I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at this years one-day digital marketing conference On The Edge, Manchester. The conference brings together hundreds of business professionals from the most influential brands to learn the secrets of digital marketing success. On The Edge, Manchester will be held on Thursday 23^rd May 2013 at the Renaissance Manchester City Centre Hotel and I’ll be speaking about Super-charging Your Organic Search Traffic – How Structured Data Can Make Your Search Result Stand Out from the Crowd

I’ll be helping you to understand that a quality organic search strategy is so much more than keywords and links. It’s about ensuring your whole presence and experience in search is enticing and straight-forward. In the session we’re going to look at how using structured data delivers attractive and enticing Rich Snippets for your search results, giving you the competitive edge.

Hope to see you there.

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During the session we’ll take a look at publishing and marketing strategies which earn you links that money can’t buy. In particular we will focus on content ideation and how to identify and polish newsworthy content. Overall the focus will be on marketing future-proof content strategies so that links can be earned and not manipulated.

In addition to this solo talk I will also be speaking on a panel on day 2 at 16:00 alongside Kevin Gibbons of BlueGlass UK, James Murray of Experian and Stephen Emerson of The Scotsman . We’re talking about keyword research strategies. I’m going to focus on “The Curse of Not Provided” and will examine some hack-arounds to help you get more from the data we’re left with; and more importantly present tools for shifting focus to content research.

Hope to see you there.

UPDATE: ION have TEN Golden Tickets available which gets you into the speaker social as well as the full conference benefits. Buy your ticket before 10:00 am on March 18th here.

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I’ve been fortunate to attend a number of events here before, and am looking forward to stepping up and giving a talk.

I’ll be speaking about Rich Snippets – reviewing the various ways that you can enhance your search listings, giving some easy ways to get this implemented on your own websites.

I’ll also be looking at the ways that they can play nicely together when you mix them up, and digging through the stats we’ve collected to illustrate what benefits these bring to your search marketing efforts.

If you can’t wait until Think Visibility, why not read my post from last year where I look at some of my adventures with rich snippets!

Hopefully see you there!

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I will be speaking on day 2 of the full conference (Wednesday 20th February) on the topic of Earned Link Strategies, which is a subject close to my heart and has been ever since founding theMediaFlow in 2009. It’s always surprised and mystified me as to why agencies would spend time and money paying to place links on poor quality websites that have absolutely no reason to be there. Why not invest that budget on creating content that attracts relevant links that bring quality traffic? I’ve been writing about this topic for a number of years now and come SES, will be sharing our asset audit and creative approach to devising an earned link strategy for your organic search campaign.

In the meantime here’s a few articles I’ve written for SearchEngineWatch to give you a flavour of what you’ll find out, including future-proofing your strategy and defining a good link.

Bises!

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We were greeted on arrival with champagne and given time to admire the motors and network with our fellow nominees, including our friends at Farm Digital Ltd who were also nominated for One to Watch and Most Efficient.

After enough time to settle we were invited to be seated for dinner and our party of four joined some of the Rawnet team who were nominated for four awards including Most Respected, and Fast Growth. During dinner we were treated to some table magic as well as the amazing Miss Balloniverse, who made a spiderman balloon for our table.

It’s a web, okay???

After a yummy dinner our M.C. for the evening, comedian Russell Kane took to the stage to get us all giggling in advance of the awards. Our table-mates Rawnet were highly commended for one of their awards and scooped the award for Best Tech.

We won our Award (One to Watch), which was awarded to the agency under four years old that is punching above their weight in terms of client wins and media coverage. Our friends at Farm were highly commended and Russell Kane stressed that this was the most difficult decision for the judging committee. We were also delighted to be ranked 46th in the Wirehive100 League Table, (based on turnover excluding PPC).

We’d like to extend our congratulations to all the winners and runners-up.  In particular we would like to thank Wirehive, who planned and executed a truly classy event which really succeeded in highlighting the digital talent in the South East outside of London.

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Here’s my slides and explanatory notes:

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Quite frankly, it was without a doubt the best few days I’ve spent in my professional career, and we are already discussing our plans for attending next year. The Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference was simply superb.

There was so much content, that I’m not going to be able to cover everyone in sufficient depth in this post – by my count there were just about 20 sessions or panels crammed in to the day. I’ve whizzed through as much as possible on this post, but you might still want to grab a coffee before settling down to read the rest it!

The Golden Circle

We arrived early, and spent our first day out on a tour exploring The Golden Circle. As this is an SEO blog, I won’t linger too long on these details here, but Nichola and I have got a load more photos up on theMediaFlow Facebook page.

