Really cool spectacle was the organised street dance session. If you've seen that T-Mobile Ad then you will know what I mean. If not, basically the whole of the conference floor filled with professional dancers, the PA system fired up and they all started busting a move. Random, effective, fun and great for getting attendees into the spirit of things.

Very very briefly bumped into Dave and Becky Naylor. Had a quick chat with Marcus Tandler from Creativity in Action and was asking him about SEOctoberfest. Really want to go this year as it sounds fantastic. Yes 5k is quite a lot of money for a 3 day SEO conference but that does include all accommodation, food and drink at some beautiful restaurants and I think the experience would be invaluable. Introduced myself to Andrew Girdwood (nice to meet you Andrew) and also saw my old pal Rob Kershaw from Latitude. Slightly disappointed the drinking didn’t really start until 6pm as I couldn’t be bothered to hang about, so I went back to the London office instead.

The sessions that me and my collegue Marie went to were as follows:

Social Marketing 101 - Andrew Girdwood, Bigmouthmedia

Covering some of the legal issues, Andrew was keen to point out that he is not a solicitor, none the less he offered some great advice. In summary be careful what you say on social sites, don’t speculate over peoples activities, professions or careers. Citation of the FSA was made, mainly noting that one should not offer financial advice, specifically online as its documented and so easy to use as evidence.

Andrew highlighted some great tools including the use of Brinkwire, Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader which used in combination can send you an alert of press releases and news items the second they are put live. Great for helping you become a thought leader in social media.

Somehow the topic got onto duplicate content so I asked Andrew what he thought about article spinning and markov chain technology. He said that in his opinion it didn’t really work anymore, apart from in some very specific cases. I was hoping Fantomaster might pick up on this one, but unfortunately he didn't.

Great presentation, poised and very well considered.

Demon SEO Panel - David Naylor, Bob Rains, Ziv Descalu, Frank Watson

This session was pretty much all about Black Hat SEO and stated very clearly in their heavy disclaimer at the start of the session, the type of things that you should be looking out for NOT the type of things that you should be doing!

Bit of an embargo on this session in terms of details, but I’ll give an overview. If you want details, just twitter me or email me or something. I’ll probably respond. Okay…

Top level, the topics were Click Hijacking, XSS, Taking out competitors, Spyware, Mallware and Hacking.

WordPress, unfortunately seemed to be mentioned a few times. Not that its insecure but more that people don’t know how to secure it properly. Chicken and egg perhaps, but I think if you host a website you’ve got to know about security or at least make an attempt to understand it.

Twitter was hitting the conversation notes again. Talk of the XSS stuff, if it was really cleared up properly. I have no clue on that but I'm just saying, it was mentioned by someone in the conference.

Exploiting web forms, again, not a "how to" but a be careful on your own website.

If you are into black hat or want to use black hat then make sure and use a different laptop, different Google accounts and keep everything totally separate from anything that you value.

Some great advice on preventing PPC click fraud, identifying issues with bounce rates, dropping cookies, the anatomy of a url shortener and of course how to manipulate one.

Hunting for that Golden Link - Marcus Tandler, Ralph Tegtmeier, Christoph Cemper and Sebastian Wenzel

Marcus reminded us of the days that W3C used to sell links, yes W3C! Well you made a donation and they gave you a link. His quote being that it was better than sex! Strange chap.

Don’t buy acquire links on bad neighbourhoods i.e. if all the links are about dating don’t just add your poker link in.

Remember that diversity is key. Diversity being the number of domains you are linked on.

Don’t just copy your competitors links, do better. Good tip here was asking to pay more on sites so as to feature you in the content body or in higher page relevance areas. Liked that one.

General consensus from that panel was that people over complicate link building. KISS, build up trust with a couple of killer links then diversify, aiming for a range of links from a range of domains. Keep it natural looking, don’t link stack anchor text. If I had to give someone starting out in link building some advice, these are the types of sentiments that I would echo. Link building is not a perfect science and if it were then it would look unnatural. Make sure that your links pass the smell test i.e. if they look unnatural to humans, then guess what Search Engines will probably think the same.

Big should out to my buddy and ex-colleague David Watkins who I saw spoke on one of the expert panels on Saturday. Sorry I wasn't there on Saturday to see you Dave, but if you are reading this, nice work mate, glad to see that you are doing well.

Cheers all. That’s a wrap.

