Receptional

SMX Stockholm

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:07:51 GMT

I love this job at times. I have NO customers in Sweden and I have to be honest - there are plenty of clever enough Scandinavian Search Marketers out there. But somehow I seem to have been asked back to Stockholm time and again, for both SES and now SMX.

Stockholm is a fantastic city. Steeped in history and cleaner than a baby's bottom. I think chewing gum and marker pens must be restricted or something.

Dixon Jones is Moving (Blog) Home.

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:35:57 GMT

I finally got dixonjones.com to do something other than have my CV from 1998 on it! I had been expecting a bunch of architects to offer me loads of money for the domain for the last decade, but since they didn't they've lost their chance.

I'll try not to be lax on that one, honest... but all future posts are going to be there. The less "bloggy" stuff that I write ends up on the Receptional Internet Marketing News pages as well.

Dixon Jones.

Dixon Jones in Image Search

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:37:52 GMT

I'm about to do a talk in Sweden about Google Universal Search. Unfortunately - it appears I have not even gotten my own image on the image search phrase "Dixon Jones". That's a bit emabarrassing and hopefully temporary as the next speaker is using me as an example of how ignoring Universal search might go wrong!

Not Forgetting Web 1.0

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:02:47 GMT

SEOMoz sent me an email this morning. That was weird in itself. I thought SEOMoz was all about the new stuff. Engagement marketing over push marketing. Infact, it was the rarity with which I receive emails from Rand and the guys there that made me read the email in the first place. Turns out I'll now be getting an email once a month. I'll add that to the same folder as all the others I expect.

To be fair, Internet Marketers are in a slightly awkward phase of the internet it would seem. SEOs and techies alike can see that RSS feeds are much less intrisive and much more respectful of our potential clients' time but they still have a flaw. The flaw is that not so many people read their RSS feeds every day. RSS has started to reach a tipping point in terms of web site implementation, but not yet reached a tipping point in terms of user take up. That's probably an issue for Rand. Being all "next generation" (even though RSS is an incredibbly old and basic technology) is all very well, but only if your client base follows.

If an organisation like SEOMoz resorts to good old fashioned monthly emails, then nobody is in a position to give up email marketing just yet, because Rand's readers must be amongst thee most web savvy there are on the planet. But a newsletter can do so much more than just avoid the spam filter. The trick is to combine three things in one to run a modern day newsletter well. Writing a newsletter and sending it out the same time every month is - quite frankly - a pain in the rear. The pain is most acute when the champion of the newsletter is on holiday or ill that week and sooner rather than later the newsletter becomes quarterly instead of monthly. These are:

Search Friendly Content
RSS Readable Content
Targeted (opt-in) email

The trick for the good old fashioned newsletter is in the "process" so that the newsletter does not take up valuable extra time and contributes to the online marketing effort. I think Silicon.com and Search Engine Land both have it about right and we run the same methodology for our own monthly internet news. The process doesn't exactly "write a newsletter" each month as much as regurgitate the pick of the crop from the CMS/Blog. What's more - the newsletter doesn't contain the content of any stories. Just the titles and maybe a snippet, with a link back to the permalink on the website. Of course, the blog or newsroom itself is search friendly and has RSS built in, so now you've got three sources of traffic for one piece of content: Email readers, RSS Readers and Search engine readers. If you then combine that with embedding the news into your web's home page then you've got an extra kick as well.

You can automate this process, like A4U does. But personally I think this is a step too far as it assumes that every news entry over the course of the month has the same value to the email audience. Better is to look at all the content written over the month and select the three stories best suited to the people you are about to interrupt.

Web 2.0 got me to Lithuania

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:28:19 GMT

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.

Link training and other events in the calander

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:15:55 GMT

I've been invited to do a training session at SES London on link strategies along with the A4U event at Excel on October the 24th. I thought it would be better to incorporate reputation management into the workshop because I think a link creates an association - good or bad - and I don't care what Google says is a "bad neighbourhood", one man's quality is another man's quagmire. My first ever link session about six or seven years ago and the example I noted then was a link from Shell Oil's website to Friends of the Earth. Now most people would kill for a link from Shell... but friends of the earth? I don't think so!

