Last week I attended BlueGlass LA, a new online marketing conference put on by BlueGlass, the newly formed agency based out of Tampa, FL.
Wait, you’re blogging about and linking to your competitors?
Yes. We love competition. It drives us to be better all the time, and there are more than enough companies that need good search marketing help. In fact, heard about Portent Interactive? They are another great agency in Seattle. See how that works? Chris, Brent, Loren, and Dave are awesome guys. We all talk regularly and consider them good friends.
Did we really need ANOTHER conference?
I know, like a hole in the head right? Just wait. This conference, like SearchExchange and the SEOmoz PRO Seminar, is focused on a geographic region and smaller. These new breed of conferences are focused on business owners and entrepreneurs and their needs.
BlueGlass covered everything from VC funding to SEO site reviews. It was refreshing to hear new ideas as well as new material. Here are my 3 takeaways.
1. Title Tags and Your Audience (Vanessa Fox)- This is one of the oldest tips in search engine marketing, but understanding your audience is crucial. Using terms for your title tag that they are using to search for your product is best. Your internal verbiage is of no matter to end users. Use your title tag for three things: a) optimization (letting the robots know what the page is about) b) relevance (identify the page topic to draw the right traffic) and c) marketing (think of it as your headline, get their ATTENTION!)
2. When community building, leave your shoes at the door (JR Johnson)
Courtsey of New Green Housewife
JR made an excellent point in that your community is what you make of it. If you don’t want spammers, be vigilant about logins and linking. If you don’t want trolls (impossible really) then make it known that it won’t be tolerated. People will do what they are shown. JR used the shoes at the door example, I use the public transportation example. When getting on a new bus, train, etc., people will follow those in front of them setting the example. Set the best example and most will follow that example.
3. The Data in Webmaster Tools is not 100% Accurate (Marshall Simmonds) – As we have mentioned before, the more we explore the data within Google Webmaster Tools, the more we see that it is good to monitor, but not to take seriously. Marshall gave the best example for client by discussing how they saw a marked increase in 404 error reports in Webmaster Tools that were totally false. We have seen clients with this exact issue and it is nice to say that the New York Times has seen the same thing. Online marketing is metrics based, but the metrics out of WMT are just flaky sometimes.
Other Coverage
It was a great conference and a great time. But going over every session just isn’t possible. Instead here are some links, 2 being different live blogging threads. If you missed it, these two streams caught just about all of it. You can’t duplicate the fun times and contacts from a conference, but because of wonderful live bloggers, we do get to read the notes from just about every conference.
My name’s Ed Fry, I’m 16 years old and I’ve had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Distilled office in Cannon Street, working with the SEO team. Besides learning more advanced search optimization skills, just commuting across London at rush hour was a mission in itself – I ended up hopelessly off-course on my first day – oh, and mastering underground etiquette was another new and alien experience.
Anyways, this post is a lil’ documentary of what I did and learnt.
Day 1 in the Distilled Office: “Lost in London”
Late, sweaty and slightly lost, I arrive at 72 Cannon Street and press the buzzer. A click announces the door hath been opened and I made my way up the stairs. Lynsey, who handles most of the HR at Distilled, meets me in the stairwell and welcomes me with a smile.
Walking through the doorway, the SEO team are sat on the sofa’s brainstorming this weeks blog posts. Distilled spend some of their time creating content for the Distilled blog but also for SEOmoz blog and recently Search Engine Land. Tom Critchlow, Head of Search is first to jump up and introduces himself, with the rest quick to follow.
The Distilled folks have an awesome office. As you walk in, there’s the sofas with an array of web-related magazines. To the right lies the boardroom and to the left, the main office space. Going round the corner, you pass the web dev team and enter the kitchen – when plentiful supplies of tea, coffee and fruit can be found.
A mockup of the Distilled Office
Next, I get shown to my desk (yeah, my own desk!). Basking in the morning sunlight lay a souped-up dual-screen computer – my home away from home for the next two weeks. Meanwhile, a glass of water and stationary appears on my desk. So far, not too bad right?