London Affiliate Conference Review

Speaking at SES

This year I am very pleased to announce that both David and myself will be speaking for the first time at SES. We are both very honoured to be speaking along side some of the industries finest and are very much looking forward to it. The session we are on is taking place on Day 1 Tuesday 15th 3.30pm to 4.30pm and is called Industry Specific Search Strategies: Under the Hood.

As the title suggests this panel will be all about industry specific search strategies. Clearly we couldn't fit in all industries, so we choose what are commonly considered to be amongst the largest and most diverse. I am speaking on recruitment seo based on my 4 years experience as Head of Online Marketing at PULSE. David Fairhurst is speaking on retail seo based on his time as Head of SEO at Intelligent Retail. Rob Kerry, who previously worked at Party Gaming and now heads up Ayima Search Marketing will be talking about gaming. Richard Baxter of SEOGadget and previously of CheapFlights.com will be covering off the travel sector. And last but not least is industry stalwart David Naylor who will be giving us his insight into all things search across all industries based on his experience with a broad range of clients at his SEM Company, Bronco.

Whilst I am 100% sure the tips, strategies and tactics that we share with you will be completely transferable to any industry, if you do work in one of the afore mentioned then you really need to be there. Not least of all so you can ask us some friendly questions at the end!

SES Conference Schedule

Little tip for you. SES is fast paced and action packed. Before you go, print off the schedule, read through the session descriptions and with a big yellow marker, highlight the sessions that you want to go to. Trust me, this saves you a lot of time, stops you faffing and allows you to focus on networking and enjoying the event. With this in mind I thought I would let you know some of the sessions that I am aiming to go to.

Day 1
Be Awesome: Ideas for Approaching Search Analytics Differently Keynote
PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle
Managing a Global SEO Campaign

Day 2
Social Media 101
Link Building - Methods and Risks with Jim Boykin
New Affiliate Opportunities & Strategies

Day 3
Advanced Paid Search Techniques or Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
Automating Twitter

SES London Social Events

If you fancy a spot of networking accompanied by a drink of your choice there are a couple of events that you will probably want to check out.

Day 2 - (Wed) 17 Feb - SES Official Black Hat/White Hat Unconferenced session.
Location: Hilton Hotel Cocktail Lounge

Day 3 - (Thu) 18 Feb - LondonSEO Party.
Location: The Camden Head - across the road from the conference venue

SES Discount Registration

If you are looking to register why not grab the 20% discount that FireflySEO can offer you by entering the code 20SPG over on the SES London Registration page.

Look forward to seeing you there.

SES London 2010, Speaking, Preview and Social Events

• At 15 I built my first website
• At 16 one of my websites was featured in the book, “Dj’ing for Dummies”
• At 17 I was making thousands of dollars per month offering internet marketing services
• At 18 I was headhunted to become the Social Media Manager for massive brands such as Nissan, Land Rover and Hewlett Packard
• At 19 I quit my job to work on my own websites and projects
• At 20, I now make a 5-figure monthly income online and travel the world in the process

Pretty impressive stuff eh!

Q1 - Glen, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us today. So, to quote your blog "ViperChill is back baby". Cool title, but where did you go!?

Down too many wrong paths. Seriously though, over the last few years my life has taken a lot of turns with moving to South Africa before quitting my job and running my affiliate websites. I was at a stage where I was writing about internet marketing and having a lot of success for clients, but didn't really have many other personal sites that were doing well.

I decided to take a year out and focus on one of my newer projects, PluginID. The site grew massively in it's first year and I got to the stage where I only needed to work on the site for a few hours per week. This freed up time for me and allowed me to start writing about my other passion again for ViperChill: internet marketing.

Q2 - A lot of people say that starting and stopping blogging can cause you problems with your traffic and your audience. Have you found this? If so, how quickly did you get back to where you left of and where are you now by comparison?

When I started blogging again at ViperChill, all of the new posts were still going out to the 2,400 subscribers I had managed to build when I was actively working on the site. I think that if I didn't have this audience which were already connected to the site, it would be a lot harder to start blogging again after such a long absence.

In around two months I've added over 1,000 subscribers to that number and the site is on track for around 50,000 pageviews in January. My search traffic is awful and the amount of content on the site is low, but I believe that with some hard work and consistency, this will start to build back up again.

Q3 - You are a well known and highly successful affiliate marketer. There are lots of people out there who want to get started in affiliate marketing, what advice can you offer them.

