The SEO Chicks have big plans of expanding and actually regularly blogging in 2012 (yay) and have already welcommed Annabel Hodges to our team. After racking our brains for…well 2 seconds really (we knew who we wanted to approach really)..we decided to approach the querky, clever and generally awesome Hannah Smith to join our blogging team, and she said YES…

I would officially like to welcome Hannah to the SEO Chicks team. We are so excited to have you on board!

Follow Hannah Bo Banna on twitter. That’s an order.

ps: I challenge anyone to find a different picture of Hannah anywhere on the internet…..I tried, there is NO other…Are you camera shy Hannah? Just you wait, embaressing photos like this one is bound to be taken when we next see you (dear god that’s an awful picture….why in the toilet…and Julie wasn’t even there, she’s the toilet chick..ehm, now I should stop…that can be misunderstood)

I’m so excited to welcome the wonderful Annabel Hodges aka Search Panda to the SEO-Chicks blogging crew. We’ve been eyeing her up for ages thinking she is probably crazy enough to become one of the SEO Chicks, and turns out she is. Yay!

We asked Annabel a few questions before “hiring” her into the crew of course, some very qualifying, difficult and important questions:

1. How did you get into SEO?
I was a translator back in the day and getting very very bored of it. I started trying to learn a little more about search and analytics in my spare time as my housemate got me interested in it and I got hooked. I then got a job with a small design/development agency who had just won some multinational clients and had a choice: train linguists up in search or train search marketers to speak other languages. Simple decision!

2. What makes your SEO heart tick?
Two things mainly:
1. Data. And by that I mean those times when you really manage to get some juicy findings that suddenly change the way you look at what you’ve been doing.
2. Direct input/output of work. Over the years I’ve realised it’s pretty rare to be in a job where you have that satisfaction. On your own sites, if not your clients. You always get to tweak and learn and change and see, monitoring the direct impact of what you do and inputting back into that cycle. So many people work in a job where their day-to-day efforts get lost in a bigger machine.

3. Do you like Adam Ant or even know who he is? (only Julie cares about this)
Anyone who gave us Stand and Deliver deserves to be liked. That and his cameo in Northern Exposure.

4. Rock or Pop?
Hmm tough one. I’d have to go rock. Give me a good dose of guitar fuzz anyday. (Having said that, I’m never one to turn down a well produced pop song. Where would the world be without it?!)

5. What does feminism mean to you?
Oddly, quite a lot although I hate it when people bang on about it all the time. I’ve never been a particularly girly girl but I have dealt with a fair amount of stereotyping and pre-conceptions over the years, which have made me a feminist at heart. One thing I would say is ‘never judge a book by its cover’. I may like fashion and own too many shoes, it doesn’t mean I can’t hold my own. I also have a solid knowledge of Marvel comic book characters and Bruce Lee movies – what does that signify? You can wear makeup and a skirt while still being a technical/analytical person – despite some common beliefs, the two are not mutually exclusive.

6. Robot dance or ballet?
Robot dance every time. That and I do a great foot shuffle. It’s my main party trick. I’m far too clumsy for the likes of ballet.

7. Why the Pandas?
I’m half Chinese but don’t really look it which has always been a source of slight bemusement to my family. When I was about 5 one of my aunts gave me a porcelain panda and we went to Beijing Zoo to see them. It made a lasting impression as a way of feeling more part of my Asian culture somehow! That and they’re totally ridiculous. I have a love of ridiculous, clumsy animals. I empathise.

8. What did you want to be when you were little?
Janet Jackson’s backing dancer. It would have been a dream come true. Then until I was 18 or so, a vet. But I realised the amount of time and money it would take to achieve were pretty ridiculous, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to have my hand up a cow’s arse for the rest of my working life.

9. Who’s your Obi Wan Kenobi?
Erm Obi Wan Kenobi himself would do. Other than that (and all the SEO Chicks of course ), I’d say people like some of the women who’ve made it at Google – Vanessa Fox, Marissa Mayer et al. Simply because it’s a tough place to be and they proved themselves. Oh and my Mum. I’m pretty sure she’d take Obi Wan down in a fight.

10. What do you think of becoming an SEO Chick?
I’m an SEO. I’m a Chick. And I’m pretty damn proud to be both of those things so hell, seems like a natural conclusion!

So there you have it, the proof is in the pudding (or the questions in this case). Annabel is an awesome panda rocking, robot dancing, cartoon loving, translating SEO – who will ‘stand and deliver’ the SEO awesomeness to a screen near you. Wilkommen, beinvenue, WELCOME!

