Fantomaster who some might refer to as one of the leading Black Hat SEOs

Lyndon Antcliffe World renowned Link Baiter

Tom Critchlow from Distilled who was superb at Think Visibility

And many others. You can find the SASCon speaker list here.

And if you want to know what the sessions are, you can find them here. Personally, I’ll be in “Running a Pan European Search Campaign”. The UK has a competitive advantage over most of Europe with respoect to online marketing and I full intend to exploit that.

To give you an idea of value, a comparative event in London would cost perhaps £545 in the case of Search Engine Strategies. Entry to SASCon will cost you £200. Why? Well SASCon is put toegther by a number of agencies collaborating (Yes, collaborating!) to improve our sector. We wont make any money from this. Any profit goes into supporting events over the coming year and preparing for a bigger SASCon in 2011.

So are you coming to SASCon? If you’re in marketing you’d be bloody stupid not to

And if you’d like to sponsor the event and get in front of senior digital marketers and decision makers, speak to Nicky Wake at Dont Panic Projects

Tom Critchlow – Distilled
Google Local Tips and Tricks

@tomcritchlow

Search for Hotel in London. Not a single organic listing above the fold.
Verified Listings
Single location, go into Google local and upload the vaious bits of data. Photos, opening hours etc. This is the best way if you have enough properties. Good control of data nad is trusted by Google.
When you are talking about many locations Nationwide: Bulk Upload whitelist using excel but these are slightly less trusted than manual upload

Worst approaches are not to claim your data. Data may be obtained by Google from Yelp or Trip Advisor

For multiple languages:
Think of hotels problems as they are relevant on multiple variants of Google (.uk, fr, .es etc):
Separate bulk uploads for each country
Use the country selection drop down in each country
Unique store code for each listing.
Solves 70% of the problems in Google.

Avoid:
Caps in description field (UNESCO or NATO) Google sees it as Spammy (Google local lags behind regular SEO)
Odd phone number formatting: try uploading small btaches of data so you can see what works for each country

Number of Reviews
Number of reviews is more important than quality! At the moment. Quality of website that holds the review is also important.
Qype and Yelp have relationships. Google is algorythmically pulling in reviews from 3rd parties. (microformats and rich data v useful)

Citations
Imagine a Venn Diagram. Big Circle which is links intersects with Mentions of brand which arent linked. Citations spans across all this this space?? Good number of citations is very useful. (lists, directories etc Big opportunity for PR)

Citation opportunities:
Competitor citations via Google

Distance to Centre
Google says it doesnt matter
It does matter
I guess this will change

Categories
Can add up to 5 categories
Use Keywords

Advanced Ranking Factors
User generated mentions (user generated maps?)
Sentiment
Citation Quality

Don’t spam the company name field. Google really cracking down on this Can be a negative ranking

So if you’ve seen a spike in referral traffic since the 1st of June, then the reason this is probably the reason.

The same type of thing happened after the launch of Google’s own browser Crome.  It wasn’t tracking people’s use of Crome at the start… which was a bit of an oversight as it’s their own browser.

Although there are many factors that influence where your website will be ranked in the SERP some factors are more important than others. After taking a look at Bing for a few days now and carrying out some analysis it has become apparent that Bing uses a very different algorithm to Google. A good example that shows this clearly is searching for SEO Manchester in both Google and Bing.

The two SERPs looks very different, only one of the top ten results are the same and many big SEO agencies in Manchester are missing from the Bing SERP. You’ll also notice that the Bing Local Listings are not very competitive at all with only one agency being listed.

So which factors should you focus on to rank well in Bing?

• A mixture of inbound links including a good number with good keyword rich anchor text (see this great article on Link Building Secrets by Patrick Atloft).
• Make sure you write keyword rich, unique meta data which is also human readable.

If you have any other ideas on which factors are most important to rank in Bing please leave a comment and let us know!

Here is an example of organic local listings for a Bing search in Manchester:

As you can see there is little competition for Bing Local Listings at the moment and the results are not great, one nightclub, a cafe and a strip club…

The new Google Webmaster Tools interface makes using the service easier and more intuitive. The site dashboard interface is particularly useful, displaying the top search queries and any crawl errors that Google has found.

Top Webmaster Tools Tips

• Check your Webmaster Tools account for Not Found URLs, these are URLs which are linked to either internally or from external sources which cannot be found by Google. Webmaster Tools provides you with a list of these and a list of the pages where these links are coming from. You should 301 redirect these not found pages to a relevant page on your site, or to the home page. This will improve your link equity and remove the error messages from Webmaster Tools.
• Check the HTML Suggestions area of Webmaster Tools (under diagnostics) for problems with meta descriptions, title tags and any non-indexable content.
• Add your sitemap(s) to Webmaster Tools to ensure that Google knows where all your pages are.

Now Google is experimenting with the way we carry out our searches with new views such as Related Searches, Wonder Wheel and Timeline. These three new views allow users to refine their search queries providing more detailed suggestions, alternative keywords and the timeline allows users to see results over a set period of time.

Related Searches

Related Searches provides suggestions for related keyphrases to the search term you have entered. As you can see from the results below this could prove dangerous as it can suggest competitors.