Later that first morning, after setting up dozens of Google apps Distilled use, we got a two-hour ‘SEO training for n00bs’ from Tom. I say ‘we’ – Distilled had taken on two trainees, Mark and David who were learning SEO from scratch, and they were starting on the same date as me. So we bunkered down in the boardroom to learn how to do SEO, and how Distilled do SEO – yes there is a difference.
The afternoon brought about a talk in the boardroom with Duncan, where he sort of asked me what sort of stuff I had done before and what I wanted to get out of the two weeks. It was then also I asked about SEOmoz PRO membership. Moments later, I was staring at the SEOmoz PRO dashboard on my own account. If you’ve read about SEOmoz PRO before, you can see why I was excited about this.
So I sat around and played with the Moz toys (I love the juicy link finder)… until Tom approached me. He was planning an SEOmoz blog post on conversion rate optimization for newspaper paywalls and he needed to enlist some help in acquiring data to make an interesting and awesome post. Paywalls are a hot topic right now, especially since The Times Online has only just started charging for content here in the UK.
Finally, before I left on that last day, Lynsey comes up to and very politely suggested I take Exit 8 at Bank in future. Thank you! (more…)
I was back from my annual leave just in time to attend the 3rd Brighton SEO event which was held on 23rd July 2010. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Brighton SEO is a half day mini conference and is organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility. Not only does it feature a line up of quality speakers, it is actually a free conference and is followed by drinks where, in my experience, most of the value of an SEO conference is found!
Our very own Sam Crocker spoke at the event and posted his presentation on Sunday. I wanted to add in my own thoughts and review of the highlights of the conference. I haven’t included every presentation but Peter Handley posted a full review of all the speakers over on Holistic Search.
Kevin Gibbons – 20 Wordpress Plugins to Supercharge your Blog
The afternoon kicked off with Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise who talked about the top 20 Wordpress Plugins for your blog. I feel I am quite experienced with Wordpress but Kevin came up with a few plugins that I hadn’t tried which looked very useful. Here are my picks from his presentation.
Backtype – Pulls in related conversations from other social media sources and displays them next to your blog post
Flickr RSS - Allows you to display a feed of photos from your Flickr account really easily on your blog
RSS Footer – Adds a link to the bottom of articles in your RSS feed, Kevin pointed out this is useful for when your feeds are scraped
SEO Smart Links – You can automatically handle internal linking using keywords with this plugin, however be careful not to go over the top!
A/B Theme Testing – Allows you to split test two different themes and see which one performs better, personally I’d code the same theme twice and make minor changes as opposed to using two totally different themes.
Takeaway Tip – Start using the plugins above!
Cedric Wooding – Managing a Facebook Advertising Campaign
Although I don’t run PPC campaigns for our clients, I found this Cedric’s talk very interesting and it got me thinking about using the Facebook system for other purposes – more on that another time! I was pretty amazed at the level of detail you can go into when targeting your customers, it is even possible to narrow down your adverts to show to a single user – very useful for PPC related pranks
Another interesting point to come out of Cedric’s presentation was that the most popular time for advertising on Facebook was Sunday evenings and Monday mornings. This makes total sense when you think about it but I hadn’t really thought about it before.
A good tip was to target connections between various products and likes to keep costs down. For example someone who is interested in the Top Gear fan page, may also be interested in an advert for a company selling experience days in a Ferrari.
Cedric told us that the more you spend, the more chance you have of getting Facebook’s attention and getting an account manager which can be very useful.
Takeaway Tip – Target connections between products and people for lower costs
Annabel Hodges – When is an SEO Campaign not an SEO Campaign
I really enjoyed Annabel’s talk mainly because she shared a lot of the feelings I have when it comes to SEO and online marketing in general. Namely that sometimes, SEO isn’t always the most cost effective solution for a client, as well as her belief that all online marketing campaigns need to be integrated for them to be successful.
I’ve seen many examples of clients getting good results by concentrating on an area which isn’t strictly SEO. A few examples being conversion rate optimisation and social media marketing. Despite SEO being a solid long term strategy, sometimes there are other short term strategies which should be executed first.
