Search Engine Strategies London 2009 – Day Two
Posted by David Wilding on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 in Conferences, Search Engine Strategies
Welcome to my review of day two of SES London 2009. Lets jump right into the action.
Orion Panel: SEO Where to Next?
Billed as a SES first and an ‘explosive’ session this panel discussion almost lived up to the hype. It’s hard to sum up in a few sentences the in-depth discussion that went on here with moderator Mike Grehan and panellists Kevin Ryan, Rand Fishkin, Brett Tabke, Chris Sherman and Jill Whalen, and still do it justice. One thing amongst many that stood out was the somewhat heated discussion between Rand and Jill. This boiled down to ‘link acquisition’ strategies (or lack of); Jills ‘natural website’ ethos, and Rands more ‘forced’ approach. Personally, I think to achieve a truly successful long term SEO strategy, and timely meet the commercial goals, you have to do both.
Edit: You can check to see just how fair off my description of the session was with this transcript from Search Marketing Gurus.
SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
Yorkshires own Dave Naylor formed part of the panel for this session. For those not yet regularly blogging or familiar with how to SEO their blog from a technical perspective, this would have been a great session. Dave and the other blogging expert on the panel, Sante Achille, gave some great advice on implementing Wordpress for most SEO impact. I was a very early Wordpress adopter and considered myself clued up on its best implementation for maximum SEO impact, so it was good to hear the SEO rock stars of the industry confirm the methodology I had developed for myself. Wordpress usage has taught me that fresh new content (i.e. blogs) ranks very well and very quickly in Google for many medium to long tail phrases in many circumstances, as Dave pointed out for Google (a) “Query Deserves Freshness”. I was brave enough to ask a question during this session in regards to BBPress and the possible future uptake in its adoption, a little off topic I know. Either they didn’t hear my question fully, didn’t think it deserved an answer, or didn’t have an answer, but I received a very small short negative reply from Dave. For the record, he doesn’t rate BBPress at all. This was quite a daunting thing to do with a room packed full of SEO professionals and the such like, but this is one thing that makes SES so great; the ability to quiz and question the SEO rock stars of this world.
Searcher Behaviour Research Update
Are the people searching for your target term, navigation, information or transaction searchers? Do you know that Google alters it SERPs dependent on the type of searcher it thinks is using the engine at the time? That is, if Google thinks your term is an information seeking term it will promote information type websites (pages) to the top of the rankings for that term. Well, I’ve read about and seemingly experienced something similar, but this session proved beyond doubt with statistical information that this is the case.
Video & Podcast SEO
So how actually do you SEO a non-text based media such as video or podcasts? It’s a good question and is increasing important for those wanting to dominate the SERPs in a time of blended and integrated engines, as well as mine this potential traffic source. This session was about how this was possible, and to be honest (and unsurprisingly) it was mainly just standard SEO best practice.
There were though a number of nice titbits in this session. This had occurred to me before, but is perhaps a new one for many. MP3s have what is known as ID3 tags, information about the MP3 contained within (attached too) the MP3 file. These tags are machine readable; itunes for example reads these tags when it displays artist and song details. Google is a machine, it can read ID3 tags. For those of you that remember the days of effective Meta Data keyword stuffing, this is one area in which an equivalent of this is to some extent still alive and well..
Pay-for-performance: Winning Strategies for Advertisers & Agencies
Though a little dry, this session was pack full of useful business models, real world case studies, and discussion on how agencies and clients together can work to produce Pay-for-performance models that work well for them both. Some really insightful proposals were put across here and I imagine was of great use to prospective clients and agencies alike.
And on a final note for the organisers, the lunch available today was much nicer than the one yesterday. Lemonee salad, yum!
