SEO, search and social consultants unite in Manchester! Brief SAScon debrief…

I cannot believe it’s been a week since SAScon.  Really, a week!  It was a huge build-up to the event, with 200 search, social and SEO consultants finally attending on the day…what a result for the industry.

In all honesty, when we first made the decision to get this off the ground, I did have concerns that we were shooting too high, but so pleased we could make it accessible to so many, both at the day event and the evening event that we opened up to all.

Not forgetting that SAScon was produced by managers of search, social and SEO consultants from around the North West and UK, with a not-for-profit agenda.  But we’ve heard all of this before, so to follow is a mini debrief of SAScon 2010!  :)

SAScon highlights

Being one of the organisers, I could play the diplomatic card and say that everything and everyone were equally brilliant, but not being one to provide a bland answer, I’d say a major highlight for me was hearing the feedback from people.

Professionals in their respective fields want different things from each event that they attend, but I can say that the format, speakers and social events saw some truly awesome feedback – better yet considering it was SAScon’s first year in production, with plenty more ambitious decisions to make in the coming years for 2011 and beyond…

A huge speaking highlight for me though was Ralph Tegtmeier / Fantomaster – an utter spectacular panellist – sharing very frank, possibly libellous and fun answers.  Really entertaining and very informative indeed.  I heard many people share this opinion too so very happy that we were able to tempt him away from Belgium for a couple of days.  J

SAScon Thank You’s

I really am quite proud of those that have been involved, whether helping to organise the event (Nicky Wake, Richard Gregory, Pete Young, Simon Wharton, Peter Cobley and Richard Hudson), or those that attended from around Manchester and the UK.

And, without a doubt a huge thank you to our sponsors.  We had such fantastic support, and couldn’t have asked for a more positive bunch of folk to help raise the profile of all these wonderful things people and companies are doing in the UK industry and beyond.

SAScon Videos

If you couldn’t make the event, then once you have emailed me to reserve your ticket, make sure you catch-up on the going’s on with a number of videos from one of sponsors video production company, Little Orchard.

SAScon Live Blogging

If, on the other hand, you are more of the avid reader then make sure you pop-by and see PushOn’s SAScon live blogging coverage, along with that of David Towers at Good Web Practices.

Anyway, I’m going to carry on enjoying the wind-down from the last few months, until Simon drags us back in to planning meetings for SAScon 2011! 

SAScon 2010 now launched! Search, Analytics & Social Media 28th April

We’ve been working hard on a project that we’ve been keeping under-wraps for quite some time, so it’s a huge relief to finally get it out there! I am so pleased to announce the launch of a new Search, Analytics and Social Media conference to the UK online marketing scene: SAScon.

With the support of SEMPO and Manchester Digital, SAScon has been organised by a team of digital marketing specialists from around Manchester and the UK. It’s a conference for the online marketing industry by the industry – a tweaked cliché, but oh so true! It’s combined the energy, attention and talents of the following online marketers:

• Myself, Ben McKay, Mediaedge:cia
• Richard Gregory, Latitude
• Pete Young, MediaVest
• Simon Wharton, Pushon
• Richard Hudson, Vanilla Storm
• Peter Cobley, iSpy
• NickyWake, Don’t Panic
• Gary Bramwell, Brazen PR

It’s kind of funny really, individually I had previously spoken to many of these people about how great it would be to put Manchester on the international map for all the talent that currently exists and create an event that people want to travel to…And this one is certainly going to be one of those events!

Confirmed SAScon Speakers

Working as part of a project that has drawn such a high calibre is quite an honour, and I think it’s going to be an event to really draw the industry’s attention. Excitingly, I can announce that speakers attending include:

• Fantomaster / Ralph Tegtmeier – a prolific SEO tool developer, often associated with what some might describe as the darker arts of SEO. Will be an exciting session!
• Richard Gregory – Chief Operating Officer for Latitude Group, a leading European, digital agency.
• Joost de Valk / Yoast – a hugely well regarded developer of SEO tools and widgets, and recently established Orange Valley online marketing.
• Jon Myers – Head of Search at MVi, the online marketing arm of the Mediavest Group.
• Massimo Burgio – a founding member of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation), and Chief Strategist for Global Search Interactive.

More speakers to be announced, but I can assure they are truly superb, super high-calibre speakers. Getting a ticket now wouldn’t be a bad idea at all whilst they’re on the early bird discount.

