But is it NoNoFo ?

As time progresses and technology adds to the way we live our lives, new words and phrases emerge. Some stay for a while, some become a part of everyday conversation, and some turn out to be no more than a passing fad.

Often, the creation and subsequent adoption of new words is driven by a lack of any word to describe an intangible concept.

Within our industry, Search Marketers have been forced to find new ways to understand and explain many of the concepts we deal with, that didn’t exist 5 or 10 years ago. Some were not even a concern to us the week before last.

When Google foisted the concept of nofollow-ed links upon us, the name instantly became an everyday part of the Search Marketers vocabulary. Of course, what we are generally interested in are the ‘links which do not have nofollow applied to them’ - a phrase said almost often enough that a term was bound to emerge sooner or later.

And indeed it did, in a Distilled Skype conversation sometime in July 2008. When we started talking about links with nofollow on as nofo links, then the obvious next step was to refer to their link-juice passing cousins as nonofo links

New Media, New Language

There are other phrases that have crept into our language because of technology and the internet that wouldn’t make sense a decade ago:

• “I get 100 free minutes a month.” - Is that all? How busy are you?
• “I have a lot of friends in the blogosphere” - We have Bill Quick to thank for that one.
• “lol” - You’ve not truly embarrassed yourself until you’ve accidental said this as an aside in a real-life conversation
• “Rob keeps sending me spam” - maybe he thinks you look underfed?

So, today’s topic for discussion: Do you have any favourite terms that fell out of favour or don’t get used anymore? (and don’t you dare say nonofo )

NoNoFo Squirl photo by richardlowkes.

This is just a short post to say that anyone who thinks about international SEO should read this post from the clearly very clever Daphne Dembo at Google. Wow. Even though I have spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges of international, there were still some things in there that blew my mind with their complexity.

I’m glad I don’t run a search engine!

On a separate note, I’m going to hijack my own post to say that if you are in London, you should really head along to the Online Information show next week because you can see:

• Me talking about monitoring and measuring social media at 13.15 on Tuesday
• Shortly afterwards, Judith on the dark side of social media (she says she’ll have chocolate)
• The next morning, Ciaran on social media marketing

Even better, I understand the seminars are free (though I think you need to buy a ticket in advance - £15 on the door). Register now

We have interviewed Dr Pete from Strategic Website Usability consultants usereffect before. We originally got to know Pete via SEOmoz and had the pleasure of finally meeting him in person in Seattle over the summer.

He has been hard at work recently putting together usereffect’s first usability ebook entitled “Converting the Believers” which is now for sale for the spectacular price of $19.99 over on his website. Pete very kindly sent us a copy to check out and I can highly recommend it as a great starting point if you are just getting into the website usability and conversion rate testing. It gives a great introduction to website analytics, with some of the clearest explanations of hits, views, visitors and unique visitors I have ever seen along with some great tips for testing and usability (and the combination of those things).

As Pete said when announcing the ebook:

In the U.S. alone, companies spent over $21 Billion last year driving visitors to their websites… For all of the money spent leading believers to the virtual door, though, only a fraction of those companies spent the time and money necessary to convert those believers into buyers.

I hope anyone new to the field of usability and testing will go and buy Pete’s book (and if you want to go further, I can highly recommend his strategic usability consultancy - you can see what he said about the Distilled website…).

For all you die-hard readers and Distilled fans out there (I know you’re out there) you’ll probably remember when Will made it into the Courvoisier Future 500 in 2007. Well I just received an email saying that I’ve made it into the 2008 version. Woop!

I’m really excited to be included - while technically the award is a personal one rather than for Distilled (hence why we’re allowed to be included 2 years running) it’s good PR for the company which is good news. As Will mentioned last year after the initial surprise of being included the next thought is “have I made it into the top 100?” and I think the answer is no which is a shame, it’s always nice to beat Will at things, not that it happens that often (unless we’re playing squash. Or poker.)

The online implementation leaves a little to be desired - am I supposed to link to this website or this website? Maybe it’s a cunning plan to link to both?! Anyway - look out for me in the Observer on 30th Nov

For any other winners out there I’ll be attending the social event on the 4th Dec if you want to meet up let me know!

PS - do you think they’ll be upset when they discover I don’t drink courvoisier?!

How can yesterday morning feel so long ago?! Day Two at SMX London was a lot more rewarding than Day One, despite a muggy head from London SEO. This was my first conference but I’m pretty sure this is what usually happens? The highlights for me were the Q&A in Blow Your Mind Linkbuilding, Massimo Burgio’s evangelism for TubeMogul and getting to watch Ciaran’s second Do The Test video all the way to the end.

Blow Your Mind Linkbuilding

A great session with some very interesting tips and a healthy debate about the ins and outs of paid links. Lyndon Antcliff kicked off with a recap of his 13 year old credit card thief story and then spoke about the need for psychological hooks when producing linkbait. These should ideally appeal to our desires and prejudices and make us almost unable not to link. Sound stuff.

