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Advanced Website Architecture – Structure plays a major part in the accessibility and ‘crawlability’ of your website, and once in place it’s difficult to change. These notes from SMX Seattle outline some quick pointers to follow.
Off the back of a fantastic meeting for Brighton SEO, organised by Kelvin Newman, here is a recap of the involved parties presentations (please leave a URL in the comments if you know of any I’ve missed!).
The whole event represented amazing value for money – just your transport in fact – and it’s always good to see familiar faces, and meet new ones too. A crowd of about 120 turned up to join in on the big ‘geek-out’ and I’d say everyone (minus one heckler) took something away from it. Of course, the pub meet afterwards erased some of the stuff from memory!
Note: Apologies for the length of this post!
Here is the breakdown of events:
Fellow Oxford-based SEO, Kevin Gibbons from SEO Optimise opened up the day with his ’20 WordPress Plug-ins To Supercharge Your Blog’. This was a pretty relaxed presentation to open up the proceedings. A couple of tools that really stood out were Blackbird Pie, which lets you embed Twitter messages into your blog, and SEO Friendly Images which automatically helps you out with your ALT tags – something I am forever going back over!
Second up was Cedric Wooding from Jollywise Media talked us through managing an effective Facebook campaign. As I’ve currently been discussing the option of Facebook with a client, this presentation was an added bonus.
I think the biggest thing I took from this was the insight into how Facebook treat customers who spend any substantial amount of money with them. It’s a case of picking up the phone and seeing if you can arrange for bulk ad uploads and other perks. Cedric also took us over the factors of targeting that effect price. Interestingly, he mentioned that specifying interests doesn’t have any effect, which I found amazing because this is effectively where you define your audience, whether by career, hobby, etc.
Another quick tip was to consider using cheaper bid prices from countries/contintents such as Asia and South America in order to ramp up your likes/fans. The knock-on effect would follow the science of social proof and therefore should attract an incremental increase in ‘likes’ as you begin to target your real market. This follows a book I’ve read, so it completely struck a chord with me.
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Next up, Annabel Hodges AKA Search Panda who talked to us about Diggerland her thoughts on when ‘SEO’ is not just SEO. I think one of the misconceptions we’re all victims of is that clients assume everything done online is ‘SEO’. It’s hard to explain otherwise, and often just confuses things. After all, what client really cares about ‘CRO’ or ‘PPC’? I think that the case studies that Annabel showed us on C4 Education and New Look further showed us that as marketers we have to be much more diverse than we did a few years back. In particular, using the rep/ranking/authority of another website to get the best result for the client is something that we should be smart enough to recognise.
The campaign they did for C4 involved a problem where by a site for teenagers was trying to be found by teachers for teacher resources. The conflict of interests (teens wouldn’t use the site if they thought it was a teacher’s playground) led Panda and team to think of ways to appeal to both markets. This was achieved using external profiles on websites like TES (the largest teacher resource in the UK) to drive relevant traffic to the website, avoiding doing much tweaking on the main website – which could therefore still appeal to the teen audience. Without this, Annabel mentioned that her team would probably not have been able to attract the same level of exposure if they had relied on only the main website.
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Mark Cook was up next talking us through traffic estimations, and why using Google Keyword Tool is actually pretty useless on its own! Mark has collected data of thousands of keywords and showed us an incredibly intriguing presentation of where there were obvious flaws in the accuracy of the tool.
Keeping in line with the SEO Freemasons joke that popped up, I’m not going to reveal much more of this presentation. If you were there, I’m sure it will still be with you. If you weren’t, well… why not?!
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Rob Green from iCrossing was up next, and took us through a quicker alternative to Mark’s recommendations. Although their ideas clashed slightly in opinion, the fact we were given two points-of-view actually worked well. Rob went into detail, showing us the downstream effect that non-branded keywords can have on brand terms.
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The only analytics presentation of the day came from Nikki Rae of Fresh Egg, who was definitely the most interactive presenter. Nikki used members of the group to show us a post-it demonstration of how custom variables can help us identify who our visitors are. This talk was interesting and probably focuses on a lesser-known area of analytics, and one that can be incredibly effective at recording visitor behavior. Whilst I don’t have enough room to go into custom variables, here are a couple of resources that may help:
On stage next was my good man, Sam Crocker from Distilled who talked about running competitions for links. This is such a simple idea that should be used more often! One of the things I took away from this was Sam’s point about the consideration of your prize. For example anybody can give away an iPad as a one off, but being more creative will resonate more with your audience/competition entries.
The example was granting the use of a Sky Lift to the best proposal for a photography shoot. Although the audience was photographers, it made something very boring, interesting and worth going for. The legacy and value from the shoot will/might last for a lot longer than if they had a bunch of freeloaders enter to win an iPad. Of course, choosing your needs and wants with your client is important here.
Another point to take away was the absolutely crucial planning stage. Sam advises not to focus on competitions that will take hours to manage. It’s better to have a photo competition than it is to read through essay after essay of why X would be best suited for winning the prize.
Also, beware of cheats! It’s not uncommon for someone to use proxies and other tools to send multiple entries that all lead back to the same person. The time taken to sort through this stuff can be costly, so plan plan plan!
