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…).

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?!

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.

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’.

Before we get stuck in, a big thank you to Rich, who answered our questions very thoughtfully and thoroughly. There’s some really useful stuff here; read on to find out Rich’s thoughts on how to become an irresistible expenditure to clients, the importance of online communities for SEO and how to come up with ideas that work.

At 15, I became addicted to an online computer game called Counter-Strike. At the time all the online communities about Counter-Strike were exactly that, communities about Counter-Strike. They talked about the new guns in version 1.3, showed screenshots of the new levels in design. None discussed what mattered most, the people playing games.

Myself and a few began starting communities talking about the top teams and players. We talked about the rivalries. If a top player decided to change teams, that was a big scoop. Before a major event we would create previews of how they thought they would do, we reported on their preparations and highlights the key fixtures. We did play by play analyses of the top-games. We even had commentators for the bigger events.

It fostered an amazing spirit of community. In the summer of 2002, about 800 gamers stayed up until 4am to watch the top UK team compete live (over the internet) in the quarter-finals of the world championships. That’s community!

Today all the big gaming sites do this. If you ever need inspiration about building online communities, I would start at places like Gotfrag and SK-Gaming.

I went on to work for several online gaming communities and a few magazines. I would have stayed on as a community manager had my careers advisor predicted there wasn’t a future doing it.

More recently I drifted back through PR, marketing and social media to building online communities. I’m happy here, I’m doing something I always want to be better at. That’s a good place to be.

There are four key things here. The first, the most successful communities have been more about the members than the products. That’s not a golden rule, but it helps if your community develops a 70/30 focus between members and the product.

The second is to forget technology and figure out what will make people talk to each other. Do they need to talk with people to achieve something? Do they need to exchange information to improve their lives? Are they looking to enjoy the experience of talking to people? Find that raw emotional drive, and work harder to develop it.

Thirdly, you really need to develop the structure that takes the work load off you. You don’t want to have to invite every member to join your community. So plan ahead, what’s going to cause people to invite their friends, and them invite their friends? How can you make it worth their time.

If you’re vague here, you’re going to fail. If your plan is to “generate buzz that will get people to join” that’s way too vague. Be specific, precise and meticulous in your planning. Why and how will Mark invite his friends? Is he recruiting his friends to defend his point of view? Or for a reward? Does the top recruiter get invited to meet the CEO?

Finally, relax. Tell your boss to relax too. You didn’t hear about Facebook or Google until years after that launched. You don’t need as many members as you think you do. You just need people engaging at a decent level and the community will continually grow from there. Measure the stuff that matters, forget what doesn’t. Don’t compare yourself to anyone.

Seth’s my hero. He thinks on a different level and with a unique clarity. As for practising what he preaches? Of course. He’s too high profile to say one thing and do another. He’d be found out in a heartbeat.

Working with Seth Godin is an experience I wish everyone could have. He provides me with the platform and the resources to act like an entrepreneur. It’s the ultimate test of any employee I think. Give them the resources and let them loose upon the world. No excuses, no lifelines and no-one to coast along with.

I hope everyone gets to work with their hero. I hope you all have a hero!

I Want To Work With Seth Godin is an old blog which had one objective, get Seth’s attention. It worked. It wasn’t so much a blog about Seth, as it was about using this approach to get your dream job. It worked for my friend Jed Hallam at Wolfstar and Matthew Watson at Rainier. Focus on the jobs you want, then build up your own marketing campaign to get them.

Over time it became more of a broader riff on careers, and I really enjoyed writing it. I want to launch another career blog in the near future. I think there’s a lot to talk about. This massive change from salaried employment to picking up talent for one project at a time.

Without meaning to go all Sarah Palin on you, I want to answer a different question. What happens when you get rejected?

If you come to someone with an idea for an online community, they’ll probably say no. There’s no budget for it. It’s too risky. Or “What do you mean we can’t advertise or sell to our own community”?

My suggestion is just to do it anyway. If you want to build an online community for someone, anyone, just go ahead and do it. They can’t stop you. You don’t even have to be directly involved, just enthuse a few great customers with the idea and support them whenever they need it.

If you come to someone a few months later with a community of 3,000 people are they going to turn you (and their loyal customers) away? Are they going to pass up on the free-advertising and WOM for life? Are they going to turn down the free market research? I bet they wont. In fact, I suspect they’re willing to pay a good price to keep you and your community right where it is.

As an aside, recently I’ve dabbled with the idea of hijacking Dell’s Digital Nomads campaign. The blog is too dry and it’s not becoming the hub for nomads like it should. What would happen if we created a thriving online community of Digital Nomads and then approached Dell for support?

Would they turn us away?

Once you get past the basic internal stuff, SEO is about the external relationships you build. Who’s linking to you? What’s the anchor text? How important are they?

Whatever your client sells, you want to rank highly for it. If your client sells cheap flight tickets, creating a budget travel community makes a lot of sense. If your client sells upmarket sofas, then an interior designer or home-living community might be a great idea.

