Posts by Bas van den Beld

Bas van den Beld is a speaker, trainer and online marketing strategist. Bas is the owner of Stateofsearch.com. -- You can hire Bas to speak, train or consult. -- More articles and bio from Bas van den Beld
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Tips on live blogging a conference, to make your life more easy

Yesterday I spoke at SASCON, a conference organized by several Manchester SEOs. The organization did a really good job. The conference was organized for the first time and that meant a lot of things were new to both organizers and visitors. And that made it a refreshing conference. The organization tried to look at as much as possible to make the event a succes. These days I mostly speak at conferences, but as a media partner for some conferences (like the upcoming A4U Expo) I’ve also blogged on conferences a lot.

At conferences you can see a lot of bloggers sitting, mostly in te front row, typing and typing. These girls and guys are covering the event. That’s a good thing, because after all, not everybody can attend the conference. With Twitter it has already become more easy to follow what is going on at a conference but it is still a very nice thing that you can read back blogposts about a conference. Yesterday at SASCON I was especially impressed with bloggers Kieron Hughes and David Towers who managed to get a lot of content out there in very little time. I saw posts coming by from Kieron even before a session was actually finished. That’s a hard work because you have to pay attention and write at the same time.

I have been blogging conferences for years. And I can tell you: it can be a lot of hard work if you want to do it right. That’s why I’ve gathered some tips for those of you who plan on live covering a conference. Just to make the blogging life a bit easier. (more…)

Privacy: do we really care what Facebook and Google are doing?

Last week Facebook announced their new ‘Like’ feature, which is supposed to make the web even a bit more social. But this likable feature, which without a doubt will generate even more traffic for some sites, also raises some privacy questions. The service connects different sites and makes surfing probably more pleasant but in the meanwhile gathers a lot of information on what you are doing on the web.

Everybody has got their eyes on Google when it comes to privacy but Facebook might very well be a bigger threat. I explained last week how the “Like” functionality connects all the dots and has Facebook ‘control’ you over different sites. With Facebook however there is another big problem: you never know what they’re up to. They change their privacy rules once in a while, which makes it difficult to keep track of what they are doing. The new way is opt-out, both with Facebook as with Google, which means that you are automatically ‘sentenced’ to join in. And if you don’t know that you can or don’t know how to opt out you have a problem. Sounds big. But do we really care? (more…)

State of Search and A4UExpo in mediapartnership, plus a nomination for best SEO blog!

This isn’t a really in depth post and you will probably learn nothing from this post, but it does contain some ‘hot stuff’. Today we are announcing a mediapartnership with A4U Expo, one of the leading conferences in Europe and the leading conference when it comes to affiliate marketing. On top of that State of Search also got nominated for best SEO Blog in the 2010 Search & Social Awards! (more…)

Facebook turns web upside down, watch out Google, watch out privacy

The world wide web used to be simple: you had websites and you had Google indexing them. Based on the ‘Google formula’ they would rank in a way Google thought was best, and we’d agree. Ok, this might be a little bit exaggerated, but its the essence of how we work with Google. Yesterday at the Facebook f8 conference however things changed.

Google is one of the biggest players, if not the biggest player out there. There have been many over the past decade who have tried to compete with the search giant and none of them really succeeded. Bing probably made the most impact, but only because it won a few percentages of market share in the search area. But now Facebook has stepped in. And they make a very good chance of ‘beating’ Google when it comes to web dominance.

Facebook announced several new features with the new Open Graph API, the social plugins and the Open Graph protocol as biggest changes. These elements are supposed to change the way we look at the web. Using this API Facebook will try to integrate websites and applications with your social network. This will mean different ‘points’ on the web you use are connected using your social circle. As Zuckerberg said: people are connecting the web, not links. (more…)

Can you buy your visitors?

Money is what makes the world go around. And money could also be the trigger for many to take a step they otherwise might not have taken that easy or to get the attention of those who are otherwise hard to reach. So if you want traffic to your website, but it isn’t going fast enough, why not throw in some money?