Stop reading and start doing. I used to be afraid by the term affiliate marketing, thinking that it was only really an option for people with high traffic sites or for those who understood PPC. Well, despite that I make a lot of money online, I couldn't successfully run a PPC campaign to save my life (I do plan on fixing that this year, though).

Instead, I started building high-quality sites that would get traffic from search engines and used affiliate offers to monetise them. On one site I went from making $5 per day on adsense to $150 per day with affiliate offers. That's when I started realising the potential of affiliate marketing and built a few more websites. Now, it makes up the majority of my monthly income.

Q4 - One of the big questions that comes up in affiliate marketing, is should I have one site, in one industry, multiple sites in one industry or multipile sites in multiple industries. What are you thoughts on this?

If you're just starting out, then focus on one site in one industry. You're going to need to give one thing your full attention so that you can a) learn as much as possible and b) actually get results. If you spread yourself too thinly when you aren't sure what you're doing, you'll probably see little results and become demotivated.

Once affiliate sites are up and running, it's really up to you how much work you want to put in. You can test different elements of your landing page to increase conversions, you can build up more backlinks or you can even add more content. This only requires an hour or two per week so once you're at this stage, it might be a good idea to start building more sites.

I have about 6 sites that bring in a decent income myself: 3 of them are in the same industry and the other 3 are completely separate.

Q5 - What are your thoughts on affiliate networks. Do you use them? If so what advice can you offer a new affiliate. If not, how come. How do you manage all those accounts?

When I first started out, I used Clickbank rather than a network as it was what I knew and there were some products that interested me. I have used some of the networks like Market Leverage and Motive Interactive, but most of my income comes from standalone companies. For example, I promote a service that thousands of people look for each day, and deal directly with the provider of this service as an affiliate. This way I cut out the middle man and get the most commissions.

That's my favourite way of doing business online, although I know a lot of people who have success with the larger networks I have mentioned and other players like Azoogle. Right now there are only 4 logins I need to check my income across the web, so it's not too hard to stay organised.

Q6 - A lot of people talk about SEO all the time, as if its the be all and end all to making money on line. In your experience how important really, is SEO in making money online.

To me, it's more than I would like it to be. I have tried to diversify my income streams as much as possible in-case anything goes against me, but I still rely heavily on search engine rankings. Thankfully, in the fields I have entered I'm dominating them quite nicely and don't see those rankings disappearing anytime soon.

You have people like me who make a majority of their income from search traffic, but then there's people like JohnChow making $50,000 per month with a website that was banned in Google until recently. The importance of SEO very much depends on what you do online so for some projects it is crucial to me but for others (like my two blogs) I don't care for it too much.

Q7 - Taking into account ease of implementation, speed and ROI. What are your top marketing methods, strategies and tactics for making money online.

The easiest way to make money online is either to work very hard on something you're totally passionate about, or simply work very, very hard. When I refer to hard work in terms of internet marketing, I'm not talking about pushing yourself so that your body aches and you can barely breath. Hard work in this industry is simply about consistent output.

If you're continually working on improving your properties and increasing traffic, you will start to make money. No questions asked.

Working on something you're passionate about cuts down many hurdles people face such as lack of ideas, lack of desire and lack of belief. If you're writing about something you love or simply building a resource for it, it's fun. Instead of seeing any hurdles as a sign to stop what you're doing, you see them as fun to jump.

Just like the message being shared is far more important than the sites it's being shared on (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc), I believe that the 'tactics' to success will reveal themselves if you surround yourself with people who also love what you love, online.

Q8 - Do you think that spotting a niche or a trend early is important? There is an old saying "Once you've seen a band waggon, its too late to hop on". Does this apply in affiliate marketing too? The poker industry springs to mind here!

You can still dominate a niche without being the first to enter, but it's much cheaper to be the first. As an example, in one niche I have entered, I spent $500 on the domain alone for branding and ranking purposes. On top of that, I have tons of competitors who are writing great content every day and getting quality backlinks, so it takes even more work for me to get those top rankings and start making some money.

If you're first to a niche, the work-rate needed to rank well in Google or simply build a loyal audience is a lot lower than someone entering the field late.

I tend to prefer having a large piece of a small pie, rather than a small slice of a large one. For that reason, I won't be entering the poker niche any time soon

Q9 - What are your key projects for 2010?

