Last year we had sessions of great interest such as those on semantic clusters by Isabelle Guiu, Web and SEO Manager at Cyclable, or by Andrey Lipattesev from Google. On the English-speaking tracks, we had sessions by international marketing experts like Purna Virji from Microsoft and Barry Adams from Polemic Digital.

Programme

The agenda for 2019 is now ready .

The event will host for the first time John Mueller, webmaster trends senior analyst at Google.

Do not miss this opportunity ! You’ll get a sneak preview of upcoming Search trends for the year 2020.

As in all conferences, SMX brings in diversity amongst speakers so all most main channels will be represented:  SEO, PPC, Social. There is always something for everyone there… check out the programme here.

Location

The location is not far from ‘Arc de Triumph’ and ‘les Champs Elysées’

Etoile Saint-Honoré

21-25, rue Balzac,
75008 Paris, France

To get there:

Métro :
Ligne 1, 2, 6 : Charles de Gaulle-Etoile
Ligne 1 : George V
Ligne 2 : Ternes

RER :
Ligne A- Charles de Gaulle-Etoile.

Bookings

Current rates for standard entry are lower this year at 750 € + VAT or for 2 days, or €450 for a single day.

If you want a discount you may use my discount code to get 15% discount

Get a 15% discount using this code: DC19

The post SMX Paris 2019 appeared first on David Carralon.

I am listing here the top four presentations that,  in my opinion,  have won the superstar prize:

1. Early morning ‘Crawl’ track

Barry Adams cracked an informative and educational and humorous presentation.

2. OnSite SEO track

The case study submitted by Matteo Monari entailed a massive site merge/migration. The success of this project deserves kudos for undertaking such a unique challenge. The case study was very presented, and there were clear, useful insights.

Lots of value in @Matteo_Monari‘s key thought – think outside the box; best-practise not always best! #brightonseo pic.twitter.com/qxl9p5cQiO

— BrightonSEO (@brightonseo) April 22, 2016

3.  ‘Results’ track

Greg Gifford culminated the two other excellent presentations with a comprehensive Bible on how to make a killing on Local SEO. There was a non-stop sequence of takeaways on how to excel at not just Local SEO, but Local Marketing. Well done to M. Gifford for a stellar performance and the incredible amount of value given away. On top of that, he made us all laugh and have a good time

4. Content Marketing track

Laura Hampton gave a demonstration of best practice on audience persona building. Read more about her presentation and takeaways on her own Brighton SEO page.

There have been many other exciting and fulfilling sessions, but those 4 stick up as the top ones for me.

The venue is great. I noticed though that the audience felt much younger than the usual Search Marketing conference type of public, perhaps because of the ‘Free’ or low-cost nature of the conference. Or perhaps I’m getting old!   Overall, we had an enjoyable time in Brighton at BrightonSEO.

Were you at BrightonSEO too? What was your favourite session?

The post Best four sessions at Brighton SEO appeared first on David Carralon.

In May this year I attended Ungagged. I got totally blown out with the experience!

So I am writing this blog post to tell you that, if you are tired of the usual half-told stories at conventional marketing conferences, UnGagged, the SEO UnConvention may be for you.

UnGagged is a reinvented conference that used to be run under a different brand. Since the re-branding, there have only been two ‘Ungagged’ rounds: Vegas November 2014, and London In May 2015, which I attended. I wish I could be in Vegas in November, but I won’t as lucky. If you can, you should go.

Here’s why :

• The focus of the conference is not just marketing, digital, SEO or a mixture of all of that. Unlike other conferences, the main focus here is: how to make money and be successful on the internet. Of course SEO is the dominant topics being discussed
• Lots of entrepreneurs, solo marketers, startups founders, bloggers and other types of individuals making their place on the internet. I met some in-house people like me too, but not as many as in other mainstream conferences like SES, SMX, etc.
• The sessions ranged from the purely white hat and ethical kind, through grey hat SEO onto plain blackhat. I have to admit that, although I’ve never been on the blackhat side of things, I learned a ton of stuff attending the darker colour sessions. It’s great to see and know what exactly is still working on the blackhat SEO world.

  

• I met a great bunch of friendly people, more than I have ever met before in any other conferences. Attendees were there to learn but also to have fun and socialise. There was a very ‘open arms and share attitude’ from most people in the conference, both attendees and speakers.
• In terms of speakers, most of the ones I spoke to were also very approachable, and welcoming of questions and ready to engage in conversation with the participants.

Here’s just some of the sessions I enjoyed the most during Ungagged 2015 London:

• Justin Gilbright’s business investment tips on online ventures acquisitions
• The Q&A session with the Search brothers was definitely one of the highlights of the event.
• Jakob Helberg’s session: “3 Killer Ways to Build Ridiculous Amounts of Domain Authority & Trust”
• Joe Sinkwitz session : “Blackhats Make the best Whitehats:  Crazy Shit I Still See”

I’ve never before been to a conference where I’ve had so much difficult choosing between two tracks. There was so much goodness going on that this was constantly the case.

It was a highly educational experience. I’m quite sad to see that I am going to miss Ungagged Vegas. So if you happen to have the time budget and are looking to attend a great conference where you can both learn and have fun, I can’t recommend it enough.

Ungagged Vegas looks like it’s going to be even more spectacular. On top of some of the top speakers they brought to the London round, they have added additional seo rockstarsv from the affiliate world like Rae Hoffman, Sugarrae and Jeremy Shoemaker. But also big names in Digital and Search, like Bas Vanden Beld or Duane Forrester. This Unconvention seems promising.

If you don’t yet have a discount code, feel free to use this one: ‘davidcarralon’ to get  10% reduction for Ungagged Vegas 2015

You can find shots of each of their conference here (Vegas 2014)  and here (London May 2015):

I took my own too. If you were in Ungagged London this year, and find yourself in any of the photos from this gallery below, feel free to pinch it and use it how you wish.

[envira-gallery id="1754"]

The post Ungagged, the conference not to be missed appeared first on David Carralon.

