Just about a month to go to this event.


SES London moves back to their traditional venue at the Business Design Centre in Upper Street, Islington, for this year's Conference and Expo from 2008 February 19th to 21st.

This will be the first London event without Danny Sullivan and/or Chris Sherman at the helm. Now it is Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan running the show.


There are a number of changes to the format, the range of topics, and the speakers actually attending. One or two people spectactularly burned their bridges last year saying they weren't going to speak at SES any more, and that has made way for some great new speakers, content, and viewpoints.

There is a full Conference Agenda posted to the SES website in recent days.

There's the usual expo hall and networking opportunities, and plenty of places to eat out in the evening. I assume that LondonSEO will also have a night of drinking and talking arranged at some point, and there will be a few other parties to attend along the way.



If anyone from SEF is going, be sure to introduce yourself to me at some point. There are several people here that I have yet to meet.


[ Message was edited by: g1smd 03/11/2008 03:15 pm ... Reason: ... Reason: Typo Corrected. ]

Just so as not to confuse satnavs and Google maps, that's Upper Street, London N1

I will probably come to the expo and the LondonSEO night if there is one

Pffffft. I knew that it was in Upper Street.

There's an Upper Road near here. Nothing to do with it.

Lisa Dit is getting the beers organised...

http://londonseo.org/blog/londonseo-party-thursday-21st-february.html

Good on ya' girl!

Ten days to go now. Looks like a good programme of events - quite a few changes to the format as compared to the previous years. There are a few regular faces that will not be there this year, and some new speakers appearing in their place.

I'll be meeting up with a few people in the Hilton Islington bar on the Monday evening. That's the evening before the show starts, and off for a meal somewhere nearby, at some point in the earlier part of that evening too.

Small chance I may go - small...

C'mon, dip the small change out of some expense account for it...

I am SO jealous ! I wanna go !!

yeah Sportsguy - cough it up lol

The first couple of sessions on Local Search and Mobile Local Search had some vague interest for me, so I had a look at those. The first few sessions were held in conjunction with The Kelsey Group who also had some conference sessions of their own on the day before SES began.

From the speakers, there was a little too much pitching of their companies' services, and the presentations were a little bit lightweight on detailed actionable information, however the main message is that this is an area that is growing fast and is something that needs to be looked at for most types of business.


So, the first session included Thomas Wicky, Andrew Klein, Andrew Hunter and Max Jennings, starting with Thomas Wicky.

Organic listings are slowly being pushed down the page, especially in Google, with sponsored listings, and universal listings at the top of the page, with hooks to YouTube videos, maps content, news items, and so on.

These are opportunities to be more visible - if you take them.

Businesses should no longer rely on their website alone, but can take advantage of video content that they host elsewhere, but which will still drive traffic back to their own site. Additonally, review sites can be great. While positive reviews are great, negative reviews can be used help improve the business.

You need to beware of competitor sabotage - community sites are somewhat self-policing in that regard anyway.

Google has a 95% share in Universal search at the present time. Universal Blending of results drives huge traffic to Google Maps, so you need to make sure you are appearinhg there effectively.

Publishers need to stay relevant. It is all about the content. Optimise for Universal and take advantage of every channel. Open up your content, and get tech drive.

Andrew Klein covered products by his company, where they create a set of generic adverts which can be branded for local businesses at the time of sale. The same advert can be used in a different location to advertise another local business, just re-branded to suit.

Andrew Hunter covered his own company and how they had built an online community of 70 000 users, with 125 000 reviews, and which now sees 2.3 million visitors per month.

Local Search 2.0 is very different to the traditional directory model. They key channels were lead generation, direct advertising, and sponsored listings.

Reviews and all the positive things said about you. What better way of exposing this content to acquire new customers? Can this work without having hard-core sales people present? Can this work without a community?

Max Jennings had a short presentation/summary without the benefit of any powerpoint slides.

