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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/20/2008 05:55 am
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/20/2008 05:57 am
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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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/20/2008 07:52 am
[placeholcder]
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/20/2008 07:53 am
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/20/2008 09:10 am
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 ]
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/20/2008 10:30 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 ]
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/20/2008 10:31 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.
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/21/2008 12:57 am
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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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/21/2008 05:15 am
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/21/2008 05:17 am
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 ]
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/21/2008 05:18 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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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/21/2008 07:28 am
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/21/2008 07:29 am
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/25/2008 08:27 am
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 ]
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sem4u
Joined: Dec 16, 2003
# Posts: 258
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Posted: 02/26/2008 12:47 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!
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g1smd
Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10059
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Posted: 02/26/2008 06:14 am
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 ]
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