This SEO conference outstands from most of the mainstream conferences in Spain in that it is a guerrilla-based, tactical SEO conference on steroids. Having attended other similar tactics-based conferences in the UK, eg: SEOmoz Pro training, I can comfortably state that this conference was of equal of even higher value to anyone who wants to learn the nitty gritty of doing SEO.

With only two consecutive years running, the Congreso SEO conference in Valencia, has become popular amongst industry professionals for its transparency towards all sorts of SEO tactics. That is, blackhat SEO presentations are encouraged as much as other types of instructional or educational sessions, eg: advanced analytics.  The requests for speaking are carefully scrutinised by the organisers to ensure all presentations are of high value.

Who were the speakers?

There were speakers from all sorts of sectors and levels: from consultants and freelancers to SEO agency owners and from small business owners running a one man show (Juan Palomo) to in house SEOs working for small and medium-sized businesses. All of them are professionals willing to tell and show their case studies (real life projects) either of their own or that of their clients. So what’s said in the conferences doesn’t get shared.

You can read about the programme and the full list of speakers following their enewsletter.

Who were the attendees?

Typically this section is always left for the end of the post, but I am going to mention the attendees first because it is with them that I learned the most and shared the best moments of this conference. The first night before the conference I was lucky enough to catch up with a group of lads with very diverse profiles ranging from white to black. It was a fantastic start to building lots of interesting contacts (and links of course).

The next day during the conference, I met many more SEOs some of whom I only knew via Twitter.

Great Content

The various blackhat-related tweets that went round during the conference may have either prompted you to think that you would like to attend, or put you off from attending. I would like to clarify something: none of the sessions, in my opinion, were solely blackhat.  It is true that there was an uninhibited and constant display of blackhat or greyish techniques throughout many sessions, but the ‘Congreso SEO professional’ conference is highly educational.  If any, you need to have a fair knowledge of the Spanish language to take advantage of all goodness going on.

I feel that I can classify the sessions into five different buckets:

1. Informational & educational
2. Strategic & analytical
3. Tactics-based
4. Case studies
5. SEO tools.

Informational/educational

The informational sessions were to say highly informational in the sense that they were going to the point with the ‘meat’ of the topics. For example the magnificent explanation of the Panda update algorithm covered by Carlos Redondo in the Valencia 2011 event was great. He compiled a massive amount of information, including dates, events, and facts. He analysed every possible angle of the Panda update to help us all understand the intricacies and specificities of this new algorithm.

Strategic & analytical

Equally fulfilling was the ecommerce-oriented analytics session delivered by Fernando Macia. He staged a brilliant, fast-pace demonstration of efficient analytics and ROI-drive decision making using e-commerce scenarios in his presentation.

I personally found Paul Gailey’s infographics sessions both strategic and tactical, yet creative and inspirational. Not because infographics may be a new thing at all, but because of the guidance given, the tools and tactics tips he gave us and the depth of his presentation.

Tactics-based

As I said earlier, many of the sessions have a blackhat component, but at the same time they are all  highly instructional too. It is up to the participant to decide what to do with the knowledge acquired and how much of the naughty stuff you want to implement.

David Carrero’s presentation on speed load optimisation shined because of the real life scenarios he used. He demonstrated how site traffic can improve through speed load optimisation. David even embedded a touch of greyhat in his slides by suggesting that some of the images used for your site’s interface could be hosted on an external host (eg: Google blogger) to minimise the number of calls on one’s server as well as the use of image sprites. He also covered CDNs which is something I am 100% concerned with in my in-house role.

Case studies

There were great case studies on websites affected by Pandan, the specific business models, the challenges faced up when they got hit by Panda, the post-Panda actions and solutions they implemented to alleviate the fall in traffic. One of these two cases even had an international dimension: the Brazil market. The other one was based on the fast-moving, highly competitive sector of travel. Not sure I am allowed to mention the name of the companies.

I can’t leave this section without mentioning Rodney Cullen’s presentation, where he showed off how a combination analysis, test and mistakes made he got one of his sites to skyrocket in traffic. The tip on not combining the ‘noindex’ (in the meta robots ) and the canonical tags was very welcome by everyone, though there are those who think that this is not the case. Every site is different though.

SEO Tool demos

The SEO Tool showcase sessions were instructional too to the point that they all contained an element of case study and taught us not only how to use the tool, but what aspects of competitor analysis to focus on and what data to extrapolate to help draw conclusions on actions. They definitely brought in just about as much value as the case studies.

The showcase sessions on competitor analysis and reporting presented by Eduard Bayo on SEO guardian and by Graham Hunt on Market Samurai unveiled great tactics and methodologies to analyse the competition in an efficient and intelligent manner as well as practical. The case studies used here reflected practical case studies with an outset and outcome. Rodney Cullen

I am only mentioning a few of the speakers, perhaps they ones that for me were matched to my main interest in the enterprise. This however doesn’t go to say that all other sessions were not equally interesting and useful. Every one of the sessions shed value and contributed something valuable. For example the session on Google Local by Jorge Gonzalez from Publigrup was a cracker!

The secrecy dimension

The organisers made it very clear from the beginning to keep some of the content quiet and refrain from letting some of the sensitive stuff out: the names of the companies used through the case studies, details on the blackhat tactics or methodology mentioned by the presenters. They wanted to keep the uniqueness of the content to the attendees and due to this atmosphere of exclusivity, everyone seems to be more prone to give you their best tips and tricks both through the sessions and outside, during coffee, drinks or other networking times.

The networking and the ‘linktonics’

If you decide to make the move to Valencia (perhaps in Madrid next year?) and join one of these conferences, you will not only enjoy and learn from the sessions but also the networking. Which of the two gives you more value? I wouldn’t be able to choose between the two. The sessions are great, but it is through the networking on all conference that you always exchange, share and discuss viewpoints, strategies and tactics that may or may not work for each sector or business model. If you look to learn blackhat, I’d say that it is through the networking where you are more likely to learn than during the sessions.

