SEOMOZ Pro SEO Training London (#proseo)

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photo4 I am on the train on the way back from the fantastic SEOMOZ/Distilled Pro Training seminar in London.  It has been an absolutely fantastic 2 days, with great speakers, insightful SEO tips, a free bar and lots of interesting people to talk to.

The Pro training seminar was as it’s name suggests, aimed at SEO professionals, with lots of technical and thought provoking content for all of the attendees.  The presenters did not sugar coat any of the topics, they simply delivered presentations on a variety of complex subjects and let the tech savvy audience soak it up :-)

Whilst nothing makes up for actually being at the conference, I would like to share my thoughts, key takeaways and links to other’s comments to give you some idea of the great information which was delivered.

There were LOTS of topics covered, so I am not going to discuss them all in this post, however I will update the post with links to other blog posts as I find them.

Lots of love for Excel (#ExcelRocks)

image If there was one consistent theme (other than SEO), it was Microsoft Excel.  Being within Microsoft, I probably take Excel use and knowledge for granted, however many of the audience were very excited to hear about imaginative use of pivot tables, vlookup formulas and other Excel functions to help analyse site referral data and keyword lists.  I will share some of the specific recommendations when I receive the Powerpoint slides from the training (since I cannot remember them all right now).

I was apparently (based on a show of hands) one of the few in the room who had used Excel ‘tables’ before.  Richard Baxter explained to the attendees how they make referencing data much easier compared to using standard cell references, since a table reference never changes, even when data or columns are added/removed.  This is a great tip and I recommend you check this page for more info on using tables.

Pivot tables were also highly recommended by all of the presenters.  Pivot tables allow you to mash up data, order it, filter it, group it and perform some really advanced manipulation to make sense of seemingly complicated data sets.  If you are not familiar with pivot tables and you work in SEO, I recommend reading this page for information on how to use them.  There is also plenty more FREE tutorials on https://office.microsoft.com to explain how to use lots of other Excel features.

image A common problem with working in Excel is the fact that copying and pasting data from Google Adwords is often problematic and time consuming.  The Firefox plugin available at https://bit.ly/daffizilla eases this process – a great time saver for anyone regularly working with AdWords data.

 

Organisational SEO

image I was very pleased to hear so much advice aimed at Enterprise level (‘in house’) SEOs.  Richard Baxter presented a great session on ‘Getting SEO done against the organisational odds’ where he discussed how an SEO manager in a large company had to tackle a different set of challenges to an SEO professional in a smaller or agency based company.

As well as discussing the challenges an in house SEO has such as internally communicating the value of SEO, managing lists of SEO activities and influencing peers/management he also provided some great advice on building an SEO team.  He described the key roles which an SEO team must have…

  • Technical people (Developers)
  • Content/Social Media people
  • Link building people
  • Analytics people

And also discussed how it is important for an SEO manager to provide an umbrella SEO strategy, which his/her team/v-team must understand and buy in to.  It is important for every member of the SEO team to track every action, so that the SEO manager can review the teams workload and keep it on track with the strategy.

He also shared some interesting insights on hiring SEO team members…

  • Hate doing lots of interviews?  Do a group interview instead.  Set them group challenges, see how they interact with the rest of the group, observe and then by the end of the session you will KNOW who you are going to hire.
  • Employ someone who knows how to search properly – they are usually the people who are interested in how the search engines work.
  • Instead of hiring a ‘link builder’, hire a ‘business development manager’ or a ‘community manager’
  • Employ people to fill the gaps you need (e.g. if you do not like doing link building, employ a link builder)
  • Blog post about recruiting an SEO

Ranking Models

image Ben Hendrickson delivered one of my favourite presentations.  Ben was obviously a very smart guy, and an incredibly funny (perhaps not deliberately) and entertaining presenter.  Having previously read this blog post on the SEOMOZ blog, I was keen to understand how SEOMOZ produced correlation to do show exactly which SEO factors were most significant in affecting search engine rankings, Ben explained how this worked…

SEOMOZ have created their own crawler and search index .  They basically crawl the web and create their own mini version of a search engine, with a sole purpose of analysing the data they have collected and using it to provide SEO recommendations.

