Spending £6 million (yes, 6 million pounds!) to develop another advert depicting a ‘classic Christmas scene’ involving too much snow and an old plinky-plonky classic covered by some woman with a piano (really, ‘the power of love’?!) just seems dull. I was greeted by multiple posts of ‘John Lewis have done it again…’, ‘OMG snowman love’ and ‘I <3 snow', as well as other inane crap filling up my Facebook feed this morning, only then did I realise that it was that time of year again; it's 'John Lewis season'.

Now, John Lewis have been doing really well over the last couple of years, reeling in great revenue figures in a prolonged period of economic depression. Before you say it, I’m not bitter at all; I’m fully in support of errr Mr. Lewis. But seriously, is this just how uncreative we need to be with advertising these days to get every mother, father and child (who, is probably entirely against the notion) to rush to John Lewis with awe in their eyes and their wallets open? Screw it, next year why not get Santa himself in, fire him out of a giant present cannon and piss Christmas in the face of the whole country, while Adele is playing a plinky-plonky version of a Chris de Burgh ‘classic’ and yodelling away in the background.

Although I’d strongly warn you from it, here’s the Christmassy shit-storm to see for yourself…

How the John Lewis Christmas Advert 2012 Could be Improved:

I’m more than a bit bored of this now, although I work in digital marketing and therefore I’m meant to ‘understand’ the message they’re trying to get across. So, after constructing a somewhat critical analysis of the new John Lewis Christmas advert, I’ve provided some recommendations of how I would improve it below:

1. A kid running in and knocking the head off the snowman at the end, or, at any time during the advert

2. A dog urinating on either snowman/woman at any point during the advert

3. The advert to run as it does in entirety but the snowman to have a snow penis and the snowoman to have snow boobs (see below)

4. My personal favourite: The sun coming out (as it tends to at Christmas in the UK these days) and them both melting like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some love story now John…

Don’t get me wrong either, I’m Christmas’s number 1 fan. Seriously, I love Christmas it’s one of my favourite times of the year, but this time next year please; please, please, please, let me get what I want this time…

“At the end of October three friends of very varying degrees of athleticism (Emma, Harald and myself Tom) will attempt to run the grueling Snowdonia Marathon to raise money for Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY).

According to CRY, every week in the UK at least 12 apparently fit, healthy, young people die of undiagnosed heart conditions. We were personally touched by this tragic fact last year when Stewart, one of our close friends, died suddenly (aged 30) whilst training to get fit for his wedding.

He was always adventurous and we wanted to do something that would have both made him proud and hopefully raise money to prevent other families and friends going through this heartbreaking situation.

CRY aims to prevent these tragedies occurring by screening those most at risk and, with the help of celebrity patrons like Sir Steve Redgrave and David Walliams, raise awareness of undetected cardiac conditions and Sudden Adult Death. The charity also provides bereavement support for all those suffering from the loss of a loved one as a result of these conditions.

Please help us to support this hard-working UK charity by donating whatever you can afford. Thank you.”

You can pledge your support on their donation page

Powerpoint is something I’ve still got a lot to learn about and am sure I will perfect with time. In the meantime, due to spending an inordinate amount of time with Powerpoint, I went a little crazy [read: corny] and developed the mantra below, in true Full Metal Jacket style:

This is my Powerpoint. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My Powerpoint is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My Powerpoint, without me, is useless. Without my Powerpoint, I am useless. I must fire my Powerpoint true. I must deliver it straighter than any competitor who is trying to outspeak me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will… My Powerpoint and myself know that what counts in this war is not the time we speak for, the repeats of the presentation, nor the amount of social shares it attracts. We know that it is the understanding that counts. We will educate…

My Powerpoint is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weakness, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its custom animations and its slide master. I will keep my Powerpoint clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will….

Before God I swear this creed. My Powerpoint and myself are the defenders of my company. We are the masters of our competitors. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is ours and there is no competition, but collaboration.

While I could take my time in fully exploring this further, a great infographic explaining the differences between the formats and why they’re so useful was posted over on SEOMoz by Selena Narayanasamy from Blueglass Interactive, you can see this useful guide yourself below:

Visual Guide to Rich Snippets on SEOmoz created by BlueGlass Interactive.

