While “Content is King”, many marketers overlook the all-important factor of authority, and the process required to establish and maintain it.

The first session of this 2013 edition of SMX London delved into the steps to claim your own identity: brainstorming sessions between SEO, social and content development teams, content promotion tactics for gaining authority links and more.

The session had Chelsea Blacker, Jim Boykin, Maile Ohye, Grant Simmons as speakers and Elisabeth Omeloski as moderator.

The first coming on stage for talking about Authority was Maile Ohye of Google.

She is going to talk about Authorship, but she says immediately that before talking about Authorship, we should understand that is strongly related to Online Identity, being effectively one of its expressions.

Some background first.

We had Pagerank, and we still have it. But Authorship is offering us the opportunity of having a web of people too, not just a web of things, and people are identities and these identities create content, hence we must have Authorship.

Identity and Authorship for Google are strongly and deeply related to Google+, because Google+ is the “identity service provider” for Google.

Authorship is growing in impression rate, as internal Google stats are showing, and help creating credibility.

Credibility, then, provides visible reputation to authors and informs Google about social search. It also helps to disambiguate and refine what people are searching for (i.e.: Danny Sullivan the Search Expert and Danny Sullivan the car driver).

How to claim your identity and authorship?

We can use the email verification or “handshake” with content (aka: rel=”author”).

This way we create a person node with cluster of information, each edge being bi-directional.

Remember the Google profile is also a cluster for other social profiles (i.e.: Twitter or YouTube social profiles).

Email verification is the simplest way for claiming authorship. Articles published prior to email verification are brought to authorship cluster.

“Handshake”: Site links to G+ profile with rel=”author” mark up. And then we must add the site in “contributor to” area of the G+ profile.

We can also use rel=”me” to chain pages (precisely profile pages) together.

Maile urges us to remember that Authorship is a subset of structured data and that Identity and Authorship help to craft the Knowledge Graph too.

And here are the best practices accordingly to Google:

• Keep author consistent on article URL
• Verify mark-up with structured data testing tool
• Include authorship only on relevant “authored” articles (not rentals or product listings)
• Be aware that it’s hard to merge or transfer authorship if you create Google profile with company email and then leave company
• Understand Authorship as a part of larger concept of Identity and Structured Data

The next talk was delivered by Grant Simmons.

Content is King, he said, but add Authority to it and we will have a “Kingier” content.

Old days are old and now quality over quantity is what matters.

How can we explain quality? Quality content is the same as saying trusted content.

Trust once used to be about links. Of course links are still important, but they are/were relatively easy to game, at least until Penguin.

Now trust is authority. And authorship is part of the authority game.

Who is an Authority? He/She is a known credible source about a topic.

Authority is now all about linking Entities to Identities. That’s why we must claim and connect our content.

So connect known identities to known identities via Social/Google+ and Rel=”author”. Remember that this is true also in Bing, where Facebook plays the role of Google+

We must then establish credibility, and that comes from creating great meaningful content.

Be a known credible topic expert, that is our mantra.

How? If you pass the algorithmic “review” a potential human review, if you have links and great engagement metrics, then you possibly are an “authority”.

But authority is not enough, and expertise is essential too. And what is expertise? It is being focused and consistently talking about a topic.

Kingier Content inspires interaction: mentions, associations, citations, connections, links, shares.

Resuming, being an Authority leads to

• “Kingier” Success;
• Better visibility;
• Better Clickability;
• More and better links;
• And because being the king is always cool.

Third on stage was Chelsea Blacker.

Chelsea approached the Authority topic from a very different perspective: Online Identity.

Somehow she had “unconsciously” linked to what Maile Ohye was saying just few minutes before.

We need to secure our profiles online. Chelsea asked herself what could her digital profile look like in 2076? She started talking about all the products that are flourishing around the potential use of the Facebook profiles of people who have passed away (i.e.: the memorial function offered by Facebook).

Social Media and the Internet in general are making updates visible that once were “private”. It is not just a question of photos, but also, for instance, of reviews that we post and that help portraying our personality online.

Chelsea shared also some tools to update profiles.

In order to check social profile availability:

• Namechk
• Namecheckr

For acquiring profiles names:

• Knowem
• Claim.io

Here are the lessons she learnt:

• Have a consistent name and, possibly, an unique name;
• Have Appropriate Avatars
• Update Key Information
• Some Aspects of our Digital Profile Are Cringe

How Chelsea updated her profile?

• Youtube
• About.me
• Positive Reviews
• Use rel=”author”
• Keep personal sites up to date

Jim Boykin was the last speaker of this session and… tadà: 

Authorrank is coming out… [I was wondering when people would have call it out]

Jim Boykin was citing the infamous Eric Schmidt phrase about profiles (Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance) and how anonymity is going to not pay dividends in the search rankings [in my personal opinion he misinterpreted that phrase completely, taking it out of the its context). And then he cited Penguin 2.0 and Matt Cutts video published just few days ago, where Matt is announcing what SEOs have to expect in the next months.

Jim affirmed that PageRank is dead and that we should look for Authorrank [OMG! But it is not existing yet!!!]

Then, he started explaining some of the most known concepts of the Authorrank theory. Sincerely, I am not going to report them here, because I prefer to link to a much better explication, which is the one offered by AJ Kohn in this post.

More interesting was the Jim recipe about how having authoritative authors “working” for your site: Ego Bait.

Tactics with which you can develop an Ego Bait strategy are

• Targeted Interviews,
• Group Interviews,
• Community based content,
• Having reputed authors as Associate of our site.

Post from Gianluca Fiorelli on State of Search From Authorship to Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters #smxlondon

Paid search has always been a popular method of advertising on desktop. However studies are finding that up to 30% of advertising methods are targeting mobile. There is no denying that mobile is growing, even to the extent that Google is focusing more on mobile and looking to benefit from mobile, as seen with new Enhanced campaigns.

