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Today I presented at the excellent BrightonSEO mini-conference. My talk looked at 20 WordPress plugins to supercharge your blog – here’s the slides, with links to each of the plugins below.

Brighton SEO – 20 Top WordPress Plugins

If you have any questions about the plugins or presentation, just let me know in the comments. And in-case you missed it, I did an interview on State of Search yesterday.

7-23-2010 by admin in conferences | 0 Comments » |

Three of the most trusted SEO and social media experts, Rhea Drysdale, Tamar Weinberg and Lee Odden. Photo by toprankonlinemarketing.

Interviews are often overlooked pieces of distilled wisdom. They aren’t very popular on social media but they definitely should be! In interviews experts often provide the most valuable nuggets of their knowledge in a very concise form. You need to study dozens of other blog posts to learn as much.

Moreover experts often tend to focus on one aspect a time when they write something themselves, even when compiling a list like this. On the other hand interviews focus on several key questions an expert wouldn’t even attempt to cover in one blog post or seminar. These facts combined result in in a very condensed piece of advice.

Also it’s quite difficult to determine who’s a real expert and who is not in the SEO industry and even more in social media marketing.

When someone gets interviewed s/he’s either popular or an expert or both. The difficulty in compiling this list of interviews was not finding 30 of them but sorting out the less valuable ones from the dozens there are. Also I wanted to feature not only the people everybody knows already like Rand Fishkin or Matt Cutts. There are numerous interviews with them.

Some true experts hide behind an invisible persona as an inhouse SEO and/or social media expert

but really have something to say others haven’t. So I added a few of inhouse SEO expert from big enterprises.

Last but not least I couldn’t find good interview that offers deep insights with some of the brightest minds of the industry like Danny Sullivan or Barry Schwartz. There were either too short, shallow, outdated or too much focused on a specific event or topic. Add those in the comment section if you think they are must read. I repeat, I didn’t just look at the names, I solely selected those interviews that offer real insights.

OK, enough of this, follow the links below to read the interviews with some of the most renowned SEO and social media experts.

SEO experts

Inhouse SEO experts

Social Media experts

Matt Cutts and other Google employees

Business Blogging experts

To be honest: A list of interviews with experts in both SEO and social media could have been a top 100, 200 or 2000. Due to time and reader attention limitations I had to choose approx. 30 of them. Don’t think just because I haven’t included someone s/he isn’t an expert. It was a really tough choice.

I even included an interview with myself without being sure whether people consider me an expert but I was quite sure that I provided some unique insights in this interview.

So accept my apologies for not being on the list please!

Btw. how do I know who’s an expert and who is not? Difficult question. I think I’m at least expert enough by now to determine who is an expert on the subject of SEO and social media.

7-16-2010 by admin in Blogging, Google, SEO, social media | 0 Comments » |

I absolutely detest these faux SEOs who run link spamming communities. These people have no clue how to really optimize for search. They just sell, share, or recommend link spamming robots that...

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This week you may have noticed we have started recruiting for an SEO executive – rather than just writing up a standard we are recruiting post, I thought I’d share the process of how to advertise for jobs online.

This is quite worryingly from Oxford – image credit Flickr

As a disclaimer, I have nothing in particular against recruitment agencies it’s just good to know the alternatives available – and of course everyone likes to know how to do things on the cheap!

