Brighton SEO was a free search conference that took place in the Brighton Dome on Friday 13th April 2012. Four of the Red or Blue team hopped on a train down to the sunny sea-side town to see what we could see beside the seaside.
WARNING: This is a bit of a read – you might want to get some tea and biscuits. If you’re in a hurry, read our thirteen key takeaways from BrightonSEO.
After a very bizarre Starbucks experience including an old man in a shiny pink suit with a handlebar moustache we arrived to find a huge queue, which is always a good sign:
Kelvin (Site Visibility, @kelvinnewman) kicked the day off in style by handing out rock and bus branded mugs to whoever had travelled the furthest.
Ask the Engineers Panel Session
The first session was a panel session featuring Pierre Far (Google, @pierrefar), Dave Coplin (Microsoft, @dcoplin), Martin McDonald (Expedia, @searchmartin), Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) and Tony Goldstone(Fresh Egg, @tonyboney).
The first topic was whether SEO is dying – universal agreement that no – SEO is safe. Rishi recognised that the industry has an image problem though – and put it down to the lack of any standards body or specific qualifications.
Question two was based around the recent spate of de-indexing. There was shared frustration at trying to work out what links are just poor quality versus what links are bad enough to be a ‘bad link’ in the reconsideration request sense.
On whether Google would just ignore bad links once reported Google refused to be drawn. Google did suggest that firing your SEO might help when entering a re-inclusion request though.
In some more helpful advice, Rishi suggested keeping a log of all the emails you send requesting link removals. Even if a site owner doesn’t respond, or refuses, you can screenshot those emails and include them as attachments in your re-inclusion requests to show you’ve tried.
Google acknowledged that there’s a huge amount of spam in the PPC (porn, pharmacy, gambling) industries and explained that if everyone in an industry’s buying links then your not running as high a risk buying them yourself then you would in a ‘clean’ industry. It was nice to see Google being open about this rather than putting up the normal ‘paid links are bad m’kay’ shield.
Question 3 moved us on to the subject of content and how to shape a content strategy.
Pierre refused to say whether rich snippets were, within themselves, a ranking factor, but it was certain that everyone’s really in favour of adding them.
Question 4 got a big laugh - by asking for the story behind Google’s latest redesigns - apparently she’s been really hating them. Pierre directed her to Google’s forums to make UI feedback/suggestions.
Question 5 took us back on to the issue of social first brought up in question 3.
Bing suggested you be ‘bloody good at social’ – by which they mean Facebook and Twitter.
“…be really bloody good at social. The more engaged they are and the bigger the following the better they’ll rank…. The number of fans or followers is a factor, but not as important, its more about how quickly content is being shared” Dave Coplin, Bing
For Bing, it would seem the speed that content is shared at is more important than the quantity of sharing that occurs.
For question 6, keyword ‘not provided’ traffic was brought up. Google’s original response was to use webmaster tools. Pierre seemed genuinely surprised when there was general agreement that Webmaster Tool’s data is really poor. Pierre argued that users make a far clearer choice to connect with a company when they click on an ad-words ad over an organic result; which I must admit to not properly understanding and didn’t find all that persuasive.
Google tried to make a big play about being at the forefront of protecting its users – conveniently forgetting the privacy concerns of Google Search Your World and the far higher privacy provided by DuckDuckGo.
In a shameless attempt to curry favour (which definitely worked) Bing changed its homepage image for today to Brighton pier:
Phillip Sheldrake – Future SEO Vistas – the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things
Philip Sheldrake - Meanwhile - @sheldrake
Philip set out his idea of the future of SEO – what others have been calling semantic search or web 3.0.
His version revolved around a few strong principles – presentation, discoverability, machinability and usefulness of data.
Philip linked to Rel Finder, which looked like a great way of exploring the semantically connected web. Apparently the UK government is leading the world on public sector semantically marked up data online – which is great news.
He then went on to start inventing words live on stage – Inernetome, for example, refers to the manifestation of the internet of things. Overall, Phil thinks it’s really important that we move beyond content for content’s sake. The lasting thought was to spend time thinking about your audiences needs, how you’re servicing them and how you can push that angle in a semantic way that search engines will appreciate.
Future SEO Vistas 2012
Sam Noble – How to launch or re-launch a brand or product online effectively
Samantha Noble - Digital Marketing Director - Koozai - @koozai_sam
Sam ran through the story of how Koozai became Koozai in May 2011. It took over a year of effort, but gave them a unique identity that they could (and have) really developed under. She was attacked throughout by a moth so insistent that by the end of the day it had its own twitter handle!
