Search Engine Strategies Conference London (2-3 June ’04) Report
by Alan Webb
Being an Englishman living and working in Germany, the search engines strategies conference in London was an excellent excuse for me to get back to my homeland. Of course, the pull of visiting my land of birth was not the only reason I attended. As an experienced search engine marketer I knew there wouldn’t be a great deal I would learn from the conference. Nevertheless, the joy of these conferences is that you get to present questions and get answers from decision makers from the search engines themselves, rather than third hand rumours which tend to propagate on forums. If you can read between the lines, you can pick up the direction search engines are going in and the main benefit is you can get confirmed what you have most likely long believed to be fact which makes the registration fee worth paying in itself.
I was very happy to see Matt Cutts from Google and Ron Verheijen from Yahoo!/Overture who both have influence in their respective companies rather than just some high management sales representatives. The quality of guest speakers was also of a very high standard.
This wasn’t my first SES conference as I also attended the Germany SES conference held in Munich, where I had speaking slot on identifying keywords. It is fair to say that the London conference was on a much larger scale than the Munich version and it was clear that many visitors had flown in from throughout Europe with many languages being spoken in the foyer and corridors. The UK and Ireland is a little way behind the US in search engine marketing but in my opinion leads Europe as far as SEM is concerned.
I attended both days of the conference and chose those seminars that for myself would be the most interesting. My focus being on organic search listings and less on pay per click/pay for inclusion. I will be trying to focus in this write up on what was new or confirmation of aspects that are believed to be true but where small doubts occur. The first seminar I attended was the “Domain Name Issues” seminar (I missed the opening session unfortunately)…
Day 1
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Domain Name Issues
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I attended this seminar, moderated by Danny Sullivan (Editor searchenginewatch.com), as I wanted confirmation of my own observations that unlike a couple of years ago, where the general consensus amongst SEOs was to have separate folders for different languages on the same site, that it was now better to have separate domains with the language/country specific top level domains for the different language content. My own site suffers currently from this as I have an /en/ directory which caters for my English pages. Good when I did it, bad now!
It doesn’t however stop at just changing the TLD (Top Level Domain such as in my case .de) There are three other considerations which were pointed out by Robin Hislop (Spannerworks) and Ren Warmuz (Trellian) who were the speakers. The language on the page is important. Defined not only by the Character set but the content itself. Other factors for determining regional relevance from the search engines are the IP address. That is of course the IP address of the website. This means you may need to find a webhost in the country you are targeting. Where the links are coming from also logically help to define region/language. So you need links from sites in the language you are targeting.
For my website which is a .de domain with an English language section in a /en/ directory I should theoretically be doing the following…
Find a web host in the US and/or UK to register my .co.uk / .com pages. Making sure there are no trademark violation issues first.
Move the english language content from my German tld /en/ directory to the uk/com domains. Change the .co.uk content to be more in line with the uk market (avoiding duplicate content and helping conversion by specific Geo targeting). If I have a .com then change the content to be more US focused.
Use 301 moved permanently in my .htaccess on the .de domain to make sure that there is search engine friendly redirection to the English language websites (.com or .co.uk) (Never use meta refresh or javascript redirection).
Persuade all those linking to my old /en/ folder to switch to the new .co.uk domains / .com domains.
A lot of work really, but it would certainly help my rankings for the English language keywords I want to target. I do very well indeed for the German terms, it’s the English terms I’m not doing well on and the reasons why were confirmed in the first seminar I went to (not an English language tld, hosted on a german server, more german sites linking in than English language sites).
A good start and thanks to Robin and Ren for the confirmation. I have a lot of work to do!
Search Engine Friendly Design
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The next seminar I attended was the “Search Engine Friendly Design” seminar.
As in Munich, the speaker for this seminar was Shari Thurow (Grantastic Designs) and moderated by Julian Smith (Jupiter Research).
