As usual, please note that the following is personal commentary and does not reflect that of my employer. Thanks

Cliff notes version: Wow. Barry and Co. have totally hit it out of the park with this new format for SMX Sydney. The inclusion of a third day (SMX Elite) devoted to the more advanced topics has cemented this as the conference for SEOs to attend in Australia. No doubt.

As always, the highlight of SMX is the chance to mingle with some of the top minds in the industry. People like Rob Kerry (Ayima), Rand Fishkin, Marty Weintraub, Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Greg Boser (BlueGlass Interactive) and Dennis Goedebuure (eBay) were all available at the conference, and I’m constantly blown away by just how open these guys are to you picking their brains. And, regardless of the price, having face-to-face time with these guys is worth the price of admission alone.

So that’s the cliff notes version. Now, if you want the longer version with added beer, read on…

Part One: In which, already nursing a sore head, the conference kicks off.

First off, I need to send out a massive thanks to my new employer for sending me down to the conference this year. Their sponsorship not only enabled me to attend the conference, but even offered me the opportunity to fly down the night before the conference started to get settled. As such, on Wednesday I headed down with Nathan and Darryl from ireckon, and Greg Boser from Blueglass (who was in Brisbane visiting Darryl following the newly formed Blue Glass Australia partnership between Blueglass and ireckon) for a preconference function.

After we checked into the Sydney Hilton, it was straight out to a Sydney SEO meetup at the Admiral hotel. Many beers were had, the inevitable (and much anticipated) hug with Michael Motherwell hugged, and somehow I managed to win an SEOmoz t shirt. All in all, a successful night… and all this before the conference had officially started.

Pre SMX Conference Drinks - (L-R) Greg Boser, Ronnie Erdos, Me, Darryl King, Chris Dimmock

And so it came to pass that, after too few hours sleep, it was time to head down for the official start to the conference.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land (who, incidentally, just celebrated 15 years of covering search marketing) was the Keynote speaker for Day 1, and – as always – got things off to a great start. Danny looked at the current state of search marketing as a whole, and amongst other things discussed:

• The fact that search is back. Despite all reports to the contrary, there is no doubt that our job is more important than ever.
• bing vs google
• The Panda/Farmer update
• The garbage that still manages to perform well in results
• The fact that Google still have a lot of work ahead of them. According to Danny, “Links are leaking.” The importance of backlinks is already becoming diminished (a point that was repeated several times throughout the conference).
• And the fact that all the search engines are desperately seeking new signals, such as social signals for quality etc.

Finally, Danny pointed out that search marketers should be proud (despite the somewhat less than salubrious picture of us that mass media is wont to paint) because we’re part of the search revolution. Without us, the engines can’t improve.

Danny Sullivan SMX Sydney 2011 Keynote. Photo courtesy of Andrew Ballard.

Following Danny, Rand Fishkin took to the stage to discuss the old chestnut of “White Hat vs. Black Hat”. Thankfully for us “live tweeters”, Rand uploaded his entire slidedeck to Slideshare, which I’ve embedded below.

With Rand jumping around the stage, it’s hard to miss the passion he has for the topic… he really, really doesn’t like spam clogging up the SERPs.

Rand Fishkin. Photo courtesy of Andrew Ballard.

As the entire presentation is there for your viewing, I won’t rehash any of the points too much. I will pull out two points though:

• On Rand’s “Reason for White Hat #2: No long term risk”, I must point out that’s probably a bit debateable. What’s white hat one day might be deemed black hat another. The engines can be fickle that way.
• On Rand’s “Black Hat techniques made White #4”, about registering fake sport accounts (or Rand’s suggestion of “fan” accounts) in order to gain large followings: as a Sportsbet affiliate, I want to point out that this totally doesn’t work. Not at all. Nuh uh. So don’t try it, mkay? Because, quite frankly, I don’t need the competition

Next up was Tiffany Oberoi from Google discussing Google Instant, and the impact on webmaster, users and technical challenges. The most important point I took from Tiffany’s presentation was one that I believe there is currently a lot of confusion around.

Tiffany pointed out that the impact to webmasters is minimal, as the suggested instant results are for the predicted query, not for the partial query.

I think this is important for webmasters to note, as there seems to be a lot of misinformation spreading that with the launch of instant, you would need to optimise for partial queries in order to take full advantage of the feature. Not so, according to Tiffany.
Other points from the presentation:

• The biggest change for webmasters is that you may see impression counts increase, as on average Google is now serving 5 – 7 times more SERPs than before.
• Impressions are counted when a user clicks somewhere in the SERPs, specifically chooses a result, or the SERP displays for 3 seconds or more.

Following Tiffany, Rob Kerry from Ayima was up to discuss working with link data. Rob’s presentation starting off with the oh-so-tweetable quote, “Stop +1’ing yourself, links are still king!” A few takeaways from Rob’s presentation:

• Spend one day a month studying your own link profile. Find out what is popular and attracting links, and create more.
• On discussing a few of the link intelligence sources such as Linkscape and Majestic SEO, Rob pointed out that there is no need to limit yourself to just one provider… influencefinder.com aggregates link data from multiple services.
• You can get a real picture of website target terms by grouping links by anchor text and sorting by number of class C IPs.
• Footprints for paid links are easier to find than you think: are the terms blogroll, sponsored, advertising near link? Is it a blog? Is there a “paid blog” disclaimer?
• English links on a non-english blog? Sure sign of paid links.

I’ve pulled out what, to me, was the most important comment of Rob’s presentation. Again, this was a sentiment that happened to be shared by many of the speakers this year:

It’s all about ratios. Anchor text, brand terms, non-commercial and commercial, noise. Manage the ratios of your links.

