I thought it was worth a mention to comment on the engagement online and angle the paper is taking as experts in travel and the place for experts to discuss travel.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of users (I am sure they are not all staged questions from their PRs!) and the use of inline polls on topics to gauge the participants opinions.

This I think could be the future for ‘experts’ to host the discussion.  Little shocked though on how little onsite promotion they had.  Maybe they are warming up.  Well done – Matt – you look tired after all that typing!!

Pranav demonstrates his Gesture Interface Devises (GID).  My favourites were his augmented projector helmet! And the camera device demo when he walks around the city and the technology displays his augmented information such as reviews on books in a shop, live updates to information in newspapers such as weather or news through to way of showing information about people we meet.

I liked the way he summed it up “Humans we are not interested in computers – we are interested in answers and knowledge”

I personally like this type of “geeky” research as it makes technology work for us, rather than us having to sit in front of a computer interacting on its terms.

Check out the video for yourself.

There have been some more shifts, changes and shake downs in my macro world. Bing and Yahoo are doing things together. Google is launching a new product or service every other week. Algo changes towards brands, something about caffeine and social media & “real time”. The ever-ever-flux of the SERPs. Personalisation of SERPs even for people without accounts. New innovations in search from fringe players (love the visual search from Bing). With as much advice, commentary, and noise in the SEO community as every (me included). 2009 has been busy in SEO.

So, at this festive time I thought I would jot down some notes to self and anyone else who wants to read them.

Now the fundamentals won’t change in twenty-ten of:

1. Make accessible pages
2. Understand your audience and how they search and use their keywords and key phrases
3. To build out content and a site that users value and engage with, and
4. Earn inbound links from authoritative site organically or with some help

But on top of this I was thinking about my New Year resolutions for SEO 2010. Here is my provisional list:

1. It’s all about Conversion in 2010

You have done everything you can to get visitors to your site. You have worked on accessibility and site performance. You have even optimized your meta to help with your public SERPs snippet. You need to do one more thing – work on Conversion. This is the next easiest thing you can do to affect your bottom line. If your targets are $£€ then you have your visits, now you need to make them work harder. If you are able do MVTs (Multi-Variant Tests) do so. Keep your best known page for SEO, as the default, but change the order, presentation, layout of your page and content and measure what is best for visitor conversion. A small percentage improvement could mean tens of thousands of dollars per day.

2. ROI, ROI, ROI

Take the reports you have asked for over the last year and really use them. There are obvious caveats about some reports around rankings, pages in the indexes etc etc. But spider reports and onsite metrics you have to trust. We all know there are issues with last click attribution but it is equally wrong for everyone. If SEO is to be taken seriously within the organisation and resources appropriately, senior management have to believe and the easiest thing you can do is find “causality”. If you pay for something; what does it do for you? And if you can prove that with numbers you will be a serious corporate SEO.

3. Team, team, team

There is so much knowledge within your own teams. Use it. Maybe we should hold an internal SEO summit with a real example ‘Show and tell’. You can learn more from things that don’t work sometimes. And if you set up a prefix of total honesty and amnesty you can learn a lot.
This could be with your own team or with other SEOs within your company or family of companies. And if you are brave within your extended network and non-competitors. You can easily set up internal d-lists and allow your widen stakeholders to pose questions, share observations etc etc. Ideas are not exclusive to people with SEO in their job title. The skill of a corporate SEO is the harness this enthusiasm and filter for the nuggets that can make a difference.

4. Read less blogs and rely on my own experience

This year I have found so many blogs from SEO commentators that get recycled extensively especially if they have a great headline or claim to have an inside tip. But much of these have been noise. I think my ego is big enough and knowledge secure enough to read a smaller set of sites/authors that I respect.

5. Sign up for the Webmaster Tools and use them

There is an ever increasing about of real information being shared back within the tools especially Google’s webmaster central. From the simple optimisation, a clue to crawl behaviour and crawl errors, to feedback on sitemaps, to page load speeds and performance to the engines telling you if you have any problems. If this matches to your own bot and user metrics then there is something in it. These tools for robots.txt and parameter handling are especially useful if you work for a large corporate and making the proper changes is difficult to do. Generally a clean site is a healthy site.

That’s my draft SEO resolutions as of the 27th. Maybe I will think of more before 2010 starts?