Talking about Google Scraps Best Practice Funding

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:03:44 GMT

Mel must be jumping for joy that Google Scraps Best Practice Funding. I am not at all disappointed either. Even though we are just about big enough to be with the "in crowd" (But only just, as our biggest customer doesn't seem to count, Grrr). We were trouncing the bad (cheap) agencies hands down when we won accounts from the traditionals - but winning was always hard when agencies said "we'll do it free".

Peanuts. Monkeys. I wonder what model will be next?

When presentations go wrong

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:08:03 GMT

Last week I was asked to talk at one of my more intimate presentations. I did - more or less - my regular talk on search marketing and for those of you at the presentation coming here just to download the slides and the talk as it should have been, the slides are here and the text SHOULD have been more or less like the text here. For those that want a laugh at my expense or to know what happened, please read on.

Now - I am really not a disorganized guy. Well - that's not true - but when it comes to doing presentations I am pretty paranoid of a balls up or arriving without my presentation. So I usually:

Send it in advance if I possibly can, even if unfinished
Bring it on my laptop
Have it on not one - but TWO USB sticks
Put in both Power Point 2007 as well as 2003 (in case the presentation machine doesn't have Vista 2007)

I think in general I go well prepared. But this time something was different. This time I was asked to bring my own projector.

I should have known I was going to be in trouble. Usually there is an AV guy on site to worry about that side for me. In fact I DID know. I have a projector, so that's fine. But sometimes my VAIO laptop has trouble triggering a signal because it came with XP home, and I set XP pro on the "D" drive. That just upset the function buttons and ... oh lordy lordy - aren't computers complicated! So when I got MS Office 2007 "Ultimate" I decided to get a new laptop to put it on. Damned HP came with so much spy ware I had to spend my first month of ownership getting rid of anything HP related that was trying to make calls to the Internet. The only other problem with the laptop is that now it won't properly update the graphics card driver, which means my presentations tend to "jump" unexpectedly between slides.

Well - I decided to be safe - to bring BOTH laptops. I got there with loads of time and happily set everything up before the crowds arrived. I was feeling confident. Turns out that getting there early was part of my downfall. As the presentation started, the jumping from slide to slide was my first problem, but the biggest issue was when the new laptop decided to just go into hibernation in the middle of the presentation. Nightmare!

I tried to think on my feet as to why this happened and decided it must have been because I was using an infra-red "thingy" to click between slides instead of the keyboard. I thought that may have been the cause of the system going into hibernation. So I booted up again and carried on fighting with the jumping slides, this time using the keyboard.

But when the system died again, I knew I was in trouble. I had to continue with my printed notes only. I hope I got the main points of the presentation across - and thank goodness I DID have some printed notes to fall back on.

Turns out the problem had been a bit more basic. I had not pushed the plug into the power supply hard enough and the laptop had been living on battery all this time!

Lesson learnt. Thanks anyway to all who turned up including: Graham Aldred; Andrew Baylis; David Ramsdale; Joseph Plosky; Chris Shoebottom; Tony Moscrop; Gareth Hare; Ronald Cohen; Geoffrey Fairfield; Ande Rogers; Martin Tellwright; Stephen Graham; Wayne Rigby; Katrina Howells; Paul Moulder;

All in one free site analyser tool

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:49:29 GMT

It seems everyone has a tool or two. Not quite so sure why people don't bundle them altogether. So apart from our BEST tool (which we are saving for a rainy day) here's our all in one site analyser tool . It combines:

Location checker
Robots Exclusion checker
HTTP Response Headers checker
Meta Information
Text Only View
Keyword Density
Search Engine Information
Keyword Information
Useful Links with pre-populated uri.

We've had it around for ages. Any use to anyone? Free site analyser tool here.

Offline Editor for Microsoft Live Bloggers

Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:40:15 GMT

I just noticed that I am in a beta for an offline editor for my Live blog. Neat. I downloaded a little application and find myself blogging offline. In case you can't find the beta - I downloaded it from http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas.

Video is a Compelling Search Engine Optimisation Channel

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 23:22:57 GMT

Because of the viral nature of video content, Video is a very useful search engine optimisation channel. The SES session at San Jose looked at ways to do search engine optimisation for video. The session started with Sherwood Stranieri who gave some interesting and relevant campaigns involving videos.

