As part of my mission to engage with larger parts of the SEO community, this weekend, I rolled up to Leeds to attend the 4th Think Visibility event, and what a weekend it was. The event consisted of a number of sessions looking at Internet Marketing stats, tips and techniques, spread over 2 floors and I am going to round up the sessions that I attended and share with you some of the important information that I garnered from them.

Learning and Earning through Social Media with Mel Carson

The first session was on both floors, with a really intriguing look at social media and the community. Mel is the community manager at Microsoft and told a number of social media stories, that were both interesting and amusing.

There were examples that were looking at the recruitment of monks across the Internet, which resulted in one of the best acronyms I’ve ever had CPM = Cost Per Monk!

Another really interesting social media tale here was from engagement from a local pharmacy – Mel was a customer in the store, and located a very specific magazine for toning up Glutes. Mel tweeted what he had found in the store, and Bartell Drugs engaged in return, in a “cheeky” fun fashion.

These types of engagements with your customers really drive up a strong sense of brand loyalty, and many businesses in many spheres could benefit from engaging with their clients more.

A key takeaway message from this talk for me was to make all your messages easily discoverable and very easy to share!

Mel then talked about how they attempted to build communities around their blogs, as well as engage with communities such as Search Engine Watch, Webmaster World and Sphinn – helping to join the conversation about the development of their products and services.

It was also reiterated that you needed to track everything – collect, collect and collect some more data, and analyse it to tell the “story” that evolves from it.

Mel finished up with 7 value indicators that I found really quite interesting:

1) Measure growth & translate as “reach”

2) Think about how you are lowering costs (for example on the eased burden with your support teams)

3) Information & empowerment leads to increased spend

4) Internal education leads to external evangelism

5) “Earned Media” – for example, the Windows 7 launch garnered 221M impressions through social media brand interactions

6) Think “Social Media Marketing” – stay focused and disciplined on the marketing aspect of it at all times!

7) The most important one as far as I was concerned – What the Return On Inaction? If you aren’t doing it, or monitoring it, what will be said about you or your brand without you being aware of it?

Going International with SEO with Rob Kerry

This talk was looking at how the web makes it easy to expand outside of your native country, and not necessarily meaning going multilingual.

There are 3 primary considerations here:

1) Domain Names

2) Hosting

3) ccTLD (your domain extension, like .uk, .de etc)

If you think you might move into a market, make sure you get all the domain extensions as early as possible to ensure that someone else doesn’t beat you to it before you realise that its a market you want to move in to.

Rob then looked at the pros & cons of having a unique website on its requisite ccTLD for each website, something he mentioned that Search Engine Watch had recommended as the “best” way to do this. Rob however wasn’t fully in agreement with this.

The main reasons for this are ones that I thoroughly agree with – for each website you have to build website authority (read links) to get them ranking in their respective markets. As well as this, there is an increased resource requirements to run multiple websites.

Many people also recommend the use of domain specific sub-domains, which again wasn’t Robs solution of choice – this is because Google typically sees each individual sub domain as a separate website in its own right (something I have certainly observed over time). This presents the same issues – you have to build authority for each sub domain in its own right, and as a result, this is more resource intensive.

So, the preferred method is to use sub-folders, which is certainly how we would advise doing it. Once you create specific content for each region, you create a sub folder for that site and you can mark in Google Webmaster Tools which region you are targeting with that folder.

One important tip regarding a bug here, that I haven’t experienced before, is that it is important to mark your home page appropriately before submitting a sub folder – Rob had come across an example of a site where they marked a specific sub folder before they had done anything to mark the home page appropriately, and it meant that the root of the website inherited that sub folders targeting – a bug that took some intervention to fix.

It was then also important to use the correct convention for naming these folders – it was suggested that rather than using the whole of a countries name is entirely unnecessary, and that instead you should use the geolocation country code of 2 letters to much better effect.

The main downside to this approach is that it isn’t quite as effective with other search engines, apart from Google.

One thing that Rob mentioned that I have heard lots of conflicting evidence regarding is the rewriting of content for each specific market – i.e. US, Australian and UK content should all be written specific to that market. Now from a marketing perspective, this makes absolute sense, in terms of localising this to the market you are want to promote yourself in – but from my talks with numerous other SEOs over the weekend, this was an aspect that many people are split on – I spoke to a number of people that have said that they are using the same content for those 3 markets with great results. However, this is probably a specific example of how there is definitely more than one way to do SEO correctly!

