Martin McDonald from seoforums.org
Matt Owen from Econsultancy

Martin McDonald kicked off the event with:

A brief history of search
Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up Backrub.com – yes that was the name before they changed it to Google. They were both students at Stanford University at the time. There were two search boxes. There was the option users to search Stanford University and also the web. In order to be seen within the search engine, you had to have keywords in the code of your site telling the engine what your site was about. This is now referred to as “Keyword Stuffing” and it did help many sites rank for 7 or 8 years.

What is PageRank?
PageRank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results. It was designed by Page and Sergey. The more links a site had to it, the higher the PageRank it could achieve. Therefore people started buying and selling links, trying to boost their own PageRank. This is not what Google intended and this is where social signals comes in.

Why are social signals important?
Social networks are more reliable authoritative representation than links. Search engines will ignore unnatural social profiles so there is no way to build up authoritative links by “buying” friends. Google counts retweets as a signal of trust, even more so if it comes from someone who has a lot of followers and who engages regularly with their followers. Not all links are equal, they are weighted. A tweet from seojoblogs who has a few number of links compared to Matt Cutts will not count as much.

So what are the next steps?
Build your own social profile. Set up a Facebook and twitter page, but do not forget to engage with your users – meaning retweet, reply, respond to questions. There is no point having social profiles if you do not use them. By integrating your social media and seo efforts, you will have a higher change of increasing your click through rate and traffic to your website.

Matt Owen from Econsultancy then talked about:

Facebook Optimisation
Google’s biggest rival and quite annoyingly for them, they do not know how the Facebook algorithm exactly works. Matt was able to share with us a few best practices on how to increase your visibility within the Facebook walled garden:

- Fan page name – make sure this is the same as your website/company you are promoting
- Vanity URL – this should be short and contain your keywords
- Keywords loaded in the information and about boxes
- Status updates should contain keywords
- Photo and Videos should be tagged and have a description on each
- Open privacy settings, it may sounds obvious but some people have tight privacy settings meaning users will not be able to see their page.

These are Facebook best practice recommendations, they are still keeping quiet as to how they actually work. Facebook is the closed community of Google and they are set to be its biggest rivals.

Have a look at some of the photos from Search London – Integration is Key

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Well there is still one more event to come in December. I am attending
1. London Blog Club on Tuesday December 14th.
Location: Theodore Bullfrog
26 John Adam Street London WC2N 6HL

Rajini Lolay of youngandpoor.co.uk will be talking about her webiste which she set up less than a year ago and already has 10,000 visits. Young And Poor is dedicated to cheap cool things happening in the city. Rajini will talk about how to grow your blog, including how to grow a social media presence, how to network, and how to make money.
What a great idea for a website. Most people talk about being young and rich, but more are young and poor as they are just starting on their career path.

2.London SEO SMO and PPC January 17th
I am the organizer of this meetup which is about the integration between natural search, paid and social media and how working together can provide the best digital solution for your own business or for your clients.

Richard Fitzgerald, blogger of 52burritodates.com will be giving a talk about his site and how he has used both social and seo to drive traffic and generate buzz. Richard won a year supply of burritos at a festival in 2010 and instead of consuming them all himself he thought he would share the burrito love with a new girl each week – hence the name of his blog.

Google will also be talking about what 2011 means for search. It is a great opportunity to get some insights from the monopoly search engine.

http://seojoblogs.com/2011/01/31/new-year-search-club/

3.Online Marketing Meetup – February 10th

This was the first event since Gus Ferguson took over the meetup which took place on a Thursday evening on the HMS President, if the weather had been better, it would be a great way to end the week – drinks on board the river Thames. Gus really outdid himself by organising 5 speakers to talk at the event, ranging from SEO, to social media and to PR. I will certainly be coming to the next one in May.