Who should attend SAScon?

So, so, so many people should attend…here are a few:

- Agency-side Search & Social Marketers

- Client-side Search and Social Marketers

- IT Professionals

- Web Designers and Developers

- Heads of Marketing

- Heads of SME

SAScon Event Details

Date: April 28^th 2010

Venue: The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK

Early Bird Tickets: £225 + VAT
Early Bird SEMPO / Manchester Digital Member Tickets: £195 + VAT

SAScon is going to be one of the UK’s finest search and social events for those agency and client side looking to excel in their field. If you haven’t already, ensure you pop-by SAScon.co.uk to register for your ticket – at £250, they’re an absolute bargain!

Another Manchester SEO Event! Wednesday 4th November

Following the success of last month’s Manchester SEO meet-up, the next event is all lined-up now for the infamous Manchester SEO group-ies!  Have you dropped a note on the Manchester SEO group’s thread to say you’re attending?  Do so here. If you’re not part of the group, drop a comment on this blog post and make sure you say hello on the night!  :)

Don’t forget this, like all ‘Manchester’ SEO events are not just for SEO folk from Manchester but from all over the North West, and I even hear we might be having some attendees from as far away as Leeds coming!  It could also be a good chance to learn more about freelance SEO services from any of the guys attending too.  So do make sure you pop by.

Regarding details…

Manchester SEO Meet-up Venue

Same venue as last month, House 9 Bar, but this time it’s upstairs in the loft of House 9 Bar – just follow the stairs up.  Feedback was good last month regarding the venue but people just wanted a little bit more elbow space so this time we’re heading upstairs to the same place where the Manchester Twestival held, here (just across the road from Deansgate Locks):
View Larger Map

If you do get lost, or have any queries, feel free to give me a ring (07828 760 343) or drop me an email: ben [at] justmeandmy.com

Time & Date

Wednesday 4th November, 6pm onwards

Drinks Promotions

If you like a mid-week drink then you’ll be pleased to hear about the following offers until 9pm:

• Bottle of house wine – £6
• Beer – £2 per bottle
• Many half price cocktails
• Shots – £1

In case anyone is especially keen to buy me a drink, I’ll have any of the above.  Ta!  ;)

Future Manchester SEO Events…

Oh, and make sure you feedback regarding the venue – fancy a change let us know, like the location for convenience, then let us know!  Feedback is always welcome!

Manchester SEO Meet-up > 8th October

Right, quick post….

So firstly, you’ve heard about the Manchester SEO group by now right?  Well if not, sign-up here. Technically speaking, it’s not just for Manchester SEO’s and we see people visiting from all over the North West, so do make sure you do too.

[Update: more info on the latest Manchester SEO event here]

SEO Manchester Meet-up

Secondly, you’ve heard about the Manchester SEO meet-ups that are being organised, haven’t you?  Well, if not, make sure you attend the next.

If you’re not part of LinkedIn the idea of signing up to the Manchester SEO group seems like a huge pain for the sake of meeting for a few beers, so here are the details anyway:

Date: Thursday 8th October

Time: 6pm

Venue: House Bar 9 (same place the Manchester Twestival was held at – the bar on the far left of Deansgate Locks)

Agenda: Anything you like.  It’s a casual affair and a very sociable bunch of people in a bar; so could be anything from discussing latest SERP aesthetics, to search engine patents, link-building approaches, blackhat techniques (to avoid?!), sharing contact details or something quite removed from SEO all together.  You decide!  It could also be a good chance to learn more about freelance SEO services from any of the guys attending too. 

Thirdly, did you know that Mediaedge:cia Manchester (part of WPP Group) are on the look-out for North West’s best SEO talent?  If you’re looking for a new SEO job, this would be a great opportunity to pop-by and say hello to myself or David Towers, as we’re always keen to meet ambitious SEO’s in the Manchester area.  Or of course connect with me on LinkedIn.

So, who’s in?

[Update: more info on the latest Manchester SEO event here]

If Actors became SEO’s, who would be spammers?…You decide!

We all know that SEO’s have usually fallen in to the industry by accident, but what if the same happened to actors and they took a slightly different career route…which actors do you think would be spammers?!!

1. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give any PageRank since my latest penalty – Clark Gable, Gone with the Wind
2. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in White Hat territory any more – Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz
3. Here’s looking at you, kid, your site sucks ass – Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca
4. Go ahead make my day…give me a .gov link – Clint Eastwood, Sudden Impact
5. @yetanotherben u talkin 2 me? – Robert de Niro, Taxi
6. I love the smell of Analytics in the morning – Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now
7. Made it, Ma! Top of the SERPs! – James Cagney, White Heat
8. Bond, James Bond. SEO Manager at Mediaedge:cia, Manchester – Sean Connery, Dr. No
9. May the spammy links farce be with you – Harrison Ford, Star Wars Episode IV: A new Hope



10. Show me the affiliate money! – Cuba Gooding, Jerry Maguire
11. Google, you can’t handle the truth! So I’ll serve you different content to that of my visitors. – Jack Nicholson, A few Good Men
12. I’ll link back – Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Terminator
13. If you build it (and promote it), they will come – Ray Liotta, Field of Dreams
14. Houston, we have a problem, we rank for ‘chocolate salty balls’ – Tom Hanks, Apollo 13
15. Keep your whitehats close, but your blackhats closer – Al Pacino, The Godfather Part II
16. Say hello to my little friend: the harvester spam bot – Al Pacino, Scarface
17. Elementary IR, my dear Watson – Basil Rathbone, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
18. Take your spammy paws off me, you damned dirty blackhatter! – Charles Heston, Planet of the Apes
19. I’m the king of the SERPs! – Leonardo DiCaprio, Titanic
20. I feel the need – the need for spam! – Tom Cruise, Top Gun
21. I see dead links – Haley Joel Osment, The Sixth Sense

Got your own favourites?  Feel free to share and I’ll add them on to the list! 

BuzzStream Link-Building Management Tool Review

If you’re a front-line link-builder, you’ll be interested in reading about the new BuzzStream link-building tool.  When I say tool, it is a tool in the sense of how link-building should be viewed…relationship-building.  It really is not an automated, link-building machine!

Link-building Relationships

If you think of a BuzzStream as a sort of database management service, that both highlights opportunities for link-building and also helping you to manage correspondence with prospective link providers, then I think that would be pretty close to the mark.

Importance of Social Media for Business

Over the last week, Hitwise has posted about both growing social media as a source of customers for online retailers and how web users are spending more time on social media networks that at online retailers.  The prominence and value of online social media has never been greater.

It’s this reason why I am so interested in social media monitoring tools, such as my Radian6 review, and various other posts online about online reputation management and SEO/social media integration (case studies are my favourite – feel free to recommend some!).  So to follow on from this I put my self down as a Beta tester for the Buzz Stream tool, following a recommendation from my fellow SEO consultant, Gab Goldenburg.

Customer Relationship Management for Link-Building

Buzzstream, like many tools of this help those looking for relational link-building opportunities…opportunities to engage with champions / influencers of your services / content, or maybe get talking with webmasters as part of the niche.  I think where I see it’s greatest benefits are in the fact that it helps find markets for engagement, and thus can help build these prospects into customers / link-providers.  In a way, it is working to be follow the lines of a customer relationship management principles…

Please note that this is just one of the range of dashboards that you can view at differing levels of detail.

Link-building Management & Performance

Many people regard link-building as a form of selling, and more so than any, ‘manual’ link-building probably is.  And with all sales process, it’s helpful to break this stage down to see where you or your link-building team are performing well, and Buzzstream helps you to do this. Part of the dashboard graphically represents:

• The number of links you have acquired
• The number of link partners you have gained
• The number of links under review
• The number of link requests you have had rejected

This means that across the different stages / types of links you can see where you or your team are performing the best and take decisions to either capitalise on those strengths or look to improve your approach…excellent stuff for link-building managers too.

BuzzBox

There’s a clever little feature for link-builders, whereby if you BCC a pre-designated buzzstream email address, such as 1234_Ben_M@buzzbox.buzzstream.com it will copy all your correspondence into your BuzzStream account – great stuff for staying on top of where you’re up to with your link opportunities and relationships….an item, very much geared-up for the frontline link-builder.