Koozai was rebranded due to brand confusion, but other reasons to rebrand include an overcrowded marketplace, buy-outs or mergers or because of a new product/service.
Sam explained how it’s most important to consider what consumers think, and connect with, your brand rather than how you view, or would like to view, your brand. Your brand name needs to be something that will make sense long-term as you wont want to go through the rebranding process for a long long time to come (if ever again)!
Once you’ve done that:
find the right branding agency
make sure the name’s easy to spell and memorable
check domain availability
check social profile availability with Knowem
choose a go live day that’s not a Friday
build a checklist of properties that need to be updated
Prepare a press release and blog post ready for the go live day
Koozai thought the name ‘Guava’ stood out and it inspired them to come up with a unique name of their own that stood out in the industry.
Sam talked about the importance of registering your brands trademarks. It’s important to consider whether you’ll need the rights provided by registering the brand. For most companies, the rights provided for unregistered trademarks under the Trademark Act 1994 will be enough.
She stressed the importance of not going live on any important project until it’s absolutely ready. Also, that going live on a project on Friday is never a good idea as the buzz around it will die over the weekend.
One nice tip was the idea of using reverse image searches to find existing uses of your old logo to build up a list of sites that need to be contacted when you change your logo.
Adam Lee – Killer Market Research for Peanuts
Adam Lee - Managing Director, No Pork Pies - @noporkpies
Adam went deep in to making sure you really understand your target market.
He quoted a study, which emphasised the importance of keeping sites simple and uncluttered.
Adam set out three different approaches to conduct market research on the cheap:
map your audience to particular personas – creating a detailed understanding of ‘who’ your target audience is, how they interact online and what they care about
conduct questionnaires and polls with your existing audience
analyse the behaviours of your existing audience to build up a better understanding of their habits and how you can involve your brand in them.
Adam uses tools such as Brandwatch, FollowerWonk and Klout to monitor key engagement channels. He layers geographical insight on top via Google Insights.
Words from Sponsors
We then moved in to presentations from Searchmetrics and Linkdex
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics had a great graph showing the effect of Panda on ciao.co.uk – which was an impressive example of the tools power:
Linkdex
Linkdex won the ‘freebie’ crown at BrightonSEO by handing out mini baseball stress-balls. On stage, Tom from Linkdex cut straight to the chase and gave us another rendition of their great cartoon ‘Zeus’:
Microformats and SEO
Glenn Jones - Founder, Madgex - @glennjones
Glenn talked through Microformats, Microdata and RDFa providing examples of each.
Glenn suggested using microformats over microdata or rdfa most of the time simply because its quicker and simpler to implement.
A lot of Glenn’s presentation centred around ranking Yorkshire Puddings which, just before lunch, got a lot of people’s stomach’s rumbling.
He suggested using the Google Rich Snippets testing tool to make sure your microformats are setup correctly.
There’s always a little bit of a debate as to quite how much rich snippets increase your click-through rate and Glenn suggested it would normally be around 10-25% – which seemed fair.
An audience member asked about spam in microformats. This has increasingly been popping up and is becoming a real issue. The Google representative reminded us of the reporting procedure and said that if they found anyone spamming rich snippets that they’d block the snippets showing for them. I’d always assumed this would include a rankings penalty because – after all – you’ve just been caught spamming Google. Apparently there’s absolutely no rankings penalty applied for spamming rich text though. I was surprised and don’t necessarily think Google’s got it right on this one – for many sites they’ll be little downside in spamming the snippets.
Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths? What Do Searchbots Actually Do?
Roland Dunn - Partner - Refined Practice - @roland_dunn
Roland talked about how little most SEOs know as to what searchbots are doing on their site. He went through an approaching of digging in to server-log files to find what pages are being visited frequently and which aren’t.
Roland described how, for the large site he looked at Google spent almost all of its time looking at two pages.
To help craft the journey of searchbots and increase your crawlability he suggested looking at:
altering your internal navigation
robots.txt out pages (in extreme cases); and
rethinking your URL construction to put the most important pages near the top
A Word From… Magic!
To finish off the sessions before lunch, Manual Link Building hired a magician:
Then it was off to lunch in what was turning out to be a really nice day in Brighton.
