BrightonSEO 2012 Interview with Kelvin Newman

Following on from my interview with Danny Sullivan last week – I decided to give our readers some insight into some of the other up-and-coming events, so that they can get an idea about what each has to offer and why they are different etc. We’ll be running a series of similar interviews during the next week, starting today with the host of BrightonSEO Kelvin Newman.

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 The growth of BrightonSEO has been phenomenal over the last couple of years and April’s event promises to the biggest yet. So is it going to be the best? :) It’s been crazy the growth, the first event we had thirty forty people along and now we’ve got a thousand, which I hope is a testament to the quality of the content at the event. Will the next one be the best? I certainly hope so, though as the event gets bigger it does become harder to please everyone but I think more than any other event in the industry it brings the biggest and best selection of SEOs in one room at one time. Being free means more people from smaller agencies or in-house teams can make it along than other more expensive events. The speakers we’ve got this time are simply outstanding and in most cases are delivring the type of session I can’t imagine being scheduled at any other events. We’re avoiding covering the conference cliches like ‘content is king’ and really delving deep into to what I think are the most interesting areas of search.What are the main sessions you’re looking forward to? The Q&A session with Pierre Farr from Google and Dave Coplin from Bing has huge potential, I know there’s loads of probing questions and unusual anomalies people want to ask them about, I’ve got high hopes for that session. I’m also looking forward to hearing from Glenn Jones and Phillip Sheldrake who aren’t part of the SEO world but are experts in areas which have the potential to make a huge difference to the SEO game, the internet of things and semantic mark-up.BrightonSEO has always been a great event for encouraging new speakers in the UK – how do you find the balance between giving opportunities to first-time speakers and growing the event in size? It’s great to have developed a reputation for finding new speakers and introducing them to the circuit, I take huge pride in seeing people who did their first major speaking gig at BrightonSEO now delivering talks all over the country and world. The reason I invite new speakers is twofold, everyone needs a first opportunity to speak at an event, so I think any conference organiser has an obligation to try and find new talent, but the real reason is too many conference organisers are scared to take risks so rely on the ‘old guard’ of speakers who they’ve worked with in the past. That’s not a bad thing, especially as I’m probably part of that old guard. But I want BrightonSEO to have the most interesting talks of any marketing event and to do that I need to find people who have new perspectives or won’t just roll out their ‘greatest hits’ set. As the audience becomes larger it does become tricky. Other than maybe the keynote slots at the big conferences, the audience at BrightonSEO is probably the biggest of any event now. that’s daunting for a first time speaker; but what I’m interested in is do they have something new and compelling to say. If they do – they’ve got nothing to worry about.What do you think have been the biggest game changers in search during the last 6 months and should be the key takeaways from the event? It certainly feels a bit more dramatic than usual, but I don’t think many of the changes are things most of us couldn’t have anticipated. But I think the changes rewarded people taking action; for example we all knew it made sense for Google to better personalise results pages based on the recommendations of someone’s friends. So rather than just anticipating that but doing nothing the early winners in Search Plus Your World will be those who were taking action! I hope what the next event will do is give people a few more things to add to their to do list, the challenge is executing on those items.Can you tell us more about what else you’re doing around the conference this year? One of the downsides to squeezing lots of talks into the conference is you can’t always go into quite as much details as you’d like, so this time we’ve added three workshops the day before covering Advanced Analytics, What SEO can learn from PR and Building your own SEO tools and we’ve also got a bowling competition the day after as well, which I imagine will be closely fought!

The event is on 13th April and already sold out – but if you’re heading down, we’re bringing the team and myself and Chelsea Blacker from SEOptimise are both speaking – so make sure you say hi!

Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

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Google & Bing Panel Discussion – BrightonSEO 2012

The panelists consisted of representatives from Google (Pierre Far), Bing (Dave Coplin), Expedia (Martin McDonald) and well known Freelancer Rishi Lakhani -

Question 1 – Is SEO doomed, damned and/or in it’s infancy?

Google (Pierre) – SEO has never been dying. It’s evolving, and we’ve seen it change over time.

Martin McDonald – it’s in its infancy – but SEO will evolve, SEO will evolve into any organic medium. (e.g. mobile apps)

Rishi – The industry unfortunately has no standard practice, ethics board or a governing body – until this is implemented it will be difficult for the industry to be a formally recognised industry.

Bing (Dave Coplin) – SEOs were like magicians, alchemists.  No one understand what SEOs do. However, SEO will evolve well beyond what we can imagine -
There is no career path laid out, but SEOs have the ability to shape whatever career they want.
SEOs are passionate; this alone is commendable – you’d never see 1000 attendees for an email marketing conference!

Q2 – Question aimed for Pierre – “Been getting inquiries from people who have got themselves de-indexed. However, it’s been very difficult to define what a bad link is? Could you broadly classify what a ‘bad link’ is? secondly, what is the re-inclusion, process?”

Answer, when you say de-indexed, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s out of the index, only that it doesn’t rank in the SERPs. There’s 2 ways of getting penalised: manual penalty (the more serious penalty) and algorithmic penalty (e.g. can get away by changing on-page layout etc.)

So how do you classify if a link is bad? Ask yourself the following questions:

1) does the webmaster of the linking website genuinely want to link to you?
2) does linking to you add value to the user?

