Lunar Park Sydney saw a host of internationally renowned SEO experts attending SMX Sydney 2009 and presenting SEO information and giving the audience the benefit of years of SEO experience. For two days, a mix of information swapping, questioning and learning preoccupied the attendees. The other activity revolved around social networking with a number of people professing that they went to bed too late the first night. It was encouraging to know that all the tweeters still knew how to interact with real people.

Some of the stand out presentations that I went to…

Monte Huebsch -Blended Search Tactics 2 – Maps & Local Listing Optimisation

Starting out Monte made the following statement: “The search engines advice when considering what to do always emphasis two elements”

• Maps/ Local Business directories
• Blogging

The presentation tackled the first one of these areas talking about local directories. Focusing on Australian local directories, he emphasized that a website does not have to pay for listings in three of the top five local directories.

These directories are good for traffic from the people who use the directories; they also contribute to a site’s overall Google rankings.
The list of top five directories in Australia presented is as follows.

• Google -> Free plus has street view
• Yellow Pages -> $$$
• Hotfrog -> Free
• True local -> $$
• Aussie web -> Free

Factors in utilizing Local directories correctly include

• Proximity of address
• Number of quality reviews
• Keyword relevance
• SEO characteristics of the website
• Links within the local community

Greg Boser from 3 Dog media – 301 Redirects, Why are they important?

Starting with this statement: “A 301 is a status code served in the http header that informs the requesting user-agent that the URI being requested has been permanently moved to a new location”

Greg moved on to say that he thought that the 301 redirect tool was one of the best and most powerful tools available to SEO’s. The reasoning was that it is the only redirect to pass or carry the link juice from one area to another area.

Greg mentioned the difficulty with developers in getting the correct redirect implemented.

When to use a 301 redirect

• Domain migration
• Canonicalization (www vs non-www)
• Site Architecture changes
• Type-in, misspelled, and marketing domains

Greg also spoke about the new canonical tag, which he called RELCAN. This gives webmasters the ability to help inform the search engines, which is the preferred page with in a site. The tag does not work across domains but will work across sub-domains. It helps hugely in the area of duplicate content and refines the process, which previously had to be done using robots.txt and other tools, which could cause other problems.

The resource he quoted was http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/301-redirect.php

Stephan Pavlovich – Conversion Rate Optimisation

A great presentation highlighting some really good best practises when thinking about conversion. Conversion of visitors to the intent of the websites existence is important. Stephen covered two topics in a list that his company uses when approaching a website’s conversion problems.

He addressed

• Understanding your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones)
• Designing your webpage experiment

Starting with Understanding your visitor Stephen defined that there are two types of non-converting users. The first is the visitor that wants what you have to offer and would like your service or product but struggles to get to the point of engagement. To fix this a webmaster needs to focus on the funnel path to conversion and clarify what the user needs to do next to achieve engagement.

The second type of non-converting visitor is the person that needs persuading. To deal with this a departure from conventional A/B testing of change something and see what happens is required. What he suggests is use the formula

What is the Objection / Counter the Objection

To achieve this he gave a few possible objections and their counter objection

• If they don’t trust your company -> Build trust elements
• If they don’t believe your product
• is better than competitors -> show advantages over competitors
• is better than nothing -> show benefits over nothing
• works -> show proof it works
• If they don’t understand what you are offering -> Use techniques to improve comprehension
• If you aren’t making enough offers -> Make more offers
• If they see the decision as being too risky -> Use risk reduction strategies

The biggest tool in helping to improve a websites conversion was the art of listening. A number of tools were highlighted which helped in getting feedback from visitors. This included survey and live chat tools.

He lastly covered off a number of methods for handling objections.

• Handle objections head on
• Give a reason why
• Be authoritative (image of someone in authority etc)
• Create Urgency, Scarcity, Exclusivity
• Provide something that is helpful (AID = advertising in disguise)
• Proof Demonstration, Media testimonials, Evidence of success, Social
• Perform Cost-benefit analysis
• Bargain appeal
• Risk Reversal
• Simplicity
• Desire to belong
• Common Enemy

His resource http://conversion-rate-experts.com/articles

Cindy Krum – What’s New In Mobile Search

“The Web has become so pervasive, so ubiquitous that it is fading into the background. It is becoming invisible. It just powers everything that we do and it is almost completely transparent; In that we often don’t even realize that we’re getting data or information from the Web. It’s just how we do things. We just expect it to be there and work. Flawlessly, at all times.”

Cindy specializes in web mobility, which seems to be the next large break through for internet search. Cindy empathised that mobility search is in its infancy and has huge benefits to offer early adopters. Likening this to the web of 10 years ago, Cindy said those that get involved now will have to test and play but grabbing the market share ahead of the heard would bring large benefits.

Why the Importance of Mobile Search

• Mass mobile coverage
• Most personal marketing medium ever
• More interactive marketing possibilities

Hurdles to Mobile search

• Lots of browsers
• Many different handsets
• Inconsistent coverage
• Expensive mobile data pricing
• User education

Cindy also talked about styling of mobile web pages, best domains to use(.mobi is dead), SEO mobile factors including directory submission.