Future Developments

One of the most exciting things to come (for me at least) is the future release of the buzz monitoring element of the tools.  Having exchanged a few emails with Buzzstream Co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, I raised the point about how this will differ from Radian 6 or similar social media monitoring tools.  I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing this comment with you, it said:

The key difference between what we’re doing and Radian6 is that our focus is engagement with influencers (journalists, bloggers, Twitters), and we’re *not* doing the social media monitoring piece. Our ideal customer will use low-cost tools like Trackur, Vibemetrix, Filtrbox, or Scout Labs or free tools like SocialMention, Addict-o-matic, BuzzDing to find engagement opportunities.

We step in once they find an influencer and want to engage them (we’re building some time-saving tools around helping you do that). I like to think of it as the difference between Jigsaw (where you find sales leads) and Salesforce. We’re similar to Salesforce, except we’re tailored to managing influencers and engagement across the social sphere.

Things I would like to see develop in the future…

Link-building Opportunities & Search Queries: BuzzStream does a great job of simplifying the management of relationships, something that all marketers might appreciate learning more about, especially in social media, but I think it could do more to find opportunities.  It helps you run wild card queries, using variable keywords in search queries, designed to help find opportunities but I think they could do more, see the image for what’s currently available:

…it is in the Beta version though of course so I expect they will as they queries are relatively easy to set-up.

Link-building Reporting: I’d also like to see a reportng tool where selected paramters could build a report, preferably in .csv, that I could use to feed into my client reports.  There are currently web-viewable reports of recent history, but nowhere can I find any export facility.  Maybe that’s another item to come.

The BuzzStream wrap-up

Overall though, I think they have made a very helpful database and facility to contact market influencers online, whereby it does each task that it tries to very well indeed, remarkably well in fact for a Beta version.  There’s loads more details to BuzzStream to what I have covered here but I hope this provides a helpful taster of it’s potential usage, and even a little feedback to Jeremy and the BuzzStream team…and now for what you’ve been waiting for…

**20 Free BuzzStream Beta Invitations Available**

For all those interested in being a Beta tester for what looks set to be an excellent tool focussed on making manual link-builders more efficient, click on the following link – but be warned as there is only 20 invites available!

• http://tinyurl.com/djyjnz

UPDATE:

I have just got the following email (15th October) on some interesting developments with Buzzstream…
Hi Ben,

I’m writing to let you know about some exciting new features we just added to BuzzStream for Link Management. Please take a minute to check them out:

Real-Time Social Media Monitoring

Want to know one of the most effective link building strategies? It’s social media monitoring combined with personalized outreach. BuzzStream now makes it easy to monitor news, find bloggers and site owners whose interests align with your content promotion campaign, sort them by authority, research them with our BuzzMarker tool, and track your outreach efforts automatically.

With BuzzStream you now can monitor mainstream news, blogs, Twitter, and dozens of social media sources to find key influencers. Our research tools make it a snap to build a detailed dossier on a contact, save them to our CRM, track your outreach, and identify links you’ve received.

And if you manage reputation management, your life just got a little easier. BuzzStream now allows you to define a set of competitive brands and track multiple sentiment ratings for the same post. This enables you to create more accurate and useful share-of-voice and competitive sentiment reports.

To setup your social media monitoring searches, visit: http://app.buzzstream.com/monitors

Import & Export — with Linkscape and SEOMoz support

Have a spreadsheet of existing links and pending link prospects? BuzzStream makes it easy to import them with step-by-step instructions. Email us for import templates for SEOMoz Linkscape and Yahoo Site Explorer (a great way to import your own or competitors’ backlinks). We also know the importance of protecting your cloud data so we’ve added the ability to create a comprehensive data export back to CSV.

Agency Client Management

Want to use BuzzStream with multiple clients? Now you can manage your clients via with a master agency account and group each clients’ media contacts, outreach history, social media monitoring searches, and media monitoring results into their respective sub-accounts. Account-level controls allow some or all of your staff access to the information, which preserve the benefits of collaboration while keeping things private and organized. To enable client sub-accounts, go to Settings > Projects > Create New Project.

New Pricing

We’ve tailored plans to better meet the needs of SEOs at different ends of the spectrum:

• FREE: 2 users, 25 contacts, 3 monitoring searches
• Solo – $29/mo: 1 user, 1,500 contacts, 10 monitoring searches
• Basic – $49/mo: 4 users, 1,500 contacts, 10 monitoring searches
• Plus – $129/mo: 12 users, 4,000 contacts, 10 monitoring searches
• Premium – $249/mo: Unlimited Users, 15,000 contacts, 10 monitoring searches

Thanks for all your feedback and support through our beta program. If you have any questions, need a hand importing your existing links, or just want a quick demo to help you get started, please don’t hesitate to email me.