Elisa Gabbert is the content manager at WordStream, where she runs the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog and helps market the company’s AdWords software, PPC management services and keyword research tools. She also writes poetry and perfume criticism. She currently lives in Denver. You can follow her on Twitter at @egabbert (but expect tasteless jokes and bad puns).

1. Can you give us a summary of your SEO experience thus far? What is your current niche?

I got into the SEO industry about five years ago, sort of by accident – I was working as an editorial assistant on a website at a big media company. Their model was to run a bunch of highly targeted websites (each aimed at a slice of the technology market, mostly B2B but some B2C as well – stuff like Oracle, Linux, server storage, etc.) and sell advertising against those sites. When I started, no one even knew what SEO was, but it slowly became a bigger and bigger part of our strategy company-wide. Most people hated it – the company employed a lot of journalists who were coming from a print background – but a few people saw how important it was and some (crazy nerds) even found it interesting (oh, hi). So I moved into an “SEO specialist” role, making recommendations for a group of websites.

Now I work as a copywriter for a venture-backed startup that offers search marketing software and services, including a PPC management platform and various SEO tools (free and paid). We like to say this is the Olympics of search, because we’re competing to rank on search marketing terms with other companies that, like us, really know search marketing. So it’s very challenging, and VERY META.

2. How do you feel about the recent Google privacy changes that will now prevent us from seeing logged-in Google keyword data in Google Analytics? It’s apparently not the case for PPC. Fair or not?

I actually just blogged about this news. I tend to side with the “privacy schmivacy” folks – clearly other motives were driving this decision. I think it sucks because that’s such useful data. The worry is that it will eventually affect all organic referrals, as opposed to just a fraction as it does now. Then keyword research/optimization for SEO officially becomes total guesswork.

3. Any tips on how to use PPC data for organic SEO and link building?

Especially now that Google is taking away some of your organic search query data, it’s super important to keep an eye on your search query report if you do PPC. Assuming you’re using broad match and modified broad match (and you should be, in concert with negative keywords), you’ll be able to discover all kinds of new keywords that you can then incorporate into your content strategy. If you manage pretty large, complicated accounts, you might want to take a look at Chad Summerhill’s tips for search query mining – he includes a link to an Excel download that can help you sort through the data. You can download the full series in PDF as part of our negative keyword e-book.

4. Besides Wordstream tools, what else do you use?

I usually use our own tool for keyword research, but I sometimes consult the Google keyword tool for comparison. I also use Google Analytics. Otherwise it’s mostly me and a Word doc. And Twitter! I’m on Twitter all day. As a writer, I can focus on content strategy and leave most of the hardcore geek stuff to our SEO guy. I avoid Excel whenever possible.

5. What are the best resources available for someone with a small budget, new to PPC?

How small is small? If we’re talking really tiny, Google offers “AdWords Express” which requires very little effort on the advertiser’s part, but you give up a lot of control, so that’s iffy unless you’re talking a budget of like $100 a month and no experience with PPC. Beyond that, I’d recommend reading a lot of blogs to keep up with PPC best practices and the constant changes and additions to the AdWords interface. Tom Demers is my point man for keeping up with AdWords. And here’s a big list of awesome PPC blogs from BoostCTR. (Speaking of which, BoostCTR is an affordable way to get help with your ad copy.) Attend webinars, download white papers – take advantage of all the free resources that PPC companies offer in order to get your email address. The amount you can afford to spend on getting help with PPC will depend on your monthly budget. If you’re spending $1,000 a month or more, you can probably afford to invest in some tools.

6. What’s a typical day like for you?

The first thing I do every morning – after checking my email and putting out any fires – is publish a new blog post on the WordStream blog. We try to do at least one new post every week day. The blog is my baby. Then I push it out through Twitter and poke around on TweetDeck to see what people are talking about. The rest of my day is some combination of meetings (talking strategy with the rest of the marketing team, planning for new features or product launches, etc.) and writing and/or editing (articles for our own blog, guest posts and contributed articles, email marketing, white papers, and so on and so on), with a little social media and link promotion sprinkled in for good measure.

7. Name your dream client and tell us why.

Anthropologie, because maybe we could work out some kind of discount? (Editor’s note: you and me both, sister.)

8. What’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever received? Ever given?

I think the best advice I got was from Larry Kim, who told me to copy Wikipedia. Who else, aside from Google itself, enjoys first-page rankings for such a wide array of keywords? So we try to emulate them on a smaller scale – create encyclopedic content on a topic (for us, that’s search marketing); organize it taxonomically; interlink heavily; use the keyword in the URL, title, first sentence, subheads, image file names and alt text; build anchor text links; etc….

