Anyway, we’ve mod’ed previous comments, thanks. We’ll keep a closer eye on it now.

The SMX Sydney franchise has just rolled through Sydney and every SEO/SEM person in the country (who could afford the ticket) descended on Luna Park for two days of fun, frivolity, hanging with international SEO rock stars and “in” jokes about user agent cloaking on large (supposed) white hat sites. It’s impossible to do justice to the numerous quality presentations that took place during the two days so the following highlights are based on highly average note taking and (often imperfect) working human hardware (memory – thanks Gord).

Adam Lasnik from Google’s Webmaster Tools team delivered a great presentation on webmaster tools. A key point gleaned is that it’s possible with webmaster tools to set country preferences for sub domains and even folders via the webmaster console which is super smart if you have one domain that targets multiple regions and territories via sub domains or folders.

Gord Hotchkiss delivered two sessions: one on PPC tactics; the other on how users interact with the SERPs. For me this was one of the highlights of SMX. Every savvy search marketer in Australia and New Zealand should be paying for and using his firm Enquiro’s research weaponry as it goes so much deeper than search and is based on how humans are hardwired to scan and consume information. FWIW Gord is also a super nice guy and made my average first time moderating efforts not too uncomfortable.

Danny Sullivan delivered a number of sessions. For me the highlight was his overview of search and where it is heading. He produced excellent and frequently hilarious quotes. When asked about mobile search, saying “oh yeah its going to be massive in 2006” and comparing Microsoft’s entry in the search space as a car race with Google powering ahead, Yahoo trying to race whilst fixing up their vehicle and Microsoft standing around saying “Is there a race on?”. Pretty damn funny (for us search geeks).

Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ, one of the most high profile people in search today, delivered sessions on link building, social media marketing and the beginner’s guide to cloaking (last one’s a geeky in joke). Rand was as excellent as you would expect and super friendly when hanging out with the Australian proletariat of SEO and SEM. My personal highlights of Rand was pretty well any time he presented and definitely any time he was near a microphone with Danny as they seemed to morph into a digital marketing odd couple arguing about anything from Firefox installation techniques through to the merits of smaller “themed” domains as opposed to one authoritative site.

Ciaran Norris from Altogether Digital spoke about copywriting for SEO/Search and social media marketing and social media optimisation. Highlights for me were the case studies on the Tefl campaign and the Brylcreem campaign and some other seriously kick arse creative. My take is that without a good idea and execution you can have every trick in the box and your bad ideas will die a lingering horrible death in the public domain. If you are trying to do viral SEO/SMM/SMO do it like this and this and whatever you do don’t employ a semi-talented overhyped rapper with no legitimate connection to your brand to produce garbage like this.

Monty Hubesch from Aussieweb delivered an enlightening session on his approach to landing page design. I found this to be an absolute gem of a session in that I love people in search sharing the outcomes of their testing for the greater good. From what Monty was saying this real ugly landing page for a waste water company has delivered a significant improvement in conversions for his client and contributed to a massive spike in turnover. For me I like the fact that Monty is combining NLP techniques e.g.: content for people who process info differently. This session showed that it just wasn’t the big name internationals who had the gold.

Other highlights/thoughts:

• Don’t get some of the most incisive/knowledgeable SEO minds on the planet to review your site live if you are doing anything suspect or seriously pushing the SEO envelope (no names).
• Don’t be a lazy dev and use user agent cloaking (covered here).
• Do digest pretty much everything Gord has to say about information scan patterns, establishing your brand’s persona and intuitive design.
• Do talk to people even (gulp) the big names, as in my experience they were very friendly and shared their time freely (whilst probably battling hideous jetlag and conference burn out)
• Do ask questions. Just not stupid ones.
• Do read the programme carefully and don’t disappear whilst you are meant to be moderating, effectively stitching up a highly stressed conference organiser (profuse apologies Barry).
• The last thing I would say is that if you have even a remote interest in search that you should definitely go to SMX Sydney next year as it’s worth the cash and it has raised the benchmark significantly in terms of what we in Australia can expect from a search conference. Congrats and thanks to Barry Smyth for getting it done yet again. (And no that is not an affiliate link.)

Quite surprising that the default search provider in express settings is Google! Either an oversight by MS, or is there something we don’t know about???

This is a great step forward for Google Analytics and will allow site owners to put a “stake in the sand”, where as previously Hitwise data, which tends to be fairly costly, was the only option.

All the info from the horses mouth here

Is this a service you will use?

Do you have any concerns about Google having too much infomation about your site?

Update:

So the data has just been added to this feature. Looks pretty good in terms of presentation, however I have a few doubts on the types of people that are sharing their data. The 3 sites I had enabled the feature for, are all showing significantly more traffic, time on site etc. than the benchmark. I think at this stage, the early adopters are probably one man band ecommerce sites that don’t do huge amounts of traffic. It will be interesting to see if the benchmark improves as more people start to share their data, I’ll keep you posted.

Another Update:

Hmm, the data is still looking a bit shaky, but a bit better than last time I updated this post. There are still large discrepancies between one of the sites I’m trialling this on and the industry benchmarks.

A few examples for you:

Visits: 16,887 - Benchmark: 2,342 (+621.05%)

Page Views: 113,709 - Benchmark: 8,860 (+1,183.40%)

Pages/Visit 6.73 - Benchmark: 3.78 (+77.99%)

I know the site above is doing quite well, but not as well as Google would have me believe…

Within benchmarking you can select which industry your site is in, ranging from very broad to quite precise. In the above examples, I’ve been able to select the exact industry the site is in. Also, as previously mentioned, no mention of country data which is a bit of let down.

