This part of the session was covered by Neil Stickells from Steak, who had some interesting experiences arising from working with a large online supermarket. 

Size doesn’t matter: 
Algorithms assess the quality of sites in the same way, whether they are a few pages or a couple of million – the same principles work, and there are no apparent scale effects. Just because you are a large well-known company, you still have to do the work! The search engines don’t ‘know who you are’ and rank accordingly. 

Best practice, red tape, internal politics and lack of resource:
So, whether large or small – follow best practice, and look out for the main problems of red tape, internal politics and lack of resource.  Neill experienced  problems getting buy-in, the company had previously just used robots to no-follow; he had to get people to understand what they needed to be doing and run seo campaigns. One of their first goals was to cut ppc – this is often a stated goal – but funnily enough, once good natural results start coming in, they often don’t want to then switch off PPC. 

Define your objectives:
What are you trying to do? Be clear about what you are being judged on in six months or a year.

Manage expectations:
Really manage these very closely and on an on-going basis. You will always be getting directors asking where the rankings are – you have to continually be pointing out that this takes time, and not just four weeks. 

Analytics:
It took about fourteen months to get this working properly – start work on your analytics as soon as possible – nearly all clients will have their analytics in a mess. Crucial to this is understanding the impact of marketing campaigns running alongside – you have to know when TV, print and radio campaigns might be running – understand what the spikes might be resulting from. It can take about twelve to fourteen months to get going – be as confident as you can be in the data – you need to be able to stand in front of management and state categorically that ‘we have x amount of revenue from search.’ He was nine or ten months in –thought he had it covered and then odd data started appearing – and they almost had to start again. You have to be able to convince people your data are correct; they will be picking!

Benchmark straightway:
Get an immediate record of PageRank, keyword rankings, numbers of pages indexed. PageRank – might be a dirty word, but is probably a concept the CEO vaguely understands and can look at.  Also benchmark competitors – how performing against a particular competitor.

Don’t work on your own:
You need to talk to all the other teams: sales, marketing, PR, content writers.

Run search clinics:
Tell people ‘we are here’ for an hour every first Monday of the month. People might not want to ask questions via email, but will be happier about asking face to face.

Write awareness documents: 
Make it clear what you are doing.

Make cups of tea:
Don’t keep asking IT to do things, make them cups of tea and talk to them about their cars, partners, leisure activities. Talk about the weather and your holidays.  

Optimising a huge site can seem overwhelming, but often they just use a handful of templates, and you can easily roll out some great changes with a little bit of application.

Prioritise all your recommendations:
Assign a value to each one – whether it’s revenue or not – if it has such a value then it is more likely to be included.

Build tools:
Bear in mind what happens to data that goes into the tools. Who owns it? Where is it kept?
Or, use Raven, Copyscape, Socialmeter, for example. 

Keyword research:
Internal search, what are they looking for? This helps with the structure of site.

Link analysis and keyword rankings:
Most agencies have their own, or you can use third party ones such as: Interwebbing, WM console, Firefox: all help with spotting errors very quickly

Reporting is difficult:
Tailor by who you present it to – keep brief, keep relevant, on a monthly basis, ensure you are reporting on the KPIs agreed.

Hold quarterly reviews: 
Don’t drown people so they lose interest. Maintain your profile and those of others – make sure you celebrate successes – let everyone know. Target the keyword you know the CEO checks on every Monday morning. One of the best things is when you get an email that just says: “Google dishwashers!” 

Brand control:
When working on sites that have multiple domain names, with the right approach, you can fill the front page with all these domain names.

Usability:
If your site is useable you can make it easier to convert, keep the traffic coming in. Some sites can make it phenomenally difficult for their customers.

It can be hard work:
It can be frustrating, but if you get it right the results make it really worthwhile.

