Search Engine Strategies is an excellent conference series, spanning the globe, which shares information and strategies for companies for whom an online presence is a vital part of their business portfolio.  Organised and advised by top marketing industry writers, thinkers and practitioners, the conference’s content and speakers are carefully selected to provide the best experience and information – most of which is not available online – for attendees.  So you have an online presence. but what is the point of attending a conference like SES, especially in this market?

Eleven business reasons for attending Search Engine Strategies London 2009:

1. Differentiation:  learn at your own level.  With beginner, intermediate and advanced sessions for most tracks, you can be sure to get the information you need at the level you need it.
2. Learn from industry experts:  the coffers are opened to attendees so that you are taught direct from people who do this every day for a living.
3. Understand what exactly is involved in a campaign to rank your web site and know what first steps you need to take
4. Speak directly to the search engines:  Google, Microsoft & Ask.com will be there!
5. Understand the difference between paid search (advertising on the search engines) and search engine optimisation (ranking organically on Google for your product or service keywords and keyword phrases).
6. Get to grips with the ranking factors for your web site:  what do you need to look at / work on to get more visitors to your site and sell more products.
7. Understand how video, news, podcasts, blogs and press releases can help your company’s products or services be put in front of potential clients. 
8. Got sites in different languages?  Want to sell to non english-speaking markets? Understand the impact of multilingual search engine optimisation and search marketing on your business and the factors to consider and implement.
9. Learn how to track your visitors from how / where they come to your site, through to purchase or abandonment of the buying process.  Start to interrogate your data.
10. Find out key tips and tactics for looking impartially at your site with the open site clinic featuring the frank and forthright Dave Naylor, Microsoft’s Mel Carson and moderated by the highly experienced Amanda Watlington.
11. Go away feeling empowered to ask the right questions of your marketing and IT teams and eel confident that you know how to interrogate and interview a digital marketing company to help you rank your website.

Making sure that it easy for clients and potential clients to get access to you is one of the main functions of marketing.  Anything that makes this happen makes good business sense.  One of the latest products on the market is designed to help with this.  Telnic have launched .tel which is a web-based contact directory and has the potential to take over current directory providers.

Once you register your company for a .tel domain you add all your contact details.  This can be in the form of email, telephone, address, website, fax number, social networks and so on.  Any web-based information will be linked straight to its source and you can update the information quickly and easily at any time.  .tel can be accessed from any device which is linked to the internet and will be particularly useful for clients on the go to access you from their mobile phones.

Domains are on sale now at the premium rate of £325 for 3 years.  On 24th March at 3pm domains will be cheaper at around £10 for a year.

Telnic’s CEO, Khashayar Mahidavic,  thinks that spreading the word about .tel will be very easy and suspects that viral marketing will play a big role in this.  Talking to Bloomberg, Mahidavic  said that .tel is ‘the biggest innovation since .com.’  He explained that one of the reasons that the product is so unique is that it provides people with information very quickly.  Information is all stored on the Domain Name System (DNS), the back-bone of the internet  and therefore does not need an IP address. This makes it return information fast.

What will make .tel very useful as part of an internet marketing campaign is that it has keyword functionality and could be adopted as part of a search engine optimisation strategy.  You can select keywords to store and these will be used when people are searching on sites such as Google.

The service has come under criticism as it has been pointed out that unscrupulous people may try to buy up domains.  Ben Edelman, an internet specialist from Harvard University said that,

‘To date, spammers and scammers have been the quickest to adopt new domains.

‘If many .tel domains spring up containing misleading information, perhaps with the intention of soliciting email addresses or other personal data, individuals and businesses with more honourable intentions will be deterred from signing up.

 ’That problem has afflicted other new domains. From everything known about .tel so far, I think there remains a serious risk of a similar outcome.’

 Time will tell if it will achieve the success Telnic would like: for it become as universal to have a .tel domain as it does to have an email address.

Moderated by Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land, this session looked at how companies need to address working with other language markets.  Duncan Morris, director at Distilled was first to present: 

International SEO

By targeting multiple countries, you can generate more business, revenue, etc. However, generic TLD’s (top level domains – such as .com) can cause issues for local search engines.  Duncan recommended using geo location:  redirecting users based upon their IP address can be a good idea, he says.  Although companies should remember that search engines tend to browse with an American IP address and this may not work for the search engines as they would not be able to view all of your content.  Information architecture is king, he stressed, you must have a way for the search engines to browse to every page.

Duncan came up with a key statistic:  to reach 90% of the world’s 1.2 billion internet users, companies must support 20 or more languages.  Duncan recommended making sure that you separate languages on a page and came up with a list of factors to ‘flick the switch’ 

• Have a local tld
• Hosting location
• Add to Google local
• Physical address on page
• Inbound link profile
• Webmaster central – try not to rely on webmaster central. Country doesn’t equal language. E.g. French also includes Canada – with Google Webmaster Tools you can target to France BUT not to French users

Duncan referenced Ikea’s site structure:  Ikea.com/en & Ikea.com/fr for the two different language pages.  According to him, would the following structure be better?

• Ikea.com/us/en
• Ikea/com/uk/en
• Ikea.com/ca/en
• Ikea.com/ca/fr

This would allow you to write content targeting the relevant country not just the relevant language.  He explained that there are pros and cons of one powerful domain:

• Pro – All of your links go to one domain 
• Con – Lower CTR (click through rate) / conversion rate vs ccTLD e.g. .com not as good in france as .fr;  What should you put on the home page? ; American pages often outrank British pages

 Then he highlighted the pros and cons of cc TLD:

• Pro – Geo targeting much easier; Improved CTR / conversion rate especially where the TLD indicated the language spoken (e.g. Italy)
• Con – Link building is much harder;  Can lead to dupe content issues; the .com still often outranks other English tld’s

Andy Atkins-Kruger from Web Certain was next to present and offered the audience…

Low hanging apples for International SEO

…in which he eloquently presented a no-nonsense, well researched way forward for companies wanting to go international.

• 1. Language & Content Presentation – spidering > language detection > language detection process (some languages have same character sets and so the SE need to look at common letter strings)
• 2. ccTLDs or local hosting: Country domains are the right way to go.
• 3. Input methods impact search – French keyboard complex so many people don’t use accents
• 4. No direct translation – city breaks / 30% off don’t work
• 5. Use a smart geo selector – for example the IBM drop down menu
• 6. Local links
• 7. Keyword URLs
• 8. 301’s – sort out the fundamentals – meta refreshes, pages not found
• 9. Adopt a global PR strategy
• 10. Consider: plurals accents, alternate spellings, disaggregation, inflection, prepositions
• 11. Don’t translate meta tags – LOCALISE them. Use keywords and use correct content.
• 12. Use UTF-8 encoding – presentation of characters on the page 

Andy suggested testing locally in one region.  Choose a pilot country, he said, and see what works.  Italy often gets chosen as the testing environment as only country that speaks Italian, for instance.

Although the last session of SMX London 2008, Day 1, lots of information was imparted to the audience and the delegates went on to the SMX-organised networking session (before going on to the London SEO bash) fired up and ready to talk SEARCH!