Specifically, the content generated by the community increases its search engine authority. It’s updated frequently, it has lots of different members and becomes a great resource looking for people to find cheap flight tickets.

Second, everyone links to communities they think will help. “Oh I saw this discussion about where to find cheap flight tickets taking place”. That helps, it helps a lot.

Third, Communities tend to attract the people with the most authority. The people whos links do matter. You can do so much with your community. Especially the best ones. You can give members a badge they can display on their Facebook page, or blog, which links to your site.

Finally, you hit all the bizarre search terms. I believe something like 40% of Google’s search results have been been search for before. When someone searches for “tickets under $100 to fly from romania to barcelona” - they might find a conversation that took place on your forum many moons ago.

An online community is an offline community that realises the internet makes participating easier.

People forget that.

I get upset when the top community builders talk about technology. Pretty much every great idea community developers have been using for centuries, can be adapted for the internet. At the very core of building an online community isn’t technology, it’s people. What motivates people to take actions? If you figure that out, you’ve figured out how to build an online community.

First, there is this great big business blogosphere of ours. We’re all pretty engrossed in this community, made more so by the joy that no company owns it. All these blogs, all these thoughts and all these ideas are without a real strategic objective. It’s brilliant.

I spend time on Brazen Careerist, in two Facebook groups and Seth’s Tribes network.

I’m also a member of an online community for people with a stutter. This is a really interesting one, because members, ideally, want to get out of this community. It’s amazing that even here, where people go for advice about overcoming or dealing with their stutter (self-interest community), you get the same problems. There is a divide in the moment about whether people like me, with a light stutter, should be allowed to participate in the same forums as those with a more deep stutter.

Think about that. Those who suffer most from the problem, are the insiders. The elites. The rest of us are the outsiders, the less important members. I think that’s a good thing. I think the extra wall lets them get far more out of the community than they otherwise might.

I hope speech therapists and book authors discover the right way to interact with these groups.

I steal my best ideas. I steal them from books, from blogs, from the news, on the subway and from hotels. I go back to whatever i’ve done that’s worked, and used that. At the core of every blog post is at least one raw motivation.

I also try to be specific with ideas. It’s better to have an idea that’s wrong but can be adapted and improved, than a vague abstract thought. You probably read hundreds of blog posts a week, but remember less than 5? I’m betting it’s the 5 that were simple, specific and useful.

As for writing the posts. I use Windows Live Writer and have about 30 potential posts in draft form. When an idea crops into my head, I enter it into the headline of a draft post and come back to it later. I delete about half the thoughts and try to write out the rest. Of these, about half will become blog posts, the other half either ramble or don’t add enough value.

Before posting, I rewrite every blog entry to remove as many words as possible. The hardest thing is to delete a paragraph you’re proud to have written, but doesn’t absolutely have to be there. I try to keep mine under 200 words. I’m a stronger believer that what you don’t say is as important as what you do.

Thanks again Rich. And to those of you that enjoyed the interview, please feel free to build our community by commenting below!

Thanks to Ciaran for pointing out a micro-site from FT.com about how to beat the feeling of impending financial doom pervading the world at the moment.

The answer, according to research by McKinsey showed that:

The companies who increased their spend in a recession were the only ones whose profits rose substantially when the economy recovered.

McGraw-Hill found (when analysing the aftermath of the early ’80s) found:

The sales of companies who had kept advertising during the 81-82 recession had risen 256% over those who had not.

As Ciaran points out, this makes a compelling case for investing in PPC just now. I also think there is a strong argument for working hard at your natural SEO at times like these as well. When your competitors pull back, you get more chance to shine - and this can become a self-reinforcing authority phenomenon which stays with you into the good times.

Now, it’s unsurprising that the FT (and indeed, Ciaran and I) think that people should keep spending on marketing their businesses, but the wealth of independent research that the FT has gathered (and their own behaviour - they are continuing to invest heavily in promoting their own business) is pretty compelling in my opinion.

They are not a client and unfortunately I was digging into this purely out of curiosity rather than commercial interest.

A while back, I wrote about the UK charity search engine everyclick and how they didn’t rank for a search for their name. They are still nowhere to be seen in the natural results (though buying branded PPC).

The first bit of digging I did showed that they were down at #61 - a clear penalty as they remained indexed, but search results #61-65 were clearly the results that should have been 1-5.

I have now spent a bit of time digging through their on-site behaviour, inbound links and anything else I can think of and can find nothing to justify a penalty.

My last post explored some of the things I thought they could do differently (and some of these still apply) - such as avoiding duplicate content issues with the pages charities create for them on the charities’ own domains, having a bit more indexable content and less duplication on their own site etc. but they have cleared up a lot of the problems I identified back then and I can no longer support my initial conclusion that they were suffering through duplicate content filtering. Previously there were very strong pages on charity websites with the same title as their homepage. They have now changed their site significantly and that is no longer true - yet they rank badly for the search for their exact title tag.

I found a few new things that aren’t great - such as a 302 redirect from www.everyclickschools.com into the site, and a lot of widgets that link back with identical anchor text (but in my opinion this is not in any way misleading - and these widgets are genuinely useful and placed editorially on powerful charity websites).

