Here’s my slides and explanatory notes:

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!

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!

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.

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!

Rich snippets are here, there and everywhere at the moment, either polluting or enhancing the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) depending on your perspective.

I’ve been working on sites utilising either Microformats in the form of hReview and hRecipe for some years, and more particularly recently with Schema.org, specifically the Review Schema.

The Old Days – Hoops to Jump

It was always historically quite difficult to get Google to show any enhanced SERP listings for your websites. In the past, it was never enough to have correctly formatted code on site. There were a number of hoops to jump through to get Google to accept you to their various programs and I found that there was a lack of consistency in how these have been applied.

I worked on one site in the review space for some time. We had a particular remit to be gaining the 5 star review rich snippets, as well as seeing those companies that advertised on the site, having reviews within Google Local listings. There were a number of complications throughout this process – we were never able to get the hReview Microformat code 100% nailed on perfectly implemented due to some difficulties with the website developers at the time.

Long story cut short means that as there were plans for a new website in the pipeline that prevented proper allocation of budget to really get this perfect (I wont mention too much that the new site ended up getting canned 6 months into development with budgets being appropriately re-allocated to my original requests).

Eventually, after we’d had *good enough* code in place on the website for 2 months and we’d resubmitted our entries to the enhanced listings scheme, we found that the reviews for the website started to display in the SERPs – hurrah! Frustratingly, we noted that something had come undone on the URL rewrite we’d put in place on the website and we suddenly had duplicated listings for 1000s of business pages on the website. That was a day of real highs and lows – it had seemed victory had been achieved, only to be snatched away from our grasp.

It took a month from resolving the URL redirect issues to the correct URLs for these to start showing up properly for the right URLs, and whilst rankings remained relatively unaffected as a result, we noticed that there was a strong increase in the number of pages receiving traffic to the website, and a big pickup in the number of phrases driving traffic to the website.

Like many things in SEO, it was difficult to isolate these rich snippets as the only cause of this. We weren’t standing still in terms of on page or off page activities for the campaign, but the client was considerably happier about these rich snippet reviews than the increases in traffic that we were delivering at the time. I’m a firm believer that SEO in most circumstances is about bringing in the revenue and providing ROI, but this does illustrate that perception of success really can differ from client to client.

Around August last year I also implemented the hrecipe markup on a food blog that I mostly neglect in my spare time. I didn’t really expect too much from this, as the site isn’t updated frequently, really doesn’t have anywhere near enough quality content or authority, and for the first 3-4 months of adding new recipes with this format, nothing happened. It’s a WordPress site, so I just installed a simple plugin.

I’m not convinced that the hrecipe elements of this implementation are entirely perfect – I get a few issues flagged with the Google rich snippet testing tool, that I’ve never found the time to fix. Interestingly though, the plugin also included hreview elements, which always seemed to validate perfectly.

The New Age – They’re Everywhere!

Towards the end of November, possibly early December, it looks as though a review rich snippet switch was flicked somewhere in the Googleplex. Suddenly reviews were everywhere, and my years of pushing clients towards implementing this markup suddenly seemed warranted.

It wasn’t until my first day at theMediaFlow that I actually noticed that my cooking site had some rich snippets of its own! Based on the data I’d input into the plugin, every page on my site where this markup appeared was displaying 5 star reviews. That’s great right?

It is great, but here is the problem. I gave my own recipe a single 5 star review. It shows up in Google for all sorts of search terms and brand based keywords. But it’s based on my own review:

Plenty of folks in the SEO world jumped on this development, and it wasn’t long before the first few pages of results for industry keywords were littered with these rich snippets. Nearly everyone has 5 star reviews, but these all seem to be carefully controlled by the sites themselves – they arent independent or impartial, and you don’t have to jump through my hoops filling in forms with Google to get them.

Get the markup for reviews correct on page, and pretty quickly after being re-indexed you are going to see those lovely stars in your websites results.

