Peter Handley's Blog

I rolled up to Brighton yesterday afternoon to partake in the BrightonSEO mini conference  organised by Kelvin Newman of SiteVisibility. It was an afternoon of presentations looking and discussing various aspects of SEO and online marketing.

I wrote a few notes as the day went on, and below is a brief overview of all the areas discussed.

First up was Jamie Freeman, from Message Digital, a self confessed SEO sceptic. I’d been amused by the premise of an SEO sceptic talking at an afternoon of SEO presentations and was quite intrigued by what he was saying.

He’d written a book with 500 web design tips (no mean feat that), and talked about what he considered to be the “Holy Trinity of SEO”, the 3 C’s - Content, Code and Connections (links).

Jamie didn’t really see the need to do SEO as the sites thathe made ranked well using compliant code, with good content and links seemed to happen in their own right. I can see what he is getting at, but things got a little hairy when he asked which of the the 3 was the most important – with the room being full of SEOs, the answers was of course Links, which Jamie disagreed with, as he felt the content was the most important

Some lively debate ensued, with the SEOs in the audience further explaining that tens or hundreds of websites can have great content on a subject – and in many scenarios this is a given – but the majority of the audience felt that in a competitive environment, content alone will not normally be enough to get to those top monetisable positions.

Next up was Andy Keetch from Wired Sussex, an organisation that helps people find the right Digital companies in the area. Andy talked a lot about the Digital Community in Brighton, how they help people find jobs and graduate opportunities in the area, helping organise social events. I was surprised to learn that they work with the region of 1500 companies and it sounded like a very organised community to be a part of, in an area of the country that has a thriving scene.

Whilst there are plenty of Web and Digital Agencies in Portsmouth and elsewhere in Hampshire, there is nothing (that I know of) organised like this in the Hampshire area and it was very interesting to hear how they go about helping that community in so many ways.

Next up was me, from Vertical Leap - I was talking about client goals, KPIs and managing client expectations. I was incredibly nervous at first and spent a bit too much time reading the cards I’d prepared the day before, but after I relaxed a bit more and stopped looking at my prompts I was a lot more confident, and I think my message came across well.

I was talking about the need to really understand a clients “real” reason to engage with an SEO Company – it’s to make money. How that website makes money, and the routes that it takes to make that money differ and the strategies that you put in place to achieve those goals differ – but all it comes down to the bottom line in the end.

I talked about many of the long term relationships I have formed with my clients, and how communicating effectively with your clients about the wins that you gain them were vital.

Clients often have goals to increase rankings for particular phrases, or to hit certain traffic targets, but these are measures that are a means to the end result of making money. Many times, these may be specific goals that you work to for a client as part of a long term strategy, but that ultimately you need to have some short term goals as well to ensure that you are delivering some kind of return on an investment as soon as possible.

I think after battling my nerves I managed to deliver the message of what I was trying to say effectively enough, and have certainly learnt some lessons for future speaking from doing this. I will definitely make a Powerpoint presentation next time, I will just try and speak rather than attempt to read from a prompt and I will try and relax more. I definitely enjoyed it though, and had some good feedback from people as we discussed the days presentations later on.

Next up was Jeremy from White Hat Media (I am pretty sure that is right, but I had nipped to the loo during the introductions).

I really liked his SEO is like a racing car analogy – you can have the best car and driver (website changes – on site optimisation), but that doesn’t mean you will always win a race (the link building part of SEO). He also interacted well with the audience offering an alcoholic prize for the best “worst thing a client has asked you”, but seemed rather disappointed when one of his own employees one the audiences loudest cheer.

Next up was Cedric from Jollywise, talking about some really interesting social media techniques for films like Up and The Boat That Rocked. It seemed like they had some good ways of getting social engagement with Banner adverts as well and it was fascinating to get an insight into some other areas of Digital Marketing that I have not really looked at before.

Steve Purkiss stood up next and gave a demonstration of an SEO Checklist for Drupal – this seemed like a really useful way of ensuring that you have the right modules required to do SEO well with this content management system - I liked the quote of “Obama uses it, it must be good!”.