Local reviews are becoming a crucial part of internet strategy. Web 2.0 and rich content is a must. Google has many cool tools that can help with all aspects of creation, hosting, and analysis. Google is the #1 and may remain so for a long time. Traditional media will eventually join the party, but have been slow to date. Personalisation of results is important. Don't overlook that. And, think about the community! Hyper-local search will become more important, especially as mobile search takes off. Aggregation and sharing of data will become more commonplace. make sure you have your content and data included in that mix.

There were only a few quick questions for the panel.

Negative reviews are not all bad. They can be used by savvy businesses to improve their service. In fact, they can highlight problems that all the users are aware of but which no-one in the company was aware of and would never found out about had it not been for the community participation in their internet prescence.

Currently 37% of all ad spending is in TV advertising. It is very expensive and out of reach of almost all small businesses. Online advertising can be targeted and measured and can be very effective without huge cost. There are very many opportunities and new ways to be heard coming online every day.


[ Message was edited by: g1smd 03/12/2008 05:26 am ]

The second session covered Mobile Local Search with Ryan Sarver, Nick Gee, and Alexandre Gaschard.


Mobile Local Search is something that is yet to happen on a large scale. Apparently some 97% of web-enabled mobile phones are used only for talk and text. Huge opportunity for growth, but the User Interface is not very advanced on most devices. The iPhone has already sparked a huge increase, through ease of use, and is even advertised as "Get on Google with your iPhone" and so on. When Data Charge priceplans mature these services will become ubiquitous.

With the newer positioning services that can locate the user in real time,to within street or two, local can be very local, and it is perhaps no surprise that most such searches are for the nearest pub/takeaway/restaurant/taxi etc... and mobile allows the user to also be targetted with offers that are redeemable right now as you are pssing the door of the business. The redemption rate is very easily measured too.

Cell positioning can locate a user to within 5 000 metres, but wifi and GPS can locate the user to within 20 metres. When geo-search software was pushed out to some 4 million mobile phones, there was an immediate and massive surge in the amount of local search type queries being made. Users do find these services to be useful. This will only grow as time goes on.

Directory Assistance, by voice, will not be replaced by 3G web services anytime soon, as you really can't use the web while driving. Some research shows that some 55% of DA voice calls originate from a mobile phone, but quite a few of those would migrate to web-based methods when the user-interface is mre usable and the sped of access improves. It can take several minutes to perform a web query that would take only seconds on traditional voice DA servces.

The benefits of additional available data to view will evenually win out. The panel were in agreement that SMS based queries were cumbersome, and slow, but that delivery of additional data back to the equirer was still a useful method, especially if it contained links to further web-based materials.

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[ Message was edited by: g1smd 03/12/2008 05:56 am ]

The third session of the day covered the popular topic of Analytics and "measuring success". Mny sites are not measuring what their visitors are doing an are missing out on vital hints at where their site can be improved, the visitor exerience enhanced, and more sales and profit to be made. The session panel consisted of .... who have written a fair number of books between them. several also run industry-leading blogs which people sould check out.

Whilst there are many Analytics products offered for sale, the speakers were quick to note that people should start off with free tools until they are more conversant with the subject. Google leads the way, with their free product offering more than 70% of the functionality of the rival paid products. Microsoft noted that they will also be releasing some free tools ater in the year too.

The panel briefly covered privacy concerns with Analytics, the main worry being that Google, for instance, see data from all sides, users, publisher, and advertiser, and there must be transparency in the process to gain trust from everyone. Some businesses might be wary of Google knowing all about their traffic, from all sources, while users may be worried that their activities can be tracked across all the sites that the visit.

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A final note for people, was to check out the Web Analytics Association website for more tips and techniques.

[ Message was edited by: g1smd 02/20/2008 12:55 am ]

The next session was a Google presentation held during one of the breaks. I still haven't got round the expo part of the show yet!!