Dennis Goedegebuure. Photo courtesy of Andrew Ballard

After another awesome lunch (seriously, the food at SMX Sydney is always tops), Dennis Goedebuure from eBay was up to discuss enterprise level SEO. This was a presentation that I was really interested in (especially considering my experiences at my previous employer), and Dennis in no way let us down. A few points from Dennis’s presentation:

• Some of the advantages of Enterprise SEO: strong brand, lots of data, lots of user generated content, and large technology platforms.
• Some of the challenges of Enterprise SEO: large teams, conflicting incentives, dead wood in the site, complex site.
• Cool URLs do not change. In fact, URLs never change. People change URLs. Keep this in mind and watch your dev team.
• On the point of expiring items and choosing which are worthy of redirects to keep alive, Dennis pointed out that a good way of establishing worth is to look at the number of unique referring domains. As a side note, when you have in the region of 10 million expiring URLs per day (as eBay does) this process of establishing which are worthy of keeping alive is an important one.
• Data is links. As an example, Dennis showed how many links they got out of a piece discussing the amount of iPads two sold. Apple doesn’t release those figures, but with the sheer amount of data that eBay has, they could put together a nice piece showing sales figures around the world.

After Dennis, Tiffany was back up to discuss “Big URL issues”.

The takeaways:

• Why use shorter URLs? They are easier to look at, easier to share, more memorable, more appealing for clicks, and (if keywords are used) very descriptive of page.
• Put keywords in URL but don’t overdo it. Use word separators (dashes are best, underscores second best), and all lowercase URLs are best practise.
• Create a simple directory structure. Don’t go too deep, and limit unnecessary parameters (use cookies instead of tracking id parameters)
• It is possible to rewrite dynamic URLs as static URLs, but that doesn’t mean you should do it. In fact, Google don’t recommend it at all. If you want static URL, then create a static version of that page.

Just as a side note, during Q&A with Tiffany, the question of duplicate content across different ccTLDs was brought up again. This was answered two years ago at SMX (in fact, I was the one who asked the question and blogged about the reply here) by Greg Grothaus from Google, who replied that generally speaking dup content across different TLDs is not something you need to worry about.

Following Tiffany, the always kickass Greg Boser was up presenting on “What’s really important for technical SEO”.

Greg Boser. Photo courtesy Andrew Ballard

I just want to point out at the beginning that during this presentation I found myself commenting… “Wow. Greg’s site reviews are just on a different level to what I’ve seen before”. And I stand by that comment.

Takeaways from Greg’s presentation:

• The very first step in any technical SEO initiative should always be focused on issues related to crawler access and efficiency. You want to make the most of that crawl, and check for any unexpected blocks.
• Check the header responses being returned… accurate status codes, accurate date stamps (if-modified-since). Look for proper file compression being used.
• Conduct a review of robots.txt, sitemaps & meta robot. Check for unintentional blocks, and accuracy in sitemaps, such as dates and priorities (as a side note, sitemaps were big this year from almost all speakers).
• Look through access logs, not just analytics. Find out what are bots fetching, and how often. Similarly, trawl through your error logs. You should consider building custom tools to log search bots separately so it’s easier to spot issues.
• Once the core crawl issues have been investigated, you can begin an examination of poor content performance. Google is no longer “page focussed”. The days of ranking based on page-level analysis are gone, and overall content is now more important than ever.
• Greg introduced us to the concept of CPR, or “content performance ratio”: what is ratio between total pages indexed and total pages generating organic traffic? Working on that ratio is really important.
• Generally speaking, Greg is not a fan of using robots.txt exclusions, he suggests rather use meta-robots noindex,follow directive. This is something I’d agree with in most cases… why restrict the flow of that link juice?

After a seriously packed first day, we headed off for the traditional SMX Harbour Cruise. As usual, the cruise was full of good times, good conversations, and good food. I actually met another ex-South African, Rory, who is now, like me, working for an STO (Tourism Tasmania) on the cruise. Small world. Considering we both need to work with the same systems under Tourism Australia, it was definitely a fortuitous meeting.

View from the Harbour cruise... not bad! Photo courtesy Andrew Ballard.

Following the cruise, the partying continued with a stint at Cargo Bar, after which a group of us headed up to Pie Face for the most delectable pies I have ever tasted, and then on to another watering hole. On the way, Leigh from SEM Samurai performed… well, I’ll let the video speak for itself…

(thanks to Ronnie Erdos for uploading the vid, and Edmund for the raw footage)

Part Two: In which we succumb to a dreaded man flu, say some very-probably hurtful things about SMX Idol, and head into Quarantine.

Unfortunately, trying to keep up with people like Michael, Greg and Chris finally caught up with me, and by the next morning, my “slightly under the weather” feeling had morphed into “full on rotten” feeling. I wasn’t able to shake that for the rest of the conference, which was a shame.

It definitely left me in a difficult position where – quite frankly – most of the conversations I carried out over the next few days came through a haze of cotton wool. This is not the best thing to happen when you’re trying to get up the courage to chat to some of the most advanced thinkers in our field, but it is what it is. And, thankfully, the speakers who I did manage to corner quite admirably managed not to comment on the fact that I looked like a zombie for over 48 hours… nice blokes all round!

Stefan Weitz and Danny Sullivan. Photo courtesy Andrew Ballard.

Anyway, despite feeling like death warmed up, I was one of only two guys involved in the previous night’s shenanigans (and, surprisingly enough, Leigh was the other) to arrive in time for Stefan Weitz (Director of Search at Bing) handle Day 2′s Keynote.

Stefan is really a hugely likeable guy, and great for Bing. A few takeaways from his keynote (which revolved a lot around social signals):

• Reputation is more than just followers. In order to make sense of reputation, you need to look at user’s attributes and actions.
• The concept of “like” farms (the new “link farms) is simply not worth your time. The scale needed to shift the needle would be huge, and Stefan showed a nifty graphic of “like farm” clumps to scare us off it.
• Stefan believes that the opportunity to infuse emotional connection into binary act of searching can only improve search.
• There is no *anonymous* ranking boost based on “likes” at this point. It only affects those with connections.
• Stefan says the engines definitely face challenges when it comes to likes as a signal of quality at this point. One challenge is that they don’t know the REASON for the like. Is it for a funny video featured on the page, the actual copy, the design, etc. Related, he feels that the really cool opportunities lie in marrying likes with specific expertise.

Stefan Weitz on Like Farms - pic courtesy of Danny Sullivan & Twitpic

Next up was Marty Weintraub, presenting on “Deadeye video SEO & winning universal SERPs”.

Marty ran us through the findings of aimClear’s latest whitepaper on video SEO. You can download the full whitepaper here (in exchange for an email address), so I won’t rehash to many of the points here. Here are just a few of the takeaways then:

• Universal results have 41% higher CTR than plain text links.
• If you want a greater chance of breaking into universal SERPs with videos, go informational.
• http://youtube.com/testtube is a super cool resource for seeing what’s working on Youtube.

After Marty, Rand was up again to discuss social media for SEO & link building.

Again, Rand was kind enough to upload the entire presentation to Slideshare, so I’ve embedded that below.

I’ll let you go through that one yourself, but wanted to especially highlight Rand’s point of linking to Google SERPs (as a way of increasing branded search volume and increasing CTR on your listing) as a fascinating way of thinking outside of the box. Watch this space.

Rob Kerry. Photo courtesy Andrew Ballard.

After an enjoyable presentation from Ciaran Norris (who thankfully told everyone to stop talking about social media as all media should be social), I headed in to hear Rob Kerry present on SEO for WordPress.

Some of the takeaways from Rob’s presentation:

• Yoast’s “Wordpress SEO” plugin got a nice shout out. I can say from personal experience that I love the thing too.
• WP-minify is a fantastic plugin for SEO, strips out whitespace, comments & unnecessary code. Personally, I use w3-cache plugin which I believe implements minify within its own settings, so I haven’t used this particular one, but it sounded great.
• Been blogging drunk and want to remove an indexed post after you’ve deleted it? Serve a 410 http status code on the deleted post’s URL via htaccess… generally Rob finds this works quicker than a usual 404.
• If you’re serious about the site you’re running wordpress on and are making money from it, don’t go for shared hosting… it’s simply not worth the risk.

After that, I stuck around to hear Paul Carff from Google discussing video search optimisation.

It was a great presentation, but by this stage I was seriously fading fast and feeling incredibly ill, so my notes were not so extensive from this one. However, major takeaways were to pay some serious attention to the new functionality within video xml sitemaps, and that Google is aware of the disconnect within hosting your videos on Youtube but wanting to get your own version to rank within the SERPs.

Following on from that, I headed in to hear “SMX Idol”, where three attendees were invited to give a three minute presentation to the audience on a subject of their choosing. The prize for the “winner” was a guaranteed speaking spot at SMX Melbourne. Now, perhaps this was the headache talking, and the winner seemed to be a nice enough dude personally, but I could not believe the winning presentation.

The dude presented on how to win more twitter and facebook followers, and basically advocated:

• mass following tools that determine if someone follows you back and automatically unfollows if not; and
• using fiverr.com in order to “get your content in front of 100s of thousands of my followers for just $5”.

Seriously?

The thing is, when it came time for the audience to vote on best preso, he had a serious majority. Maybe it’s just that most of my day job is now spent in the social media area, but even though the presentation was entertaining, I simply cannot believe/accept that the SMX audience is that naive. It was, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Sorry. There’s my old man rant over.

After the usual site clinic (which, despite presenting Mike with the perfect opportunity to make completely inappropriate comments thanks to a Brazilian bikini site being up for review, was fairly staid) the main part of the conference was over.

For those of us “Elite” ticket holders, however, there was still another 24 hours to go. Following the site clinic, we were bundled into buses, and transported to the Q Station in Manly, where – for the first time ever – attendees were allowed to attend the “international speaker dinner”. The dinner (which was full of scrumptious delights, by the way) gave us unprecedented access to some of the best minds in the business.

I was lucky enough to get some insight into the Asian online scene with a very entertaining Barry Lloyd, president of WebCertain Asia. Whereas most Australian online marketers are still getting to grips with the Asian market, Barry is an absolute fountain of knowledge. And considering how important the market is for local tourism needs, I had a great time soaking up Barry’s anecdotes.

Unfortunately, however, I was simply too ill to stay up for much longer past the dinner, and decided to head back to my room to rest up for day 3… SMX Elite.

The view from a soggy Quarantine Station, Manly.

Part 3: In which we dive into advanced sessions, ask the search engines to leave the room, and get the best of the best from the speakers.

This is going to be a short recap. Here’s the thing: Although we were only asked to sign a (hilarious) FriendDA* for the “Give it Up” sessions, I don’t feel comfortable writing about a lot of what was discussed during the Elite sessions just yet. Not because they were too far into the “grey” side of the “white/grey hat scale” (they weren’t) but I still need to play around with a lot of what was said before I offer my own thoughts out into the wider field.

So I’ll rather just give an indication of the day itself.

For a while now, Australian’s have been complaining about the lack of “advanced SEO training” at our local events. I can without hesitation say that Barry and all the speakers got it exactly right during these sessions.

The entire conference ticket would have been worth it if only for the sessions on the Elite Day, and the access provided to chat to the speakers afterwards.

