To be honest, I was a bit shocked, when I entered the room for the first International Search Summit in Berlin this Monday. About 10 attendees were waiting for Webcertain‘s boss Andy Atkins-Krüger to launch the conference. The lack of local publicity for the conference, which isn’t known in Germany, probably caused this low attendance. Maybe also the combination with the “Localization World” didn’t work out. Translators and Search Marketers are two different species as Isabella Ballanti impressively showed in her presentation later on the day.
Calijn van Lennep, member of the E-Commerce team at KLM, was the first speaker of the day. She talked about how to manage a brand on global websites. Although this topic isn’t really search related, Calijn showed some interesting insights how KLM deals with global and local content on their 116 websites. Another interesting point was Social Media. Calijn said that KLM doesn’t have a real social media strategy, but they just try out things. During the ash cloud problems Twitter and Facebook were the most important communication channels though!
Next Andy Atkins-Krüger covered ten fundamental laws of international search marketing:
1. Content is key to SEO, PPC and SMO
2. Keywords cannot be ‘translated’ and translations need keyword adding
3. Search-trained native speakers must nurture SEO, PPC & SMO
4. Best practice only comes through centralisation with local tentacles
5. Always stand next to your customer virtually through geo-targeting (Language, Local Domains, Hosting, Local Links, Webmaster Tools and Tagging)
6. User behaviors are environment driven and buying and paying are environmental factors
7. All people are equally sophisticated, impatient and lazy following the line of least resistance
8. Trust is built through cultural relevance and dealing with environmental factors
9. Language drives difference in long tail and website structure
10. Input methods drive behavior – including mobile, PC and tablet
Like I mentioned before Isabella Ballanti talked about SEO Localisation. She demonstrated the ideal process how translators and SEO’s can work together without fighting. The big difference between those two jobs is that translators look for the correct word, grammar and language rules, where SEO’s look for the optimal word and search behavior. As an example: just try to make a translator understand that he has to use misspellings in his text 
SEO Localisation by Isabella Ballanti – Click to enlarge
“Finding Local Links” was the topic of Dixon Jones and of course Majestic SEO was the tool he chose 
Dixon demonstrated how to extract localized backlinks with Majestic SEO (by anchor text or by IP location) and mentioned Wiep’s great post about creating a World Link Map. Besides that he showed how to find good backlink opportunities by extracting DMOZ data and analyzing them with the new Wordtracker Link Builder tool.
Florian Stelzner, SEO consultant at TRG-the Reach Group, talked about international social media optimization. He started pretty basic about SMO in general, but his presentation was really interesting at the end. Did you know that the most retweetable days and times are Monday and Friday preferably from noon till midnight?
Google.kr for me was the most interesting part of Sebastien Monnier’s presentation. Actually his topic was “Achieving European Success”, but Sebastien made it a bit bigger. It’s really interesting what Google did at Google.kr and the fact that they introduced a new Google service “Google Topic” in that country eventually gives us a sneak preview on the future?
“PPC is like prostitution, prostitutes sell their bodies, we sell keywords and Google is the world largest pimp!” The first phrase of Klara Lettavova’s presentation was the right one to wake the audience up after lunch for some PPC sessions. Klara talked about the possibilities which the “exotic” Search Engines like Yandex and Baidu offer and how PPC works on those engines, followed by Andy Atkins-Krüger with his favorite topic “international campaign management” and Thomas Bindl about “optimising the longtail”.
Massimo Burgio closed the day, before the site clinic, with an energetic speech about international Video Optimisation. I think this was one of the most interesting presentations of the day, but before repeating everything Massimo said (in authentic Italian High Speed ) I think I just insert his presentation here, so you can see it for yourself:
International Video SEO Optimization ISS Berlin Massimo Burgio
All in all it was a very interesting day with some good speakers and interesting content. I hope International Search Summit will return to Berlin next year, despite of the low attendance this year.
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