Search Engine Strategies London 2009 Day Three
Posted by David Wilding on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 in Conferences, Search Engine Strategies
Welcome to the third and final day of my SES London 2009 experience. It’s been a tiring few days and my brain is bursting at the seams from information overload, but boy it sure has been interesting. Follow me as I take you through my third and final day.
Brand & Reputation Management
A useful session with plenty of guidance on how you can implement brand and reputation management for any organisation. Due to the nature of the beast this session blended into the topic of Social Media, so forgive me as I venture down the SMO alley.
Dave Snyder, Co-Founder of Search & Social, kicked things off in the world of ORM (Online Reputation Management). Dave started his talk with, Social Media, the best link building technique and took us through both the light and dark side (his words) of ORM. Dave informed us that when trying to promote content on Digg (for ORM or general SEO) don’t get obsessed with making the front page of said website. The point of promoting here (in this instance) isn’t the traffic you will attract; it’s the incoming links this exposure will generate. The goal here is to get others to blog about your content, and ergo supply incoming (and possibly keyword rich) links. If you’re selling something 99% of the time the bulk of traffic that Digg can generate is worthless, these people aren’t looking to convert, there just looking for quick entertainment.
Dave Naylor was next and outlined the things he tracks in the SERPs when undertaking ORM; brand terms, company name, key employees and product names. Reputation scoring was another technique Dave explained. Simply this is looking through the SERP and assigning a score to the SERP content based on how positive or negative the comment was. Undertaking this at regular interviews allows you to assess the current online reputation of your clients for key terms.
Social Media Optimization
In what was most definitely the prettiest session of the entire of SES London, this all female panel gave some fantastic explanations and insights into SMO, and how to form your own all encompassing Social Media Strategy.
All of the talks here were great, but I thought Jennifer Laycock in particular made some good points. For her it’s not about optimisation but conversations; Social Media Conversations. For example, in this time of recession SMCs are a great way to interact with your customers and find out what they think about you product and its price point as wallet sizes diminish. It’s the ultimate focus group. Remember also that Social Media is on the bleeding edge of search marketing, and it can hurt. It’s important to take a look at adoption rates of these sites before trying to promote your client sites in them.
Lisa Ditlefesen informed us that the actual practical implementation of SMO is easy, and I agree with her. What is hard here, and is the true driving force behind many SMO successes, is creativity. You need to be creative and innovative with your submissions.
Were heading back into ORM here, but another important point of SMO is too alter the SERPs. The success of positive social content can take another position on the front page of Google for your companies name and help to protect your brand image. I intend to go into more detail on SMO here on the Epiphany blog shortly, so look out for that and more
Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Mentions Online
Going beyond the clich that is the term link bait is many ways is very much a use of old school marketing tactics. You need to make contact with important and prominent journalists and bloggers in your particular niche and bait them, supply them with a News Hook; a term that anyone who’s had anything to do journalism will be familiar with. It’s simply really, you need to give them a news story, journalists love fact and figures, supply them with a targeted press release with a great story complete with facts and you will generate incoming links from authoritative sources. You clearly need good contacts to be most successful here, and the panel suggested creating your own database of journalists to help with this and gave plenty of great advice on how to put this together.
Dixon Jones, the managing director of Receptional Ltd, rose a point that may surprise, or even worry many. 301 redirects may decrease in relevancy for Google in the not to distance future. Dixon was careful avoid putting too much emphasis on this controversial point and kept his analysis deliberate vague. He cited the recent introduction of the canonicalisation Meta tag by Google as evidence of this possible change. Dixon went on to outline how to analyse the quality of links pointing at a website and as well as covering the issue of the use of short URL services such as TinyURL. Simply, don’t use them, create your own script and gain control over those links. Mr Jones also suggested that rather than building new links you should also look at getting current links changed to suit your purpose, i.e. improved anchor text.
So all in all would I go back to SES London? Yes, most definitely. As a day to day SEO professional alot of what was covered wasn’t new to me, but the regularly ‘golden nuggets’ that were provided made it all worth while.