Rob’s presentation was quite a short one, as he wanted to leave plenty of opportunity for Q&A where there was some great exchange of ideas from around the room.

Social Media for SEO with Lisa Myers

The next presentation was a really good one, that reaffirmed a lot of my views about how to utilise social media to benefit your SEO. Lisa was also 36 weeks pregnant and about to go on maternity leave, and was certainly bold to stand up in front of everyone under the circumstances! There were a few jokes flying around about how she could drop at any moment, and we’d have a baby on our hands.

Social Media is all about ideas and creatives – its not about Twitter or Facebook – these are just the tools!

Lisa looked at how the links are being treated much more strictly, with paid links being cracked down on, and content relevancy around the links becoming much larger factors.

For driving traffic and links, article marketing and link baiting are great techniques that are intrinsically tied in to social media.

Its also important to determine your objectives:

1) Brand Awareness

2) Traffic Generation

3) Links

4) Conversions

5) All of the above

Its also vital to determine who your audience are, and target them accordingly. What is their age, their gender or their location? If you put yourself in their shoes, it can help you identify their problems, what sites they visit and what they search for. You have to “be” your audience and put yourself in their shoes and try and talk about them.

With regards to link baiting, where you are creating content to generate attention, one of the areas that people often fall down on is not telling people it exists – if they don’t know about it, they can’t share it! It also needs to be creative and awesome, because all the promotion in the world wont do anything if its just rubbish.

Another important consideration, when doing this for links is to actually host the content yourself – a common mistake is to do something great, on somewhere like YouTube, without any means for the link equity that you build to that page to be passed on to the place that needs it – your website.

Identifying key influencers in your areas is also absolutely vital – as these are the people that you need to spread your message or content to the masses – and there were great comments about the “Power of Being Nice” – a mantra I have always tried to live my life by!

To summarise, creating content without marketing is silly – make great content and make it super easy to share with other people through as many channels as possible.

Affiliate Marketing Technologies by Kevin Edwards

I decided to take a break from my heavily SEO oriented session watching by getting to learn something about Affiliate Marketing, by Kevin Edwards, of Affiliate Window, and also the chair of the Affiliate Marketing Channel.

This talk was more of a look at the industry in general with a great number of stats and figures about the state of the industry. Some interesting snippets of information were:

1) PPC growth in the industry had stalled – it still sent as much business as it ever did, but in terms of overall market share, it was diminishing.

2) The concept of “last click wins”, is something that is being challenged for the industry

3) Sub affiliates like Skim links are on the rise

4) Affiliates were less reliant on the top 10/50/100 sellers and were generating more revenue from the “long tail”

5) Voucher code and Cashback is growing massively, but mostly generated by a few websites.

6) Facebook and Twitter only accounted for a tiny % of affiliate marketing revenues

7) It’s estimated that 60% of consumers will browse the Internet on their phones by 2015 (relevant to much more than just Affiliate Marketing

I really enjoyed hearing about where the industry was, but in many respects, I think I would have benefited more from some hints and tips to get started in Affiliate Marketing, but as Kevin worked in the Industry rather than “doing” affiliate marketing, none of this information was really available.

Linkbuilding in Real Life: A Practical Guide to Dominating the SERPs by Jaamit Durrani

I missed the first couple of minutes of this presentation, which I was really frustrated by, as I had been particularly looking forward to this – Jaamit was one of the first SEOs outside of Vertical Leap that I met, and I was very interested in the tips and techniques that he was sharing – this was certainly a session that I got a hell of a lot of actionable tips from.

As I walked in Jaamit was talking about how it may well be time for SEOs to burn their respective hats – ultimately all SEOs are looking to manipulate the results in one way or another and the rigidity of the hat classifications causes “no fly zones” where people are made afraid of testing things for themselves. To a certain extent I agree with Jaamit here, although there are definitely aspects of SEO that I would never feel comfortable implementing on a clients site with the risks that are associated with them.

Jaamit was specifically looking at offering tips to 3 real websites and used a number of examples that applied to all 3 about how to gain links for those sites to hell propel them into the top ranking stratosphere! Here are some highlights for me from this talk:

Quality vs Quantity – in short, you shouldn’t be going after either in isolation – in reality to rank well, you need a good mix of both.

