Anthony Milner

Today I joined over 300 people at Luna Park for the annual Sydney Search Marketing Expo. According to Barry Smyth, the event organiser, this years expo has attracted a larger number of attendees than in past years which is consistent with my opinion on the activity around SEO and SEM during a GFC. It seems more and more organisations especially large organisations are embracing SEO and SEM consultants. The industry has really grown up since the bad old days of keyword stuffing, white text on white background, link pages and all those other lovely tricks that gave the activities a bad name. Now the focus is firmly on generating traffic, quality content and conversions.

I’m going to use this blog entry as a catch all for everything downloaded to my brain today in order to share with my work colleagues who were eager to attend and to anyone else interested. I’ll assume a fair bit of knowledge and of course will only reveal enough to get you one rank below my results lol – actually that reminds me of my fav comment of the day from Greg Boser in relation to SERP rank “if you’re above me you’re a spammer, if your below me you suck. “

Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ

A high rank creates a perception of trust

SEO is about fixing problems and maximising opportunities

On TrustRank – “Of 60 billion pages indexed only 5 billion would be worthwhile” Google engineer

The se algorithmic mix…

• Trust/Authority – 35%
• Usage Data – 10%
• Page level link metrics – 25%
• On page and keyword factors – 30% (in our control)

The SEO Pyramid

• Social
• Link Building
• Keyword research
• Accessible and Quality Content

On the consultant versus in-house SEo consultant question – Need in house people that can craft strategies and live and breath SEO

• SEO is not free (just high ROI)
• SEO is not guaranteed (the engines don’t owe you)
• SEO changes constantly (keep up to date)
• SEO is a tactic (but requires strategy)

Emerging Trends in SEO (Rands opinion)

• More awareness of SEO in general especially since financial collapse
• More crackdown on SPAM and Manipulation
• More tools and metrics
• More data sources for the engines
• Social media emerging w/ SEO
• More options in the SERPs
• QDA (Query Deserves Freshness)

Cindi Crum – RankMobile – Integrated mobile marketing

What’s new in mobile search

• People on mobiles have immediate intent
• Mobile phone is the most personal marketing medium ever
• iphones have 5% market share in the US but make up 75% of mobile searches
• Expect massive surge of people searching via mobile due to iphone and clones
• Mobile web search indicates desire for immediate action

Challenges

• Many different browsers on handsets
• Inconsistent coverage
• Expensive
• User education

Types of Search

• On-deck search i.e a carrier based search (walled or semi walled) usually monetized content and downloads. Carriers have massive targeting power
• Off Deck i.e traditional search engines, not controlled by carriers
• Mobile Search Applications

Engines are using website mobile quality as part of the algorithmic mix. In other words your site which renders badly on a mobile is marked down in mobile results

Dot mobi is bad for search engines

• Not universally accepted
• Cumbersome development standards
• No unique assets or features
• Limited useful life (in future won’t need sep sites)
• Bad for SEO
• Bad for consumers

Architecture

• Sites should stack
• Note the order of content and page fold height
• Javascript and Ajax will display in full
• There are a number of testing sites for checking how sites render on mobile phones
• Popups cause a lot of mobile phones to crash. If ur site crashes a phone the user will NEVER return
• Use display: none to hide elements (but remember they’ll still load)
• Submit your site to mobile search engines, they’re looking for good content
• Google has a separate search page for the iphone
• iphone ignores handheld stylesheet
• iphone has a metatag “viewport” let’s you set a different width

Monte Huebsch – Owner of AussieWeb – Maps and Local Listings

To get better organic results Matt cuts says you should do two things…

• Be in maps and local business directory
• Blog

40% of queries have local intent

62% search online and then buy in stores

Google say their local listings data come from business, web and reviews

Microsoft say their directory data comes from the Yellow Pages

Google recenty dropped data provision from truelocal for yellow pages

Google maps is number 1 in terms of traffic search – data comes from yellow plus reviews etc… Map data sciences does map data

Whereis uses yellow

Microsoft uses mylocal a business listings site – can’t claim your listing in MS you need to be in yellow

Once you complete the local data listing for Google they will rank your data higher

Truelocal used to power Google, they still power yahoo7

Enhanced listing with truelocal is $750 per year

Hotfrog is a free directory and have a PR 6

Aussieweb is a free directory

The local listing traffic goes to…

1. Google

2. Yellow

3. Hotfrog

4. Truelocal

5. Aussieweb

6. Ninemsn

7. Yahoo7

Ranking factors for maps

• Proximity to address
• Number of quality reviews
• Keyword relevancy
• SEO characteristics of related website
• Linking back to your local listing
• Video content

Issues

• One location that serves multiple areas
• Multiple location but only 1 website
• No address – mobile provider