Twitter - If you have a following for your company or personal brand on Twitter, it makes sense to reach out to these contacts in order to help find potential candidates. In 2008 PubCon spent $75,000 marketing the conference via email maketing. In 2009 they marketed using Twitter for $0, attendance was up 30% and income 40% – in a recession! That shows Twitter can be an incredible marketing tool if you have the right audience.
Blogging – Similarly to Twitter, make sure you reach out to your subscribers and let them know you’re recruiting. Did I mention we’re recruiting? ;)
Industry leading website’s – This is probably the most expensive recommendation, but rather than paying a recruitment agency commission, it may be more beneficial to reach out to industry leading website’s to advertise directly via a one-off fee. Econsultancy is one of the top digital website’s out there, especially in the UK – so the quality of responses for listings on their job board is likely to be very high. Also there are normally many industry-specific job boards which are either free or charge one-off listing fees which are worth checking out.
LinkedIn – Of course LinkedIn is a huge social media site for professionals, so it’s an obvious choice for advertising jobs. LinkedIn charge $199 for a job listing fee, but as a first (free) step, try sending out a LinkedIn status update to tell your contacts you’re recruiting. Make sure you optimise your LinkedIn profile too, helping to improve its reach.
Local job boards – Outside of the big cities it can be more difficult to find people with the relevant experience. Make sure you find the best people in your region by targeting them via local advertising or job boards.
SEO – try targeting industry specific career/job terms, for example if you can rank for “search engine marketing jobs“, then you’re likely to start receiving a steady stream of applications.
PPC – PPC is far more successful than you may think for recruitment, just watch this very clever idea in action from Alec Brownstein. Alec specifically targeted vanity name searches on top Google execs with the aim of getting a job interview, slightly crazy idea, but it worked! Maybe you could think of something just as creative as a recruiter – although geo-targeting ads specifically based on job-based keywords would be a good start too.
Business parks, Universities & Colleges – if your company is located on a business park, this can be a great way of drumming up some local interest via direct advertising – plus in some cases it’s a nice way of building some quality links too. Perhaps your local University or College has a job board too, hopefully externally available online and containing those little things called hyperlinks…
Facebook Marketplace – If you have professional contacts on Facebook, this can be a great way of making people aware that you are recruiting. Plus it’s very easy to create a quick job listing which can be found via the marketplace by users outside of your network.
Facebook advertising – this is where you can stalk target individuals based upon profile criteria. Those options include interests and employer – so if you’re selective you can stalk target the right people very cheaply!

So there’s a few ideas to get you started, if all else fails then it’s probably time to turn to your recruitment agent. If you have any more to add to the list please let us know in the comments.

7-13-2010 by admin in seoptimise | 0 Comments » |

Having attended both SMX Advanced conferences in London and Seattle this year, I thought it would be useful to share the highlights of each event and compare the differences of each conference.

SMX Advanced 2010 - Seattle

Image credit: Flickr

On a personal level I found them both to very good events, for different reasons. London provided my first SMX speaking opportunity, while Seattle was the first conference I’ve attended in the US – so hopefully I can be in a good position to comment on both.

Top 10 Tips & Takeaways

Obviously the main reason for attending the conference are the sessions and this is the bit you really want to know, so I’ve picked 5 tips from each conference to get started.

SMX Advanced London

These are listed in more detail in my original SMX London review – but here’s a quick recap:

Link building – be creative and use ideas such as offering student discounts to target educational links.
Keyword research – use Mozenda as a keyword research tool to scrape Google suggest results to highlight top suggestions.
Twitter/Google deal – Google and Bing now have a huge wealth of information available from Twitter. From recent tests they appear to be using this for QDF as well as real-time search, and expect organic search to be next.
Facebook – try to think about advertising from a user perspective. Use profile interests, location and demographic information to build really targeted campaigns.
Social media – make sure you measure the value saved in customer service costs when reviewing the performance of your social media activity.

SMX Advanced Seattle

Indexing – try searching for [allinurl:domain.com] to find the full number of indexed pages in Google.
Social media – a huge selection of social media tools was provided by Tony Adam, the best of the bunch to test out for me were FlowTown, PitchEngine, Klout and Scout Labs.
Test, test and test again – some great multi-directional testing tips from Branko Rihtman.
Link building – almost too many tips to mention, but Chris Bennett’s infographic viral marketing ideas stand out as a very effective tactic. Tip; use topical content for wide-appeal and to generate a broad range of links – and niche ideas for targeted links and attention.
Twitter – use Twitter search to find customers (“where to buy…” or “anyone know…”), links (“sponsors…”) and guest blogging opportunities (“guest bloggers…” or “write for us…”)

How do the the conferences compare?