The next talk was about “cookies” from Nikki Rae of Fresh Egg. This was a really entertaining presentation, that had plenty of audience interaction with me, Paddy Morgan from Pin Digital (who must win the award for travelling the furthest – all the way from Birmingham!), Annabel Hodges (better know to me as SearchPanda), Mark from Fresh Egg and Anna from MAD taking part in a demonstration of how cookies (which Paddy got to eat) go from the person browsing to a website to a sever and back again.

I must confess to not really having the greatest knowledge of cookies and found this a really interesting introduction about them. It was certainly interesting.

The last of the main speakers was Jack from Propellernet, who was taking the opportunity to show off some fantastic new offices they have moved to, with some really good Graffiti artwork. He then talked about how he formed the company and I particularly liked the phrase “block out the noise – focus on the clients”. I was also quite interested in their somewhat different approach to SEO with very tight integration with traditional PR techniques.

After the main speakers were complete, Kelvin then thanked everyone for coming along and mentioned that one more person wanted to speak – in regards to an NDA that had been floating around in recent weeks and introduced a chap called Paul that wanted to speak to us. I don’t know that this is necessarily being widely talked about yet, but I’ve never agreed to not disclose it, so here I go.

Paul explained about his background – he was a blackhat that had controlled millions of millions of links in the past and had used that to propel sites to the very top positions for highly monetisable phrases. He then went on to explain that he was now working with a large number of national and regional Newspapers across the UK and US, and essentially they have had enough of Google taking all the advertising revenues that they have over the years been used to receiving and think they have found a way to “fight back”.

As I understood what was being proposed (and this might be slightly misinterpreted), is that the Newspapers have millions on pages that they don’t gain traffic from anymore, and they are prepared to sell links on these pages, with anchors that you want and large volumes of them – in an effort to a) make the newspapers some cash, and b) manipulate Google’s rankings to gain those websites traffic. As I understand it, this is being planned on a particularly large scale, and I think that we were being offered the opportunity to take part.

I’m not convinced that Paul selected the right audience to talk to about this. Many people in the room had not engaged in buying links at all, and whilst all the SEOs in the room agreed that Newspaper links as a rule do a carry a lot of weight, it seemed agreed that they might not do in the foreseeable future were this to come out in the open.

Paul’s thrust on this was that many journalists have lost their jobs in recent years because of the rise of the Internet and the amount of “free” content that gets put out on the web – often without the “standards” that journalists have to adhere to.

I think that whilst the concept sounds interesting (and quite possibly expensive), that this surely, once out in the open, has very little chance of success in the long term. When Paul discussed his sites, he seemed to be prepared to throw them away if they crashed and burned in the SERPs, but with my clients and their brands that they want to establish for long term success, not take risks for short term gains. If everything he said was true – it sounded effective, but certainly not long term strategies.

All in all, it was a great day and a great evening!

If you were there, and I’ve missed anything important, please feel free to leave a comment!

I’m going to be doing a short presentation at the latest #BrightonSEO event, this coming Friday (17th Feb 10), and am planning on doing it about SEO Goal setting with clients, KPIs that I often (rightly or wrongly) find our SEO results measured by and talk through some of the ways to manage expectations of clients when engaging with an SEO company.

It’s starting at 2pm in the Quadrant in Brighton, and I’m hoping to make some new friends, meet some more people that I speak to regularly on Twitter, and see some folks that I’ve met before and not seen for some time.

So, hope to see some of my readers there! I’m writing this now, and tomorrow night, so if anyone has had any paticularly interesting goals or KPIs set for them, or has had particular challenges with managing people let me know in the comments, and I will see if I can work some of those in too.

I very rarely speak in public (my last was a best man speech), so hope everyone bears with me!

I’ll probably do a write up of the presentation on the Vertical Leap search marketing blog at some point next week if I can fit it in!

Sigh -I’m not going to dignify the fella with a link back to his website, but somebody no-one I know has ever heard of spouts off some controversial linkbait drivel with:

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

First of all this is absolutely nonsense – SEO is important, because frankly time and time again web designers don’t pay heed to what search engines need, whilst also paying attention to their users.

I’ve got a few examples from this week already, I have some really good web developers who do some really good work, but forgot to take the noindex,nofollow tag off site wide before the website re-launched – it was of course an accident, but if I hadn’t been looking at the reason for why new pages weren’t indexed, I wouldn’t have found it. From an SEO perspective there aren’t too many things that I needed to look at changing on this site, but this doesn’t mean that things don’t get missed!

