 500 million user announcement tomorrow.  Chris Sherman rightly warns that Facebook may be today’s thing, but not necessarily tomorrow’s so take away the tactics.

Guy Levine

He put a QR code on slides.  Will not be long before you can use these to get Facebook likes.

When you stick your head in the sand, everything looks cool but it presents your butt to the world.  Facebook is here, like it or not.

You may think Facebook ads may not work but we have to learn how to use them.  Facebook is different

Tip: Put name of competitor brand into Facebook ads to head hunt!

No quality score slaps.

Facebook is somewhere that people don’t want adverts.

Key to success:

• Special offers
• Linkbait e.g. as 4 ways to determine if it will be a boy or girl as oppossed to come and buy a steriliser here)
• Local
• Personality Driven (picture of person works well)

Extra Tips

• Keywords represent interest not search
• use Google conversion tracking
• put text into pictures to get round editorial – Facebook can’t read.
• Pay an admin to run your advertising on group page or give you admin access.  Can also include affiliate links for payment
• Works well when you identify something people are passion about.
• Use ads to start a conversation
• Long running ads suffer
• Put the wrong people off clicking – joy of PPC model
• Often makes sense to generate leads rather than sales.
• Have consistent style of landing page to your advert

Marco Covsaro

Facebook opportunities.  Good because:

• Reach (inc 100 million mobile users)
• Not just a direct response tool – fan page is as important as website. Apps and Open Graph.  Facebook is a search engine and open graph represents attempts to build a new type of search engine
• Targeting Options are incredible – expect it to get better.
• Ever increasing user engagement opportunities – fan pages, facebook ads (see them as direct response), engagement ads (new ways of creating virality), social ads, apps (mass of opportunities), social plugins
• Sales pitch for the technology that track Likes, Comments, Clicks and Shares.
• Sales pitch for social ad bid management
• Seeing that customers are able to spend 10-15% of what spending on Google at similar or lower CPA

Merry Morud & Marty Weintraub

• Segmenting landing pages by social groups rather than keywords
• Facebook helpcenter recently updated.  Can’t use Facebook as verb or screen captures.  Well Facebook that.
• Branding in Facebook is very inexpensive
• Not all Facebook is direct response
• Don’t rule out B2B
• This is the future of demographic research
• Search is focus but no longer biggest piece of pie.
• Segmentation is very powerful. e.g. engaged women probably on a diet.  Not going to sell retirement package to 14 year old.  College students identified.  Give teachers free stuff to teach the next generation to be fanatical about your products in years to come.  3000 people like swords
• Need to expand with lateral thesaurus as very easy to miss very large chunk of your potential demographic.
• Random global kick ass segments:
  • green
  • learn language
  • pets
  • kids
    • daughters
    • sons
  • interior design
  • holidays
    • Christmas
  • Hosting parties
  • Enagaged
  • Yoga
  • Social Anxiety – sell them antidepresants
  • Cooking
  • Craft
  • Gardening
  • Organising
• Facebook is like the content network except it works!
• Philanthropy rocks on Facebook

• Privacy setting are WTF for average user
• Concept of trogan horse as a way to market
• Friend your competitors friends – industrial esponage but hey ho!
• Do not fake it, be who you are.
• “The age of radical profiling”
• “Sweaty and Incentuous Mix Babe” so please don’t bitch about privacy.
• Identify what people think about your competitor
• Organic social friending.  Get involved in semi private conversations on other fan pages
• Refresh button is your friend – get to see more friends (6 featured each time)
• Take them outside as quickly as possible – easier to kiss them
• Recruit competitors facebook fans using Facebook ads.
• 4000 people who work at HVAC companies – yes it works for B2B