Enhanced Campaigns with AdWords

Manny Rivas dived into how AdWords has grown from 5 years ago, to where we are now, which is on the cusp of Enhanced campaigns. It was highlighted that Enhanced campaigns could be the biggest change in AdWords history.

Manny went on to highlight the pros and cons of Enhanced campaigns, and stressed that he feels the negatives outweighs the pros. While most pros and cons can be found online, Manny did highlight pros such as location based bidding, sitelink extensions etc and cons such as tablet bidding is not available, mobile only campaigns are not possible etc.

With Enhanced campaigns becoming compulsory in July, Manny stressed that when converting a legacy account to Enhanced he has never seen a change over that has been completely hassle free. There is always something that fluctuates and activation doesn’t go as smoothly or seamlessly as would be preferred. With Enhanced campaigns imminent it is important to expand on reporting variety, and look at reports that may not have been focused on when Legacy accounts were active. Some reports recommended for examining were Quality Score tracking, account level reports and ad performance reporting, all of which Manny recommended using Scripts to perform these reports.

When upgrading to enhanced it is vitally important to remember your goals. Activating enhanced may be a great time to restructure and adjust an account; however it is important to keep in mind that fluctuations would be difficult to attribute to Enhanced activation or your restructure changes.

After Manny, Alistair Dent came on and continued the theme of Enhanced campaigns. Alistair states that users don’t care what device they use, they are more interested in getting the correct results that they are looking for. Whatever device they use, they want the same useful results. The only difference to keep in mind is to focus around the user being “in” or “out”. Is the user at home and in a static location or is the user on the road and browsing?

Targeting Users

Once you know whether a user is “in” or “out”, the 3 areas to look at for targeting users are to focus on keywords, the user’s location and time of day. Knowing the answers to the 3 areas for targeting will help define your targeting and how you will structure and focus your campaigns. Within each of the 3 areas for targeting there are different multipliers, factors and exceptions, so it is important to keep that in mind as well. Different factors within each of the areas are applicable, and this will help define your targeting and messaging even more.

Alistair ended by stating that multipliers should not be guessed, and that in the future he expects that multipliers within each stage of targeting will become more and more.

Why Phone Calls Matter

Jason Spievak and Bill Dinan took a left turn, where their discussions are now focusing on phone calls and inbound telephone calls from paid search marketing. Phone calls matter because search, and particularly mobile search, drives billions of phone calls. Advertisers should want phone calls and when the value of a product reaches above £100 pounds users are more likely to convert via phone call than by making an online purchase.

Desktop search and mobile search are not the same. You cannot duplicate your desktop campaigns to target mobile and expect the same results.

Mobile call durations tend to be approximately 3:50minutes where desktop calls are about 2:20minutes. The underlying theme from the mobile talks is that mobile marketing needs more focus on receiving telephone calls, as the call duration and conversion rate from phone calls are usually higher than the same actions from a desktop. Campaigns need to target mobile consumer, and need to target them differently than desktop users. The end goal of mobile targeting needs to be different than desktop. While desktop campaigns may want online conversion to be the end goal, mobile campaigns should aim to bring phone calls to a call centres and let the call centre agents try and convert users brought to them by online mobile marketing.

Guest Author Bio

This post was written by Kyle Pretorious the PPC Manager at Media Vision. Kyle has spent the past six years in the online marketing industry, gaining experience in social media, SEO and copywriting, allowing him to bring a wealth of experience to his role at MediaVision, where he specialises in PPC.

Twitter profile - https://twitter.com/Kyle_Pretorius

Post from Guestpost on State of Search Paid Search Advertising in a Multi-Device World #SMXLondon

SEO has been growing exponentially during the last year due to it being more connected to all the other Internet Marketing disciplines. SEO grows more complex and the size of the sites we work on continue to grow.

It’s more important than ever to have a set of high-quality tools that give us both a competitive edge and save our increasingly precious time.

During this session at SMX London, we had Steve Lock of Linkdex, Pete Wailes of SEOGadget, Stacey Cavanagh of Tecmark and Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO showcasing their toolbox of hardcore SEO power tools.

Steve Lock, Linkdex

First sharing his toolbox was Steve Lock.

Steve said that the best tools are those which help him to automate repetitive tasks and make his work easier so he can concentrate in what really matters.

Trello

For this reason, after citing very fastly tools like Majestic SEO, Link Detox and Buzzstream, he talked more quietly and deeply about Trello.

Trello, as Steve said, is a powerful collaboration tool that integrates smoothly with Google Drive, Harvest, Dropbox and many more other tools.

It is extendable with many awesome plugins, as calendars, agile marketing based tools, and export ones. More over, we can first work our spreadsheets in Google Drive and bulk them upload via the Trello API. Finally, Trello has a solid mobile app and best of all, it is totally free.

Browser Extensions

But one of the best tools that Steve and many other people forget about, is our own browser. He uses Google Chrome as his preferred browser, so the perfect browser setup he proposed was Chrome based:

• Use different Chrome profiles to switch between general, auditing, link building, etc.
  • Grab Y’All Links
  • Xmarks
  • Quick Markup
  • Majestic SEO
  • SEOmoz Toolbar
  • Scraper
  • Check My Links
  • WebRank SEO
  • Pocket
  • Trello Scrum
• SEObook extensions are great too if we use Firefox;
• Bookmarklets

RSS

Then Steve presented us how he uses RSS for better organizing his work.

Steve uses RSSOwl, hacks the Twitter Search API for creating advanced RSS/Atom feeds, and hooks it up with feeds from Google, Topsy, Social Mention and filter all the information and creates alerts via keywords.

