A very special show this time around. Our guest Richard Baxter from SEO Gadget joined us to discuss amongst other things SMX Advanced London 2010. And Richard really did his homework. He asked several speakers at SMX to give their take away for the show. You can find the different take aways below.
Next to SMX London we also discussed
The shownotes are below, all the links can also be found in the special delicious feed.
Listen to the show here
Links and topics discussed:
Richards credentials:
http://seogadget.co.uk/handy-tips-from-smx-london-2010-day-one/
http://www.stateofsearch.com/events/search-marketing-expo/smx-london-2010/
Links about A4U Expo:
http://www.stateofsearch.com/events/a4u-expo/a4u-expo-munich-2010/
Google Analytics have launched their “opt out” browser add on
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/05/greater-choice-and-transparency-for.html
http://searchengineland.com/google-lets-users-opt-out-of-analytics-tracking-42842
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
US Newspapers selling SEO:
http://searchengineland.com/u-s-newspapers-start-selling-seo-42637
Sam Crocker – Distilled on the Keyword Research Panel
- Scrapers are incredibly valuable- make the most of other people’s datasets and research. Sam’s using Mozenda to fetch “top xxx” items from competitor sites, eg top shows on Hulu. He also demonstrated using Mozenda to feed keywords into the Google Search Suggest API to get many more out ready for keyword research.
- He’s a big advocate of outsourcing (or at least advises us not to be afraid of it) – Mechanical Turk,
Sam’s top tips:
- Demographic targeting is key and (for me at least) a largely untapped resource/area for research. (From Alex Cohen and Pere Rovira’s talks on Analytics as well as Robert Barnard and Eli Goodman’s talks on “Reaching and Closing your Ultimate Customer”)
- Infographics still win. There’s been a lot of hype made about infographics but they still tend to be way more successful than normal linkbait and blogposts for generating links (from Chris Bennet’s presentation on social media – 97th floor)
Reasonable surfer (from Rand’s presentation but also Bill Slawski’s blog) suggests that search engines already pay and will probably pay more regard to location of a link on a page when assigning value.
The folks over at Mozenda are offering a 25% off voucher code for all pay-as-you-go purchases just use “SMXL25″ on all purchases before May 26th.
Mike Belasco – President – SEoverflow
If you qualify, try to get white listed in Google Local (Place Pages). I’ve seen clients get away with murder (almost) by simply being white listed and not having to verify each location individually.
Try to use an email address from your domain as the email for the google account which holds your Google local listing. Google encourages this.
More than anything when optimizing your local listings, consistency is king. Make sure your business name, phone number, address match up EXACTLY everywhere they appear on the internet.
Mike explained local search tracking using 301 redirects
Melissa Campbell – SEO at Distilled
Gave me one lovely quote: “social media is like a dinner party: don’t be boring, and bring more than just your work to the conversation”
Other take aways from Richard:
- Link position on the page does matter and Rand Fishkin recommends you should read the reasonable surfer model post on SEObytheSEA (Bill Slawski) if you haven’t already
- Use Zemanta to find relevant links and images while you’re blogging (and pay to be included in the WordPress plugin). I checked this out and there’s a class name that contains the word zemanta so easily detectable paid links there
- Promote yourself with Outbrain’s Outloud service, $10 a month for around 1 million impressions. (Andrew Girdwood).
- Kelvin Newman had some awesome tips for getting links from government and student sites:
- # Sponsor a student event (it costs peanuts)
- # Deliver a careers talk (It’s hard to get a job as a graduate)
- Run for parliament 
Martijn Beijk
Martijn Beijk’s presentation:
http://www.martijnbeijk.com/my-presentation-on-smx-advanced-london/
Martijn was a strong advocate of tracking everything in local search – using 301 redirected tracking parameters for example. He explained that quite often you’ll see some different user behaviour with traffic coming from local search (lower bounce rate, higher conversion) but you have to commit to measuring it.
He also discussed that local SEO tends to lead to offline conversions and discussed methods including using coupouns and special offers to track offline conversion.
Will Critchlow – Distilled
Top 10 analytics reports – http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/first-touch-tracking-in-google-analytics/
Explained his analytics hack for first touch tracking and talked about that fact that you really should have first touch set up. Noone buys on the first visit, right?
- Use visits to purchase to convince stakeholders few buy on first visit
- Set up multi-touch tracking
- Consider reports like branded vs. unbranded, first vs. last touch
- Use the GA API to set up reports like “new links”, “conversions by keyphrase
- length”, “# organic landing pages over time”
A great show. And Richard will be back! On June 15th both he and Joost de Valk will be joining us for a special show about microformats html5. Be sure to tune in. Next Tuesday we have Nichola Stott as a guest!
Want to suggest a topic? Send in a url through delicious (send to stateofsearch) and if the topic is right we’ll discuss it in the show!
You can listen to us live at Webmasterradio.fm at 8pm every Tuesday here in Holland, which is 7 in the UK, and in the US it’s at 2pm on the East Coast and 11am on the West Coast. Be sure to join us in the chatroom to take part in the discussion!
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A good show, guys!
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