In October there are two that we are particularly looking forward to. Having been spoiled already in the previous months with being able to attend the free and very comprehensive industry event ad-tech London based SEOS can look forward to finding new insights at the Distilled conference Searchlove London on the 24th and 25th of October 2011. With ticket prices of up to ? 750 you may find that this event is not on the cheap and cheerful side but will definitely be inspiring and worthwhile as you get the chance to find out about the latest in linkbuilding strategies, social media and technologies from Distilled’s and SEOmoz’s SEO gurus.

Those of you who like travelling and still have a few holidays to spare might still find an available flight to Berlin, where they can have two industry events for the price of one: SES holds its annual conference in Berlin on 13th October in conjunction with OMcap. This popular search marketing events previously took place in December but this year SES and OMcap organizers have teamed up to deliver one big event with over 40 experts talking about the latest industry insights. Tickets cost € 499 but according to the website drinks are included.

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For instance, if you attended the talk about ‘SEO Through Blogs & Feeds’ where Mikkel (deMib) and Andrew (BMM) discussed sitemaps, you would have learned that both have completely different approaches -I would definitely encourage you to try a combination by yourself. Let’s say you have a website that has been live for a few years, and all the pages have already been indexed, then there might be very little value in taking the time to create the sitemap and submit it to Google WMT; however, if there are quite a few pages that have not been indexed, then you should definitely take the time to do so. The same will apply with any other assets that you have on your site, PDFs, Videos, Images, etc.

On the last statement, I am definitely with Paddy @ Distilled who suggested digitising all business documents/assets on the ‘Digital Asset Optimisation’ presentation. Let’s assume you work in the retail sector, images and videos of your products are invaluable as these improve user experience, let alone the fact that they could generate traffic themselves with universal search. Press releases, product specification documents (as PDFs), reviews, testimonials, podcasts, everything counts when reaching new audiences, and business owners and marketing department must be aware of the importance of sharing this information as this is the key in today’s globalised world.

In the end, the main takeaway is ‘it’s all about trial and error’, which was brilliantly discussed on the ‘Conversion Clinic’ session by the guys at Conversion Rate Experts: make some changes to your website, test the results, make more changes and keep on testing. Same with link building: submit your press releases, pictures, videos, pdfs on different platforms -didn’t work as you expect?  Just keep on trying new things, rename your files, change the titles, descriptions, evaluate your keywords… Just make sure you have clear goals and benchmarks when testing! If someone already knew the magic SEO formula, then everybody would agree at these events.

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So, coming in at a fairly strong 1st place it’s ‘be wary about telling people you are going away’.  Various accounts online of people being burgled as a result of tweeting they are leaving the house for weeks.  However you have to think that either they have stupidly posted where they live, or have some fairly unsavoury acquaintances!

Number 2.  It’s all about me.  No. No it’s really not.  I don’t care that you have run out of tea bags on a Saturday morning or that you are settling down to back to back Inbetweeners and it’s the FUNNIEST THING EVER!!.  You know who you are.

Number 3 (and the slightly more serious Brand error).  Bad humour or just plain offensive….not your best tweet by retailer Kenneth Cole!

Number 4.  Don’t be offensive to your customers!  Nestle making a mistake here with its not so great use of Facebook to manage complaints back in March last year, should probably have remembered to mind manners in public forums too ( this came from a request from Nestle not to use altered version of the company’s logo as  profile pic, or your comments will be deleted)

Number 5?  I leave the floor open!!

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So, I top tip takeaways that I will certainly be thinking more on include…

1. Social Media Monitoring Tips

6 Key Metrics for Social Media Measurement (courtesy of Search Engine Watch).  I thought this was a very useful starting point and a good way to look at influence holistically.  To be fair though those on board are only really going to be concerned with conversions, so thanks again SEW for pointing us in the right direction.

• Gross Views: Aggregate views across various social channels (Facebook, Blog posts)
• Connections: Expressed interest in your brand (Blog subscribers, LinkedIn group members)
• Audience Engagements:  Re-tweets, social media Brand mentions, Blog comments
• Social Media Referrals:  for this you need to configure with your web analytics tool
• Social Media Conversions: You should measure conversions from each social media channel again by configuring as per above
• My Engagements:  Monitor your own activity within the social media space (internal blog posts, external blog comments, tweets)

2. Best Tweeting Tip

Great tip from Ralph Tegtmeier that many big brands forget about.  Don’t tweet the full 140 characters as it limits the ability for your followers to be able to re-tweet.  Also make your tweet a good headline and an attention grabber

3. Best all round quote

I loved Mel Carson‘s talk on Social Media and the Marketing Mix – really made you think about how many forms content could take and how it could be proliferated.  Great use of anecdotes!

“The web is already social, it’s what you do with the content that counts’

All in all, a good thought provoking day!

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Mikkel Svendsen was one of the speakers in SES, he talked about the Myths around Duplicate Content

Mikkel said that there are several SEO myths surrounding duplicate content, he broke them down to 7 myths, in this post I’m just going to summarize the main 4.

1.Don’t worry about duplicate pages … search engines will figure it out

False.

Not entirely false, but you need to be careful because search engines can de-index important pages which could translate to you losing organic traffic.

2. Google will coo coo for cocoa puffs if they find duplicate content on your site

False.

Main thing you need to know is the difference between punished and filtered. If you’ve been filtered you just need to make a few changes and you should be OK, if you are punished … Well that’s another story. The difference is crucial to how you fix it.

3.If it ain’t broke don’t fix it

False.