Tom. No wait, Will. No, it was Tom… was up next with a few jewels that I saw a lot of folk scribbling down:

• a text-based, objective link from a charity to acknowledge a donation is fine (but do consult your own tax lawyer);
• search for expired pages using creative terms like ‘page no longer exists’ or ‘content no longer updated’ to find strong pages with lots of links that need your help on where to redirect;
• manual linkbuilding is as unpleasant as sucking lemons, but it does need to be done;
• browse niche forums for untapped linkbait ideas and content. (Tom wrote a post on User Generated Linkbait a while back).

Wiep Knol from Tribal was up next and spoke about linkbuilding opportunities in a time of recession (the slides are now up on his site). I particularly liked this tip: many bloggers will be cutting back on their posts because they need to do some real work, therefore presenting lots of opportunities for guest bloggers. Anyone looking?

Jay of LinkFishMedia was next on the podium with an interesting and compact presentation on some of the shadier linkbuilding techniques. The first half of the talk contained these tips:

• start a surrogate company with a believable website but no telephone number, privatise the whois, get some attractive pictures on the profile page of the person requesting the links, target the opposite sex and start shopping around!
• always use the phone if you can, lowball on the price you’re willing to pay and don’t be afraid to walk away. Also, don’t forget to ask for introductions and incentivise this if necessary;
• offer to sponsor a university club or night out- go straight to the impoverished student;
• determine market fluctuations in search volume and build any dodgy links you may be acquiring in times of high traffic;
• get four links for the price of one by requesting a seasonal change of anchor text.

The second half of the talk had the very clear disclaimer ‘Act on this advice at your own risk’:

• advise those that link to your competitors that, if appropriate, what they’re doing is against Google guidelines and could have negative repercussions;
• poach competitor links when they’re coming up for renewal (use Internet Archive to find links that are coming to 12 months old);
• offer to ‘fix’ any broken links, but help yourself along the way;
• use Google Insights to find the best place for your business to rank in blended search (competition vs. volume) and then go about setting up a fake local business (which can be as simple as getting a local Skype number and a buying a local mailing address).

The Q&A focused (predictably?) on whether paid links should even be discussed.

My Secret Weapon

An interesting idea and generally well approached by all of the panel, who tried to focus on what you could actually do with the data gained through the use of these tools. There were some pretty competitive comparisons going on between Will and Steve Johnston’s Secret Weapon.

Gary Beal of StickyEyes.com touted MarketDefender and had a healthy list of other tools his team uses (which he invited one and all to email him for- I certainly will).

Will Critchlow of Distilled talked about SEOmoz’s Linkscape. He was there in place of Rand Fishkin who was busy with an update of Linkscape’s data back in Seattle.

Steve Johnston revealed that Search:Johnston’s secret weapon is Majestic SEO (it’s not pretty but is apparently worth the cost!) and spoke inspirationally about 2009 being the year that will “democratize link reputation”.

Massimo Burgio (who made a heroic, last-minute entrance despite hold-ups in Italy) talked about the effectiveness of TubeMogul for launching and monitoring video content. Although, with a wave of his luscious locks, he revealed his real secret weapon is actually Frizz-Ease.

Search 3.0: Video Search and Blended Search

A great session from some of the top players in the field. I reckon we got as close as currently possible to an answer for the question ‘how do I make my video appear without fail in blended search results?’

Tom Wilde of Everyzing spoke first and covered video best practice. He also included a great graph from Hitwise that charted separately the amount of traffic to video sites coming from social media sites and search engines. The lines dovetailed, with traffic from social media dropping and traffic from search engines increasing. Tom drew the sensible conclusion that this has occurred through a combination of blended search results and users that have learned to search more effectively.

Brian Marin from Performics was up next and spoke about GAUDI and the various implications of speech to text indexing. He then focused on image search (with over 1 trillion images online, it needs some attention) and covered topics like Google’s leaps forward in facial and scene recognition technologies.

Ciaran Norris of Altogether Digital spoke last and had a few nuggets of video wisdom to share:

• aim for a category page on YouTube- they tend to perform better
• YouTube only counts a view if the video is viewed all the way to the end so keep it interesting!
• have a look at hi5.com, metacafe.com and break.com
• post follow up videos as a response- they’ll then be featured at the end of the original video.
• watch Epic 2015 if you want to hear some speculations about the future of social media online.

Local Search and Blended Results

Another useful session but, perhaps because of the quality of other presentations I attended on Day 2, felt a bit basic. I concentrate better when doodling (ahem) and thought you might enjoy my ‘maps of the world’ illustration that accompanied this session. Heini of Tribal, Susan of Hallam Communications and Jon of MediaVest covered local search best practice and reiterated the importance of:

• local links
• independent reviews on 3rd party sites
• local directory listings

---

Thanks to everyone who contributed- I learned a lot and it was really great to put some faces to the names. So, to end in true conference presentation style, that’s it.

This is my take on Day 1 of SMX London 2008.

Obviously, I couldn’t get to every session or speak to every delegate, so please feel free to add your experiences in the comments.

Likewise, if you’ve managed to to snap photos of anyone wearing this year’s Distilled t-shirts, please do drop a link to them. We might even be able to rustle up a prize for the best photo (though I can’t guarantee that it won’t just be another t-shirt.)