Building Your Own Tools

Coming onto the vast universe of “Do it Yourself” Tools, Steve suggested that we all start learning how to efficiently create tools our self using guides. Alternatively, we can always use the tools that have been made by others like:

• Distilled ImportXML Guide
• Udacity
• SEOgadget Links API for Excel
• SEER’s SEO Toolbox

Less known tools Steve suggested are:

• Rafflecopter to build relationships with bloggers
• Gephi/NodeXL to visualize social networks and link profiles
• RapidMiner for DIY crawling and data mining
• RSSOwl (again)
• BlogDash
• GroupHigh
• PitchBox
• SEOgadget toolset
• Social Mention
• Linkdex Network

Pete Wailes – SEOgadget

Next up, we had Pete Wailes from SEOgadget taking to the stage. At SEOgadget creating tools is a strategic asset in order to provide a more effective service to their clients.

Pete presented us a classic situation:

We have 9,000 links and we need to get all their metrics

Doing that manually would mean literally days of work even if we were very fast. There are so many tools on offer that offer us useful data and metrics but every tool is independent. To try and complete the task mentioned above, we would need to use so many different tools!

When we have to deal with data reporting, which normally is a compilation of boring and repetitive tasks, we must find other ways of doing this than the manual way.

The first option is using our most used tool: Excel.

First of all we should create a wireframe based on our needs and then create an Excel template or use one already existing, as the SEOtools for Excel by Bosma or the same SEOGadget created and offers to everybody for using, and finally we must test it.

Just using Excel we can save up to 96.4% of the time before allotted for manual data reporting and reduce it to a more digestible 2.5 hours frame.

The second option is creating your own tools.

For that you first have to MVP in Excel, then find a developer (PHP, Python or Ruby) and finally rebuild everything as a tool.

Doing so you can decrease the time needed for data collecting to just 15 minutes!

The third option is scaling tools paralyzing the collection of data.

Result? 10 second needed instead of days!

What tools for developing tools?

As languages, Pete suggest using the most common ones:

• PHP
• Ruby
• Python

Remember to always create the API service first, which will give life to your tools, and then start building the front end(s) of the tools themselves.

This is something SEOGadget learnt from failures in creating tools, which were looking awesome but whose core was less the efficient.

When creating a tool, it is always better to create a demo rather than writing a specifications doc, because “to do it faster” is always better than “to do it slow”.

Stacey Cavanagh – Tecmark

Third on stage was Stacey Cavanagh of Tecmark. She is absolutely not a coder and therefore what she looks for in tools is to get help in working smarter with less consumption of energy, which can then be used for other things she may have to do.

Do you need an infographic, but no budget (or very small)?

• Easel.ly
• Piktochart
• Many Eyes by IBM
• Infogr.am

Or do you need data but client is not giving you anything?

• OnePoll
• Toluna Quick Surveys
• What Do They Know?

Do you need to write something, but have lack of inspiration?

• Google Hot Searches
• TrendsMap
• SEOGadget Content Ideas Generator
• Portent’s Content Idea Generator

Did you create awesome content, but don’t know who to show it to?

• Journalisted
• GroupHigh
• Followerwonk

Have you pitched to bloggers and journalists, but not had any response?

• Don’t use tools!
• USE THE PHONE!

Did you publish great content but not had anyone looking at it?

• Zemanta
• Outbain
• StumbleUpon Paid
• Facebook Promoted Stories
• PPC (AdWords, Adcenter)

Do you have pretty pictures, but you don’t know who’s using them?

• Reverse Google Image Search
• Image Raider

Is keyword research giving you migraines?

• Übersuggest
• Soovle
• Keyword Eye 

Do your report suck?

• Cyfe
• Venngage

And what about tools directly into our own browser? Super charge your Chrome browser with apps like SEO for Chrome or SEO SERP.

Finally, Stacey presented some tools that can make our SEO job easier when we are on the move:

• SEO Rankings
• Found SEO Tool

Dixon Jones – Majestic SEO

Fourth on stage was Dixon Jones from Majestic SEO, who started with a question: what differentiates an average tool from a hardcore one?

Dixon explained how exists a “Maslow’s hierarchy of Tools”.

At the base we have Site Scrapers, in the middle Big Data Tools and on the peak of the triangle we find the Meta Tools, which relies over the two before cited.

Scrapers

Let’s go back to the Scrapers, and we can find they have a problem when it comes to Google: Google doesn’t like them at all.

Scrapers break the Google’s terms of service, they are short term, they accede to non-proprietary information and, ultimately, their business model may be forfeit.

What are the best site scrapers?

• Screaming Frog
• Power Mapper
• Site Auditor by RavenTools

Big Data

Dixon moved on talking about Big Data tools, which have a problem: they distort the math, but are ultimately needed.

In fact, knowing traffic to every site puts our won site’s traffic into context. On the other hand knowing the Link Graph of every site reveals weaknesses in our own relationships. Finally, seeing the whole web and not just our own site helps us seeing the wood the trees.

When it comes to Big Data tools, Dixon segments them in Link Analysis tools, Content Analysis tools and Tracking Analysis tools.

• In the first segment we can rely on Majestic SEO (obviously), Hrefs and OpenSiteExplorer;
• In the second segment we can use Blekko, Bing WMT and Google WMT;
• In the third segment, we have SEMrush, Alexa and Compete.

Meta Tools

Finally we have the Meta Tools, which have too a problem: the dependency over the other two sets of tools (Scraping and Big Data tools).

Some of the tools that we can put under this category are:

• Wordtracker
• SEOClarity
• Market Samurai
• SEOmoz
• Covario
• Serpico
• Raventools
• Conductor
• Linkdex
• SEOGadget
• Brightedge;
• LinkRisk

Of all these, Dixon suggested to give a closer look to LinkRisk and Linkdex.

Post from Gianluca Fiorelli on State of Search #SMX London: Hardcore SEO Power Tools

A wealth of information was shared at the first day of the SMX London conference. From a paid search perspective the speakers shared knowledge and ideas on a wide range of areas pertaining to paid search. Below are some of the most valuable tips and information gathered on day 1.