Sincerely,
Paul May
Co-founder, BuzzStream

The recent life and times of Ben McKay…

Well, I just thought I’d provide an overview of a few things that I’ve been up to lately as I’ve not been writing much to my site…so here goes…

Think Visibility Conference

Firstly (as I really should have written about this sooner) was the Think Visibility conference.  This was about the best sort of SEO conference I could hope for.  I am hoping to be attending more conferences this year, but I would not be surprised if this is the best of 2009.  I loved the set-up; 100 attendees, 15 awesome speakers or so, and a great chance to speak to a whole host of people from the wide world of the web.  Hello to all those that I met!

I hear that this was the first of a string of conference so make sure you head over to the site and register for updates.

Starting Work for Mediaedge:cia

The biggest update for you is my recent move to Mediaedge, part of GroupM / WPP – a cool company with plenty of cool projects to get involved in.

Exposure to the best working practices, technology, analytics, integrated media projects, and of course, people, has made this move a real exciting change over the last couple of months.

I should say (even though I have not been asked) is that all opinions written here are my personal opinions and not those of my employer!  It’s obvious, but just wanted to emphasise that this is a personal space and not an extension of the Mediaedge website or company views.

SEO Scoop Author

Those nice guys at SEO Scoop kindly invited me along to write for their site.  I like SEO Scoop – it’s kinda like a co-op of writers, and when there are so many views and overlapping fields of interest in internet marketing, it’s great to have multiple points of view.  The other great thing is that if you don’t have much time to read about social media, SEO or PPC each day, then this could be a handy one-stop shop for all your needs, so add it to your feedreader today!

My first post for SEO Scoop was on my recent move to corporate SEO from SME SEO – it’s been a cool change and an interesting topic to write about so go and take a read.

My First SEO Tool

I’ve been toying with an idea to develop my first SEO tool to support my freelance SEO services since Christmas (it’s amazing the impact of a holiday on your clarity of thought), and have been researching the technology necessary to get it up and running for a while now.  I think I’ve nailed the technology / coding that is necessary, but like with many things, the more challenges you resolve, the more that rear their not so pretty head…very excited about the prospect of developing it though, just wouldn’t mind a bit more time!!

Summer, at last!

The evenings are getting lighter and the Summer is rolling in at last!  I hope the same is happening for you too…!

Radian 6 Review – Social Media Monitoring Tool

I had a great conversation with a guy called Cory at Radian 6 today. He talked me through the their social media monitoring tool, developed internally by their guys in the States.  I think anyone that provides SEO services should be aware of such tools as they can play an important role for more than just social media marketers.

The Issues and Opportunities of Social Media

One of the ongoing problems that social media marketers have is the degree to which they can gauge how effective each social media marketing campaign has been.  I have said before that for social media to be a realistic marketing solution, it has to tick a lot of business boxes…these boxes include items such as accountability, understanding (i.e. not making it a stab in the dark) and of course creating a return on the investment.

Not only this but for social media marketers to be the perfect social media marketers it certainly helps if you can be everywhere, socialising, all of the time!  Social media monitoring tools help industry professionals keep their ears and eyes open to new opportunities, responses to marketing efforts and mine this invaluable data on a level not previously possible.

Importantly for marketers social media is measurable in many ways:

Users of social media share a lot more than just their opinion. Those who enter the social media domain leave behind a lot of clues about who they are and how they think via information found in social bookmarks, comments, engagement, influence, friends, followers, downloads, favorites, views, votes and links. From all of these user actions, you can measure what’s important, what ideas are gaining ground and who, or what, is having the biggest impact on your, or your client’s brand.

…so this certainly awakens the need to tackle so many social media management issues.

Social Media Monitoring and Online Reputation Management

Social media monitoring has become all the more important as more conversations are recorded online. This means that brands have the opportunity to listen-in on the conversations around their brand, and deal in online reputation management there and then if they choose to do so. You can imagine the benefits of this if you are a working with a brand where an immediate response would be value in any way as it puts out the flames before they have even begun.  For this reason and others, I wanted to provide a bit of coverage to a tool that I have been exposed to lately called Radian 6 – a premium social media monitoring tool.