Keynote

The day began on a somewhat odd note, with a Keynote session by speakers from Microsoft adCenter and Webmaster Center, with a strong focus on the tools and services they offer to SEMs running organic and paid search campaigns.

ZhaoHui Tang walked us in detail through Microsoft’s keyword research plugin for Excel, which pulls a variety of keyword data from Live Search. Though I’ve had installed on my desktop for months, his presentation may persuade me to try it out - particularly as he suggested that UK and French keyword data will be rolled out over the coming months.

One surprising feature was it’s ability to generate text ads, given only the URL of a page. I’ll be interested to see how they implement it, but I can’t imagine that our PPC Expert, Richard, will be quaking in his boots just yet.

With a more organic focus, Nathan Buggia walked us through some of the features of Live Search Webmaster Center. Many of the features would look familiar to users of Google’s offering, but Nathan did demonstrate some differentiating features - including the ability to see in reasonable detail the pages on your site that are inaccessible to spiders, and any issues causing this.

Surprisingly, his demonstration involved logging in and showing us the account details for MSN - allowing us to see that the around 40,000 pages on MSN.com return a 404 error! Apparently this is out of a total of about 1 billion pages across the domain - this figure seems particularly big when compared to the factoid that the Live Search index now includes about 20 billion pages - I’ll let you do the maths.

Nathan implied that a broad target for his side of the search business was “to make sure that our search engine is the best partner to content publishers” and to achieve this, suggested that “being transparent and working with third parties is part of Microsoft’s DNA.“

Keyword Research Tools and Techniques

KeyRelevance President Christine Churchill (described by her fellow panellist as ‘the first lady of keyword research’) spoke about he process and best practice for keyword research. She put particular emphasis on ensuring that you are “speaking the customer’s language” - with the sensible recommendation of involving sales people, customer service staff or call-centre employees to assist in the process, as they have direct experience of talking to the consumers, in their language.

I’d highly recommend seeing Christine speak if you have the opportunity, but for companies that have recently employed new SEM team members, it would be particularly worth giving them the chance to hear the First Lady.

Completing this session, Tor Crockatt seemed excited to be able to discuss her ‘keyword algebra’ process for identifying positive and negative keywords for a PPC campaign, and explained the pitfalls of not using exact matching on brand names or media titles.

Landing Page Testing and Optimisation

This session found a good balance between paid and organic search landing pages, with some valuable insights from panellists. Graham Cooke (Google) suggested that many of the pages a user encounters during their journey through your site may be landing pages, and showed the improvements that had been made to the AdWords sign-up page, after they employed Google’s multivariate testing tool, Website Optimizer.

Anders Hjorth was unapologetic in his belief that designing a landing-page design can be as difficult as designing an entire website. He also discussed the differences in data collected and impression made on a user who has arrived on a page from a search engine, rather than navigated to it through the site hierarchy.

Jon Myers explained how, thanks to personalized search and blended search results, users are increasingly likely to interact with your brand on websites other than your own. By way of an example he offered Dove, who have received many more views of a recent video via YouTube than their own site.

To finish the presentations, Mark Simpson discussed successes that some of his Maxymiser clients had seen when testing their landing pages. One example was Jobsite.co.uk, who managed to increase sign-up rate by 50%, by using two pages for the sign up process (rather than one) which made the process seem simpler and less daunting to first-time visitors. Mark reminded us that for a PPC campaign you can create as many landing pages as necessary (even one for each keyphrase) and then use robots.txt to disallow bots from crawling these pages and causing duplicate content issues.

For a company just staring with landing page optimisation, the final tip from the Q&A provided a useful jumping-off-point: use analytics to identify the pages with highest bounce rate on your site, and begin by working on these.

Link Building Fundamentals

Four panellists managed to cover broadly the same fundamentals, all without adding much to the conversation. Meanwhile, the moderator managed to put questions to the panel that suggested he’d been having a post lunch doze during the presentations.

Search Engine Friendly Web Design

Once you’ve learnt to ignore the tiresome American bombast and outrageous claims, Shari Thurow is a trustworthy web designer who evangelizes about solid information architecture and design to suit humans - with search engine spiders as an important but firmly secondary concern.

She suggested that the old ‘the target content must be found in three clicks’ structure has been superseded, and that users will click anywhere up to 8 - 20 times to arrive at the content they want, as long as the keywords they’re interested in are ‘validated’ back to the user at each stage - part of a conceptual tool, as I understood it, called ’scent of information’

London SEO

To recharge before another full day of Search Marketing, we retired to a London SEO pub session hosted by Rob Kerry, and kindly sponsored by CAP Euro, a Casio Affiliates Program.

I had the chance to meet lots of people that I’ve only ‘met’ before on Twitter, alongside some really interesting SEMs and other people working around the industry. Though I can’t list them all here, I’ll be following them from my robousbey Twitter profile - feel free to stop by and say hello.

So: your comments, corrections and additions are appreciated, and I’d love to see if any Distilled t-shirts have been seen ‘in the wild’.