About once a year I get to speak at somewhere slightly out of the ordinary. Last year it was Reykjavik, in Iceland: this year it is Vilnius, Lithuania.  There are a number of reasons why this special over and above the location.  The most relevant for most readers will be that it was an entirely “2.0” experience. (Yes – I KNOW I  shouldn’t  talk about 2.0).  The enquiry initially came via LinkedIn, a business to business social networking site.  A friend of mine from university, Jeff Hurst tracked me down.  We had not met for 20 years, but when he found me he saw my profile.  On a separate track, a friend of HIS was putting on an Internet Marketing conference in Vilnius and asked my old firiend whether he knew of any speakers that might be interested.  Expenses were to be paid, so - inspite of the talk being just one day before AdTech London - I took the chance to say yes.

The web 2.0 experience didn’t stop there, however.  Between the confirmation and the event date, we talked – of course.  Our natural tool of choice was Skype and Skype instant messenger.  From there I was able to ascertain enough about Lithuanians to modify my presentation to suit the audience.  I found out, for example, that more Lithuanians use a site called “Frype.lt” than Facebooks and so I joined Frype (after getting an invitation from the conference organiser) and managed to read the entire site quite well in English and set up a profile – albeit with only one friend!  This was to all to create one specific slide in my presentation showing the immediacy of information that social networking offers and the real advantages they have over traditional search engines.

The web 2.0 experience followed into the talk.  Because I was going to be speaking to an audience at least partly using translation headphones, too much text on the slides struck me as one leap too many for the poor translators, so I decided to illustrate much of my talk by taking the audience around the world using Google earth.  The presentation eventually got to Eva – a model on a massive canvass of the front cover of Maxim magazine, sitting in the Nevada dessert – and then jumped to Flickr, where a guy (I assume a guy!) called Methodshop had captured the image and started taking Maxim’s viral message to a wider audience.

Before the presentation I let my friends know what I was doing through Facebook and updated the “places I’ve been” application to include Vilnius and Lithuania.  All through the presentation, I had my video camera on a tripod, with a view to possibly cutting up the 50 minute slot into smaller videos for popping up onto YouTube.

It really is incredible how the new world is coming at us, which was – not unsurprisingly – the central theme of my presentation and I was delighted to have been given the chance to talk in the Baltic.

So what’s Lithuania like? Well I only got to spend a day there, but if you think they are a little “behind” then you had better wake up and smell the coffee!  I saw proportionally more Saabs and BMWs than I would on a UK street and everyone was extremely “chic” – as were the shops and the whole culture.  My fellow speakers (one Brit, one German) were also surprised at the incredible speed with which the country had replaced their old communist trappings with the new.   The Lithuanians aren’t just coming – they are well and truly on board. To the north, Estonia is so far advanced and internet-connected that they even run their elections online.  Now why are WE so behind?  Can you imagine the UK or the USA going that far into the new world in the near future?

If you think web 2.0 can’t help you in business, think of this next time you say that thought aloud!  Here’s the various ways Receptional is currently using 2.0 ideas (other than the Lithuanian presentation).  If you’d like to find me on http://linkedin.com or http://Facebook.com , track me down and feel free to hook up (but PLEASE – add a note saying who you are and that you were reading this article or I’ll ignore it).  If you want to stay in touch using RSS our newsfeed is at www.receptional.com/newsroom  where you will also find the chance to sign up to the good old fashioned newsletter. The photos are here.

The last speaker was Stephen Baker who has a technology  designed to transcribe the audio of a video file into text to enable that text to be the basis of a search algorithm. Assuming that technology is the future, the words used in a video may – in time – help for SEO purposes. 

In the Q&A, an excellent suggestion was made. If you have a long video, try putting up a teaser on YouTube which then draws people into the main video being on your own site.

With the emergence of Google Universal Search, it makes sense to take a refresherer course on how to do search engine optimisation with images.

Shari Thurow started off and started with the most obvious tip - that we should use "Alt Text" on every image on our site, pointing out that whilst this tag is not particularly useful in text based search algorithms, they have increased relevance in the image based search algorithms. However, she went on to observe examples where these tags were not indexed, and the images in the site in question was returned only due to anchor text on inbound links. Inbound text links therefore have relevance in image indexing and ranking.

Shari also suggested:

• That the engines interpreted .JPEG as photos and .GIF files as graphics.
• The filenames of images are important and some programs like Photoshop tend to name files with meaningless filenames.
• Use captions or labels around images on the page to gives cues to image search engines
• Still optimize the page for the targeted search phrases

Shari has a new book out via www.search-usability.com which has more information on image search.

Next was Liana (Li) Evans from Commerce360 was next. Here are her bullet points.