Another item is duplicate websites – I’ve been cleaning up a web of sites that area all the same at work lately, and nearly every website I ever start working on has a duplicate website when I start that work. Why? Because a web developer suggested that they should put the same website on lots of domains – the more places this content appears, the more chance that there is of it being found right?

I suppose that could have made sense (I certainly did it before I knew any better, more of which I will cover in my next Path to Search Engine Enlightenment post) – but this isn’t going to help your marketing for any of these sites all that much – it might work a little bit, with various different search engines drawing in small amounts of traffic, but nothing like a single, well optimised site can potentially draw in.

Web designers make websites, but that doesn’t mean that they know how to market them, how to look at the analytics data and interpret what it working here, what can be improved – identifying those new opportunities is vital? Most designers that I know create a site and hand it over to a client – what does the client do with it then without the guidance of an SEO?

Perhaps its from my experience of managing website SEO campaigns, and the type of client that my company works with most of the time – but for the vast majority of these folks, they have a great product, that they can sell fantastically well in an offline environment, but do they have the knowledge and tools to do the same online? Usually not, which is why they come to internet and search engine marketers for assistance.

A lot of SEO is fairly simple and logical, as the guy that prompted this post has said – it’s no more difficult than many other things in a digital age – but that doesn’t mean everyone knows how to do it – or in fact needs to know how to do it – they instead hire in the appropriate assistance.

However, his link bait did work – he now ranks on page 2 for SEO, on Google.com – no mean feat indeed – VL sometimes ranks on page 1 for SEO in Google.co.uk (darned everflux mind), and I know that this has taken a lot of work to get there, unlike this guys rant (which is why I am not going to link to it and feed his ranking further).

Controversy does generate links, and this in turn helps rankings, helps traffic to a site – I don’t know what his conversion is mind! Maybe I am just a bit too nice to try to employ this type of link bait for myself!

My name is Peter Handley, and I am a search engine marketer. This blog series will explore my journey into the search engine optimisation world.

I’ve been interested in computers for as long as I can remember – starting out with my Spectrum in the 80s, moving on to an Atari after the tape deck died (and I was happy to learn that they are remaking Carrier Command as I spent a lot of hours on that when I was younger, some old pics are on Wiki, though they look terrible now), before moving on to a “proper” PC a few years later, using DOS and Windows.

My first experience of the “the web” was using AOL in the mid 90s and this was my first exposure to the term “keyword”. I talked in Internet chat rooms, searched for information on these keyword, looking for information to help with school projects, and even built my first website with a few friends, a site dedicated to the joys of cheese (sad I know, but we were only just teenagers and still hadn’t found booze then).

I quickly came to realise that AOL was at the time a very closed system – it wasn’t all that easy to find the “real” web, and it was all through their rubbish proprietary browser, and although AOL did have a wealth of information, it quickly felt restrained.

I feel lucky to have grown up in the age of the computer, and the Internet revolution. I see the difficulties that some people that have come to technology late have with doing things on computers or the Internet, but most of what I have to do comes naturally. Then again for years in my circle of friends I have been the expert “go-to” man for all things computer.

Throughout the years, I’ve supplied free tech support to plenty of folks, but I’ve always tried to educate at the same time, to prevent similar problems and maybe to prevent being phoned up again to come fix the same problems.

This is something that I have brought into my working life with clients as well, there is no point being mysterious about what you doing, and it helps to engender trust in what you are doing if you can explain how and why this is going to help.

Having come from a family that has always done hard physical labour, I’m glad that computers have helped me to escape that kind of graft. When I was younger I worked at my dads concrete making construction business, and part way through education was offered the chance to potentially take it on in the future, but it was something that was never going to appeal to me. It was only a few months after I turned down this opportunity that my dad sold the business and moved on to being a gardener, so I wonder if I did him a favour here saying no!

I went through school, where the IT facilities were terrible (and ironically in a school that is now a specialist in IT), and did ok, but messed up college the first time around, partly due to breaking an ankle. This led me to taking some really shitty jobs, like Asda’s and the Co-op, and working for a company that refurbished computers that were shipped off to Africa. I tried and nearly succeeded in getting a job with IBM/AT&T, but was told that they would only take on a graduate, and at that stage I didn’t have grades good enough to get me onto a degree.