Firstly, I think there’s little value in having a which is better review – it’s important to remember that SMX Advanced in Seattle is an established and very highly-regarded conference in the US – and while SMX London is one of the leading search conferences in the UK, I think it’s fair to say that this is still largely developing in comparison, with 2010 beginning it’s first year as an advanced conference.

London

Starting with London, many people were eagerly anticipating the new advanced format. If I’m being brutally honest, not all sessions quite lived-up to the title (as is expected for its first year), but overall the conference didn’t disappoint. While SMX London still has a way to go in order to attract the very top speakers and overall quality of the US, it’s refreshing to see so many sessions from a UK market perceptive and there were plenty of tips, takeaways and presentations during the two days which made this event more than worthwhile and a “must-attend” conference again in the UK for 2011.

Seattle

From my point of view and almost looking at this from the outside (or at least UK), SMX Advanced is one of the few conferences which appears to rival PubCon in its reputation as one of the world’s top search marketing conferences. Most of us Brits are likely to visit one conference a year at the most in the US, so I was really hoping this would live up to expectations. It did!

The conference started well, providing high quality sessions and advanced concepts and ideas. But for the SEO track this really got into gear during the afternoon of day one, starting with a superb link building session, quickly followed up with a great session on social media tools and then ending the day with Danny Sullivan’s superb Q&A session with Matt Cutts and the announcement of caffeine. Day one alone made this a worthwhile journey and day two followed a similar trend, keeping me very busy since with re-writing client strategy documents (largely based on content and ideas from both SMX conferences) and giving several excellent reasons to come back again next year.

Networking

As expected the best tips are those you pick up in the bar after a beer or three and there’s a very good reason these type of things are left unsaid at conferences, unfortunately the same applies here too!

SMX London is always a great event for everyone in the UK to get together and meet a few new faces, while Seattle was great to finally meet lots of people from the US, previously known from the online world of Sphinn and Twitter. SMX London is always good for networking, but judging these on the hangover scale I would have to say Seattle was far more eventful – even if slightly painful in mornings!

7-12-2010 by admin in conferences | 0 Comments » |

So China just renewed Google’s license to operate there. Google has tried to “abide by Chinese law” as they prefer to put it. Chinese law says: The communist party decides what’s the truth and what not. What’s not true shall neither be published nor searched for.

Are multinational corporations like Google good law abiding citizens? Rarely. Is Google abiding by the laws elsewhere? Well, just look at the other news today.

May I cite:

from BBC: “Google’s Street View ‘snoops’ on Congress members” (my emphasis):

[The search giant said the snippets could include parts of an email, text, photograph, or even the website someone might be viewing.

"We think the Google Wi-Spy effort is one of the biggest wire tapping scandals in US history," John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog told BBC News.]

from AP (via Yahoo! News): “Australia: Google Street View broke privacy law” (my emphasis):

[Google broke Australia's privacy law when it collected private information from wireless networks, the country's privacy commissioner said Friday, following an investigation into the Internet giant's "Street View" mapping service.

(...)

In May, Google acknowledged it had mistakenly collected fragments of data over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries while it was taking pictures of neighborhoods for the Street View feature. ]

Just think about it! How absurd this sounds. They mistakenly spied for years on hundreds of millions of people in around 30 countries! Wow. That’s quite a big “mistake” if you ask me. Sounds like a thousand BP oil spills.

Google StreetView operators might have had access to your email, they might know the websites you have visited. They know who you are and where you live. The data has been collected and Google still has it. And btw. Google collects such data using other tools as well.

So let’s return to China issue: Google is trying to abide by the law in China. They are really trying hard by breaking every major law of democratic countries like the US or from Europe. Most if not all of these countries guarantee free speech not only by law but in the constitution.

OK, so Google China now doesn’t redirect anymore to Google Hong Kong, the allegedly uncensored search in Chinese. You have to click now to get there. Now, that’s fine? Don’t you think? This way the Chinese people can see uncensored results!

Sorry to disappoint you: Google Hong Kong gets censored as well. I needed just one search query to find it out: I’ve searched for [police brutality china] and got some results, none of real brutality on top though.

