Sitting right at the front of the auditorium in the same row as Michael Grey and Lisa Barone, I can’t help feeling I’m outgunned by some pretty amazing bloggers. that said I’ll do my best to get the main points of discussion down in the final session of SMX Advanced, day 1.
Danny introduces Matt with a brief background and introduction “spam police” and we begin… Matt begins by taking off his t-shirt to reveal a Matt Cutts / Not Matt cuts pair of t-shirts. Cool.
Audience Targeted Content – target your audience wisely
Campus Area Yellow Pages – superpages.com
For this site, Superpages produced content targeting .edu sites. They took a regular search engine on the site and tuned it to serve results for universities in their corresponding areas.The information featured in the page templates was entirely relevant to the needs of the higher education community. Some examples included:
Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag up next – here’s the session description:
Duplicate content has long been a worry of the SEO pro. Recently, the search engines introduced a new tool to help combat duplicate content issues: the canonical tag. This session looks and how the tag has been performing for some webmasters plus revisits other duplicate content tools and techniques.
This was a great session, particulary in Q&A session where Matt Cutts came on stage to help out Maile and Nathan. The search engine guys seem really against rel=”nofollow” on internal links!
Throughout the next few days I’m going to try to summarise and cover off the key points raised at this years SMX advanced. First session is “Keyword Research Artistry”. I must warn you, last night was a blast and I’m still feeling a little jetlagged, so please forgive any typos!
Keyword Research artistry
I walked into the session a little late, but I think I managed to get a great snapshot of the first presentation. Christine Churchill gave a great summary of some useful tools such as:
I’ve had some time this weekend to play around with Ubuntu and update some of my more popular Ubuntu posts. Today, I updated the how to install Compiz post for Jaunty Jackalope. Here’s a screenshot of my beautiful new desktop in 3d mode: (Click the image to enlarge)
If you want to build a similar Ubuntu setup, and you’re starting from scratch, here are the guides and resources you’re going to need to get going:
ReadAir is an application built on Adobe Air that brings your Google Reader to your desktop. I’ve been looking for the right desktop RSS reader for my Ubuntu machine and I’m really happy with this one: (Click to enlarge)
Readair is a wonderfully simple and easy to use platform with the only missing feature being the keyboard shortcuts offered in the browser version of Google Reader. There’s definitely keyboard shortcuts in the development pipeline and you can keep your eye on feature requests and their progress by monitoring the discussion in this Google group.
Thought this was worth posting – a screenshot sent over by Jemima after going directly to Google.co.uk, she was presented with this setup dialogue:
You can see from the link in the top right hand corner that the Google homepage is its iGoogle guise.
I’ve never seen an automatic redirect to iGoogle’s homepage before – perhaps this is an attempt to get more users signed up to iGoogle? Note that Jemima was not signed in. Curious…
SMX London 2009 turned out to be another hugely successful and enjoyable conference, both inside and outside the conference building! With plenty of useful content across both days and heaps of networking and hanging out with some really nice people, I thoroughly recommend attending next year. In the meantime – here’s my presentation from “Diagnosing Website Architecture Issues”, presented with together with Rand, Heini, and Luisella Mazza of Google.
Overall, the session was extremely exciting. Here are some key takeaways from the presentation and some tips I gave in conversation during my intro and the Q&A session:
Over the weekend I’ve been seeing a 30 second TV commercial that ends by revealing the domain name: allinhishead.co.uk
Doing a search in Google reveals absolutely nothing – the domain isn’t in the index, nor does any meaningful result appear that can be considered relative to the campaign.
Curious, I visited the URL. It 302 redirects to Virgin1’s “chuck” homepage:
Here’s the server header response on the URL from httpFox:
What’s the lesson here? It looks like the creative was encouraging users to visit allinhishead.co.uk which, (via a redirect) would expose the viewer to a TV show webpage.
Here’s a little taster of what’s in store for my presentation at SMX London. This tip combines two SEO tools to make one awesome SEO weapon. SEOmoz’s “Top pages on Domain” and HttpFox, a server header analyser plugin for Firefox.
Want to work quickly through a new client’s domain to make sure all their high authority (or most linked to) pages are loading correctly or are being properly redirected?
Analyse your top URLs in sequence, quickly and easily
Install HttpFox and head to SEOmoz’s Labs area*. Do a query on a domain and activate HttpFox:
and we begin… Matt begins by taking off his t-shirt to reveal a Matt Cutts / Not Matt cuts pair of t-shirts. Cool.
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