SiteVisibility » Presentations

Market Research: Informing SEO and Link Development – Rosie Freshwater #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:49:38 +0000

Rosie Freshwater is Managing Director Leapfrogg, and founded the Brighton-based agency specialising in digital marketing of premium retail and travel clients in 2003.

Rosie’s talk was all about how market research can help to inform SEO and linkbuilding strategies. It focused on how understanding a client’s target audience can help to develop useful content which will appeal to the influential individuals who can help promote it.

Photo used courtesy of John Vetterli on Flickr

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Market Research: Informing SEO and Link Development – Rosie Freshwater #brightonseo

Beyond the Last Click: Finding Hidden SEO Value with Multi-Channel Funnels – @darafitzgerald #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:49:18 +0000

Dara Fitzgerlad is Head of Insight at Worthing-based Fresh Egg. He’s responsible for helping clients to understand, measure and improve the performances of their online businesses.

Dara’s talk was all about the new Multi-Channel Funnel feature from Google Analytics, which has enabled Analytics to monitor beyond the final click. He told us how marketers, SEOs and analysts can now report on previously hidden values in Analytics, with multi-touch visibility.

Dara Fitzgerlad is Head of Insight at Worthing-based Fresh Egg. He’s responsible for helping clients to understand, measure and improve the performances of their online businesses.

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Beyond the Last Click: Finding Hidden SEO Value with Multi-Channel Funnels – @darafitzgerald #brightonseo

Delight in the Digital World: Why Settle for Customer Satisfaction – Rae Lovejoy @dweezil1968 #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:48:38 +0000

A Senior Digital Account Manager at iCrossing, Rae Lovejoy has over twenty years of experience in media sales and marketing, and five years in digital marketing. Rather impressively, she has raised over thirty thousand pounds for the NSPCC through social media activity.

Her talk was all about client retention and relationships, and about how to ensure your clients are not only satisfied, but delighted! She touched on the difficulties many encounter in explaining complex services, strategies and deliverables, as well as how to monitor and improve client relationships.

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Delight in the Digital World: Why Settle for Customer Satisfaction – Rae Lovejoy @dweezil1968 #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – How to Pitch SEO – Sam Crocker @SamuelCrocker #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:47:51 +0000

Sam Crocker is SEO Associate Director at OMD UK, and has been building a team of good SEOs there, in order to provide integrated online marketing strategies. He participated in a panel discussion at Brighton SEO in April, titled ‘Is SEO Doomed?’, and revealed that he sees himself as “an online marketer who currently is employed in SEO”.

Today’s presentation was a crash course on how to position SEO in pitches, and the key elements of developing a successful pitch. He’s had a great track record with proposals, so we were all eager to hear what he had to say.

Brighton seo preso

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Sam Crocker on Pitching SEO by djbarker

Photo used courtesy of @randomduck on Flickr

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Brighton SEO – How to Pitch SEO – Sam Crocker @SamuelCrocker #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – How to win at SEO with Duplicate Content: Featuring Pippa Middleton’s Arse – @malcolmcoles #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:47:35 +0000

Malcolm Coles is Director at Digital Sparkle, and is a London-based SEO consultant and strategist working with a variety of businesses and organisations.

In this presentation Malcolm Coles showed us how duplicate content can actually be a great asset for a website, showing us how images of Pippa Middleton could win thousands of page views and links. You can view the presentation on his blog.

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Brighton SEO – How to win at SEO with Duplicate Content: Featuring Pippa Middleton’s Arse – @malcolmcoles #brightonseo

Driving SEO with PPC – Kane Bartlett #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:46:38 +0000

Kane Bartlett is the Senior PPC Manager at GO Optimisation and has a wealth of experience managing high profile PPC accounts. With this knowledge of big name brands, his talk on “Driving SEO with PPC” is bound to offer us some great insights.

In this quick-fire presentation the main question asked was “If we spend more on PPC will organic traffic see any lift?” Although PPC has no influence on organic search rankings the answer to this question seems to be yes. Both for high and low value products the non-branded keyword search traffic experienced uplifts as did brand searches. This uplift generated an increase within; new visitors, bookings/sales and the average order value.

