Search Engine Strategies - Toronto

For the past two days, I was totally engrossed in Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto show. My hat goes off to this years conference organizers at Incisive truly came through and took all the negative criticism from the past couple of year and turned it around.

Change from the Toronto conference centre to the Sheraton Centre was by far the biggest improvement. No longer were attendees and speaker subjected to the dungeon like bottom floor of the convention centre, but instead were treated to a much warmer environment even if it was all virtually on the bottom floor as well. Perhaps it was just the lighting and the cushy carpeted floors, but it just worked better and there were not (or at least I couldn't find them) black holes where you cellphone wouldn't work.

As usual, the quality of speakers was fantastic as usual and Andrew Goodman who chaired this event did an excellent job developing the session topics. Grant many of the session were very basic, but there were a few sessions and frequently at least one panelist who took it to the next level.

One change I did notice this year was the background of the attendees. In past year there were many do it yourself business types at the event trying to figure out how to do SEO and PPC on their own. This time around there was the usual independent SEO consultants and some agency types, but many more people who were from medium to larger business who are the ones being tasked with implement SEO or paid search campaigns.

But no conference takes place with out a few criticisms. The biggest one I heard and agreed with was the location of one of the 3 session rooms. It was far way (about a 5 minute walk) from the may area. Attendees and/or speakers not paying attention to which room they needed to go to were frequently seen rushing to these rooms or getting there late. The distance from the main conference area to the speakers room had the same problem. While this was a inconvenience for most speakers, on the positive side this forced many of the speakers who usually disappear to the speakers room to remain in the conference area and opened up the lines of communication with all the attendees.

There are numerous blog posts and tweets on the session specifics so I would take up any more of your time, just simply search on SES Toronto for the blog post or #sesto in Twitter for more information

An Interesting Project

Since late February I've been involved in an interesting SEO project with a branch of the British Government. In essences, I've been mentoring teams at 3 different institutions on the there SEO efforts as part of a pilot project.

The project has the following steps

1. Basic SEO Training
2. A technical review of their web sites along with recommendations (conducted by me)
3. Implementation of any technical changes (implement by their developers)
4. Identifications and recommendation of specific keyword phrases (joint effort)
5. Either the modification of existing pages or the creation of new content in support of the keyword phrases.
6. Monitoring of page ranking with on-going recommendations
7. Monitoring of impact on web traffic until the end of June

A couple of interesting things came out so far from this project. First off, at the time of the keyword research when the amount of time involvement became clear one of the two institutions dropped out of the pilot project. Leaving behind 2 participants CETLD and Archive Hub.

Fortunately, the remaining two organizations have given it their all and results have started to appear within 1 or 2 weeks of making the various adjustments.

In one case, CETLD chose low volume keyword phrases, but ones that were high quality. This included the phrases "Learning Spaces" and "student centred learning". In both cases, CETLD started rank in the top 100 within days of launching new content and has slowly been climbing of the SERPS.

In the case of Archive Hub it was decided to go after some very high volume and very competitive phrases. These include: "history of railways", "history of fairgrounds" and "history of textiles". Once again, a wide variety of changes were required, but as CETLD they are slowly climbing the SERPs.

The biggest issues we've faced on this project so far has been time. With different civic holidays on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, plus the usual paper work in getting anything done in a large organization has taken its toll and made getting the optimized pages published a little more difficult then expected.

What is interesting with both projects, is measuring the impact on web site traffic. Both sites have very seasonal traffic trends plus specific topics are being marketed externally which might be having an impact of the total amount of search they are targeting. The finds will be a interesting write-up next month.

SES Toronto

In just over two weeks it will be time again for this year's Search Engine Strategy (SES) conference here in Toronto (June 8-10). Despite the economy, I expect a good turnout for this event.

If you're contemplating going but are a bit unsure keep this in mind. Based on this year's agenda, the majority of the talks will be focused at people just getting involved in search engine marketing to those at the intermediate level.

There are a lot of great speakers lined up for this event, so I do hope to see you there.

My Appologies

I'm using Blogger as my blogging software and while I haven't posted anything for about 6 weeks, I just noticed that several of last posts starting in late February until early April are all missing.

If really isn't appropriate for me to dig through my files and resubmit them, but I'll be keeping a closer eye on these posts to ensure what ever happened doesn't happen again.

WebTrends Release New Tag Builder

WebTrends announced today the release of a second generation tag builder. The tag builder is used for generating customized SDC (Smart Data Collector) java scripts to be added to web pages for java script based web analytics for both WebTrends OnDemand and installed version of WebTrends.

Details of the changes can be found at http://blog.webtrends.com/2009/02/24/new-verison-of-tag-builder-available/

Of note, you no longer have to tag Google Adword ads as paid search as WebTrends can now use the Google generated campaign ID assume you've enable "Autotagging" enabled for your Google Adwords campaign.

I'll be testing the new tag builder within the next few days and will post any problems if I find them.

Shorten URL's - TinyURL

With the growing acceptance of Twitter into main stream use, the use of services to shorten lengthy URLs is growing. There are many of these free services out there on the web. Popular ones include:

• tinyurl
• bit.ly
• hex.io
• zi.ma
• is.gd
• and many more

The question becomes how do these services affect your web analytic reports? So let's start with the basics.

First off, if someone is using a twitter application (for example Tweetdeck) any one clicking on a full and proper link it would appear as direct traffic. The only way to properly identify this users is to use your web analytics campaign tracking feature.

If someone were to click on a shorten URL on a web page, how the referrer is handled would vary by the both the shortening service (most service do however work the same way) and your web analytics software.

For example using tinyurl and generating a link to my company web site www.knechtology.com the shorten URL would appear as: http://tinyurl.com/dfjood and would generate the following sequence of hits.

GET 301 Redirect to http://www.knechtology.com/ http://tinyurl.com/dfjood
GET 200 text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 http://www.knechtology.com/

The first hit might appear in tinyurl's web log files or possibly not depending on how they handle the 301 redirect. Regardless, there is nothing recorded in my web site's log files until the second hit.

Now the big question is: will this hit appear with the referrer of tinyurl.com or not. For that you need to check your log files. In my experience at best this will appear as a referrer from the shortening service. That's why if I'm posting a link in Twitter back to my web site, I alway like to add a campaign id to the URL.

I personally don't care which Tweet generated the traffic so here at K'nechtology have set up a standard one. If you want to distinguish your Tweets, you'll need to generate unique campaign IDs for each post.

WebTrends Update

WebTrends has released an update for those of us who have the software version. This update includes an update of the latest search engine list including Twitter and an update of the browser list.

It is simple to download and fast to upgrade.

To download or for more information go to:

http://www.webtrends.com/support/browser-and-keywords-updater.aspx

SMX Analytics

As I mentioned before starting on March 31, 2009 SMX will be holding its first SMX Analytics conference in Toronto Canada. At this time, I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be speaking at this event on March 31 during the "Analyzing & Converting Organic Search Traffic" session.

This promises to be a great event and remember that eMetrics will be on at the same time in Toronto as well. Great chance to take in two different web analytic conferences.

Twitter Imposters - Watch Out

Over the past few days I've received about 10 follows from various people in Twitter. I found it strange when reviewing their past Tweets all had the same single tweet. I was getting suspicious and then today I got a follow from someone I knew (and followed), but the Twitter ID looked different.

Upon checking out the Twitter account I knew it wasn't him. So I decided I was going to investigate and write a detailed post about it. During my investigation I came across this blog post which details the problem in great detail http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10146731-26.html.

So be aware that like all good technology Twitter is being exploited by those who want to trick us to make a buck.