Annabel gave some case studies for Channel 4 and New Look. The New Look one really impressed me as it was executed totally on YouTube as opposed to the main New Look site – something you wouldn’t see many SEOs recommend! By doing this, they were able to compete on keywords which they wouldn’t normally be able to target. Their videos started showing up in Universal results mixed in with powerful ecommerce sites, therefore exposing their brand to different markets whilst doing no traditional SEO to their site.
Takeaway Tip – Ensure your online marketing plan fits with your clients business targets
Mark Cook – Making Accurate Traffic Predictions
One thing came out loud and clear from Mark’s presentation – he doesn’t like the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator
Instead of using this, Mark recommended using Google Insights for Search which provides (on the whole) more accurate data. Mark went on to show some very impressive ideas of how he can predict traffic using a system his team have developed. I’m not going to go into loads of detail but suffice to say, it was a very impressive system. Mark basically looks at the various different types of search result pages we see, then attempts to calculate the CTR of various results on this pages. For example a number 1 position on a regular organic listing will probably get a high CTR than a number 1 listing with Google Maps blended in above.
This type of data is invaluable in my opinion, being able to predict levels of traffic can save you a lot of time and money and makes sure you are chasing the right keywords right from the start.
Takeaway Tip – Use Google Insights for Search for more reliable traffic data
Nikki Rae – Custom Variables and Google Analytics
I saw Nikki present at the last Brighton SEO and even became a participant at one point! This time she was talking about custom variables and how they can be used to provide you with even more useful insights about your visitors. I’ve worked with custom variables a fair bit but its obvious that the possibilities are just about endless.
Nikki again got the crowd involved with a demo of how a user is tagged with various data as they move through a site and how this data is then recorded into Google Analytics.
Takeaway Tip – If you aren’t already, start using custom variables!
Simon Dance – Link Building and CRM
Simon talked about the importance of relationships in the link building process and I could relate to a lot of what he was saying. I think that many people forget about the importance of building good business relationships when doing link building. Simon talked about a number of tools he uses to manage these relationships and link building in general.
The key point that Simon made was that if you can build these relationships, then you can build links which are very hard for competitors to copy due to your existing relationship.
One tools which Simon mentioned which I’ve used in the past is Buzzstream which I’d recommend. It is not a link building tool but it is excellent for organising the outreach you do as part of a link building campaign. It can keep track of all the people you contact and help you form those relationships which get you the valuable links.
Takeaway Tip – Build long term relationships to get the links that your competitors can’t
Nichola Stott – Challenging the Conventional Wisdom of Anchor Text
I found Nichola’s talk very interesting, in particular because it focused on a keyword that I’ve done work in the past for several clients – “outdoor clothing”. Therefore I found some of the stats and conclusions very interesting!
The main point to come out of her talk was that one particular website was ranking lower than others despite a very high number of anchor text links pointing to it for the term “outdoor clothing”. The sites above it were much more brand focused in their link building which appeared to be making the difference. Perhaps this shows the shift towards branded links driving search results for keywords rather than pure anchor text links being the main factor.
What I loved most about this presentation was the fact that the time was taken to actually test a theory as opposed to just assuming what may happen. So a big thumbs up to Nichola for that.
Takeaway Tip – Don’t undervalue the power of brand driven anchor text links
Rishi Lakhani – Actually Making SEO Happen
I think this was my favourite presentation of the day. I’ll admit I didn’t learn very much that I wasn’t aware of before, but having Rishi present in his unique style was very entertaining and made me think a little more about the things that are truly important to an SEO.
I just need to give a quick mention to Rishi’s opening statement which included the following -
“I don’t like giving presentations and I don’t think I’m very good at SEO”
I really wish I’d used that at the start of my first ever SEO presentation
Rishi has worked with some very big brands in the UK and knows the various problems this can present. Getting SEO done when working with big brands can be very difficult given the masses of people to consult, contracts to agree and changes to sign off. Just being a good SEO isn’t enough, you need to be able to communicate with your client in such a way that they understand you and don’t get bogged down stuff which can stop the job from being done.