So it’s clear that PPC can affect SEO but why? This comes back to how conversions are attributed to SEO and PPC. Those typing in non-branded terms may click on a PPC ad, go off to do more research and then convert through the organic results on branded terms. This is why both branded and non-branded terms see uplift.

Therefore, if there is more interaction between the PPC and SEO departments then benefits can be seen for both. The departments should be working together to create a complete package that will pay dividends throughout the whole project.

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Driving SEO with PPC – Kane Bartlett #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – My Hack Day Addiction – Dom Hodgson (@thehodge) #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:20:51 +0000

Dom Hodgson has given his job title as ‘Head of Stupid Projects’ at Pizza Powered, which is an agency comprised of five diverse developers, designers and SEO experts. He is also the organiser of the Think Visibility conference, a northerner and a hack day addict.

Many people have misconceptions about what exactly hack days are, and tend to think of a group of people getting together and hacking the web. Dom quickly dispelled these theories, describing them as a group of designers, developers ect meeting and creating ’cool s***’ overnight. During his presentation he told us about many of the Hack Days he has attended, why he loves them so much and why we should all be doing them. He even gave us some tips on how we could win.

Photo used courtesy of @Seth. W on Flickr

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Brighton SEO – My Hack Day Addiction – Dom Hodgson (@thehodge) #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – James Bond: Architecture Critic – Toby Barnes (@tobybarnes) #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:09:07 +0000

Toby Barnes is Principle at Mudlark Production Company, and has been working in digital since 1995, in publishing, production and development. He is Executive Producer on Chromaroma, Mudlark’s self-published online multiplayer game.

His talk was all about modernism, how we have lost confidence in the future and brutalist architecture. As @jasonwoolley put it on twitter, it was “Funny, entertaining and uplifting… You just had to be there.”

Photo used courtesy of @Dave McLear on Flickr

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Brighton SEO – James Bond: Architecture Critic – Toby Barnes (@tobybarnes) #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – What Can Social Learn from Mad Men? Roger Warner @RogerWarner #BrightonSEO

Lyndsey — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:01:06 +0000

Roger Warner is the founder of Content and Motion, an online communications agency based in Lewes, East Sussex. Apparently he wears blue blazers on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays – Today being Friday I am excited about this blazer and I’m hoping for the whole hog. Blue blazer, hair slicked back, pretty girl on his arm, doing Don Draper proud. Let’s see what he has to say about what social can learn from Mad Men…

Roger’s talk involved comparing the similarities and differences between social media and advertising using the wisdom of John Hegarty a partner in an advertising firm in the 1980′s, examples from the TV show Mad Men and recent Chanel advertising.

The main points that emerged were that there are many things that social cannot get away with that advertisers could:

Authenticity is key in social, whereas as the Chanel advert demonstrated, an advert doesn’t have to make sense to sell the brand.

Short snappy social takeaways:

- Lack of charisma is fatal

- You are not competing with your competitors but with time.

- You must never stop thinking like your audience

BTW Roger was wearing a black blazer and was without the pretty girl on his arm, but I’m sure Don Draper would have been impressed with his delivery. Overall some great takeaways, advice on useful reads and personally-provoked creative thoughts around the topic.

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Brighton SEO – What Can Social Learn from Mad Men? Roger Warner @RogerWarner #BrightonSEO

Links – SEO Value vs Client Expectations vs Cost – Neil Walker (@TheUKSEO) #brightonseo

Lyndsey — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 14:20:34 +0000

Neil Walker Online Marketer, SEO, speaker, rapper , data miner, domainer, analytics connoisseur, link building veteran a man with many strings to his SEO-bow.

BrightonSEO an excellent opportunity to gather SEO talent and allow experts to converse one anothers experiences, almost a nirvana for SEOness

The two were just made to be together and that is why today Neil Walker is Discussing SEO value vs Client expecation vs Cost.