Radian 6 Tool

There’s loads of information provided by Radian 6 on their website and their sales guys are really helpful, but I just wanted to provide a run-down on my perspective of it’s pro’s and con’s.

If you’re unaware of Radian 6, this is how they describe themselves:

Monitor social media effectively with Radian6’s user-friendly web dashboard.  It allows topics to be quickly set up for monitoring, queries and analysis.  Use it to uncover seemingly hidden issues and trends that could affect strategic directions for clients.  Easily share the real-time analysis with clients and others to support your recommendations and proposals.

Radian 6 Dashboard

The dashboard for Radian 6 is really easy to use. It has an array of different windows that can be flipped over to access their settings. These are really quite more extensive than at first sight and provides plenty of opportunity to drill-down into the item(s) discussed around the brand in question.

Brand Conversations and Engagement

Interestingly, Radian 6 allows brand owners, social media marketers and SEO’s to see the comments on a live basis in what they call River of News – a cheesy term for a live feed where you receive brand mentions.  Here you can mine this data in more detail to their location, their various networks, the positivity towards your brand and even the degree to which they influence your market.

Benefits to the Marketing / SEO Agency

As a result of being able to easily and accurately monitor the response to social media activity, agencies can save time in reporting, learn more about their clients consumers, be more accountable for their success or failure and of course justify continued expenditure in the SMM field…something that could pose as a serious competitive advantage.

This is where Radian 6 see the key benefits for agencies and brand manager’s alike:

• spend less time collecting brand sentiment data and trend data
• uncover the top online influencers affecting your clients’ brands and develop a plan to engage them
• analyse trends and spot opportunities for your clients – something that might be priceless
• find and promote third party endorsements, by retweeting them as an example
• justify more advertising and engagement in social media through accountability and ROI
• give your creative department a new way to research an audience or use content for concept inspiration.

For SEO though, there are great benefits too…it picks up on positive/negative trends around brands, keyword clouds that are used around your brand, highlights key market influencers that could help in championing products/services.

As every marketer wants to get closer to their niche’s consumers and promote 2-way engagement in conversations around the brand online social media monitoring tools are increasingly being seen as the way forward for many agencies.

Negative Points for Radian 6

There are plenty of social media monitoring tools, but none as far as I can tell that are this comprehensive (please let me know if you know of others around a similar kind of grade)…but for this you have to pay a fair amount.  Think along the lines of £500/month/brand…then again, for the insight and engagement opportunities it provides, it really could be justified.

Outstanding Points from Radian 6 - these points are not exactly negative but I would like to know more.  As extensive as the conversation was, I still left the meeting with a few outstanding questions about the reach of the tool, especially as it relies upon it’s own bots. Questions I have raised have included a break-down of the API’s used and an understanding of the reach of the in-house search bots, but more testing will help me understand that I hope.

Additional Suggestions & Tools

Online social media monitoring tools are not the only means of analysing your prospective consumer base, visitors and general online activity. Also think about tools and data found at services such as:

• Hitwise / ComScore / Nielsen / Compete – site/industry stats
• Rank Pulse, maybe? – changes in search rankings
• Google Analytics / Woopra – website analytics
• Clickheat / Crazy Egg – site-usage via heat mapping
• Keyword Research Tools – understanding keyword usage and search volume
• Competitiveness analysis tools and queries
• For monitoring Twitter conversations, try Monitter

But remember, in researching your market, search marketing tools can only go so far. A healthy level of analysis and experience creates a massive amount of value in using these tools.  Although I have to say, I am pretty excited about using it some more!

Have you used Radian 6 or any other social media monitoring tool?  Please share…

The SEO Dojo – Training for Super SEO Geeks!

There’s been something pretty big bubbling in the SEO community for a while now…a new training platform for higher-level SEO learning is about to be launched…something I think we can all agree will be well received by the SEO community.

This SEO forum is to be called the Dojo, and will providing teaching and training to those looking to hone their SEO skills to a greater level.  The Dojo has been established by a Mr David Harry, a professional SEO.  Here’s a snippet about the man himself…

David Harry

You’re more than likely to know David Harry through his ‘theGypsy’ pseudonym on various social media sites, Huomah SEO blog  or other areas where he writes such as Site Reference, something that really might be handy for my beta custom SEO job search engine and SEO job site!  </self-plug>

More than that he is one of a handful of SEO guys that delves into the search engine patents, tests and reports, challenges and promotes a whole host of extremely value-adding SEO content…sharing ideas that create great opportunities in developing your website(s) to be optimised to their greatest long-term ability.