Something that really hit home with me was the point that the owners of a company only care about the bottom line – revenue. They don’t care how many links you secured this month or what their META titles are – they don’t need to know this. All they need to know is how much money they are making – if they don’t know this then they won’t pay you.
Takeaway Tip – Talk to your client in a language they understand – not technical jargon
Sam talked about how to run competitions and benefit from the links that can be generated as a result. He gave some real examples of how we have run these for Distilled clients as well as the mistakes we’ve made along the way!
One of the key points that Sam wanted to get across was to be creative. He gave one example of a client we worked on that would usually be seen as fairly boring and not very link worthy. However we created a competition that appealed to a number of people and built some good quality links in the process.
Takeaway Tip – There are always ways to be creative even if you think your industry is boring
Overall it was an excellent conference and the feedback was great. Big well done to Kelvin for organising it and thanks to all the speakers and attendees for making it a great event.
First of all, I just wanted to give a big thank you to Kelvin Newman for putting together a really enjoyable #BrightonSEO conference on Friday. The event was well attended, well covered and offered a lot of new offerings for the folks in attendance… and best of all, it was free!
There were a number of excellent presentations on analytics, SEO, and general marketing. Please find below my contributions: effectively it offers a step-by-step guide to running competitions for links. It also offers a number of case studies, and things we have learned the hard way at Distilled.
Please enjoy and don’t hesitate to share your own experiences in the comments below!
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find out if people liked your video, or hated it so much that they left right after the first scene? YouTube can answer that.
Welcome to Insight. Insight is a free innovative tool available in your YouTube account that essentially transforms your videos into focus groups, giving you detailed statistics for each of your uploads. Within Insight, you can find an innovative tool called Hotspots that essentially gauges your audience level:
The Hotspots feature, or the “film critic” as I like to call it, works like this:
Your video plays next to a graph which shows you the high and low points of the video
YouTube compares your video’s abandonment rate to other videos of similar length
The graph is represented by a green (low point) or red (high point) line
Quite simply, if the graph goes up (hot), less people are leaving your video and possibly even rewinding to watch a scene again
When the graph goes down (cold), viewers are either fast forwarding to a good part or leaving the video entirely
Trust me, Hotspots is your most ruthless critic. It’s not for the faint-hearted. Compare it to asking your good friend what they thought of your video.
Question 1: How did you like my video?
Friend: Um, ya it was ok, I guess…
Now if Hotspots could speak, here’s what it might say:
HOTSPOTS: Even Jeremy Kyle’s shows are better. I started thinking about cheeseburgers 3 seconds in.
Okay? Squirming in your seat yet? It gets better…
Question 2: Was there any part of the video you liked?
BOB: Um ya, there was a cool part about a guy laughing or something like that.
HOTSPOTS: The only scene worth rewinding happened at 3:03 (guy with a hyena laugh) until 3:10, then I started thinking about cheeseburgers again.
Although YouTube won’t exactly give you these kinds of answers, it will definitely help determine your video’s effectiveness. Use the “film critic’s” advice to find out if the scene with the Ferrari was the big hitter, or maybe if your video was just too long. Ensure you make the most from that graph, it can reveal more truths than just comments and ratings!
Need some inspiration? Have a look at a video with over 200 million views:
So how do you make a great video? Here are some tips:
Plan it out: Is it going to be funny, serious etc..
Invest in a good camera and microphone, it can make the difference
Waiting on fade screens for too long will cause your viewer to lose attention. If you must, try and add music, text etc..
Be original, no matter how hard finding that new idea may be.
Short and sweet. Most of the top videos are rarely over 5 minutes. Coincidence?
A great post by Chris Pirillo may guide you in the right direction in his compilations of a top 50 tips list to making YouTube videos.
Here are some other great videos on YouTube:
If you haven’t used this tool yet, I strongly urge you to get in touch with YouTube Insight accessible through the Insight dashboard in your YouTube account.
A client recently asked if there was a way to identify which pages in their site were not being indexed. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have very different systems and getting a definitive answer from any of them is next to impossible. Anyone that has done research on indexed pages in the past 10 years know that the three engines don’t agree on how many pages to index, much less which ones. So we decided to run some tests to see how to discern which pages were being indexed by any engine, without hand checking every URL.