Having not seen it before (and also mistaking it for the ‘verified’ logos that cropped up a few months ago…) I clicked on it and it led to this:

Which (evidently) appears to be the users personal ‘Twitter Translation Centre page’ showing the ‘level of translator’, ‘no. of translations’, ‘votes’ and ‘approved translations’. This appears to all be part of a broader service/objective to begin translating the whole of Twitter. They have also employed a gamified way of approaching this, with the more trusted translators receiving higher scores.

In my opinion, this is a very interesting and savvy business move by the social network and a move toward broadening their user base. This is also interesting considering some of the implications this could have on the media increasingly using Twitter to report ‘on the ground’ on global events. This truly will show messages from the people experiencing these newsworthy happenings.

I think this is great and a really interesting move by Twitter! What are your thoughts on this…?

GroupON’s end of year figures were published recently and show that they finished with a whopping $1.6 BILLION in revenues, up 419% from last year! Hooray! I hear you cheer, I’ll get the drinks in! But before you head off to the bar, I wouldn’t get too excited though, as revenue can be a very misleading figure. Profit is really where you want to be looking at, something that we’re very conscious of at Quirk (the company where I currently work) and is often preached by our company leaders.

Taking a look a GroupON’s profit figures tells a very different story… It has reported an ‘unexpected’ loss of $42.7 million. One can assume the ‘unexpected’ refers to their investors reaction when the bank calls for a second mortgage on their house…

The moral of the story is not that Internet ventures such as GroupON cannot work with incredibly rapid expansion, nor that GroupONs offering is poor (hell, I would’ve invested when it first came onto the scene if I had the money!). However, as we all know, and some of us have experienced in the digital world, the devil is always in the detail. Digital firms more often implode, or wither away like Charlie Sheen’s bank balance, because of over-accelerated expansion and poor strategic thinking. Put simply, GroupON cannot rely simply on its rapidly growing user base to continue to invest in their repetitive deals. Doing so would be self-alienating. Eventually their growth will plateau, and those who are not their customers yet will have spent their money elsewhere, probably with one of GroupONs countless competitors.

Poor attention to detail, has been one of GroupON’s downfalls. An example of this can be seen with a little acid test I have created:

• Consider you’re an existing GroupON user trying to reach your account.
• Go to Google and type ‘GroupON’, then click the PPC result*.
• Can you reach your account, or is the landing page simply [and hungrily] trying to capture your email address…?

GroupON have paid for that click and achieved nothing but an extra few cents on their PPC bill for the month.

• So you return to Google and click another result, and perhaps another, until you can reach your account to print your latest GroupON voucher.

This lack of attention, coupled with their aggressive international expansion has put them in a very precarious position where many digital firms find themselves, where their only option is to sink or swim. I, for one won’t be throwing them a lifejacket, but it’s okay, they’re probably competent swimmers having completed their discount PADI introductory course seven times over…

What are your thoughts on GroupON or similar deal related sites? Do you agree or disagree with the points I make above? I’d be interested to see if I’m not the only one thinking this way…

*This may differ in other markets, but I’d be curious to know…

Below is a run down of the 6 talks that I attended and all of the great tips that I picked up:

SEO for eCommerce (By Barry Adams, Pierce Communications)

Certainly one of my favourite talks of the day. The content was very relevant to some of the main clients I have been working with and doing a lot of the research for. Essentially some great ways of tying SEO activity directly to the bottom line, something that is a constant struggle for many SEOs. My top tips from this session are included below:

Top tips

1. Identify top revenue generating keywords “focus on where the money is”

2. But, don’t forget about brand terms – they often convert the best

3. Find out which product pages you have (unexpectedly) good rankings for; consider increasing the price and/or upselling.

4. Use internal [site] search and track it in GA, a great source of promotional activity

5. Site structure is key in SEO for eCommerce

6. As much as possible upload multiple hi-res images for each product. Ensure that all alt attributes are filled in too.

7. Build a GA filter for image search traffic, often shows you how little traffic converts from image search but can uncover areas of interest/investment.

8. Use faceted navigation. Name facets appropriately, using keywords and brands for SEO purposes. Filter/block facets that don’t add semantic value (prize, size, etc). But beware of the potential for duplicate content issues.

9. Write unique descriptions for each product as good as you can make them, this does help!

10. ‘Gamify your shopping cart’ drive a user to purchase additional items e.g. “only £3.50 to go to qualify for free shipping!”