Other bits about David Harry: he cares for a range of exotic pets including a 40″ python, he’s an ultra-SEO-nerd reading search engine patents over his Corn Flakes, and  he is the author of The SEO Handbook.

The Dojo’s SEO Training Forum / Resources

What makes the SEO Dojo so special is that it’s aiming to take more than just one step beyond the ‘introduction to SEO’ guides, but rather several, and delving very honestly and openly into the scientific and artistic depths of SEO.

The Dojo states:

We are here to teach, to learn and to grow; every teacher a student and student a teacher…The HuoMah SEO Dojo (or Fire Horse) was started as a place to collect search related documents, interact with others and spread the word of search optimization in it’s highest form.

…how positive is that!  David Harry’s credibility as an SEO has been backed by experiential knowledge and masses of research and testing across various niches.  He has also built-up such a reputation from his ‘no messing’ approach to SEO/SEM commentary and of which poses as the ideal condidate to be your SEO mentor in the SEO Dojo.  If you like what you read on the Huomah blog, and want even more depth and access to resources, keep your eyes peeled for more news on the SEO Dojo.

The Huomah SEO Dojo Resources

• Library and Study Hall – learn, educate, share SEO thoughts and practices
• Profile and Friend management – build a healthy, higher-level SEO network
• Twitter feeds – see what’s happening outside the Dojo
• Member messaging – network, build contacts / friends and share information
• Activity stream – see what’s going on in the SEO Dojo
• Ask the experts – questions answered on search marketing (specifically SEO) topics
• Groups – discussions on a range of SEO aspects and wall posts
• Knowledge Exchange (private forum)

If you are looking for a means to extend your SEO knowledge and online networks, I expect this is the opportunity you’ve been looking out for.  If you want a taster before the full arrival of the SEO Dojo, maybe pop by the Huomah blog to sign-up for the SEO newsletter, get your free badge for your site, and do of course visit the  SEO Dojo to learn more…

UPDATE: The SEO Dojo is fully open to the public!!  Pop in and see for yourself for just $30

More SEO Heroes!

I just wanted to write a quick post giving credit to people who have been putting out some truly awesome SEO content lately…content that I believe has and will continue to add a great deal of value to the SEO industry’s professionalism.  This is following on from an early article written to thank my SEO heroes that had taught me so much already.

The Science and Professionalism of SEO

There is a second reason that I am writing this post beyond just thanking people.  Recently there has been an increased discussion regarding the science of SEO, and the professionalism of the SEO industry as a whole.  There has been good reason for this.  In many people’s mind there has been less focus by SEO consultants considering the technologies, research and developments in search engines, than what we might consider ideal.

Keep on your Toes

Because of the evolving nature of the web, I personally think it’s very important to understand the nature and technology of search engines and the technology behind them in order to see where they are going.  That way, you could argue that you bring in an increased likelihood of longevity into your organic search marketing results.  For that reason alone, I think it justifies considering such areas of the SEO field.

Read and Read and Read

For me at least, I find a huge amount of comfort and value in reading about internet marketing in all it’s forms, testing and trying considerations made, and it’s something that I think I can take into meetings with me, providing a great deal of confidence in the field.

One of my SEO Heroes, Gab Goldenberg has a pseudonym SEOBookworm, which I related to as soon as I saw it – reading and researching are the most important things you can do if you’re looking to learn more about SEO.  If you read something controversial, or something that doesn’t ring true, find multiple arguments and see where it rings true.  Alternatively, design your own SEO tests and discover for yourself the power of ranking factors for your sites.

More SEO Science Heroes

Here are a few extra helpful resources, research and analysis in the field of SEO.  These are specifically one’s that take a more scientific approach in the consideration of search engine optimisation:

• David Harry, Houmah SEO
  
• Michael Martinez, SEO Theory
• Bill Slawski, SEO by the Sea
• Marie-Claire Jenkins Science for SEO
• Mike Thelwall, Link Relationships
• Fantomaster News

Thanks to all!  The SEO industry wouldn’t be the same without you!