Classifieds accounted for 27% of the total online ad spend. Recruitment continues to lead this category, followed by real estate and automotive. This indicates that recruiters and HR departments are still relying heavily on job boards as a way of attracting candidates.

The likes of Seek, MyCareer and CareerOne all realized at an early stage that search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! were going to provide the majority of their traffic and hence acted upon it. As an example try searching for “IT jobs” – the top three “sponsored” and natural search results are all job boards. According to some research released by AOL, the top 3 natural search results attract almost 70% of the traffic for that keyword.

So which is best? PPC or SEO? Both - depending on your situation. PPC has the benefit of being virtually immediate, i.e. as soon as your campaign has been built, your ads will start to show almost immediately and start receiving clicks. The main downside is usually the cost. PPC works on an auction system, so to be in the top paid position it may cost several dollars per click. Also remember you are competing with the large job boards for the same keywords – they tend to have very large budgets so they can afford to outbid you. According to Google the average spend for a job board is approximately $200,000 per month*, that’s just on Google! Another potential issue with PPC is the trust factor – i.e. if you have to pay to be there, is the person searching likely to trust you?

Natural rankings, achieved through SEO tend to be favoured by most companies, however most don’t realize the amount of work involved to achieve high rankings for large traffic keywords like “IT jobs” or “mining jobs”. As previously stated, the top three natural search results receive the lion’s share of the traffic, so everyone is fighting for those spots. SEO tends to be much cheaper in the long run as clicks are essentially “free” once the rankings are achieved. A fundamental first step in SEO is establishing what keywords you want to rank for. There are several ways of doing this, but one way is to use your PPC data. From your PPC campaign you’ll be able to tell which keywords delivered clicks to your site and even which keywords generated enquiries or potential candidates.

Another benefit to consider are the branding opportunities offered by both PPC and SEO. People tend to associate credible rankings with credible companies. So for example, if your site comes up number one for “mining jobs” people will think you’re the specialist leading company for that keyword. In this scenario combining SEO and PPC has a multiplier effect, so if you are in the favourable position of already ranking number one in the natural search results for a particular keyword, it’s advisable to also bid to position one in the paid results as this almost guarantees you’ll get the click.

As most companies still haven’t taken up this opportunity both in regards to PPC and SEO for recruitment, now is the time to act and focus on your PPC and SEO efforts.

According to the Google website Mapplets are mini applications that you can embed within the Google Maps site.

For me, while I thought the initial offering from Google Maps was fantastic, letting people integrate their own applications onto it makes it even better. The avenues opened up by this functionality are literally limitless. Imagine if the big real estate sites, such as Realestate.com.au, could integrate their existing system with Google maps to better show where new properties houses and apartments are for sale. Prospective buyers could then use other third party tools to gather information about travel routes, bus stops, school zones and a whole lot more. The user experience of a total package like this would be absolutely amazing!

On a much smaller scale, you could use Mapplets to let friends and family know about overseas holidays, favourite spots, walking tracks etc. With 3G phones becoming more commonplace, wham! Right there you have a “poor man’s GPS system”.

Hey! Maybe that’s something else they have in the pipeline - a Google-powered Personal Positioning System!

As you can see Google has thrown a map based result for my query “Birkenhead property”. Unfortunately the map that has been thrown is for Birkenhead in England as opposed to Birkenhead in Auckland. I wondered if the results could be getting screwy because I was searching from Australia so I replicated the search via a proxy and the same results appeared.

I then found another result where Google had thrown a Canadian map-based result for another New Zealand suburb + keyword search.

Now, none of these searches are particularly high volume (compared to say a search for “hotels” on Google.com) but when it comes to the SERP’s irrelevant results like these are likely to frustrate the average user.

It’s also worth noting a recent study from a US automotive site Autobytel (summarised here) that found that “7 out of 10 Americans experience search engine fatigue”. Based on the above map-based results I would suggest 10 out of 10 Google.co.nz users would experience search engine fatigue with the above results.

The biggest and quite significant change I’ve seen here in Australia is to MSN/Live. One of our clients has increased his visibility by 20 percent in one month!!! To put that in perspective, we usually see a much much smaller increase in visibility month on month for clients that we are optimizing for. As anyone in the industry will tell you, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. So to see such a massive jump in visibility in quite a competitive vertical was surprising to say the least. Aaron gives a very good analysis of the change on his blog, so I won’t repeat it here, but basically it seems that MSN/Live is now giving links and their respective anchor text a lot more weight than they used to.

What does all this mean? If you’ve spent the last couple of years optimizing for Google (seriously, who hasn’t?) you’ll more than likely start to see some good results on MSN/Live, probably without doing too much. Granted MSN/Live only has seven percent market share in Australia (Hitwise, August 2007) but if you’re in a competitive vertical there’s bound to be plenty of good quality traffic there.

And yet, here we are, just a few short weeks later throwing out the net ourselves. Okay, so we’re not prepared to splash that kind of cash around but we do have an opening for some quality people – a php developer, an SEM campaign manager for our PPC division and a subeditor / web producer / content manager. We’re growing pretty fast! And now based out of shmicko purpose-built offices just a hop skip and a jump from Bondi Beach we’re hoping we won’t face the same hard-sell the Americans have had… Know anyone who might be interested? Shoot them this jobs link. And here’s more detail about that Ajax job post – just in case you need to see it to believe it…