Jason West – Web Salad – Video Optimisation

Some stats

• Video search on youtube accounts for ¼ of all Google searches in USA (Comscore)
• 13 hrs of video are uploaded to youtube every minutes
• 80 million videos watched every day
• 200,000 new video uploaded daily

Eyes are now ending to focus on video pictures in the SERPs

Video is not indexed , it’s what you do around the video that counts

Try to find the podcast and vodcast directories that target your theme

Youtube is ‘nofollow’

Shorter video is better avg you tube video is 2.5 minutes

• Shorter = more views
• More views = more popular
• More popular = more comments/bookmarks
• More comments/bookmarks = higher pr

Optimising video is similar to web seo

• Video title
• Keywords in description
• Put url back to website in description
• Use target keywords as your youtube keyword tags
• Generate views, comments on your video
• Cross promote from blog, facebook etc…
• Targeted anchor text back to video
• Link it back to your site
• Call to action at end of video

Podcasting

• Time is taken out of consideration because people take the content offline
• ABC is in one of the top 2 or 3 podcasters in the world by downloads
• BBC get avg 1M downloads per month for podradio and 1.3 for world service
• Setup RSS – link up subscribers (submit to itunes)
• Bandwidth considerations – potentially huge
• Distribution – from your website, blog, directories, podcast search engines
• SEO – transcripts, keyword them around the topic
• Main podcast directories are itunes and yahoo

Content ideas

• Weekly features on new projects
• Short promo videos
• Instructional podcasts
• Thank you videos
• Goal should be to tell their friends (viral)

The future

• Google are starting to understand and index the audio

Q & A

The Contact Us page is dead. Should just be on every page

Jane Copeland – Search Marketer – AYIMA Search Marketing

Internal linking is the most important on page SEO factor

• Allows people to find content on the site
• Allows search engines to nav the site
• Search engines actually rank pages not websites
• Pagerank must be passed onto deeper pages

Common site links

• Nav – be consistent, remove barriers
• Content
• Secondary or Tertiary – promotes deep linking
• Breadcrumb
• Footer – have been devalued because they often take a pages links to over 100 and have been abused for spam
• Site wide
• Resources links (eg tags, categories, related resources etc…) – usually link to useless pages with no content, use them sparingly – suggest nofollowing them
• Editorial links – the most valuable i.e links in content (only the first link to a particular page is counted – i.e no point linking over and over again with the same anchor text)

Suggestion: Avoid the Wikipedia model of internal editorial linking

Passing page rank – each page has a certain amount of page rank it owns and a certain amount it can give out. Sites don’t lose anything by passing page rank on.

Best type of link is basic HTML and not an image link

Each of these are viewed and valued differently by SE’s

Take control of a sites internal linking to make sure authority is passed correctly e.g nofollow pages like, terms, privacy and help

No danger in using nofollow from a trust perspective

Using no follow means that in the SE’s eyes your page does not exist

Keyword Cannibalisation – instead of targeting the same keyword all the time for every page send them all to the important page

Absolute link versus relative links – best practice is to use absolute links

If you must use relative URL’s use the BASE tags

Subdomains are seen as separate entities e.g wordpress blogs do not inherit page rank from WordPress

Do not send internal links through redirects of any sort

Avoid pagination

Do not attach complex tracking code to internal links

Google ignores content following a #

Use less than 100 links per page

Greg Boser – 301 redirects

301 is your most important SEO tool

IIS redirects default to 302 (bad)

use 301’s for misspellings in urls for search

Google hate conditional redirects because they have to trust a site far more than they want to

relCan is much better from googles perspective

Rel=canonical only came out a month ago

http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/301-redirects.ppt

The Sydney Business and Technology User Group was on last night at Microsoft headquarters in North Ryde and it was an absolute cracker. Steve Herzberg from NRG solutions spoke about networking (with people, not wires as someone suggested LOL) and Craig Bailey did a talk on Content Management with a demo from Jodie Miners of Angry Koala.

For me the highlight of the night was Steve. I find his talks very interesting and always full of great advice. I think I’m not alone when I say networking generally sucks but Steve turns it into something that I want to do instead of something I have to do.

The most important takeaway for me was the idea that when meeting people go for less but deeper connections as opposed to broad surface connections. We should try to connect and create meaningful encounters with fewer people as opposed to working the room and meeting every possible person for 30 seconds as if the world is going to end. Sow seeds, follow up and build relationships over time. Other great tips included…

• “Turning up is 80%” (Woody Allen quote) – If you don’t get out there you don’t have a chance
• Have a plan
• Link people
• Asks questions
• Remember names
• Be a good listener
• Be able to answer the 4 key questions…
  1. Your Story
  2. What you do
  3. How you help others
  4. Your unique selling proposition
• Practice your elevator pitch. Suggested structure… I/We help…by…so that..etc..
• I also liked Steve’s ideas for ice breakers during those awkward first moments…
  • What prompted you to come along?
  • What are you doing now?
  • How did you get into that?