My main aim this year is to decrease the number of projects that I work on and increase the quality of each. That means focusing on growing my two blogs and hopefully cutting down the number of affiliate sites I have to about 2 or 3. As I said earlier, I am in a number of competitive niches that are going to take a lot of work but also offer the greatest reward.

I would prefer to have a portfolio of just a few, very successful and high-quality sites than a lot of good sites that are making me money, but aren't great. I don't just want to make money on the internet, I genuinely want to give value to website visitors.

Q10 - If you had to offer one piece of advice to someone wanting to start out as an affiliate, what would it be?

Decide what you're going to focus on and then ignore 99% of affiliate marketing advice out there. First of all, the people who give you advice probably don't make money as an affiliate marketer themselves, and secondly their advice probably comes with a nice bold affiliate link somewhere.

This is not rocket science, but you are going to have to work. Find something you want to promote and do what it takes to start making money. It's up to you whether that is from social media traffic, PPC or even SEO. Have some faith in yourself that with enough effort, you can really 'get this down' and start making some great money online!

ViperChill Interview

Now that I am starting to pay a bit more attention to my blog again, I started to do some cross browser testing and in the process noticed that none of my YouTube video's were rendering properly in IE7. Pants!

A little bell rang in my head about that nasty embed tag and validation, so next thing I did was pop over to W3C and run a good old validation test. Guess what, yes, crap XHTML. Double pants!

This needs fixing!

XHTML valid, tested in Firefox, IE6, IE7, Chrome and Safari this is what I have come up with.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:350px;" data="YouTube Video URL">
<param name="movie" value="YouTube Video URL" />
</object>

Any comments on the above code are most appreciated!

Clearly it would be nice if WordPress could do this automatically, but despite running through the "Upload/Insert>Add Video>From URL" functionality several times, I have been left with the opinion, I could be wrong, that its just not possible in the current version (2.8.5)!?

As plugins can be badly written, whenever possible, I try to avoid them! This said I would be grateful for any recommendations!

Right, must go, off to recode all my previous posts with YouTube videos in them. The joy!!

How to embed YouTube video into WordPress. The right way!?

As its nearly the weekend and we have all been working too hard I thought I would give you all a well earned break from all the intelligent blog posts and conversation and post this little GEM of a video. I just sat and watched it and laughed lots and lots. We all like a good laugh, so hopefully it will be a bit of fun to your day. This is SFW BTW!!

More seo posts soon.

Peace,

Allan

Sales Guy VS Web Dude

Many search engine folks like the "seat of the pants" approach to SEM but I am so disorganised when I try to remember everything that I find myself turning to Microsoft Excel.

Yes, there are far sexier subjects in the search world than using Microsoft Excel, but stay with me, Excel can be useful even if it is not cool!

How can Excel help you with your search engine marketing efforts?

1) Keyword Research - Make a list of all your most sought after keywords, where you currently rank, and the level of competition. Prioritise your most important phrases using a mixture of competition and potential traffic.

2) Link campaigns - First make a list of all the target sites that you would like to get links from. If you find a lot then use a scoring system to determine the priority sites and those that you care less about. Maybe one column will have things like Alexa, or maybe where they rank for key phrases? At the very least you need to label the site and find their contact details. When it comes to launching your link campaign note who links, who doesn't, and the URL they link from. This allows you judge progress, remember those you have contacted, check later if the link still works, and which efforts paid off.

3) Competitor research - For each of your most important keyphrases develop a list of the sites who are ranking, where they rank, how many backlinks they have. You might get even more detailed and look how many exact keyword match links they have etc. These are your hit list and you will have an idea what it will take to overtake them.

4) Competitor Links - Take the above list and mine their backlinks to find where they are getting links from so you can either do the same or avoid some of their dodgy tactics!

5) Networking Opportunities - People in the search results ahead of you are not necessarily competitors. They might be appropriate places to get links from, buy advertising, or guest post. Could you partner up in some way? Get information like site owner name, contact information, and where they hang out online. What kind of information do they link to? I wrote a full tutorial on using Microsoft Excel for networking productivity - check it out.

Call me a geek, but I think if you look, Excel can really help your SEM efforts, even if it will not win any awards for drama and adventure!

5 Ways Microsoft Excel Helps Me With SEM

To my mind there are probably only two (or possibly 3) strong contenders. Yep you guessed it, either the Iphone or the Gphone.