In light of these working so effectively, we pushed for a client to get the schema markup applied to the reviews they already had on the site. They had tried marking this up, but it failed the validation tests when I checked this. It was therefore only a small change to make to get this functioning properly by adjusting a few elements on the product page templates.

Within a day of this markup being changed on a couple of key product page listings in SERPs, we saw the reviews. These were absolutely real reviews – not all of them were 5 star ones unlike with my own tests.

Interestingly, one area we’d hoped to also see these apply was in the Google Shopping vertical. However, my research into a number of niches has led me to the conclusion that these are not displaying yet just from having the appropriate markup.

It seems much more weighted into trusted and authority sources of this information, presumably with similar hoops to jump through for inclusions as in the old days. Maybe this is paving the way for a paid inclusion option for Shopping results specifically, or maybe this vertical is a little behind the main index.

It’s likely only a matter of time before they do start to appear here though.

My final recent rich snippet experiment has been with the rel=author markup. I documented my attempts to get this working on a Google Plus post, trying out various options before implementing 2 different methods of it across the 3 sites I was looking to get this functioning on.

This was an unnecessarily complicated procedure – it involved getting the markup all right, following some quite baffling documentation from Google, and then digging around to find a form to submit the request to be included.

I was fairly satisfied that the markup was functional on all 3 sites after testing again with the rich snippet tool, but after waiting for a few weeks not a lot happened.

At the start of February it seems like the authorship rich snippet switch must have been flicked by Google, as I started seeing this on 2 websites that I’d implemented it on (the 2 that I implemented the same way) but annoyingly not the other.

Double Rich Snippet Goodness!

At the same time I saw a lot of chatter about everyone else that had been playing with this suddenly getting some as well. Since then, I’ve also been told that similar to when we got schema implemented on our client site, that if you add this code now it doesn’t take very long for this to start displaying in SERPs.

In short, the method that worked best for me here was to link to my Google Plus page at the end of every post, with the following addition to the destination URL:

?rel=author

When I get a chance to do so, I’m going to replicate this implementation on the 3rd site and see how long it takes to start displaying that information.

Conclusions

Like it or loathe it, it seems that the rich snippet explosion is here to stay. The opening up of the scheme to just about every site employing the correct code is making even more people jump on the bandwagon, and the number of SERPs that these don’t appear for seem to be reducing daily.

As Nichola observed in her post on SEO Chicks, we saw a marked increase in click through rates where we had sufficient data to be able to measure this properly.

On my own cooking site, I’ve seen rankings remain relatively unchanged, but particularly on SERPs where there aren’t many other rich snippets seen big increases in traffic on those terms – most noticably when in position 4 or 5.

I’m looking forward to having sufficient data on rel author to draw some conclusions on performance of these, but it strikes me that the more you can do to get your listing in a SERP to stand out from the rest, the higher the CTR is going to be. I just want to collect more data to prove it to myself!

I’ve heard a lot of grumblings about the authorship elements only working for linking to Google Plus, but recall seeing in passing that Google are considering opening this up to wider social sites. This is something I’d love to see, as my Twitter profile would be a considerably better direction to be pointing people interested in more of my writings than a Google Plus page where there is mostly just tumbleweed.

I’d love to hear any experiences you may have had with various rich snippets over the years! Drop a comment or send me a tweet so we can discuss further.

Also, if you aren’t bored of reading really long posts yet, why not go and check out my favourite search marketing tools?

Introduction

As this was part of a panel (with Shira Abel of Hunter and Bard, Jon Sumroy of National Positions and our fearless moderater Sam Michelson of Five Blocks) I wanted to focus quite specifically on reputation in the search results; rather than the social media sphere in order to prevent too much overlap.

My perspective on ORM in the search results (and therefore the wider content/reputation messages these results point to) is not about trying to “control” search results, but more about a strategic approach to message-management; with content-strategy, message position and communication tools being the essential stages to managing a campaign.