One thing for sure this stuff does not come naturally to many people and in an environment of slower growth it’s essential that business people are out there meeting and connecting with people so I fully endorse and recommend Steve’s services if you’re in the market for some business coaching.

Earlier in the year Craig Bailey posted a tip on his blog for Fixing the annoying Vista Windows Explorer View quirk. [side note - Craig has a great blog which covers all things Microsoft. I also am lucky enough to say that I work with Craig at Elcom but unfortunately not for much longer he is leaving us to pursue some new challenges and I wish him all the best with his new endeavours.] Back to the quirk – everytime you open a folder in Vista it resets to either thumbnail, detailed or list view with no memory for set preferences. My fav is detail view which I reset many times throughout the day – I’m sure it only adds about 1 minute of wasted time to my day but that’s not the point – it’s annoying and it should just work.

Well I finally got around to fixing it using the information posted on Craig’s blog and it’s made me so happy that I felt compelled to pass on the tip. How Microsoft let such a simple feature slip past their testing not to mention the lack of a fix in SP1 is odd. Vista is a nice OS but it’s the small things which create negative perception. I’m often surprised by the number of people I know in a wide variety of industries that look at my PC and say “how did you get your PC to look like that?” and I respond “oh that’s Vista” and they reply “really? It looks pretty cool, is it as bad as they say?”.

It will probably take years for MS to fully recover from the not-so-great release of Vista and as a result the next version called Windows 7 will most likely be viewed with great skepticism. I think we may look back on Vista as the tipping point for the end of bloated operating systems as we’ve known them to date, but that’s a story for another post.

Sydney photographer Keith Loutit has been hard at work producing this awesome series of time lapsed tilt shifted photos. His work has slipped into the international WOWgeist care of the VIMEO sharing site and of couse the blogosphere. This stuff makes me so proud of our little city, I reckon Tourism Australia should jump on it.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Bathtub II from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

The North Wind Blew South from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

A recent Sitepoint newsletter by Alex Walker spoke about the “hierarchy of needs”.

According to interaction designers, experiences should fit somewhere into a “hierachy of UX needs” — from functional at their most rudimentary, through to meaningful at their best

Its a really great way to articulate the users interaction with great design. Many apps are functional, realible and even usable but its the convenience, pleasure and meaningfulness that has the most potential to turn regular users into passionate ones.

Presenter: Leslie Nassar (Mobile Geek)

Very expensive to serve mobile content in Aust.

1990 – Making calls

2000 – Making calls and sms

Now – Making calls, sms and apps

Nex gen of mobiles are all touchscreens with gestures

Current breed on mobiles are too slow for web browsing with the exception of the iphone

Nokia N96 is looking good and will have Silverlight for mobile

Best practices

• go for portrait – most devices are going portrait for default design
• test on real devices – do not rely on emulators
• Focus testing on the top 50% of phones
• no frames or pop-ups – ever
• watch out for latency

Presenters:

Lachlan Hardy, Atlassian Design Engineer

Damien Edwards, Senior Consultant, Readify

Interoperability - Write pages once and have them work cross browser (the big 4 i.e IE, FF, Opera, Safari)

Content Layer – Content tags encased in structural tags

Presentation Layer – Typography, dimensions, positioning, background images and colours, border, outlines and bullets

Acid 2 litmus test – works in IE8 [Interesting: it does not work in Firefox 2 - I must say I assumed it did - hmm wondering about FF3 beta]

Whose heard of CSS Zen Garden? [Only 3 people put hands up. Sheesh]

Support for generated content in IE8 – allows us to add “sugar” to the page – [show me an example please]

Support for attribute selectors – I didn’t get this. [again no rendered examples]

Behaviour – Javascript – i.e manipulation of the document object model 1.0 level 2

target= is deprecated in xhtml 1.1 – why? – because it’s considered behaviour and therefore should be handled with JS

Only manipulate the DOM via the correct handlers otherwise browser will not behave nicely

Compatibility - Don’t break the web

DOCTYPE switch was first introduced in IE5 for Mac

Version targeting – IE8 uses a completely new rendering engine and it sits side by side with the old one.

There is no IE8 quirks mode

Things that used to work in IE7 and below will not work in IE8

X-UA-Compatible http-equiv meta tag allows us to target a rendering mode : IE8/7/5 etc…

Innovation – New features

Webslices – define a portion of a page that is likely to change and then allow a user to subscribe to that portion. It becomes highlighted in the page and toolbar like an rss feed.