The first idea was to use the exportable list of internal links from Google Webmaster Tools to identify pages that has been indexed. The logic being that if internal links were identified from the page, then it was most likely indexed. The accuracy of Google Webmaster Tools has been somewhat inconsistent, so we wanted to test the accuracy on some smaller sites first.
Click 'Your site on the web' -> 'Internal Links' -> 'Download this table' to find a list of pages
Our clients have any where from 100,000 to 10 million pages, making it hard to pull a list of all indexed pages using a “site:” search and that was integral to testing how many pages were “accurately indexed.” This is loosely said because the “site:” search can be flakey based on the datacenter, time of day, etc.
The Tiny Test Group
We used four sites with very few pages (<200) were used to perform this small test. This is in no way scientific, nor can the data be used for full analysis or correlation. This is rather just a quick look at how the use of the internal links report might help identify indexed pages. The sites used are a financially based consumer site, a personal blog, a health services site, and a medical surgeon’s site.
Please note that once we pulled the internal links information for the original client we came across the major caveat: Only 100,000 pages are shown in the downloaded report. So for sites with more than 100,000 indexed pages, this idea won’t ever work, no matter the accuracy.
The test started by downloading all internal links from Google Webmaster Tools into Excel and de-duplicating. Then we used the SEOBook.com SEO for Firefox plugin to pull a “site:” search for each domain, downloading all pages into CSV. The two lists were compared, and the results were dreadful. The only time that the two came close were when the site had less than 20 pages.
From this rest and the fact that we could not use this tactic for the client anyway, the idea of using listed internal links has been thrown out. And it was our best idea for the automation of such a list. But it did bring us to do more research as to the many ways a client or webmaster might look at the number of indexed pages. And with some clear oddities in the data, this test spurred a deeper look into the numbers we were pulling.
Identifying the Outliers
The main issue we wanted to explore was the fact that there were pages in the internal links list, but not the indexed list. We realized that the site reporting this has a select number of pages set to noindex. Therefore the links to these pages were identified but the page was not in the index. That led us to wonder if we pulled all the possible ways of looking at the list of indexed pages on a site, how they might differ and why. So using the same sites, we pulled numbers from all the engines from both a logged in and site colon search, and compared those numbers to the sitemap for the site and the number of visible pages.
Definitions
Known Pages – those pages that a webmaster would see as “pages” on their site. Typically product pages, informational, and others that are easily navigable from the navigation. Sitemap URLs – How many URLs are listed in the XML sitemap. (These sites only have one.) Noindex Pages - Pages on the site that have a noindex tag. Google Indexed – The number of pages for the site domain using a site colon search. Google Sitemap Indexed – The number of pages of the sitemap Google has indexed. Yahoo Indexed – The number of pages for the site domain using a site colon search. Yahoo My Sites – The number of pages the My Sites section states as indexed. Bing Indexed - The number of pages for the site domain using a site colon search. Bing WMC Indexed - The number of pages Bing’s Webmaster Center says it is has indexed.
What the ****?
The numbers don’t line up at all do they? They are all across the board for every site. The reasoning is fairly simple but can easily be missed by anyone looking for a way to locate a list of pages not in the index.
First remember that the “Known Pages” is a relative number. That was really just me looking at the number of pages that could be identified externally by looking at the blog or site. The number of noindex tagged pages is by hand as well. Those two and the sitemaps are full of human error. We have already noted that the site colon search isn’t always spot on, but the real kicker is in the data from the engines.
Google -The only way to get a “count” of indexed pages from Webmaster Tools is to have a sitemap and those can be flawed in many ways.
Bing – They are notoriously slow to crawl and index sites. So the newer and smaller site is not yet indexed.
Yahoo – There was only one major outlier here, but if you notice their numbers are so much higher than everyone else’s; that is common for Yahoo. Site Explorer is known for showing every link to a site under the sun, so if the file exists in any form, we could expect them to list it.