Q&A

• Can Facebook advertising be used by all? e.g. international moving company? MW: Target people graduating from medical school. Love children 45+ with daughter – sell them on who would they trust to move their daughter GL: Use AdWords
• How to target on Facebook? Facebook.com/advertising MC: can store segments for re-use. GL: Use ad planner to see language uses.  MW: Take synonyms from adwords. GL: Keyword research is much more 3 dimensional – you are looking to interupt the conversation
• Click through rates? GL: If doing naughty recruitment can get very high.  Much higher than Content Network. MC:  CTR not right metric.  GL: Look at impact on brand searches as a way of determining if branding is working.
• Facebook privacy escaping privacy scrutiny? MW: Zuckerberg doesn’t believe in privacy.  Who owns the pipe will be interesting. GL: Everyone gives FB their data.  Google takes it from trends etc.  Leverage Facebook whilst you can.  Important to get e-mail addresses as fans could be switched off.
• Facebook’s impact on search results over next five years? MW: Expect to see social network that excludes people soon.
• Theory on why Google users can’t be easily socialised? CS: personal view is that Google has always taken a very controlling way Google does stuff for us, not something we interact with.
• In a years time, will we still speak about Facebook? GL: Doesn’t matter, we just need to get in there and play. MW: LinkedIn profiling could be very interesting.  Facebook will plateau but expect to see a lot of niche communities popping up where you can target. MC: Experiences show things move very quickly. MW: Do it now, its so cheap, awesome opportunity to build a household name.

YouTube is the leading online video destination. It’s also the leading video search engine (and by some measures the second largest search engine overall). But with more than 20 hours of video being uploaded each minute, it’s increasingly difficult to get noticed by YouTube viewers without going beyond video SEO and using innovative approaches that—at least for now—are little used and underappreciated. Tune in to this session to find out how.

Moderator: Andy Atkins-Kruger (AA), Managing Director, WebCertain

Q&A Moderator: Christine Churchill (CC), President, KeyRelevance.com

Speakers:

• Dara Nasr (DN), Senior Industry Manager, Google & YouTube
• Ciaran Norris (CN), Head of Social Media, Mindshare
• Avi Wilensky (AW), ceo/founder, Promediacorp

(The below are Tim’s notes from the “Advanced Tactics For Promoting YouTube Videos” session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here)

Dara Nasr

This presentation was a pure advert for YouTube advertising.  And I paid to listen 🙁

Been with YouTube 3 yrs (previously TV advertising)

• Video accounts for 1/3 of all web traffic (bandwidth) 90% by 2013 (Cisco)
• BBC claim 50% of its content will be watched online  by 2013
• 2 billion videos watched per day
• Smart phones increasing growth
• 24hrs of video uploaded every minute to YouTube.  In UK 20% is now premium partner content (what advertising can be served against) as opposed to UGC
• YouTube accounts for approx 4% of time spent online
• Video is 50 times more likely to appear in natural search
• Google searches vs YouTube searches.  YouTube likely to be more entertainment orientated.  More about brand focus than reviews.
• YouTube search volume tool – compare and contrast with AdWords tool.
• Promoted Video Ads – CPC keyword targeted.  Often use for “branded response” adverts e.g. O2 selling music tickets.  Can saturate all buzz phrases if want – 15p per click average currently
• Can target by demographics
• Sharing with friends becoming more important. 10% of all YouTube video views are embedded on social sites e.g. Facebook
• Question: Ranking? YouTube algorithm is simpler, more based on popularity and tagging.

Avi Wilensky

(Works agency side for Sony Music)

Differences between channels

• User Channel – free
• Brand Sponsor Channel – requires 6 figure media commitment
• Partner Channel – rev share for selected users (adsense for video model)

YouTube Partnership Program

• Only open to established, good quality YouTubers.  Have to apply.  Higher standards than adsense.  Gives quite a number of advantages including being able to claim and monetize their content via “Content ID” – allows Sony to add “Click to Buy” when song included in UGC
• Not just for big brands.  Fred Figglehorn makes 100k per month, shot on flip camera improv series about a 6 yr old dysfunctional kid.
• Streaming Rentals (in Beta in US) – ad free monetise by rental similar to iTunes or Netflix.  Potentially work well for niche topics.

Viral Videos

• Killer linkbait
• Example Shakira World Cup – getting people to upload themselves doing dance
• Blog post idea: Build top 10 lists from great YouTube content e.g. Mashable top 10 wedding dance videos on YouTube

• YouTube insight – Analytics for YouTube
• YouTube Captions – allows sub titles to be added to videos – accessibility
• YouTube Feather – cut down bandwidth use
• Creators corner – portal with tips and tricks.  Includes AudioSwap for getting music you can use.