Activities – Add contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any web page. its an easy way to create a “plug-in” that exposes the services of your website. Used for lookup and send to operations. To make one you create an XML file and installed via JS.

Good examples at http://ie8.ebay.com

Other improvements in IE8

• Adaptive Zoom
• Faster JS performance
• Accessible RIA support
• Every tab runs out-of-process i.e one tab will not crash another
• address bar improvements

www.positioniseverything.neet

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(vs.85).aspx

Presenters:

Alistair Jones – Readify, UX Consultant

Adam Kowaltzke – Avanade, Creative Analyst

Alistair…

Expression Web 2 now supports…

• ASP.NET
• PHP
• xHTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• Silverlight

Quick Case Study – Quicksilver

Quicksilver wanted a live video stream for 400,000 unique viewers with an average 20,000 concurrent viewers

This was done with Expression Web 1 and Blend 1 which needed a lot of wiring to make things happen

With Expression Web and Blend 2 this has been significantly simplified with simple wizards.

With blend 2.5 beta you can now use C# or VB as opposed to JS

Adam…

[Preso not working]

A couple of years ago Steve Ballmer ran around a stage screaming developer, developer, developer. At Mix08 he changed this to Web Developer, Web Developer, Web Developer – Adam really wants him to be shouting designer, designer, designer.

Why are standards important

• Faster download, lighter weight pages
• Wide compatibility
• Accessible
• Support for a wide range of devices
• Print friendly
• Better SEO
• Fast and more efficient site maintenance
• A competitive edge

Before we start design

• Identify strengths and weaknesses with existing sites/apps
• Define user needs
• Build IA
• Wireframes
• Solicit design feedback

Demos

• 3 column layout using CSS
• Creation of a menu using an unordered list

{Its interesting seeing standards and css use being evangelised – most of the web community have been doing this for the last 3-5 years. At Elcom we’ve been adopting, evangelising and using advanced CSS layout and standards based design for some time now. Hat tips to Russ and the Web Standards Group, Mark Cohen, Sitepoint and John Allsop of Web Directions who have been major drivers for in this area, its great to see MS coming to the party.}

Don’t forget – The UI and UX is important – it is 10% of the effort but 90% of the impact

Tim Adilin – Design Evangelist, Microsoft

Responsible for MIX creative in the US

Tim is presenting with DeepZoom to delve into slide presentation – HOW COOL – I love this stuff!

Tim is attempting to explain the array of Expression products…

Expression Media 2

• for organising photos
• batch processing e.g batch rename, voice annotate the images
• HTML galleries
• image enhancements
• Kind of like photoshop
• very cool scatter silverlight enhanced photo gallery template
• Watermarking
• Available for the Mac
• Controls

Deep Zoom Composer

• Simply create zooms into images within images – a bit like fractals
• Simple process to create one – import > compose > export
• Tagging, sorting and media will be coming to deepzoom in future releases
• [How cool would it be to convert our image gallery to use a deepzoom UI - or a family tree that zooms in through the generations]
• Resolution DPI 96 – the reason for this as a default is because web blend works natively with 96 dpi which can be a bit tricky – more later
• Only works with expression blend 2.5 beta

Expression Design 2

[hmm also a bit photoshop like - working with Illustrator files, layers and slices]

• Vector vs Raster
• XAML
• Tools
• FileTypes
• Layers
• Slicing

Expression Web 2

[Good old frontpage, but hugely improved]

Nice wizard to build good clean CSS

• Standards
• Deep CSS support
• Great intellisense
• PSD support

*Tim asked that anyone with ideas or suggestion for the product suite contact MS product contacts in Redmond and let them know about it*

Expression Blend 2

[Twitter is huge with the presenters today but its getting some blank stares from the audience]

Presenter: Jose Fajardo- Cynergy Systems

Demo – creating a deep zoom

Its all about the UI and the UX – spend the time getting the UI and UX right – anything can be built

DeepZoom composer is a Microsoft tool for creating deepzoom images- very cool – commercial application – [hmmm thinking]

Example of mocked up SMH site with deep zoomable images – Now I get it – great for ads and creating a hugely immersive experience

[I wonder what the bandwidth debt is for deepzoomable images?]

DeepZoomable documents e.g PDF – [awesome idea - must get code sample]

[question answered] Optimised to deliver high amounts of data with narrow bandwidth

Another brilliant demo of distant teaching i.e teacher deepzooming through images  with students on other side of the world. Great for colloboration.

[IDEA - Collobarate with customer over project plan]

http://advertboy.wordpress.com