Last year when working in London, I had the privilege to attend SES the Search Engine Strategies conference in London. Being back on home soil obviously means that this year I have had to miss out however I have been following the guru’s who have attended the event to provide Australia’s digital network with some of the key learning’s from the event.

Overall from all the commentary it seems that there were no major new revelations but a lot of good nuggets to help SEOs improve their search strategy.
Conversions & Metrics

One of the hottest topics for the conference seemed to be centred around ways to drive intelligence out of your analytics to make more informed decisions about your search strategy. For too long SEOs have measured effectiveness of efforts through rankings and other superficial measures. However experts have taken the opportunity at this conference to challenge SEOs thinking. Below are some of the different ways SEOs should consider slicing and dicing their data to gain new insight (and in fact many of these can be applied to other channels to compare success).

1. Search term segmentation
One of the new measures organizations are looking at is to quantify brand engagement (I think it is more recall) through analyzing search and direct visitor traffic;

Brand Engagement (recall) = (Direct site visitors + Brand Searches) / (Total Search Visits + Direct Visits)

To me however search term segmentation extends well beyond generic vs brand terms. Grouping keywords into topics / related segments and analyzing onsite behavior and conversion is a useful way to understand how certain kinds of keywords are performing and where some of the best traffic / value is being derived from with your search activities. This analysis enables SEOs to determine where their effort is best spent.

1. Per visit values
The per visit value equation allows SEOs to go beyond traffic. This measure allows SEOs to determine how much value monetary or otherwise is on average delivered by each visitor to a site.

Visit Value: Goal Value Total From Search / Total Search Visits

By understanding this value SEOs can develop strategies to improve that value or alternatively use this information to forecast the future value that can be gained through further investment.

For non e-commence sites this one is often a little trickier, however like ecommerce sites traffic = revenue but just in a different form. Non revenue generating sites need to attribute advertising $$$ and value derived from visitors. By doing so non e-commerce sites can start to become more strategic in their analysis of value from search and traffic in general.

Aside from measurement and conversion some of the other important topics covered were related to content and strategy. Whilst I didn’t glean as much from these there are definitely some golden moments that are worth reiterating.

SEO Strategy & Content

Planning - “Chasing keywords is a reactionary way to develop your search strategy – it needs to be proactive”
With keyword research a staple in the search diet, this is definitely a new way of thinking about how to plan search. Should we ditch our keyword tools? On the contrary search marketers need to be smarter at identifying trends to get ahead of the search curve and use tools to identify these trends.

Execution – “Getting good at execution is key”
Search experts can benefit from riding the topic wave. 2 hours after Michael Jacksons death Amazon had revamped their whole MP3 site whilst competitors didn’t get anything up until the end of the week. Whilst sites being indexed within hours of making a change is a luxury for some, the message here is clear - agility and quick execution in search can give you the edge over your competitors.

Delivery - Content really can disappoint
For years organisations have allowed search people to bastardise their site in pursuit of rankings but now search industry has to evolve. The bottom line is more time needs to go into the planning of content to really understand user behaviour and to deliver high quality engaging content. In this era content just for search will fail it will be those who build for the user first and the search engine second that will win.
The above are of course just my highlights from the event. If you want to read more on the outcomes of the event I have attached some of the best blog coverage on the seminars. Enjoy!

http://blog.arhg.net/2010/02/is-seo-dead-ses-london-takes-look.html
http://www.seo-chicks.com/1532/ses-london-panel-meaningful-seo-metrics.html
http://www.facebook.com/notes/search-engine-strategies-conference-expo/ses-london-2010-day-1-blog-coverage/316758288685
http://www.seo-chicks.com/1532/ses-london-panel-meaningful-seo-metrics.html
http://blog.freshegg.com/state-uk-search-industry-ses-london-2010-recap_2881

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog

Written By: Teresa Sperti

Whilst most of our efforts are focussed on how to rank within the top 10 Google results through traditional techniques, this article explores the ranking factors for non conventional search in the areas of news, social and video content.

Twitter Feeds

Whilst Google is the most dominant search engine globally, it is surprising to find that over 1 billion searches are conducted on Facebook alone every month. There is thus no wonder that Google needed to roll social results into its search to maintain control of the search market. One of the first rounds of integration of social results into Google SERPs saw Twitter feeds rolled into results when relevant – but what factors impact their inclusion and how are tweets ranked?

1. Reputed Followers; According to the Google engineer – Amit Singhal one of the key elements for ranking Twitter posts is to identify “reputed followers”, which follows a similar theme to that of PageRank.

2. Hashtags; One of the elements which seem to downgrade what Google seems to deem as a quality tweet is those related to hashtags. During formulation of ranking criteria, analysis showed Tweets associated with hash tags usually were associated with spammy content thus this is one way Google identifies lower quality content.

3. Signals; Google also analyses the context of tweets to file through and locate the latest topical issues. Take Obama for an example – hundreds of thousands of tweets occur daily – thus Google uses topics to signal what content should be shown based on how much tweet activity is centering around a given subject.