Video Site Maps – No downside to pushing content rather than relying on a crawl.  XML feed managed through Webmaster Tools

Microformats – RDFa: meta type data for videos

Can upload directly from mobile by emailing youraccountcode@m.youtube.com

Ciaran Norris

How to get a video to go viral.

• What is viral marketing? “Shit that people like to share”
• Why? Lot of products simply not interesting enough in own right, viral offers opportunity for e.g. toblerone, milano cookies
• Can’t make a viral.  All you can do is make great content and push it as hard as you can.  Don’t neglect paid ways of promoting.
• First things first?
  • Is your audience likely to upload videos to YouTube?
  • Email still best tool for spreading viral
  • YouTube itself is great example of a viral – made sharing easy.  Ditto Hotmail – signature – make your product viral.  virals don’t have to be video
  • Virals that do well are: funny (e.g. will it blend), unbelievable (e.g. sunglasses catch), pose a question (e.g. look out for cyclist advert – missed moonwalking bear – made people think again), informative (good for B2B – if it has real insight) or piggyback or spoofs fo cult phenomena (e.g. wonderbra spoof of cadburys gorilla “talent imitats, genius steals”)
  • Tip: Ask your community what to do next
  • Tip: subtle embed of slogan e.g. “Never Hide” in dirt on car window – if you searched Google got taken to raybans site
  • B2B – a few views could be viral
• Tips
  • Headline: Make them “Exclusive”
  • Thumbnail: plan your video to get middle of vid interesting
  • Comments – let them roll
  • Referrers – if people embed your vid, think how you can drive traffic to them
• Conclusion: Its the creative stupid.

Q&A

• Are there plans to change to CPC model? DN: Can purchase some space by CPC.  However advertisers are used to CPM so now immediate desire to change.
• Copyright infringement.  How often are search index updated? DN: Biggest probs are in music industry.  YouTube recognises copyright music and alert record label who can choose how to deal with it.  Do not serve adverts against UGC as impossible to police.
• Will audioswap be extended to allow UGC to be added? DN: Possibly
• Are there tools that show when best times to upload videos, what words to use etc? CN: No. DN: No CN: Mixture of art and science
• Algorithm? DN: Lot of work going on currently with voice to text type technologies for ranking that has proved very favourable [suggestion that not included yet but being worked on].  Image recognition technology likely to be a way off yet due to difficulties of moving image and variable quality.  Work being done with premium partners first.

This session looks at innovative approaches to keyword research that help you find those really significant keywords your customers are searching for, uncover your competitors’ keywords, mine the long tail for those elusive but truly valuable obscure search terms, and expand your “virtual shelf space” in surprising and non-obvious ways.

Moderator: Kristjan Mar Hauksson (KH), Director of Internet Marketing, Nordic eMarketing
Q&A Moderator: Merry Morud (MM), Search Marketing Account Manager, aimClear
Speakers:

• Andy Atkins-Krueger (AA), Managing Director, WebCertain
• Christine Churchill (CC), President, KeyRelevance.com
• Sam Crocker (SC), Lead SEO, Distilled Ltd.
• Barry Lloyd (BL), Search Marketing Evangelist, Unica Corporation

(The below are Tim’s notes from the Keyword Research session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here)

Christine Churchill

Data Mining Technique related to the Editorial Calendar – a basic but oft-overlooked technique.

• Editorial Calendar shows major planned stories for up coming issues of magazine or newspaper [additional idea – look up editorial calendars of those in industry]
• Morph it for keyword research by identifying scheduled events (conferences etc), seasons, trends etc with relevance to your industry.  Can then plan your blogging/twitter updates, PPC, YouTube videos etc
• Example: RenFest (Renaaissance Festival) where people dress up as kings and queens and speak in bad english accents.  Lot of search volume in run up to event.  Can also use Google insights – regional info very useful in States.
• Use excel to draw up appropriate lists of events etc
• Many suggested tools including Google Tools, usual paid ones, Twitter trending topics, YahooBuzz
• How can you capitalise on the ashcloud?
• Consider making seasonal content ever green
• Have content waiting in the wings
• Think well ahead – also helps you be much better organised and unified.