Founding Just Search Ltd in 2003 to which he was the first technical person in the company of 4, which is know a Global Online Marketing company. By 2004 Just Search Ltd had succesfully acheived top three status for the Search terms of SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, Internet Marketing among other phrases.

Consider by many as one of the top UK SEO Consultants Nick Walker has been based in Manchester and Cheshire but regularly travels across Europe to speak at events and socialise with other top industry speakers. Just Search Ltd is a Search Engine Optimisation Consultancy based in Cheshire. Gaining in rankings for SEO and related phrases but also covering long tail phrases such as SEO Cheshire, Search Engine Optimisation Manchester etc.

Discussing the differences between clients and SEO’s he studied link value to both parties through figures

To an SEO what makes a good link
Text Link
An old domain
Domain Authority
Page Authority

To a client what makes a good link
Anchor text
Domain text
Page Authority

A clients priority is Direct online sales, as a SEO this can be difficult as you all may know

So is the client always right?

in a recent poll of clients vs SEO Neil asked how much would you pay for a PR5 charity link

68% of SEO’s said they would pay somewhere between £30-£75

25% Clients said they would pay somewhere between £30-£75

75% of Clients didn’t know

This rise in clients agreeing to pay means that they are becoming tech savvy and are starting to understand the relevance of a good link.

In Conclusion – How to Get Along with the Client

Be transparent (spell things out if you have to!)
Explain certain methods
Explain strategy
Manage your Expectations
Don’t fret over bad links
Remember SALES and TRAFFIC are the main objective

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Links – SEO Value vs Client Expectations vs Cost – Neil Walker (@TheUKSEO) #brightonseo

Choosing and Implementing Friendly URLs for Ecommerce – Erika Ungar (@erikau) #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:30:28 +0000

Erika Ungar is an SEO & Usability Specialist at Boux Avenue, a new multi-channel lingerie brand from Dragons’ Den’s Theo Paphitis. She’s been working in Search since 2008.

In this presentation, Erika shares her experiences of working with web developers to create user-friendly URLs for a dynamic eCommerce platform.

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Choosing and Implementing Friendly URLs for Ecommerce – Erika Ungar (@erikau) #brightonseo

Dr Social Love: Or how I learned to Stop worrying about Google Algorithms and Love the People – James Carson (@mrjamescarson) #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:28:58 +0000

James Carson is Head of Search Marketing at Bauer Media, and his presentation was an overview of significant developments in social media marketing, how social activity relates to search strategies and how to “socially charge” marketing content to ensure that it is shared and linked to.

Dr Social Love: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Google Algorithms and Love the People

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Dr Social Love: Or How I Learned to Stop… by mrjamescarson

Photo used courtesy of @tnarik on Flickr

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Dr Social Love: Or how I learned to Stop worrying about Google Algorithms and Love the People – James Carson (@mrjamescarson) #brightonseo

Attracting Links – Dave Peiris (@sharkseo) #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:43:56 +0000

In this presentation Dave Peiris aka Shark SEO spoke about attracting links by creating useful content.

He spoke about using webaps such as hackerbuddy, and how they can be useful as part of your SEO strategy. Two of the best reasons that Dave gave for using them were that they can give strong links and the fact that they are great for branding. The others can be seen in the video.

He also spoke about how he has found creating useful content such as aps to be a learning process and one that you cannot get right every time. He gave us some of the lessons that he has learned through this process which again can be seen in the video.

His also gave us his tips for getting started creating linkbait, and these can also be seen in these videos.

Attracting Links

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Photo used courtesy of @StormyDog on Flickr

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Attracting Links – Dave Peiris (@sharkseo) #brightonseo

John Mcelborough – Building a Private Blog Network @johnmcelborough #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:40:27 +0000

John Mcelborough runs his own consultancy business, IOptimal, working as an SEO consultant and affiliate marketer, priding himself on this “hands-on” approach. He also runs a number of his own web projects and blogs from his own website.

John talked about Blog Networks and how effective they are as an SEO Strategy. He discussed the practical and technical difficulties of creating a blog network for linkbuilding purposes, a network of sites used to link back to other sites in order to get more links.