On the ‘Congreso SEO’ the added bonus is that people go round looking for opportunities to exchange links. They are all keen to proposals that entail collaboration on content-supported links, straight link exchange and any kind of link building collaboration. Nearly everyone runs their own websites and boasted a number of blogs and websites, some even large number of blogs. In turn, mostly everyone I met encouraged and supported the idea of collaboration based on a safe one-way link approach.

Lastly, how could I possibly finish this post without mentioning the great social momentum at Red VLC, one of the trendiest and most prestigious clubs in Valencia. Participants, speakers and other local SEOs were invited over. We were treated to a sophisticated tapas dinner with great food, wine, cocktails. The conversations revolved around all sorts of technical SEO stuff, exchanging & buying links (‘linktonics’), SEO tricks & tips, buying domains, ‘JuanPalomo’ SEO and even Corporate SEO. Everyone had a lot of fun and it seemed that, for some, the party carried on till wee hours. When I left at 4.30 am,  I got the impression that the majority were still at the club talking ‘SEO lingo’.

Conclusions

This conference has been without any doubt the most instructional, educational, valuable and enjoyable SEO conference I have attended for a good while. Other conferences I usually attend are good too, eg: ISS for example as it has a high component of ‘International’ stuff, which is irreplaceable for the kind of corporate SEO I do, but Congreso SEO has contributed significantly to my overall SEO knowledge. It is to say that a lot of the stuff you learn here presents a big ‘no no’ into a corporate environment, but it is still interesting and useful stuff to learn about.  Blackhat, spam and manipulative SEO is out there and you want to make sure you understand it just so that you can identify and understand it when/if your competitors use it.

‘Congreso SEO’ is a highly recommendable SEO event, which I thoroughly enjoyed and would not hesitate to recommend. Whether you work for an agency or work  in-house, or a small enterprise enviroment or for a international organisation, if you speak and understand Spanish and want the best of an SEO event in Spain, this is the place to go/

If you were there and would like to add anything please feel free to do so in the comments…

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I attended ‘LeWeb’ 2010!

I had only known about ‘LeWeb‘ Internet conference for three years, and always missed the chance to attend, until last year. This event brings the ‘crème de la crème’ from the internet world in terms of speakers, entrepreneurs, marketing directors and celebrities from the digital world. It is all about presenting innovation, discussing latest industry news, the start-ups and the opportunities for the start-ups, digital and social media, the social game industry, and the workshops.

The entrance fee to the LeWeb is pricey: €1995 for the full price, but €995 if you buy at early bird discount like I did. I have been looking forward to the event for the whole year, followed all
arrangements and plans, participated in comms with the community via Twitter, facebook throughout the year and got all excited.

It is clear that I missed quite a lot of good sessions during the two days event as it is a huge venue comprising 3 buildings and hundreds of debates, product showcase. So it is easy to miss important bits and bobs, for example I missed the Facebook workshops as they were constantly packed.

Yet, I hope that my recap will give you a good grasp for what you can find there if you decide to attend next year. But let’s move onto discussing some hightlights:

Day 1

1. The ‘state of the industry’ morning sessions was informative and entertaining. It was interesting to see debate into some of the trickiest and most controversial areas of the Internet at present: Windows phone 7, privacy concerns on facebook, Twitter and MySpace news, all spiced up with Michael Arrington (Chief Editor at TechCurnch)’s ‘on the spot’ and direct questions. A good way to start the conference. For info, all footage on ‘leWeb’ sessions can be found on LeWeb’s youTube channel. 2. The Ignite sessions were very entertainining and my preferred presentation was ‘Japanese Geek Culture’ by Fumi Yamazaki, a Japanese Blogger that currently works for Google. Fumi spoke about the awesome sharing, reusing and remixing Japanese geek culture.
2. The Fireside discussion between M.Arrington and Marissa Meyers was interesting. Marissa was praising the many great features of Android phones, including the amazing 3D local maps functionality, which is really something. Michael Arrington asked the audience if they would consider switching to Android after seeing that, and only five people raised hands, not good publicity for Google Android-enabled phones. Marissa spoke about contextual discovery, about acquisitions and about ‘Hotpot’, Google’s new local reviews platform. Watch the video here or read a full post on this interview on State of Search’s blog.
3. The session with Tomoko Namba, CEO at DeNa was great. DeNa is one of the largest mobile social network and mobile game companies in Japan: 20 millions registered users, 1.2 billion dollars in revenue from selling virtual goods eg: mobile-based social games. Loic compared their platform to facebook as there is a social element to the games, with the difference that users actually make friends on the platform and play games together, but without having previous met f2f : virtual friendship. However MobileGate, their flagship platform is an area where apart from having inhouse developed games other developers can come in and deploy their games too. They are now moving onto smartphone platforms and also desktop and outside Japan they are acquiring companies : MGBOKO, which is another Games platform outside Japan. Awesome stuff! Watch the whole discussion.
4. The workshop on HTML5 was instructional for me as I still had not had time to learn much on HTML 5 and the supporting environments. Although I got there once it was already started, I grabbed some tips on the functionality of the the 3WDOC authoring studio, which has the ability to showcase video on a webpage without any supporting piece software. It will be offered as  freemium and integrated versions in WordPress with watermak and option to remove it if you pay.
5. Q&A with Dennis Crowley, Co-founder of Foursquare and Loic LeMeur. I was intrigued to hear more about Foursquare’s plans to provide further functionality or enhance the product. Such question was asked by an attendee from Siberia who got a free pass from Loic leMeur to attend the conference. Apparently the guys at Foursquare are thinking what they could possibly do with all the data they are compiling but for the moment there are no decisions, well there may be but nothing was given out at the gig. Dennis seemed calmed and unworried as he was sitting there answering questions with confidence despite knowing that some competitors were launching similar products eg: Facebook Places. Watch the Q&A with Dennis on Youtube.
6. At the media Panel at 18.00 Brent Hoberman made some really good points about the difficulties for foreign companies to penetrate in Europe. This complexities are diverse, for example in France’s employment law is so complex that you need to bring specific expertise to deal with that single area. Leo Laporte asked Loic why he didnt set up Seesmic in Paris, instead of San Francisco. Loic speaks about the complexities of setting up an idea in Europe, and having to fly to Berlin, Madrid, etc… and by the time you realise, chances are that someone may have already developed a similar business in the Sylicon valley. Watch this discussion here.