Barry Loyd

Using broad and phrase match for your keyword research

• Analytics data is crucial info often overlooked.
• Finding keywords that convert is vital.  Many phrases get clicks, far fewer make money
• Move converting broad match keywords to exact match as cheaper
• Advocating use of paid search as a keyword research technique.  Likely to find phrases that other keyword research won’t kick up.
• Most people don’t get down to actual search phrases in Google Analytics as default shows bid phrase
• Ultimately you should look to increase number of exact match phrases as an AdWords account matures.

Sam Crocker

Becoming a Keyword esearch Ninja

• Standard tools all OK, but other tools described below increase efficiency, none are designed for keyword research
• Mozenda – a tool designed for crawling and scrapping. Google XML API to get Google’s suggested related terms out efficiently.  Use Mozenda to take existing 1000 phrases and generate more.  Navigate to Google suggest API, import an excel file with existing phrases.   Can also use Mozenda with Delicious to pull out tags associated with a keyword.  Also use Hulu (example was with a TV series)
• Most popular TV shows – didnt follow the point
• Xenu Link Sleuth – crawls sites, strip keywords from urls
• Microsoft IIS (Xenu on crack)
• Mechanical Turks – outsource data
• 80 Legs – similar to Mozenda but more user friendly

Andy Atkins-Krueger

Keywords can not be translated!  Andy is very keen on Casseroles!  In French they are pots for cooking, in english they are stews.

• Concerned by our reliance on keyword tool
• Google translate (can use the detect feature to determine how Google views a word.  For example it detects casseroles as being a french word)
• Keyword tool is giving different numbers depending what language you put in.  So don’t believe everything.
• The longest search tails are actually in Dutch in German, not English.  Spain has a very short tail.

Crocker, Samuel, Keyphrase Research Beyond the Ordinary [Final]

Q&A

• How does Google compute Google Suggest Suggestions? SC: Something to do with number of searches for phrase. AA: Manipulated to have relevance to user.  Could be related to IP but it does produce different results depending on what domain using. SC: Search history seems to be a factor
• Competitiveness of keyword tips? AA: Not a fan of KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index), a much better approach is to do an intitle search and look at the volumes on that.  SEOmoz has some metrics but as with any metrics need to take care. KH: Recommends Trellian
• Use own web analytics as a tool? CC: tendency not to go deep enough, filter out brand, look for two to three word phrases that incorporate into longer phrases.  AA: Look for phrases in our Analytics that you don’t have first page listings for.  Likely to be gold dust. AA: Bounce rate under utilised metric.
• Other tips: CC: Yahoo suggest is slightly different and may give other ideas.
• How to judge long tail phrases with one conversion – good conversion or not?  AA: Need to look at patterns.
• Qualifying keywords to decide if you need additional content? CC: Is it relevant? What is user intent? Need to make a call, somewhat subjective.  AA: Run a keyword map for your site.  With new keywords can then look if you have the content already and can just tweak.

Links still rule as a major factor in helping pages rank well. You know all the obvious link building tips such as directories and forums…This session goes off the beaten path with ideas on how to find important, trusted and relevant linking opportunities you might be overlooking.

Moderator: Rob Kerry (RK), Head of Search, Ayima Search Marketing

Q&A Moderator: Gary Beal (GB), Managing Director, Vanguard SEO

Speakers:

• Andrew Girdwood (AG), Head of Strategy, bigmouthmedia
• Dixon Jones (DJ), Marketing Director, Majestic-12 LTD
• Kelvin Newman (KN), Creative Director, SiteVisibility
• John Straw (JS), CEO, Linkdex

(The below are Tim’s notes from the “Link Building Outside Of The Box” session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here)

Andrew Girdwood

(Edinburgh’s own!)

Deeply concerned that SEO industry and link building industry in particular is tearing SEO world apart.  Thinks “Link Development” is a better term.