In short, I can see no reason why Google would wish to penalise this site.

Except 1.

That it’s a search engine.

Now, it’s small, but the charity concept is pretty powerful and they have some evangelical fans (and it’s powered by Ask who are at least in the search engine race still!).

I’m not an expert on anti-trust / monopoly law, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a company with a truly dominant market share treating its competitors differently to everyone else didn’t break the rules. I think this would be like Microsoft selling Vista with a browser that redirected apple.com to microsoft.com (and I reckon they’d be slapped pretty hard for that).

When I wrote about this before, I thought it highlighted some technical problems for everyclick.com. Now, I think it’s more sinister than that and indicates potential future problems for Google.

I could be wrong about this - maybe they’re up to something nefarious that I haven’t spotted. If you think that’s the case, let me know in the comments, via twitter or by email - I’m pretty easy to contact and I’ll update the post.

Every now and then you get that kind of shock in PPC data, when the serene progress of an account has to be re-evaluated in an instant because of a new discovery. This is exactly what happened to me when I took a look at the affect of Google’s new Adwords transparency on some of our PPC campaigns.

As you’re probably aware, Google places ads in three places- its own results page, the results page of its search partners (Google Product Search, Google Groups, Earthlink, compuserve, shopping.com, AT&T Worldnet, and search sites such as AOL and Ask.com) and on its content network. Previously, Google bundled together its own results page with the other search sites like Ask.com, allowing you to separate out the data from the content network if you wanted to. The new tool allows you to fully break down the data from the three places Google places your ads.

I don’t often run content network campaigns so I hadn’t felt the need to delve too much into this new breakdown. I assumed that the results from Google and its search partners would be very similar– same adverts, same keywords, same delivery system and surely then similar CTR and conversion rate. This would mean that the best approach for me would be to use the summary view of my accounts.

However, when I did try separating them out the result was very surprising. The figures were astonishingly different; clickthrough was often a fraction of Google’s, conversion rates were much lower and although cost per click was less, cost per conversion was way up. Here’s some data that I think highlights the problem pretty well:

This campaign has been running on Google’s conversion optimiser with CPA set at £12 and yet it has chosen to spend a rather large amount on the Search partners’ share of the clicks when the CPA is way above the required level. At this point I am still unsure as to why there should be such a big difference. Do the lower quality search engines fail to distribute correctly by location? This could explain some high traffic volumes but low rates. Whatever the reason, judging by the clickthrough and conversion rates, the search partners produce traffic that is poorly targeted.

We can’t choose to target certain parts of the partners network, nor can we create ‘partners only’ campaigns which we could then refine the traffic from, bid in accordance with the cost per conversion and maybe use to our advantage. Even if we could separate out ‘partner’ campaigns we can’t drill down to see which of the search partners is more effective. If Google gave these options we could quickly duplicate our campaigns, distribute them to each area of the ‘partners network’ and find out if they could be improved to come into line with the other campaigns.

As it is, I am switching many of my campaigns to Google only and, unless greater data and control becomes available for the search partners, I can’t imagine returning to this area anytime soon.

Hopefully, this post will prompt someone else to take a look at their figures and maybe, with this one change in Adwords, improve their CTR and conversion rate in a stroke. To take a look at your own figures in Adwords, go to your Campaign Summary page and choose ‘Split: Google Search/search partners/content network’. I can assure you that it’s well worth your time and may make a significant difference to your campaign.

This is massive news for anyone working in the PPC industry as there are sure to be some ferociously contested markets in the coming months. With poker sites, casinos, spread betting firms (or spread firms as they’re known in the industry), exchanges, fixed odds firms, comparison sites, tipsters and other niche gaming sites out there, it is going to be an almighty scramble for some prime positions.

As ever Distilled are ahead of the curve, as our Paid Search Marketer worked in online gaming for 7 years before joining us. One of Paid Search’s biggest problems is that, although your marketer may understand the technical side of the job, running Adwords day to day, they will take time to get to know the marketplace that they are advertising in. Having someone who has worked in the industry, almost from the birth of online gaming in this country, is a big bonus to getting ahead of the competition. So if there are any gaming companies out there looking for a paid search gambling expert then we have the man for the job - you should get in touch!

Over the last 10 days or so, I have been helping out a guy called Matthew Rushton who runs Mediator Magazine and Mediator Directory after being introduced by Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor of The Telegraph. The time we have all spent thinking about the online problems facing small businesses in particular have now resulted in a great piece in the business section of The Telegraph (split into 3 on their website):

• Small firms switch on to search engine optimisation
• Distilled’s top 10 tips for DIY SME SEO (acronym central) - with some links to us, SEOmoz and our clients, Sofa.com
• Matthew telling his story: Search engine optimisation: what’s it worth?

Now, if you are here for the first time because you have read the Telegraph story, welcome…

Many of my tips are in the article, but feel free to get in touch if you have any specific questions and we’ll do our best to help you out. Happy SEOing