Day 2

The start of the day took me to the building next along (Plenary II stage –Eiffel dock), a smaller but more homely building. I was looking for something more geeky and data-driven, so I dived
straight for: ‘Lean Analytics for Start-ups’ by AlistairCroll, from Bitcurrent.

The main goal of his presentation was to present key analytics for start-ups. Alastair explained the intent behind the analytics, having clear KPIs and the essentials of tracking things
like visits, bounces, etc… but also tracking other things like usability (eg: via heatmaps, form completion tools, use surveys….)

He then delved into the need for optimising your page load using an experiment he made on users which showed that a faster site always returns better user experience: more engagement, more visits per visitor, less bounces… point taken: users want faster navigation and sites. He briefly picks on community Managers stating that they should be there to analyse the start of the funnel and making sure that their work leads to meeting the objectives for the campaign.

The most important part of the presentation in terms of the analytics: ‘In a start-up the purpose of analytics is to iterate to a product/market fit before the money runs out’. Here’s some learning points:

1. Focus on the Viral coeficient: how many people that use your product helps promote it to others, example: ‘get your private free email: www.hotmail.com‘
2. How well are your messages being amplified: Twitter is given as an example: how many people view your message, RT, and how many visit your page, and eventually ‘the total revenue’ in $ per social media (or Twitter) campaign.
3. No. visitors vs conversion rate + other metrics like what visitors think of us, how engaged they are
4. Extended funnel abandonment
5. what moved us away from goals?
6. what is the cost per visitor
7. Minimum sustainable burn: min cost to run the company Watchthe session on youtube or his slides

Next on was the “Asia: Digital Life, Real Billions” where a group of Asian top entrepreneurs were interviewed. Amongst the panelists, we had :

• Naoki Aoyaki, Senior Vice President, Business Development & CFO, GREE
• Takuya Miyata, Senior Vice President, Global Business, mixi
• Yiqun Bo, Vice-President & Co-Founder, Great Wall Club
• Steven Goh, CEO, Mig33
• Chang Kim, ex-CEO of TNC, Product Manager, Google Blogger
• Jimmy Kim, CEO, Nexonova

I learned quite a bit about the Social gaming industry in Japan. One piece of data that really got my eyes opened was given by Takuya Miyata: apparently Japan’s No2 social network Gree spends 10 million $/month in TV commercials!

However, I think he said that it worked out at about $12 per acquisition, so advertising spent is even justified?

The next session on ‘How Social is Changing the Gaming Industry’ was a bit slow though it was interesting to hear from the panelists how they went about monetising, being Micropayments & advertising the two main revenue making models in the gaming industry. So I decided to cross over the road onto the Pullman Plenary Room. I stopped a few moments for coffee, some networking and also viewed some product demos at the stands.
I then headed for the ‘Start up competition Finals’ where I really enjoyed seeing the final 4 winning startups showcasing their ideas. I thought one of them was very imaginative and typical of a French mind: ‘Super Marmite’, a site to go to find out who’s cooking and willing to sell you a portion around your local area, request a visit to try whatever the person is cooking and arrive at the spot with your taperware, pay, eat healthy and socialise. The presenter was a young lad full of charisma who put a bit of humour on the session. I am glad they got the No1 prize on originality.

I was sad to see that no Spanish startups were competing with other French, Dutch and German startups… why are Spanish start ups not selling themselves outside: is it the recession, the lack of information, language barriers? Read more about the startups that presented at LeWeb on this TechCrunch post .

Keynote: Social Media And Big Business: Trends for 2011 by industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah kicked off his presentation by saying : ‘you need to be where the money is and how you should spend your social media budget’. Wow! he then got everyone’s attention. It’s worth watching his video but if you cannot be bothered, here’s some of the main points of his presentation.

The biggest area of growth in 2011 is hiring people to run the programmes/campaigns on social media. We should invest in scalable social media programmes by:

• Hiring: hire the business people first, then those to run the programmes
• Hiring: hire the business people first, then those to run the programmes
• Integrate social media features the right way into your website not just placing a follow me bottom and encourage traffic to go away.
• Use advertising that enacts word of mouth
• Develop an army of advocates that can spread the word about your products and services perhapsjust in return for free products
• Invest in social CRM
• learning to measure right: don’t give executives engagement metrics like retweets and followers, but performance metrics: revenue, reputation, customer satisfaction. Give to each one the metrics they are interested in

Download his presentation slides.

Q&A with Gary Vaynerchuk, Host, Wine Library TV,
Author, CrushIT

This was the last session of LeWeb conference but probably one of the most entertaining, enjoyable and fulfilling. We were all tired but Gary Vaynerchuk woke us all up.
Gary knows how to draw the public’s attention by bringing an unusual, outrageous fun to the Q&A. Gary got the session started with some rants about social media stuff, the humanisation of
businesses, how they are starting to get closer to customers, talk to them, feel what they need, listen to them…. but Loic prompted him into the Q&A. The session can be viewed on LeWeb Youtube channel too.

The main highlight of his presentation arrived the moment someone asked: What is the ROI of social media? to which Gary replied:

‘what is the ROI of your mum’?

Tip: jump straight to min 37.30 as the whole session is about 45 mins.

That one must have been one of the most tweeted phrases of LeWeb. LeWeb10 was over, and I guess everyone is now looking forward to LeWeb11

Summary

I was a great, fulfilling experience that got me inspired for days, however I didnt feel like I learned anything practical. My knowledge on the digital world definitely got enhanced as I found out about new things, but didnt get any takeaways with me in terms of practical advice, so perhaps this type of conferences are not for me.

I acknowledge the fact that this was not a search engine marketing conference and didn’t expect anything like that, but got a bit dissappointed of the poor or virtually no coverage that ‘Search’ gets at LeWeb, apart from a few mentions here and there by a couple of speakers, like Marissa Mayer.