The Six Things to Remember
Beyond the fact that all of the engines are different, here are a few things we realized when pulling the numbers from all the engines. These are all easily fixable if you are serious about getting a clear list of indexed pages, but can be easily overlooked, causing confusion when the numbers are pulled.
Parameters For many sites, there are pages being indexed with dynamic parameters such as a session ID. If these are not ignored by the engines, there is a possibility that there are a number of pages in a site colon search and internal linking report that are in essence duplicates.
No index If you have set some pages in your site navigation to noindex, naturally they are not going to appear in a list of indexed pages. But those pages can be linking to other pages, and would therefore appear in the report of internally linked pages.
Outdated Sitemap If you are relying on a sitemap to tell you how many URLs are indexed, the sitemap needs to be constantly updated. If possible set it to be automatically generated server side. This will cut down on any confusion like on Site 2.
Other File Types (PDF, Flash, Word, PowerPoint) The engines index more than just web pages. Any document on your domain that is linked to anywhere on the Internet can be indexed if it is a supported file type and not restricted by robots.txt or an htaccess file. These include any flash files, presentations or marketing material you might have pushed at some point. Think press releases.
Pagination If you own a blog or a site with products that span a number of pages, pagination is most likely occurring. A category on a blog that the owner would think counts as just one page, could be two or three pages long. This can make the number of indexed pages larger than expected.
Subdomains Are you running a mobile site? Anything on your domain, including mobile site files, subdomains, and duplicate content from those subdomains could be throwing off your numbers of indexed files.
Just remember that in the end, pulling a number of indexed pages from anywhere without digging into the data is most likely going to be misleading. Just like if you pull rank numbers for a keyword and expect that to be your rank for everyone searching for that term. The internet is not a perfect place, it is not scientific by any means. Take every number with a grain of salt and do your homework. Things change all the time and the best way to combat that is to keep your analytical brain engaged at every moment.
As I write this, Sam is busy delivering meme training for the company. For those interested in memes, social media and viral videos there really are no words to describe how immensely, insanely amazing the old spice campaign has been. This video sums up the whole thing:
Silverfish Handcatch!
To make this post useful in some way – why not consider how you might actually engage with people next time you’re running a social media campaign – don’t treat it as broadcast, treat it as a two way conversation.
I recently went through the not inconsiderable pain of installing the Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit. It’s probably easier if you already run IIS servers. Since we are a LAMP shop, I’ve used Microsoft servers before but never installed them. I don’t quite know why this tool is a plugin to the server – it is essentially a crawler. So you don’t have to run it over sites on your own machine (or even sites hosted on MS servers). Whatever the ins and outs of that, it’s worth following this guy who is the original developer.
The web installer is a really nice touch, but it doesn’t play nicely with user permissions on Windows 7. I managed to make it work by logging in as root before using the web installer (which meant setting up a bunch of browser settings in my superuser account).
Even after doing that, I still need to run the application as administrator each time.
If you are used to the general terminology of the web and crawlers like Xenu then you’ll find it pretty easy to get started, but this is a great walkthrough of the basics.
My intention with this post is not to walk through the features (I’ll leave that as an exercise for the interested reader) but rather to point out some cool specific SEO tasks:
Digging into errors
One of the first places I check out is the status code summary.
The nice feature here is the ability to drill down by double clicking on statuses. I have found this to be one of the quickest ways of digging into structural issues across big sites. Although there would have been other ways of finding it, it quickly highlighted an issue with a recent client’s site where they had accidentally changed a large proportion of their internal links to go via 301 redirects. On large sites, it can be hard to find patterns in this kind of thing without a scalable tool.
Performance
I have recently become a big fan of webpagetest for creating management-friendly videos of sites loading side by side (see this corporate comparison for example). This is only indicative, however. It doesn’t help make widescale improvements to large sites. Your (client’s) developers are going to want to know patterns – the kinds of pages that are generally slow etc.