The first thing to notice in video SEO is that YouTube is larger than the 64 other video sharing sites combined in terms of viewers, making it an immense giant in this space. It would really seem sensible to put videos on YouTube rather than any other site unless there is an overriding reason not to do so.

Now – videos are not just for bands and singers. Pharmaceutical companies can make just as much use of video as other industry sectors. Explaining the side effects of a drug, responsible use, background about the disease that the drugs treat would always be useful and could even be advertised on the packaging itself.

Another example of novel ways to promote your product includes a video of a blender, blending an iphone! The effect being black smoke and fire... and 1.7 million downloads, associating the blender itself with a cool product along the way.

Even Coke are in on the act. Searching for “Diet Coke / Mentos” shows videos from Google’s results from a campaign run in the US some time ago. The resulting back links from the campaign have given the videos continued prominence to this day on the engines.

In Q&A, Sherwood also pointed out that even in the travel industry, videos can play a part – with videos of hotels now showing up in the results these days.

Jeremy Clan from Double Click showed graphs about the increase in people looking and downloading videos from the web (using Hitwise data). He went on to explain that search is still very dependent on the text associated with the video, as algorithms to interpret the content itself. Embedding the video within an article is – in his opinion – a good tactic. My concern here is that in the GUS presentation we learnt that Google Video search is limited to specific video sites, so I am not so sure that the surrounding text on your web page is much help if the image itself is not on YouTube. Luckily, YouTube makes it very easy to embed a YouTube video on your own site – giving you (presumably) the best of both worlds.

Another obvious thing to say is to put your brand on the video itself. It may end up embedded on other sites and you need to still receive the branding messages in whatever context the video is seen.

A huge number of tips and tricks were offered that were very similar to the image search optimisation session.

Gregory Markel then came on board next. An entertaining speaker that I have spoken with before at a previous “Pubcon”. So I decided to more or less sit back and relax – but my guess is that you should go and download this presentation from the SES site after the conference.

· 8 times as many people are looking for “Video” than “God”

· Type Car Video into Google and no car manufacturers have videos there

· Using Video to push out bad content is a useful brand reputation management tip

· He provided a complete list of video sites which will be in his presentation

· He suggested putting the video on your site as well as on YouTube. Not so sure this is the best plan.

· It looks like he recommended uploading the video to several video sites, not just one. That said – with YouTube so dominant, that’s the best place to start.

There seems to be different messages here from the speakers about these strategies – so here’ my personal take. The long term SEO effect of videos is enhanced links. It helps if all the links come into your site if they can – and certainly don’t randomly link to different versions of the site. Multiple uploads is also labour intensive. So I recommend uploading to YouTube and then embedding the YouTube video on your site and then encourage people to link to your web page, where you can.

If, however, you want to upload to lots of video sites, then Tubemogul.com is a (currently free) system that allows multiple uploading – like the directory submission software of yesteryear.

Here was a clever trick. YouTube is taking a frame about a minute and 20 seconds into the video as a still shot. Make that section compelling if you can.

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.

Images and Search Engine Optimisation at SES

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:23:22 GMT

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.

A Deeper Look at Google Universal Search (GUS) at SES San Jose

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:13:08 GMT

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.

Searchengine marketing fundementals

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:43:38 GMT

These are the slides from AdCentre Sunderland event

My thanks goes out to all of you, but thanks especially to those that gave me their card: William Ingram, Neil White A.C.I.M, Neil Walker, Martin Cooper, Craig de Prez, Mark Flanighan, Thomas Ogle, Sue Cant, Andy Watson, Alan Connor McVey, Darren Hester & Wendy Adams, Mark Burdett.

Adding Video to Live Spaces

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 19:53:33 GMT

Well lookie looke - Live Spaces let's you add video. Well - I tried, but a .mov file was not an option. But hey - I can youtube it!

This is made by my brother in law, Steve Tolfrey. What do you this of this?

Let me know. If you like it, he's a freelance animator you know!

Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce May 2007

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:59:09 GMT

Thank You Edinburgh

I would like to say a huge thank you to the members of the Chamber of Commerce in Edinburgh for their pleasant welcome. I hope that there were a few ideas in the talk. If you would like the script for the talk, you may have noticed me losing my place in my notes - but what I MEANT to say was very similar to the Birmingham Version.

I would also like to say thanks to Microsoft (with my apologies for mentioning Google QUITE so often!). I know a few people felt that Microsoft possibly sold themselves a bit heavily, but being in the back room I can say that they didn't mean to do that. Of course, since they paid for my flight to Edinburgh AND fed me and put me up overnight, I can't blame them that much .

My thanks goes out to all of you, but thanks especially to those that gave me their card: Andrew Forbes; Ross Cunningham; Sarah A. Moore; Tich Tamanikwa; The Bellini Restaurant; Edinburgh Computer Services; Sandra Laird and Maggie Urquhart.

Is the SEO industry clever or simply a bunch of fraudsters?

Tue, 15 May 2007 09:22:30 GMT

I was in a chat room on the Internet Chess Club the other day and someone read my profile and said I was an “seo expert”. The predictable barrage started from a couple of presumably very able web developers about the SEO industry being a bunch of snake oil charmer salesmen and general charlatans.

I’m not saying they didn’t have a point, but it depends on what you are asking the optimiser to do. If you are asking them to put you in the top three organic positions for [insert phrase here] on Google, then you have already committed a cardinal sin. The search guy taking the challenge might also have threatened their entire client list by taking that challenge on head-on at the same time. Why? Because being one of the best three companies for [insert phrase here] is not the search experts’ responsibility. It’s yours. Think about it - If you are NOT one of the best three companies for the chosen vertical, then any effort to pretend you are is just that… pretence. Search engines try (not always with success) to avoid conning the searcher into being where they don’t want to be.

Now – a search friendly website can dramatically improve your chances of being seen on the search engines. Good content pushes you further. But the real marketing clincher for any business in the real world is reputation. Brand is the offline embodiment of “reputation” and how the engines (and their users) react to your site in search is the online equivalent.

Now plenty of people will say words like poppycock (but much shorter and succinct) and when you look at the quality of search engine results in general I think it is fair to say that most times, engines don’t return the “best” results, but “adequate” results. The results are only adequate because people are manipulating them, still with some success. But I say look at the bigger picture. We are still only 5% of the way into getting search right. Of course results won’t always be perfect. But ignoring or trying to short-cut the intended strategy of the engines to return the “best” results has to merely be a short term objective. The SEO companies that have survived since 1999 are the ones that generally held that philosophy to be true. Help a company to be best, don’t help them to bypass that responsibility.

This news may come as a bit of a pain in the neck for affiliates hoping to score big on Google, rake it in and retire. But creating a brand reputation is not hard. Just best done by doing what you do best as well as you can. Everyone in search has heard of Matt Cutts, but less have heard of the girl that heads up Google’s Webmastertools team.Vanessa Fox started her blog in March and has just released her April stats and the article highlights exactly the challenges for any newbie site. I’m confident her one girl (nude) brand will stand her in good stead. The moral is that you can position yourself as one of the best in any of a million niches and then you can make that niche bigger. Any affiliate can still do that – but you better come to the Internet armed with more than a domain name and a blog. You need a strategy to become the best in your niche.

Dixon Jones

Search Engine Fundamentals Talk–SIPA SEO and SEM Workshop, London

Wed, 09 May 2007 12:16:43 GMT

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 whether your marketing is worth it. I think I’m misquoting Henry Ford who may (or may not) have said: “I know 80% of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which 80%”. With the Internet that just doesn’t have to be true and it scares the WILLIES out of traditional ad agencies. I can tell my clients where their buyers were before they came onto the website, how many times they returned before they purchased, and what search phrase if any brought the buyer to the site and the path the user travelled through the sire to buy. Now I am sure you’ll hear more about knowing your customer today, with adCenter’s new demographic targeting as well – but for now let me say that a traditional shop only has data about you after you’ve bought something. They can’t find out what prompted you to buy. So advantage 3: you can learn more about your users online than you can offline.

So hopefully you are now all dying to master the search engine marketing world.

Let’s look at search engines market share. How many people used Google in the last 7 days?