Let me just add the impressive figures about network usage data at LeWeb:

* Total Unique Devices: 4688
* Total Traffic: 1.12 TB
* Top (Ab)user (wireless): klug20s @ 11.2 GB
* Top (Ab)user (wired): Tubby Builder @ 110 GB
* Top 5 Applications: Flash Video, iTunes, Twitter, YouTube, email
* Top 5 OS: iPhone, OSX, iPad, W7, Android
* Top Client devices: 71.8% Apple, Intel 10%, HTC 5%
* Devices having used Twitter: 2602

The post Le Web Paris 2010 appeared first on David Carralon.

My slide deck has been uploaded on slideshare. You can view the presentation on the embedded slides or download it. Feel free to repurpose it for your own use if you find them useful, but if you do please be kind and remove all British Council branding and imagery.

It is difficult to convey the same ideas and concepts on these slides without the accompanying speech, but the top messages are there.

The main areas I spoke about were

• the British Council’s mission and objectives
• the web network model,  the diversity of the projects we work on
• the challenges we face as an public body international cultural relations organisation
• the much needed marketing resources
• the deficiencies of our technical platform and CMS
• the simple but effective low cost SEO strategies that bring benefit to the organisation
• the importance of giving credit for the achievements
• a couple of tools I use for the management of SEO projects.

One of the top messages that I tried to send across was to do with how the power of a big brand can make the simplest of your SEO strategies successful, how the absolute industrial strength of our sites can support longtail strategies by realising our internal linking power, and how the added support of simple link building strategies like niche directory submissions can give us the needed edge to achieve search engine visibility for competitive terms.

Updates like the MayDay or Vince in the past may seem to have brought opportunities for brands and/or losses for smaller businesses.  My experience of doing SEO for an organisation with recognised brand status and positioning is that whatever the various updates that may have taken place on the Google other international search engines the advantage of having a recognised brand can result in garnering amazing opportunities to gain links. This in turns impacts positively on the SEO strategies if the value of those branded links is used efficiently via internal linking structures that work and avoiding critical mistakes like javascript navigation structures.

If you would like to read more about the event, Gemma Birch, from WebCertain wrote a piece on the Multilingual Search Blog where they present Inway Ni owner of one of the most successful gaming sites in China: http://www.4399.com/ as the winner to the Medallion Speaker at the ISS.

You can find coverage of the event at other sites: Yandex, Baidu and Google competition on the Freshegg site and several live blogging sessions at State of Search where you can read all related posts by Louise Venter, of which I particularly like the one by Mark Hauksson on IP addresses and GEO targetting .

Did you happen to attend the ISS in London too? please feel free to comment on the presentations you found useful and/or enjoyed the most.

The post My presentation slides for the International search summit London 2010 appeared first on David Carralon.

I like attending Search Marketing industry conference as it does not only provide you with different insights, new experiences and networking opportunities, but it also helps you remember that you have some skills and knowledge that, for some reason, you are not using to good effect.

To the point, my top five takeaways from SES London 2010 were:

• • More emphasis on ‘Conversion rate optimisation’ (CRO):

    There is great potential in implementing CRO techniques and often the secret is to test more often. Read Bryan Eisenberg’s advice on Mel Carson’s blog post or this other one from Andrew Girdwood and watch the video on top right where Bryan is interviewed by Greg Jarboe. If that is not enough, you may want to check the work being done by Conversion rate experts, which I mention in my recap post from the SEOMoz Pro seminar las October.

• Tailor your web analytics data reports.

  Focus on the datasets you need to do your work and then make data driven decisions. Give your boss/client the datasets she/he needs to get their ‘buy-in’ into the SEO campaign you are lobbying for. Use custom filters, advanced segments, custom reporting to drill down and segment your data so that you can focus on what is needed to gain the ‘buy-in’.

• Improve your keyword research techniques

  Try picking more long tails, drawing out more data on them and test their ROI levels upon implementation.

  To get better at Keyword Research, I would recommend to read Richard Baxter’s posts on vlookups, excel tables and pivot tables.

• Don’t always follow 100% what the expert SEO speakers say

  This is industry where only your own testing and analysis will give you the answers and help you conclude of actions. While I agree that it is good to follow good practice advice, sometimes you have to balance what’s being said against the specificities of the site you are dealing with. Every site is different (eg: size, link portfolio, content) and therefore there cannot be a ‘one rule/opinion fits all’. An example of this is the ‘sitemaps’ topic. Some will tell you there is a lot of benefit in using them and others will say they’re useless. It all depends. This is one of my tweets during the session on ‘Pushing Content Via XML, RSS & Site Maps‘

  

• Learn Affiliate marketing

  This is a area of Online marketing that I had been ignoring until now but after attending the session ‘New Affiliate Opportunities & Strategies’, I became inspired and noted down some good ideas to take both to my in-house SEO job and to my own sites.

• Get better at Link building by drilling further on competitor’s link portfolios.

  Jim Boykin‘s session on link building reminded me that I have to get better and faster at using tools like Linkscape and SEO Majestic to analyse competitors’s link portfolio’s and find those links which my sites also qualify for.

If you would like to read more about SES London 2010, the official full blog coverage from SES is a good start.

It feels like ages since SES came back to London last February, but I have only just found time to go through my few scribbles and notes taken during the conference and the various speaker’s slides. I have managed to pull out my five top takeaways from the event, which I intend to take action on during 2010.

I like attending Search industry conference as it does not only provide you with different insights, new experiences and networking opportunities, but it also helps you remember that you have some skills and knowledge that, for some reason, you are not using to good effect.

To the point, my top five takeaways from SES London 2010 were:

• • More emphasis on ‘Conversion rate optimisation’ (CRO):

    There is great potential in implementing CRO techniques and often the secret is to test more often. Read Bryan Eisenberg’s advice on Mel Carson’s blog post or this other one from Andrew Girdwood an watch the video on top right where Bryan is interviewed by Greg Jarboe. If that all is not enough, you may want to check the work being done by Conversion rate experts, which I mention in my recap post from the SEOMoz Pro seminar las October.

  • Tailor your web analytics data reports.