• The Inconvenient Truth of Link Building – value of links has changed as a result of low quality/no quality rot.  Industry needs to become more professional
• Pretend we are Google reviewing a link? Can you answer yes to the following:
  • Is it on a trusted site?
  • Is the rate of growth for links to site natural?
  • Does it look natural?
• Zemanta (wordpress plugin) suggests related links.  Can pay to be included?
• Outbrain scans blog post – again
• Facebook like button – not SEO friendly but…(In contradiction to this mornings suggestion that Facebook like not significant, could a Hilltop effect be happening here)
• Use Google Reader “More Like This” tool for finding sites
• Yahoo Pipes – Use it to work out what you should be blogging about it next.  Speed is so important.
• PuSH Bot – get content published quickly
• Monitor press release sites to see what the news is about to be.
• Advanced video searches to find videos to put in blog posts as soon as poss.
• Influencing people to link to you is the future.
• Question: Do you think Google sees difference between bought link and the suggested wordpress? AG: different as paying to encourage people to link to you, not to buy the link

Dixon Jones

• Majestic SEO Free Tools
  • See top 5 sites in vertical and see how links have been built up over time is a good way to assess size of SEO
  • Referring domains more useful than number of bank links
• Truth is that it is difficult to see what a site is about just by anchor text in a spreadsheet.  But cutting and pasting into TagCrowd  allows easy visualisation
• Link Reclamation: If site has been around for a while, redeveloped etc, then good to find links you used to have.  Can get them from log files or tools such as Majestic 🙂  Free Link Juice
• Finding Golden Links
  • Start with search phrase and competitor
  • Check their internal link themes first to gauge how important external links are
  • Isolate the external links to the ranking page (as oppossed to home page) – likely to find most influential links
• Question: Is there better correlation between domains or shiny IPs?  If you have a lot of links from same class C IP address, chances are it is a signal.

Kelvin Newman

17 ways to get Links from University and Government Sites

Academic

1. Reach out to bloggers – lot of high quality blogs on .ac and .gov domains.  Take the approach of interacting etc
2. Offer a student discount and ask to be mentioned (Student Union)
3. Give the University some good press (they will tend to highlight positive coverage) – look at research that is relevant to sector and quote it.
4. Participate in a Scheme – e.g. under graduate interns, do a case study so they feature it on their pages.
5. Sponsor a student event – typically costs peanuts.
6. Deliver a careers talk – approach careers service
7. Advertise a job – careers service again
8. Become a case study for the business school.
9. Get boycotted! (Engage with them if it happens)

Government

1. Launch a community site
2. Set up a charitable website (how can you leverage CSR?)
3. Business Directories on government sites
4. Put on an event – the more local the better (make contacting local govmt part of the process)
5. Start a campaign (that the council agrees with)
6. If you have a job website, governments (job centers etc) may link to it.  You could develop your site’s careers section
7. Run for parliament
8. You  have to ask Kelvin for the seventeenth one?

Question: Are universities savvy to link approaches? Yes! You’re link building plan needs to be integral part of your marketing plan, not and add on

John Straw

[Turns out that this presentation was a soft launch for InfluenceFinder]

How do you handle massive lists of potential link partners and boil that down to the best ones?

Working with e-Consultancy site.  Whatever tool you use the number of links to E-Consultancy is a large, unmanageable list – 8000+ domains.  Narrowed it down

• Find bloggers as good link targets.  Used a decision tree to identify blogs with 94% accuracy.  Reduced it to 2723 blogs.  Then filtered by publishing frequency.  Very high volume publishers were considered to not be good targets as either very difficult to get links (e.g. The Times) or spam.  Equally those publishing infrequently not likely to be that influential.  So identified daily updaters.  This reduced the list to a manageable number of people to develop relationships with.  Substantial time savings to be had.

Q&A

• Pages that return 404, where do you redirect to? DJ: In most cases there will be a natural page to redirect link to.  Typically redirect to home page as last resort.
• How does the influencer tool measure influence? Currently doesn’t look at Twitter
• The Salmon Protocol for syndicated content for combining comments across website?  Caused quite a lot of confusion which reverted back to the quality vs quantity debate.
• How is Lindex influencer tool different to Adgooroo? Has a larger web map.  Layers in lots of data sources to make better e.g. LinkedIn data.  Data strategy is exceedingly rich and deep.
• Top Tips: Build Relationships, Build Relationships, Invest in PR People, The harder the link is to get, will often have highest benefit.

Reportive plugin for Gmail will find peoples Twitter profiles etc.

This session looks at the state of universal search today, and how to leverage different types of content to gain maximum advantage.