Then I tried the same search on Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.de, Google.pl etc.

Everywhere else I got the same but different results, Chinese police officers beating down monks and other demonstrators. So Google keeps on censoring in China and lying about it.

Google’s fake excuse of “abiding by the laws” is just a cynical way to deal with critics.

Now that we have the topic of police brutality and abiding by the laws: Recently a new law has been passed in Toronto, Canada for the G20 sumit granting the police powers only known from dictatorships. They could detain anybody without reason and by using force. They did. Watch this video below to find out how it looked from the peaceful protester and innocent bystander perspective. Also listen to the police beating down harmless people: “We’re just obeying orders.”

Abiding by the laws and obeying orders is sometimes not enough.

When laws or orders do not abide by the universal human rights and democratic principles you are actually breaking laws by abiding by the laws and obeying orders. I’m pretty sure that in Canada pretty soon some high ranking politicians and police offers will be sacked and tried in court for abiding by undemocratic laws and obeying criminal orders.

Google abides only by the laws they choose to. They ignored and broke the laws of most countries Google StreetView data has been collected in. Sorry, I don’t believe they just didn’t now what data they collect for years. I’m not that naive. Also they censor results in China and Hong Kong, a practice illegal everywhere else.

Are you in China? Do you speak Chinese? Can you access Google Hong Kong and are the results censored as well?

7-9-2010 by admin in Google, censorship, google china, google hong kong, laws | 0 Comments » |

In recent months I have been reading all kind of material on Facebook, search and SEO. I’m not here to predict the future or to hype Facebook as the new better search. Instead I’d like to analyze the clues we already have.

Others have done great work on Facebook SEO by now.

Moreover I’d like to combine these clues with the statistics suggesting that people trust their friends when it comes to products, services and other recommendations while at the same they by now distrust social media in general.

Facebook search is still in its very early stages so this post is only guess work but to me it seems that Facebook search will become the dominant player sooner or later.

This might sound very vague but let me explain why I think so. Just yesterday Twitter founder Biz Stone announced that they are bigger than Bing and Yahoo together as a search engine. So why won’t Twitter become the next search engine of choice? Well, they’re results suck. I’ve written about that already more then once. Also they have a huge bot problem. You socialize with bots not people in case you autofollow Twitter accounts. It’s really hard to find the real people on Twitter these days as the bots pollute Twitter with their automated retweets.

IMHO, there are far more real people on Facebook than on Twitter. People trust people they know. So Twitter has the same problem with bots as Google has.

Automated content farms scraping their content from all over the Web or fully automated Twitter accounts, both have no trust and real people wouldn’t “like” them or share them on Facebook, at least not using their real names.

Even if spammers start to build Facebook bots that click on like buttons it won’t really mess up Facebook search as you’d still see search results provided by your friends, most probably real people with real names.

Already my search results for SEO on Facebook are almost perfect, after all they match my choices.

I get the companies and resources I like on top, plus those who have “SEO” in their name and the most friends we both share. While I dislike the “on page factors” taken into account here because they can easily get manipulated the first 7 results I got were really great.

Searching for a smartphone, netbook or such I get the results most people recommend on top. You can manipulate that too but in this early stage it seems either not many people do it yet or Facebook has reached critical mass and thus ensures search result quality.

Google has also customizable search results and results by friends etc. Still you get the anonymously linked up resources on top. Twitter shows the most popular ones but only at a given moment, plus you get main stream crap like SEO jokes on top when you search for SEO.

When I search for SEO I want to see the sources I trust on top not Wikipedia or stupid rants by Derek Powazek. Both Google and Twitter rank not the best results on top but those most contentious, for whatever reason. As most people don’t understand SEO they either look it up on Wikipedia or dismiss it. This works as long as there are enough links or tweets by real people. Otherwise both Google and Twitter will offer you automated crap. So it gets from bad to worse.

Am I too optimistic here? Will Facebook search soon deteriorate? Or will it become even better at finding out what truly matters to me and you and thus dominate search in the future?