But how do these networks work? When setting up his own company, John started testing linkbuilding techniques, looking at public blog networks. He came to the conclusion that they do work; however, small private networks worked the best. Public blog networks often lacked in quality, get a higher amount of spam, and are mostly US-sites, which UK marketers are probably less interested in.

John argues in favour of creating your own blog network rather than using someone else’s. This reduces the risk of being associated with spam and keep intellectual property for yourself instead of giving it away. This is a rather controversial issue, taking into account the effort and time it takes to create a whole new network instead of using existing networks. However, as John explained, creating a private blog network should be seen as an investment rather than expense.

Have a look at the video for a more extensive overview of John’s talk, such as the steps he recommends to be taken to build up your own blog network.

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John Mcelborough – Building a Private Blog Network @johnmcelborough #brightonseo

Google’s Panda – A Case Study – Jonny Stewart ( @jonaths ) #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:00:15 +0000

Jonny Stewart is Head of Search & Social Media at The Review Centre, and has been working in search for over seven years. He spoke first at BrightonSEO, with a presentation all about the Google Panda update, something which his followers on twitter will know is close to his heart.

The Google Panda update is an update which was made to Google’s algorithm this year, in order to provide users with better search results. The aim of the move was to reduce the number of low quality content sites being shown in the search results. Google Panda effected a great number of websites, but some sites suffered worse than others, and digital marketers have been trying to understand the change ever since.

This presentation presented data and insights from The Review Centre website, which was severely impacted by the Panda update, and the efforts and activities which were undertaken in order to overcome it.

Jonathan summarised the changes that The Review Centre had undertaken in order to try to counter-act the effects of the Panda update, including a cycle estimating the time taken for changes to be made, content to be re-crawled and Panda to be re-run. Four months was a conservative estimate about the amount of time it would take a website to recover from the update.

His conclusion was that brand signals are playing an increasingly important role in ranking content, and said that this explained why similar sites such as Trip Advisor had not been so badly effected, or “pandarised”.

Panda photo used courtesy of @zidane_0120 on Flickr

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Google’s Panda – A Case Study – Jonny Stewart ( @jonaths ) #brightonseo

See Kelvin Speak at A4UExpo in London, 18th – 19th October 2011

Kelvin — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:15:54 +0000

I’m very chuffed to be speaking at the upcoming a4uexpo in London on the 18th – 19th October 2011, as this event is aimed at the affiliate industry and has some of the best speakers in search. By some Jedi mind trick I’ve managed to convince them to let me to speak on two sessions.

I’m opening the first day with a session titled The Science of Influence & Engagement and here’s the session synopsis: the business of affiliate marketing would be a bunch easier if we better understood how people think. The good news is scientists have been studying influence and engagement for decades.

This session will cover how the science of psychology, behavioural economics and game theory can help us market our products and services with more success. If you need to influence or persuade somebody to do something then this is the session for you.

I’m going to be talking about tricks our minds plays on us AKA ‘cognitive biases’ and what marketers can do to take advantage of this. I was involved in helping select the speakers for this session and I’m hugely chuffed to be sharing the stage with two of the brightest minds in the industry, Will Critchlow from Distilled and Stephen Pavlovich from Conversion Factory.

The second panel is Internet Sleuthing: Gathering the Intelligence Required to Beat the Competition with Sam Crocker from OMD and David Sottimano from Distilled. What will we be talking about? Knowing your competitors’ plans and their areas of past success are essential insights for any brand, affiliate, or webmaster. Identifying how to compete in the SERPs for a given product or vertical is essential and while no two are identical, having the right tools can help ensure success irrespective of the competitive landscape.

As such, we will provide the industrial grade tools and techniques required for finding what will work in your particular niche. This panel is dedicated to exploring the latest and greatest in techniques for finding out valuable competitor insights and learning the things that your competitors don’t want you to know. The final step will be to take webmasters through how to ensure their data is well protected and how to throw competitors off the scent.

I’m really looking forward to this one. Sam and David always bring their A-game to presentations and I’m going to do my best to knock it out of the park.