So much snow! More than this soft English southerner has ever encountered in his life!

Intro with The President of Iceland

I kid you not. The conference was opened by the actual President of Iceland:

Can you imagine David Cameron doing that at any Internet Marketing events in the UK? I doubt it is very likely!

He had some really interesting things to say, tying in to the conference theme of “You Are Not In Control”.

The President talked about established Western political structures being revolutionised by Information Technology and Social Media, with an example given with regards to the banking crisis issues, which ended up with 25% of the Icelandic population signing a petition to force a referendum.

One of his final points was absolutely spot on as well – what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning – no one knows what the landscape will be like 10 years from now.

The Filter Bubble

Is the Internet as democratic as we’d hoped?

Is it the great connective force that we think it is?

These are the questions being asked by Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble.

Eli told us a tale of how he broadened his Facebook friends deliberately to look at political views from both sides. However, Facebook only displayed the liberal stories which tied in to the activity of posts that Eli interacted with.  Why? Because:

In the quest for relevance – things get perfectly targeted to you. But personalise information can lead to personalised facts too. As time goes on, its going to become harder and harder to watch or learn things that haven’t been specifically tailored to them.

Is this a good thing? Should these algorithms tailoring this information to us have this sort of control? What information do we NOT see as a result of our filter bubbles?

We need these information gatekeepers to challenge us. To show us other points of view, things that we need to see. Can we rely on them to do this?

I found this a really interesting opening to the day, and I am certainly interested in checking out the book further. It certainly asks some pertinent questions about matters that should concern all of us, as this information helps us to determine what we perceive as fact. Those facts being presented to all of us vary based on our own previous personal views, or those in our networks, is somewhat unsettling, as it distorts the perception of our own personal realities.

Social Media Marketing Sessions

At a lightning pace, straight after Eli had finished we were flung headlong into the Social Media track. Here we head presentations from Bill Hunt from Back Azimuth Consulting, Ben Chapman, Head of Popular Music at the BBC, Paul Madden from Automatica and Hubert Sepidnam (AKA Mr Taster) from Kaspid.

I really enjoyed all 4 of these sessions.

Bill looked at what search data reveals about customer needs and desires. We need to understand searchers – search suggest and related searches need to be leveraged as this is what people want to know around those root topics. We need to understand query intent better, as this can be great opportunities for new products and services to drive a business forward. Language has to be used in the way people looking for them use, its no good using internal jargon – forcing users down that path doesn’t work!

Ben from the BBC looks after all the popular radio channels. Ben overcame some technical challenges to deliver a really interesting presentation about the challenges of getting content out onto the website whilst the audience interest was high (i.e. it has to get out immediately, or interest wanes!).

Liveness and Friendship are the 2 core drivers of all BBC radio now – listen, watch and share!

Paul is a speaker that I’ve seen a few times before, and have always really enjoyed and RIMC was no different. Paul whizzed through a presentation about building a Twitter Bot Army (I really want to get to see those slides again, as I just couldn’t write fast enough). This presentation took us through why you’d want a Twitter Bot Army, what you need to do to build it, and what you might want to do with it. The golden rules here seemed to be mixing up real outsourced people with some automation and most importantly, don’t be anti-social.

Hubert, AKA Mr Taster led us through a really fun presentation looking at how to operate on social media in countries like Iran where he came from, where Twitter, Facebook, YouTube; even Google AdWords are banned.

Seeing as they couldn’t get any traction from the main company account (Facebook is for fun right, no one wanted to read SEO articles on there), they created a persona called Mr Taster, full of adventures and cartoons from tasting lots of food. Despite Facebook being banned in Iran, this got fantastic local pick up and by all accounts Mr Taster is quite the celebrity these days!

Internet Marketing Sessions

In this final session before lunch we had 3 more presentations squeezed in. First up we had Matt Neal from BrightSparx, followed by Massimo Burgio from Global Search Interactive and finally Ludvik Høegh-Krohn from OMG.

Matt was looking at how Social and Search are not the new TV, but instead are the new telephone. This presentation looked at why businesses shouldn’t start using social because its popular, without having a driving reason to actually be using it. Why use it? How does it fit in? What will you get out of it? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before getting involved.

Ludvik looked at the new GTLD applications being made (which could cost some businesses and groups a couple of million Euros!). These were mostly being broken down in to 4 groups; Brands, City/Areas, Generics and Communities.