As for given? My favorite piece of advice is: When you don’t know what to blog about, consult your analytics. Inevitably, you’ll find a traffic-driving search query that you don’t have a dedicated post for yet. So write it, duh!
9. Write an SEO haiku. Just kidding!! Who’d win in a fight between Martin Amis and Ian McEwan?

I don’t know, they’re both pretty namby-pamby, wouldn’t you say? I think the ghost of Kingsley Amis, annoyed by their bickering, would hangover-vomit on them from above. (Editor’s note: I think Amis is less so than McEwan but McEwan is creepier, therefore he’d win. However that 9/11 book by Martin proved that he’s a bit scary, so…ok Amis would win.)

10. What’s the biggest bullshit SEO advice going around today? I’m quite annoyed by all of the “must do” items being pushed about. We didn’t have freaking wordpress tags in place and we still ranked, damn you all!!

The perpetual thorn in my side is the obsession with getting into Google News. Sure, it can send lots of traffic, but I think evergreen content is more useful for our business model.

11. If you were not working in SEO, what would you be doing, besides staying home watching Oprah reruns and eating moonpies? Or is that just me?

I’m a writer, so I’d spend my days writing about one of my other interests – mostly frivolous things like perfume and outfits, but I’m also into lofty pretentious stuff like poetry and women’s rights and “culture.” So if it weren’t for this SEO gig I’d probably be our generation’s Joan Didion.

12. Who are the most fun SEOs you’ve met and why? For the sake of not having to arsekiss this cannot include any of your bosses.

Can it include you or does that count as arsekissing? (Editor’s note: I’d have accepted that HAD YOU MENTIONED ME.) My former bosses, Tom Demers and Ken Lyons (who now run Measured SEM), are a laugh a minute. I’ve met a lot of great people through WordStream. If Twitter counts as a “meetingplace,” I’m a big fan of Dr. Pete.

13. What’s the ickiest search you’ve ever stumbled across? When I was researching the types of chickens I wanted to get (shut up) I accidentally searched for “black sex links” instead of “black sex link chickens.” Yeah. Unfun. Luckily it was a web search, not an image search.

I’m totally impressed that you have chickens. Please invite me over for breakfast. (I mean to eat eggs, not the chickens.) I don’t think I’ve ever “accidentally” searched for kinky sex tricks, but one of the common keyword referrals for my blog is “dave matthews band tattoos.” How icky is that? Also “emo gay sex blogspot,” but that’s just cute.

Now this is Julie talking…I realize there are a lot of links to Wordstream here so before any of you start thinking they’re giving me free stuff or in any way influencing me, let me say that I WISH THEY DID. They don’t. I just think Elisa is three hoots and I like to see literate folk in our industry. Thanks for the interview Ms. Gabbert!!

Hi there, it’s me…Julie, the one who used to be prolific here but is no longer due to maddening amounts of chaos in my life that now includes a killer bloodhound, a flock of 6 hens, and a fledgling attic squirrel population. However, considering it’s this site that brought a lot of the aforementioned chaos (ie blogging opportunities and proper business) I should take it a bit more seriously, especially as I’m vacationing with the Viking and her family in August and France is the perfect spot for her to beat my ass, because we’ll all be consuming loads of Camembert and local wine. Oh, and omelettes, because that’s listed as the main vegetarian option in Normandy. Yay.

Anyway, looking back over the years, we’ve had some amazing posts here, and I love finding older articles when I do a search for something industry-related mostly because I love seeing how the industry changes, how what we think about a certain metric or technique goes out of fashion or stands up. With that in mind, here’s a list of the 20 most popular SEO Chicks posts over the past 4 years, for your viewing pleasure.

Do You Want To Rank For Large Fish?
Oh My Christ They Got Facebook
The Local File Google Local Business Hijacking Issues
Top 10 Favourite WordPress Plugins By A Pregnant Chick
Twitter Is Not A Social Media Strategy
How To Get More Followers On Twitter If You’re A Girl And Aren’t All That Interesting
SEOs Should Moonlight
How Keyword Matching Is Just A Little Like Online Dating
Shock Horror Blackhat SEO Discussed At SMX Advanced
Why Relevant Links Are Irrelevant
SEO Sheep Are Baaaaaaad
Google I Don’t Get It! Com vs Co.UK
Even A Blind Hog Finds An Acorn Now And Then
The Best Job In The World
How To Interpret What Your Clients Want
Could A Chimp Do SEO? Heck Yes!
What’s Changed In The Matrix? Ehm I Mean Algos
Yoda’s Ultimate Tool List Part 1: Competitive Research
Our Princess Leia: An Interview With Dazzlin’ Donna
Let’s Talk About Spaceships

As many as 30% of all search queries have local intent, and the Google Places platform now operates in over 100 countries. According to IDC, more smartphones will be sold this year than computers which is astonishing and makes you realise just how entwined local and mobile search will become. The session mainly dealt with devlopments in local search, some “must do’s” when optimsing a places acocunt, alternative ways to track Google Places and mobile apps.