Moderator: Anders Hjorth (AH), CEO Europe Middle East & Africa, Outrider
Q&A Moderator: Dixon Jones (DJ), Managing Director, Receptional LTD
Speakers:

• Rob Kerry (RK), Head of Search, Ayima
• Rob Sheppard (RS), Senior UK Product Manager, Ask Jeeves
• Ian Strain-Seymour (IS), Social Commerce Strategist / Client Partner, Bazaarvoice
• Shmulik Weller (SM), CEO, SundaySky

(The below are Tim’s notes from the “Leveraging Digital Assets For Maximum SEO Impact” session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here.)

Rob Sheppard

(Product manager at Ask Jeeves)

• Blend results if they know they have a good quality result.  Freshness appears to be a key driver for Ask Jeeves.
• Example “How to mend a bicycle puncture” – video would be  a good result.  [Lesson – “How to” phrases good to target for video]
• Search engines use relatively few sites (YouTube etc) so its not good enough just to have digital assets, need to make sure they are published in right places too.
• Users like Universal Search because: more compelling, more choice, become expected standard.  Ask Jeeves working to make blended more prominent, suspects other search engines are too
• “It is easier to get ranked if you have Universal style content” but most share the content on main platforms
• Yahoo Answers content is viewed as a blended result – [target]
• The Basics of SEO for Universal:
  • Have different types of content
    • Videos
    • Social Media Presence (bring feeds into site)
    • RSS & Blogs
  • Video: YouTube, Vimeo, VideoJug
  • Press Releases
• AJ are looking to increase types of content.  Twitter etc becoming mandatory.  Focus on long tail of universal search.  Believe that answers are the future of universal search (“true Q&A content” – Yahoo Answers).  Search engines love structured data such as FAQ and help pages.

Ian Strain-Seymour

Exploiting Voice of Customer for SEO

• Universal search may represent an opportunity to achieve ranks with much less effort
• “Master the micro & inject it into the macro” – e.g. understand how to rank in Product Search, then can see your results in main rankings
• Voice of Customer = authentic conversations between you & your customer, customers with each other, customers with suppliers.
• Look at where you are strong – if have lots more video than competitors, good place to start.
• Product Search
  • customer reviews, Q&A, blog posts, comments.  Can give you additional keywords, can syndicate the content, Use microformats
• Realtime Search – push existing content out to Twitter.  Dell Deals example – put out 1 to 2 products a day – worked because separate Twitter feeds to increase targeting.  Started injecting different content (not just deals, also reviews) Let Google do the hard work.
• Video – Often the oldest and youngest demographics will comment by video
• Questions:
  • Twitter was slowing page load down.  Is it better to have the additional content or the quicker site.  ISS: go for faster download

SundaySky Representive

Using Video to Optimise Reach

• Video is more engaging on the results page so will often get higher click through rates than a standard result.
• 68% of top retailers now using video
• Video can improve the ranking of a site that has initial rankings
• Three pronged strategy
  • In Page Video Mark Up
    • Example: Overstock.com – video embedded into product page.  Page needs to have titles descriptions etc to help search engine understand what video is about.  Need to embed it in a way that is – use standard embeds (could be in tab or light box but must be part of initial load of page)
    • Facebook share – can specify that you have a video in page.  There is other video meta data that you can add too.
  • Website Level Optimisation
    • Video must have its own landing page with unique url
    • Have as many vids as possible (allows a long tail approach)
    • Keep videos up to date
    • Have a designated video section (more a usability tip than SEO)
  • Proactive Steps
    • MRSS (Media RSS)
    • XML site map for Google to include video url, website url, meta data and compelling thumbnails
• Question: Can a YouTube video help standard organic result? An on-site video definitely helps.  Not sure if including YouTube into page gives boost (YouTube experimenting with allowing you to link back into yoursite)

Rob Kerry

Google News

• believes it is for everyone, not just news sites.
• Short term solution to getting into top 10 of most competitive
• Get good click through rates because of thumbnail
• Likely help other rankings into the long term (possible connection with personalised search, but also adding content)
• URL format
  • unique url per article
  • have a unique number on end of each url (not date)
• Images are important for getting into news (use standard sizes 300×250 or 180×150).  Make alt tag same as headline
• Need to 3 different identities to have posted within the last 7 days.  Fake names OK!
• Author names need to viewable in article page and ideally included in Google News XML feed
• Need to submit sites to Google news
• Question: What happens if get rejected from Google News: Be Billy Big balls about going back to the editors.