Some SEOs think that you can get away with duplicate content as long as you haven’t been filtered or punished. Well …   it is a lot like a landmine in Guantanamo Bay, people think it’s OK if you don’t step on it, but guess what? Google keeps moving the landmine and sooner than later it will get you!

4. Duplicate Content is only problem across domains – not within your own domain

False.

Search engines will try to filter it out if it pollutes the index, even if the duplicate content was found on your site. When the algorithm thinks that it doesn’t make sense form a user point of view, your pages will be filtered if not punished. (Google won’t penalize or filter your entire site, only the pages they consider as duplicate content)

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Following last Thursdays SES London, I thought I’d summarise my favourite tool discovered from Thursdays social media conferences. There were a number of Social Media monitoring and management tools mentioned throughout Thursday but there was one tool which every single speaker recomended people use for their clients. This tool was Socialoomph, there are many features included in both the free and paid for package including:

• Scheduled Tweets & Facebook Updates
• Manage multiple accounts in one interface
• Find new Twitter Followers with keyword searches
• Automated Twitter Lists
• Automatically integrate your Blog with your social media
• Track your clicks with the in build URL shortening system

I could go on with may more features, but the above represents a number of my favourite features. Most of the basic features including scheduled tweets and the url shortening system are completely free to use, if you wanted to upgrade your experience this can be done for a small fee of $30 a month.

There were also a number of other tools mentioned throughout the events including Radian 6, Raventools.com, Social Mention, Tweetdeck and more.

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Attribution panel (myself and Paul Mead): before you decide to drop last click wins and start using an attribution model – ask yourself – and analyse the data – how long is your typical clients’ path to converion? if it’susuallty only 1 or 2 clicks – stick with your current tracking model. Don’t overcomplicate just for the sake of it. Eventhough the technology now is truly amazing for analysing paths’ to conversion and setting up attribution models – there will always be leakage within the system and it is still a bit of a fudge… attribution models are much more useful for products that have a long purchase cycle – if you’re selling t-shirts – don’t waste your time and money!

Retargetting panel: That search ignite guy is pretty impressive – as was the speaker from Banner. Top tips I picked up were: 1. use the cookie data you have – if you know they want a flight to spain definitely advertise that not a generic flight ad 2. Test your re-targeting window – one speaker found that the most efficient was to retarget only for 7 days after the first engagement 3. Don’t stalk – actually i knew that from when I was single…. 4.  swap remarketiong tags (illegal?) with a partner site that has a complimentary service 5. dont retarget to everyone who came to your site and didn’t convert – make sure they had some engagement such as they got half way through the application form, or they viewed 3 or more pages etc.

Biddable Media: again that search ignite guy is pretty smart – good at taking a concept and drilling down to what’s important – I only saw his speech before I had to go pick up Amelia. He made 2 good points – 1. the cool thing about display auctions is not the fact that they are auction based – search has been like that for a decade. The cool thing is that you are bidding on targetting an individual with all the cookie data recorded on this person – if they are your sweet spot an advertiser might be willing to pay 10 times what someone might pay for just a blind impression. 2. agencies are starting biddable media departments….. food for thought for all Search MDs…

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http://www.SearchEngineStrategies.com/london

The sessions planned this year which caught my eye are:

Search a real time paradigm

This session looks at how Search engines and social networking sites strive to have the most up-to-date content on the web, indexed and ready for display to searchers.

Managing a global SEO campaign

This session tackles the key issues critical to successfully developing, optimizing, and managing the global campaigns that will meet those next generation marketing goals, without losing control or your mind. .

Advanced paid search brain candy

This panel session covers campaign expansion techniques, advanced ad testing, advanced auction theory, the proper use of relevant analytics reports, ideas for bid rules and campaign automation, techniques for acting on seemingly inconclusive data, and more.

Search becomes the display OS

This session explores these leading edge ideas, technology and provides some early case studies the effectiveness of making Search the Operating System for Display.

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

This session looks at issues like syndicating content through RSS and feeds, running mirror sites and its possible negative effects, and maintain similar listings and explores solutions.

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Covering the Report, NMA had this to say:

“Some 48% reported better returns on natural search (optimisation) campaigns and 43% claim greater ROI on paid search (pay-per-click). However, 15% reported decreasing effectiveness for paid search compared to just 6% for natural.

The report, conducted by Econsultancy in association with search company Guava, found more companies were tracking ROI effectively than last year – 45% of respondents who used paid search campaigns and 35% using natural.

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, said, “It’s encouraging to see a large proportion of companies still increasing budgets for both paid and natural search. It shows they’re better at measuring returns for search, and that’s good at a time when budgets are being cut.”

The report also revealed the end of Google’s Best Practice Funding had little effect on the market, with just 5% of companies reporting a negative impact since 1 January. However, 15% of respondents said Google’s trademark bidding policy had had a negative impact on ROI.

Unsurprisingly Google remained the behemoth for paid search, with 85% using the search engine, well ahead of Yahoo (44%)  and Microsoft Live (30%). Yahoo took the biggest hit year on year, with 5% fewer companies using it for paid search.

Mobile search remained static, with just 5% of companies investing in mobile search listings. Despite 23% of respondents planning to invest in mobile search this year, more than two-thirds (37%) said mobile isn’t on the radar yet and a further 32% have no plans to use mobile search.

“Mobile search represents a huge opportunity for companies as there’s no one really doing it,” said Gregoriadis.

The report also revealed huge growth in investment in social media, which 65% of companies saying it’s used as part of the marketing mix. Twitter was used for marketing by 49% of respondents, compared to just 3% a year ago.”

For the the full article go to: http://www.nma.co.uk/over-half-of-companies-to-increase-search-budgets-for-measurable-roi/3000311.article?nl=DN

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