Just a heads up, webmaster radio tonight have a show, airing from 7pm, which features Local David Mihm, Martijn Beijk and Lisa Myers Don’t worry if you missed the the show, it will be up on State of Search tomorrow You can also download it from iTunes

Philippe Huysmans (EMEA Product)

Three phases of Local Search

• The first date
• Dating
• Marriage

Once you have acknowledged and prepared all the information around you, you are able to enter into the first date by making your first query to make your first query. Once you have had your first date you get a deeper understanding of whether it matched your expectations, once you know what you want you can refine your query (dating phase) Once you have committed to what you want you continue to purchase the service or product and enter into a long term relationship (marriage stage)

Outside Influence

• 44% of people influenced by peers
• 37% leverage mobile to look for information after seeing product on television, print, outdoor media
• 28% leveraging PC and mobile for more information after seeing a product on television

Partnerships at Scale

Integrating social information into local search is important and will be even more important as time goes on. The recent
Nokia and windows partnership is a demonstration of how important companies are taking local and mobile.

Bing Business Portal

This was released last month in US This is a FREE service and allows businesses to put their profile on the site. Features include:

• Coupons and vouchers
• More space for profile information
• Hyperlocal ad opps

Social Signals

Vast amount of conversations happening online via social networking sites. 50% increase in consumers trusting their social network contacts for product recommendations

PC and Mobile Query Intent

• 70% of PC complete search stages in 1 month
• 70% of Mobile completes search stages in 1 hour

This might be a result of users following up research driven queries on their way home from work, but even so, the differences are vast.

Bing Deals

78% of consumers want special promotions

This is illustrated by the rise and evolution of affiliate voucher sites and similar sites such as GroupOn.

Hyperlocal Ad Opportunities

64% of consumers expect a business distance to be within 15 miles

Ads to be shown only 5 miles from my location (new feature from Bing)

National Scale w/ Local Presence

This is in beta stage so don’t go looking for this feature just yet. It involves looking for favourite brands in your location. Similar to a dynamic store locator.

In store engagement

• 90% use mobile search
• 84% shoppers use search as part of shopping activity
• 46% of smartphone users compare prices in store

Bing Vision

Allows you to take a picture to get product info, prices and nearby stores.

From camera to Search – this lets you make a decision in store rather than at home

David Mihm (President of getlisted.org)

What’s new, Pussycat?

Better question, what’s NOT new as there are SO many new features over the past year, including:

• QR Code integration
• mobile apps
• loyalty SMS messaging
• lead gen sites

Examples of Bad Places Pages in UK

• Italian restaurants in leeds
• Costa coffee Exeter
• Clinton cards Birmingham uk

The main reasons why places pages are optimised poorly are the following:

• Not categorised properly
• Poor data accuracy
• Data incompleteness
• Category incompleteness
• Poor KW research to inform custom categories

Consider the following

1)    Mobile
2)    Pre website Conversion

Google products search is becoming localised and if you carry out a broad search in google on a mobile it detects your current location to populate the local listings

Pre website conversions

You can now make a booking on places page (industry dependent – hotels)

Need to start thinking of how you can convert on the place page – both literally (with new features) and persuading users intent to buy

Intergating rich snippets, sentiment snippets into a website will help Google pull this data through to Places pages

Good job in Local

Pipers farm Exeter

Sold before even went to website – important to gain affiliation before they visit your site

Category research for Places

Great resource on this area from:

Marybowling.com

Mary outlines that you can research (in Google insights) related categories and see the difference in volume to make educated decisons when choosing your custom tags in Google Places.