Major Takeaways from the conference as a whole? (barring the final day)…

• You’d better hope your site offers something of value. “Perceived Quality” is no longer just something the search engines pay lip service to. With the amount of quality indicators that the engines can now draw from, you really want to be seen as a quality brand. Better yet, you want to be a quality brand.
• Exact match anchor text is no longer the holy grail of link building that it once was.
• Maximising crawl efficiency is more important than ever. Pay attention to the accuracy of your sitemaps, look to increase your CPR, etc

When next year rolls around, I’ll be first in line to get this access again. And next time, hopefully I won’t be feeling like I’m dying.

After the Elite Day had ended, we capped off a fantastic conference in the traditional SMX way... with a visit to the local brewery.

Once again, kudos to Barry and Lisa for pulling off Australia’s best Online Marketing conference.
Thanks to Andrew Ballard over at rebusiness.com.au for the use of several images throughout this post.

*Like an NDA, except less legal.

You know when I come out of my blogging hiatus, it has to be for a damn cool reason.

And it is.

First, some background: Back at my old employer, a lot of my time was consumed by educating the higher ups on exactly what social media was, how it was impacting the larger consumer market, and how we could harness that. And, as anyone who’s been in that position before knows, that means – regrettably – lots and lots of powerpoint presentations.
But there was always one source I knew I could turn to, to inspire slides when needed… and that was the Universal McCann “Wave” research, tracking the impact of Social Media. Seriously, it’s gold.

So it was with much excitement that I learned that Trendstream – headed up by Tom Smith, who was the lead market researcher at Universal McCann during the “Wave” series – were releasing a “lite” version of their Global Web Index – a tool that, as Trendstream puts it, “provides anyone with the free of charge chance to view and play with the GlobalWebIndex data, and more importantly to start developing unique insights on social media.”
You can play around with it below.

Now, of course some may question basing strategies on information gleaned from tools such as these; but I see the value here as coming from another direction. Not unlike the Forrester Groundswell tool, the Trendstream data is a veritable goldmine for those looking to take the “bullshit baffles brains” approach to convincing the “higher ups” to release the money to test your ideas out.

So play around with the figures, and see if you can get the data to say what you want it to… and when you finally get the budget you’re after, make it count.

Social Media Marketing for Beginners is a regular column on this site, in which we discuss the fundamentals of marketing in the world of social media for businesses. As the name suggests, this is a column for those looking to get their toes wet for the first time, although even if you’re already experienced in the social marketing world… well – despite what they tell you – you certainly can teach an old dog new tricks. To keep up to date with this series, be sure to subscribe to our free updates.

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Social Media Marketing for Beginners #3: How to find relevant conversations on Twitter

Here’s a quick post that will give you actionable advice for Twitter that you can employ today. So read this, and then go do it… don’t wait!

A lot of people have read my “Listening and Brand Monitoring” post – which was part one in this series of “Social Media Marketing for Beginners” – and as a result, I’ve received a lot of feedback on what worked, or didn’t work, for individual businesses. One of the questions that I’m asked most often is:

We’re listening on Twitter for our brand name, but not enough people are talking about us yet. How do we find conversations that are relevant to our business, but that don’t mention us specifically by name?

If this is you, then fantastic! I love the fact that you’re ready to proactively go out there and look for conversations that are relevant to your business, rather than just reacting to those that are out there already. The great news for those utilising Twitter in their social media outreach, is that it’s actually incredibly easy to go out and find conversations relevant to you and your business.

First off, we’re going to use our old friend, twitter search, which can be found here: search.twitter.com. If you’ve read the “brand monitoring” post, you should be familiar with how this works already: basically, you enter in the desired terms that you want to search for, and twitter search will return tweets that mention the relevant key terms. Easy, huh?

Now, here’s where a bit of lateral thinking is called for. Instead of simply entering in your brand terms, start thinking of questions that people might ask that are related to your business, and – importantly – how they might be asking them. Here’s an example of what I mean…

This is a search, on search.twitter.com, for the query: “anyone know” plumber.

Twitter search

You see what we’re doing there? We’re looking for people who obviously need an answer about plumbers. And, as you can see, there are plenty of people that need help right now. Could your business be the one to help?

Of course, you’ll want to make sure your time isn’t wasted, so be sure to include either a geographical term within the query itself (such as “Melbourne”), or used the advanced twitter search to add a locality to your query.
Now, a caveat to this post… don’t expect to be blown away by the number of results here in Australia, at least just yet. For example, if I run a search for the query “anyone know” london hotel as opposed to “anyone know” sydney hotel, you can see that the London query returns several results, while the Sydney query returns none… it’s all about adoption rates at this point.

But, just to prove that it still could be of use to businesses here in Australia, take a look at the search results for “anyone know” melbourne…

People in Melbourne need help!

Look at all those people who need help in Melbourne… do any of those cries for help apply to your business?

This week’s task

Spend some time brainstorming how people might phrase questions in conversation, and how you could monitor this in channels like Twitter. Some examples to get you started would be queries like:

• “anyone know” melbourne hairdresser
• “can anyone help” sydney plumbers
• sydney dentist help

Of course, the list goes on… it all depends on how creative you get, and – more importantly – how your customers think. And, you know that… right?

If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up for our free updates? Packed full of social media tips and SEO copywriting advice, it’s a great way to keep your business up to date with online trends!

Every Friday I try to share a selection of things that I found worthy of bookmarking in Delicious during the week. “What’s Delicious”, you may ask? From the horse’s mouth:

The Web is a big place, full of new and interesting things to discover. The problem is finding the good stuff and keeping track of it all. This is where Delicious can help.

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that we can show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, our search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like you.

You can always check out all of my Delicious tags here, but this is a regular column on this site where I bring together the best of the bunch.

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Things that were delicious this week – 21 May, 2010

• Do things like font size affect the value passed through a link? Sounds strange, but Bill Slawski specialises in asking questions that the rest of us may not even come close to thinking. A great SEO read.
• Using Google Analytics? Check out Jennita’s post, “5 Simple Google Analytics Tips You Should Be Using“. Like the title says, the tips are… er, simple. But who knows, there may be a tip that makes your day just that little bit easier.
• Amber Naslund (a regular in this column) argues that intent, above all else, may be the most important thing in relationships and relationship marketing. What say you?
• What Facebook, giveth, Facebook can take(eth) away… at any time. Many of us use custom landing tabs for our Facebook pages to increase the chance of a visitor “liking” that page. So when Facebook announced they were limiting that use, page administrators revolted. They seem to have backed down, for now… but for how long?
• Brian Solis – with a guest post over at Mashable – gives us the 21 Rules for Social Media Engagement. I sometimes get irritated with Brian’s more “fluff” pieces, but this is a great piece full of practical advice.

… or is this reading into it a bit much? I don’t know, you tell me.

We’re all familiar with the new Google layout by now… but I noticed another subtle difference the other day. Google no longer includes the “Showing results X of XXX” on their SERPs. Take a look at the below…

Here’s a screenshot of Google’s old results page for the query [online copywriting]:

Click to enlarge

See the “Results 1 – 10″ part? Now look at the new SERPs for the same query:

Click to enlarge

Google no longer makes it explicit that they are showing 10 results on their first page. The same goes for the following pages… compare the second page on the old Google for [online copywriting]:

Click to enlarge

… and the new:

Click to enlarge

The phrasing has changed from “Results 11 – 20″ to “Page 2″.

What does this all mean? Possibly nothing. Possibly, it’s Google’s way of devaluing the “prize” of a top 10 ranking. Or, possibly, it’s a way of Google for preparing us for a time when they completely blow the whole “10 results to a page” thing out the water. We’re already there with the blended results… possibly they changed the wording to simply reflect that fact more accurately?

Who knows? But I thought it was interesting

Every Friday I try to share a selection of things that I found worthy of bookmarking in Delicious during the week. “What’s Delicious”, you may ask? From the horse’s mouth:

The Web is a big place, full of new and interesting things to discover. The problem is finding the good stuff and keeping track of it all. This is where Delicious can help.

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that we can show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, our search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like you.

You can always check out all of my Delicious tags here, but this is a regular column on this site where I bring together the best of the bunch.

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Things that were delicious this week – 14 May, 2010

• Ian Lurie kicks off this week’s edition with his “19 ways to be a good marketing copywriter“. Some great reminders there for all of us who may lose sight of the basics occasionally.
• This piece from Jessica Lee over at Bruce Clay, “Content Boot Camp: Run a Mile in Your Reader’s Shoes“, would be worth it if only for the PDF questionnaire shared at the end of the post. But the rest of the post makes it all the sweeter.
• “Diesel Cam Brings Facebook To The Fitting Room“. Yeah, the link says it all, doesn’t it? But seriously, this is a fascinating use of Facebook at the point of sale.
• Dave Fleet looks at the new “Community” pages on Facebook, and why they might be a problem for your brand. It’s definitely something brand managers will want to keep an eye on. Read the piece here: “Why Facebook’s Community Pages Could Give Brands Headaches“.

Every Friday I try to share a selection of things that I found worthy of bookmarking in Delicious during the week. “What’s Delicious”, you may ask? From the horse’s mouth:

The Web is a big place, full of new and interesting things to discover. The problem is finding the good stuff and keeping track of it all. This is where Delicious can help.

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that we can show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, our search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like you.

You can always check out all of my Delicious tags here, but this is a regular column on this site where I bring together the best of the bunch.

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Things that were delicious this week – 7 May, 2010

• Laura Lippay continues her fantastic series of posts over at SEOmoz, with part three in her SEO strategy, titled “Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy“. Seriously, this whole series looks like it will be included in these recaps.
• Levi’s show just how clever brands are leveraging Facebook’s new social plugins, with an educational video. Hopefully more brands will follow suit in explaining to their customers exactly how to use these new tools.
• Loren Baker gets a nod in this recap thanks to his article, “Competitive Intelligence in SEO and Social Media“. Well worth a read.
• Finally, Glenn over at DivineWrite is offering a… well, unique Mother’s Day special over at his blog… get both of his ebooks for $10 each! And, if you film yourself actually giving them to your mother, you get them for free… gratis… nada! Glenn’s a dude that knows what he’s talking about, so seriously, get in quick… Mother’s day is Sunday!

Every Friday I try to share a selection of things that I found worthy of bookmarking in Delicious during the week. “What’s Delicious”, you may ask? From the horse’s mouth:

The Web is a big place, full of new and interesting things to discover. The problem is finding the good stuff and keeping track of it all. This is where Delicious can help.

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that we can show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, our search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like you.

You can always check out all of my Delicious tags here, but this is a regular column on this site where I bring together the best of the bunch.

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Things that were delicious this week – 30 April, 2010

• Marty (who I saw speak recently at SMX Sydney) put out a great piece upon his return entitled “What the Hell is SEO Now Anyway?“. It’s well worth a read, and certainly shows you that the world of SEO is in a constant state of flux.
• Although I would normally just say that Jeremy is looking for linkbait by publishing yet another “SEO hatefest” on his site, I actually agree with his latest piece. Well, mostly. Anyway, check out why Jeremy hates SEO here. And see how much of it rings true with your site.
• Rand’s post, “30 SEO Problems & the Tools to Solve Them“, is a super-helpful post for those who are looking for more tools to add to their arsenal.
• Looking to beef up your Facebook fanpage? Then this post from Mari Smith, “21 Creative Ways To Increase Your Facebook Fanbase” is just up your alley.
• I’m a big fan of Raven SEO Tools, and this piece just made me love them all the more; they’re currently offering Raven Internet Marketing Tools to Nonprofits… so ahead and nominate your favourite nonprofit today.
• Of course, there was huge, huge news from Facebook over the last week. The first of the pieces to make it into this Delicious roundup is the announcement of enhanced analytics to Facebook fan page owners.
• The second is a demonstration of how quickly businesses are taking advantage of their new social plugins… in this case, Levi’s demonstrates a fantastic use of integrating the new Facebook “Like” button into their store.

Three days, 21 search-packed sessions, roughly 10 hours of sleep, and copious amounts of beer later… I’m back from another great SMX Sydney conference. The conference was – as always – a fantastic chance to catch up with old friends, meet some new ones, generally natter about search marketing, and gain some fantastic tips from some of the world’s top online marketing minds.
The conference itself isn’t cheap, and travelling down to Sydney always seems to end up costing more you think… but even though I’ve only recently launched Conversation Media, there was never any doubt in my mind that I would make the financial plunge to attend the conference; even if it meant I had to slum it a bit.

And I am really, really glad I did.

There’s one thing I want to make clear, before I dive into this recap: the highlight of SMX, for me, is always the people. While the knowledge passed along in the formal sessions is great, it’s the chance to solidify online relationships face to face, and generally just hang out with some damn good people that makes the conference for me.

As an example, this year I finally managed to catch up with one of my favourite Twitter folk, Todd Friesen from PositionTech (@oilman on Twitter) for the first time, after a year of generally shooting the breeze on Twitter and sharing a common love of music. Other folks included Greg Boser from Three Dog Media (@gregboser), who I’d managed to meet briefly last year, but managed to spend a bit more time with this year. And, even though we – mostly – live within a three hour flight of each other (some of us even within a 10 minute drive), it also gave me a chance to catch up with my #invisiblefriends (it’s a twitter thing… don’t judge) too. Although it sounds ridiculous – even to me – catching up with all those folk was worth the price of admission alone. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it just so happened to take place around a bunch of search marketing sessions.

With that said, here’s a brief (selected highlights) recap of what happened down at the 2010 SMX Sydney Conference.

Part One: In which our hero panics, the conference kicks off… and Chris Sherman looks at the current state of search

The first day kicked off with me locking myself out of my hotel room. Surely, an auspicious start to the conference. Following on from that brief moment of panic, I somehow managed to sprint my way to the Hilton hotel in Sydney in time to catch Chris Sherman’s opening keynote. Chris is the Executive Editor over at Searchengineland, and it was clear from the opening moments that he really is passionate about search. Chris took a look at the current state of search, and looked at where things site with four players: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wolfram Alpha.

Chris Sherman kicks off SMX Sydney 2010. Pic courtesy of @DDsD and Twitpic

A few points from Chris’s keynote:

• He truly believes that we are, right now, witnessing seismic changes in search.
• By now, it’s clear that Google have shifted from being laser-focussed on search, to being “everything to everyone”. In the end, we never learned if Chris saw that as a good move, or a bad one… and unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to ask him.
• Chris pointed out that Yahoo no longer seem interested in the search itself, but rather what happens before and after a search is conducted. In a way, they’re returning to their “browse” roots.
• When Chris moved on to Bing, he asked how many people in the audience had used it; I was completely shocked by the low number of hands that went up in the air. I mean, sure… Bing has less search share, but c’mon people, this was a search conference… almost every search marketer should surely be testing it out, at least? Regardless, he pointed towards Bing’s fantastic travel planner, and its price forecast technology (learn more about it here)… how long until this is rolled out to more verticals, such as retail? I wouldn’t bank on it taking too long…

After a look at Wolfram Alpha (which, while undeniably cool, still doesn’t fly to high on my radar of concerns right now), Chris moved on to look towards the future of search…

• It’s undeniable that social is impacting search. Some statistics on usage: 1 billion+ users spend 2 billion minutes on social media per month. In terms of time share spent online, facebook is 16%, youtube is 9% and google is 5%.
• Chris also brought up the recently released figures detailing the number of searches that take place on Twitter, and reminded us that this is still a largely untapped opportunity for the future.
• Recent research released by Morgan Stanley shows that, sometime between 2013 and 2014, mobile internet usage will overtake desktop internet usage. Interestingly, Chris also pointed towards the Cisco research, that claims that by 2013, 70% of mobile data traffic will be consumed by video.
• Chris sees a point coming where we actually see less advertising online. Even though that sounds counter intuitive, he firmly believes that as targeting becomes more advanced thanks to our social activities, ads will be refined more and more.

Finally, Chris concluded with a reality check… web search has consolidated to a few major players, and it’s likely to stay that way. The good news is that the competition between majors has also increased, which should drive innovation.

Part Two: In which we learn to build a bullet-proof link campaign, how to deal with duplicate content, and that neither Americans nor Canadians appreciate Vegemite.

Greg Boser’s session on “Building a bullet-proof link campaign” was a real highlight for me. As part of my work, I often rely heavily on the quality of the content itself to be enough to attract good quality, editorial links. As such, I’ve never delved too deeply into strategic link building. Greg’s presentation changed all that, by showing how he does a detailed analysis of competitors’ link profiles… as opposed to the usual “take a cursory look at your competitors backlinks and make assumptions” approach that I’ve seen so often.

Greg Boser presenting at SMX Sydney. Pic courtesy of Kalena

Greg’s advice was to analyse the top players in your space, and develop a link profile based on the average of that analysis. The goal? To build a link profile for your own site that replicates quality and quantity, BUT – before you ask why you would want to only replicate – the point with this is to stay within that norm. Greg’s point was that you don’t want your site to draw too much attention when you’re first going after those links.

When building a link profile of their competitors in a space, Greg said the things they will typically look at include factors like:

• The average number of links a site has
• The age of the linking sites
• The PR of the linking sites
• The average number of linking domains
• The average age of the linking domains
• The PR distribution of incoming links
• The anchor text concentration

After his presentation, Greg tried Vegemite. As did Todd. Let’s just say that Americans and Canadians don’t seem to be able to grasp the finer points of Vegemite.

