So SES London 2009 is over. Day 3 was a much quieter day with far fewer speakers and less interesting sessions for the more advanced SEOer.
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.