The Google session had to be pre-booked at registration time and was well-attended. There were three different sessions - basic, advanced, and analytics - with some of them being repeated tomorrow. I elected to attend two sessions, one today and one tomorrow.


The session started with some overview statistics. Some 60% of UK houses have internet access (up from 45% in 2003) and they spend on average at least 8 hours per week online. Some two hours of that is related to shopping. Average household spends GBP 1000 online per year.





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[ Message was edited by: g1smd 03/12/2008 06:27 am ]

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Well, another day dawns and I am here an hour before things kick off in earnest again. Last night saw a whole bunch of people head of to Thai Square, Upper Street, Islington. About 20 people, including Scottie Claiborne, Li Evans, Christine Churchill, Judith 'deCabbit' Lewis, Joe Morin, Motoko Hunt, Dixon Jones, Greg Jarboe, Alan Perkins, Simon Heseltine, Nick Wilsdon, and a few others, enjoyed a fantastic meal at a very reasonable price, before heading to O'Neills for a (ahem, several!) Guinness, and then on to another bar when they closed early.

After a year at the Excel Conference Centre, Docklands, which everyone (speakers, organisers, and attendees alike) seemed to hate with a passion, SES is back at the Business Desgn Centre in Upper Street, Isligton, this year; this being the venue used in previous years before last years' erroneous deviation.

Anyway, people are arriving and the sessions kick off again in a few minutes...





[ Message was edited by: g1smd 02/24/2008 06:50 pm ]

A number of videos made on the exhibition floor, yesterday, have just been uploaded to YouTube. Search on SES London 2008 to find them.

Day 2 : Keynote by Nick Carr:

Unfortunately, for health reasons, Nick was unable to fly over for the conference, but was more than generous to record a professional video presentation which did a very good job in conveying his message.

The major news, which you cannot have missed, was the recent Microsoft bid for Yahoo, which was rejected. This looks tactical as its own properties fail, and Yahoo is currently at a very depressed price.

This would be another step in the move to a centralised model of supply. This happened centuries ago with food production, when hunter/gatherers turned into farmers, and that freed up the rest of the population to do other things.

Just a century ago the same thing happened with power production, when local supply was replaced with a central generating model, and that opened the way for a cheaper and more reliable supply.

The same moves are happening with computers. There is a move to more online offerings, with, in many cases, both the data and application being held online.

Software apps are being replaced by online applications. Flick and bebo are just a few examples of this move, and both are extremely popular. The early adopters are home users and some small businesses. Larger businesses still rely on their IT department and huge legacy applications, but even they will gradually evolve their usage to embrace the newer ideas.

These sites are often supported by advertising, and many are looking like media companies. Microsoft is making vast sums of money based on the old software supply model, but will need to shift to the new model in order to stay competitive.

The new companies have a very large customer base, but you will be very surprised at the small number of employees they have.

Skype employs 200 people, while BT employes some 100 000. Skype has twenty times as many customers as BT. YouTube has about 60 employees, and Craigslist about twenty.



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[ Message was edited by: g1smd 03/12/2008 06:22 am ]

The expo hall is seeing a steady stream of visitors and enquiries and seems a little more busy than yesterday, and it is still early in the day. There are a wide range of exhibitors and trade stands, the largest occupied by Google.

Whether your bent is PPC, analytics, traditional SEO, affiliate marketing, or breaking into foreign markets there is someone to talk to and make some initial enquiries and gather ideas.

Today is also the longest day of the conference with the most number of sessions: the keynote, five ordinary sessions, and two Google University sessions. Necessity means skipping at least one session to get some air, a drink and some food.

There will be a lot of tired bodies and aching minds by the end of the day. Many people are eating out tonight, and there are plenty of places to choose from, in Upper Street. Ten minutes walk in any direction covers more than a hundred bars and restaurants covering almost every nationality.


[ Message was edited by: g1smd 03/12/2008 06:26 am ]

The second session of the day was on Successful Site Architecture.