Paid Search Updates and Tactics

Ann Stanley was the first speaker to talk about paid search, and dived into details pertaining to Enhanced campaigns.

Ann went into detail about the pros and cons of the launch of Enhanced campaigns highlighting specific areas that can be beneficial and other areas that can be a hindrance. While Google has mentioned that automatic changes to Enhanced campaigns will begin on the 22nd July 2013, Ann highlighted that the practices most agencies are seeming to use is to wait until the last possible moment before changing campaigns to Enhanced.

Advertisers are preferring to keep the campaign on the Legacy setting as long as possible in order to limit the risk of unwanted changes that could occur when activating Enhanced campaigns.

Product Listing Ads Update and Best Practices

Ann Stanley also discussed the benefits of Google Product Listing Ads. Product listing ads are going to be the only way to get into the shopping results, and product extension ads are disappearing and will soon no longer be available with search text ads.

When it comes to structuring the PLA campaign Ann recommends 1 campaign being setup for PLA’s with adgroups focusing on products as well a ‘general’ adgroup to broadly target all products. It was recommended to bid very low on the ‘general’ adgroup and bid higher for more specific products.

When it comes to optimising PLA campaigns it is best to examine Search terms reports in order to see which search terms triggered the product ads. These search terms should be examined and negative keywords added to eliminate irrelevant searches.

It was highlighted that Product Listing Ads have CTR’s that are unpredictable and often depend on the competition of products and sectors. Competing with large retailers, such as eBay and Amazon, who almost constantly have more than 1 PLA being displayed, results in driving up of overall CPC rates.

This is a concern as smaller retailers are having to pay high CPC rates in order to compete against the likes of eBay and Amazon It is also vitally important to test PLA campaigns and adgroups.

PLA campaigns should be setup and tested for each category and brand. Using PLA’s do not work every time, it is unpredictable and testing is recommended.

Science of Conversion

George Popstefanov went into great detail about the growth and benefits of mobile advertising, having a mobile site and driving mobile traffic.

Mobile traffic cannot be ignored and should be embraced. An example given was that Amazon saw 25% of their revenue coming from mobile and tablets in December 2012.

George also highlighted that mobile sites should be on separate servers to your desktop site, as increase speed often results in higher conversions.

Give the same priority to mobile site optimisation and maintenance as to your desktop site. Similar rules for desktop websites can also be relevant for mobile websites, such as not having pop-ups on your mobile site, and avoid multiple redirects.

George also had 4 top tips that he recommended for mobile sites:

• Build fully responsive website
• Build dynamically served alternate experience
• Build mobile subdomain experience
• Use mobile providers

These tips will allow for a positive user experience when users land on a mobile site, which will increase the possibility for users converting on your mobile site.

Manny Rivas delved further into the science of conversion, and quite bluntly stated, “crappy input equals crappy output”, meaning if you bring in terrible traffic you will get terrible conversion rates. This means that the first stage of conversion science is bring in relevant traffic. Then, once the relevant traffic lands on your site, the first stage of onsite conversion science would be great content.

Great content speaks to your audience and is impervious to algorithm changes.

The Death of Trial and Error in AdWords Advertising

Sean Malseed gave a great talk on how vital research before creating relevant campaigns and adgroups is. What stood out about Sean’s method is that he does not support the idea of trial and error. Sean recommends looking at your competitors and getting as much info from them as you can, and learning from their trial and error. Let your competitors make the mistakes, while you learn from them.

The very first step before creating new campaigns is to identify who your competitors are, and then look at what they have done and what they are currently doing.

Steal your competitors’ experience, avoid their mistakes and where possible use tools to aid your research. Sean was the first speaker that really pushed the use of tools.

While previous speakers mentioned the use of tools, Sean actively showed examples of the use of various tools in his research and actively pushed their use.

Creation of Ads

Rebecca Hansson spoke about the importance of ads and ad creation. While the importance of constant testing was an underlying theme throughout the talk, Rebecca did give advice on ad creation before testing would be required.

Before creating an ad it is important to first ask the questions “who is searching?” and “who is the ad for?” The way a teenager searches is different than the way an adult searches, even if it is for the same topic.

If you know who you are targeting then it is possible to create ads that speak to the audience you want to target.

Following up from what message the ad communicates, ads need to live up to expectation of the landing page/website.

You can’t have modern slang in an ad that promotes partying, for example, but then directs to a site that is dull and boring and doesn’t relate to the ad or user who clicked on the ad. This will result in the visitor bouncing off the site.

Forget What You Know About AdWords & Paid Search

George Popstefanov was back for another topic of discussion, this time focusing on Enhanced campaigns. George spoke about his experience 10 years ago when Google would make a change in AdWords every 6 months it used to cause panic, but now we are seeing AdWords changes almost daily.

George did make his opinion vocal on the negatives of Enhanced campaigns, however during this talk he decided to try and focus on the positives.

George reiterated the fact that every paid search marketer has always had struggles with AdWords. AdWords has never been perfect, but paid search marketers always made it work, and even though Enhanced campaigns aren’t perfect and has flaws, paid search marketers will make it work.

An example of a positive area that George focused on are the new sitelink options in Enhanced campaigns, which allows for scheduling which was never available before. This will allow for less sleepless nights as specials and promos can be scheduled and allows for less late night manual work, especially when it involves very large accounts.

The first day of the SMX conference saw a vast range of speakers from all over the world discuss and share ideas and opinions. While there were minimal discussions on actual strategy, the discussions mainly revolved around fact sharing about the latest updates, tools and news involving AdWords and Google. Enhanced campaigns was an undercurrent throughout the day and saw many worries about Enhanced reiterated as well as some other fears soothed.