This Sunday is the annual SMX (search marketing expo) Israel.SMX is a fantastic, global search conference, which takes place in many locations throughout the year. I’ve been lucky enough to attend the London event for the past couple of years, and this year will be speaking at the SMX Israel conference on two subjects; namely Online Reputation Management, and Mobile Search practise.

Tickets have already sold out, so if you are interested in further SMX events, I’d definitely recommend an early calendar reminder! I’m sure that for those that can’t attend, there will be tweeting and blog coverage, so that you can follow some of the content online. The hashtag is #SMXIsrael.

I can’t reveal too much about the content of my presentations at this stage, however for those undecided as to which sessions they will attend, here’s the full schedule, and a brief description of my presentations – to help you decide either way.

Online Reputation Management – My perspective is that there’s generally no such thing as bad publicity; it’s all about message management and I’ll explain some of my favourite rapid response tools for such message management.
Mobile SEO – I’m talking about Google’s Serendipitous Search product (a mobile, opt-in service, currently in development under Marissa Mayer) and explaining what data-types and technologies would be required to realise this as it is currently described.

I’m very much looking forward to this event, as it will be a great opportunity to get to meet fellow professionals whose’ content and industry contributions I’ve been enjoying over these past years; including Barry Schwartz, conference organiser, Search Engine Land News Editor and Executive Editor of Search Engine Roundtable. I’m also looking forward to meeting fellow speakers, such as Branko Rihtman of Rank Above who I’ve been speaking to for a couple of years (via Twitter) but am still yet to meet!

In my last role, we had a number of internal tools that I’ve had to find replacements for or just stop using the equivalent of. As a result, it’s made me think closely about the tools that I needed to be bringing across, look for some more modern variants in some cases, as well as making sure I find some new ones to help with the day to day role.

Some of these are SEO specific, and others are more general useful tools to aid productivity, but I thought that this would be a decent topic to write my first blog for theMediaFlow on. I hope you find some of them useful, and be prepared for a fairly long list!

SEO/Search Marketing Tools:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider -

This tool has changed my working life immeasurably for the better. I first started talking to the Screaming Frog tool about this whilst it was in development well over a year ago now, as I was looking for a tool that could help me check with the implementation of the canonical tag across a website.

From an on-site audit perspective, nothing beats this for me. You can evaluate titles, descriptions, keywords, headings, canonical tags, internal link patterns. You can review specific inlinks and anchor texts to specific pages, review broken links and links passing through internal redirects. I’m sure that there are plenty of elements that I am still not getting the full benefits from still, but this is a tool I love and recommend incredibly strongly that you try it if you haven’t already.

Google Keyword Tool - I’ve used lots of keyword analysis tools over the years, and found most of them fatally flawed by the data sets supplying the information. Who knows, they may have got better over the years, but I have my doubts (let me know in the comments if there are any worth having a look at).

I don’t exactly trust the data that this tool gives as the potential traffic levels available on terms are rarely anything like what the exact match data suggests is possible. However, I do find that in terms of comparative volumes between phrases that this is a useful indicator of how a keyword might perform in terms of traffic potential.

Excel - I definitely need to get better with spreadsheets, as I’ve been known to tear my hair out at times, but where would I be without Excel? 2012 is the year where I am really going to get my head around better spreadsheet usage.

I know a large number of the SEOs are talking about learning to code this year, but for me, maximizing and improving my Excel usage is a considerably higher priority.

Already though, I wouldn’t be without it, and its an essential part of the Search Marketers tool kit.

Raven Tools - in particular this is replacing the internal tools that I have previously used.

I have a long way to go before I get to grips with everything that its possible to do with Raven – I’ve mostly thus far been using it for the rank checking & competitive intelligence elements for campaigns that I am working on a the moment, and am planning on spending a lot more time getting to grips with all the extra features over the coming weeks and months.

Header Status Checkers – I now mostly use check your server result codes.