Of all the presentations, Shari’s was in my opinion the most professional with plenty of “do’s” and “don’ts”. Not just however the theories in bullet points on the PowerPoint slide but there were also plenty of REAL examples in the form of screenshots of sites which is always a good thing for effective presentations. As a speaker Shari is one of the best as well with and ability to generate enthusiasm which is the mark of a good speaker. I actually found that this presentation was better in content and presentation than the one she made in Munich.
Search engine friendly design is an area where many even large blue chip corporations, as well as far too many smaller companies require serious help. Hopefully, some were attending the conference and took on board what Shari had to say. Unfortunately, many won’t implement changes as it would require “too much time and resources” to re-launch a search engine friendly website. Sad, but in my experience true in many cases.
Tragically, Shari’s computer froze half way through so many examples were unable to be shown and visitors had to resort to their manuals to follow the presentation. I looked around and unfortunately many didn’t open their manuals to the relevant thumbnail slides. They did not do themselves any favours as although a lot of search engine friendly design issues are common sense, Shari has a great presentation talent and if you are not paying full attention to the content of her presentation you would be doing yourself and your company a huge injustice.
I think the slide on the “5 basic rules of Web Design” was the most important slide of her presentation. Everything that followed went into the detail but the content of this slide should be drilled into every web designer before they ever write their first line of HTML. The five rules are…
• Easy to read
• Easy to navigate
• Easy to find
• Consistent in layout and design
• Quick to download
Many of the five compliment each other.
For example, without clear and effective navigation, inner pages may not get found by search engine crawlers. You need readable text in order to rank well and get found. Although Shari’s computer broke down half way through, it was still one of the best presentations I attended throughout the entire conference.
Writing for Search Engines
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The next seminar I attended was “Writing for Search Engines”. This was presented by Charon Matthew (MediaCo(UK) and Jill Whalan (HighRankings.com)with Julian Smith (Jupiter Research) moderating.
This presentation is really a must for all web copywriters/marketing managers. Jill Whalen is probably without question one of the leading copywriting specialists out there. I have been an admirer of Jill’s contributions in newsletters and forums on writing for search engines for some time. Her presentation was of the same high quality. I hadn’t heard of Charon before but she definitely knows what she is talking about as well. This presentation would benefit not just a companies search engine traffic but also their sales conversion rates. There is no point having tons of traffic if it isn’t converting into service/product sales. A little SEO knowledge can be a dangerous thing and many webmasters stuff keywords in places they don’t belong, resulting in odd sounding sentences that commonly are grammatically incorrect and make a page look amateurish. This is not going to help conversion (and often ranking either as the keyword phrase densities are way too high).
Charon recommended four keyword phrases (NOT keywords was stressed) in 250-300 words or for longer pages 8-10 times in 500 words. This equates in terms of keyword density on visible text to roughly 1.6%. Although nowadays keyword density is not as important as it used to be with much more weighting placed on off page criteria, you really should be aiming for those criteria, or perhaps a slightly higher rate. My own research has just over 2% keyword density being ideal but that was carried out a few months ago so it may well have decreased to 1.6% since then. Targeting only 2-3 keywords per page was also recommended and although this has been known for a long time amongst SEOs, how often do you still page titles that are 10 words plus which target over 6-7 keyword phrases? Answer, very often.
Jill Whalen mentioned some research she had carried out regarding text in alt attributes on images. According to Jill’s research, search engines place no weight at all on alt attributes unless the image they are on is also a link. Either way, the alt attribute on images should be used regardless of whether an image is a link or not as it also has usability and accessibility considerations. The alt attribute has very little ranking influence, but it was good to see some research being done on its effect.
The presentation was of the standard I’d expect from Jill with quite a lot of specific copy and optimization tips consolidated into an easy to understand professional presentation. Those experienced in SEO would not have learnt a great deal, however, those new to SEO would definitely have gained a lot from this presentation and saved themselves literally months of trawling forums and articles to find the real important basics.
Link Building Basics
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The final seminar of Day one I attended was the “Link Building Basics” seminar moderated by Nate Elliot (Jupiter Research) with speakers Matt Cutts (software engineer, Google), Mike Grehan (Smart interactive and author of “Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide” and Thomas Bindl (OPTOP).