• She reinforced the message that GUS has changed the way we need to look at search
• Image search is the fastest growing form of vertical search (using a Hitwise graph to show this)
• Li showed an example ("Squawkers") to show how a manufacturer was losing ranking to resellers on their brand product because they did not tag their images.
• Ask has the best layout with their version of blended search. (Others have said this at SES)

Liana showed images of presidential candidates and showed that some candidates had much worse reputation management than others when it came to images of them on the web – with Hilary Clinton’s images being particularly poor.

Liana also showed that when typing in “Hurricane Dean” (currently raiding the Gulf of Mexico as I type) showed a thumbnail image of the storm. This was an image that did not exist yesterday so demonstrated Google’s ability to react quickly to event.

Fun image searches to try “RIAA” and “Toilet Paper” come back with amusing results.

Li also added some optimisation tips, which were pretty much already described by Shari, although she did also point out that you should ensure your images folder is not blocked by your robots.txt file.

Next was Chris Silver Smith from Netconcepts. He looked at the potential SEO value of social image sharing sites and found Flickr to be the best, with “23” and “Fotki” being the only other two working well. However he decided to talk based on Flickr.

The design features of Flickr lend themselves well to SEO as it allows you to edit many parts around each image including:

·         Title

·         H1

·         Description or article field (with links back to your website)

·         Tagging

·         Cross-Grouping

·         Comments

·         Alt Text

·         Linking Hierarchies

·         Date stamps

Cross grouping is the ability to share the image with different user groups (e.g. the “Weddings”  group and the “Brides” group.

Chris observed that pictures with good contrast improved the thumbnail images and therefore tended to work better. He also pointed out that the photo must be viewable by the public and also suggested loose licensing right (allowing others to use the photo if you link to the owner).

Chris also pointed out that if the image is a location, you can drag it onto a map within flickr. You can also share the pictures on Flickr with news organisations. You can also associate the image with “Delicious”.

He also showed how you could add &imgtype=faces to the end of a search query on Google to target your search better.

If you would like a full Search Engine Optimisation audit on your site – please visit our main site.

Dixon. 

The session at SES san Jose on "Google Universal Search" (GUS) was packed with people sitting on the floor. This has immense implications, as Greg Jarboe - the first speaker was quick to point out. Google universal has been slowly rolled out across the Google results. This means that not all results are from the main search engine. But are instead "blended" with other data sources - from Google maps to Video results. This rewrites all the rules of search engine marketing and Greg prophecized that 70% of everything he knows about search is now redundant and everyone needs to learn some new rules.

Greg started with the example of the phrase "iphone" which was launched recently in the states. The fourch result was a picture of an iphone and also on the front page was a Youtube video of an Apple employee demonstrating how the phone works! In those circumstances, what would be returned on your company's site? Here are some early tips from Greg on what you can do in this new world. If you are

doing a press release, he suggests you look at "Newsknife" - a site that shows which news outlets are best optimizing their news stories for Google. He suggested adding a JPEG image to every press release to increase your exposure and to warn your directors that any pictures taken of them in compromising positions might - in the not too distant future - show up in Google alongside the company's online messaging. He used the News International mogul as an example. Typing in a News International related search showed images of the boss with his family! Will your boss be seen in such a clear light?

Greg also talked bout the need to silo Blog users into search verticals or industry verticals, making sure you communicate with the right people in your industry. He showed a few tools to help in this regard.

Sherwood Stranieri of Catalyst took the debate on, focussing on Google Video and how one might optimise or manage video content. He took "A&E Television" as a case example. The company has huge amounts of video content across its three TV channel sites. They found both authorized and unauthorized video clips all over the web. He found that there were a lot of factors that you could manipulate or change in terms of how Google Universal might interpret the videos. These included tagging, video format, whether the video has inbound links, download popularity and social commentary about the video made by users and viewers.

They found that in SEO terms, the page rank was not important, but page views and comment activity correlated well to the search results. Page Rank - in some cases - was zero. He also suggested that Google had the ability to work out whether a video was "hot" or "not" down to a 15 minute time segment! Based around Google's older technology of "Zeitgeist", Google can then influence its results in real time based on what people are interested in. What he also revealed was that Google currently have to tailor its process for indexing Video sites and as such, only a few video sites were in the GUS index. This suggests that you should put you video on a biggish video portal instead (or at least as well as your own website to get exposure on Google. This was confirmed in Q&A by Google. One of the reasons for this was that they needed to be able to rely on the video servers being relatively robust for the user experience.