I mean if Twitter search can become bigger than Bing and Yahoo together it would be no problem for Facebook to become ten times bigger. After all it has roughly 10 times more users and unlike with Twitter most of them are real people.

7-8-2010 by admin in FaceBook, Google, SEO, social media, twitter | 0 Comments » |

Dear Readers, at the end of last week I haven’t published the “Twitter weekly” column. This time it was no poor time management issue. I did it on purpose. The week before I had written a highly popular “Twitter weekly” post but it was the last of its sort. Why?

The Twitter hype is over!

Twitter has peaked usage and traffic-wise in January, or maybe even earlier. That’s not the main reason though. Also Google Trends still shows an increase. We had started publishing the Twitter column when Twitter traffic had been far less significant. No, the real reason are Twitter news or rather non-news.

The week before last week I really had to deal with baseless rumors and to spice them up with some exaggerated colloquial language. While it was fun I realized that’s it’s not a tabloid here. I don’t want to sound like a jerk just to hide the fact that there is nothing of importance to report or analyze.

Sure there are Twitter news and developments you could write about but they are daily business of a second rate player.

Twitter is big but not as crucial as Google and Facebook

and by now I have the impression that the time spend on covering Twitter is unjustified. I will keep on writing concise posts about Google, Facebook and Twitter or whomever will be most deserving at a given moment. There is no need for a weekly Twitter column anymore though.

That’s OK. The Web landscape is ever changing and you have to react quickly. My nickname wouldn’t be “onreact” if I would ignore the changes.

Is Twitter negligible now? No.

Will I quit Twitter? No. Does Twitter marketing and SEO still make sense? Yes.

I will keep on using Twitter daily at least once daily but i want exclusively focus my writing habits on that subject. The hype is over. That’s a good thing. Covering Twitter’s business consolidation is no fun though.

They keep on alienating users, developers. They hide their numbers and practice corporate newspeak (like “promoted tweets” for ads). I’ve searched Topsy for the most popular results on Twitter in the last month and I couldn’t find something really relevant. So I’ll shut up. I won’t try to revive a dead hype myself.

7-6-2010 by admin in social media, twitter | 0 Comments » |

Crossroads by Captain DJ.

Getting targeted traffic for a website is just the first step in a thorough SEO process. What comes next? Landing page optimization or conversion (rate) optimization/CRO follows. After all you want the visitors you get to stay on your site and perform the desired action (like ordering or subscribing).

One of the foremost ways to optimize landing pages for more conversions is A/B split testing

sometimes also referred to as simply AB testing. The concept is pretty simple. In the most basic set up you show version A of a page to half of your visitors while in the other half will see version B.

Of course in reality it’s a bit more complex.

You will have more than two versions in many cases and you won’t split 50/50 but will choose a smaller portion of your overall traffic to test. Also you will probably only subject new visitors to your tests in some cases in order not to scare away your repeat visitors by frequent changes.

When you prepare more than two versions of your content (as in A, B, C etc.) it’s not necessarily called multivariate testing then. Multivariate testing rather refers to tests with multiple variables you check.

The most known tool for A/B split testing is Google Website Optimizer. Like with many free tools and similarly to Google Analytics it’s not the easiest to use tool though.

There are more user friendly tools out there by now. Over the course of the last year A/B split & multivariate testing has been booming. I discover new tools, tutorials and other resources every other day. Nonetheless it’s by now a best practice that has been around for years. So this is not about early adopting a methodology. AB testing is common sense by now on the Web.

Introductions to A/B Split Testing

Examples and Case Studies

Resources

Tools

Guides & Tutorials

The biggest problem with A/B and multivariate testing is the time and resources needed. Even a simple test for small website entails three different departments be it, SEO, analytics, web design.

How do you perform your A/B tests? I am still undecided which tools best suit my requirements.

7-2-2010 by admin in SEO, website analytics | 0 Comments » |

Last Friday was the SEOptimise summer party, being such a sunny day we made the most of it by going punting (unfortunately no-one fell in!), followed by a beer or three in Oxford.

We thought we’d share some of the photos with our readers: