June 25, 2008

SEO Class: Edinburgh Review

by Brian Turner

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Jim Boykin’s SEO Class in Edinburgh has just wound up, and this is definitely a project to put on your radar.

Though I came to this session as a speaker, I also expected to learn something from other speakers, and I wasn’t left disappointed - probably because Jim has brought on board some of the top names in the UK SEO/Marketing industry.

Speakers included:

and myself.

Even though a big part of my background is link development, through listening and discussions, I’ve come to realise the limitations of my practices so far and why these definitely need expanding.

Jim Boykin is one of the few names in link development work, but I got to truly appreciate what a pioneer he is in this industry. I already respected him - I respect him a lot more for it now.

I also got to appreciate a lot more issues such as on-page, wider marketing and analytics, and the overall role of search marketing as an integrated approach leveraging different specialities.

SEO Class Day 1:

Lyndon Antcliff

Lyndon spoke on link baiting, and highlighted the need to do dedicated research on topic areas as well as careful audience profiling to raise your chances of success.

He covered various hooks that can be used in linkbaiting, and especially the need to spend a lot of time dedicated to good headline writing in order to attract attention quickly but in a very targeted way, with examples of successful headline formats.

Ammon Johns

Ammon explored the sales and tracking process, and why ranking lower on Google can actually be optimal for conversions. He covered the complexities of the shopping process and how difficult it was to accurately following this via analytics, but suggested different ways you can cleverly compensate for some of these.

Ammon also underlined the importance of customer engagement and reassurance in the sales process, and how in B2B you can actually turn potential customers into potential salesmen for you, simply by understanding the profile of your prospective buying audience.

Jim Boykin

Jim explored different methods for searching for quality accessible links, as well as speculating on the importance of different weighting factors, not least page position and co-citation. We also got to see the importance of the Longtail of keyword variations in anchor text.

Jim also speculated that the “-6 filter” observed in December 2007 was a direct consequence of Google attempting to apply data sorting based on Bounce Rates, and how rewriting page titles and meta-descriptions from PPC data could be more enticing for clickthroughs and therefore potentially help for future rankings.

SEO Class Day 2

Brian Turner

I spoke on the advantages of publishing as a marketing model, and how companies could significantly increase sales, by proactively and reactively engaging the social web by building independently branded informational sites, such as forums, review sites, blogs, news and similar.

These could then be developed to dominate coverage of an entire industry - the caveat being that such sites must be high value and built to serve good user experience, provide fair and neutral coverage even of competitors, and take a soft approach to marketing.

Shaun Anderson

Shaun of Hobo Web spoke about the importance of on-page SEO, and especially of good internal linking strategies, and how each unique website requires an individual approach based on the needs and focus of the client.

He specifically explored minimising global navigation, and the use of secondary navigation and links in the content text to silo link equity naturally to main areas of the site.

Quadzilla

Taking a break in Europe from his US base, Quadzilla had been persuaded by Jim Boykin to attend and provide more information on the darker side of SEO. Famous for his seoblackhat site and forums, Quadzilla gave an overview of the “blackhat” industry to date, and covered some of the past techniques that have been successfully used.

Quadzilla pointed out that blackhat was more about testing and exploitation of weaknesses than concerns for search engine guidelines, and that it was the creative challenge of this process that was a primary driver - though obviously the financial rewards could also be significant.

Jim Boykin

Jim then covered two shorter presentations:

1. Using “Internet Marketing Ninja” tools
2. Summary of Google quality rater guidelines

I’ve got to admit, I was actually impressed with the IMN tools. I am personally very wary of using tools, because I think there are so many signals that can be missed through manual checks: not least on rankings, such as the sudden disappearance/appearance of a competitor; plus the simple pitfalls of misreading link data and overlooking link quality with link quantity.

He also spoke about how you can leverage various keyword search combinations with the tools to determine good prospects for strong and natural links.

For the second presentation, Jim went through a summary of the Google quality rater guidelines.

For those who didn’t know, Google has a team believed to comprise of more than 10,000 specially trained staff, who constantly check through Google’s results and manually review both the quality of Google’s search, and also the individual websites comprising those results. This is the process by which a site can be manually removed from Google.

Jim made observations on some of the more interesting pointers within Google’s rater guidelines, especially on the signals Google uses for quality purposes.

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