Simon Dance from CheapFlights.co.uk took us through CRM management and more link building tips. This was a great presentation that really focused on old school tactics – like picking up the phone and speaking to somebody! Simon detailed how building relationships can really accelerate the link building process. Getting to know journalists/editors etc can have a profound effect on the media coverage you can receive. Remember that they might not only apply to one client, but instead look to them to be a link across all your client base – of course also remembering not to take the piss! Nobody likes a freeloader, as Simon reminded us, so always think of ways that you can help others.
Some of the tools Simon suggested for managing your links and relationships were:
Other tips Simon reminded us of really took marketing back to basics. Things like setting up follow-up reminders to prompt us to get in touch with someone. Simple advice, and no doubt extremely effective.
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Zachary Colbert from White Hat Media delivered a pretty deep theory into the effect that hyperlinks are having on us. Citing from Manovich, Zach told us his thoughts on how we associate words to feelings/memories/likes/dislikes. But using hyperlinks that are pre-determined actually erases the thought process from it all. I was quite taken in by his thoughts and ideas, but to get a deeper insight (and I think it deserves one), I’d recommend you read his write-up. I don’t think Zach is on mind-altering drugs, but he could pull it off!
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The penultimate (I’ve probably got it mixed up somewhere along the way) presentation was from Nichola Stott. Her talk challenged the conventional thinking that websites rank purely based on keyword anchors. The stats she showed had examples of sites that ranked without in fact targeting a single term.
I’m sure we’ve all seen similar examples that must go some way to proving that contextual content and brand association must play some part in where the search engines place a website. It challenges the question of where the boundaries are set between optimising and over-engineering.
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Lastly, Rishi Lakhani showed us how to get sh*t done! This is the first time I’ve seen Rishi speak and he is undeniably a captivating person. The delivery was humorous, passionate and honest. This was a superb presentation to end the day on (and I’m glad that nobody had to follow it!) that left everyone in the room thinking over their approach. Rishi went over his frustrations with client-agency miscommunication, reminding us all that the people pulling the purse strings are often too busy to care about what we do. Results are the only true metric, and results means an increased bottom line.
I can’t write on here the delivery of this speech because it was genuinely career changing in my mind. However, I can provide you the entertaining slides:
All in all, a huge pat on the back to Kelvin for organising such a thought-evoking event. What did you think of Brighton SEO?
This was a slideshow made by Paul Adams that I clicked through to from a tweet by Tom Critchlow. A really interesting presentation on the origins and evolution of social networking online.
Looking through the presentation, the correlation between how we [as people] group our network together is really quite interesting:
The pattern is quite simple, we group people we know together based around a familiar hobby, occupation, interest, acquaintance, or other. I believe this is down to simple memory – we find it easier to remember things in chunks of between 5-9 (in short-term memory) before we start to flounder. One would normally recall friends and family through short-term memory thinking back to those they have been in contact with most recently, or have most affection to. Therefore the above slide works true for most.
However, when this is shown online:
We can distinctly see that it’s possible to have an accumulated bank of ‘friends’. There is no need to pull from short-term memory as such, because all our contacts are accessible through the system architecture, whether that be Facebook, Flickr or YouTube.
Online, it’s now completely possible to store thousands of contacts (how many people have added you on Facebook after meeting you once?) into a system that we can (and do) pull from, and push to, at any one time. Another quite famous theory, the six degrees of separation, would suggest that with the sheer volume of contacts we are ‘linked’ to, we interact with could theoretically connect us to almost everyone we have ever met. In fact, one of Paul’s slides reveals that only 3% of group names, labelled by the test candidates, actually contained the word ‘friend’ in.
How does this affect your business? Well, consider that the customers you interact with everyday are sharing/reviewing/promoting/canning/connecting more than ever. Customer service and added value have always been winners in business, but my gut tells me that it could be even more important than ever. The idea that a reputation spreads would only make the online world a catalyst. The rewards of this are significant if we follow a familiar pattern:
Zipf’s Law suggests that the best wins. By a lot. Conversely, if your customer service, added value, refund policies or telephone manner are bad, then by the same law you would be touching shoulders with ‘Praline’ on this graph. The same graph applies for almost anything and everything, from CD and box office sales, to the biggest insurance companies and largest farmed salmon suppliers.
Harnessing your customers to praise your business/service and then inadvertently spread that message to those closest in their network would almost guarantee some return. If we go by Paul’s research that suggests our close networks are typically limited to a handful of people within a localised area, the potential benefits are obvious for a local business.
Paul mentions that we should learn to embrace what makes us tick socially, and not focus on the technology so much. Whilst I think this is true, I feel it’s also important to harness the correct technology for our core audience. This in principle does require us to learn new technologies and test thoroughly until we find the most fruitful for our labours.
Carrying out an experiment trying to pattern up two people from opposite sides of the world together, and mapping out the journey – now that would be something.
I am an SEO Specialist working at Urban Element in Oxfordshire, UK. This blog is a record of my working life, my thoughts on SEO, business, marketing and a whole load of other stuff. None of the views on here represent my employers opinions and are wholly my own thoughts.
I am an SEO Specialist working at Urban Element in Oxfordshire, UK. This blog is a record of my working life, my thoughts on SEO, business, marketing and a whole load of other stuff. None of the views on here represent my employers opinions and are wholly my own thoughts.