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

Before I begin, I would like to say thank you to all the SEO Chicks for letting me be the first ‘chick with a dick’ to post on their site. It is a huge honour and I got to dress up like a girl so everyone’s a winner. After trying on the t-shirt I must admit it looked like a boob tube on me so it’s an experience I would like to forget, especially since Nick Williams thought I looked like this butch chap when I put on the wig as well:

However, I am wearing the t-shirt with pride today, even though it is underneath my ‘normal’ sized shirt. I hope you like my coverage of SMX today and feel free to ask me any questions on my Twitter account or in the comments section below.

Our first session today from #SMX is about search analytics and competitive intelligence.

This process has continue to evolve over time, in the early days of search a lot of people were doing it in a vacuum, however the reality is very different. It is very very competitive, especially in certain industries and if you are not aware of what your competitors are doing they are certainly aware of you and your activity.

We have two speakers today @dsottimano and @johnstraw They both look at how can you look at your competitor and how you can use the information to your own advantage.

David Sottimano

The main objective behind competitor analysis is how to turn your findings into something actionable.

Inevitable question – why are we not #1

Everyone has experienced this question and may have gone off to analyse client’s competitors and even produced a lovely spreadsheet with all their findings. However, we need to make it client friendly. Try to give a solid response. This is why…. Now go off and ask yourself can we replicate and how can we make it better?

Make sense of your findings, seeing it clearly:

“If time be all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.”

Benjamin Franklin.

Try not to waste your time, realise why you are carrying out the comp analysis

Identify Competitors

Offline to online – There is a difference, inform and explain to your client

Figure out exactly what space they are competing on, is there a match? Is it similar?

Educate you client

Available Google document for you to use

Three main benefits of using this system:

-          Identify competitors by frequency (solid, accurate data)

-          Identify similar sites that don’t sell your product, approach them as link target

-          Repeat the process every 2 weeks, identify new competitors & their tactics

Use a valid metric

Can’t use competitors traffic estimates as a reliable metric, so ranking is the only feasible metric.

Get data for high level decision

Create excel table:

Your keyword list (actual and hopeful)

Rankings (you and comps)

URLs ranking for each keyword

Create columns in spreadsheet that identifies:

• Keyword
• My rank
• My ranking URL
• Section (blog, category etc..)

Make sense of it all – give it a value

Which content drives their rankings/most valuable

How to do this – example

How many #1 spots for each keyword multiplied by the weight you give a number 1 spot

8 #1 rankings X 40% (weight)

+

6 #5 RANKINGS X 8% (weight)

=

THEIR Q&A SEARCH DOMAINCE SCORE

This is answer to the question

Now think like an SEO and use the tools you have and know about to develop your plan of attack.

Deep Dive

Screamingfrog.co.uk + other tools – majestic, SEOmoz

Actions are to build a better Q&A or get UGC, optimise and expose to SEs

There was a lot of actionable information here so make sure you try it out.

John Straw

John started off his presentation with some questions that raised some interesting points. Getting intimate with competitors

80% of people put their hand up if they were getting regular competitive intelligence

50% of the audience thought this data is actionable

ONLY 20% of these people believe they are actually actioning it

INDUSTRY PROBLEM – Plenty of people talk or blog about using competitive advantage BUT not enough people action it

Where we get data from?

OSE

Free, not very fresh, updated every 30 days (long time in SEO) nothing like as large as Google’s index

Majestic

Free-ish, its fresh, nearly as large as google, only reports link data

If only looking at links you are not being effective. This is true, you need to combine this data with analysis of on page elements to really visualise what they are doing. Maybe they are implementing on page features that have not taken off yet (obtain the links that would make you notice) but by visiting their site and reviewing it you can see what they are doing way before it has an impact.

John went on to discuss the benefits of building your own tools and hiring mathematicians to create algorithms. Their team has created a tool that matches nearly 70% correlation with PageRank.

Use the Linkdex and Yoast WordPress plugin integration to help make some sense of this.

This touches on the same points as David, using the tool breaks down sections where they are active, such as blogs, directories, forums, news, or social presence.

One great TIP is if you compare over period of time and see where growth comes from

If anyone has their own crawlers speak to JS and he will give you algorithm for you to use @johnstraw

Thomas Barker works as a Digital Marketing Executive at Lynch Buchanan and has been doing SEO for 1 year, he has also started doing some freelance SEO consultancy.

Here’s what Thomas had to say “I just wanted to say thank you very much for the tickets to SMX London next week. It’s a great opportunity for somebody like me who has only been in Search for about a year and doesn’t have the backing or funds to attend the industry leading events. I’m so thrilled about it and hope I can make the most out of this great opportunity the amazing girls at SEOChicks have given me!”