There is only a short window left on applications here though, so if you are thinking of applying you’d better do it soon. Ludvik suggested that there could be PR benefits for the first few big brands to start using a .brand domain. I’m not convinced that these will be that huge, as .com’s are so deeply engrained in the user psyche at the moment, but it will certainly be interesting when some of these applications get approved and sites start to use them.

Massimo looked at Social Media Policies. What are they? Why do you need one? This was a really energetic performance, and my favourite example policy was simply “Don’t be stupid”. Massimo closed with a really good video by the Department of Justice in Victoria, Australia and this was so well produced I’ve embedded it below:

Making the Most of Facebook

The first session after wolfing down lunch was with Charles Dowd from Facebook, who offered us an insight behind the scenes there.

I though Charles was brave to acknowledge Eli’s concerns about the Filter Bubbles, and said that Facebook were constantly aware of this and looking at ways to ensure that the users don’t just get tied in to these bubbles.

Some of Charles more interesting points were:

EVERY page you look at on Facebook is personalised specifically to you.

A lot of their ideas come from their hackathons and hack culture, including the phone app and the timeline features.

One of their favourite motto’s is “Move Fast and Break Things” – focus on getting things done. Also, that if you never fail, you probably aren’t trying hard enough.

PPC & More Sessions

As I don’t use PPC particularly often specifically myself, I often find it interesting to learn more about this side of Search Marketing. Here we had Phil Greenwood from Microsoft, Ólafur Kr. Ólafsson from Nordic eMarketing and Bardur Orn Gunnarsson from Hvitahusid.

Phil’s presentation was titled “The Mafia, Bachelor Parties, Black Hat and Me” and started with a marketing effectiveness quiz where the audience scored themselves on how much they had influence over marketing with their roles.

The message here was that Marketing and Innovation are what produces results. Everything else comes at a cost. We need to get ahead of analytics and develop much deeper customer insights.

Be the voice of your customer in your organisation, and pre-launch market like hell to generate early awareness of products and services. Most of all though, “Be Lucky”!

Ólafur looked at the bigger picture beyond Google Adwords. You have to use marketing tactics hand by hand, and say it like you mean it. Offline and online marketing should never be a head to head duel, and should focus on supporting one another.

We were shown a case study looking at the lack of visibility between a Home Improvement show sponsor and the tiles they had (and what they didn’t do to join up those segments).

Bardur’s session looked at paid search being the beginning, not the end, allowing for real time market research.

This centred on another case study, using Facebook ads to A/B test to identify what the audience wanted (in this case, it was looking at the local Airline and what route they should be looking to add to their flight plans).

The lesson mostly learned from this was that you had to be careful about the results found on only one medium. When this market research was carried out on different platforms it produced varying results, and the aggregated scores across all the areas that they used for this had very different results to the initial Facebook only tests.

Organic with a Twist Sessions

The final sessions that I’ll be properly writing up were the organic with a twist presentations.

There were 4 presentations in this section, with Brent Payne from BaldSEO, Motoko Hunt from Adobe, Barbara Coll from WebMama and Sepita Ansari from Catbird Seat.

Brent started these sessions with Social Media to Improve SEO. Brent urged us to get involved and start talking, explaining about his rule of thirds – 1/3rd activities on social platforms should be Personal, Self/Company Promotion and Interesting/Useful Info.

Brent looked at the ways you can bypass SEO results for particular terms by helping “enhance” (ok, the word was “manipulate”) Google Suggest results to display messages that will push users directly to your site, without going to the main SERP they might have been thinking to search for originally.

There was some controversy on this talk – I’m not going to get in to those, but the over-arching message was “We, as SEOs, have one task…get results for clients. We should not care about anything beyond that.”

The methods used for the Google Search Suggest manipulation were quite interesting – particularly the final ones of these that we were asked not to repeat. I can certainly see it would be fun (and potentially make some clients lots of money) to play around with these techniques!

Next up was Barbara Coll with SEO, Keywords and the Sales Funnel. This centred on making sure you identify the right sort of phrases across the spectrum of buying cycles, producing content for education, content for product spaces and much more.

A lot of this resonated strongly with me, as in the past some of the most successful campaigns I’ve worked on have been built on the foundation of producing truly worthy resource content to cover users at the research stages of the cycle, the purchase and the post purchase. Dominating all these areas in a particular niche is certainly an effective content based SEO Strategy. Most of all though, keep building this content up – there is always more to write about!

Motoko took us through an the process that Adobe went through to bring search activities at Adobe in house, and breaking out from the multi-agency model that they’d used previously. This was all about reducing the number of cooks in the kitchen, streamlining processes and being responsible for achieving the required growth targets.