Clearly in the UK, Google has a dominant market share. Well over half of all search queries. In the USA they own less than half of what’s called “query share”, and in Europe they vary from virtually none in Iceland I have found, to 80 plus. What’s interesting is second place.

We track plenty of sites for our clients, and in some, YAHOO comes in second and in others Microsoft properties MSN (which is turning into LIVE.com). high traffic web site we can see a large percentage of organic traffic coming from Yahoo and MSN. On a site that ignores LIVE, search traffic can drop to 1% from this source. The moral of that finding is to work on generating traffic from many sources, not just one. More about the wisdom of that thought later.

So – I am going to talk about “Organic search”. There are two strands of search and it is important to know the difference. Pay per click listings are being discussed by Alan from SilverDisc. I plan to talk about the “organic listings” – which are the ones with the Green arrow.

Receptional do manage Paid Search listings for clients. It is entirely possible to do yourself, but there really can be quite a lot of work involved. Here is a list of just one customer’s keyword research for a single product company targeting the UK only.

Pay Per Click. is half the story in search

But Receptional were selling their services in search well before the PPC model hit our shores. I’m sure that all of you have received countless emails about how SEO companies can get you to the top of search for £50 a month. Well these are lies and I am going to spend a short time showing you exactly how search works and why no company – not even the major search engines themselves – can make such a guarantee.

I’m going to show you – I hope – how search engines decide what should come back in the organic results under any given criteria and how you can influence this process.

First you need to decide on your strategy. Do you want?

· Traffic from lots of phrases or

· To win on one big phrase?

Well it depends on your industry and your attitude to risk. We have a business – that sells downloadable murder party games – and frankly it is quite a niche market, ideally suited to the internet and research showed me that murder mystery games is THE key phrase to optimise on. But I have gone to considerable lengths. I set up a Ltd company called murder mystery games. I bought murdermysterygames.co.uk AND I bought murdermysterygames.net and I built two entirely different websites –

One that suits Google…. And another site for the other engines. Actually - here I am just beating myself, which goes to show how the engine philosophies are converging in their core design, even though they are still trying to differentiate themselves in other regards.

But that was a project started back in 1997 – a DECADE ago. Imagine how much money and effort has been poured into projects that are more mainstream than Murder Mystery Games? Given a ten year head start, is it really realistic for you to catch these guys up?

Organic SEO is High risk – and setting out to win on one major phrase is pretty much asking to winning the lottery. It might happen and you can improve your chances. Maybe from a million to one all the way down to… say 1000 to one. We’ll have improved your chances 1000 times. But you’ll still only have a one in 1000 chance of being near the top.

So don’t go for the big phrase. Organic SEO is high risk because the Internet is heavily interrelated. Results depend on the relative weights that engines give to other pages on the Internet. If Wikipedia went offline (and let’s face it, it’s a free encyclopaedia) then you would be amazed at the impact this would have on search results over a few weeks. If Microsoft bought Ask, you’d find they had two HUGE databases and they would have to merge them into one, with the ripple effect of the metaphorical and surprisingly common “cyberspace butterfly”

Organic SEO is high risk. But if you avoid measuring success based on key phrases and work on the basics then you can help your users primarily and in the process help the engines to do their job.

Search engine marketing – on the organic side – is about three things:

· •Good, unique content

· •Good site architecture and

· •Good quality and relevant inbound links into a given page.

Good content still needs to be displayed in a way that the search engines can understand. This means that on page factor remain important. I’ll go through a couple of these factors here. However – more and more, search engines rely on off page factors when understanding a page’s place in the order of all things virtual. The two most significant of these are

· The way in which pages in a site link to each other – which helps to theme site content for the engine’s benefit as well as the user.

· The context in which pages on OTHER websites link to your content, which helps to both theme the content and signify its relevance on the internet to a given user search query.

So looking at the on page factors, two of the most basic remain the most important.

The TITLE of a page should be unique to that site. Do not have “your company” as the title on every page. This gives neither humans nor search engines any clue as to the page content. The Title of a page shows in the blue bar at the top of most Internet browsers. It is NOT NECESSARILY the same as the headline text that you read at the start of the web page – although clearly you (and the engines) would expect a good correlation between the two.