Bulk uploads

Important to have:

• Unique phone number
• Max out categories
• Photos
• Same domain for email account as business (delays process otherwise and not trusted as much)

Critical 3rd party Data Sources

Citations continue to be essential for ranking well in Place Search. It is your thumbprint so it has to match up everywhere on the web

Major UK Citations sources

• Qype.com
• Hotfrog.com
• Bview.co.uk
• Touchlocal.com
• Welovelocal.com
• Thomsonlocal.com

Critical 3rd party review

• Vertically relevant
• Geographically accurate
• Competitor Research

Competitive Intelligence

Not just “more info” section to discover citations but also: where are Google pulling photos from, sentiments from, anywhere with specified structured information

www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder

TIPS

• Search both .com and .co.uk
• Review organic results too
• Blended Search
• Half dependent on places algorithm
• Got to ensure your site is associated with places page

Why the introduction of “packs”

• Dramatically reduces instances of phoney locations
• Diminishes incentive to spam business title
• Less reliance on low confidence data sources

Best Practises in Local

• Unique page for every location operate
• Needs to be coded in html
• Incard microformat is even better
• Use city, state in title tags
• Use internal geographic

On page Best Practises

• Submit contact/location page as your places page
• Stronger geographic scent more likely to rank
• Cross link nearby locations

Good example of good store locator:

www.lakeland.co.uk/stores

TAKEAWAY

Submit KML sitemap in Google WMT
www.geositemapgenerator.com

Increase trust that this website belongs to this location.

Martin Beijk

What, how much, the why, the what else, the gold.

In order to do business effectively on the web you need to refine and optimise

GP dashboard minimal insight

GP Tracking

Google changed the format so now UTM tracking method disappeared.

Google is trying hard to keep visitors on the site for as long as possible, the addition of the places page highlights this

New or alternative tracking methods

• Segments using customVar based on referrer
• Segment of visitors that visited local pages (contact, itinerary)
• Segment visitors that visited store locator page
• Detect various behavioural differences

Darrin Clement

Search queries take into consideration existing location on mobile search

For example:

Restaurant {location will be automatically loaded}

Geofencing Use Cases

• Static – special offer is sent via text message to opt in users when enter store
• Dynamic – an open parking space message is sent to nearby mobile app users
• Peer to peer social networking device that shows if friends are nearby

Keyword research tools are powerful and plentiful and your competitors are using them for the same reasons as you are. This session explores keyword research “outside of the box”, mining unique or unusual sources of data for insights and opportunities that others overlook.

Richard Baxter

The problem with keyword research data is it’s a bit of a jumble, anyone can make a list, but how do you make it actionable for SEO?

How do you get from a dataset to IA?

If you can find a way to group and segment, and take away noise you can learn about priorities. By breaking down the following search query you can identify segments and groups within the phrase.

Buy used audi s3 black London

Action => condition => brand => model => colour => location

By identifying these segments you can then scale the search query to find a wider range of keywords.

The original query becomes:

Buy used audi s3 black London
Find new bmw z3 green Manchester – and so on…

Identifying the search demand curve

Make a pivot chart in excel – SEOGadget has a helpful guide

Keyword Strategy

If you have data that you can filter and make sense of then you can create keyword groups and ultimately a keyword strategy

Awesome Excel queries:

FIND()
ISERROR()
NOT()

How do I categorise keyword data?

Create a table in excel, then use an array formula – (more info contact Richard Baxter on his Twitter account

An array formula is a formula that works with an array or series of data values rather than a single data value.

Increase your data – improve perspective

• Downloading all of analytics
• Use suggest API’s to increase your KW list
• Capture search engine rankings
• Build a data set

Why this is awesome?
This data reveals more about the mechanics of a search and allows you to understand the intent and nature of search queries a lot better.

• How do people search for products in my indust
• What terms are most important to my site
• Where are the quick wins
• Are there new types of search

TOOLS
Richard has created a list of his favourite tools with small descriptions

Christine Churchill

Christine sets the tone of her presentation with her opening sentence…

“Tools will make your life easy and keep you sane”

Christine continues to identify the best keyword research tools and some of their benefits.

Google Keyword Tool

People might have noticed a change in September. The tool used to pull data from Google and partner sites, but now is just Google which led to massive drop in search volume.

• More info if logging in (more kwd’s and trend info)
• Ability to compare desktop or mobile search phrases (filters)

Google Instant
This has a direct impact on user behaviour so it is worth spending the time analysing what keywords are suggested. I have personal experience in this and is definitely worth tracking the related and suggested keywords. Rishi has done a post previously about how you can manipulate Google Instant

Ubersuggest

suggest.thinkpragmatic.net

Scrapes all suggestions from Google Instant and is a great way to download these into excel files.

Lasse Clarke Storgaard

Lasse declares himself more of a search philosopher than a practitioner and his first gem is:

“Our customer is our wife”

Lasse talks about search-economics and says it is not always important to be the first or the fastest but how well you carried out your strategy. Using a supermarket shelf analogy Lasse describe the consumer decision process to the position of products on a shelf.