Here is my latest version.

“SEO is about 3 things. You need to make your website totally accessible to all search engines and users alike.
You need to making sure your site content is relevant and engaging. And then make your site as popular as it can be. And, more popular than your competition. And that’s it.”

Or Accessibility, Usability and Linking strategies.  The secret is knowing how to combine them into a pragmatic plan.

How do you explain it?

I am on the phone with you and we are comparing rankings. I am in London and you in New York. I bet we see different results. The major players try to help with geo-targeting results. Especially if you have a geography in the search term.

You see ranking different to me?! Are you logged into your Gmail account when searching in Google. I bet the boss has been obsessing about a competitor, on their site for days. And then searches for us, we won’t be there and the competitor is there in natural search and PPC. The engines believe is you have been to site a lot, then you like it and gives you it more in your personalized results.

Vanity terms. People always talk about the vanity terms of very precise terms/phrases. But being high on this term may not be the terms that will actually make your money. You can always use your PPC campaigns to validate and if necessary educate your stakeholders. Maybe you too focus on these terms and you wonder why with a good position the $$$ isn’t rolling in!?

Universal or blended search. It seems and from bitter experience you get a #1 ranking and then the engines decide to put a map, with listings, reviews, news, stock information or a image above the classic one spot. So your potential click through rate has vanished!

Although I always love a number one ranking. And still a secret objective!

I too can appreciate that social media (SMO) is not right for everyone and everyone’s business. And after some pilots I have run, your customers may point you in the real direction.  But not to act seems to be a lost opportunity.

To measure ROI on social media is difficult if you are comparing to conventional channels.  You should ask yourself whether a Twitter followerer or Facebook fan is worth <, > or = to a newsletter sign-up? And whether a highly engaged internet active, prequalified online early adopter is the type of customer you should be appealing to?

With one foot in the marketing world, I hear my colleagues past and present talk about “customer centric”, “customer engagement” and “top of mind”.  Surely any medium that allows the customer to be in charge of comms/info/receiving deals is a good thing.  And brands that encourage people to engage I predict will be the winners in the long term.

Anyway, watch their video, it is better than I can type here – what do you think?

Product Ads on Google

Its another move into supply chain integration and control demand!

When Google starts to have its own warehouse and fulfilment team. You really won’t need to leave Google!

Still love them and hate them in equal measures. Or is this just jealousy that I didn’t think of it first?

Having worked for some excellent managers, some OK, and unluckily historically some bad managers this intrigued me into thinking about Me, how I act and am perceived by immediate reports, peers and virtual teams.

So, I thought I would share somes notes.  I am sure I am opening myself up for ton of abuse from people who know me, but would be fascinated in hearing what you think I should add to these categories.

Good traits in a people manager/team leader

• Accessible & Personable
• Knowledgeable and can communicate it
• Respected and shows respects to other
• Open & Honest
• Fair & Consistent
• 1-2-1’s are on time and add value
• Timely feedback
• Awards credit when it is due
• Receives feedback
• Cares about Me

What traits makes a bad people manager?

• Vague (in all forms)
• Personality misfit, lacks social skills
• Unrealistic targets or expectations
• Picks on employees
• Pits 1 employee against another
• Changes their mind all of the time
• Micromanages
• Lies (especially when they say publicly different things to what they advise you)

And then, being the thinking type I am and trying to be fair.

There are on occasions when circumstances or the environment can make this hard or fall straight to the bad category.  It is possible to have a circumstance that your manager  is under orders, or a company culture actually puts up barriers you and them being a  good manager.  These could be:

Excuses for being a bad people manager!

• Development opportunities as reward/goals are limited by the company
• Office politics
• Changing orgs and re-orgs
• Communications styles are dictated by a higher power
• Fear and Fears
• Lack of knowledge
• Lack of experience in being a people manager
• Time/Prioritisation imposed upon them
• And I am sure the list goes on

What do you think?

Opinions welcome.  Unless you are in one of my teams! Then “SHUT UP and DO SOME WORK!”

If you go to Google.com for Mortgages you will see this type of screen.

Mortgage comparison on Google.com adwords

If you are running adwords, and you are in a competitive comparison rich areana, get clicking those ‘include’ me buttons today.

It seems to add value to their users, Google is once again working on supply chain integration (or is that eradication?).