Q&As:

• What if your client wants to use linking techniques that will get them up there fast using dubious practices? Ask, ‘how important is their domain name, as opposed to the keyword ranking?’
• What do you report on internally?  Pages indexed and inbound links; this will impact on long tailed-traffic, to anticipate call from client. Don’t worry about numbers of people ’through the door,’  it’s more about how many put money in the bank – ie the quality. 
• For smaller businesses, with less budget, find niches where people search ten times a day, on the long-tail search – how to make the page look that people will land on when they are there, card in hand. They won’t do a price comparison; you’ve already done it; make sure you have compared prices and that you are the cheapest – if not the cheapest, then the best.. 
• Content: Produce meaningful and worthy content on the site. A travel company can support its content with destination guides – measure the impact of these, see how traffic works on these pages and look at the natural links coming in. Do advice on traveling when disabled. Identify opportunities and look at what niche groups are out there… 

 And finally…

• Content is the prince, links are king.  This is what we all think. Except that there was one case where someone from a company was talking to Dave Naylor about their new site and said that it had only taken a week to rank extremely well for a particular keyword, and their site had no links…  They  don’t know how happened  - but they did put fifteen hundred pages of content on flooring up on the site.
• Try running competitions to create content – ie for a phone company, ‘tell us what you love about your phone.’ However, you have to balance this with understanding about managing control. (Which was very well covered in another session.)

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!

Graham Cooke, eCommerce Project Manager, Google commenced the Landing Page Testing and Tuning session by talking about conversion frameworks and marketing effectiveness:  driving the right person to your site.   Ok, when you get them there, are expectations met (tech)?  If yes, they will stay if no, they will bounce (how many people analyse their bounce rate when optimising pages?).   

For non-bouncing users it is about website usability.  When they arrive at your page, does it offer them what they want?  Is it easy to navigate around?  Are they a short click away from finding what they need?  Product & Service Offering > Measuring Analytics > Continuous Improvement Framework.  Graham identified the web usability framework according to ‘buyers’: help me find, help me choose, help me buy.

• Find a product category
• Find product within category
• Find product with on-site search
• Find product by cross sell

Identify where there are problems on the site.  What are your KPI’s?  You need to analyse Key Trends & iInsights, Impact on the Business, Actions to take.  Multi variant testing allows you to try out different pages and identify what parts of site and your products are working.  56% conversion in Google’s own conversion for one of its own pages with a ‘try’ button instead of a ‘sign up’ button.

Graham advocated using analytics to figure out your biggest problems.  Build a simple multivariant test using website optimiser, for instance (free from Google).  Use the results to determine a scale plan, then scale successful results across the site.  Next up was Anders Hjorth, who looked at:

Landing page testing:  a DIY approach.

Why landing pages work:

• Site hierarchy
  • Use standard hierarchical structure
• Principles of design
  • Designers are taught consistency and repetition
• Level 1 personalisation
  • Why are you here? Looking for something?
  • Where did you come from? Search engine?
  • What language do you speak? Geo target
  • What are you looking for? Keywords

 According to Anders, the Number 1 secret of landing pages is ‘keep it simple’.  Use conversion cues:

• Everything the user needs is on the page
• Simple working, persuasive, efficient
• Call to action

His key takeaways from the session?  Build a framework;  Build a methodology; Appoint a strong project manager.

Jon Myers took the presenting Baton from Anders and launched his presentation with the attention-grabbing statistic that:

it takes 13.2 seconds to convince your visitor that they are in the place that they should be and not to leave

You need to physically stand out and to optimise and to do that you have to start using relevancy principles.  Quality score is more relevant for a landing page,

What are the basic principles of creating a good landing page? 

• Deep linking, offer driven – use image and text.
• Messaging
• Potent images
• Navigation
• Pricing
• Offers
• Cross selling
• Drop off
• Product reviews

Jon then gave a second stat:  that it takes 1.8 seconds and just 1 glance to get people to click through to your site. Consumers are less likely to purchase from a brand that doesn’t appear in the (google) search results, he says.  Google is trusted by the internet public.  He recommended putting an 0800 (a UK freephone) number on Google local search advertising.

Remember the Gorilla advertisement?

 185 000 people viewed video on the Cadbury’s web site.  2 500 000 watched the video on YouTube.  What does this suggest to ?  Integrate with google a lot more.