Charlie Peverett – It’s only words? Working with Content Strategy
Charlie Peverett – Content Strategist - iCrossing UK - @cpev
First up after lunch was Charlie Peverett. I’ll admit to having missed the start of Charlie’s presentation. It was a beautiful day in Brighton and a lot of people’s lunches overran.
Charlie hit out at the rise of people putting ‘great content’ down as an anonymous item on an SEO to-do list. This has been a bug-bear around the Red or Blue office for a while – creating great content’s one of the most challenging activity we undertake and few people go in to the detail as to how to come up with great ideas.
Content strategies need to go further than just addressing written articles – attack universal search by generating pictures, video, audio and all kinds of media based content.
He also suggested ‘Content Strategy’ by Christina Halverson. It’s not a book I’ve read personally, but it seemed to get quite a good reception in the hall.
How you can get BIG links from BIG media sites
Lexi Mills - Online PR Consultant, Distilled - @leximills
Lexi gave a great presentation on the interaction between PRs and SEOs as well as how to get links in more traditional publications.
Her speech was all about actually getting on the phone and pitching your stories. Too many people are frightened to call, concerned with asking for a link and scared of really pushing.
She spent a little time talking about the friction that can often exist between the two. Whilst I’ve not seen this myself I liked her suggestion of providing the PR teams you’re working with a report showing the SEO effect of their work that they can include within their own reporting – making them look good whilst building bridges.
Lexi explained that, no matter how negative a reply to an email she gets she always follows it up as any response is a possible opening.
Asking for keyword anchor text in your link can sometimes rattle journalists so Lexi advised usually going for branded links. If you’re too embarrassed to ask for a link at all then pass the buck and claim your boss asked you to ask for one.
If you get one article published by a media outlet, but they don’t link to you don’t burn the contact. Go back to them next time, but don’t give them full details until they promise the link.
She was really keen on making the link seem like a natural, obvious inclusion – referring to it as a credit or further substantiation of an article.
Lexi mainly uses PR NewsWire and BusinessWire for her press releases online. She describes the links they provide as marginally above directories, but good in bulk.
For BusinessWire you can only get a link if you don’t fill out the URL and blog URL boxes when filling in your press release – a non-obvious tip she only found out by having drinks with the devs.
Lexi recommended tracking #prfail #prwin and #journorequest on twitter.
Maximizing your SEO Agencies
James Owen – SEO Manager, Hotels.com - @jamesoseo
Hotels.com have been working with a whopping 10 SEO teams. Plotting their activities on a graph, it looks like the localisation team managed to give the largest push , which is something we’ve found at Red or Blue – pursuing local traffic has massive ROI.
The key points were:
audit before an agency begins work
monitor progress against KPIs throughout
Segment all your analysis based on brand v non-brand
It’s important to pass marketing collateral to an agency as early as possible so that they can learn from what has and hasn’t worked in the past as well as to remove the possibility of a workflow bottleneck.
I was really impressed at how good hotels.com approach to ringing the most from their agencies is – no surprise, then, their phenomenal rankings.
Words from Sponsors
Next up was AdInsight and Analytics SEO.
Analytics SEO
Stephen Lock - @stevejlock
Stephen SEO suggested using DuckDuckGo for link prospecting as it has a lot less spam in it than Google.
In what I’d class as one of the stand-out tips of the entire conference though, they also suggested using reverse image searches (like TinEye) on your competitors banner ads. That way you can see where they’re advertising and you have a list of really relevant sites to go after for link building. So, whilst your competitors are paying for presence on that site you might get yourself some nice free advertising through a guest blog post etc.
Search marketing – from Panda to Black Swan
Stefan Hull – Insight Director - Propellernet - @stefanjhull
Stefan showed us an image of a turkey farmer, which I’m still pretty convinced was him, and invited us all not to be those farmers. His point behind the image, though, was simple – SEOs are constantly shocked by the changes in Google’s algorithm - and we shouldn’t be.
He suggested planning strategies around creating great users experiences rather than just what’s trending at that moment. That way, when the next algorithm change occurs it’s likely to benefit you not penalise you.