4.World Congress Barcelona February 14 – 17

The mobile conference is again in Barcelona this year and is one to attend if you are serious about mobile. Here is an overview of what is happening:

* A world-class thought leadership conference featuring visionary keynotes and action-provoking panel discussions
* An exhibition with more than 1,300 companies displaying the cutting-edge products and technology that will define the mobile future
* An even bigger App Planet the new Centre of the Apps Universe
* An awards programme that highlights the most innovative mobile solutions and initiatives from around the world
* And most importantly, the planet’s best venue for mobile industry networking, finding business opportunities, and making deals

5.SES London February 22 – 25

This has come around fast. I attended one day last year which was really interesting and I learnt so much. There were SEO and social media 101 sessions. I wrote about my experience earlier this year http://seojoblogs.com/2010/01/31/seo-events-calendar/. This year there are beginner sessions such covering the following:

* Introduction to Search Marketing
* Basic Analytics
* Introduction to SEO
* Introduction to Social Media

I hope to attend some of the advanced sessions:

* Twitter Nation & Automation
* Advanced Paid Search Tactics
* Duplicate Content Issues
* Killer Facebook Marketing Tactics

6.London Blog Club – February 22

London Blog Club – Richard Fitzgerald who spoke at my last event talked about his success with 52burritodates.com. He started blogging in 2007 and received minimal traffic to his site. It was only when he won the year supply of burritos at a festival last April, that he saw visits to his new blog explode. Moral of the story is that you may be trying to get lots of visits to your site, but if you have a niche then you may hit the jackpot and attract lots of visitors

7.SEO Chicks Boat Party – February 23
The SEO Chicks party was a nice way to round off midweek and talk to other fellow seo professionals. It was on the HMS President, the same location that the Online Marketing meetup took place a few weeks ago. There were well over 100 seo, online marketing, social and pr gurus.

8.London Blog Club – March 22
I went to London Blog Club – hosted by Marko Saric, Filip Matous and Tamara Walker. The event was held at the Blue Posts pub (one of the regular locations for the London Blog club), just off of Oxford Street, so quite central.

Sanjay Shelat from Edit Optimisation was the guest speaker. He has worked for companies like Gumtree & Ebay and was very enthusiastic about seo and gave a lot of tips on how to optimise your blog. I summarised the key points to take away in the post below:

http://seojoblogs.com/2011/03/26/london-blog-club-march-22-2011/

8.Spring Search London – March 28
This event was held in Theodore Bullfrog, 26 – 28 John Adam Street. I reserved the top floor for us and there was a small tab for some drinks.

At this Spring Meetup, Nichola Stott – Director & Founder theMedia Flow talked about her experience in social and seo and how working together has benefited her clients.

theMediaFlow is a UK SEO and social media agency and Nichola is also co-founder and director of SEO PR Training so she has plenty of experience to share with us. You may have read some of her work, she blogs for SearchEngineWatch, State of Search and SEO Chicks.

http://seojoblogs.com/2011/04/04/spring-search-london/

9.Search London – Boating on the Thames – April 18
I will be hosting an event on Monday April 18th. “Search London – Boating on the Thames” will take place on the HMS President, which is by Blackfriars station. At this event, we have Marko Saric, from howtomakemyblog.com. He will be telling us all about how he grew his blog from nothing to being voted one of the top 50 blogs.

So there are some of the events for early next year. I will add more as the event calendar fills up. Let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to see at SEO, SMO and PPC meetup.

Tweet

On December 1st, Danny Sullivan, from search engine land published an interview he took with Bing and Google which confirmed that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings. You can find out more here:

http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Below is the interview by Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing:

We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google:

Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article [NOTE: see the end of this article for more about that].

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Bing:

Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google:

Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?

Bing:

Yes.

Google:

Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.

Danny Sullivan: Do you track links shared within Facebook, either through personal walls or fan pages?

Bing:

Yes. We look at links shared that are marked as “Everyone,” and links shared from Facebook fan pages.

Google:

We treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook.

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone on Facebook, either say via their personal wall or their fan page.

Bing:

We don’t do this on Facebook. On Facebook, we only get what’s public, only updates and things you’ve posted to everyone as viewable. We don’t get things only shared with friends, so we don’t know how authoritative you are on Facebook. There isn’t the whole convenient retweet mechanism we see on Twitter.