Iphone vs Gphone

Iphone is a simple choice, as it just comes in one flavour, the Gphone on the other hand is available at TMobile in the shape of the G2 and also at O2 in the shape of the Samsung Galaxy I7500. Windows Mobile / HTC, well to be honest, is not something that I am really all that keen on as in the Past I got an O2 XDA Orbit 2 and IMHO it was totally crap! So, WM devices are possibly lower on the list. Anyhow, I digress.

So for me I think these are the main things that I want from a phone.

1. Good connectivity i.e. 3G and Wifi
2. 3MP plus camera
3. Easy to make a phone call
4. Exchange email for work and normal (Gmail or POP/IMAP) email for personal
5. Maps and GPS
6. Ability to add apps
7. Access to social networking sites particularly Twitter and Facebook
8. Single click upload of pictures etc, to social sites would be nice
9. Good at watching videos or even better “streaming” videos off the Internet
10. Mstce.exe or PUTTY so that I can access servers whilst on the move. Brucy Bonus that one.
11. Ability to take voice notes

I think thats about it.

So what can you tell me! What phone should I get?

What phone should I get next?

With the introduction of Bing, I've been doing a bit of research into the effectiveness of the two search engines and it seems that Microsoft's 'new kid on the block' is giving far better conversion rates than Google! I just had to dig deeper to see exactly "why this is so" and how our retailers can benefit!

The company I work for durring the day, Intelligent Retail have hundreds of online retailers with e-commerce websites, all wanting traffic which converts well into sales. We therefore have to find the best channels to get conversions from website visits constantly and it appears that Bing is certainly bringing in traffic which converts well above average.

Conversion rate analysis of Bing vs Google

I've had a trawl through the Analytics data for Bing and Google traffic, and there is definitely a much higher conversion rate for Bing traffic compared to Google's traffic. This has been verified across many different accounts in Analytics. Here are some snapshots of some of the large amount of data that I analysed:

A typical Google conversion for our E-commerce shops

A typical Bing conversion, much higher than Google!

Analysing the data

Anyone well versed in conversion rate analysis will tell you that you are more likely to get visitors to actually buy products via an e-commerce website if the entry phrase into the online shop is further down the funnel of search terms i.e. further down the buying cycle - this means that longer tail keyphrases are more likely to convert into a sale than more generic terms. This makes sense, because if you think about it, any user who does not know a specific product name / brand starts off by searching for a generic term, say 'ski jacket' and is presented by a huge array of websites all vying for this term in results, yet a search engine user is not really likely to actually buy at this point. The actual sale is much more likely to come further down the search chain, when a search engine user is homing in on a particular brand / product.

So what is Bing doing better?

Again I've trawled through the data from a number of e-commerce websites at Intelligent Retail, and the data seems to suggest that Bing is serving up much more long tail results - these results are converting very well into actual sales (much better than Google's shorter tail terms.

Google short tail keywords at top of the list

As you can see below the much longer keyword strings being returned by Bing are more relevant to 'purchase level' searches, which is resulting in a much better conversion rate per search - this is not to put down Google as serving up irrelevant search results, but it's clear that Bing is either not returning top level short tail terms for all of the websites which I've analysed or this relatively new search engine is much better at picking out relevancy from actual product level pages in our e-commerce stores, thus indexing them where they should be.

Bing's much longer tail keywords at top of results

If you have any comments or any further analysis or data which either confirms or denys these findings we would be very interested to hear from you.

Bing VS Google Conversion Rate Analysis

I hope you find this post useful and interesting!

Twitter – Its top of my list so I can get it out of the way. Good as it is, you can't go anywhere this year with out someone talking about Twitter. Twitter has become massive in 2009. More specific points of interest being that Twitter has proliferated use of the term "Real Time Search" which is slightly interesting but for me the really interesting part is their API. seo is fading out and it is less about Search and more about Applications is something I have been saying for a while now. This is a trend that I see continuing. Twitter API, Facebook connect etc. All are creating very useful interfaces which in turn means very useful apps and my personal thought is that apps are the future. Also if you think about things like Hilltop theory, you can imagine how with in the social world there will be little hill tops and social bubbles. Being at the top of your industry hill top, I think, is still going to win you rankings. I won't go into the science of that as I don't have the time or the inclination, it is just a hypothesis based on experience. We are @fireflyseo BTW, just incase you want to follow us.

SES New York – My first business trip to the USA as an seo professional. Google launch new version of Adwords and I meet David Szetela of Clix Marketing who I thought was a thoroughly nice chap and very skilful marketer. Thanks for your time David.