    Focus on the datasets you need to do your work and then make data driven decisions. Give your boss/client the datasets she/he needs to get their ‘buy-in’ into the SEO campaign you are lobbying for. Use custom filters, advanced segments, custom reporting to drill down and segment your data so that you can focus on what is needed to gain the ‘buy-in’.

  • Improve your keyword research techniques

    Try picking more long tails, drawing out more data on them and test their ROI levels upon implementation.

To get better at Keyword Research, I would recommend to read Richard Baxter’s posts on vlookups, excel tables and pivot tables.

• Don’t always follow 100% what the expert SEO speakers say

  This is industry where only your own testing and analysis will give you the answers and help you conclude of actions. While I agree that it is good to follow good practise advice, sometimes you have to balance what’s being said against the specificities of the site you are dealing with. Every site is different (eg: size, link portfolio, content) and therefore there cannot be a ‘one rule/opinion fits all’. An example of this is the ‘sitemaps’ topic. Some will tell you there is a lot of benefit in using them and others will say they’re useless. It all depends. This is one of my tweets during the session on ‘Pushing Content Via XML, RSS & Site Maps‘

  

• Learn Affiliate marketing

  This is a area of Online marketing that I had been ignoring until now but after attending the session ‘New Affiliate Opportunities & Strategies’, I got inspired and wrote down some good ideas to take both to my in-house SEO job and to my own sites.

• Get better at Link building by drilling further on competitor’s link portfolios.

  Jim Boikin’s session on link building reminded me that I have to get better and faster at using tools like Linkscape and SEO Majestic to analyse competitors’s link portfolio’s and find those links which my sites also qualify for.

If you would like to read more about stuff that went on during SES London 2010, the official full blog coverage from SES is a good start.

It feels like ages since SES came back to London last February, but I have only just found time to go through my few scribbles and notes taken during the conference and the various speaker’s slides. I have managed to pull out my five top takeaways from the event, which I intend to take action on during 2010.

I like attending Search industry conference as it does not only provide you with different insights, new experiences and networking opportunities, but it also helps you remember that you have some skills and knowledge that, for some reason, you are not using to good effect.

To the point, my top five takeaways from SES London 2010 were:

• • More emphasis on ‘Conversion rate optimisation’ (CRO):

    There is great potential in implementing CRO techniques and often the secret is to test more often. Read Bryan Eisenberg’s advice on Mel Carson’s blog post or this other one from Andrew Girdwood an watch the video on top right where Bryan is interviewed by Greg Jarboe. If that all is not enough, you may want to check the work being done by Conversion rate experts, which I mention in my recap post from the SEOMoz Pro seminar las October.

  • Tailor your web analytics data reports.

    Focus on the datasets you need to do your work and then make data driven decisions. Give your boss/client the datasets she/he needs to get their ‘buy-in’ into the SEO campaign you are lobbying for. Use custom filters, advanced segments, custom reporting to drill down and segment your data so that you can focus on what is needed to gain the ‘buy-in’.

  • Improve your keyword research techniques

    Try picking more long tails, drawing out more data on them and test their ROI levels upon implementation.

To get better at Keyword Research, I would recommend to read Richard Baxter’s posts on vlookups, excel tables and pivot tables.

• Don’t always follow 100% what the expert SEO speakers say

  This is industry where only your own testing and analysis will give you the answers and help you conclude of actions. While I agree that it is good to follow good practise advice, sometimes you have to balance what’s being said against the specificities of the site you are dealing with. Every site is different (eg: size, link portfolio, content) and therefore there cannot be a ‘one rule/opinion fits all’. An example of this is the ‘sitemaps’ topic. Some will tell you there is a lot of benefit in using them and others will say they’re useless. It all depends. This is one of my tweets during the session on ‘Pushing Content Via XML, RSS & Site Maps‘

  

• Learn Affiliate marketing

  This is a area of Online marketing that I had been ignoring until now but after attending the session ‘New Affiliate Opportunities & Strategies’, I got inspired and wrote down some good ideas to take both to my in-house SEO job and to my own sites.

• Get better at Link building by drilling further on competitor’s link portfolios.

  Jim Boikin’s session on link building reminded me that I have to get better and faster at using tools like Linkscape and SEO Majestic to analyse competitors’s link portfolio’s and find those links which my sites also qualify for.

If you would like to read more about stuff that went on during SES London 2010, the official full blog coverage from SES is a good start.

The post Five takeaways from SES London 2010 appeared first on David Carralon.

During this conference a lot of  lessons were taught. This post is just an overview of what I considered the best highlights for this one day annual event. If you however would like to know everything that happened during this event, you can find a detailed recap post I wrote for the Youmoz section of SEOMoz

Don’t’s

• Don’t use IP address country detection methods to redirect users to specific language versions of your site. You website could mistakenly take a search engine crawler for a real user and redirect it to the English US version of your website. The other versions of your site would then never get crawled.
• If a targeted keyword is an accented term, it needs to be considered as a different keyword than its non-accented version. This also applies for plural versions of the term. Eg: bus =NOT buses, impresión in Spanish is not the same as impresion
• ignore Yahoo if you plan to penetrate in Japan. It is the predominant search engine with a 53% market share, however, don’t completely ignore Google either as it takes up the remainder 47% market share.
• neglect doing the right research into Dutch culture and society if you plan to bring your product in the Netherlands.
• fall in the mistake to think that traditional Spanish can be applied to the Latin American context, particularly keywords. Every Latam country speaks a different Spanish. Eg: ‘renta autos’ in Mexico vs ‘alquiler autos’ en Argentina.
• ignore the great opportunities that Latam markets present at this moment:  SEO is easier than in Europe and NorthAmerica, paid search has very low CPC in Latam (€0.20 per click or even less), yet there is a fairly good average conversion rate.