We do see valuable content shared by Facebook users, even though we only get what’s public. For example when Gary Coleman died we saw a video from Different Strokes, saying his favorite line “what ya talk’in ’bout Willis” gain popularity. It happened to be what a lot of people are sharing on the day he passed away.

Google:

Again, the treatment is the same as for Twitter. And we have no personal wall data from Facebook.

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who shared it on Facebook?

Bing:

We can tell if something is of quality on Facebook by leveraging Twitter. If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate.

Google:

Same as question 5.

So what does this mean for seo? Well it confirms what we already knew and the same best practices of seo can be applied here.
Facebook and Twitter can be seen as an external link building channel. The more varied the links from the different Twitter and Facebook fans, the better. So you can’t go on retweeting a post x number of times from the same account, hoping to build more authoritative links, it just won’t work.

I am pleased Google and Bing confirmed the impact of social media on seo as it proves my point that integration is the key in this digital space.

New organizer for the meetup

It is important to integrate, seo, social media and paid search and therefore I was pleased when the organizer position became available to demonstrate how these three areas can be integrated. I think it is hard to think of each separately in this digital age. There is so much cross over between the three.

Blogger outreach – social media seem to have taken control of this. However, when bloggers are contacted and write content about a product/service, the seo team should become involved. They should work with the social media team to put together optimised content the bloggers can post on their blog. Optimised content, simply means links on keywords back to the site that is building up rank and traffic.

Keywords – paid search data showing the impressions and number of clicks can feed into seo work. When a new page is built, the seo team carries out keyword research to see which words have the highest search volume. Google keyword is sometimes used to view the search volume for the terms but it is often inaccurate. This is when the paid search data can be used to see the words that have the highest click throughs. If paid search are using certain terms that are performing well, then these terms can also be used on the landing page for that campaign. This also helps to improve the quality score of the paid search advert.

Buzz - the social media team monitor the amount of buzz generated for a certain client. However, it is the seo team that monitors the traffic and sales to the site that this buzz has generated. The seo team also record the rankings for its key terms and should see rankings improve. It is important to be able to assign a ROI to the buzz, otherwise it is very easy to keep spending money on social media with out seeing a return on the investment.

Integration is not just a new word, it is here and now and going to stay. The more people pay attention to it instead of treating PPC, SMO and SEO separately, then the more we will be able to reap the awards.

Sign up to SEO, SMO and PPC meetup on meetup.com to network and meet like minded digital people.

I work closely with social media who produce monitor the amount of online mentions or “buzz” for a particular brand. The seo guys use these buzz reports to see which bloggers and twitters are talking about the brands. The social media team contacts the bloggers but the seo team people give them the optimised content. This means that when the bloggers write about a particular product we have asked them to review they are linking back to our destinated web page on our key terms.

Facebook ties in with social media, but it also has an impact on seo. If your client wants to have a facebook page then they need to make sure it is optimised for seo. They must make sure that their key terms and links are on the facebook page and that they have an optimised URL.

Paid search and seo go hand in hand. By monitoring paid search adverts, we can see the number of impressions and click throughs for certain campaigns. If there is a high number of clicks on key terms and then we see through tracking that there is a high bounce rate, it may be that the landing page does not have enough content or that people cannot find what they are looking for. A new landing page will need to be created and the keywords that generated the highest CTR will be used in the page title, meta description and on page copy.

Another example of working together is when there is a brief for a new landing page to be built. Paid search will carry out keyword research to check the volumes around particular terms. This research can also feed into the seo recommendations.

The next time a client asks you just to do their paid search for them, look at their site and see if they have optimised it for seo. If they have not, show them the great opportunities there are with the integrated search strategy.

Integration is the key to unlocking traffic and high rankings.

However, Google are now serving its ads with other people’s content. This means that Buzz republishes the content, the full article, not just parts of it, in Gmail without asking permission. Apparently it also strips advertising from that content serving Google ads so this means people are losing money. There was an interesting post on Econsultancy’s website which goes into greater detail according to one blogger’s experience.

