1. Search and the Evolution of Marketing
This session will cover how marketing and its consumers are evolving, and the part search has to play in this ever-changing environment. I imagine recent recession statistics will be discussed in this presentation, showing how search spend has only decreased slightly and has been largely unaffected when compared to many other areas of marketing. This is the opening keynote of the event and always a topical subject to kick the event off with.

2. Analyzing & Converting Organic Search Traffic
This is an area that I still feel a lot of companies fall down on. SEO is no longer just a case of driving as much traffic as possible and seeing what sticks, it’s about driving the right traffic. Search analytics have come a long way over the past few years allowing the categorisation of visitors into certain types, and information on what makes them tick. This should be a session an SEO would love to attend – who doesn’t want learn how to make their campaign more effective?

3. Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques
This has got to be the most mouth-watering session of all. Link building secrets and tips that will surely only enhance your campaign with some very well respected speakers. I was particularly excited by the appearance of Rand Fishkin on the panel. I have seen him speak before and the guy certainly knows his stuff, but understands how to apply it to the corporate environment and, more importantly, knows what clients expect….results.

If you are still without a ticket don’t forget you can get 15% off by using our SMX London Discount Code.

Jill Whalen

Jill has been involved in commercial SEO for over 13 Years and founded her successful company High Rankings in 1995. She is a prominent figure in the SEO community, called upon to speak at industry conferences around the world and published in national and industry publications. We posed her some SEO questions relating to Google in the UK, agencies, in-house SEO and the state of our industry as a whole.

No ‘run of the mill’ SEO questions here!

Epiphany: Google’s search dominance in the UK is huge, we don’t see anything around currently that could dislodge or even eat into Google’s market share. What are your thoughts on this?

JW: Google has done a great job of working its way into the popular culture and therefore, I can’t imagine their market share doing anything but going up over the next few years. It’s been Google’s game to lose for quite some time now, and they show no signs of cracking. The thing is, even if they did do some really bad and dumb stuff, it would take many years (and something hugely better) for people to stop using Google. I just don’t see it happening.

Epiphany: During 2008 there was a lot of doom and gloom talk in the SEM industry regarding a fall in the use of SEM providers in favour of in-house teams. The latest e-Consultancy UK Search Marketing Report and our own observations show that this predicted shift either didn’t happen or was very minimal here in the UK. What is your take on this?

JW: I haven’t seen the numbers, but I do believe that smart companies will indeed (or at least they should) take their SEM in-house. It would be a much more cost effective way to do it. Unfortunately, it’s still very difficult to find people with the skillsets required to do SEM who are interested in going in-house. I believe that we will start to see more companies taking their SEM in-house, while also keeping an outside consultant or agency close at hand for those times when some specific expertise is required.

Epiphany: What would you say are the main challenges facing companies looking to bring SEM in-house during 2009?

JW: As mentioned above, finding people with the right skills is certainly a challenge. Beyond that it’s getting all stakeholders in the company onboard with the SEM program and working together to make it happen. So many SEM efforts are thwarted because different departments within the company don’t seem to always be able to work well together for the common cause. When bringing SEM in-house, it is critical to have someone in charge who can bridge the gap between marketing and IT in order to be successful.

Epiphany: In the UK recruitment for SEO technicians is still difficult with a lack of truly experienced candidates and a lot of false claims in CVs. On the understanding that you could teach a new employee all they needed to know about SEO, what traits and skills would you look for when recruiting?

JW: This is indeed a very difficult task. I’ve had to hire people for my SEO agency, and it’s nearly impossible to know from a few interviews and a CV how well they will learn SEO. It is one of those careers that seem to do best with extremely passionate people, so that’s certainly one trait I’d look for. I also feel that the best SEOs often have both sides of the brain working well, meaning they are often both technical and creative at the same time. They should like solving puzzles, as well. I’ve also noticed at the various conferences I’ve been to through the years that a disproportionate number of SEOs are also musicians, with many having been professional musicians at some point in their lives. So musical ability might be a good trait to look for as well.

Epiphany: We are still seeing a lot of large companies that don’t understand SEO and even some who don’t understand it having employed an SEM agency for the past 12 months. This leads us to believe that SEO is still seen as shrouded in mystery with snake oil salesmen a plenty. Would your own observations agree with this and what would you say the SEM community as a whole could do to change this?

JW: Yes, yes and yes! This is something that has plagued our industry since the very start. Unfortunately, the snake oil salesman label is never going to go away as long as there are still a ton of that type of SEO company around selling their snake oil. And there are many. Way too many, in fact. Nearly every call we get these days to our agency is from someone who’s been burned by a previous SEO company. They waste time and money performing tasks that are in reality just SEO myths and of course never seen any results. The only way to change this is to continue to educate the public as a whole on SEO best practices as much as possible so that they don’t fall for the scam artists. Google has helped a bit because they have made it harder and harder to get websites to rank, so many of the scam companies just start to disappear. But not without first having taken a ton of money from unsuspecting clients.