Facebook buy FriendFeed - Some consolidation in the internet landscape. I love FriendFeed! It is a fantastic way to stalk people and to be stalked and actually its one of the few services that acts as a portal for social and actually does it quite well, with minimal fuss or overhead. I am starting to view social sites in terms of how much overhead they demand. If a social site takes a lot of my time to operate, then I am less likely to use it. Facebook for example!! I hate using Facebook as it is a faff, useful, but a total faff. FYI, if you want to stalk me on FriendFeed I am available here or on Facebook I am available here.

Yahoo and Microsoft merger - More consolidation in the market. I can see a lot more of this. The internet is maturing and what happens in mature markets? Consolidation! I think we will see a lot more of this. I also think we will see a few failures from a VC point of view in internet investment. PE ratio's and valuations are stupidly high and not based on real money, top line and net profits. Anyway, I digress. My point is that internet properties are markets, and as markets mature they tend to consolidate, so don't be surprised to see lots more of this happening.

Microsoft launch BING - What is BING? Its Bing Not Google, quite clever I thought. A new search engine with faster indexing, faster search and more relevant results (than MSN and some would say Google). At FireflySEO we love BING, the results aren't half bad, UI is awesome, but the main point is it that it is just really fantastic to have some more competition in the industry.

Yahoo! To use BING to deliver their search engine results - Good for searchers but probably bad news for fly by night affiliates who like to use display URL's so they can pretend to be the companies that they represent. Full details of how the two disparate paid search marketing platforms are to be merged are not yet released, time will tell but me thinks it could be pivotal.

SMX Advanced – Matt Cutts and Google send out lots of confusing messages about the sodding “no follow” attribute. I have just decided to ignore it, have for a while now in fact, and go with what I think makes sense. I already talked many times how I think no follow is a load of crap and I am not going to link to any external articles that debate this fact as clearly it is correct.

Google Conversion Optimiser - Now this is an interesting move from Google. Pretty much, you set the CPA and Google takes care of the sales. Who needs affiliates anymore, right? Wrong, it works, but is not without its problems, trust and conspiracy theories being amongst them. Use with caution, use as a part of a blended PPC strategy. Definitely worth a test though. Have a look at the snazy Google video...

Pub Con 2009 - The first Pubcon London for 3 years yet it seemed a bit of a quite one. Proof perhaps that lack of momentum is a killer? Did anyone go? Please do tell, piccies and blog post links very appreciated.

Kenshoo – Totally amazing search engine marketing platform with distributed key phrase attribution and a myriad of related bid management strategies. Its not just bid management, trust me, as a business tool this is second to none.

Google update Vince - Has Google put more focus on Brand? Makes sense really, if you think about it search has a limited appeal and more often people are searching by brand, CTR on PPC is higher, brand is authority, trust, diversity etc. The video below explains some of the detail.

Google Caffeine – Well its all a big mess at the moment, but lets not focus on the small stuff. The big and important change, I think is the fact that Google are becoming more transparent in their approach, giving us a Sandbox now and letting us see algo changes before they actually make those changes live. For those who are interested here is the sandbox.

SMX London – Give It Up Session. No body actually did give it up, even after the 30 day embargo. No write ups, at least none that we found. Very sad and I can only assume it was totally awesome (and nobody wanted to discuss) or totally rubbish (so nobody bothered). Anyone know?

LondonSEO.org – If you are an seo and you live in or near to London then you should definitely be aware of LondonSEO.org and their groovy events for seo people. They don’t happen often, but when they do they are worth making the effort for.

Rebecca Kelly moves from seo Moz to 10e20 Media.

CiranJ leaves Altogether Digital and joins Mindshare.

I Discovered that Evilgreenmonkey he doesn’t spend (waste) hardly any time on personal Twitter or blogging accounts. Clever chap that he is.

Mobile - I know, just know that it is going to be huge soon. Given the increase in affordable and “useful” PDA’s the only way is up and if they are not already, I would be advising most businesses to start investing in this channel sooner rather than later.

Braodband Access - The Internet is going to be more integrated with our everyday lives with technologies such as SIP, DLNA, Wireless IP homes and cloud computing. The impact of this on seo will be huge and means a hypercompetitive landscape across a range of broadcast mediums. I like to draw a comparison here with south Korea where they have 1000GB internet access for £10 per month. Imaging if UK or USA had broadband speeds like that!