Lasse states that there are 3 mindsets in the online space environment:

• Purchase 6-8%
• Consideration 10-15%
• Research 60-80%

Although the vast majority of users start off with research driven search queries you still want your client to be present on the top shelf.

Understanding that ecommerce hasn’t evolved much is key, it still has research and purchase stages so it is important to position yourself at both of the stages and to also consider the intent of the user at every step.

Kevin Gibbons

How do you optimise for long tail traffic? Especially when Google themselves say between 20 – 25% of queries have never been recorded before?

You need to understand the nature of the beast, most searches are long tail, in fact 94% taken up by long tail compared to head so if you are just focusing on head in ranking reports then you are not seeing bigger picture.

Kevin outlines 10 steps to targeting long tail traffic process:

1)    Find common search trends
2)    Answer FAQs within niche (google instant, how to queries, yahoo answers, quora)
3)    Pick out popular themed keywords in GA
4)    Use segments to analyse long tail terms (focus on 4 or more keywords)
5)    Use PPC & impression share data
6)    Use multiple tools to verify results (strategiser by wordtracker, hitwise)
7)    Estimate avg CTR (SEOmoz and Econsultancy predict between 36-42% CTR for 1st position) WMT more accurate to your industry
8)    Use excel to predict traffic vales (use click distribution to help manage expectations of clients)
9)    Filter keywords into themed group
10)    Don’t overthink it and go too long tail

Q&A

Recommended by panel to analyse internal site search, however be careful when you use these terms to create content. Make sure you use clean URLs without search query nodes and create unique content.

Look at how they are searching and look where they are searching, analytics can tell you what page they were on when they used site search. Could you identify their problem and provide the solution on the page?

Want to extract Google suggest results? Use a front end tool like ubbersuggest – or hire a developer from freelancer.com

Scraping Google for rankings? Make sure you distribute ranking request by range of IP addresses or just use existing tools such as AWR

Can you believe SEO-Chicks.com is 4 years at the end of May? We launched officially at the very first SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 2^nd 2007, myself and Julie pranced around Seattle wearing our SEO-Chicks t-shirt proudly, with no perception or plan of what we were going to do next. All we wanted to do was have our “own place” where we could chat about search and it grew from there.

As we launched the blog at SMX Advanced we thought it would be appropriate for SMX to be the place where we announce our very first EVER male blogger on SEO Chicks. And the “honour” of being the first male SEO Chicks blogger goes to: Sam Murray. The lovely Sam (or shall I say Samantha) isn’t actually at all feminine so we had to give him some help to “doll up” (oh my god I laughed so much):

Samantha Murray

Although, Sam is not the first dude to be wearing an SEO Chicks t-shirt though, in fact, none other than Rand Fishkin was the first to “cross dress” as an SEO Chick back in 2007 when we first launched (Sorry Rand, I bet you thought this was all forgotten..)

Randine Fishkin

Thanks to the SMX crew, Sam will be covering the SMX London conference along with Nichola Stott . You can also follow Sam on twitter: @SamMurray

Happy birthday SEO Chicks!

Moderated by Lisa Buyer, we have Massimo Burgio and Liana (Li) Evans

Li is up first to talk mainly about organic marketing and also some FB ad tips.

First thing to remember is that FB is difficult to work with unless you’re already connected to something – it is not a search engine. Most important thing is to know if your audience is there.

Is the audience lurking but not engaging? If so then perhaps FB ads are more appropriate.

Stickiness – games are great for this, and can be addicting.

Twitter – 200MM accounts only 20% are active, whereas FB has 500MM active accounts.

Contests can engage people e.g. SES Conf fan page, marketing tip of the week, with the prize being a book from the conference speakers.

Talking to the person, the fan works to let them know they are valuable (including bespoke content for fans).

Valuable applications e.g. the TripAdvisor app has almost half a million users.

Cross promoting from platform and brand.

Don’t do anything that isn’t valuable to the user. Valuable applications connect and also distract.

Badges (very popular with women), might seem annoying but people actually like them.

Quizzes – even the silliest are out there and prove popular.

Even profile pictures (and changing them frequently) can distract.

Use tagging wisely to benefit from the additional audience of tagged page. Li shows the NFL page and shows a post with refeence to two players, but didn’t tag them or their teams – which could have given exposure to the page to an audience of millions.

FB Ads

Extremely powerful targetting capabilities, however ad burnout happens very quickly. You have to stand-out.

Don’t blend with FB colours, use faces, high colour saturation.

Landing pages are still important.