11. “Ensure that delivery information is right there on the product page, if people go looking for it, you may lose them!”.

12. DON’T 404 OUT OF STOCK PRODUCTS! Keep the page and identify to the user that it’s out of stock.

13. If a product is out of stock then include related products/cross-sell. Then, after a grace period 301 redirect back to in-stock products to retain link equity.

14. “You are Google Shopping’s bitch”, but utilising tracking parameters in Google shopping feed can help with this.

15. Attract seller reviews (note: different from product reviews) to enhance you Google Shopping visibility. Attract these from shopping comparison sites, such as: Ciao UK, Dooyoo.co.uk, Kelkoo UK, PriceGrabber.co.uk, ReviewCentre.com, TrustE-Marketing, TRUSTPILOT, Feefo

16. Attract product reviews, but remember! These don’t need to be created on your own site can come from review sites.

17. Mark up product/seller reviews with Schema.org. Microdata for products reviews (star ratings) and also for store locations if you have different ones…

18. Link building for ecommerce should utilise the following methods: Blogger outreach (very powerful if used correctly), awards, giveaways

19. Once you have engaged with bloggers: Invite them to industry events, award ceremonies, conferences…?

20. Focus link building on product category pages where possible, otherwise “if the product is discontinued you’re screwed”

21. Encourage social sharing of products by including social sharing buttons on product pages and order confirmation product, ‘it’s not hard to do and it does help!’

Barry is one of the UK SEO ‘heavy weights’ and is a name often bounded about when regarding SEO for eCommerce, therefore having him talk and socialise (over and above just interacting with him via Twitter & Facebook) is a shining example of why events like ThinkVisibility are so great. Great talk Barry, hopefully see you again soon!

See Barry’s talk on SEO for eCommerce on Slideshare.

Link Building with Swiss Toni (Jon Quinton, SEOGadget) 

What was a rather strangely named talk also turned out to be a really useful one for the day. All SEO conferences tend to have anywhere from one, to several ‘link building’ talks, often they can be repetitive or tend to cover much of the same content. Jon’s talk was not like this. It focused very much of link research and the utilisation of a large variety of tools for link prospecting, largely to my delight Excel! Some of my top points are listed below:

22. Generate really good content to acquire links, after a post that loses authority; embed links to your money pages or 301 redirect.

23. My Blog Guest is a great tool for researching guest blog opportunities.

24. Top tip: for My Blog Guest is to “Go to the end of the listings, you’ll tend to find more established blogs”

25. Simply searching for ‘list of [keyword] blogs’ can provide a number of blog link prospects

26. Build your own Google docs blog scraping tool, like Distilled identified in this post. Use this to scrape potential blog link prospects

27. ‘Learn from your peers’, search for the ‘big sites’ in your industry e.g. Vogue – then go through to their related sites. Then scrape.

28. Use Google operator inurl: “guest post [keyword]”

29. Looking through competitor backlinks using ahrefs and check ‘lost links’ for the date when links were lost. “pounce before they know what’s happened”.

30. Use Followerwonk to find popular bloggers, search for url in the bio, then scrape using Google docs.

31. Use the BuzzStream Buzzmarker add on to speed up process of link prospecting and tag sites on the go

32. Use the Multilinks add on, allows you to drag to select all links on a page, then either open all links in separate tabs or export to .csv

33. Use SimilarWeb add on to shows similar sites

34. Use SEO Tools for Excel to pull through PageRank and Social Metrics

35. The best tool for link building is gut feeling

36. When thinking of content, use the websites own ‘popular topics’  are a great way to understand what to write blogs on – it tells you what works!

37. Import website XML sitemap in Excel. Do this by opening Excel > Navigate to ‘data’ > click ‘from web’ > paste XML sitemap URL. You can then, use SEO Tools for excel to pull in social activity for the ‘top pages’ on a site.

38. Outsource content, but do so with care! Jon recommended trying oDesk, PeoplePerHour. Don’t go too cheap though, “cheap content is a false economy”

Jon delivered an insightful and technical take on link building, focused on automation and quick methods of discovering quality link prospects. In his argument, more time can then be focused on developing good content and fostering relationships. He also showed a harmless passion for business focused reality TV shows, using an example from The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den to frame some of his examples, a novel approach!