Don’t obsess over your home page – get more deep links, and watch the long tail grow and soar.

Anchor text is your friend – 90% of the time, and particularly for those deep links. Anchor text isn’t necessarily how most people “naturally” link to websites, but Google continues to place a lot of weight on anchor text based links and it’s important to get them to increase those rankings.

The misleading nature of “create great content and the links will come”. This was a statement that I wholeheartedly agreed with – unless specifically engineered, links rarely point to your money pages, and this is necessary to generate the revenues that you need from an SEO campaign.

Jaamit went on to talk about some of the tools that he uses to analyse backlinks, like Link Diagnosis, Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, and using these tools Jaamit observed a number of themes in the 3 example websites, competitors backlink profiles that whilst not great in every aspect had helped propel them ahead of them in the listings.

From these, Jaamit determined some specific methods to not only emulate how the competition had got ahead, but also do it much smarter and lay the groundwork for improved performance above and beyond what they were doing.

From the examples given, it was quite clear that tactics that many in the room would consider quite low value and spammy were quite clearly working for the competitors of these sites – by refining and improving on these techniques, a solid foundation would be laid to bear them in the longer term.

We were given some examples of how to use article content with some great complimentary tools for this activity, and Jaamit extolled the virtues of reaching out to Bloggers and offering them some really good content in exchange for links back.

There were also some fantastic tips to try and get some .ac.uk based links and some useful search operators to identify some opportunities here.

There was also some great advice on using some of the spammier tools of the world to good effect – identifying locations that comment spammers and the like are looking for, but instead of spamming them, offering content and opinion of decent value instead.

What Would A Spammer Do? by Paul Madden

This ended up being my favourite session of the day and was a talk looking at a number of techniques utilised by spammers to game the system and earn them money. One thing that Paul mentioned strongly is that all of this techniques are ones that used to work, and that they probably wouldn’t get you far nowadays.

I don’t think its all that wise for me to go into a great deal of these techniques here – whilst this was a fascinating insight into a completely different world for me, I’m not sure I would want the vast majority of our readership attempting these techniques.

However, there were some key concepts that drove the activities here.

1) Don’t just flood the Internet using every technique without testing to see if it works

2) Measure everything

3) When something starts to generate revenue – replicate it and scale it – quickly

4) You have to build it yourself – anything publicly available is already going to be known about – you need to have something that isn’t known for it to work

5) Burn & Replace – on average, it took 44 days before a technique or site would be burned – and you needed to have extracted revenue from it before that!

How to Dominate Any Market Through SEO by Dave Naylor

The final session of the day was looking at utilising SEO to dominate a sector, and build a brand that powers on.

Objectives – understand that while tactics vary from market to market, the overall SEO strategy is the same.

Shortcuts:

1) If you have budget – buy the results. Buying out your competitors from under them can be a really easy win if you have the money, and you can tailgate off the back of existing brands quite simply. However, buying authoritative keyword rich domains can prove expensive.

2) If you want to be evil – you can purchase common platforms to monetise directly from your competition, and pull the rug out from underneath them.

3) If you take a client on, and you are on page 2, Dave recommended getting budget to buy links to push results onto page 1 where there is money to be made.

Longer-cuts:

1) Understand the link landscape of your industry

2) Develop a strategy to not only match it, but better it!

3) BUILD A BRAND!

Dave also showed off some insights from their internal tools that help them to determine the “real” value of potential traffic from SEO, and  help identify pages that don’t perform to fullest potential.

One important tip given here – identify the pages that under-perform and change them to give your visitors what they want – and generate more revenue as a result – and ultimately, Google want what you want too – good content!

The aspects of Dave’s talk regarding brand really interested me – Brands can’t be touched by Google, they have to show them, because when people look for them, Google has to show them!

Don’t just focus on narrow head terms for SEO, go after the long tail, build communities, loyalty and reputations.

Summary

If you have got this far – then well done, this post turned into a mammoth one! In summary, it was a cracking day, full of posts, and as with my meet ups with other SEOs over the last year have proved, whilst there is plenty of value in the talks, the real meat of the value comes from the talking to other do-ers in the industry between and after the talks.

However, many of these aren’t going to be repeated here, until I have had a chance to have a go myself and see how they turn out. I got to meet a ton of interesting people that I have been talking to on the Internet for over a year, and have formed some really good friendships based on all that talking!