If these sessions, plus two days of talks on all areas of digital marketing, sounds up your street you can get your hands on tickets here. Plus, as a special treat to you a 10% discount can be used to make an already great value ticket a bargain. The code is SPEAK10%

Hope to see you there.

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See Kelvin Speak at A4UExpo in London, 18th – 19th October 2011

SEO Tactics Off Limits After the ASA Changes… #smx

Kelvin — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:19:31 +0000

You no doubt will have heard about the changes in the ASA remit which affects how you do internet marketing and SEO. In fact we’ve been going on about it on the blog before. It’s important and something we all understand.

In this presentation originally delivered at SMX London 2011 and goes into detail of how link building may be affected.

SEO Tactics Off Limits After the ASA Changes #SMX

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As with all of my presentations I’ll be working it into future podcast episode so you should sign up for them.

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SEO Tactics Off Limits After the ASA Changes… #smx

Breaking Out of the Link Building Echo Chamber #SMX London 2011

Kelvin — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:45:15 +0000

I was fortunate enough to be asked by the lovely chaps at SMX London to talk on their session Link Alchemy: Creative Ways Of Conjuring SEO Gold – In the talk I wanted to try and encourage people to look out side the walls of search to come up with better link building ideas.

Below are my slides and in a few weeks there will be an audio podcast version as well. So stay tuned for that.

Breaking Out of the Link Building Echo Chamber #SMX London Link Alchemy: Creative Ways Of Conjuring SEO Gold

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Breaking Out of the Link Building Echo Chamber #SMX London 2011

Brighton SEO – The Evolution of Linkbuilding – Lucy Freeborn ( @LucyAF ) #brightonseo

Simon — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:50:28 +0000

This morning’s presentation was delivered by Lucy Freeborn, Head of Social Media and Content at Leapfrogg. Her presentation offered some great insights into “The Evolution of Link Building”.

Her talk featured a lot of key information on PR aspects of link building and how SEO can learn from PR strategies. She encouraged SEO companies to contact PR agencies to discover what methods they use and what works for them.

She looked at how link building has evolved over time from basic activity to more complex marketing, supported with case studies of successful campaigns that have delivered results.

The presentation included Leapfrogg’s approach to link building, case studies of different link building techniques that they use and how they are able to mix and match link building, allowing them to be genuinely strategic and ultimately help clients generate revenue.

The main point which Lucy insisted on was that many PR agencies are not SEO specialists. She stressed the importance of the work that SEO agencies provide and that they have a competitive advantage in many areas over PR companies as they provide a much wider and deeper marketing service online.

Please take a look right here if you want to find out more about Lucy Freeborn

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Brighton SEO – The Evolution of Linkbuilding – Lucy Freeborn ( @LucyAF ) #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – Day-to-Day SEO for Content Producers – Malcolm Coles ( @malcolmcoles ) #brightonseo

Nick — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:50:27 +0000

So we’re here at the Brighton SEO event and Malcolm Coles, Director at Digital Sparkle has just taken the stage to talk about Karen Gillan’s underwear (better known as Doctor Who’s assistant Amy Pond). So this should be interesting…

Oh. Turns out it’s not so much about her underwear as how content creators can integrate SEO into their everyday workflow. We’re promised a look at how to embed SEO best practice with writers and what free tools are available to use…and naked celebs, hurrah!

Topics Covered:

- Trending topics: How to find what people are searching for and how to use it for SEO. Mentions Google News, Yahoo Buzz, AOL Hot Searches, Google Analytics, Surchur and Twitter as great places to find trending subjects. News organisations are also worth looking at for their “Hot Topic” sections.

- Hurrah! pictures of Karen Gillans underwear have appeared, all the geeks in the room momentarily lose concentration……

…..

- Sorry about that. Where were we? Yes, so, trends show that weekends had the most searches for Karen Gillan, entirely due to the fact that Doctor Who is aired on a Saturday. So it would make sense to release the picture & story on a Friday/Saturday. This is how the website www.holymoly.com works, by looking at trends it can release its stories at peak interest times.

Overall tips include:

- Publish as soon as you can.