So it seems that Google’s attempt to try and spread itself into social media has not got off to a good start. On the plus side though, the location-based features in Google Buzz for mobile seems great. Buzz updates is not limited to 140 characters like Twitter.

I will be monitoring Google Buzz over the coming months and will update this post to reflect the news.

This service is available on a wide range of handsets and to make this launch even more special (or more marketable) Vodafone will have two new exclusive 360 handsets developed by Samsung that syncs automatically with the PC. The H1 followed by the M1. There will also be four Nokia Symbian smartphones pre-loaded with Vodafone 360 but these have yet to be announced.

The famous tag line “make the most out of now” will be replaced with “power to you” as Vodafone sets to rebrand itself as a communications specialist. (words from Vittorio Colao CEO of Vodafone). The new mobile internet service is expected to launch by Christmas in 8 different European countries.

As you are well aware of since the explosion of the mobile apps, all mobile operators have been jumping on the bandwagon and Vodafone is no exception. For those aware of mobile sync and back up, Vodafone bought Zyb last year for £28.5m. Zyb was a small mobile start-up that had developed software that lets mobile phone users share information and messages between their contacs in their address book. This was the start of Vodafone 360.

One year later and the 360 internet service has developed further to include gathering all customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favourites such as music, games, photos and video in to one single place. It brings together all contacts from the user’s mobile phone, social networks and their gmail, hotmail and any other internet account. What is great about this service is that it is automatically backed up and synchronised, regularly and wirelessly, between the mobile and PC and yes the mac as well.

Some interesting articles:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/20/vodafonegroup-telecoms

http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news_analysis/115121/Vodafone_launches_360_services_and_devices.html

Facebook is one of the major reasons people are spending more time online. People in the UK spend a total of 22 hours and 20 minutes online which is up on 34% a year ago. (April 2008 – April 2009) However, facebook recorded people spending 3.8billion more minutes in April this year than April 2008

The most heavily used web brands are those in the communication and entertainment industry. Hotmail’s instant messenger has people hooked for hours online, chatting away to friends or sending work files to colleagues. YouTube is the entertainment channel for most users online, allowing those to search for quirky videos or funny clips.

The 10 most heavily used brands online are the following:
1 Facebook
2 MSN/Windows Live
3 Google
4 eBay
5 Yahoo!
6 AOL Media Network
7 BBC
8 YouTube
9 Microsoft
10 Apple

Here are some facts about facebook

What is a facebook friend?
Someone who you have not spoken to for over 10 years and you found them on facebook. You exchange a couple of emails and plan to meet up, but most often do not.

What is the wall?
An area where you can snoop in on conversations your “friends” are having. People don’t realise your wall messages can be followed by anyone if you have not amended your security settings.

What is the info on the wall?
The area where people reveal their whole biography, where they went to school, where they work, their life story.

You must be careful what you put on your facebook. One 16 year old recently got fired as she said that her job was boring. Another worker got fired when he called in sick, only for his colleague to see on facebook that he actually was just hung over.

It allows you to stay in touch with all friend and family in real time.  You can leave “tweets” which are short messages, no longer than 140 characters anytime.  Some say Twitter is the SMS of the internet.  You will begin to have “followers” who are updated with your tweets.

“Should I join Twitter?” I hear you say.  Well it is free and easy to set up like any social networking site. Only join it if you have the time to update your “tweets” and if you have interesting messages to leave.  However, celebrities who have also been bitten by the Twitter bug often leave just random comments.  Stephen Fry and Lily Allen are just two of the many celebrities who have joined Twitter and who have a lot of followers.

Here are a few reasons to use Twitter:

1. Push traffic to a site.
You can use Twitter to drive traffic to your site or your friend’s websites. Post a link on your page and start discussing it with other friends and you will notice an increase of visitors.

2. Network
You can meet many people in the same industry using Twitter. You can start following other twitter people and vice versa.

3. Friends
You can also meet people on twitter who have similar interests, and you can even make friends.

4.Work
Twitter can be used to find work and also freelancers to work with you.

So you never know what is out there till you try. Go on, get your twit pic today.