In the ‘performance’ tab, you can select to see slow pages by directory and sort by ‘count’ descending:
Click depth
Rather than bore you with more screenshots and detailed explanations of pivot tables, I thought I’d demonstrate with a quick screencast how to mash up the IIS crawl data to tell you how many pages you have at each ‘level’ of crawl (this post from Rand explains why you would care about this kind of thing). I don’t know of any other good ways of getting this data, so I hope this is of interest as a use for the IIS toolkit. Note that the video was recorded in the Distilled office rather than a recording studio so there is background hum, hopefully it serves its purpose:
In our effort to continue to make Distilled a great and productive place to work, we have decided to trial a summer hours scheme. The summer hours scheme is a form of flexible working time that is currently offered at a number of agencies and large corporations across the UK and the US. For example, Kellogg’s have run a similar scheme for more than 6 years and have seen a great success from it.
Distilled has decided to try out our first summer hours scheme for 8 weeks, from 9 July to 27 August.
The basic equation:
An extra 45 min of work Monday – Thursday =
½ day on Friday (afternoons off)
What this means to clients:
We’ll still be working the same numbers of hours each week, and we are still as dedicated as ever to meeting all deadlines and project objectives. The summer hours scheme is optional, is a privilege for our team and will not get in the way of our service or dedication to our clients.
The only real difference will be that our offices will be shut from 1pm on Fridays.
What this Means to Distilled:
We strongly believe in a work-life balance, and we feel that this will help us to keep up office morale, encourage strong time management and lead to an overall decrease in stress across the team. We are giving everyone the choice to opt in or out of the scheme, and we have made it very clear that this is just a trial to see how things work.
All in all, we are very excited about the possibilities that come with flexible working hours. We will carefully manage its effect on our utilisation of resources, and we expect some very positive returns.
We welcome all feedback from clients, and we would be more than happy to discuss this with you further should you have any questions or concerns.
There are a bunch of online apps and services that make running Distilled much much easier, and I wanted to share these with you. This is mostly written from my perspective at Distilled LLC (our new American office) – as I wanted to give some idea of how we function as a small, flexible company. I also didn’t feel it was fair to keep some of these tools to myself – as they might help you be more focused, productive or cost-efficient.
The ‘Must Haves’
These are the apps which literally keep our business running; everybody uses them, and they’re working well for us.
The ’shiny new toy’ of the webapp world; Dropbox provides an incredible service; at its most basic, you can sync a folder across multiple computers and backup the files on their servers. Their basic package is free, but you get more space on a premium account.
For Distilled, each staff member has an account, and we share our project files on it – allowing each person to have access to all necessary files from their desktop, without us having to run any kinds of classic shared drives or network storage devices.
My USB stick was getting too heavy anyway.
If you’re not on Dropbox already, it’s definitely worth giving it a try – even if only as a way to make sure your most important folders are backed up in the cloud. And if you do want to give it a go, use this link to:
When we first launched Distilled in America, it was anticipated that we would outgrow our office within the first year. (In fact, three months later, we’re already about to move, and the new office has had to have been extended before we even moved in.) I didn’t want to sign up to a long term telephone contract, or have the difficulty of porting numbers between buildings when we move.
Using Skype lets us have a Seattle phone number that calls our computers for about $6/month. (Adding phone numbers in other cities or countries costs about the same, and means that people can call you from abroad without it costing them overseas rates.) We can receive calls wherever we are logged in – so being at conferences, airports or in our UK office doesn’t mean I’m unavailable.
For $3/month per person, each staff member has unlimited calls to anywhere in the US and Canada – that price is only $14/month for unlimited worldwide calls.
This is how happy all the Distilled employees are, and we don't even have kittens in the office.
Of course, all this relies on you having an internet connection in your office (I’m assuming you do) and there can be a little bit of fiddling to get the audio levels right on each computer, but all together, I’d highly recommend it for any small business that needs a flexible phone system.
In contrast to Dropbox – a solid service that does just one thing well – Google Apps is a massive heavyweight that fulfills a huge number of roles. We primarily use it for email and calendars (all our Distilled email in the UK and US runs through the system) – and although you could just use it as an email POP server, the Gmail interface is my favorite user experience of any webmail service or desktop mail client. The calendar ‘just works’.