- Spend time on the headline

- Do it for links not traffic.

- Social Media is equally as important, tell everyone to retweet it as part of an experiment.

Website: http://www.digitalsparkle.co.uk/

Malcolm: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/malcolmcoles

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/malcolmcoles

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Brighton SEO – Day-to-Day SEO for Content Producers – Malcolm Coles ( @malcolmcoles ) #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – Staying on the right side of the ASA @jo_morley @mrgraeme #Brightonseo

Lyndsey — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:41:03 +0000

Graeme Benstead-Hume and Jo Morley from SiteVisibility explained the new rules which have been put in place by the ASA since the 1st March 2011. These rules will affect and change the way we approach elements of SEO, but mainly practices of social media.

On the surface they look calm and ready…

Main point to take from their presentation apart from amazingly selected pictures:

Who are the ASA? They are the Advertising Standards Authority who regulate all paid advertising and now they will be regulating all online non paid spaces to make sure everything found online is honest, truthful decent and legal.

The main social media spaces that will be affected are Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and blogs. This will affect tweeting, re-tweeting, likes on Facebook etc. Each post on these spaces must be true at the time of publishing or there will be repercussions for companies who are taking part in such postings. Forums and reviews are another area that will be affected where fake reviews and posting under pseudonyms are now forbidden.

The reality of non compliance will include a name and shame list on the ASA’s website. This will not be policed and will rely on other people to report this non compliance.

Ultimately this is a positive step in digital marketing, making it more ethically sound and putting everyone on a level playing field.

And in their own words, watch this space and watch your back!

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Brighton SEO – Staying on the right side of the ASA @jo_morley @mrgraeme #Brightonseo

Brighton SEO – Everything is a Social Network – Paul Chaloner ( @PaulChaloner ) #brightonseo

Lyndsey — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:15:50 +0000

Session 3 Brighton SEO

With so many differing opinions about whether we have always ‘socially networked’ or whether or not the end of SEO is rapidly approaching, Paul Chaloner, Social Media Specialist at FreshEgg examines our treatment of social media compared to other aspects of digital marketing.

Paul takes us through why SEO and Social Media have to work together as part of a combined strategy and not fight it out against each other. He begins with SEO is dead, social media is here to stay!

Fresh egg ran 2 tests to examine the affects that twitter has on influencing rankings:

The first test was a blog post on a well ranked site, the blog fed into Google news, and the number of tweets reached a total number of 53,000 people. The post which was called “There are no social media experts” and shortly after the experiment, the post was ranking on page 1 of Google.

Test 2 was a post on a lower ranked website, it wasn’t fed into Google news and there were no initial tweets about it. However when the tweets began the page then became indexed a few days later.
Concluding thoughts and takeaways from this experiment-TWITTER IS VITAL!

-Tweet with your keyword
-Tweet on an account with 1500+ followers to get maximum reach
-Your blog must be fed into Google news
-Optimise title tags

Fairly short and sweet. So get out there and tweet.

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Brighton SEO – Everything is a Social Network – Paul Chaloner ( @PaulChaloner ) #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – Dark Patterns – Black Hat user interfaces – Dr Harry Brignull ( @harrybr ) #brightonseo

Nick — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:26:12 +0000

“Dark Patterns – Black Hat user interfaces” is a talk being held by Dr Harry Brignull – Senior User Experience Designer at Clearleft (http://clearleft.com).

The talk is about the tricks and traps of bad user interfaces that are designed to trick people, usually into paying more for something, or ticking a box they don’t actually need to.

First example up is the NHS donor register and how in the UK you have to opt in to be part of it. In other countries you automatically get entered into donor registration and have to opt out. The result is that the rate of people opting out is much lower than those opting in, resulting in a healthy amount of organ donors.

Moves on to the Oxfam site and how the donation call to action is in the middle of the page. Questioned if its ethical. Yes, yes it is, even though you might accidentally make monthly donations instead of a one off donation but as it has social benefits then its fine.