Guest Author Bio

This post was written by Kyle Pretorious the PPC Manager at Media Vision. Kyle has spent the past six years in the online marketing industry, gaining experience in social media, SEO and copywriting, allowing him to bring a wealth of experience to his role at MediaVision, where he specialises in PPC.

Twitter profile - https://twitter.com/Kyle_Pretorius

Post from Guestpost on State of Search Paid Search Techniques and Updates from #SMX London Day 1

via Martini Media

Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Search 95% of UK Marketers Will Increase Digital Marketing Spend in 2013

In a fascinating ‘fireside chat’ type interview, Ilya Segalovich was interviewed about Yandex’ development.

In a frank exchange, Segalovich revealed that the name was originally an abbreviation for ‘Yet another Index’, and the motivation for building it was that there was no alternative – in the early 19990s the Internet didn’t exist in the state it is now, and the developers didn’t see huge market for it. Their first product was used by 100 people – Segalovich was both engineer and customer support.

There was no shopping index in Russia – the founders tried to make “something beautiful” to help.

Perceptions of Yandex differ inside Russia and outside – they are number one for news, shopping, payments and search in Russia, and don’t have a plan to change perceptions of the engine: in a disarmingly candid way, Segalovich implies that it is what it is – different to each user. As I listened I felt like I was taken back to the heady days of the Internet boom, when the web was a shiny, exciting new place.

It’s a breath of fresh air: Segalovich notes that it’s getting harder to compete, so they have to work harder now to stay ahead. Yandex was a big winner on the basis of its Russian language. As other competitors move in, it’s having to innovate. Whilst it’s increasingly using geotagging, it’s still trying hard not to dilute or spoil the results. Guessing user intent is a sophisticated process. Yandex was two years ahead of Google – it was trying simply to improve the user experience.

Yandex resisted personalisation for a long time – ‘in your face’ personalisation can alienate users. They start with regular search results (one size fits all), but tailor the results according to user habits such as a preference for free, or willingness to download. Measuring personalised relevance is hard – people can switch off personal results in Yandex, but few ever do.

Yandex has followed a Facebook initiative and allowed people to go and collect all of their data in a single zip file. Segalovich is calling for the other search engines to allow people to port this information across search engines – perhaps at a browser level. The searcher should own the data.

Yandex has been acquisitive, although it calls itself and SME by comparison to other monolithic search engines. For example, machine translation has become an important area of investment, and Yandex is also looking at speech translation.

Yandex recently launched in Turkey and already boasts around 3% penetration there – people who are hugely loyal. Yandex Panorama is, suggests Segalovich, a very useful tool for transport – like Streetmaps but more advanced. This has been a valued feature in Turkey. Adapting the engine when searches reach so few people, combined with the complexity of language means the engine has faced some interesting challenges, about which Segalovich is disarmingly honest.
From here, Yandex will expand country by country as they make the business case for it. They know that both Google and Baidu will be watching them closely. However, China has both language and government limitations, so we are unlikely to see and Yandex expansion there soon.

Ranking on Yandex is based on machine learning. There are no penalties for not having local content, Segalovich notes, but having addresses on the pages relevant to the search query really helps.

Yandex consistently wins on search content, and is trying hard to create training programs for newcomers. This openness and vision of a search is resonant of Firefox – a more open, quality driven service. Segalovich believes that Google isn’t very open on the search front. He noted that Yandex regularly wins, above Google, in search comparisons.

He notes that Google’s changes (Panda) are probably for the best for Google, but that Yandex will continue to serve quality content, no matter where it’s been found.

But it’s mobile that’s possibly the space to watch. Mobile, said Segalovich in the same breath as acquisitions, is important, but smartphone penetration in Russia is still low. Yandex is, however, already working on mobile, with an Android app already launched. He thinks, however, the learning from mobile will be interesting because of the user interaction with the screen – the signals may be very informative to the search engines.

We watch with interest.

Post from Claire Thompson on State of Search Yandex Interview with Ilya Segalovich at #ISS

Social media has revolutionsed the way we interact with clients, friends, family and peers but at the same time it can also be very complex and time consuming. This session focused on giving and outline of available tools to automate social media sharing. However, leaving those tasks unattended to a machine can also cause various problems if not social disasters therefore speakers provided the audience with best practices to blend the automation of social media with human oversight.

The speaker panel consisted of:

Samuel Bueno de Mezquita, Group Social Media Manager at Regus

‘Social Media Automation: Getting the Balance between People and Machines’

Regus’ unique selling point is there network since they provide flexible office spaces around the globe including petrol stations, airports, rail stations, etc. Their challenge is to communicate with their audience – in 36 different languages whilst they have a highly targeted audience group. Another question they have been asking themselves is ‘who would follow a B2B organisation’?

‘Cargo Cult’ social media  actually looks like a real social media programme with

• High output of content
• High volume of friends and followers

However, it misses the true nature of social media – integration and engagement.

MWB one of their competitors use social media automation – they were tweeting up to 20 times per day linking to Regus’ blog since they themselves didn’t have content to put out there. What’s the point in that?

American Air even provided its audience with automated Twitter responses – the rule is that it simply never works. Machines cannot replace human beings.

To make the automation process and sequence work Regus follow the order of: content creation (humans), internal sharing, distributing to wider audience (automation/human), sense checking (humans), interaction (humans), measurement (Analytics and humans).

• They have a social media/communication team = creating & curating content, and identifying third party links relevant to their audience.
• Delicious & ITTT = stories get tagged on Delicious, ITTT then translates those tags into feeds
• General managers =  repurpose content for their local markets and sense check it for relevance.
• Buffer App/Hootsuite = where content is queued for distribution
• Customer service/communications = for real human interaction.

How does it work at Regus?

Content is collated by the social media team. Edited, translated and shared by 300 trained Regus general managers. Each has over 500+ followers on LinkedIn.