Do’s

• use language meta tags : <html lang =”de”>  or <html lang =”en-gb”>
• enable “enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMTs) area account
• embed your digital assets in text within your webpage copy for better ‘Universal Search’ results on the SERPs.
• Try MajesticSEO to gain an insight into your competitor’s link portfolio. These can be good sources to grab new links opportunities. Use the folders facility to keep up with the verticals, and use the Link Reclamation feature to get a list of the top pages in the domain.
• Produce two or three versions of the same press release if you plan to distribute it via different channels.
• Take into account that Japanese alphabet is made of four different alphabets and words are not separated by spaces as in the Western alphabets.
• Get hosted in China and choose the right host eg: China Host if you wnt to penetrate in the Chinese market
• Use ‘simplified Chinese’ as opposed to ‘traditional Chinese’
• translate your copy in other languages as this is fine so long as you don’t translate your target keywords
• use neutral Spanish to target Latam countries if you only have the resources to have a single websites
• consider ‘Machine translation’ (MT) as a solution with an element of human review if you are responsible for enterprise-level content production.

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar, the presentations and the excellent tips I got on International Search. If you would like to read more, you can start with my detailed recap on the SEOMoz blog or the recap written on the official Web certain blog: Multilingual Search.Some of the common mistakes multinational companies make when deploying their search marketing strategies are translating keywords.  If you want your SEO strategies to work you should avoid translating keywords. Every language needs to be treated separately and specific keyword research needs to be carried out for every one of them. This point was made very clear at the International Search Summit when speakers like Andy Atkins-Krüger and Bill Hunt quite rightly pointed it out.

During this conference a lot of  lessons were taught. This post is just an overview of what I considered the best highlights for this one day annual event. If you however would like to know everything that happened during this event, you can find a detailed recap post I wrote for the Youmoz section of SEOMoz

Don’t’s

• Don’t use IP address country detection methods to redirect users to specific language versions of your site. You website could mistakenly take a search engine crawler for a real user and redirect it to the English US version of your website. The other versions of your site would then never get crawled.
• If a targeted keyword is an accented term, it needs to be considered as a different keyword than its non-accented version. This also applies for plural versions of the term. Eg: bus =NOT buses, impresión in Spanish is not the same as impresion
• ignore Yahoo if you plan to penetrate in Japan. It is the predominant search engine with a 53% market share, however, don’t completely ignore Google either as it takes up the remainder 47% market share.
• neglect doing the right research into Dutch culture and society if you plan to bring your product in the Netherlands.
• fall in the mistake to think that traditional Spanish can be applied to the Latin American context, particularly keywords. Every Latam country speaks a different Spanish. Eg: ‘renta autos’ in Mexico vs ‘alquiler autos’ en Argentina.
• ignore the great opportunities that Latam markets present at this moment:  SEO is easier than in Europe and NorthAmerica, paid search has very low CPC in Latam (€0.20 per click or even less), yet there is a fairly good average conversion rate.

Do’s

• use language meta tags : <html lang =”de”>  or <html lang =”en-gb”>
• enable “enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMTs) area account
• embed your digital assets in text within your webpage copy for better ‘Universal Search’ results on the SERPs.
• Try MajesticSEO to gain an insight into your competitor’s link portfolio. These can be good sources to grab new links opportunities. Use the folders facility to keep up with the verticals, and use the Link Reclamation feature to get a list of the top pages in the domain.
• Produce two or three versions of the same press release if you plan to distribute it via different channels.
• Take into account that Japanese alphabet is made of four different alphabets and words are not separated by spaces as in the Western alphabets.
• Get hosted in China and choose the right host eg: China Host if you wnt to penetrate in the Chinese market
• Use ‘simplified Chinese’ as opposed to ‘traditional Chinese’
• translate your copy in other languages as this is fine so long as you don’t translate your target keywords
• use neutral Spanish to target Latam countries if you only have the resources to have a single websites
• consider ‘Machine translation’ (MT) as a solution with an element of human review if you are responsible for enterprise-level content production.

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar, the presentations and the excellent tips I got on International Search. If you would like to read more, you can start with my detailed recap on the SEOMoz blog or the recap written on the official Web certain blog: Multilingual Search.Some of the common mistakes multinational companies make when deploying their search marketing strategies are translating keywords.  If you want your SEO strategies to work you should avoid translating keywords. Every language needs to be treated separately and specific keyword research needs to be carried out for every one of them. This point was made very clear at the International Search Summit when speakers like Andy Atkins-Krüger and Bill Hunt quite rightly pointed it out.

During this conference a lot of  lessons were taught. This post is just an overview of what I considered the best highlights for this one day annual event. If you however would like to know everything that happened during this event, you can find a detailed recap post I wrote for the Youmoz section of SEOMoz

Don’t’s

• Don’t use IP address country detection methods to redirect users to specific language versions of your site. You website could mistakenly take a search engine crawler for a real user and redirect it to the English US version of your website. The other versions of your site would then never get crawled.
• If a targeted keyword is an accented term, it needs to be considered as a different keyword than its non-accented version. This also applies for plural versions of the term. Eg: bus =NOT buses, impresión in Spanish is not the same as impresion
• ignore Yahoo if you plan to penetrate in Japan. It is the predominant search engine with a 53% market share, however, don’t completely ignore Google either as it takes up the remainder 47% market share.
• neglect doing the right research into Dutch culture and society if you plan to bring your product in the Netherlands.
• fall in the mistake to think that traditional Spanish can be applied to the Latin American context, particularly keywords. Every Latam country speaks a different Spanish. Eg: ‘renta autos’ in Mexico vs ‘alquiler autos’ en Argentina.
• ignore the great opportunities that Latam markets present at this moment:  SEO is easier than in Europe and NorthAmerica, paid search has very low CPC in Latam (€0.20 per click or even less), yet there is a fairly good average conversion rate.