Part of the SMX Bootcamp Track, the Keyword Research session covered this fundamental part of any effective search marketing programme.  Beautifully introduced by Chris Sherman, Christine Churchill of Key Relevance commenced with her presentation on Learning the Lingo of your customer.
If you can really get into keywords and understand the language of your customer, you are ensuring that you are giving yourself a head start with Search marketing.
Keyword research is vital. 
• It is the fundamental step for search marketing. 
• It corrects bad keyword choices.  (remove insider jargon)
• It provides market research information – you might see a way of expanding your business
• It increases your conversion (success) rate through speaking the customer’s language
• It develops a list of relevant terms to target in SEO PPC, Blogs, Videos, Social Media marketing, and offline documentation.
• It gives competitive intelligence insights
• Keywords give ideas for site design and navigation
• You discover new keyword opportunities

Keyword research has 3 main stages, according to Christine: brainstorming; keyword expansion (tools); keyword evaluation… and she gave this key piece of advice:  don’t just go after popularity numbers from keyword tools!

Keyword Brainstorming

Cast your net wide and gather as many keywords as possible.  Where do you start?  Look at your current web site, speak to your colleagues, customer services department, press releases, etc.  Look at company reviews (3rd party reviews); your log files or analytics which shows what people are looking for when they come to your site.  Use the long tail search terms and make sure you look at the single visitor phrases.  Site Search is a treasure chest of keyword data. 
Talk directly to the customers:  ensure that you are understanding what they are looking for.  The sales department will have modified their speech patterns for the customers – use this.  Look at your competitors – what words are they optimising for? What are they buying for PPC?  If they are buying it, it could be an important keyword.

Using Tools

Christine gave a brief overview of Google’s keyword tools, WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Microsoft Ad Intelligence (UK database to follow in the next few months).  She advocated using several but not to obsess over the numbers, just gather interesting, relevant keywords for your company’s products or services.

Evaluating Keywords

You do the brainstorming, use the tools, you develop a huge list of keywords, so now what?  Think about:

1. Relevancy – you need to get targeted traffic
2. Popularity – be careful about over focusing on this one.  Slightly longer phrases are less competitive but are often higher converting.
3. Consider user intent. You need to get into the mind of the user – buying vs browsing e.g. mortgage calculator vs fast mortgage loan.  Your keywords are key to identifying where people are in the buying cycle.
4. Evaluating by competition – how active are your competitors in each keyword space?
5. Competitive intelligence
6. Test keyword performance early – use PPC to test candidate keywords.  This gives quick quantitative feedback on the keyword performance whilst controlling the costs.

The Microsoft Editorial Take…. 

Chris then introduced Tor Crockatt, Group Manger Editorial Operations at Microsoft gave the perspective from a predominantly paid side.  In her lively and animated presentaion, she started by sharing the OED definition of a keyword: 

Keyword:  key to a cipher (secret or disguised way of writing), word of great significance indicating the fundamental importance of keyword research. 

So why make your keywords relevant?

Seems obvious to anyone used to working with sites, but when you are investing your time in this, sometimes you need to explain this to the ‘powers that be’

Relevant • Engaged & buying customers• Quality of Keywords impacts brand• Highest position at lowest CPC (ROI!) Irrelevant • Annoyed users• Wasted efforts

According to Tor, the basic keyword research steps are as follows:

1. root work / concept – e.g. travel
2. synonyms – e.g. holiday / break
3. colloquialisms - e.g. trip, getaway,
4. qualify with modifiers – e.g. late holiday deals, cheap holiday Australia, city break, luxury getaway

Tor then introduced ‘Keyword Algebra’, a way of building out keyword phrases using a variety of different modifiers in a logical, ordered way.  The following modifiers can be added to most keywords to build them out into phrases that represent your online products or services:

• Product / concept – laptop, digital camera, insurance etc
• Add adjective (product) e.g. cheap, low cost, green, high speed
• Manufacturer
• Location – NY, UK
• Intended action – buy, quote, apply, book
• Intended user (for) men,  back to school

For example:  compare low cost fuji digital cameras  / budget 2007 las Vegas real estate

Chris and the audience posed several questions, including:

Will keywords grow in importance or diminish?  Right now the use of keywords will expand not contract.  They will become more important as it is through language, predominantly, that we convey our message.