This was one of the few panels where there was only one presenter. In previous years Shari Thurow has presented this session, but this year it was the turn of Alan Perkins who did the same great job of covering the subject matter in an easy to understand manner.

SA is fundamentally important to any website, and can be critical in interfacing to various PPC efforts too.
There are two parts: Information Architecture and Technical Architecture.








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The Google Analytics session was very well attended and covered the basics of setting up an account, and describing the types of data that can be accessed.

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One of the afternoon session was on Searcher Behaviour Update and this was held in a packed room. This panel consisted of Erica Schmidt, Piers Stobbs, Rob Stevens, and John Marshall.

Erica started off with a recap of a bad hotel experience, staying somewhere after one person had personally recommended it. However, it turned out to be very badly run, poor quality rooms, many problems, nasty food and unhelpful staff. Some online research in advance would have highlighted that a change of venue would have been very appropriate, a fact only discovered after returning home. The trend in recent years is for more and more people to look at "review" sites to check product offerings in advance of a purchase.

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[ Message was edited by: g1smd 02/21/2008 01:07 am ]

The last sesion of the second day turned out to be one of the best sessions so far. This was the session on various aspects of Social Search. This panel consised of three very well-known names in that area: Li Evans, Scottie Claiborne, and Joe Morin, and the session was a mine of information.

Social Media Marketing is not SEO. It is a separate branch of marketing. Social media isn't purely about marketing to people in the one-way 'broadcast' way that a normal website doe. Social is about sharing and starting a conversation.

In the early days of the web, a simple website could be used to get your message accross, later augmented by PPC efforts. However, spammers soon entered the scene and it became more difficult for some legitimite product types to get their voice heard. The space was mostly filled with junk. Additionally, some already realised the massive benefits in getting their customers to promote for them, and saw advantages in hearing about problems in order to improve their product/service offerings.

So, social media is about tools and websites that create communities and facilitate a conversation. It is not a fix for bad SEO. It's not just about Digg and Facebook. It is time consuming and there are very many disparate facets.

Social Media covers many hundreds of sites, in very many categories. There are sites for:
Social News, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Sharing, Ratings and Reviews, Future Events, Answers, and so on. Knowing which of those you should get involved with is a complex job, and requires a lot of research. At this point slide after slide jammed full of various names of social sites were shown to show the audience that there are very many sites in this space. You can't just start a Facebook page and expect that to be a magic bullet. It might be completely the wrong thing to do for you type of business.

In many cases Social is all about the "wisdom of the crowd" as well as engaging the audience in conversation and encouraging participation.

A lot of the Social Media topics are technology relate, but other areas, such as fashion, are rapidly growing. Social Media can be a good source of traffic, and an even better outlet for pure "brand awareness".

But, who exactly is the audience? Different sites may have a completely different demographic. Digg tends to be more technical, younger, geeky people, while some other sit may have an average audience some 20 or more years older.





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[ Message was edited by: g1smd 02/21/2008 12:51 am ]

The second day is over and I don't have net access this evening.

Will fill in the details of today's sessions tomorrow.

It's the third day already. Everyone had a good meal last night. We did Italian, at Strada, Upper Street, Islington, and mighty fine it was too. It was great to chat with Jim Sterne from the Web Analytics Association too. Then, off to a bar to talk SEO until late into the night.

The third day is a little shorter than the other days and the expo part of the show has now finished. I heard a few people complaining about that as the second day was so feature packed they had no time for the expo.

People are slowly turning up, and most are pretty tired by now. There's still a lot of enthusiasm, and the day kicks off in about half an hour.







[ Message was edited by: g1smd 02/24/2008 06:53 pm ]

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The second session of the day was very well attended and dealt with problems with dynamic websites. A lot of material was covered in a short time, by the panel of Mikkel, Ralph and Krisjan, with even some time for a few questions at the end.