For a techie, Matt Cutts is a very good speaker and his presentation technique was first rate. Matt focused on basic methods for webmasters to gain links naturally and the very basics of how link bulding effects rankings and Google Pagerank. The general thrust was for webmasters to try and create quality content that is going to get linked to naturally from the same or similarly related themed websites. There were some excellent tips on how to get links from expert/authority sites and a great emphasis placed on how not to get links. Especially no-nos such as link farms, guestbook entries (where it was confirmed are increasingly counting for nothing) and forum links. Some really good ideas came out this session. One from Thomas Bindl, which I hadn’t considered myself, was that of helping out charities with a service or product for no financial gain. Often you can get a link from charity sites which invariably offer high PageRank and are considered authorities. Matt also said (possibly let slip) that thematic incoming links from authority sites carry more weight than on-page optimization. That concurs with my own research. The evidence is in the search term “computers” on google. The top ranked site “Apple” does not have the term anywhere on the visible page or source code. Not once. Yet it is ranked top from 69,300,000 competing pages. The Apple homepage could well have been used as a ‘before’ in a before and after case study on the ‘writing for search engines’ or ‘search engine friendly design’ seminars. Off page optimization is now more important than on-page. A Google software engineer had just confirmed what many professional SEMs have believed for a while.
Another important point was not to hoard your pagerank by not linking out. Your site will gain relevance by linking out to same/similarly related authority sites. I’d go a step further and say even linking to a competitor who is deemed an authority will do more good than harm. I’ve mentioned linking to authority status competitors before in one my own articles, and it was confirmed at this seminar.
Mike Grehan, of whom I have a lot of respect for and is a genuinely nice guy having met him the night before over a pint, went a little further than Matt was probably allowed to go on ways to obtain quality links through affiliations. The most amusing moment of the seminar was when Thomas Bindl, having heard a series of ways how to get natural thematic links showed a slide titled “Buying links”. I wish I had a camera, as Matt’s face was a picture
SEMPO Open Meeting
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At 7pm on the first day SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organisation) was holding am open meeting for all members/potential members and anyone interested in the organisation. It was to be the launch of SEMPO UK/Europe. A European Chairman was appointed, namely Mauro Lupi (President, Ad Maiora SpA). I’d been toying with the idea of joining the three German companies currently members for a while, and wanted to find out more about their plans and particularly where the membership and sponsorship money was going. Barbara Coll opened the meeting with an excellent presentation on the goals of SEMPO offering many “reasons to join”. SEMPO members have access to some quality articles and, case studies, tutorials and SEM specific business articles.
However, I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t much mentioned about what SEMPO will be doing about promoting SEM in the mainstream press and there was nothing as to where the money is being spent or plans to what it is going to be spent on. I have no doubt it is an excellent networking platform and that there were some good resources to be found. My main concern was that nobody had heard about them outside SEM circles. There seemed to be no transparency (unless you are a member) as to where the money is being spent or what it is going to be spent on. In ten months I do not know of any study/research sponsored by SEMPO or have seen anything in the mainstream press promoting the SEM. This might be because I’m based in Germany however. I have learnt that the money hasn’t been squandered and is still safely in a bank account with plans for research to be carried out soon. I wouldn’t have known that if I had landed on their webpage. I had to ask board members specifically at the pub after the meeting. SEMPO in my opinion needs to be more transparent on its plans and finances. It is a non-profit organisation that asks for $5,000 to be a member of the “inner circle”. Is it not reasonable to know where the money is going and what the plans are for not just creating resources for SEMs and networking but for pushing SEM into the mainstream and market managers minds?
I will be joining SEMPO as I want it (need it) to work and hope to be able to add value to it. Especially as the country I operate in is primarily Germany. If anyone needs SEMPO it is Germany which is virtually untapped in comparison to the UK/US markets as far as SEM services are concerned due to a general lack of SEM awareness.