SEOktoberfest – The very definition of a cool seo conference for a select bunch of L33T affiliates and seo gurus. Unfortunately the £4000 price tag per ticket meant that I could not quite afford to go this year as my wedding in October has monopolised most of my finances for the year.

WebMasterRadio - Joost launches Press This a very cool show about WordPress and WordPress seo. Search Cowboys launch a new show covering European seo and other things. Both definitely worth adding to your ITunes podcast library to listen to on the way to work.

seo Ranking Factors - Basically this is the bible. seo Ranking Factors from seo MOZ has been updated. If you are an seo there is no question that you should be reading this.

Distilled gain a lot of traction and brand awareness in the search space.

Well that is all that I can think of for now! Obviously this is not an exhaustive list but feel free to comment if there is something that you think should be added.

Thanks for reading.

SEO Landmarks of 2009 (So Far)

Looks okay, until you click on the top result for a company called Urban Kudos and you get this...

As 99.9% of you will have picked up on by now, Urban Kudos is simply an entry into the Google Local Business Centre by some scammer who is running a PPC Monetization scheme most probably on a massive scale. This is SPAM, as blatant as it gets and is probably making the black hat seo in question a tidy little profit at the expense of legitimate people who would otherwise be at the #1 for the term seo Consultant London like our friend Richard Baxter.

It gets worse! Look at the total garbage this black hat seo has written in his profile account in Google Local...

And I quote "This guy is VERY knowledgable about seo and search engine marketing. He put me at the top of goole for Best Hotels in london! Dave". Case in point, he's actually selling this as a technique, "He who dares Rodney, he who dares". LOL

I mean what a load of trash! This indicates that one can just write whatever they want in Google Business Centre and it will get approved. Full credit to the black hat in question for finding this loop hole but how easy is it to game Google!! This is low brow, low tech black hat SPAM and surelly there should be some form of moderation. Clearly moderation of features like this, which are lauched to the mass market, is not a simple problem. None the less, I am pretty sure Google should be able to do better. Lets just hope Google Caffeine is not supposed to be the fix, because the results are just as bad over there too!

SEO Consultant London SERPS and Black Hat Spam

Obviously, because the new site is not launched yet this puts some severe roadblocks in the way of traditional seo techniques!

After all you can't optimise a site that is not even there yet and you can't promote pages that don't exist!

What you can do however is a little bit of forward planning. Here are some tips...

Setting up social media accounts

Most 'switched on' clients will be aware of social media and it's impact on search engine results and web traffic. Setting up accounts for the use of your client whilst you are waiting for a website launch can save time later and give more credence to any posts that are done under these accounts. It takes time to build up friends or followers and reputation and history counts for a lot.

Utilising current resources

As proven in this post, a bit of cross-promotion never hurts. Utilise accounts from other clients (if appropriate), personal blogs, Facebook pages, Digg profiles, the long you have been in the business the more of these you will have. This is especially good if your other clients and accounts are trading in the same vertical market but if you are creative you can add value, even across subject lines.

Directory Submissions

If you're a search engine marketer, then you will already have a trusted list of directories which you can submit your client websites too. As directory submissions can take months to get approved it makes sense to get this out of the way as soon as you can.

Teaser campaigns

I think we have all used teaser campaigns at one point or another. Create some interest before launch using websites like YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIN Groups, Facebook Pages. Another good idea is to look for bloggers in your vertical market, make contact with them ask if you can write a guest post. There are many services out there that allow you to do this. One that we like is called Pay Per Post.

Create content

Your client is paying you money to promote their website, so if you are in link building deadlock get your creative head on and write some top quality and focused text content for the new website. This has two effects: it means you won't have to do it later (when you are REALLY being pushed to show results) and it keeps your "eye on the ball." If you are thinking about your customers products and keywords then it makes promoting via external channels easier, especially on unfamiliar subjects.

Anyhow, that is about it for now. I hope this is useful to some of you.

Any other tips you might have on how to make a head start with seo campaigns please let us know in the comments.

Promoting an Unlaunched Website

Also, while I think of it is that clients like or do they actually have those clients? Really bad advert that.

Another spot courtesy of Eloi below. Barclays Bank (of all people) making some bad mistakes with DKI!

**Update** Digital agency in question have changed their ads to "Clients including." Good to know they are taking my advice.

When DKI Goes Wrong