Q&A

• Benefit of linking directly to image? RK: Not seen any additional benefit over linking to page
• Microformats – is there a risk of people not clicking through to your page? View that consumer will click through – likely a controversial answer.  RK: SEOGadget.co. uk has good guides to microformats.  Concerns about people putting wrong prices in to gain click throughs. Remember that universal search increases other touch points other than just website visits e.g. drive footfall.
• Media RSS Top Tips? Supported by most search engines but use  Google sitemaps for Google.
• Number of views or reputation of video poster on YouTube have impact on Google? Probably only works when appear in “Most Popular” videos. Alternative view is that likely to have impact – make sure they are reviewed well.  Very spamable
• Levels of competition before video will be included? Ask Jeeves view is that degree of editorial control combined with strong algorithmic signals.  Has to be enough videos before likely to be added to blended.
• Add video to separate page or existing page? Existing unless good reason not to.
• ID on end of url necessary?  Yes.  Separate out company news (make it blog) and then make industry news into news content
• Flash video players to get indexed if you don’t want to use YouTube? No specific recommendations.  Search engines need to be able to validate that it is a player, so use a leading one.
• Using different video hosting (e.g. YouTube and Vimeo) simultaneously.  Good or bad idea? Multiple for the views but if main goal is conversion, then include on site.  YouTube monopoly is a changing landscape.  “Rankings affected by same factors as main results”.  Divided opinion as to how to do it for SEO.
• Advantages of Social Media profiles? RK: Main benefit is reputation management, not much in the way of link benefit due to no follow.
• Fake ratings etc.  How effective?  Sub Urban Profit as an example of a service that does this but Digg seemingly on top of it.  Better services are those who have genuine love of content – more expensive but lower risk.
• How might you prevent brand showing up out of context in real time search? If you have enough accounts can flood Twitter.

This session looks at on-the-page and off-the-page factors that influence web search, to understand what remains useful, what no longer works, and what new signals are growing in importance.

Moderator: Kristjan Mar Hauksson (KH), Director of Internet Marketing, Nordic eMarketing

Q&A Moderator: Will Critchlow (WC), Co-Founder & Director, Distilled

Speakers:

• Gary Beal (GB), MD, Vanguard Online Media (Didn’t make it because of #ashcloud)
• Mikkel deMib Svendsen (MS), Creative Director, deMib.com
• Rand Fishkin (RF), CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
• Rob Kerry (RK), Head of Search, Ayima

(The below are my notes from the “SEO Ranking Factors in 2010” session at SMX Advanced.  They have been posted during the session and are still to be tidied. I have bolded what I consider to be the best tips. – more SMX coverage here)

Rand Fishkin

Saving his best stuff for Seattle ;(

• Search for Randon Surfer vs Reasonable Surfer patent
• PageRank is the Random surfer model which treats all links from a page as equal.  Reasonable surfer updates this to add user and feature data to put greater emphasis on:
  • Link position matters.  The higher up the page, more weight passed
  • Font size
  • Summarise as: The Links on the page that people are more likely to click may be considerably more valuable
• Twitter Data influencing search?
  • SEOmoz correlation work in October 2009 non compelling but end of October deal with Google and Bing so likely to be some correlation today
  • Today tweets appear to be influencing QDF (Query Deserves Freshness)
  • Questions over whether Tweets treated as links but assuming that they will simply due to the fact that is where the bulk of the freshness links are occurring
• Facebook Social Graph
  • Does it have enough adoption yet to be useful?
  • Facebook has 50,000 sites with like buttons on them (end of April) but = 0.06% of domains
  • Suspects that data is not flowing from Facebook to Google.  Bing on the other hand does have relationships and therefore likely to see effect of Facebook here first.
  • Will Facebook build own engine? Not until there is wider adoption of sites.
• On Page Correlation Data
  • Keyword or Brand at start of Title? Strong correlation between position and rank so compelling evidence for keyword first
  • H1 tags – very limited correlation between rank and using H1 tags (however first words in page important)
  • Alt attribute – slightly better correlated! (not that strong but good for image search so do it)
  • KW density – no correlation
  • Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) – simsilar to LSI (Latent Sematic Indexing).  Looks very promising as a ranking factor. (Use wonder wheel to get relavant keywords to include in page)