Tools they are using are

• For curation & distribution: Buffer App and Hootsuite.
• Purely for curation: If This Then That & Delicious
• For monitoring: Tweetdeck and Sysomos heartbeat

Our one and only Bas van den Beld, Chief Editor at State of Search

‘Social Media: The Good and The Bad’

Bas shared his publisher perspective of social automation with the audience. Firstly,  you have to choose your channels specifically – you must not try to populate all channels as the rewards won’t pay off! If people see the same message on all your channels they will start to block your message out – that’s basic human psychology. Use the channels for different messaging. Yes, Twitter can be a bit more corporate whilst using Facebook for corporate is doubtful due to its live and engaging nature. He then went on to discuss a few channels in more depth.

Twitter is primarily used for sharing information and links. A lot of people just want to follow people. Bas sees that a lot of his followers simply re-tweet content in order to simply share.  For instance, if a post goes live on State of Search automation is in place. He also uses TwitterFeed to feed blog posts straight to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social is a WordPress plugin that doesn’t just automate your Twitter feed but also feeds it back to your site in the form of comments or ‘latest tweets’.  State of Search bloggers also have the ability to use automation to promote their posts via Twitter.

When Bas went on holiday recently he was cut off the internet entirely. Meaning that he could not promote posts manually or automated which resulted in a decrease in traffic. This experience showed that the right automation makes a big difference in generating and increasing site traffic.

However, he highlighted the fact that automation does not always go as planned therefore we need to make sure that all our settings are set accordingly.

In terms of Facebook – EdgeRank decides what and what you don’t see on your time line.  When State of Search publish new posts they are also feeding them into their Facebook site.  However, the number of people who engaged with it was lower than expected. Why? Facebook is mainly used by individuals to share funny content (cats, anyone?). So what did Bas do? He decided to also post funny pictures and the engagement number went up massively.  Now he adds State of Search blog posts manually as this allows him to be far more visual (screenshot of the post with short description) and the engagement immediately increased. He also tags the author so that the author’s friends can share the post. The result? He got 4 times more traffic – what an impact! To measure the results Bas uses Facebook’s activity log.

What lessons have we learnt?

• Automation needs attention as it does not always go according to plan.
• Regarding Twitter, Bas from his personal experience believes that automation works.
• Facebook is only truly impactful if you use more visuals and images.
• Scheduling automation usually works pretty well but the audience was advised to leave a few minutes for flexibility (not all clocks are set exactly the same!).
• If you are considering automation keep in mind to think how readers use social!

Aaron Wester, Director Web Analytics at Deserted Digital Media

‘Social Media Automation: Look before You Leap’

Their goal is to maximize engagement and conversions through automated content sharing.  Their focus is on the user – automation alone does not work, human interaction is needed as well – hybrid interaction.

The sequence and tools Aaron uses to get the most out of social, human automation is:

• Social influence (Netvizz/ Gephi:GraphML and NodeXL with social importer plugin)
• Social reach (Graph API, Twitter Search API v1.1 & OAuth/ Google Docs)
• Social engagement  (click tracking and heat maps)
• Social geolocation (traffic data/ Google fusion Tables)
• Competitive advantage  (NetVizz/ GraphML)– follow what competitors are doing and understand how they are engaging users.

Post from Clarissa Sajbl on State of Search Social Media Automation: The Good And Bad #smxlondon

Andy Atkins Kruger of Webcertain, gave a whistlestop tour at ISS London of which signals matter for international search.

His toolbox would, broadly, include: local domains; ccTLD; webmaster tools; server location; sitemaps;  alternate hreflang and canonicals; and signals such as currency and links. (The meta language tag is, he noted, now defunct.)

Atkins Kruger was very clear: the geo-targetting matrix is complex.  Firstly there are multi-lingual countries (like Switzerland) Some countries, including  China, Russia, Czech Republic and Korea – have their own tier one search engines. Other countries are simple and generally speak a single language, but World languages , such as English, French and German mean that content from the wrong place can be served by engines to the user.

And despite the apparent simplicity of a single there can be duplication issues on translated pages..

Good geotragetting needs local language, local sharing, and local prices. However, geotargetting, noted Atkins Kreuger, also reduces site visibility to the wider language speaking audience. (So if I target Spanish at Spain, using a Spanish address etc, Spanish speaking countries elsewhere will be unlikely to be served my content.)

This has to be balanced with the fact that local domains are important to users and there’s a bias on Google to present sites local to the searcher.

Webmaster tools can help geotarget, often a better solution than the heavyweight hreflang solution. Href lang can also facilitate content discovery, but this should not be the primary reason for using. Don’t, he warns, put canonicals and Hreflang together unless you can do it properly. Using hreflang it’s possible to ask Google not to translate, to use your own foreign language page.

The tools need planning: geo-targeting needs a mixture of solutions, not just one! Whilst machine translation and duplication are to be avoided at all costs, the separation of sites and use of domains and subdomains has to viewed on a case by case basis for relevance. Think about what you most need , was Atkins Kruger’s  key message, and  develop your strategy accordingly.

Post from Claire Thompson on State of Search Understanding and Implementing Geo-Targeting #ISS

Twitter has fast evolved to become a key element in anyone’s social media strategy. The landscape has changed though and the days of simply pushing out 140 character messages in the hope of generating new traffic to your site are long gone. Nowadays we as digital marketers, have to take various considerations into account i.e tweet time, frequency, re-tweets as well as the authority of those that are re-tweeting. Twitter has launched various new service enhancements such as its expanding Twitter promotion program and as Twitter cards. The session’s focus was on techniques and strategies to truly get the best out of Twitter.

The speaker panel consisted of:

Mike Essex, Online Marketing Manager at Koozai

‘The Death of: Corporate Brands and Personal Brands’

How people see social media has changed massively over time. Nowadays we think of corporate and personal accounts meaning the lines are often blurring. Online the social and corporate brand collide. The reality is that there’s an overlap between the two.  The question is how can we fix this?