Also part of the bundle is Google Docs, most useful for its spreadsheet application which is fairly limited in terms of functions, but brilliant for collaborative data capture, editing, etc. For example: there are a bunch of internal files (blog post ideas and schedules, holiday calendars, link building resources, financial information) that we store there, and the user permissions allow us to restrict files to particular people or teams.
We also use the ‘Google Sites’ application; like a private ‘wiki’, it’s a collaborative site building tool, and we use it to power our private intranet. It also includes a local version of Google Wave – the less we say about that the better.
For businesses, Google Apps costs $50 per-user-per-year, which is a reasonable cost, even if just to save the hassle of managing mail servers.
The Blue Ribbon Apps
There are a variety of apps that we also use at Distilled, which aren’t as ‘mission critical’ but having tested out the alternatives, we’ve settled on these.
Distilled has always taken a fairly relaxed view to internal management practices such as time tracking. We believe that the real value is to help you identify which projects and task-types are efficient or profitable, and which areas need looking at more closely. We don’t use it as a tool to keep tabs on what our staff are doing for each minute of the day, and I’ve always believed that time tracking should be very painless and take very little time out of the day.
There are a few tools that focus on time tracking, but we’ve just started using Toggl for our teams in the UK and the US.
Now you know what I was doing all day today.
From a management perspective, it has a web interface that lets me get to project and task data, and allows me to export exactly the kind of reports I need. Perhaps more importantly from a user’s perspective, they can input time using the website, a desktop app or an iPhone app. The app even lets you select the task/project you’re working on, and then hit a timer button to record time while you’re working, so there’s no need to log anything later on. Hopefully, the easier it gets to log time, the more useful data we’ll collect as a team.
Distilled has a mailing list of around 1,000 subscribers, who receive information about our SEO conference calls. Mailchimp handles the subscriptions and the sending with ease, and serves up friendly stats to help you grow your list and manage your campaigns.
Mailchimp brought 'Web 2.0' to running email campaigns.
With clients all over the world, we often need to arrange conference calls with groups of people in different locations. Go To Meeting allows each meeting participant to ‘call in’ using their phone or computer – and it supports sharing of the meeting coordinator’s desktop.
I heard about this tool from Alexis Ohanian, who claimed it was making him a ninja with his time. It sits quietly on your computer, recording every application and website you use. It returns reports to you, specifying the percentage of your time spent on productive tasks, and doing things that might have just been time wasting.
I'm in the top 9% of people. The statistics say that Twitter, Reddit and Spotify are to blame for me not being higher.
I’ve not been in the office a lot since I started using it, so have’t collected a lot of data, but it’s definitely starting to be interesting already. I’d definitely recommend some manual tweaking though – lots of my clients’ websites are registered as being ‘distracting’, so my efficiency stats were dreadful at first. Give it a go, but be prepared for some surprises.
Oh – and the ‘Get Focused’ mode will block any distracting websites for an hour, to force you to get on with some work.
Distilled employees use a variety of systems for their ‘task management’ – from lo-tech wirebound notebooks to hi-tech online systems. Some ‘Distillers’ recommend Remember the Milk – an app which allows you to input tasks and read your to-do list online or on your mobile.
This tool lets you capture thoughts, ideas and notes very quickly – and find them again more easily that other similar systems might allow. In particular, people who follow the ‘Getting Things Done’ method of task management will find it a useful place to start the process by capturing anything that needs to be processed later on.
I’ve always been happy to read and post to Twitter via the website, but some people definitely prefer a desktop app – particularly if they want to watch the tweets from a smaller group of their friends.
I’m tempted to take another look at these now – I think Tweetdeck might be up my street – but take your pick if you’re looking to graduate up from the ‘plain vanilla’ website.
I’m not going to give SEOmoz a plug here just because we’re associates of theirs, but because for small and medium sized businesses without a dedicated search team, their Pro membership is an invaluable tool to help manage your SEO marketing. Plus, they’re currently really busy on a product launch that will (and I don’t say this lightly) change the way some organizations do SEO – check this out and keep an eye on their site for more info.