  SEO Ranking Factors 2010 SMX London

Rob Kerry

January and May SERPS updates

• 301s passing less link juice.  If changing domain, build authority from scratch.  Need to build links to new domain, ideally before move, then have to go to every single or consider using the canonical tag instead of 301s as they now work cross domain
• Tolerance towards spam links.  Now easier to rank for home page, internal pages harder to get.  Niche websites have done well.  Losers are those who don’t have enough non keyword anchors

May

• Believes that changes over exaggerated.  Authority sites seem to be losing out with niche sites doing better.  More effort required to make pages unique.  Biggest losers are search results style and category pages

Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Get rid of the Crap on your site (how to avoid losing ranks)

• Code Junkyards – lazy programmers syndrome
• Malware – caused by hackers (often ex-employees).  Need to check source code regularly.  Will have drastic effects on click through to your site due to “This site may harm your computer” message in SERPS
  • Check software updates
  • Check Secunia.com to identify vulnerabilites
  • Santise all user data – check that no user input required that you don’t expect
  • Check using automated but don’t rely on it (Use link tools to find strange anchor text)
• Small is Beautiful
  • Site Speed (now officially a factor but MdM believes that indirectly has always been important)
  • Quality of Code – all his testing has shown it doesnt matter if don’t validate (even Google doesn’t validate).  However:
    • Clean up code
      • If 90% of your page is code clean it up
      • Get rid of Micorosoft.net view_state (see picture!) – better solutions today
      • Javascript should be placed in external files (just one or two file not 5 or 10!)
      • Keep all CSS in one external file (don’t use inline CSS if using classes)
      • Remove empty containers (e.g. divs or table)
      • Remove all comment tags when publishing
      • Minify or Obfuscate code (remove white spaces and line breaks – will render faster)
      • Remove all unnecessary meta tags (e.g. revisit after).  All DC
    • Use content delivery network
    • Compress objects and http response (use compression where ever poss inc http requests (usually using Gzip)

Q&A

• May Day Update Highlights? RF: Unusual updates in that White hat sites have taken a hit (8-9% drop in traffic almost all in the long tail).  Happened very close to the change in l00k and feel – could their be a correlation? RK: Some may have lost but others have done better.  Winners are niche sites with very unique content. MdM: Lot of small changes.  Change of interface could have caused drop in long tail traffic.  Thinks new look is good for AdWords. Increased chances of refining searches rather than clicking through to page 2.
• Mixing US and UK results on UK SERPS? RK: Strange results less of a prob but still expect international results in local SERPS
• Strength of LDA? RF: Difficult to see correlations but more interesting is the concept that content will be more relevant if additional related terms are being seen on page.  No real data.
• QDF? RF: If Google sees search volume spikes and content spikes including keywords then they will bias results to the fresh content (e.g. oil spill SERPs will not correlate with standard ranking factors).  Very important for those in news. MdM: not so dramatic in non-English searches. RK: Often see US results in QDF results in UK.
• 301 Findings? RF: Hasn’t seen evidence to agree with RK but trusts him! RK: Canonicals are not perfect solution.  Perfect solution is to get links redirected.  Think Google may be taking a view that Canonicals are better than 301s as less easy to abuse.  Thinks 95% chanaged links is practical! MdM: Concerns about canonicals – can go wrong. RF: Google over respecting the canonical e.g. big sites redirecting every page to home page.  Seems to work too well, so maybe there will be a pull back from this.
• Top Tips? RF: Thinks that it is insane that Twitter content that is not being saved – webmasters should capture it. RK: If value short tail, don’t change your brand. Focus on home page. MdM: Very hard to predict, especially the future.  Value of dynamic content not to be under estimated (e.g. UGC or scrapping!) – more dynamic your site the better.
• Diversifying anchor text from external links? RK: Wide array of terms to both home and deep pages – include things you don’t want to rank for and high ratio of brand links.  Mess it up a bit.  Maydate: Less value being placed on internal linking?
• Canonicals for internal? RK: Use rel=canonical rather than 301. RF:  The significant concerns over 301 are quite new to Rand.  Is it a bigger problem with more aggressive SEO? MdM: Just avoid moving. Its why its so important to make your architecture as flexible as poss.
• How important is it for the content to be the same on two pages that are canonicaled RF: Google seems to respect it.