SEOMOZ run a bunch of searches against their own search index, compare the results to those of Google’s and then make tweaks to the large number of variables controlling their results.  They repeat this process until their results are as close to Google’s as possible. 

When they have an algorithm and set of search results close to Google’s, they run large numbers of tests on their own data to determine the effect of various SEO techniques (e.g. headings, titles, inbound links, keywords in domain, etc…).  Whilst there is some error or margin, this technique allows SEOMOZ to get a completely unique (outside of Google) insight in to what really matters for SEO.  Please read the blog post  from a few months ago for information on which key factors emerged from this data.

Golden Tweets

image There was a lot of Twitter activity over the 2 days, so there are plenty of top tips available by searching for the #proseo hash tag on Twitter.  Some notably active people on the Twitter feed were @rodnic66, @RichardShove, @distilled, @tomcritchlow, @thetafferboy, @jaamit, @AriNahmani, @RobOusbey, @foliovision, @RobBothan, @SearchPanda and @Lou_geek.

I tried to tweet as many of the golden nuggets of information as they came up, so here are some of mine and other people’s key tweets…

Universal search…

  • jaamit: #ProSEO great tip from @patrickaltoft: easy way for visibility on image search for big terms- pay blogger to slap big branded logo on img!
  • ChrisMdotCom: Google will TRUST a lot of info from video sitemaps from trusted domains. Lots of potential to easily get videos in results #proseo

Google local listings…

  • ChrisMdotCom: Google local can pick up a citation from a website even if they don't link to you (by finding a matching company name/address) #proseo
  • ChrisMdotCom: Number of reviews on Google local listings is more important than the rating #proseo
  • ChrisMdotCom: Key Google local ranking factors verified listing, # of review, citations, distance to centre, categories #proseo
  • ChrisMdotCom: uploading products in Google base with a location, can be a good way to get bulk results in to google local #proseo

Tools/automation…

Content/Conversion…

  • ChrisMdotCom: Use old URLs which already have link juice. Put new content on old url and old content on a new url #proseo
  • ChrisMdotCom: To launch a new site, put everything in a folder on your existing site, get it ranked, move it, then 301 redirect #proseo
  • jaamit: #ProSEO now @randfish on content. "if u cant answer the Q 'who's gonna link to this' u'll get beaten in seo. Make links part of brainstorm
  • jaamit: #ProSEO dont be afraid of dupe content. Why not submit a guest post that u already published. < I agree!
  • RobOusbey: CR Experts: "your product page should include at least all the information that you would give to someone when selling in person." #ProSEO
  • ChrisMdotCom: Placing keywords in headings does not significantly affect rankigns #proseo

SEO for news sites

SEO Stats…

Penalties…

  • ChrisMdotCom: The majority of penalties from Google are a result of bad inbound links #proseo Sometimes you need to ask people to remove links!
  • jaamit: #ProSEO Vince has led to more over optimisation filtering (not penalty) - eg if most of ur backlink anchors r keywords not brand name links

Misc…

  • jaamit: #ProSEO @randfish suggests hot tweets affect google rankings. I agree, they gotta be looking at this for fresh web
  • ChrisMdotCom: @davenaylor says that the ‘search suggestions’ are the latest battleground for SEO (x3 on Bing) #proseo
  • jaamit "removing certain toxic backlinks can actually give u a boost in rankings" @davenaylor #ProSEO"
  • jaamit: #ProSEO interesting: re-using old, well ranking urls 4 new stories can b awesome BUT keep title, meta same or G will reset its power. True?
  • jaamit: #ProSEO @robousbey: ppl like linking 2 print friendly pg&apos;s (uncluttered) but eg guardian robots.txt blocks em! Use canonical 2 keep juice
  • rodnic66: "The harder a link is to get, the better it is" @randfish on link building #proseo
  • ChrisMdotCom: Brainstorming is important. Don’t just do it with one person. Do it down the pub if that works #proseo

Finally, Conversion Rate Experts deserve a mention for their great presentation and the giant squirrel they brought along with them :-) . . .

photo3

As promised, here is an update with some of the related blogs posts on the seminar…