This is what made me in life, as it made me re-evaluate what I wanted to do and got me back into education.

So, I went back to college, ended up getting on ok, and got grades that got me into University at Portsmouth, studying Entertainment Technology. I started messing around with HTML and Dreamweaver whilst here, and made a few websites whilst there. The degree also consisted of graphics, animation, music & radio production with some video thrown in too, but I was always interested in the web based elements, and the surrounding project management theme.

At this time I got my first paid work as a web designer, working for some local music producers. I also managed to use this as extra credit on my degree, which was handy. I remember at the time that the lecturer marked me down on the project because the proposed domain name was too long, although looking back on it now, it would have been a great keyword rich domain.

This is also when I first installed a tracker on a website, although one of those horrible hit counters, and in hindsight, supplied me absolutely no useful information at all – but hey I didn’t know better, and thought it was great to be able to see how many people had visited the website.

It was at this stage that my interest in search was first apparent, as I was baffled at how to actually direct traffic to the website that I had built.

The first website that I ever built that went live was made entirely of images – so none of the text was readable for the search engines – I didn’t “get” at this stage, that they needed the words to be in text to be able to read them, though it seems so obvious now!

So, I stuffed the Meta Tags full of things that they probably should have ranked for, as well as spammed it to death with a list of every keyword that they would want to rank for. I didn’t know any better, so set a pretty useless sitewide Title and Description too!

I pretty much killed this websites chance of ranking for anything, and although it did get some visitors (that hit counter did keep going up), I think that they were mostly direct visitors.

That’s it for part one of my path to search engine enlightenment – part 2 will be coming soon.

Morning guys and gals – been way too long since I last wrote a blog.

Since then I’ve been off on a stag do that I organised for my good friend Ben, been playing lots of resident evil 5 (god I hate those guys with Chainsaws) and have been working hard at the office to keep on top of everything.

This morning I managed to get my “vanity” facebook URL – I’m www.facebook.com/ismepete – a strange name “ismepete” I’ll grant you, but its been a name that I have been using for years, and its not something that anyone else seems to use – I’m ismepete on lots of sites, its my PSN id, my twitter name, used to be my MySpace name (before I got bored of it and joined the legion of people leaving the place), so at least I am consistent. Not quite sure if there is any real point in getting one, but hey ho, why not eh?

So, I’m up early this morning and I am working on my best man speech now that the stag is done and dusted. Or rather, I should be – I’m not as I am writing this blog instead. I thought I had made a really good start on this when I started thinking about it a few months ago, but having just typed up my notes I’m a bit disappointed. 3 paragraphs is all I have written, and I thought I was about 3/4 of the way there – big exageration!

I’ll get there though, and this weekend too – as it needs to be translated for the spanish folks that are attending! Wish me luck

I’ve also decided that I am going to try and get a 32GB iPhone next week – getting to work early and gonna head down to town for 9.30 when they start to go on sale. Hopefully there wont be as much demand for these, as I desperately need a new phone! I’m no iPhone fanboy – I just want a decent media phone, and there is still no release date for the n97, so enough is enough, I’m going to bite the bullet and get a new machine.

Finally, the bane of my life this week is something that I wrote a blog about over at work – Strange US search results mixed in with the normal UK Google searches.

Why Google are doing this, I do not know – for lots of search terms, this is destroying the credibility of the engine, as the results being shared with users just arent as relevant as they have been.

With Bing pushing strong to improve it’s market share (Bing is the new name for MSN’s rebranded search engine), I think that these poor results are really coming at the wrong time for Google – and I really think that they should do better than this, as Google have always said, another search engine is only ever 1 click away. All it takes is a few searches with poor results and people could switch over to another engine in an instant.

I dont really think that Google’s dominant market share is in danger at the moment, but I dont think that these are improvements to their engine – quite the opposite in fact, and something that Google should be fixing as a priority!

Over and out for now – I’ll try not to leave it so long until I blog next – maybe next week when I’ve had a chance to play with my new phone (fingers crossed I can get one).

I’ve decided to relaunch my website as just a blog.