This allowed the development of an over-arching strategy for search that was integrated at all levels. It meant that best practice guidelines could be adopted by all the stakeholders at every stage and that KPIs could be unified as much as possible, as everyone knew what was being measured and why.

Sepita looked at Large Scale Linkbuilding. This presentation took us through what you need with link campaigns at larger scales, looking at why it was necessary for competitive terms, quality vs quantity, trust & social signals, whilst of course being “invisible” to Google – needing to be as natural as possible.

We were presented with further information on anchor text variations (brand, non brand and beyond), link location, sitewide vs content links, deeplink vs homepage ratios, follow/no follow and velocity. Plenty of food for thought was given here, as well as some ideas of what you could (and shouldn’t) do to get what you need.

The Dark Session

I don’t really want to write up too much from this session. It was great fun and definitely thought provoking, but some of the topics were not all that suitable for sharing, and there was definitely some “adult” themes running through it.

This panel was made up of Fantomaster, Mikkel DeMib from DeMib and Peter Van Der Graaf from SearchSpecialist.

I think the chord was struck with the following statements though:

“It’s not about ‘hats’, its about achieving goals” and

“Blackhat shouldn’t necessarily ‘harm’ innocent bystanders”

Closing thoughts

I’ll return to my title… just WOW. We’ve had such an awesome, unforgettable time in Iceland and we absolutely cannot wait to return.

A huge thanks to Kristjan Mar Hauksson, founder of Nordic eMarketing, his family and all of the team that organised the event. Everyone truly made us feel welcome. All you UK (and beyond) search marketers reading this should start planning for coming along with Nichola and I next year!

Now I just have to hope that videos of my singing at the after party don’t surface anywhere – I’ll save that particular public embarrassment for BrightonSEO in a months time!

I’ve done my best to link everyone up when I could find the right places – let me know if I’ve missed any though!

Also, thanks to Jackie Hole for letting me borrow all the pictures!

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Next Thursday 15th, I’ll be moderating a number of roundtable discussions at the Econsultancy Digital Cream London event.

Digital Cream is an invitation-only event, run by Econsultancy and aimed at client-side senior online marketers. Due to popularity and demand the event is split out into consumer and B2B tracks.

Digital Cream B2B is a unique opportunity for B2B marketers to network with peers, share best-practise and air opinions and common challenges that face client-side marketers.

Although the event is invitation only, there are a handful of spaces left and you can request attendence via the button on the right of this page.

Hope to see you there, to discuss Attracting quality leads with Integrated Search!

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We’re more than a little bit excited about our latest voyage of learning here at theMediaFlow. Tonight myself and SEO Director Peter Handley are flying off to Iceland to attend RIMC 2012.

RIMC, or to give it its’ full title, The Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference is an annual event organised by Kristjan Mar Hauksson, founder of Nordic eMarketing and attracts an incredible range of speakers from across the globe.

We will be writing up the keynote from Eli Pariser (author of widely acclaimed book The Filter Bubble), plus I will be reporting a round-up of the best tips for Search Engine Watch on Monday. We’ll be doing our best to tweet tips and facts on the day, so keep an eye on the hashtag #RIMC2012.

It won’t all be work, work, work, as we plan to take our first team trip tomorrow,with a tour of Icelands Golden Circle. Be sure to like our Facebook page for the more informal reportage and pictures.

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SEO for Ecommmerce, Barry Adams from Pierce Communications

The day kicked off for me watching Barry’s tips for ecommerce SEO. This is something I’ve done quite a lot of over the years, and there were some really good ideas on enhancing what I’m already doing here.

Below are a few of the main highlights:

Focus on where the money is. The keywords bringing the greatest revenue aren’t always the ones that bring you the most traffic, so focus on the money first

Use site search tracking in GA for ideas on potential keyword targets

Make sure you structure your site properly with appropriate internal linking anchors. Don’t forget the breadcrumbs!

Where possible get multiple high res product images. Don’t just use JavaScript to display these, as this might prevent them showing up in image searches (alt tag them too)

Use easy and intuitive faceted navigation, using appropriate SEO focused facets. Use URL parameters to block facets that have less SEO value. Be careful of duplicate content though!

Get delivery information on all product pages – don’t make users click through to a specific page, taking them away from product and reducing chances of sale.

don’t 404 your out of stock items. 301 them if they go permanently to retain that value.

Product reviews – use schema (I love rich snippets!)

Link building efforts should be focused to category pages where possible

Great way to kick off the day, and I was really glad to have met Barry finally after a long time talking online. You can find his SEO for Ecommerce slides in full over on slideshare.