In Summary

• FB marketing does take a lot of time and resouce.
• Needs to be integrated (e.g. use email to inform people as to what is going on on the FB page)
• Set goals and measure.
• People get bored.

Massimo Burgio

Massimo is going to talk about FB marketing tips that will get you killed.

It’s very common to get FB accounts disabled so don’t worry about pushing the boundaries. The FB police (or spam team) do exist and will figure out inconsistencies and shut down accounts or your clients accounts.

We’re shown a seriously funny video on FB etiquette which if you haven’t seen, then you should check out.

How to get your account disabled.

• Not being human/using a fake name
• Using a personal account instead of a page (for a company or brand/organisation)
• Posting copyrighted material
• Importing too many RSS feeds
• Promoting business on walls
• Scraping FB
• Getting reported as “abusive” by other users
• Starting hate groups/obscene groups
• Adding too many friends as once
• Joining too many groups

Spamming

• Don’t post identical messages on multiple walls
• Don’t place refused ads multiple times
• Adult content

Consequences

Digital signature

Bad content – online forever/indexed by search engines

Get a social media policy!

Massimo shows a list of excellent corporate social media policies as well as some cool single line e.g. Zappos “don’t be stupid”.

Solo Presentation by Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing

It is a PACKED hot room for Mr. Odden who is taking pictures of us all so we can go and tag ourselves daft on their Facebook page.

Lee asks “What is the big lie about content?” – oh yeah it’s the “build it they will come” stuff.

If you have great content… set it free!

92% of US internet users use search to find information to help inform purchase descisions (according to Ketchum study).

Search is becomming a lot more social (innit.)

85% of marketers consider content marketing as extremely important, however only 50% have a content strategy.

Most Popular Types of Content

• social
• articles
• events
• eNewsletters
• blogs

Lee asks if anyone has heard of TopRank Marketing blog. (Erm,.. yeah – I think we might of come fourth in your poll!)

We’re doing a peanut butter and jelly analogy where peanut butter is SEO (‘cos it totally would be) and social media is the jelly (which is actually jam).

So how does this sandwich connect with the consumer?

“I need lightbulbs” – therefore I search; and the SERP presents us with “5 lightbulbs that save you money” i.e. social commentary on a purchase – which is where the peanut butter meets the jelly.

Brands as Publishers

Proctor and Gamble brought content like Dawsons Creek to the world (if there aren’t enough reasons to dislike them already).

Ford publish a “publication” style website, very information-rich.

On TopRank – having an awesome content strategy means…

• 25,000 kw a month bringing traffic to their blog
• 600K+ links
• Great staff
• and some stuff I missed (NS)

liveblog in progress – this will update

3 Types of SEO Content Optimisation Strategies

• Audit existing offline and bring it online
• Optimise priority content
• Develop new content and editorial plan for adding content

Checklist

• goals
• buyer personas (who, how do they discover & consume?)
• KW
• content & assets
• editorial plan

More on buyer personas,.. data sources include customer surveys, web analytics, conversion data, social media listening tools, demog info, KW info, engagement info (PostRank).

Forrester social media profile tool.

Flowtown Appending Service (which collates and analyses the social sphere) and allows for the construction of a soc/dem profile; which if we can do so allows us to create a killer CMO strategy.

Keyword research tools and social KW tools are also incredibly useful for establishing user interest.

SMM tools scrape the social sphere and present our social data (as search engines scrape content and present site data, ranked algorithmically).

Once you have the content themes and ideas in place you need an editorial calendar (which includes multiple platforms inc. social media.) Also consider how you can re-use content across platforms.

Hub & Spoke Publishing

I.e. with site in the center and social publishing outlets as the spokes of the wheel, also incl. PR outlets and industry publications. So a multi-media content distribution strategy with site as central.

Also – think of channels not just media i.e blogging, RSS, email etc.

Model – Cycle of social and SEO

• create promote
• noticed and shared
• attract momentum
• inc. links and social exposure
• that traffic (and data therefrom) informs development

Lee has 45,000 subscribers on their blog (which is more than SearchEngineWatch apparently)!

Tie social media efforts together in distribution channels – which in turn feeds niche blogs, which leads to links!

Repurposing Content

Event occurs; upload video, embed in blog post, post screenshots in flickr, upload images with text as a story in PPT. One piece four ways.

Another example is video transcription.

Lee recommends embedding video and images in PRWeb content.

Content curation is in effect, a method of re-purposing content.