Wonder Wheel

Wonder wheel provides a new way to navigate search results, refining your search as you go along. Selecting a related result from the spider diagram on the left-hand side of the SERP automatically updates search results on the right-hand of the SERP.

Timeline

Timeline allows you to search for results between specific dates, this is particularly useful if you are researching for an article or just want to see how long people have been speaking about a certain brand/topic.

So how do these changes affect SEO? Well, it’s not the first time Google has made changes to the SERP and it certainly won’t be the last. Related searches provide an opportunity for internet marketers to optimise for new terms that may not be as competitive for example a search for “garden” shed results in a number of related search suggestions which could also be optimised for. They may have been low-volume in the past but now they could receive high levels of targeted traffic.

It is also interesting to see that Google has placed the related searches above paid listings.

The Wonder Wheel view again provides search suggestions and will give users the opportunity to make their search more refined, this may help with conversion rates.

Timeline view is probably the least important in terms of Internet Marketing as it seems to be aimed at people researching topics.

Advanced segmentation

You can do this in Google Analytics if you set up advanced segments – listing non paid traffic from each keyword you have decided to target (a new segment for each keyword).

Measure the performance of keywords

However, you may have some additional improvements in rankings and search traffic from people typing variations of your targeted phrases. And to judge the success of this, you have two useful reports to help you out.

Keyword report

Firstly, you can use the keyword report, select the time frame you want to test and compare it to the past ticking the box under the calendar.

Then using the comparison view to see your improvements in traffic and deteriorations.

You will be presented with something along the lines of this report, with your improvements on the previous period marked in green, and deteriorations in red:

Keywords with higher traffic than normal

Alternatively, you can use Greasemonkey to enhance your reports, with this is a fab trick that Sal Uryasev outlines on the Juice Analytics blog.

Once you have set this up, you can easily see how your traffic for each keyword from the last 30 days compares to the previous 30 days (or whatever period of time is most useful to you).  Your report shows something like this:

Once it is set up it’s quick and easy to see the results of all your hard work

Times are hard at the moment for many sectors, however there are still many opportunities to do good business. Some businesses are drawing right back on their marketing spend. In my opinion this is a serious mistake. You do not sell more by telling fewer people about what you do and what you sell. Being judicious with your marketing spend makes complete sense. You should demand that every penny be accountable and deliver a return on investment. There is no more accountable form of marketing than online. A well managed website should enable you to understand who is coming to your website; how they are finding it; what they are doing there and most importantly, how much it costs you to get them to do what you want them to do. This might be to purchase a product or fill in an enquiry form or even make a phone call. As a starter, we have put together 10 simple pointers to ensure your website is managed well and will start delivering an improved ROI despite the credit crunch.

If you are intending to get a new website or your first website, research it, plan it and write it down. Deliver your chosen website developers with a written brief and work with them to develop something truly appropriate and suitable to you. You’d be surprised how often we meet business who have spent thousands based on a verbal brief and not got quite what they expected. Writing a website brief

Ensure that your website is W3C compliant. The W3C define standards for the coding behind websites. If a website is standards compliant, it means that search engines stand a very good chance of finding and understanding all of the valuable content on your website. There are tools online you can use to test your standards compliance
HTML Validator
CSS Validator
Ensure that your website is accessible to people who are blind, partially sighted or disabled in any way. You have a responsibility to make sure your website is reasonably accessible to all parties. You risk prosecution otherwise. Happily, an accessible website is one that usually works well in search engines

Make sure that you have some form of analytics properly installed on your website. Measurement is essential. Google Analytics is free to use and is sufficient for the vast majority of businesses

Make someone senior responsible for the website. All too often the website isn’t an “owned asset”. And make sure that this person has time to work with the website and understands that their work is valuable, perhaps critical.
Understand the keywords and phrases that people use to find products and services like yours. There are many more relevant terms than you think. You can research search terms people are actually using

Make sure each and every page on your website is optimized for perhaps keywords or phrases that are relevant to that page. This is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Wherever you can, ask relevant businesses to link from their website to your website. Suppliers and customers are ideal as they are likely to be thematically relevant to what you do. Don’t get links from or to anyone who you would not be comfortable being associated with in real life. Search Engines like links from other websites. They are like votes of popularity.
Add content to your website regularly. People like it. It gives them a reason to keep visiting your website without getting bored. Search Engines think in a similar way. One way to achieve this is to add a blog to your site. This is a very simple tool that just about anyone can use to publish content to the internet.
Blogspot
Wordpress
Don’t be bamboozled by sharp sales people who offer you 5 page 1 Google rankings, guaranteed. There are no guarantees in search. Search Engines can change how they work at any time. Rankings are merely a tool. It is no use ranking well for a search term if no one uses that search term and you do not generate any business from it. It is conversion into business that generates an ROI.

Finally, if you’re serious about wanting to make sure your website is working for you, PushON will happily provide you with a free website MOT that will give you a simple overview of how well your website is working for you

If there’s anything else you think should be added, then please comment below.

The new toolbar is not only extremely quick but also incorporates everything in a nice and easy to use format. I personally, to this point have been using SEOpen and in the office we use Search Status but in the coming months we will no doubt switch to this new and much more advanced tool. If you haven’t seen the tool bar yet we definately recommend that you take a look. You can find out more and download the tool from the link displayed below.

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/