Its a concept which many sites have tested, with different success. Some ‘bought’ traffic by paying for advertising, others have tried to give away stuff to get visitors to come back to their sites. Microsoft is probably the best or at least the biggest example of a site, in this case even a search engine, trying to ‘buy their way in’ by throwing in hard cash for every search with their cashback program. The most recent one going this way is real time search engine Leapfish, where you can win $100,000 in cash and prizes if you help the search engine reach the 20 million searches they want in 2010. (more…)

7 tips on running a group blog

As you may have noticed State of Search is a group blog. Which means that its not just one person writing all of the content, but many more. On this site we have a few of the best bloggers in the business producing great content just for you.

There are many group blogs out there and running a group blog seems easy. After all, you don’t have to produce all the content yourself, and with a bloggersteam like we have it should be easy as hell.

Well…: wrong! Yes, the fact that great content comes from the different bloggers is the absolute plus for this website. It makes or breakes the success. But to get to that success you need to lay a good foundation. And if you are blogging for business it can even be hardere. In this post I’d like to share with you some tips on how to run a group blog. Based on my experience here and on Searchcowboys. I know, it’s not about search, but I hope it will benefit you. (more…)

All flights cancelled because of volcano: how can you help?

Europe has been ‘hit’ with a natural disaster this week. In Iceland a volcano burst leaving not only about 700 people homeless, it also left people stranded all over Europe with flights being canceled all over the continent.

As you can expect this event has been discussed all over the Internet. Several websites are down, others (like the Schiphol airport) have put up a plain html page because they can’t handle the traffic. A lot of activity on the web, all for a sad reason. The information people are looking for is also very difficult to filter and to find out the right answers to your questions. A quick look around the web also showed that not many are actually using the situation for their own benefit. Is it because its not ‘decent’? Or are many out there just not paying attention?

Lets take a look at a few opportunities which you have to gain from the situation and how you can help those looking to go home at the same time. (more…)

State of Search radioshow – episode 6: E-Bay, Twitter ads, site speed and more

This week the guest on the show is Dennis Goedegebuure. He is ‘a dutchman in San Jose’, working as SEO at E-Bay. He worked for E-Bay in the Netherlands and made the move to the US four years ago.

In the first part we discussed the background an SEO needs. A college degree is not necessary for working at an agency, working at a company like E-Bay however you probably will need that degree to grow within the company. Also the discussion goes on about how and if you can teach SEO.

In the second part Roy and Dennis discussed some E-Bay and Marktplaats issues like the frames issue with Marktplaats and the way a big company works with media and external statements. Also Twitter Ads, sitespeed and more was discussed. One interesting part (in the final part) was the way you adress people you work with in the US compared to Europe.

The shownotes are below, all the links can also be found in the special delicious feed. (more…)

Tracy Falke, John Marshall and Kristjan Hauksson talk at SES New York 2010

At SES New York I got to talk to a couple of speakers who all had interesting sessions at the conference. Every single one of them had a different angle on search and social media.

I talked to Tracy Falke, John Marshall and Kristjan Mar Hauksson about their talks, their jobs and what keeps them busy. Find the videos below.

Tracy Falke

Tracy Falke runs Content, SEO, SEM, and Social for Freestyle Interactive, one of the largest full service creative digital agencies in the UK. She also works with their Art Directors to conceive, execute and manage CRM (or social CRM campaigns, and sometimes even invent technical solutions, though she can’t code!

At SES she talked amongst other things about automating Twitter in a much discussed session. After the session I talked to her:

(more…)

State of Search radioshow – episode 5 – SEO Copywriting mythbusting

The State of Search radioshow this week was one without regular host Roy Huiskes. But instead we got two Dutchmen, David Brinks (who ranks number one on the term SEO copywriting in the Netherlands) with a lot of knowledge of SEO copywriting. Both guys did a session at SES Amsterdam called “SEO copywriting: mythbusting & takeaways”.

We took the time this show to discuss SEO copywriting and the myths they busted at SES Amsterdam. While talking about this some other topics past by like the fact that Google is enhancing the titles, plus the chatroom came up with a couple of questions.

The shownotes are below, all the links can also be found in the special delicious feed. (more…)

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