Epiphany: There is no doubting your commitment to the SEM community with 13 years of running a successful SEO company under your belt and a contribution to the community that surpasses most. With so much on your schedule, do you still have time to relax and what kind of things do you do to challenge yourself outside of work?

JW: I do have time to relax, although in general, there’s nothing I’d rather do then be at my computer reading about SEO! Over the past 2 years since I got out of my home office and into a real office with employees, I’ve found that I can finally separate work and home much better. I’ve finally gotten to the point where many nights after work I don’t even go on my computer at home. Of course, it helps to have an iPhone so that I at least still feel connected. I don’t have any particular hobbies, but now that my children are mostly grown, my husband and I are able to enjoy time away from home watching various Boston sporting events on TV and things like that. Nothing too exciting, but relaxing nonetheless!

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.

The day began with a session on brand reputation & management. Dave Synder began the session, running down hypothetical case studies and a ‘light’ and ‘dark’ side review to online reputation management (ORM). Synder is clearly a leader in this industry but didn’t give that much away in this session other than the basics, and why would he? After all that is his company’s IP. The message that was driven home at this session was that your own publishing network is essential to succeed. Building up a database of Digg power user accounts, YouTube power accounts and Reddit users on your ‘books’. This is apparently the only way to consistently get results.

The next session I attended was on search term research and targeting. This was a very good mix of panellists: tools, analysis and ‘academic’ as it was put in the session. The session covered everything from keyword discovery, assignment and re-analysis. There were some very interesting tool suggestions and Google Analytics add-ons suggested in this session, which I will examine and report on at a later date. One of the more interesting issues covered was judging the value of a keyword. This should never be done solely on search traffic! A site can have all the traffic in the world but if it doesn’t convert the way you want, what’s the point? The panel examined using conversion rates, profit margins, etc to determine keyword value, this is something that is not used enough on many search campaigns.

Another one of my bug bears about campaigns and this was summed up by Dave Chaffey when asked “what’s the biggest mistake to make in keyword research?” Dave’s response was: “Not looking at the tail, only looking at the head!” This was something that rings true on a lot of campaigns we take over, the previous company has only focused on the major search terms and not even considered the 100s of long tail phrases that should convert at a higher rate.

The final session I want to report on is called Beyond Link Bait. Essentially this covered the additional ways you can acquire links with suggestions such as guest blogging and article dropping. These are nothing new. Similar to the earlier ORM this session also suggested building relationships with bloggers and journalists and creating a database of journalists who have previously published your news. One of the more interesting pieces of information, but this was not confirmed as true. Was that 301 redirects are not passing as much power as they have previously done. Where a 301 was expected to pass all power across, it’s now not passing the full amount. This was new to me, but to be honest I’m not surprised. 301 redirects should be used show robots that a page or site has permanently moved. So presumably the moved page will have similar content to that of the new page. I can see this being a factor should Google decide that 301s don’t pass as much power, unless the pages are very similar.

Overall SES London is essential for anybody involved in Search. For the more advanced, you will probably know 99.9% of what is said, but occasionally there are unique nuggets of information you may not have know before.

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!

The topic of link building eventually came up and the general agreement seemed to be that you need to get more creative with your link building, reviewing the psychological triggers for linking and playing on those.

Twitter was also discussed along with Facebook. These were seen as applications that could take away some of Google’s search dominance in certain areas, especially local search. One of the examples used was of when looking for ‘London restaurants’, one of the panel stated they don’t use Google local for that because the search results are so manipulated. Instead they use twitter and ask for advice. Now, this may work for Rand Fiskin or Mike Grehan but is that going to work for the average joe?

Overall I really enjoyed the discussion, one stat I would like to quote Mike Grehan on was that there is now a ratio of 5:1 on user generated content to mediated content. I just thought this to be very interesting to find out how much UGC there is actually out there.

I next attended SEO through Blogs and Feeds. Which began with Maile Ohye from Google talking through the basics of blogs and feeds including what’s available in Google base, how the overall blog post and Google indexing process works, etc etc. Dane Naylor was also present and it was refreshing to see him tell it like it is. His corporate SEO experience really shone through in his discussions and his frank comments were just what the doctor ordered. I never got the chance to chat with him but on almost every comment our beliefs seemed aligned. One of the issues Dave covered was where to put your blog, either on a sub-domain or sub-folder and the agreement was that it depends on your situation. I have to agree. Having it on the main domain adds value to that domain, having it on a sub-domain means it is effectively its own entity. Therefore you can gain link juice from it and also use it as a reputation management tool.