Think of the incident where a teacher was fired based on tweets from her personal account . Even though her tweets showed her in a revealing outfit socializing with friends is that reason enough to fire someone? This shows that her personal life has massively affected her professional life. Keep in mind that  tweets are here to stay online and you cannot make them disappear.

Nowadays teenagers and children grow up in this new environment and their online social behavior will have an impact on their professional careers.  We all did silly things when we were young but now  our online identities are here to stay and if you are not careful they might come to haunt you eventually.

So what’s the solution? Pick a thought leader to be in charge of your Twitter accounts and not an intern – as it’s not worth the risk.  Mike provided a Cineworld example where a customer mentioned the high ticket prices and the person in charge of Cineworld’s Twitter account replied along the lines ‘it’s a free economy’ as you can imagine that did not go down well. As a result the person in charge of their twitter account was made redundant. One comment basically turned into a large scale problem.

There are various examples of mismatches between brands and employees – something that can easily be prevented.

So how can we embrace this? Mike reckons the new social media is  an ‘everything brand’.  The solution is to provide employee branded accounts. The BBC was one of the first brands to embrace this approach i.e @DavidBondBBC – and a lot of brands have followed since. Another benefit of this approach is that employees feel part of the tribe then, additionally they get new followers by association meaning immediate wider reach.  Further tweeting during the day gets a lot easier resulting in personal brand benefits.

In Koozai’s case over a third of mentions of their brands are thanks to their employees.

There is a fine line though that’s why Koozai have an employee handbook at hand to integrate it into the brand’s and personal culture.  It’s important though to monitor conversations in order to minimize risks. Having a good tool in place is essential though.  Options would be: tweetDeck, Google alerts, Hootsuite, social mention, BrandsEye, trackur, etc….

It’s crucial to determine who owns the account. At Koozai they allow employees to keep their accounts so they are fully and truly dedicated to growing them. Mike gave the example of Phonedog who sued an employee for $370,000 for trying to keep 17000 Twitter followers when he left – so make sure you put that in employees contracts so they know how to use social media and also the consequences.

Organisations still need a main corporate account but remember to make it personal . It can be run by multiple employees but use initials at the end of each tweet.

Brent Gleeson, CMO at Internet Marketing Inc.

‘Tuning Up your Twitter Tactics – for Powerful Content Marketing’

Brent kicked off  defining the new buzz term as ‘ using content that is not, at its core, promotional material, but which is interesting or valuable for its won sake’.

Apparently 91% of consumers find costum content useful and 78% believe that organisations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them.

So why is it so important? Because 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content, they are also more likely to buy from that company.

Whereas organisations need to think of how they distribute content. linkedIn currently accounts for 83% whilst Twitter follows closely with 81% and Facebook now accounts for 80%. Brent then went on to provide us with tips to improve our  Twitter content distribution techniques

• Less is more – keep it short and sweety
• Replace words with symbols
• Use the hashtag in the copy instead of at the end
• Include a call to action
• Shorten and track the URL through using bit.ly or ow.ly

He also highlighted the importance of thought leadership either through speaking engagements or writing efforts.  If you are a conference speaker make sure you share your slides via Twitter afterwards.  If you have access to data ensure you write white papers and share them with their followers since it’s valuable for them.

Research has shown that fueling thought leadership is the main objective for B2B marketers marketing efforts in 2013 accounting for 56%.

Twitter is probably the most powerful tool to support and distribute content. Additionally it’s a fantastic way for PR outreach strategies since

• Most journalists are on Twitter
• Keep it short and sweet
• You get to learn about them – what are their interests?
• Allows for better relationship building

Twitter is a great way to learn about them – you can find out if you have interests in common – what are they tweeting about? You can start engaging with them and send direct messages. Tools to help you are: Follower Wonk, MediaonTwitter.com, Seek or shout and Cision.

Brent then went on to provide us with a case study of ‘Couple Resorts’. Their aim was to create a fully integrated campaign to increase revenue from online bookings.

So how did Brent incorporate content marketing to achieve this?

Keyword Strategy

• Attract early passive audiences and introduced them to Couple Resort brand experience.
• Direct appeal to their audience (recipe for a healthy marriage)
• Focus on history – facts of the community
• Worked with the social team and onsite content contributors to identify priority keywords

Creating content based on strategy

• Optimized blog posts for keywords
• Created assets to help gain visibility  – images, videos, infographics, etc.
• Looked at how pieces performed and optimized

Content Optimization

• Social teams and content creators work together to recommend priority terms
• Reviewing the schedule
• Provide monthly proximity and landing page adjustments based on keyword performance and linked terms with internal architecture using keyword rich text
• Made sure titles were well optimized for all content: blog posts, press releases, etc…

Social Distribution

• Distributed new content pieces through Twitter and other social channels with targeted keywords is proximity to the target landing page to help convey relevance in search signals.

The results were brilliant – Twitter became the highest source of traffic and multi channel analytics was used and the average time on site was 31 minutes whilst  they also generated $50,000 worth of room bookings.

Jim Yu, CEO at Brightedge

‘7 Steps to Take Twitter Campaigns to the Next Level’

Social content is a key priority for marketers in 2013. Understanding the relationship between Twitter and search is a huge area of opportunity. So how do you align the SEO and social team? Key is to create a dialogue between the two.

1)Think keywords – what keywords matter to your audience? SEOs know the keywords and should share that with the social team.

2) Identify keywords trending on Twitter – absolute number of tweets with keywords

3) Prioritize keywords for driving Twitter activity – capitalize on strong trending keywords. Do topics overlap? Consider how many tweets to send out.

