Richard Baxter kicks the session off with a ‘Fun with Metrics’ presentation.

To analyse the way in which websites ranking and to identify the metrics, he is using the test search term ‘ UK SEO’.

Page authority by SEOmoz allows you to view how authoritative a certain page is in terms of links that are pointing to it. There is a clear correlation between high page authority and good rankings in the search engines – bar a few anomalies.

Domain authority also has a correlation with search rankings.

The next metric is root domains linking to a specific page. Apart from a few anomalies there is more linking root domains pointing to the higher positioned website in search results.

Moving on to another metric is the inbound links with specific anchor text. For the text results page being examined, there is a website in position 4 with a really high amount of inbound links containing ‘uk seo’ in the anchor text. Reviewing the linking root domains though, shows that there are many pages but only one or two domains – providing that there isn’t much authority being passed through.

It’s all well and good analysing the competitors and reviewing the data, but in the time that you did that you could write some blog posts or do some link building to help you improve for a specific term.

What the Analysis Taught Him

• Tools may provide an insight, but use your experience and judgement.
• Page authority and domain diversity play a role.
• Focus on links that will improve your domain and page authority.
• A lot of anchor text links from the same domain probably won’t help all that much
• You’re better focusing on high quality links rather than high volume, low quality links

Now over to Kristjan Mar Hauksson.

Ground rules of ePR

- do not distribute the same text to multiple locations
- rewrite to two or three versions
- write it short and “scanable”
- don’t spam it with links, two or three tops

One of the main issues when distributing with ePR is that people post the same copy many times, meaning there could be many duplicates of the same text on the web.

Using ePR with good content can be highly influential in terms of readers and also the search engines.

Using this method allowed Bradford and Bingley to rank very highly for a number of highly competitive terms.

Another method of getting links is via distribution feeds. Google News allows you to have a position in the organic SERPs for news results, and your content will also be picked up by other major websites to be redistributed or linked to.

PR leap, market wire and press port are good services for the distribution of content.

Neil Walker now takes to the stand.

How to choose the right links for the right occasion

The keyword competition / industry can dictate the links you should build.
- niche /directory submissions?
- to buy or not to buy?
- niche authority sites/memberships/white papers
- link bait

Building your own content network

Advantages:
- reliability
- control (theme, building speed, position, anchor text)
- useful for deep linking
- useful resource for link acquisition (contacting other networks etc)
- references/citations (for Google local, for example)

Disadvantages
- recreating link power
- if the network goes down then so do all your links
- maintenance of network

Do’s
- domain names – purchase domains
- TLDs – look for a variety of top-level domains
- hosting – purchase IP addresses and nameservers
- WhoIs – different whois information for each site
- unique content – write unique content for each website
- optimise the websites – make them search engine friendly

Dont’s
- Google Analytics – don’t put them all on the same analytics account
- Webmaster Tools – same as above
- Interlinking – don’t like them all together, keep them seperate
- Duplicate Content – don’t use the same content on every site
- Percentage of Links – don’t link your whole network to one single site

Over to Joost de Valk (aka Yoast)

Building Links, Easily, Cheapily

An idea from Yoast:

Setup a blog – or a network of blogs
Place the same content on all of the blogs
Build links to the initial blog
Use cross-domain canonical tag across all of the domains, pointing at the original one

This hasn’t been tested, but he’s positive that the method would work. He would like people to test this and let him know if it works.

And finally, Ralph Tegtmeier (aka Fantomaster)

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – this applies to SEO and link building. You need to make your link profile look as organic and natural as possible. Don’t listen to clients who wish just to get links from PageRank 5 links and do-follow links. You need to have a diverse link profile.

The post Advanced Link Building – SAScon 2010 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Bas Van Den Beld opens the session by talking about the many different countries and languages that are in Europe.

All Europeans are different – they have different languages and lifestyles. Even within countries there are sub-cultures and different languages.

Translating this into search – you cannot target every European country in the same way. For example if you target Belgium, they have a split country and they don’t like each other. You have to make considerations for this as you can’t port the same website in the same way across different countries. Things have to be specific to the place you a targeting.

Things you can do:

Researching the languages

- don’t just do a translation by machine
- use native people to help with the migration
- understand country or city-specific information from the natives

Colours Matter

If you have an orange website in the Ukraine it stands for the revolution and you will be portrayed as supporting that movement. In Holland if you have the same orange website, the colour ‘orange’ stands for party and this will have a completely different meaning.

Know Who you are Targeting

- how do they live?
- how do they behave – both online and offline

Think Outside the Box

- understand the differences between the cultures and how different people search

The session now moves over to Andy Atkins-Kruger.

Should we over-obsess with domains, and SEO-specific principles when doing international search? Well yes, but it’s mainly about content.

Translating Keywords

Translating keywords just does not work. Keywords are abbreviated thoughts created from people who are native with a language and have constructed the terms. Equivalent key phrases won’t be directly translated between languages.

Language Issues are language specific.

What Geographic Signals do Search Engines use?

- language
- local domains
- hosting
- local links

How Global People Succeed?

- centralise at least part of the activity
- benchmark against their own history
- native-speaker SEOs report to centre
- cooperate with local teams
- gain support for search from senior management
- implement what the agency says

Over to Kristjan Mar Hauksson for the next part of the session.