The next session was on News Search SEO, very good information for big news corporations with some real power players speaking. I couldn’t help but think that a lot of this session was aimed at huge news corps, not really at the majority of the audience. However there was some good information for journalists, showing them how online is completely different to print. One line I particularly liked was ‘the art of the headline is dead’. Ciaran Norris provided this and I thought he was particularly good despite his presentation problems.

The final session I would like to report on was the Organic forum right at the very end. Surprisingly quiet for an interesting topic. I just want to quote one of the lines from it:
“It used to be Google vs Yahoo, it’s now Google vs Twitter and Google vs Facebook”
Which for select search areas I might agree. I’m not sure how much of the UK market is influenced by these sources, Twitter has seen a recent explosion, but I’m certain the bigger commercial search terms will not be affected by these. If they are the impact would be so minimal I’m not sure how anyone would notice.

The Pirates Dilemma
Perhaps the best presented and most entertaining talk of the day, SES London kicked off with a talk on ‘how youth culture reinvented capitalism’ in the guise of The Pirate Dilemma, hosted by Matt Mason. I won’t dwell on this one to long as it has little relevance for most people involved in a day to day search marketing campaign, but it was certainly an insightful lecture. In essence the talk outlined how privacy has influenced & changed business models & practices, and how to best deal with privacy (to your advantage) if you should ever become a victim of it. You can download the book for free from Matt’s website – http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book.

Universal & Blended Search
Over the past two years Google has significantly changed how it displays search results with the introduction of Universal and Blended search. For those not familiar with these terms I’m referring to the image, video, news & local results Google inserts into the natural listings, as well as the targeted search tabs that run along the top of Google.

As search marketers were all familiar with the CTR stats of the top 5 results in Google gleamed from the leaked AOL data a few years ago. What may shock may people to learn is that when a video is present within the natural listings this ‘steals’ away 30% of ALL the traffic the top five sites normally receive. Its this kind of insight and statistical data which makes me really warm to SES, you just can’t seem to find trustable data and statistics on things like this very easily, if at all, anywhere else. There was a lot more to this presentation which I hope to share with you all in the coming days, but simply if you want to dominate the SERPs that you need to understand Universal Search and “Digital Asset Optimisation”.

IAB: Search Marketing Best Practice
This would have been a great presentation for marketing managers looking to hire an search marketing agency, concluding with a fantastic checklist of what to look for and ask when hiring. After asking these questions about Epiphany Solutions I’m happy to say we I think we would fair very well against these ‘standardised’ benchmarks of quality.

Orion Panel: Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
One point that may surprise many that don’t work day to day in the world of SEO is the view of Google Analytics that came across in this question and answer session.

“Jack of all trades”
“One size fits all solution”
“If you only have a hammer then all you see is nails”

Were just a few of the clichés used to describe Google Analytics by the panel, and I think they have a point. If you have a specific KPI for your business than you should chose the metrics package that will best report on that KPI for you, and not just blindly adhere to the Google mantra. I think this is an important point and for me, the same is also true of Google Website Optimizer. It’s a great product, and its free, but don’t just assume that it’s made by Google that it’s the right solution for you and your particular business objective.

Analytics: Data into Action
Heavily relying on a Star Trek (The Original Series) analogy throughout, this presentation was insightful, to the point and packed full of useful information, as well as entertaining. The message to this talk though was fairly simple; don’t get locked into just producing reports with meaningless numbers. If you are to provide useful advice to your clients then you need to give insight, you need to look at the experience a website visitors receives, you need to segment your data and not just aggregate it all in together to gain a true understanding of what your visitors are really doing, and whos really converting. Otherwise your reports are just meaningless lumps of numbers and data.

Come back tomorrow to read my review of the second day of events at SES London 2009.

I then attended Search around the world: US, Europe and Asia which explored search markets in other countries, namely China, Germany, Russia and Brazil. This had some very useful stats around search engine usage, user behaviour and tips on entering a local search market. I will present these stats once the slides are made available to me. But this was a must see for anyone considering search in another country.

Next was Search Marketing Best Practice. This was put on by the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and covered intellectual property relating to SEO copy and PPC accounts, it also covered trademarking and some top tips on what to look for when choosing an agency. Informative presentation overall but nothing revolutionary or shocking came out of it.

There was then a panel discussing how to measure success in a 2.0 world. The was a lot of discussion around different analytics packages In the end the discussion boiled down to ensuring you have defined your KPIs and building your web analytics package around them. No one should just be looking at visits and bounce rate as a measure of success.

The final session I would like to report on was Matt Bailey’s excellent presentation on Analytics: Data Into Action. This again was focused around showing success, but also how you need to act upon your data. It focused on segmentation as a way of looking at your data and making decisions from it. This was a must see, for all types. I will be trying out some of Matt’s suggestions in the coming weeks, I will report back on any success.