If you “right click” most web pages, and select “view source” you can see how this Title tag is encoded into the page.

Similarly – usually immediately below the title tag is the Description tag. This tag fell out of favour a short while back, for search optimisers. I don’t know why. I think some bright spark decided that search engines don’t use this tag in their algorithm. Well – that’s poppycock and the next slide will show you why.

Note the description tag here: “review and Road test of the Vauxhall Corsa….”

Now have a look at the results as they appear on yahoo.

Result three uses both the title tag AND the description in the presentation of the results.

Now – this slide shows no evidence that the description affected the ranking of that result – infact it suggests the reverse – the top result is Auto Express. But look at the auto Express result. The user’s eye is in no way drawn to that result. It takes up less real estate on the page and does not help the user on his journey. He is MORE LIKELY to click through to results two or three than he will to result one.

The lesson: Use a unique title and eye catching description on every page of your website. Otherwise all your hard work will be in vain.

At an early stage in your site build, do check to see if the search engines can properly index you web pages. You can use a variety of online tools to do this. Essentially, you want to be able to see what your site looks like with all the images and formatting removed. Does it still read well?

One good approach to this is to also build the site for accessibility at the same time. Making a W3C compliant site, using CSS instead of tables (or flash or images) for formatting makes for a much better site design.

If you are building a database driven site don’t expect your developer to be a marketer. They are already programmers for goodness sakes. Do you want a guy with a split personality defining your brand?

Once built the hard work begins.

The hyperlink is the most fundamental method for the integration of the Internet

Hyperlinks build you into the fabric of the connected world

People forget how pervasive the hyperlink is. You can either get to a web page by typing in a web address or… more commonly, you click on a link.

•A Search engine result is a hyperlink

•A link from another web page

•A link from a PDF file

•A link from an Email

•A link from a word document

•A link from a spreadsheet

These are ALL hyperlinks. Human navigation relies on the hyperlink. For this very reason, Search engines rely on the hyperlink

Let’s see the power of the hyperlink in action…

Here is an old, but none the less revealing example of how search engines work. Typing in “Manage your profile” you would perhaps expect to see pages relating to identity theft or credit history. But out of 3.5 million results, the second here is g.microsft.com/mh_mshp/48.

Now one of the things about Google is the ability to look at the “cached” version of the result. This is the version the Google collected when it indexed the web page.

Looking at this cache, we see that “mange” and “profile” do not even appear on the page.

So much for on page optimisation eh? It is anomalies like these in the search results that reveal how search engines work. How could this happen?

Well the answer lies on Microsoft’s home page. Right at the bottom (and therefore probably on many other pages on Microsoft.com) we can see the exact phrase I typed into the search engine, which links into the search result. Google knows that Microsoft’s home page is very important. So any hints it gives about the content and meaning of other pages outweighs even the content on those pages themselves.

Understanding this basic concept – first addressed in a Stamford University paper written by a chap called Larry Page – leads us onto how we should interpret SEO in a marketing sense in today’s connected world. Organic SEO is not so much a marketing channel in its own right, as much as it is a combined product of all other marketing activity – both online and offline. It is better described as a “measure of online brand strength” than anything else. Get all your other “ducks in a row” and make sure that you maximize the opportunities for other marketing channels to positively influence search and you WILL generate traffic. Being true to your brand messages will improve the consistency of that message at therefore the quality of those visitors.

SEO is not part of the marketing mix; it is a MEASURE of the marketing mix.

So talking about measurement – you must lastly have the tracking tools to make the right decisions. Do not measure SEO success by whether you rank under a specific key phrase. Instead, measure it by the number of VISITORS arriving from organic search and the SEARCH PHRASES they used to get to the site.

This gives you a quantitative metric and a qualitative metric. At the same time it avoids breaking the terms of use for the main search engines, who do not like machines tracking the rankings of thousands or millions of websites at the cost of their bandwidth

Thanks to everyone who turned up to see me speak, including: Lauren Crawford; Meike Suggars; Stephen Rowley; Neil Clasper; Julian Kramer; Phil Solomon; Kellie Mason; Amir Belal

If I have made any errors in the above list - please let me know on this blog. I'll try to get around to fixing it!