We like him already. Congratulations Thomas, looking forward to meet you next week!

Grab your gadgets and gladrags it’s time for the summer conferences, wohoo! SMX Advanced is coming to London town this May, and for the second year in a row they have teamed up with the guys at International Search Summit to deliver a truly awesome Search conference. Fancy going? Don’t fret, as this year the SEO-Chicks have partnered up with SMX as blog partners so we can offer YOU some sweeeet discount:

All you need to do is quote the following to get your 15% off: SEOCHICK011

SMX Advanced is on Mon 16th and Tues 17th May
Full agenda

Search Summit is on Wedn 18th May
Full Agenda

Where: Both conferences will be held at the rather posh Millenium Gloucester Hotel and Conference centre in Kensington, “oh ja my dear, grab that cap and tweed jumper and let’s go shoot some foxes”.

Who’s going to be there?: Well the SEO-Chicks for a start But also a whole bunch of awesome speakers, brands and bloggers.

Still can’t mustle up the money to go? Don’t worry, The SEO-Chicks will keep you posted as we will be live blogging at the conference. If you want us to cover a specific session please let us know in the comments below or tweet us @SEOChicks

See you there!

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

Meaningful SEO Metrics – Going Beyond the Numbers

Moderator – Brian Clifton

Speaker – Matthew Bailey

Speaker – Peter Young

Brian Clifton introduces the concept of web analytics by saying that for many it can be off-putting, however Brian defines it as “measuring the user experience” in order to improve it. Two types of tools – on and off-site analytics.

On – what happens when a visitor comes, what do they do, how do they engage? To a large extent it is site-determined, and within our control.

Off-site – less within our control, e.g. search rankings or 3rd party mention.

The challenge for the web analytics industry is “how do we bring these together?”

Brian hands over to our speakers, kicking off with Peter Young, who is focusing on off-site metrics.

Peter Young – Brilliant Media: Objectives, looking at what constitutes success can differ. SEO professionals can tend to be metric obsessed or rank obsessed, wereas from a client perspective leads and conversions are what matters.

Secondary metrics e.g. views, likes etc/>

Traditional issues with SEO Metrics: not always traditionally aligned. Technology lacking the sophistocatin to provide a 360 on and off-site view.

Combined with a huge increase in SEO investment as part of marketing mix, driven by greater wealth of data. Net result being increased accountability from an SEO perspective.

Four Rs – ROI, Response, Reach and Reason

Can our data and campaign meet/answer these criteria? How and why?

In measurng the success of these campaigns it is incremental increases that count. Fundamental to that is to establish a benchmark.

Understanding CTR forecasting is essential to understanding profitability potential. Some data sources out there – none of which can be 100% accurate and variables must be considered i.e

• search intent
• queries
• serp cannibalisation
• blended search results

Essential data types

• volumes
• existing client data
• conversions etc
• seasonality

Halo Effect

Look at share of voice, not just primary keywords but whole market sector. Raven or Advanced Web Ranking tools can provide good data here.

Integration and De-duplication

Integrated tracking allows opportunities

• actual channel blend
• blended search ROI
• channel impact of one channel on another
• understanding of client online marketing behaviour

Tracking offline – online?

Adinsight or Infinity – new tools that allow for click to call tracking (call centre activity down to SE and KW level.

Econometrics – using mathermatical models to measure the number of in-store sales driven by increased website visits.

Take Aways

• Report metrics that matter to the client not internal success
• Simple forecasting at start of campaign to benchmark
• De-dupe conversions with attribution
• Don’t look at “hero” rankings in isolation – look at the bigger picture if possible

Second part about to start,… this post will update.

Matt Bailey – SiteLogic: Make the data more communicable in order to make it more meaningful. Matt speaks about Ed Tufty “the godfather of data visualisation” – if you want a better understanding of data – add more data (but don’t show that to the CEO).

6 Keys to Integration

• show mutli-variate data (i.e. more data points)
• Show comparisons
• Show causality (if you don’t ask why – you’re not a good analyst)
• Show different reports for different sorts (of people)
• Show the money

Your job as the analyst is to show where the money is, where it’s going, how to make more.

Reports: don’t get stuck in “caveman analytics”

• Pageviews
• “Hits”
• Rankings

More data points = more comparators. Pivot tables rule!

Better comparison = better causality analysis.

Matt recommends multiple computers and multiple monitors – whilst looking at the data, you need to  be looking at the page/the item/action that the data represents on that site.

Segment aquisition, then determine causality, and to do that we need to understand context. I.e an in-text ad in quality content carries greater content than a URL shortened twitter link.

As a result those that visit from twitter may not stay as long as those that visit from the former type of link.