Day 2
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Slightly hung-over from the night before but still eager to pay attention to the days seminars. Unfortunately I missed the first session (a good night was had by all).
My first seminar was the “link building clinic”. On the panel for this seminar was Ammon Johns (Propellernet UK) Warren Cowen (Greenlight) and Dixon Jones (Receptional).
The reason I went to this clinic, which essentially just question and answer session from the start, was that as mentioned earlier, off page criteria is more important than on page so any seminars on link building are definitely worth going to. Another reason was that I wanted to hear Ammon Johns as I had a lot of respect for his posts and contributions on cre8asiteforums.com as well as his various published articles. I was keen to see if his speaking was as professional and knowledgeable as his forum posts implied. I wasn’t disappointed. Ammon knows his stuff, and is as good a speaker as his posts & articles suggested he would be.
I decided to ask a question on interlinking of sister sites (multiple domains) that are hosted on the same IP ‘c’ block. Whether or not such links counted and were given as much weight as links from other sites off the IP range.
Not really a basic link building question, and one which did have some visitors literally asking what a c block is, however, this is an area where there is a lot of mixed opinion even amongst SEM professionals and I was keen to see what Ammon and the panel had to say about it. The answer was pretty much what I myself considered to be the case which was that interlinking multiple domains on the same domain in itself is not a sin. Having JUST links from the same ip c block might well be. It looks (and often is) artificial in the eyes of search engines and can easily be spotted. If there are no other links from any other domains, particularly authority sites of the same theme then it wouldn’t be difficult for Google and Co. to not count ‘incestual’ linking. However, if there is a good mixture of links from other domains then this may well not trigger a filter or remove a site from a filter. In other words, the doorway domain spammers out there are wasting their domain registration fees if they don’t work on links from other related sites and rely solely on their own sister sites. This makes sense from a search engines point of view and I believe is being implemented now and is not just theory.
Another good tip from Ammon was that of gaining citations/testimonials links. You know the ones
“I have used xyz product and have found a significant increase in business..” <link>Company name and website</link>
A good example for my own field might be…
https://www.wordtracker.com/testimonials.html
A PageRank 6 link from a thematic website. They don’t get much better!
Dynamic Web Sites
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The next seminar I went to was the “Dynamic Web Sites” seminar moderated by Julian Smith (Jupiter research) speakers Jake Baillie (Priva), Mikkel deMib Svendson (Marketleap) and Laura Thieme (Bizresearch)
I was at the same seminar in Munich where Mikkel was also a speaker. He impressed me then and did so again today. His suit was even louder than the German conference (bright orange)
but it didn’t distract from the quality of his presentation. The inherent problems of dynamic websites were very well pointed out by all speakers with the biggest sinners predictably and correctly being pointed out as CMS (content management systems). I know from experience of optimizing many a CMS website what a nightmare they are. Often there is no provision for even the basic of search engine optimization and virtually all of them need supplementary programming to be made to produce search engine friendly web pages. The first company to make a truly search engine friendly CMS system that is flexible and doesn’t require a team of programmers to modify it is going to make a killing. If there are any out there they are doing a poor job promoting it as none of the panel knew of any decent ones either. Next on the sinners has to be the online shop systems/software. Intershop urls run the full length of your browser address bar and have more parameters/query strings than you can shake a stick at. An example of a url was shown on a slide and it practically filled the whole slide. The cost of purchasing an Intershop product would make even blue chip companies think twice, yet Intershop sites are nigh on impossible to make search engine friendly. Imagine paying literally tens of thousands of dollars for an online shop system and finding out a month later you have zero chance of getting any of your shop product pages indexed in ANY search engine. Others are just as bad, I’ve singled out Intershop as being probably the worst of them all as far as SEO is concerned, but there seems to be very little thinking going on at online shop software houses with regards to making their products search engine friendly. Anyway, the basics were well covered in the seminar. Mod_rewrite/isapi filters on the urls, session id killing, template optimizing, creating static pages from dynamic content were all covered. Not in great detail it has to be said, but the audience were for the most part decision makers and marketing types with less technical backgrounds. Going into mod_rewrite code and examples of session id killing / php url rewriting would not have been appropriate. What was important is that these decision makers could go back to their technical teams armed with the knowledge of the problems of cms systems/shop software and instruct their technical/webteams to do something about it. What I was particularly pleased to see was that references to some useful tools for creating static pages from dynamic content were provided. Many speakers do not readily provide links to other resources and tools, I’m pleased Mikkel and the other speakers gave reference to such useful tools and software such as Kapow, robotmanager, Qwerksoft and others. A couple of others I would have added would be https://httpsd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html which would give a techie a good starting point. Or for the not so technically minded or experienced on apache the webmaster toolkit mod_rewrite generator… https://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod_r ... ator.shtml Meet The Crawlers
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The next seminar, and one I was particularly looking forward to, was the “Meet the Crawlers” session. Danny Sullivan (editor, searchenginewatch.com) moderated this session with the speakers Matt Cutts (Google) and Ron Verheijen from Yahoo!/Overture.
Ron started and talked about new features at Yahoo! As well as some interesting facts on how they choose descriptions. They are based on meta, directory or snippets depending what is deemed most relevant. They also have some useful new “shortcuts” such as ‘Weather’. Go to Yahoo.com and type in “weather yourtown” (without the quotations and of course your town not “yourtown”). I have just tried it for hannover, Germany) and got…
Current weather in Hannover, Germany: 64° F
Mostly Cloudy - Expected High/Low: 69°/53°
View 5-Day Forecast for Hannover (link)
Now all they need to do is give the temperature in Celsius as well, hint hint
They also have flight details as well. Type in a flight number and they will tell you its status in the air.
Apart from new features, on the search side something interesting came out. Apparently Yahoo understands CSS code. Beware all those spammers that rely on CSS!
This session produced two of the finest body swerves (no comments) I’ve come across. Winner of the best ‘no comment’ award must go to Matt Cutts, who when asked by myself if normal text with keywords immediately surrounding a text link adds weight to that link above and beyond if the link was say one of several in a footer area produced one of the finest body swerves (effectively a ‘no comment’) with how they COULD see it being helpful and something that would help to distinguishing link spam… It took me a second after to realise my question hadn’t been answered. Matt should play American Football or Rugby as that was one fine body swerve he had there
You couldn’t really expect him to answer though in truth. It was along shot that didn’t pay off. Second prize for the best no comment has to go to Ron Verheijen from Yahoo!/Overture. I was a bit naughty and put him on the spot about the new pay for inclusion / pay per click service for inclusion in Yahoo! Search and all other Yahoo! Search search engines (altavista, MSN, alltheweb) namely “site match”. My question was something like…
“Why did Yahoo! find it necessary to make pay per click (sponsored listings) compulsory on the site match submission program instead of splitting the program into two, a pay per click option and a pay for inclusion option. Bearing in mind that many small business wouldn’t be able to afford any form of ppc campaign and for many the 15 cent per click (minimum) does not compute into a reasonable ROI”
You could sense Ron squirming a little and then came the answer. “You can still submit freely to Yahoo! which does however provide no guarantee of being indexed…”
Not really answering the question, but a pretty good no comment, despite the answer being somewhat unsatisfactory in my opinion. I’d like to be able to offer clients pure pay for inclusion without being tied into pay per click. I know I’m not alone in the SEM services world in that either. I could see Matt enjoyed the question much more than Ron did
Google mentioned its own new services such as Google deskbar, regional targeting for adwords, search by location, toolbar 2.0, new calculator features (type in “what is 10 times 10” in google without quotation marks.) there is also a demo of its personalized search on labs.google.com as well as other projects that may be of interest.
Advanced Link Building Forum
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The final session for myself was the “Advanced Link Building Forum” any session on link building I was determined to be at. I was a bit torn here as I would also liked to have gone to the “Optimizing flash & Non-HTML Content” session that ran parallel to it. I decided though that linking strategies was more important.