GSiteCrawler - this has been mostly superseded for me now with the additional features being added to the Screaming Frog tool, but this is one that I’ve historically had a lot of use from. I used to use it to create XML sitemaps (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider), spotting duplicate content issues (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider) and… ok, maybe I don’t really need to be using this one anymore – if you don’t have a paid subscription for the SF SEO Spider, then it could be useful for creating fairly big XML sitemaps.

Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools - goes without saying really!

Google URL Builder - A handy tool for tagging links up for campaigns.

Google Analytics Configuration Tool - This is a newly released tool from the Raven Tools team to help configure Google Analytics in the way that you need for your website. It has options for helping you to setup Google Analytics accounts for websites with multiple subdomains, track multiple domains in one account as well as configuring site search and 404 tracking. It also helps you to setup Goals for the website, using event tracking methods, helps you to track Facebook page traffic and has a URL Builder.

I’ve actually not used this yet beyond a couple of tests, but can see plenty of uses for this in the future and can definitely see how simple this could make configuring some of these options.

Piwik - This is a new one to me, but I’ve been starting to have a look at this open source analytics package since starting at theMediaFlow. It seems to broadly collect the same sort of information as I am used to seeing in Google Analytics, without Google having access to that data specifically.

MajesticSEO - The link analysis tool that I am most familiar with, I regularly use this one. Useful for identifying potential problems in your backlink profiles, performing competitor intelligence and comparisons. So much data available to be looking at it can be a little daunting at first, but once you get your head around what’s on offer its a valuable resource.

OpenSiteExplorer - Since the demise of the Yahoo Site Explorer, this has been my go-to for quick link spot checks. It also does some good comparisons and visualisations of the data.

Link Research Tools - I’ve historically only really used free tools and MajesticSEO for backlink analysis and have enjoyed having access to these Link Research Tools to review that data from a slightly different source

Cognitive SEO Tools - this is a fairly new tool, and one that is certainly new to me. However, I’ve started to play around with the data that this is collecting for a few clients of late and have really liked the data visualisation that you can produce from it. I suspect that as I start to use this a bit more in the future that I will be finding plenty of additional uses for it, as it seems to have a lot of additional features beyond the link analysis elements that I’ve been using it for mostly so far.

Schema Creator - I actually only found this tool today, but I can see this being really useful for using Microdata as set out by schema.org to mark up People, Products, Events, Reviews and more. It gives you a preview and then the HTML to copy and paste where you want to use it.

Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool - Well, once you’ve implemented schema for your reviews (and recipes which I’ve used a fair bit too), you want to make sure that its possible for it to display with those 5 star reviews in the SERPs. Drop a URL into here and see how Google *might* display your rich snippets. It’s also useful to find any problems that you might have with your code to help you get these working properly. Rich snippets are everywhere in search results at the moment and seem to have fewer barriers for entry at the moment, so now is the time to get them on your site!

Google SERP Snippet Optimiser - I’ve loved the SEOmofo SERP snippet optimization tool since i first stumbled across it. It lets you put your title, description and URL in and generate a preview of how that snippet might look when its live on a Google search.

WHOIS Domain Tools - Always useful to do a bit of snooping. Find out details on the Whois record, registration details and some hosting information on websites you want to know more about.

First Link Checker - I’ve used this tool for a number of years now; it lets you look at the links outgoing on a page and flags to you when you link multiple times to the same URL. It can be useful to identify when you might be over-linking internally to a page on your site – I particularly use this a lot on website home pages or specific pages that I want to investigate further.

SEO Browser - Another old one, but I still find it useful to have a quick look at text only views of a page from time to time.

Hitwise Intelligence Dashboard - Whilst this isn’t a tool as such I tend to find myself checking this data a couple of times a month. I find its search engine share statistics particularly valuable to check in on (it always amuses me as well that Google has the top 2 slots here, with .co.uk and .com engines).

Assorted Productivity & “Other” Tools:

Percentage Calculator - I used to get a lot of stick for this one being in my bookmarks, and yes, I can calculate percentages in excel. But this has been in my bookmarks forever, and for a quick and easy percentage calculation that I don’t want to attempt in my head, I always visit here.