Do’s

• use language meta tags : <html lang =”de”>  or <html lang =”en-gb”>
• enable “enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMTs) area account
• embed your digital assets in text within your webpage copy for better ‘Universal Search’ results on the SERPs.
• Try MajesticSEO to gain an insight into your competitor’s link portfolio. These can be good sources to grab new links opportunities. Use the folders facility to keep up with the verticals, and use the Link Reclamation feature to get a list of the top pages in the domain.
• Produce two or three versions of the same press release if you plan to distribute it via different channels.
• Take into account that Japanese alphabet is made of four different alphabets and words are not separated by spaces as in the Western alphabets.
• Get hosted in China and choose the right host eg: China Host if you wnt to penetrate in the Chinese market
• Use ‘simplified Chinese’ as opposed to ‘traditional Chinese’
• translate your copy in other languages as this is fine so long as you don’t translate your target keywords
• use neutral Spanish to target Latam countries if you only have the resources to have a single websites
• consider ‘Machine translation’ (MT) as a solution with an element of human review if you are responsible for enterprise-level content production.

I thoroughly enjoyed this seminar, the presentations and the excellent tips I got on International Search. If you would like to read more, you can start with my detailed recap on the SEOMoz blog or the recap written on the official Web certain blog: Multilingual Search.

The post dos and donts from the International Search Summit 2009 appeared first on David Carralon.

Wow, what a couple of action-packed days!

SEOMoz Pro training seminar is an annual advanced SEO training event organised by SEOMoz. The event ran in London for first time this year, in partnership with Distilled, a London-based search marketing agency.

I found this seminar very educational, the quality of the presentations were of high standard due to the topics chosen and the generous approach to give out actionable tips made this event unique. If I had to choose only one  SEM conference to attend every year, likely this one would stand a high chance.

I am not going to cover the event in detail because that’s already been done by SEOMoz, Distilled and plenty of other SEO bloggers that attended the seminar. Instead I am simply going to list my own top 10 learning points or tips that I took home after the seminar.

1. Invest time into mastering Excel for long term benefits: get on with Excel’s advanced features, including filters and pivot tables. It will help you enormously to organise your keyword/keyphrases terms lists, perform permutations of different kinds, mix data from other sources (eg: Linkscape reports from competitors sites, data from GA reports….). It will, in a nutshell, help you analyse data and make faster decisions to move onto other tasks, from Will Critchlow and Richard Baxter.

2. Microsoft has produced a Search Engine optimisation toolkit and is recommended by Dave Naylor.

3. If you do in-house SEO, Richard Baxter‘s advice is to invest as much time as needed to justify the impact of an SEO investment to the management in order to win the business case for SEO. This learning point was complemented by Rand Fishkin‘s presentation the following morning, packed with pretty charts and graphs, to help win the case for SEO to your management or clients. From a corporate SEO perspective I found these two contributions invaluable.

During this presentation, there was a very interesting piece of data that drew my attention: over a third of search engine users are still not aware of the existence of Google Adwords as an advertising scheme. Also, over half of all search engine users are unable to recognise PPC advertising on the SERPs (search engine result pages) meaning they probably click on them thinking they are part of the overall set of natural results.

4. Like SEO, social media should be part of an overall online strategy instead of being a standalone initiative (from Lucy Langdon)

5. Bad links can cause harm. When it comes to a situation where rankings have been lost, a lot of those so-called penalties are often just filters. Removing cloaking (eg: hidden links) and ‘bad neighbourhood’ inbound links, can greatly improve your rankings. (from Jane Copland).

6. Ben Hendrickson, the mastermind behind Linkscape gave a speech during the seminar. His conclusions based on SEOMoz Labs various tools being developed was that:

– Search engines are not placing as much importance on H tags as they used to. Keywords placed into H1 and H2 tags do not represent a strong signal to the search engines as those included in images ALT tags.

– Keywords on the domain name have considerable weight in the ranking algorithm, however, repeating the keyword on the path name doesn’t seem to have any positive effect on rankings.

– It is necessary to have more than one complex models for defining ranking factors. It is necessary to look at some other models.

7. The best strategy to be succesful at link building is to realise your site or your client site’s USP ( Unique selling proposition). Once you come to terms with this principle it becomes easier to earn links naturally (using tools like Linkscape or Back link analysis from SEOMoz to identify link opportunities from your competitor’s link portfolios) – from Tom Critchlow.

8. Without any doubt, Ben Jesson‘s presentation provided excellent ideas on how to increase your CRO (conversion rate optimisation) :

– answering customer objections to your product (the main landing page has to be able to respond to those objections).
– use testimonials to highlight answers to some of those objections.
– perform A/B Testing via Google website optimiser or other tools

Ben already presented some of this material at the SMX London in May this year. The difference with this presentation is that a lot more detail was provided on how to actually get the job done.

9. If you are managing a big site, it is worth spending some time on improving page load time. As the web grows bigger, this is something that search engines are going to start considering more firmly as a factor for ranking sites. I cannot remember who I got this bit from.

10. Make better use of SEOmoz tools and use a combination of them to find out how your competitors do link building, what works best for them and where their linkbait is: Linkscape in conjunction with some of the best tools in SEOmoz Labs.

There was a great deal more of useful tips and advice that was given, such as dealing with scalable information architecture, online PR stuff, vertical search such as Google maps and local business listing optimisation, video sitemap strategies, content strategies, etc… of all, the points listed above were the most significant for me.

One other noticeable trend I noticed was the large number of SEOs I met that were involved in affiliation or running some form of affiliation marketing on their sites… there was a great deal of affiliate marketing discussion and buzz going on during the event itself and also during the evening social gatherings.

If you are interested in reading more about this event and other bloggers’ recaps, I suggest you google ‘SEOMoz Pro Training seminar 2009’ and you will find plenty of related material in different languages depending on the local version of Google you use. For example, this one from Fernando Maciá, in Spanish, was one of the first blogs out to be covering the event.

I had the chance to meet or catch up with some SEO peers : Dan Reynolds from Strategic TMC, David Jackson from Sixt, Kirsteen Fox from Iglu, Dan Barker from Baker Ross, Ian Bryce from Sony, Alec Kinnear from foliovision, Ari nahmani from Matan Media, Ashkan Parsa from Netgrade, Annabel Hodges.  As I didn’t exchange cards with everyone, apologies to those I do not mention, please drop me an email and I will add you to the list.

As usual, one of the best things about these SEO events is the networking during or after the sessions.

The post My top 10 takeaways from SEOMoz Pro Training seminar London 2009 appeared first on David Carralon.