News sites – same contextual argument to be had.

Example shown of a high-bounce prod. page. By looking on various monitors the team discovered the page would stretch to screen size, thus distorting the appearance of the landing page.

Do a 404 report in analytics – look to see if people are finding your error pages (not just Googlebot). What is taking them there – what’s the nav route?

Segment by entry point – average conversion rate – 2.2%, made up of homepage on #3 with conversion rate at 1.8% and a category page in #12 at 4.3% conversion (effectively same number of sales). Took the decision to de-prioritise the homepage and focus on linkbuilding on the product page to drive sales.

Fret not, if you haven’t got a ticket for SES London 2011, as the SEO Chicks will be out in force (like Delta Force.)  Unfortunately Sarah Carling can’t be with us, as she is pretending to be Canadian. Lisa Myers and Judith Lewis will be speaking at various sessions, whilst I’ll be covering some of the main events, with some support from Julie Joyce.

Here’s the dates and times of the sessions I’ll be covering. The intention is to liveblog, so keep an eye on the hashtags #SESUK and #SESLondon.

Day 1: Tuesday 22nd February

2:45 – 3:45 Track 2. Meaningful SEO Metrics

Speakers: Brian Clifton, Matthew Bailey and Peter Young

4:00 – 5:00 Track 1. How to Become a Link Magnet

Speakers: Gillian Muessig (Mod), with Dixon Jones, Judith Lewis and Ken McGaffin (panel)

In the evening I’ll be heading along to the LondonSEO Big Party, which is open to anyone in the SEO (and related search fields) that happens to be in town and wants to go and have some fun, make some new friends and business contacts.

Day 2. Wednesday 23rd February

9:30 – 10:30 Track 2. Monetising Social Commerce

Solo presentation by John Butler, Global Head – Communications & Media, dunnhumby

11:00 – 12:00 Track 3. Content Marketing Optimisation

Solo presentation by Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing

1:00 – 2:00 Track 1. Why Does Search Get All the Credit

Speakers: Bill Hunt (Moderating), with Nick beck and Paul Mead on the panel.

2:30 – 3:30 Track 1. Is Search Remarketing/Retargetting Right for You?

Speakers: Matt McGowan (moderator) with James Yancey, Guy Levine and Magnus Nilsson on the panel.

Wednesday nights’ entertainment; the SES London Networking Party starts at 7:00 pm, on board HMS President. Due to head-count restrictions this is for conference attendees only and you must show your pass.

Make sure you bring a business card for a chance to win one of five super-cool Raven Tools t-shirts!

Day 3. Thursday 24th February

9:30 – 10:30 Track 3. Video Search Optimisation

Speakers: Sean Hargrave (moderating) with Paul Carff, Will Critchlow and Jonathan Allen on the panel.

10:45 – 11:45 Track 3. Local 2.0 – The Evolution of Local Search

Speakers: Andy Atkins-Kruger (moderating) with Lisa Myers and Jens Munch on the panel.

Karma, undying affection and a possible Raven t-shirt will go to anyone who brings me coffee whilst I fly around the conference centre trying to be in the right place, early and with signal.

The SEO Chicks are pleased to announce this years “must attend” Networking Party on Wednesday 23rd of February on a boat on the river Thames. Yeah you heard it right, a boat…FUN!

SES London is only a few weeks away (21-25th February) and is set to be yet another fabulous conference with some cracking speakers lined up, sharing their SEO, SEM and Social Media strategies and tips. This year the conference has changed venue and is held at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, in Westminster. Over 1500 knowledge hungry attendees are expected this year for 3 days of Search & Social Media sessions. But it can’t be all work and no play, so one of our own Chicks, Nichola Stott is organising the party this year; ably assisted by the wonderful, Joanna Butler and myself and backed up with the support of Incisive Media (the people behind SES.)

We went in search for sponsors and are very pleased to have on board Raven SEO Tools as our main venue sponsors (if it wasn’t for them the party would have been in some boring bar) and last but not least our second sponsor Linkdex. Both sponsors have been very generous and put some money behind the bar, so the evening will start off with a FREE bar, though as us search marketers are a sociable bunch its best to get to the venue as early as possible if you are banking on a few free drinks.

So if you are going to SES London be sure to put the networking party in YOUR diary:

VENUE: HMS President
TIME: 7.00 – 11.30
ENTRY: SES conference attendees only (must show conference pass at the door)
CAPACITY: 350 people max (therefore you must arrive early to be sure to be admitted)

The HMS President – this historic boat even has it’s on Wikipedia page

See YOU at the party, whoop whoop!

Finally; keep your eyes on Nichola’s company blog: theMediaFlow blog for updates and further details on the party closer to the time.