Comet website kindly puts a Ipad case for £30 automatically in your basket when you buy an Ipad, without asking. Is this Ethical? No, no its not. You might buy it anyway if you didn’t notice or noticed after you bought it (and a bit stupid I imagine, you should totally shop around for them to get the best price. This is SEO after all…)

Few more examples of bad user interfaces until the “evil genius award” is announced and it goes to the Ryanair site! They use many “black hat” style tactics to rip you off including hiding the option to NOT buy travel insurance from them in the “country of residence” drop down menu (random), whats more, unless you look for it (located between Latvia & Lithuania) then you’ll be charged for travel insurance. Thats very annoying.

We’re left with a warning that it is becoming so common place to try and rip people off using “black hat” web design that its sending a message out to the younger brands who are starting to think that is normal……

Really informative, you can check out Harrys Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/harrybr

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Brighton SEO – Dark Patterns – Black Hat user interfaces – Dr Harry Brignull ( @harrybr ) #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – Communicating the Value of SEO – Doug Platts ( @dougplatts ) #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:17:37 +0000

Doug Platts is the Head of Natural Search at iCrossing, and led this presentation about how to show clients the true value of SEO. He highlighted a number of ways to identify and share the reasons why SEO will work for clients. Defining their objectives, audience, marketplace, brand and market was a key consideration, as was managing their expectations. The subtleties of working with different sized clients was discussed as well as how SEOs need to understand the full mix of marketing activities which a client is conducting.

Doug emphasised the importance of reporting on year-on-year results as well as month-on-month, and how reports should be backdated to accommodate this. He also distinguished between good KPIs, like conversions, revenue, profit and brand awareness, as well as bad measures such as page views, bounce rate, percentage of natural search traffic and page rank.

He pointed to Paul Cook’s article on Econsultancy titled ‘Social Media and SEO Massively Undervalued‘ and Sam Crocker‘s post on State of Search titled ‘SEO Forecasting: A Poor Allocation of Resource‘. While he agreed that forecasting was incredibly hard to do in SEO, it was essential to communicate ROI to clients, which in turn influenced the budget allocation based on opportunity analysis. He recommended fewer promises and more educated guesses, also reminding us of some of the different types of data and measurables which are available, including Webmaster Tools as well as Analytics.

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Brighton SEO – Communicating the Value of SEO – Doug Platts ( @dougplatts ) #brightonseo

Brighton SEO – Is SEO Doomed? – Panel Debate #brightonseo

Alan — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:04:53 +0000

We began today’s Brighton SEO Conference with a panel discussion between Rishi Lakahni, a freelance SEO Strategist, Jamie Freeman from Message, Andy Budd from Clearleft, Nichola Stott from The Media Flow and Samuel Crocker from OMD.

The panel seemed to agree that SEO was in trouble, although they disagreed about the degree to which is was “doomed” and whether it could be saved. Rishi pleaded with the audience (“link junkies”) to “grow up” and “become real marketers” while others like Samuel Crocker and Nichola Stott argued that whilst it’s name might have been tainted it could benefit from some rebranding. The legitmacy of SEO as a practise was brought into question by Jamie Freeman, who argued that there was no “white hat SEO”; only different shades of grey. Andy Budd made comparisons to the financial industry, and agreed that SEO was “morally corrupt”.

The panel seemed to agree that a new focus is needed in SEO, with Rishi hoping the industry could rebrand itself more honestly as Search Engine Results Manipulation. Nichola speculated that the technical skills involved in SEO are going to continue to be sought-after for technical marketing exercises, but that the black hat, spammy side of SEO really was doomed. “Be a marketer, a pr person, a writer or a musician” pleaded Jamie Freeman, while Samuel Crocker stood his ground by claiming he was “an online marketer who currently is employed in SEO”. The panel seemed to agree that SEOs needed to leave the bedroom spamming behind and concentrate on mature digital marketing. It was a lively debate with some good audience participation, with one contributor bravely admitting “I am a spammer”. It has to be taken with a pinch of salt considering the conference itself centred around SEO, but there were some useful and insightful opinions and perspectives shared.

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Brighton SEO – Is SEO Doomed? – Panel Debate #brightonseo