After Greg, Todd Friesen took to the mic to talk about duplicate content issues, and how to deal with them. Now, this is something I deal with fairly often in my work, but an old dog is never too old to learn new tricks.

Todd Friesen discussing duplicate content issues. Pic courtesy of Kalena

Todd kicked off by showing just how easy it is to run into duplicate content issues, especially when it comes to web server configuration conventions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to advise people that allowing your website to resolve on both http://example.com and http://www.example.com (or even http://www.example.com and http://example.com/) is not exactly optimal, so the point can’t be emphasised enough. Pick one version of your site, people!

A common theme ran throughout Todd’s presentation: duplicate content is not that difficult to deal with, so there’s really no excuse for not dealing with it. With so many tools at our disposal, such as 301 redirects (redirecting all other versions of the page to the “real” version of the page, that you want displayed in the SERPs) and the “rel=canonical element” (a second choice behind 301 redirects, but in most cases far easier to implement), right through to setting preferred versions of your domains in Google Webmaster Tools… there’s a number of ways that you can – and should – deal with duplicate content.
Heck, as Todd said… even if you’re dealing with a site with faceted navigation – such as a large ecommerce site, where products can be found through multiple categories – the answer is simple: choose a default path that you want Googlebot to follow, and block the rest of the paths.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in learning more about duplicate content, check out Google’s Webmaster Tools “Duplicate Content” help page; it’s a great resource, and recaps a lot of what Todd talked about.

Part Three: In which we learn a very interesting tidbit of information from a Google representative.

Following a presentation from all-round nice guy, Danny Dover from SEOmoz, and one from Tribune SEO Director Brent D Payne, a very interesting comment was made during the Q&A session. Following some gentle prodding from Brent towards Greg Grothaus from Google on the question of cloaking, However, Brent succeeded in getting Greg to admit something which – I personally think – is a huge admission in the world of search.

According to Greg, as long as Google users are served the same results as Google, then you should be fine from Google’s point of view. I thought this was a huge statement. If this is indeed the case, what it means is that if you’re keeping an eye on your visitor’s refferer, just serve up the same content to users referred from Google as you would serve to googlebot… but every other source of traffic seems to be fair game. Just think of the link building implications! I’ll be awaiting further confirmation from Google on this.

Another interesting (albeit less controversial) point to come out of that Q&A is that webmasters should not be afraid of using that “recinclusion request” in the Webmaster Tools console. The fact is that – once you’ve been pinged with a penalty – even if you remove the offending elements from your site, it’s not enough to simply wait for Google to come back and see that you’ve cleaned up your act… in fact, it’s totally plausible that they may not pick up on it and remove the penalty until after you’ve submitted the reinclusion request.

Part Four: In which we wrap up the first day, consume far too many beers, and our hero finds himself having McDonald’s at 3am in the morning.

When the day wrapped up, a few of us headed down to the Marble Bar, and watched a ridiculously funky band called “The Suspects” tear it up. After some serious funking and jiving, I realised it was roughly 10pm, and I still hadn’t had anything to eat. I headed back to my hotel to get changed and every intention of picking up something to eat… when I promptly got a text message telling me to get back to the Marble Bar, as more attendees had rocked up. Heading back out at 11pm – with no dinner in my belly, and only the lunch and afternoon tea from the conference to sustain me – things rapidly went downhill, and after a very cool night hanging out and learning all about the finer points of viticulture with Todd, Greg, Barry, Darryl and “the irishman” Gavin Costello, the next thing I knew it was 3am, and I was eating a McDonald’s burger. Just another typical night at SMX.

Part Five: In which we deal with a pounding headache, wrap up the conference sessions, and pay tribute to the food.

SMX Morning 2 Keynote. Pic courtesy of Andrew Ballard.

Having an early morning meeting scheduled for 8am for my day job, I was ready and waiting (albeit with a slightly worse-for-wear look) for the morning keynote at 9am. Looking around the conference hall, there must have been a few sore heads that morning, as there were notably fewer people than there had been the previous day . Which was a shame, as I found the longtable keynote featuring Gillian Muessig from SEOmoz, Marty Weintraub from aimClear, Andrew Goodman, Chris Sherman and Alex Parsons from ninemsn very entertaining. There were some seriously smart cats up there, particularly Andrew who continually blows me away with his insight.

Following the morning keynote, I headed into the “Social Media Track”, where #invisiblefriend Cathie McGinn from Readingroom was presenting on “Building and Maintaining a Social Media Strategy”. The poor girl seemed slightly nervous, but she shouldn’t have been… Cathie had some great tips to give, although I think it might have been slightly basic for those already deep in social media.

Dennis Yu from Blitzlocal was up next, discussing “Facebook Ad Targeting for Social Marketers”. First off, no, I didn’t get a chance to ask Dennis what the deal with Shoemoney was, seeing as that seems to be what everyone is asking me. Moving on to more pertinent information, the takeaways from Dennis’s presentation were:

• When it comes to Facebook ads, the most important element to test is the image.
• The most powerful element of Facebook advertising is the ability to target friends of friends.
• Forget about CPC on Facebook. When it comes to volume, bid on the CPM basis and not CPC, but make sure you monitor the CTR risk.

Marty "If you're not using Facebook advertising you should be fired" Weintraub. Pic courtesy of Kalena

Marty Weintraub was next, and he absolutely nailed us with 119 slides in 20 minutes (good thing he said he’d send off his slides to attendees!). One of my favourite quotes from the session? “If you’re not doing Facebook advertising you’re goddamn negligent, and should be fired! Facebook is half the internet!“. Leave it to Marty to tell it how it is. The main points I took from both Dennis and Marty’s presentations was that you can and should be very aggressive when it comes to Facebook advertising. I know that in the past I’ve taken a passive approach, but after that presentation I’m definitely going to be shaking things up.