Take aways

• Develop & optimise content with customer personas in mind
• create an editorial plan
• develop your distribution channels

http://tprk.us/cmgsesuk for the TopRank Guide to Content Marketing & Optimisation

Questions – Kelvin asks why don’t people favour audio content? Why don’t we emphasise that kind of content?

Lee – I don’t have data as to why that is and admits to not heavily promoting that content. He fesses up “I don’t know”.

Nicola, of Pira International asks “how do we get internal stakeholders excited about content”?

Lee – there are a number of strategies but fear works well. Look at the consequences of what will happen if we don’t. Look at stats, numbers case studies.

Moderator – Gillian Muessig

Speaker – Dixon Jones

Speaker – Judith Lewis

Speaker – Ken McGaffin

Looks like Gillian is MIA so Judith is warming up the crowd with some @greenandblacks good stuff.

Judith Lewis – Beyond fills in, to intro for Dixon. Hands over to Dixon.

Dixon Jones – MajeticSEO

We’re looking at what defines success; correlatrions between links and traffic.

1st Case Study: beautifulpeople.com

Dating site, pretty common, competetive, not particulalry newsworthy.

Aim was to create a storm by kicking out all the fat member (7000) of the site, which worked extremely well as linkbait and in terms of articles.

“Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model” (CEO quote). Perfect linkbait, got national coverage.

Story came out 4th January 2010, and looking at link graph using domain discovery report (Majestic) shows that the links go bang in Q1 2010.

Activity was stoked by follow-up press releases about brits being ugliest people in the world etc.

In this particular case the link graph and traffic correlated highly, which is the hallmark of a great link campaign.

Press releases were the main communication method for this – but the question is – is there something stickier?

Case study 2.

XE.com – became the authority on the web, which they did by creating  a link-magnet of a widget. They are number 1 for their headline phrase, however they are beginning to lose traffic. Possible loss of site-wide links? Usurped by better/slicker conversion widget?

Lesson – being number 1 is not always enough and do not assume that links are forever.

Case Study 3 – Paper.li

Collates a personalised “best of” tweets and RT’s from those in your feed. Dixon calls this “technobait”. Content is collated and geared to the individual, but the fact the Paper.li is “published” via twitter, showing which users are featured as content contributors, combined technobait, with egobait, meaning their non-cumulative link generation has seen phenomenal growth.

Campaign is therefore exponential. Doesn’t matter if Google sees this as good or bad, as “duplicate content” or less than original.

Lessons

Social link elements have added virality

Play to vanity (even wordpress plays to this with pingbacks)

Good links = good traffic

Press can be good but technology can be more powerful

Anne Kennedy steps in for Gillian and introduces Judith.

Judith Lewis – Beyond

What is the motivation for becomming a link magnet?

Sharing is one way, becomming a useful resource in your community.

Create a strategy – why dictates the strategy

• Personal fame
• understand voice
• choose name, register, publish
• Register domain, and all social spaces

be careful, if you want to be a personal link magnet as a representitive of company, then who owns that intellectual property.

Copy a winning strategy – e.g. drinkbait campaign

Project Your Voice

• Blog
• Guest blog
• Speaking

Obligatory top 10 link magnet ideas

• controversial
• be the font of all knowledge
• take a stand
• personality
• share
• funny
• prolific
• mysterious
• buy links

That’s why Judith does the chocolate thing! Now using this strategy Judith pwns all bar one on the top 10, as opposed to previously 2 out of top 7.

Anne Kennedy asks Judith for a comment on JCP – “don’t buy stupid links”.

This is a liveblog in progress and will update…

Final speaker is Ken McGaffin of Wordtracker, who is going to offer a slightly different stance.

Ken is going to look at creative ideas/products/tools as link magnets.

1. Free tools ( a good idea will continue to bring traffic and links months and months, if not years after launch)

Creativity is a skill that can be learned. Ken quotes Kipling “I keep six honest serving men they taught me all I knew; Their names are What and Why and When, And How and Where and Who.” (I have no idea where this point went – NS).

How many people watched the Golden Globes? Very few – however all the coverage and re-views came from the Ricky Jervais publicity. Who was Jervais’ audience? Not those at the awards, not really even those at home. His audience was the press, bloggers, online sharing (linkerati).

Whole event and the selection of Jervais as host is an absolute ratings coup.

Ken asks – how can we apply this kind of traditional PR mentality/creativity to a magnetic link campaign.

Key Lessons:

• Get creative
• Identify top targets (using link analysis for influential links not competitor links)
• Create something oustatnding
• Generate direct income
• Prime your top targets
• Write customised press releases
• Tweet about the launch extensively
• Monitor results and add new linking sites to target lists