You need to design a website around the culture, not the corporate identify of a business.

When IP targeting remember that Google has an American IP address.

The post Running a Pan-European Search Campaign – SAScon 2010 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

What kind of companies have the best idea of what they want to do in social media?

WM – Companies usually come to us with a question mark rather than an answer. We hope that our role in social media is temporary – clients and organisation should be doing social media themselves. Who should be owning social media within the company? Nobody should own it, but yet everybody should own it.

JuL – As usual Judith distributes chocolate to everybody. Any form is social media is about interaction – you should be able to talk to a company and get a response, rather than submitting an enquiry and not hearing back. Inside of a company everybody should be given guidelines with social media, but with the freedom to move and engage.

PF – Social media can be looked at as reputation management or many other things. The objectives of comms teams within a company may be different to the customer service team – it’s not practical to give everybody a voice.

MB – Social media isn’t just about being on Facebook. Companies need to understand their core goals and identify the priorities, then you can identify the resources and outline the strategy in terms of targeting.

WM – Most of the brands that impact on our lives have been built with media by doing much more than story telling. Search looks at social media to trick the game, and look at how you can get your message to the top of the list.

JL – You need to work with your customer and interact with them.

PF – Using mercenary SEO techniques to get something visible isn’t the way forward. But having a great social site that has many active visitors isn’t great if it is appearing on page 5 of Google. SEO and social media are two distinct disciplines, but the agencies who embrace and use both of them effectively are the ones that will do the best.

With social media being so big, where do you start?

PF – You should ask yourself ‘why do it?’ – you shouldn’t just be doing something within social media just because your competitors are doing it. You need to understand why you are doing something and what value you can get from that. You need to make sure your message is relevant.

JL – The personal who is responsible for social media within a company should be the person who is most responsible for the overall goal. If you want to be interacting with your customers in terms of resolving issues, etc, then it should be the customer service team taking responsibility. However, if you want to drive the company and increase the awareness of the brand, then maybe it should be someone higher up in the company taking charge.

JuL – Whatever you do within a company has to have a measurable output.

The post Exploiting the Social Media Opportunity – SAScon 2010 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Now for some stas:

Cisco released a report showing the following figures:

Video is 1/3 of web traffic
In 2003 it will be 90%

A comscore report showed as many video streams are viewed on YouTube as searches are carried out (2 billion views, 2 billion searches)

24 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube.

1/2 of all content uploaded to YouTube is rated or commented upon.

YouTube has now been re-engineered in HD quality and is rated the best on video quality by CNET (1080p quality).

YouTube now has around 1000 premium partners (including BBC Worldwide, C4, DIscovery, IPL, C5 and National Geographic). Their biggest partners are the record labels.

YouTube reaches people across the spectrum:

1/2 of all small business owners
1/2 of all mums online
1/2 of all movies goers
1/2 of all movies addicts

Attentiveness on YouTUbe is 1.5 times higher than on TV
Engagement with ads can be amplified ~140% over

Smart Phones

The average iPhone user views 3/4 YouTube clips per day
Android is up to 3 times that amount

Sharing

2/3 of YouTube users have received a clip from someone or sent a clip to someone.
10% of all of YouTube views were embedded on social sites.
Facebook is a bigger refer to YouTube than the home page is.

Site Improvements

Re-engineered the watch page of YouTube – making it more about the actual video. The star rating system has been removed, replaced with a ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ feature. Hidden a number of features, such as the ‘more’ data – information about the clip. Any site that refers a lot of audience to YouTube now gets a link back on the watch page.

Half of all YouTube video views are from people who have clicked a related clip on a watch page. They have made the related videos feature much more predominant; expanding the entire right sidebar to improve number of videos viewed.

YouTube now has a search volume tool to discover what searches people are searching for on the site.

Advertising

Promoted Videos was launched in November last year – has around 500 advertisers using it in the UK. People can place their promoted videos to display for certain searches, or tags, or on the actual watch pages. It’s usually quite a cheap method of promotion as not many people are currently running ads.

InVideo ads place your message around premium video content. InVideo ads get the best click-through rates bar none.

Pre-roll ads place your message inside premium video content. This is a highly effective way of advertising.

YouTube only sell ads against cleared content, so there is no worry of your ads appearing against inappropriate videos.

Take home point – Video is expanding rapidly, and YouTube offers a platform for businesses or just normal people to target the people looking for video. Even with a normal YouTube channel you can appear in natural searches on Google and other search engines to increase brand awareness and click-through rates to your own website. Highly targeted advertising can place your ads within specific content to attracted the relevant traffic you require to your website.

Video is essentially taking over the web – so ensure you are utilising it.

The post SAScon 2010 Keynote – Bruce Daisley (YouTube) – The Online Video Revolution appeared first on PushON Ltd.

I will be live blogging the entirety of the day (laptop battery and internet permitting) so be sure to check back here for updates as they happen throughout the day. There may also be pictures and random musings from the rest of the team, so be sure to follow the PushON Twitter stream to keep up with the latest happenings!

Quite a few of us will be going from the PushON office, so pop over and say hello if you recognise any of us. No doubt you will be seeing a lot of Simon, as he will be chairing the conference.

The post PushON Live Blogging at SAScon appeared first on PushON Ltd.