This was moderated by Chris Sherman (Searchwise and associate editor of searchenginewatch) with speakers Matt Cutts (Google), Paddy Bolger (Top-Pile), Warren Cowan (Greenlight) and Dixon Jones (Receptional.com). Particularly impressive was a graphical representation of what was like a linkage radar chart. I believe this was from Warren Cowen. It is impossible to explain without showing it, but it highlighted all aspects of linkage on a chart and you could work out how valuable a link would be based on, if memory serves me correctly, around 10 different linking aspects. The more of the radar you filled in, the better the link. Such aspects as thematic/page relevance, number of outgoing links, authority status, prominence, anchor text, hub or not and others that escape me. It was well explained but may have been over the heads of any beginners there. It was however called “advanced link building forum”. It highlighted WHY forum links, link farm links, guestbook links, off theme links are not weighted as highly as thematic links from authority sites. An excellent presentation all told. Matt Cutts also went into additional detail about how quality not quantity of links is important. That cross linking between similar sites is not in itself a no-no as long as there are good reasons to do so apart from ranking reasons. It was also hinted that Google finds suspect a large number of links pointing to the same site with identical link text. It looks (and 9/10 times is) a sign of manipulation of its pagerank algorithm though the purchase of links and artificial linkage. Natural links don’t always use the same link text, Google is looking for natural linkage. In other words alternate link text for your inbound links. Good to hear confirmation of what many SEOs cottoned on to a while ago. The google sandbox was briefly mentioned. One of the panels mentioned it could occur when a site launches and all of a sudden a large number of links point to it with the same link text. So the sandboxing may well just be a filter for those sites that have an exorbitant amount of incoming links on launch. It is the links that are sandboxed not the site. This might explain why only some sites get sandboxed and not others. Matt Cutts on the other hands basically thought there was nothing in it and that there is no sandboxing “I don’t know where this sandboxing theory started from..” In others words there is still no answer to the sandbox question, whether it exists or not. My personal opinion is there is a form of quarantine going on some new sites which is triggered possibly by an unusually fast link development or from cross linking on same ip c blocks or one of possibly many other factors. It is being seen too often, and where there is smoke…
On buying links it was suggested that you shouldn’t buy links for PageRank or link popularity but for traffic. Google can easily spot sites that allow payment for links. They usually have links next to each other that go off to completely unrelated websites. It doesn’t take too many phds (of which Google has more than its fair share) to work out which sites are selling links and which aren’t. It is not a crime however and can make sense as long as you are very careful who you buy your links from and especially to if you are selling links. Linking to bad neighbourhoods is still a no-no and can affect your ranking. Thematic linking is the way to go. Link out and get links from sites of the same theme or similarly related theme, get links from authority sites and don’t rely on many forum links / guestbooks. It’s hard work, but as Matt Cutts really pushes, you need to look at your content and find a way to include some unique content that is going to get linked to from other sites within your own field naturally. That certainly worked for me but it took a lot of time and work.
Summary
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A very good conference and although I am an experienced search engine marketer, the cost to fly from Germany and the registration fee for 2 days was definitely worthwhile. If for any other reason than to hear what is believed and is posted as fact on forums (commonly wrong) confirmed or denied by those who know 100%. Sure, there may be some disinformation but if you are good at reading people you can sort out what is disinformation and what is for real especially when face to face with those who are definitely in the know..
For those not experienced, or with limited search engine marketing/optimization knowledge, the handbook that goes with the conference is worth the two days entry fee alone. You could learn most of what was at the conference for free on forums and in articles, but it would take you literally months to sort out the crap from the real nuggets and even then you wouldn’t know for sure what was really fact or what was pronounced as fact. I strongly recommend anyone who has not yet been to one of the SES conferences to save up if necessary and do so. The knowledge can literally change your online business around and could potentially be worth a very substantial amount more than the cost of the conference registration fee.
Alan Webb
CEO, ABAKUS Internet Marketing