After another fantastic lunch…

(actually, at this point I’m going to interrupt the narrative, because something needs to be acknowledged here. I’m not sure if it’s simply because I was travelling rough on this trip, and basically living on nothing but the food at the conference due to a tight budget… but in my opinion this year’s SMX had undoubtedly the best food EVER. Seriously. The chocolate pastries were heaven. The banana bread was delectable. And that chicken butter, on the second day? C’mon people, I know you all agree with me… it was insanely good!)

Ahem, where was I…

After another fantastic lunch, it was back to “Ballroom B” to listen to Todd presenting on “Marketer to Developer translation”. Although most of the session was common sense, it would have been a particularly helpful presentation to any inhouse search marketers. I know that, in my own capacity, it certainly inspired me to “renew” that relationship with our developers… after all, without them, we’d be nowhere.

During the Q&A with Todd, Greg and Lucas, I played "Q&A microphone holder", where everyone played the hilarious game of "How far can we make Matt run between questions?". Pic courtesy of Andrew Ballard

Lucas Ng from Fairfax Digital continued the inhouse stream, with a presentation dealing with “How to get more budget for Search Marketing”.

Again, this was common-sense stuff, but I think what both Todd and Lucas’s presentations exposed to us is that, as inhouse marketers, we sometimes take the easy way out. It’s easy to blame a lack of progress by pointing the finger at the IT dept getting things done, or at the “money people” not releasing the purse strings… but what Lucas and Todd drove home was the point that – instead of complaining about it – it’s far more productive to actually DO something about it. I really enjoyed this inhouse stream, and hope that Barry keeps it around… but looking around at the attendees, it seemed like the number of inhouse SEOs there had certainly dwindled this year, replaced more by agencies. Time will tell if the “inhouse” sessions stick around.

After that I sprinted off to the other stream to catch Greg Grothaus from Google presenting on real-time search and social networks. Greg’s a seriously nice guy, and as much as it’s fashionable to take pot shots at Google, he exemplifies a lot of what I love about this field. Even though he’s involved in search at the highest levels, he’s still like an excited kid when it comes to the new horizons in search; such as the effect social is having on exactly how we view search itself.
One thing that came out of the presentation is that – while there wasn’t an explicit endorsement – Greg certainly didn’t vehemently deny that links through Twitter may pass some ranking signals. Anecdotally, I can say that I’ve certainly seen some evidence on this from numerous social networks; in particular, through the nofollowed links on Facebook fan pages. Just something to consider…

The final session for the conference was the infamous “white lab coat” site clinic. To the dismay of many, no sites were “outted” this year… although let’s just say it looks like appliancesonline.com.au may have their link profile examined (see what I did there guys? Gave you another link from another unique domain to help you out, when that inevitable scrutiny comes… ain’t I just a nice guy?).

Part Six: In which we cruise the Sydney Harbour, imbibe more alcohol, and say goodbye to some new and old friends.

What other way is there to end off an SMX Sydney conference, than with a harbour cruise? Fantastic scenery, fantastic company, fantastic drinks… it was, well… fantastic. Rather than prattle on about how it was a great time, here’s a short pictorial recap of the event (I’ll update this as more picture surface, so be sure to check again later)…

The view on the walk to the SMX Harbour Cruise

Standing around the drinks table. Where else would you find @motherwell? Pic courtesy of Andrew Ballard.

Kalena from Searchenginecollege, Danny Dover from SEOmoz, and Pete from Sitemost.

View of Sydney Harbour Bridge from the cruise.

Kalena and conference host (and vineyard owner) Barry Smyth

View of the Sydney Opera House from the SMX Cruise. Pic courtesy of Andrew Ballard

After the cruise, we all piled off and headed into various waterholes around Sydney. Good times. Pic courtesy of Andrew Ballard.

… more to come…

And there you have it… a whirlwind recap of my 2010 SMX Sydney highlights. Of course, with two streams running throughout the conference, there are plenty of things that aren’t included in this recap… for example, I unfortunately missed out on Cindy Krum’s “Mobile SEO” presentations, although by all reports they were (as always) fantastic. I also missed Gillian’s presentation on “Checkout Process Optimisation”, which apparently was an eye-opening session.
There were, however, several people live-blogging the sessions, so if you’re after an alternative viewpoint, then I’d recommend heading over to Glenn’s writeup (caveat: that’s not an endorsement, as I don’t agree with all of Glenn’s comments; but it’s a nice alternative take) or Kalena’s.
If you know of any other coverage that you think should be included here, drop a comment and I’ll consider adding it to the post.

Congrats must be thrown out to Barry and Lisa, for pulling together yet another kickass conference.

All that’s left to say is: See you at SMX 2011!

Thanks to Andrew Ballard for letting me steal some images for this post.

Just a quick note to let you all know that as of today, I’m heading down to Sydney to attend the SMX Sydney 2010 conference. The conference only officially starts tomorrow, and then runs until Friday… although I’ll be staying down in Sydney for a bit longer.

This may impact on regular posts on this blog over this time, but rest assured that there I’ll make up for it when I get back!

If you’d like to keep an eye on what’s happening at the conference, I’ll be (semi) live tweeting throughout, so feel free to follow me, or simply follow the hashtag “#smx” to keep an eye on the wider discussions. I’ll also embed a Twitter widget below, that will stream the conversation, so feel free to bookmark this page so you can come back to it.

In the meantime… I’m sitting at Brisbane Airport, with a dark and stormy sky causing several delays, a single pair of shoes that decided to start leaking when walking through one of the larger puddles, and a smile on my face; after all… I’m off to SMX!