Search engines want to index as much content as possible, but they cannot always achieve that due to problems on the site/server they are trying to index. Some may be familiar with the IRTA model:
- Indexing - dynamic problems can be a serious issue to overcome
- Ranking - In some cases dynamic solutions can outrank static solutions
- Traffic - same game for both static and dynamic sites
- Actions - design of page will influence user action to buy.

When a user makes a page request, quite a lot happens. The request is sent by the browser to the server, and the server may well have to interact wth a database for retrieving content, fetch 'included' boiler-plate header and footer information, build navigation links, and deal with other variables. Only once the page has built, can it be sent out to the browser.

The requirement to manage content via a database ofte leads to the fact that information needs to be passed from page to page as the user browses the site, and that can lead to some very long parameter-driven URLs that are very search engine unfriendly. There are ther ways to implement a site in such a way that the required user-functionality is maintained, while delivering a search-friendly solution at the same time.

In some cases, a simple "bridging layer" between the simple-life that the search-engines crave and the complexity of the underlying site architecture may be all that is required. Alternatively, some automated process could be setup to replicate the site as a separate static copy that is stored and cached for the users to directly access.

In general, there is NO problem to:
- store data in a database, but you do have to provide a way to get that data out onto spiderable HTML pages
- A question mark in a URL is NOT a problem.
- using server-side includes is NOT a problem.
- the URL extension (the bit after the dot) can be anything you want, just as long as the page is served with a MIME type of "text/html".

Where the direct problems lie are:
- in having very long URLs, epecially those with very many parameters
- duplicate content (note was made of a site where one page was indexed 200 000 times, all with the same identical content) caused by session IDs, time stamps in URLs, parameters in a different order, www and non-www, multiple domains, capitalisation issues, and a whole host of other problems
- spider traps, such as caendaring functions that can bespidered for an unlimited number of days into the past and into the future
- issues raised by the use of Ajax technology
- owntime of the server for whtever reason, including '500 error' messages.

Indirect problems include:
- cookies, flash, javascript
- geo-targeting and personalsation issues
- forms especially if used as navigation elements


Not related at all, but still problems:
- robots.txt
- meta robots
- password-protected content
- frames










[ Message was edited by: g1smd 02/21/2008 05:54 am ]

I've taken a break and missed the session on link-baiting immediately after the meal break, and will go to the last two sessions of the day instead.

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Finally back home and back online after a hectic week-and-a-bit away.

The London SEO beer night was a success. That was on Thursday, immediately after the conference finished. I am not sure how many attended, but I'll guess at somewhere close to 50 ventured over the road to the Camden Head pub shortly after five, and many stayed until after midnight. The generous bar tab lasted until about 10 pm I think.

Thanks to the sponsors Altogether Digital and RedFly for opening their corporate expenses wallet and emptying the contents on the bar. The only downside was the incredible crowding, made worse when we all had to move downstairs at 8 pm for the comedy club to take over the upstairs room. A few braved the cold and stood outside, but I'll have to say that it wasn't as comfortable to do that as at the last time LondonSEO held a night there, that was two years ago... but was in May.

It was great to meet up with a few new faces, including sem4u from here in the forums. Good job you spoke up, otherwise I would have missed you. Adam Lasnik was in the bar most of the evening, and having been collared by a very nice Australian girl, managed to chat to her and a group pf people all evening without mentioning SEO or Google more than once. That must have been a welcome change from the million-and-one webmaster questions fielded in the previous few days.




[ Message was edited by: g1smd 02/25/2008 09:14 am ]

>having been collared by a very nice Australian girl

Lucky you! I was collared by a very drunk casino SEO on my way out of the pub!

Adam Lasnik was the lucky one. Tricia is the blogger behind "TooSexyForMyBooks".

There's now some photos of the event linked from the LondonSEO website too.

There are lots of phots on Flickr. They are mostly tagged "SES London 2008".

[ Message was edited by: g1smd 03/12/2008 04:52 am ]