Skype - to keep in touch with those around that I need to be able to communicate with at all times (it’s mostly a smaller extension of my Twitter network).

ToodleDo - I resisted using this in my last place of work, but particularly now, where I am working in multiple locations, the importance of a to-do list that syncs everywhere I go has grown to be invaluable. Throw in the iphone and ipad app and I can access my to do list wherever I am in the world. Much better than the post it notes and scraps of paper that used to litter my desk space.

Evernote - Another app that I’ve started to use as a result of working more frequently in multiple locations (and the primary location that I have written this blog from), Evernote allows you to write notes and attach data to it, and have a central storage and access to that wherever you go, on all the devices that I own. In tandem with Dropbox and Toodledo, these are keeping me organised at the moment.

Dropbox - I’ve used dropbox every now and again over the years, but not really with any seriousness. However, since starting here, having an online storage space where I can access what I am working on everywhere that I am working has become more important. Again, using iphone and ipad apps has proved invaluable whilst out and about

Google Chrome Extensions:

I made the switch to Google Chrome about 18 months ago for the most part, although of course keep other browsers to test differences in SERPs and the like. I regularly make use of the following Chrome Extensions to help make SEO’ing that little bit easier!

SEO Site Tools - A fantastic extension for Chrome, my main browser based tool. Contains a ton of offsite and onsite data about a wealth of factors, it lets you have a quick snapshot of a pages primarily important on page items. A must have for Google Chrome using SEOs.

Pinterest Right Click - Not a search marketing tool at all I guess, but I have really enjoyed adding things to my Pinterest boards – particularly since I found this extension that allows you to right click on an image and pin it without any faff.

PageRank - Pretty simple extension – displays the PageRank of a page. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it with any credibility, but hey, I still like to know.

XML Tree - I didn’t like how Google Chrome displayed XML sitemaps when I looked at them, and this makes them more usable and readable

Number Search Engine Results - Does what it says on the tin, and numbers search results for you – simple!

Google Global - an extension to let you see Google results in different regions. I often forget that I have this extension, but it is handy for some quick research on how your results might appear in other locations when I do remember to use it!

Evernote Web Clipper - in conjunction with using Evernote I’ve been using this to clip articles to Evernote for later reading.

Honourable Mention:

Spotify… ok, this isn’t a search marketing tool at all. But everyone needs some background noise to help the day on its path. I’ve also been enjoying starting to build some playlists for sharing, and will be tweeting about some more of these over the coming months. I am someone that isn’t a complete iTunes hater, and have previously run my music collection mostly through that, but similarly to some of the other things I’m using at the moment, the accessibility between multiple locations is growing in its importance for me these days.

Finishing Up:
For things like Twitter & Facebook, unlike many search marketers, I actually just use the web interfaces. I find that I can dip in and out of the activities on these platforms much more simply as a result of closing down the browser windows, rather than receiving a barrage of notifications when there have been new updates and getting distracted all the time. For the same reason, I have notifications switched off for most things, particularly email.

Hopefully not all of these were completely the usual suspects for this sort of post, although I appreciate that a lot of these are popular tools and bookmarks. I’m always on the look out to develop this toolset further though, so I’d love to hear if there are some obvious tools and bookmarks that I should be adding – please let me know in the comments.

Pete is one of the most personable and well-thought of people in the SEO industry; with a reputation for honesty, loyalty, customer-retention and some kick-ass SEO skills too! With five years experience of managing over 100 clients at Portsmouth based Vertical Leap, Pete’s a veritable old-hand in the industry.

Pete is going to be a great asset to theMediaFlow, and we are both super-excited about developing our client base and industry profile in the coming months. We’ve got an exciting conference-speaking schedule already lined up for Q1 2012 (more anon), plus a range of new clients to get cracking on in the next few weeks.

Please join me in welcoming Peter to the team!