I was fortunate enough to be allowed to leave the office for a day and go down to London for SMX London 2009. Looking at the lineup and the topics covered, I knew this was going to be a good conference and hopefully one where I could take away some ideas for client websites. I attended the second day which covered mainly organic SEO subjects.
It was a great conference and all of the presentations I attended were well worth it, I've decided to write a summary of the conference and expand a little on some of the ideas that came out of the day.
Blow your Mind Link Building Techniques
Starting at 9.00am this presentation was very well attended and I can see why because traditionally this has always been a difficult area for most SEO's. The speakers were Patrick Altoft, Lyndon Antcliff, Rand Fishkin and Pete Wailes. So what did they cover?
Lyndon Antcliff spoke about link building being more about building relationships with other website owners and connecting with them on a personal level. I can understand this and I think what most people forget is that for a website owner to give them a link, they need to provide something of real value. This is because for many website owners, they have spent a long time and a lot of effort building their websites, so linking out to people on the back of a random email saying "hey I found your website and think its really cool" is not going to happen.
I do believe that making direct contact via email or phone to related website owners asking for a link can still work, however the way you go about this is very important. Using an automated tool to send out 1000 emails to websites which contain your keyword and mail merging their website URLs into the email, is not the best way (or most ethical in my opinion) of doing this.
Instead I think you should spend time getting to know a market and the informational websites currently ranking well. You then spend time going through a website and see if and how they link to external websites. Make a note of these and think about why they have decided to link to that website. Once you find the reason why they have linked to another site, you are in a much better position to craft an email to them which gives them a similar reason to link to your website.
Patrick Altoft really impressed me, he gave away a few good and creative link building ideas. One of which involved the use of javascript on your images so that if someone tried to copy them, they would be given a small piece of HTML which they could put on their website to use the image. This code of course included a nice anchor text link back to your website. You are not going to earn a huge amount of links from this as most people may not have the knowledge to embed HTML code on their website, however the links you do get will build slowly and naturally whilst being from a number of diverse domains.
He also talked about building a website directory containing entries for people interested in your niche. The example he used was a caravan related website where you could create a website containing pages for caravan owners with pictures, info and a link to their website. The aim being to get these pages ranking well for the persons name or website. You can then contact them, show them the hard work you've done to promote them and ask for a link back to your main website from theirs.
Rand Fishkin gave a good talk which wasn't really focused on how to get links, it was more towards seeing why a website ranks for a certain query in the way it does. He used the example of "office supplies" on Google and did an analysis of the top three websites. I personally found this very useful because Rand showed some graphs and data grids that he uses to conduct this analysis. He also exposed a big SEO myth - you don't need loads of links to rank well, you simply need one more than your competitor :)
This has inspired me a little to spend more time conducting analysis of search results and going much deeper into exactly why a website ranks in the way it does. I'm recording a lot more data about websites and running my analysis in a methodical way. Having this data and general knowledge could be the most valuable thing you do as an SEO. You are getting an understanding of not only your competitors, but also a deeper understanding of how the search engines rank websites. By doing this you can apply the principles (but better) to your client websites.
Whats New with Social Media Marketing
Next up was a session on social media marketing. I've been reading so much about social media and trying to apply the principles to client sites. I've come to learn that all the hype around social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, is not always justified. I think certain sites lend themselves to some social media channels and some don't. It all depends on the industry and the market that industry relates to.
The speakers on this panel were Massimo Burgio, Dean Chew, Lucy Langdon and Ciaran Norris.
If I'm honest I didn't get a great deal from this presentation that I didn't already know. I think this is mainly because social media marketing and SEO have not found a common ground yet. The social media sites are in general very hostile towards SEO's and have done all they can to limit the value of link building on their sites. I can totally understand this with the amount of spam links these websites get.
Something I did find quite interesting was that it can be relatively easy to identify peaks and trends in search traffic for certain queries. If you can do some analysis over the course of a year of
a clients traffic, then you can probably spot certain keywords which spark an increase in traffic at certain times of the year. With this data in hand, you can try to leverage social media channels and take advantage of these trends.
I've seen social media marketing used very well to boost client sales and reputation online. One particular example I can think of was where a client used only Twitter to advertise a new product. No other marketing, not even a new banner on the website, it was just the product page and a single Tweet. They sold out of the product very quickly. But this only happened because they spent time building up their following on Twitter and making sure they communicated with others. So just taking this idea and applying it to another client with a brand new Twitter account, even with followers, may not have the same effect.
Analytics every SEO needs to know
I was looking forward to this session in particular because of a challenge between two of the speakers. Prior to the presentation Rand Fishkin challenged Will Critchlow to a showdown, whereby the person who delivered the worst presentation must buy a present for thw wife of the victorious speaker. The prize would be decided by the wife of course and could be anything they chose. Talk of expensive shoes and handbags were enough to send a shiver through the guys wallets!
Anyway, Will Critchlow talked about how to tweak certain parts of Google Analytics so that it could delivery more powerdul and accurate data. Most of his tips involved tweaks to the javascript, you can add code which can help with the following -
- Tracking across different domains, particularly helpful if you send visitors to an external site to complete a sale such as Paypal
- Adding a variable which will stop URLs with the UTM value being indexed
- Tracking exact keywords used for broad and phrase matches in Adwords
There were many more tips from the presentation and WIll is emailing me the content of his presentation soon, so when he does I'll post about it and post some instructions on how to do each one.
Rand's presentation covered less detail and focused more on using metrics from various sources on the web like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast etc to predict how search results may appear. He pointed out that its not possible to use only a single metric to conduct research of why SERPs appear the way they do. A combination must be used to determine why a site ranks how it does and what traffic they get as a result of this.
At the end we all voted on our favourite, I went for Will's as his info was much more actionable and something I could relate to straight away. Although both were good presentations.
SEO Checkup
I was very impressed with the quality of this panel with it including Dixon Jones, Jane Copland, Lisa Ditlefsen and Jonathan Stewart. The idea of this session was for the crowd to give one of their websites to the panel to run some analysis on and come up with suggestions for improving the websites search visibility.
This was a session which I enjoyed but more because I felt on a par with the panel in terms of the problems they found and the recommendations they made. On-site SEO is hugely interesting to me and I like experimenting with various factors to see how they effect a websites rankings.
One thing I did notice as a common problem for many SEO's is the lack of direct control over a clients website. There were a few instances where the audience said they couldn't change certain things because of a bad CMS system or a difficult development company to deal with. The reaction of the panel seemed to be very much "get control somehow" and make the changes.
I feel very lucky on this front because the client sites I work on have been built by us as well so I have usually been involved with the design and build at some point with an SEO influence. Also if I want to make a change to a website which isn't possible via our CMS, I can just walk next door and ask one of the developers (nicely!) if they can make the change for me.
The final session of the day was the Give it Up panel with Will Critchlow, Dave Naylor, Rob Kerry and Mikkel deMib Svendsen. Unfortunately the rules of this session mean I can't blog about the content for at least 30 days after so I can't comment on this one for now!
So overall SMX London was a great experience with some excellent speakers, hopefully I can attend a few more in the future. I'd highly recommend that anyone serious about search marketing attends a conference at some point, even if you think you know it all you are sure to learn something or at least spark some new ideas or techniques for client sites.