As an overall take-away… What was the key message from the session?  Research, research, research, refine, refine, refine… then repeat.  Pitching just right to the audience with a blend of the basics and thought-provoking points, these two superb speakers gave a great introduction to Keyword Research, this important and vital fundamental of both paid and organic search advertising.

Autumn in the UK’s Search Marketing world is rapidly becoming synonymous with British ‘leg’ of the excellent conference series from Search Marketing Expo. The second SMX London kicked off with venerable Chris Sherman introducing a quality Microsoft double act which looked at the latest offerings from this major search engine.

ZhaoHui Tang, the Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft adCenter commenced the presentations by discussing the latest from AdCenter labs and drilling down into the information now available, even looking at the topical issue of the elections and looking at demographics related to searches around that topic. The audience were introduced to the downloadable analysis tool which identifies click through rate for various different keyword phrases and highlighted the functionality of Adcenter labs which can also look at search funnels and conversion funnels.

Nathan Buggia, the Lead Program Manager from Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center introduced the Webmaster Center – relationship for portal web publishers.  He kicked off with a live demo of how webmaster center interacts with publishers to offer support and advice in helping them to enhance their web sites.  Nathan demonstrated using live data from MSN, identifying pages not found and other errors within Microsoft’s (millions of) pages.  As with Google webmaster tools, to ensure privacy of data verification of the web site is required before information like this is provided.  Like Google, it shows 404 errors,  pages blocked by robots.txt file, etc.  It also identifies URLs with too many parameters which could cause an issue for the crawlers. All of the data provided in the webmaster center are actionable and where they are highlighted by one search engine will probably be true of all and will occur with all of the major search engines.  Nathan focused in on a couple of areas to give the audience a feel for the tools:

Outbound links. In addition to demonstrating who you are linking to, this function also identifies pages that you are linking to that are malware, for instance.  A filter can be applied to only show this information.  This also allows you to identify all of the pages on your site that link to this URL, for instance.

Keywords.  Web site owners want to ensure that he highest ranking page is the highest converting page.  Microsoft gives pages a Page Score – is a proxy for the MSN version of page rank.  In broad terms, 5 ‘buckets’ means a well regarded page.

Web site owners want more information about their customers but also they want help with web site placement and visibility plus information on ROI which is the feedback from webmasters and this is their continued aim.

Microsoft has been working on these tools for about 18 months and there is, according to Nathan, much more to come.  They have a 3 part strategy to help internet marketers:

1. Best results – relevance is the Number 1 investment in search.  Microsoft are making huge gains in terms of relevance.
2. Helping people find new information & ‘get stuff done’.  Looking at users:  what do they want? User intent is key.  Looking for those 10 blue links is only wanted about 40-50% of the time.  Sometimes people are looking for help to understand something & refining their search queries over time to facilitate this.  These explorer searchers want a richer experience.  Microsoft is wanting to deliver this.
3. Business model of search.  Today cost per click is the driving model.  But is there more that can happen.  Live search has been exploring cash back and cost per action.  How does that change the dynamic of the equation?  This has big implications for the future.
   

Chris and the audience then asked a variety of questions, including :

What is the best piece of advice that Nathan and ZhaoHui give?

Build really good stuff.  Microsoft has a bunch of people with PHD’s – if it is good, Microsoft can find it!

In 5 years, what will we be talking about then?

Advertising market size will grow – systems platforms will be more connected and option based according to ZhaoHui,  maybe for paid; for display ads; for search.  Everything will be much more transparent and with real time options based to assist the user.  They will be easy to manage and with lots of tools.

According to Nathan, this room (the Edinburgh Room at the New Connaught Rooms) won’t be big enough to hold SMX London in 2014.  Search will be a much richer experience.  At that time, we will reminisce back to the fond old days of 10 blue links.  The idea of measurable ROI will continue to affect advertising throughout.  Fortune 500 or global 100 companies will be substantially more sophisticated in their online interaction.

An excellent start to an interesting first day at SMX London 2008 with an exciting lineup of industry experts.