“Chase after your best interpretation of what users want” – Matt Cutts
He talked about buying links as a risk you need to manage. Visualise the amount of risky links you have to graphically show how vulnerable your link structure is. By doing this you’re more likely to get sign off on a less explosive, but better in the long-run, white-hat campaign. If you know what percentage of your competitors’ links are vulnerable you also know how risky you can be. This lead to some interesting research:
60% (of respondents) pay for links
67% of those think their paid links are producing results
10% of those haven’t mentioned to their boss that they’ve bought links
20 Tools You May Not Have Heard Of, But Should Be Using
Kevin Gibbons - Director of Strategy, SEOptimise - @kevgibbo
Kevin unfortunately couldn’t be at BrightonSEO, but was good enough to publish his slides online. It contains a bag of lesser-known SEO, social media and project management tools. Check it out below:
Before moving on to the 20/20 presentations they decided to have a game of Tetherball. Despite Kelvin nearly destroying the ball, Dom still won:
Sell the Sizzle, Not The Search: Tactics for Appeasing Marketing Directors
Chelsea Blacker – Search Manager - SEOptimise - @chelseablacker
Apparently SEO’s not as measurable as PPC, cute as social or glamorous as TV – I say Chelsea’s not seen Red or Blue’s SEO .
Chelsea talked about the importance of being really positive when selling concepts; using positive words and smiling even when on the phone.
She suggested talking in terms that marketing directors really care about. So, move away from the technicalities and closer to revenue, talking closer to the way a PPC team would because marketing directors tend to ‘get’ PPC a lot more. Based off of this, make PPC comparisons – how much could they be saving by investing in SEO rather than spending on PPC?
Enterprise SEO Titties
Tony King – Head of Search Marketing - FindaProperty.com
Tony gave a speech about Tools, Tips and Technique (or TiTTies) for Enterprise SEO.
He gave us the great acronym ‘FIRST’ – Findable, Indexable, Rankable, Sustainable and Trackable.
There was a nice tip to remember as it’s easy to miss out when planning dev work – if you’re going to have any down-time on the server for upgrades etc, let the PPC team know so they’re not running ads during that time! A nice piece of inter-agency thinking.
Beyond the race for rankings, Tony’s found altering calls to action in meta descriptions one of the easiest ways to increase click-through rate and, in doing so, increase traffic.
SEO & PPC Working Together in Harmony
Tim Ireland - Jellyfish
Tim perhaps like zooming in and out more than any man I’ve ever met. His presentation’s pinned here. It was a fantastic, though fast, psychological look at search – well worth a read.
I Believe Authors are the Future
James Carson - Bauer Media - @mrjamescarson
James explained what author rank is and how it may affect search.
Whilst James strongly believes in author rank, he’s yet to see an uplift in traffic on any of the Baur properties from it. This is because rel=author is a great way for journalists and other experts as it helps to reinforce their position as experts over and above ‘amateurs’.
He’s not had any problem implement rel=author – in his experience, the most difficult part of getting rel=author setup is convincing journalists to get Google+ accounts.
AuthorRank is vertical based so it’s important not to reuse personas created for one vertical in an unrelated one. This could harm that personas author rank as their relevance plummets.
Mobile Serendipity: How Google Plans to Send Search Results to Users, Before You’ve Even Thought to Look
Nichola Stott – Founder & Director - theMediaFlow - @nicholastott
According to Nielson data, there were over 2 billion searches in the UK in February alone.
Nichola tracked what she called ‘serendipitous search’ through the years via comments by Marissa Myers. This is all about Google personalising search and more accurately guessing at what content a users needs or what answer they’re looking to fulfil in a way that I’d describe as ‘automagic’. We’ve definitely seen this occurring with GSYW, search suggestions and Google beginning to provide proper answers within the SERPs so this is definitely something everyone needs to consider going forward.
Brighton SEO 2012: Serendipitous Web Search on Mobile
View more presentations from theMediaFlow
I appear to have started a sweetshop (and advertising company)
Dom Hodgson - CEO - EmberAds - @thehodge
Dom explained the dilemas involved with opening a sweet shop online. Should you include a picture of a squirrel? Yes – always. Is there a risk that people might think it’s a monkey. Unfortunately, yes. What did we learn?
Dom reminded us that:
everyone loves pick n mix
giant snakes are expensive
postage is even more expensive
its important to wait for your wife to go to Wales before starting your own sweet shop
He launched EmberAds new site live on stage with party-poppers. I took some video of it:
We wrapped up by Kelvin giving away AN ARCADE MACHINE to a woman who hadn’t previously really known what SEO was:
Finally, on to the pier for drinks, karaoke and lots of networking. Thanks go to Kelvin and all the speakers for a great BrightonSEO.