The next speaker was William Slawski from Commerce 360. He started by looking at the similarity and differences of results across search engines. Looking at when "onebox" results appeared, for example. He found Ask showing the most diverse set of results, with Live and Yahoo both ahead of Google on his particular example. He also displayed a huge variety of potentially blended results - from phone numbers to travel bookings. He also showed the evolution of blended results from One search through to the Google Universal Search that we are seeing today. He noted that the language of the query, the country of the user and many other factors could influence whether a blended results was displayed or not.

William pointed out an obvious strategy for search marketers, in that optimisers should look at all the vertical search facilities in Google (video, Imaging, News search) and try to optimise for each of these independently. He noted that question answering on the engines was triggered by the user query and as such, to get returned, you would have to frame your objects appropriately. for example, using "born dd/mm/yy" on a Marilyn Munroe site might help your chances when a person types in "how old is Marilyn Munroe?". Similar examples followed with business address details being preceded by the phrase "address" or a the telephone number being preceded by the phrase "Tel:".

Dave Bailey from Google followed, pointing out that Google's mission is to "organize the world's information" and that Google Universal is just an extension of that philosophy. He noted that people have busy lives, and the Onebox saves people time. Blending a map into the results, when relevant, just saves the person time doing what they need to do next. Google's top consideration remains relevance - although speed is also important. With that in mind, they do not want to blend in different types of results unless they are clearly useful.

Dixon Jones.

Search Engine Fundamentals

My text for my talk at the SIPA SEO and SEM Workshop, London.

Thanks for everyone who attended.

How many of you are morning people?............... How many of you are definitely NOT morning people? Me too. I recently took some advice. The best way to stay awake in a morning presentation is to do the talking. Thank you Jonathan for the kind introduction. I am delighted to have been invited here today to talk about search. As you know my name is Dixon Jones. I’m the Managing Director and founder of Receptional Internet Marketing and I also have my own niche internet company on the side – selling Murder Mystery Games for download to play at dinner parties and the like.

Receptional are an Internet marketing consultancy, which specialises in search. We started before Google. In fact – the first conference I ever went to in London I was busy trying to suck up to a journalist called Danny Sullivan in the hotel bar, not realizing the Sergey Brin, one of Google’s founders was sitting on his own in the corner of the bar. Now there was a missed opportunity.

So we’ve been around a while and I get to speak at some great locations. Before Christmas they let me speak in Las Vegas, a week before that in Iceland but now I’m home

Probably better than Qualifications and accolades, are examples of Receptional putting our money where our mouth is?

We are currently top 10 for the phrase “Internet Marketing” on Google

We also do competitor analysis reports – so "competitor analysis" is an example of our site prominence on Live.com.

When I started speaking at conferences, would you believe, I had to start by trying to convince people that the Internet was going to be a big thing for businesses before I could even start to tell the audience about the importance of search. In fact, I really had to start by explaining what a search engine is. People now know more or less what a search engine is, but frankly most never wanted to learn how they work. Unfortunately for you, you are now stuck with me for 40minutes, part of your life you’ll never get back.  In that time I am hoping to show you more or less exactly how they work. Most of it is not rocket science – but nor is accountancy and you still use professionals for that as a rule. I’ll also show you why knowing how they work doesn’t in any way guarantee success.

But before we learn any of that stuff, its well worth going back to the business reasons why you should involve search as a core element in your marketing mix. It’s easy to see these advantages as they are written on the screen.

Firstly – these days – customers pre-qualify themselves before being exposed to your marketing message. It wasn’t always thus in search. In 1999, most search engines simply sold banner advertising on the search results page. Even if you searched for Blue Shoes, you’d still get an advert for credit cards. Correlation between search query and advert: Nil. That’s why SEO was born as an industry. The search engines couldn’t target their adverts, so people like me built pages to do well in the organic results. Nowadays, it’s all MUCH more targeted. Although we are barely 5% into how sophisticated and personalised search can really be, customers only get exposed to your site if they want to be exposed. It’s much more targeted than advertising usedjags.com on a motorway billboard in my opinion, because the user has already switched on his PC, gone to a search engine and typed in a (hopefully related) search term. So that’s point 1 – Pre-qualified Users

Secondly - Search can interact with your customers at ANY stage in the buying cycle. If you understand the buying cycle of your customers, you can build online marketing campaigns that work in harmony with those buying patterns. You don’t start with telling a user the price of a holiday just because they typed in “Best French Holidays” but you DO tell them the price when they type in “CHEAP French holidays” for example. Understanding the user intent is one of the first lessons in how to fail online and I rarely hear people taking the time to think about words and phrases that “frame” the question the user is asking the search engine. I can tell you that understanding user intent is precisely what the search engines are trying to do – and so should you. So – Advantage number 2 – Targeting the MESSAGE based on user intent.

Thirdly – and I can’t recommend this enough – you can actually track to see whet