4) Map existing pages to trending keywords. SEOs know all about keyword mapping and then refine your keywords

5) Craft your tweets

6) Measure success and tune up your twitter tactics

7) Collaborate – so both SEO and social media teams win

To conclude – align your search and social teams. Listen to Twitter and use it as a fire-hose of data. Identify trends and tab in if possible. Test your practices and learn on an ongoing basis. Integrate your SEO and social efforts and constantly adapt!

The sessions were followed by a short Q&A

Why are you specifically using  Twitter instead of Facebook?

Facebook is perceived as more private. Koozai wouldn’t encourage employees to have clients as Facebook friends, whilst with Twitter it’s far more public so it’s easier to distinguish. The messaging you put on Facebook resonates differently to messaging on Twitter so you would need to cater differently.  Twitter traffic is also quicker transferred to your website instead of coming from Facebook.

How do you feel about people who follow a big number of people – what should the balance be?

The days of ‘if you follow me and I follow you’ are over. Mike uses Twitter lists a lot – to follow journalists for instance because it’s easier to manage. The key is engagement though, only that will drive traffic and conversions.

Post from Clarissa Sajbl on State of Search Turning Up Your Twitter Tactics #smxlondon

First session at SMX London 2013 I attended was run by Christine Churchill from Key Relevance looking at targeting the mindset of the customer.

Why Keyword Research Matters

Christine opens with declaring that keywords should be at the heart of all search marketing – the first and most important step in SEO. Keywords, she says, are the single most important thing for site relevancy.

Reassuringly she notes that it’s important to get into the customer mindset using the example ‘duplicate a CD’ and ‘burn a CD’: which would the customer look for: business jargon may work inside the industry, but mostly it’s not what customers search for.

Churchill is a fan of the long-tail term – they tend to be closer match and therefore convert better.

How to do Keyword Research

The referrer information ‘not provided’ has had a major impact. For information on not logged in customers, she suggests taking a look at Bing and PPC data – and Google webmaster tools. GWT comes with a caveat though – that it’s all data lumped together. You will need to filter the data, and it’s only there for 90 days.

She also suggests that site search is a valuable source of information.

She also suggests a brainstorming session – with some provisos: filter out negative people and avoid internal jargon.
Customers are a source that shouldn’t be overlooked, along with trade magazines and competitor sites.

To avoid keyword stuffing, finding synonyms can be really helpful.

Keyword Tools

Keyword tools help creativity.

Free ones include the Google keyword tool, although it’s been constantly changed, and it defaults to broad search. It’s also not that smart: a steel forge, for example, lead to a Dolly Parton reference. It can also help with translations. It works for most countries as google’s the biggest search engines, but be aware of the exceptions (Like Baidu in China). It can also check from Google’s perspective what a page is ranking for.

• GWT – also free – will give you a lot of keyword data (with the provisos above) – and trends data can be really useful. It will also give you demographic information (even by region).

• Google contextual marking tool – this can offer some great lateral thinking

• Google Instant shows suggestions as you start typing – words are there because they’re popular

• Soovle.com uses the Google Instant data combines with other sources and Keyword planner tool has not been widely released. It’s slated to replace the keyword tool, but Churchill notes that it’s a glitchy, limited issue beta with a clunky, slow ‘wizard’ with limited data output.

• Wordtracker.com calls in data from many places

• Keyword Discovery

• Twitter search offers up hot searches

• Ubersuggest (ubersuggest.org) can be useful

• Video search: YouTube suggestions and keyword tools

• Yahoo clues – offers head terms, not longtail

• Quintura, visual search – useful for brainstorming

• Related questions on Google and Ask can help

Like all good SEO professionals, Churchill loves Excel – she suggests putting terms in to a ‘bucket’: a broad selection of terms. She then suggests creating a matrix.

Keyword Selection

Relevancy, popularity, user intent (and stage in the buying process), searcher behaviour. We need to get past popularity: popular phrases are competitive – a less popular phrase may both rank better and convert better.

The user intent is important: some terms will be for research, others – far fewer – will be for purchasing: 80% of searches on the web are non-commercial (Jim Lanzone of Ask.com).

Searcher behaviour can be navigational, informational or transactional.

Single word phrases are growing in popularity.

Evaluate by competitor: you need search term parity: how optimised are their sites, are they doing PPC, look at their linkage situation and anchor text.

Competitive Intelligence tools exist – most have free tools for Evaluation. Particularly notable include SearchMetrics, SEMRush, and SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty.

She suggests using PPC for testing keywords.

SEO Copywriting Post Panda

Everything is better with keywords. White papers, articles, product feeds can all help.

Keyword stuffing was never a good idea, but mixing synonyms helps.

Get all copywriters to use author rank, and encourage social media, especially Google +.

Clean up your site: remove low quality pages and rewrite or use canonicals.

Deeper content, well thought out, works better – make sure the content is light and entertaining.

Scan friendly layouts: bullet points, heading, and ‘bolding’ – appropriately – all helps.

Women read more text than men, who need visuals.

Don’t forget a Call to Action!

Good copywriting is a balancing act: it’s more important than ever before. Good, natural content matters – the ‘read aloud’ test is a great way to see if your copy is great.

Make sure you have an editorial calendar so that there’s not a knee jerk reaction to seasonal events.

How to use keywords to optimise the content

The title tag is the most important place: Google weights it. Meta description is important – H tags need to be used sensibly, and alt attributes need consideration.

Schema is important.

Titles 120 characters or less. Title tags must be unique.

Captions under images, bolded, are one of the most read things on a page.

Breadcrumb navigation is good for the user.

Home page SEO

Home page SEO is tough: for most sites it will be the strongest page on the site, where the bulk of the links are made. S

So targeting some of the most competitive phrases makes most sense. Only use the more competitive keyword terms 1-3 times.

URLs

Keywords in URLs are useful, but need using carefully. Shorter titles often work better in blog posts. Longer ones are better if they’re compelling and make people ‘click’.

Post from Claire Thompson on State of Search Targeting the Mindset of the Customer #SMX