Link building with Swiss Toni, Jon Quinton from SEOgadget

Our next session was off to see our good friend Jon’s ThinkVisibility debut. Jon showed us lots of funky tricks to help identify good link opportunities as quickly as possible, using all sorts of data sources and pulling them all in to excel.

My main highlights here were:

‘Link building can be like making love to a beautiful woman’

Use google docs to scrape link prospects, and pull in metrics to assess potential targets authority.

Use SEO tools for excel (I’ve been meaning to check this out for a while) to pull in page rank and social metrics

Make link prospects offers they can’t refuse.

Only use really good content – its not an area to scrimp on costs for poorly written articles.

Cheap content is a false economy (so true!)

Well done Jon – great presentation, and I’ll look forward to seeing some more from you in the future! You can see Jon’s post and slides over on Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni at SEOgadget.

Website analytics – 60% of the time it works every time, Anna Lewis from Koozai

Anna is another good friend who I was really looking forward to seeing speak. Anna clearly has some good ways to use analytics – helping to find the right kind of numbers from it, as well as finding them faster.

She rightly talked about making sure that data you use, and present to clients needs to have both context & authority.

Determine the right metrics for customers and create custom reports to look at the factors as simply as possible

Use APIs to speed up these processes and to ensure you don’t rely on sampled data. Either learn to code, copy and paste or outsource this work.

Not provided traffic – look at landing pages of this traffic to gain better intelligence as to what might have brought visitors there.

With multi touch attribution set up custom channels to review data more accurately. You can see Anna’s presentation and slides over on the Koozai blog.

25 Useful Tips on WordPress, Dan Harrison from WP Doctors

Another session I’d been looking forward too, I was really torn here as to whether to watch this or go see Carla Marshall from Sorbet Digital presenting in video SEO. Nichola went off to watch that one, so I’m hoping she’ll share her insights once we’ve recovered from the weekends exertions.

Back to WordPress, Dan whizzed through his tips for WordPress (I reckon he could have done 50, but needed Q&A time too). I really liked the shirt he had made for the event:

Fortunately ahead of the event, I talked him out of a ninja themed shirt!

Anyway, on to the content. Dan highlighted the ways on speeding up WordPress using caching and assorted other techniques, shared tips for encouraging social sharing and ways to set it up properly in the first place. I thought the CTA buttons looked interesting and Dan showed us lots of ideas for using gravity forms.

Dan also turned this into an ebook, so you can see all his tips!

Saying Stuff Is Dead… Is Dead, James Carson from Bauer Media

This was possibly my favourite session of the day, but was also the one I took the least notes on. It was fun and engaging (I loved the ‘Steve Jobs IS dead’ joke ).

This presentation looked at how most things that are written about as being dead, actually aren’t. SEO, Email, Facebook; none of these things are dead!

Great stuff from James! James has his slides up on his blog already too.

From URL to Result, Pierre Far from Google

This was a really interesting session, and the first one I’d ever seen from an actual Googler.

It looked at indexing of the Internet, and looked at the process of how this happened (this wasn’t to do with the described ‘magic’ of how rankings were determined however).

I was intrigued that there had been a new smartphone Googlebot thrown out into the wild recently, and Pierre encouraged us all to setup email forwarding on Webmaster Tools messages, as they are sending more than ever now (I didn’t really know this existed, so will go and hunt for this).

I was also particularly fascinated to learn that crawl budgets are not set for ‘sites’, but are instead budgeted by servers. Google call this host load, and do it this way to minimise the chance of breaking a server, but still looking at as many URLs as possible.

I’ve not found any links to this presentation, so let me know if you find a copy available somewhere.

Final Summary

There is a real family, community oriented feel to this conference that many others could learn from – there is a really sociable feel to this event, and it’s always great to meet up with a set of like minded peers again, as well as meeting a bunch of other old friends for the first time.

This time around there was once again a great selection of speakers, although with an emphasis on letting some fairly new speakers get up and show us their stuff. It was a great opportunity to see some folks delivering different angles on things than I’d seen in the past, and I’m hoping to take some inspiration from them and try and dip my toe into having another go at doing some speaking if I can get an opportunity at some stage this year.

It was another fantastic event all round, as they have been every time I’ve trekked up to Leeds for ThinkVisibility. Where else would you see a bouncy castle in a casino?

There are lots of interesting pictures from the event over on Flickr.

Thanks again to Dom and the team for having us, and I hope to see you all again in September, if not before!

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