Jon also came out with one of the best, and most shared, quotes of the conference “link building can be like making love to a beautiful woman”. Great work Jon!

See Jon’s slides here Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni

Lunch: SEO Weakest Link (get it…?)

So I’m #1 in Google What Next? (Kean Richmond, Bronco)

Up next was a talk that, in honesty, I had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be a refreshing talk about design and it’s central [and often overlooked!] importance for websites. My top tips from this talk are included below: 

39. “Rankings don’t equal profits… Pretty website don’t equal profits…”.

40. “Ranking highly in search doesn’t allows equate to profits from the site, if site is ugly and unusable people won’t engage…”

41. The 4 basics of a website include a logo, navigation, content and a search area. Should be core to all designs.

42. The web is designed to be used by anyone, anywhere. Don’t over complicate things or you will lose people very quickly.

43. “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

44. Lovely depiction of the Heirarchy of User Needs (Aarron Walter) using in ascending order ‘Functional, Reliable, Usable, Pleasurable’. 

Image Credit: http://dribbble.com/shots/386460-Walter-s-Hierarchy/attachments/20815

 45. “The only important thing about design is how it relates to people” (Victor Papanek)

46. People will talk about great design, Kean showed an example of a great 404 page from Blippy

47. Calls to actions… “should be clearly labelled & as far to the top of the page as possible.”

48. “Designers are meant to be loved, not to be understood” (Fabien Barral)

Kean delivered some very thought-provoking insights into design and it’s importance on the web. People often forget how closely human psychology and SEO are so closely related. Without due attention, the design and usability of the web can be a big influencer/deterrent for your website.

Great work Kean, you can find the original deck here.

Why YouTube is so Much More Than Kittens & Car Crashes (Carla Marshall, Sorbet Digital)

Next up was Carla Marshall to talk about Video SEO, an ever-growing area of SEO and something that has brought us great success at Quirk historically. Other than a great presentation title, there were also some great takeaways:

49. Important to understand that Video SEO is best as part of an integrated campaign.

50. Make sure your video is HTML5 marked up, use something like JW Player or Wistia, both of which offer cross platform support

Carla identified the differences between 2 video SEO strategies, ‘hosted’ and ‘posted’ video. Hosted being when it’s hosted on your own site, posted when it’s hosted on another site e.g. YoutTube, Vimeo… etc

For ‘hosted’ video:

51. Provide an embed code, you will get the link from this when the video is republished, upload to social media channels (YouTube and Vimeo…etc) and allow easy sharing of content

52. Create an MRSS feed for your video

53. Make sure each video need its own landing page and URL

54. Good tip: Repurpose the content from your videos. Turn the transcription into presentations, images, podcasts, PDFs… Use SpeechPad for video transcriptions

55. Create a video sitemap even is the video is posted to YouTube. “Google will not index you content if it doesn’t know where it is”

56. Use SmartVideo to upload and get quick indexing of your videos.

57. Last week Google announced that they will support Schema for video.

For ‘posted’ video:

58. YouTube is strongly influenced by tittle tag, tags, engagement of video, use of embed code, how often that video is found via Google.

59. Use YouTube closed captions to target additional phrases.

60. YouTube META data: The title is all important. Make the title keyword rich but don’t keyword stuff it. The first 27 characters are the most important.

61. YouTube Descriptions: Use the ‘above the fold’ section, first few sentences that show without the user clicking ‘more’. Include the URL in format http:www.example.com in this section, will create a link to your website.

62. Best practise: Offer multiple formats, include target KWs and include ‘video’ in the title (matches search data), encode your video with targeted metadata,

63. On site: Unique landing page + URL per video, build internal and external links to the video page.

Carla covered a good amount of common-sense points that are more-often-than-not, completely overlooked when utilising video material for search. She spoke from experience and tried-and-tested methods that we at Quirk will certainly be utilising moving forward, if we don’t do already.

Click here to see Carla’s presentation Why YouTube is so Much More Than Kittens & Car Crashes on SlideShare.

Saying Stuff is Dead, is Dead (James Carson, Bauer Media)

This was no doubt the most confusing title of the day and after meeting James during the lunch break I decided I’d give it a go. It turned out to certainly be one of my favourite talks of the day. While not ‘hardcore SEO’ it was great to hear as James explored, to great detail, why there is a consistent trend for bloggers and authors to state that ‘[everything] … is DEAD’. James’s argument was essentially “whether you’re using it for dramatic effect or otherwise, it’s just annoying, so stop.”