News Content

Despite news being integrated within standard search results and also being a prominent channel on Google in its own right, it is still an under-utilised channel by search marketers. Like Twitter results, Google News relies on its own factors to rank content.
1. Story Clusters; The first thing to note is that Google clusters related content and then ranks this within search results.

2. Cluster Ranking; What is important is how Google then ranks the individual content within those clusters. Ranking is based on originality of the news content, locality of the content as well as recency of the content.

3. Source Reputation: Reputation of the content source is also relevant thus if the article appears in a trusted publication it is more likely to feature as the lead story.
What this tells us is that for search marketers it is important to driving very unique content online and distributing it through the best online PR distribution services around to be published in some of the major news sources.

Video Content

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, thus it is no wonder that like social sites Google dug its teeth in fairly early to ensure that it monopolised video search by buying YouTube. When looking at it in this light, it is important to understand the video algorithm to ensure you are ranking for video content on both YouTube and Google. Apart from the traditional elements which drive text based search such as keyword optimisation and age, the key ones you need to be aware of for video are;

1. Engagement; YouTube factors in how many users are engaging with video’s ie placing comments, ranking the video, embedding the video or sharing it.

2. Reach; Popularity on YouTube is important and video’s with a higher number of views are seen as more relevant to a users search thus with any video content uploaded it is important to have an effective distribution strategy to get eyeballs viewing the content.

Traditional text based search is just the beginning of search, to get an advantage over your competition search marketers must step up and take their SEO strategy to the next level through some of the non conventional search categories.

If you have any other tips to rank in news, social or video results, please leave your comments below.

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog

Written By: Teresa Sperti

Just over a week ago both the Australian and Canadian governments approved a deal to see Bing power Yahoo’s search results. So whilst Google has 87.79% share of search traffic down under, collectively under a Bing/Yahoo arrangement 1 in 10 clicks in Australia would go to a Bing search result. So suddenly this deal combined with the added promotion behind Bing in Australia means that marketers should take note of the important considerations to improve Bing rankings and exposure without comprising Google rankings.

The Core Elements
Overall it seems Bing has bought back some of the key elements that once held significant weighting within Google’s algorithm. However Bing has learnt from the loopholes used by black hat SEOs and improved on it to so ensure spammers don’t benefit from manipulating SERPs.

So what should a Webmaster focus on to rank on Bing?
- Content and more content; Bing loves it and some experts recommend pages should contain a minimum of 300 words. In addition Bing seems to be a little anal and favours content which is free of spelling errors giving you an added reason to proof read your content.
- It’s not how much you’ve got, it’s what you do with it; Back links do play a key role in optimizing for Bing however quantity is less important than the context of the link. In particular links from sites that are of a similar theme seem to provide the most strength to your Bing SEO efforts.
- Keywords Tag - An oldie but a goodie; Bing’s own blog has advised webmasters to ensure they are optimizing keywords within all of the important parts of the code ie in H1 tags, Title Tags and even the keywords tag.
- Give Love & Get Love – It seems that unlike Google, part of Bing’s algorithm favours sites that link out to other sites related to a sites theme.

Other Important Considerations
Outside of the core elements there are some other key variables which marketers need to consider to get the most out of their Bing search efforts.

Are you even there?
As stated above Bing’s algorithm does include some of the older Google techniques – but with a stronger monitoring system to detect SPAM and penalize offenders. As a result it seems that Bing is suffering from some teething problems. The Bing search blog seems to be somewhat inundated with webmasters whose sites have disappeared from the index for various reasons. Whilst Bing has similar rules in place to Google which cause sites to be de-indexed, Bing has also stated that as their algorithm changes, sites may disappear from the index completely as they have been incorrectly flagged as Spam.
Thus as a starting point it is important to ensure your site is in the index and if you are experiencing problems follow these instructions.

Bing Document Preview Feature
Bing provides a document preview function to allow searchers to instantly see more content on a page without the need to go to a website.

Why is this important? Not only can content help you rank but Bing uses this information to assist searches to find what they are looking for with a try before you buy type function. This means SEOs have direct influence over how search listings are presented, to attract more users to your site.
The examples below for Clive Peeters and Freedom Furniture demonstrate how some of the big retailers of Australia are currently being affected by this feature.

Enhancing the preview function
If you want to ensure that Bing is displaying useful previews, the most important thing is to ensure that site pages include useful content not just images and this content is featured at the top of your site code.

However if you are restricted with your current site, webmasters can also insert the tag within the tags on each HTML page to disable the feature.

There is also a site-wide exclusion, insert the following line in your web server’s HTTP header:
x-robots-tag: nopreview.

Want to learn more?
Bing has released a series of tools and articles to help Webmasters, get the most out of Bing. I have included some of the most useful links below;
Bing’s White Paper For Webmasters
SEM 101 for Bing – A series of articles on how to optimize for Bing

If you have got any top tips to help fellow SEOs optimize for Bing please leave them below.