In terms of reinclusion – show that you have made an effort – Let Google know that you have identified bad links, you have emailed all the webmasters, these guys say they can’t remove them, these guys never got back to me, etc. and we will make an effort to help you.

Also make sure to tell us what you did, and to be honest.

Rishi – Check GWT, and see if there’s any dodgy links pointing to you

Martin – “How about competitive industries where people buy massive amounts of links?”
Pierre – buying links is a definite NO! Definitely report it!

We use over 200 signals, and there are some websites that rank without any links.

Q3 – What about Content? What should shape a good content strategy?
Bing (Dave Coplin) – Definitely social; it’s the new kid on the block, if you are bloody good, then your content will get shared.

So What is social? (Dave) For Bing it’s Twitter and Facebook

Google (Pierre)- who are my users? what do they want? and do they get it? Every page on your site must supply a knowledge demand. Use rich snippets, when dealing with duplicate content think about what you choose to serve as canonical. Also content doesn’t only mean text, use video, images, apps, reviews etc.

Rishi – Think about whether you are making it easy for people to share?
Does your content have tips?
Update old content. Ask yourself if these need updating, are they still relevant?
Add genuine resources in your posts.

Q4 – Do you test before rolling out Google Analytics redesigns?
Pierre: yes, we do test. We serve webmasters, serve in-house webmasters, agencies, so eventually something will have to give, but we try to cover as much as we can. Also provide us with specific feedback – tell us why the design is bad? Don’t say “your redesign is crap!” tell us what is the deficiency and how we should improve it.

Q5 – What is good social signals?

Bing (Dave)- good social signal is the quantity of the shares, the speed of which it is getting shared.
Google (Pierre)- if you are raising awareness about something, and it is genuinely shareable content, then these will get the coverage naturally.

Q6 – Aimed at Pierre – “you mentioned that you should know who your customers are, and what they’re looking for? Can you tell us about not giving us the search query data”?

Pierre: We do provide this data in in GWT – for most webmasters this data is more than sufficient.

Martin – The data sample size is so small that it’s rubbish, I rank for Expedia!
Rishi – I rank for insurance according to GWT. The data isn’t accurate.

Pierre – GWTs process data differently, our main focus is about protecting users and we don’t want user’s personal data being compromised by providing search query data especially with the roll out of Google plus your world.

Bing – easy to be angry about this – I’m not defending Google, or “dissing” them, but you must genuinely appreciate that there’s a larger issue here. People are getting more concerned about privacy issues.
But it certainly does show that there is an underlying need for more discussion and engagement among all parties; users, webmasters, legislators and search engines.

-Ends-

Shaad Hamid is an experienced SEO, PPC and social media consultant, blogger, and citizen journalist who is passionate about online marketing. Get in touch with Shaad on the social networks below:

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Glenn Jones on Microformats and SEO – BrightonSEO

Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.

Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.

There are three different ways to markup structured data.

Microformats let you markup data with pre-existing attributes. Both Microdata and RDFa are more flexible, as they let you use prebuilt schemas or create your own

Which should you use? Glenn uses microformats most of the time as they’re simpler, but they only cover some things. Microdata can be used to describe more unusual objects.

Glenn talked through how to mark-up a Yorkshire pudding recipe using microformats:

You can have a property inside another, such as yield inside the summary.You can have marked up data within paragraphs of freeform text.Some properties have parent-child structure. For example, ‘ingredient’ has the child properties ‘amount’ and ‘name’.Properties can take data that aren’t text, eg has to be an imageSome data are more complex. For example there are many ways to write same date, so you have to use a specific data structure that says what the text means, eg title=”2011-10-27? when text says ‘27 Oct 2011’.

Google’s Webmaster area has a rich snippet page that tells you how they want you to mark up data, and what’s most likely to be pulled into the search results. Not all data are pulled into the SERPs at the moment, but as more may be used in the future it makes sense to mark up as much as possible.

Best thing to do to help is to use Google’s rich snippets testing tool – this gives an example of how how it looks your page could look in the SERPs and shows the data it’s parsed.

There are compound microformats (microformats with microformats nested inside them). For instance hRecipe can hold an aggregated review and author.

To mark up an author, link all recipes (or articles) to a profile page using rel=author, then link form the profile page to a Google profile with rel=me. See the Google Webmaster Tools help page on authorship.

Does this affect SEO? Google are not telling us – Glenn suspects it does affect ranking but doesn’t know.

How does it affect CTR? Paul Bruemmer saw a 30% uplift for rich snippets, while Richard Baxter only saw a 5% uplift. You have to test it yourself: there isn’t one figure for everyone.

Audience Question: there’s spam going on with microformats, how do you avoid it?

Glenn says it does happen: people will game any technique that affects search listings. It will be the usual cat-and-mouse game between Google and spammers. Microformats are about adding extra semantic data to website, improving way machines can parse information: quality content will win out in the end.

Pierre Far from Google said that if someone’s rich snippet spam really affects the SERPs, Google will take their rich snippets out. There’s a form to report rich snippet spam. Don’t abuse it.

Audience Question: Unlike other attributes, rel=author is tied into Google+, so does it belong to google? Will it be able to tie into other social profile sites to be used by Bing and others?

Glenn hopes Google will become more open, as people are interested in connecting up social media identities.

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