While there were no ‘key takeaways’ as such, I’ve included a couple of interesting things that James brought to everyone’s attention, below:

64. ‘Endism’, isn’t true to life, even though many famous philosophers (Plato included) have debated it. ‘Writing did not destroy memory’, ‘television did not kill radio, or movies’…

65. Statistics ‘make it easy’, most statistics are used out of context, or are just dumb’.

Understanding Google Crawling & Indexing (Pierre Far, Google)

The final session of the day was held by Google’s very own Pierre Far, who works as a Webmaster Trends Analyst. Poor Pierre was plagued with technical difficulties with the main screen cutting out consistently throughout the beginning of the presentation and ended up, bravely simply sitting on the edge of the stage and talk us through the presentation as he went along.

66. Fetch as Googlebot in Google Webmaster Tools indicates to Google a URL that you want to be indexed.

67. There are now 3 mobile GoogleBots

68. Google scheduler, “changing the URLs that Google actually knows about”. Trade off: try to get as many URLs as possible…without overloading the server”.

69. 500 error on robots.txt file signals major server issues and will stop all other crawl activity until they see 200 status code.

70. Google understands most duplicate content is unintentional and “it doesn’t hurt”. But still important to fix if you can.

71. Google will only change the title tag to increase relevancy e.g. in a situation where you homepage is titled only ‘Home’ then it may substitute this for something with greater explanation of what’s on the page in question.

72. Rich snippets, USE THEM!

Pierre delivered a good talk and it is always good seeing Google representatives at SEO events. To see some additional links that Pierre gave reference to you can see his post on Google+ here.

Presentations that I missed:

• Website Analytics – 60% of the time it works every time (Anna Lewis, Koozai)
• 25 Useful things your can do with WordPress [eBook] (Dan Harrison, WP Doctors)

Summary:

ThinkVisibility 7 was another roaring success and a great example of why the UK is one of the world’s leading markets for SEO. It has a huge following of passionate and intelligent people working in the industry and luckily enough we’re lucky to have events such as this to meet up and exchange ideas. My hat goes off to Dom Hodgson who organised the event and even brought a bouncy castle in for the after-party (see below), absolutely excellent work sir!

Also, I can’t end without sending a MASSIVE personal thank you and on behalf of Quirk London to everyone at Manual Link Building, particularly Gareth Hoyle, Dan Bell and Rhys Wynne. And to all of the new and old faces that I met while there. See you next time!

Oh, and yes. I did wear a penguin suit to the conference…

Thanks to Sk8geek for the awesome photos from Think Visibility 7

The competition, ran by Manual Link Building, internationally focused SEO and link building experts pitted me against other SEO-bods (and people that just like free stuff). We had to answer 2 questions:

1. How many miles is it from Rhys’ [Manuallinkbuilding employee, pictured right] front door to the office in India?

2. How long in minutes will his total journey take including stopovers and transfers?

A combination of referencing Google Maps, Kayak, SkyScanner and just lucky guessing led me to answer:

1. 6106 miles [correct answer 5330 miles]

2. 785 mins [correct answer 1512 minutes]

Although not completely ‘on the mark’ this made me the overall closest with a combined variance on the correct answer of +49.

While I had planned on going to Think Visibility anyway, having attended before. The way I can best describe it is:

“It’s essentially a room packed with some of the best UK, and international, SEO heavyweights. During the day we will talk about all of the latest and greatest advances in the SEO field, as well as comparing tips and tricks. Also, there’s normally beer involved…”

On my behalf and Quirk London, whom I will be representing, I would like to say a big thank you to Gareth Hoyle and Manual Link Building!

Read the announcement (and see a lovely sign they made with Ned’s name on it) on their blog here.

And although it’s not your run-of-the-mill infographic (if there is such a thing), I still feel that it falls under this category as it’s a well thought out, visual way of representing different artists and their music types.

Have you come across anything similar to this, or do you have any great examples of infographics? I’m certainly keen on seeing them if so, so get in touch!

Check out some of my other posts about infographics.

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY from jason silva on Vimeo.