Hilarious music video found on Youtube today, and as it says in the song, I just had to blog about it!

Enjoy!

Christmas is just a matter of week’s away and I’m sure it’s been a busy year… So why not end the year on a high and get yourself down to the SEO Christmas Hootenanny in Brighton!

If you’re an SEO and you’re based in Brighton, make sure you put the following date in your diary -

Friday 21st December from 7pm

I will be announing the venue within the next couple of weeks and will post all the details shortly.

So… who’s up for a night of search, santa and sambucas?

With so much talk about the SMX conference in London last week and with many great conferences in the States coming up soon, how do you justify with your boss the costs involved and more importantly get the time off work?

If you work for an agency or consultancy then you probably don’t have this problem. However, if you’re an in-house SEO you will need to sell the idea to your boss so he gets his cheque book out and signs you off work for a few days.

Here are a few tips that should help you sell the idea.

1. You’ve got to stay ahead of the game!

The search industry in the UK is competitive, if you’re going to stay ahead of the game and learn what those around you are getting up to, you really should attend a conference. Many conference sessions offer valuable information that is not always available online. The chance to then go and grill the speaker and ask questions after his/her presentation is invaluable. Research your competition online and show your boss how they are doing certain things that you may need to learn about, tell him that if you are going to compete and reap the rewards financially…you need to go to this conference.

2. Don’t mention the partying!

Search conferences provide great opportunities to party, there will be evening pub meet ups, invites to go and eat at restaurants and all night drinking sessions in the hotel bar… but your boss won’t like the idea of his few grand being spent on a drunk employee with a killer hangover. Instead talk about the type of experts that are going to be attending and how the conference will provide a great opportunity to network with them. Tell your boss that you have a strategy to meet certain experts and ask them lots of questions. That way if a picture of you getting drunk with a bunch of SEO’s appears on the web, you know what to say.

3. Save money on consultancy!

Could you imagine the cost of getting Matt Cutts in for an hour to look at one of your sites? What about asking Danny Sullivan to come and carry out a site audit for your lead client. It just won’t happen. However, if you manage to grab one of the hotshots while at a search conference, as long as you’re polite and don’t go too overboard with the questions, they will always be accommodating and will answer your question. Approach experts and say “Hi, I read your blog all the time, can I buy you a beer?” That always works! Go to the conference with a list of things you would like to find out, tell your boss that you have a strategy in place for what you are going to learn and come back with.

4. Spread the wealth!

If your company decided to take the whole team out to PubCon in Vegas, it’s going to get pricey. If your boss pays a few thousand quid for you to go, he may have concerns that you are going to be offered a job and may not come back. Instead tell your boss that you are going to gain as much valuable information as possible, take loads of notes and then brief the whole team when you get back. Spread the knowledge around your organisation and provide write ups for employees to read, blogging the information is also a great way to spread the word around your team.

5. If you’re part of an agency, pitch it to your clients

If you work for a few clients or provide consultancy, why not speak to them and inform them about the conference. Pick out a few key areas that they are interested in and discuss the benefits of you attending the conference and coming back to implement everything you have learned on their website. If you are lucky they may even offer to contribute to the cost of you attending. This can happen, trust me.

6. Choose the right conference

If you are like me you probably want to go to all of them, but some are better than others. Research the conference schedule, see who is talking and what they are speaking about. Make a list of things you really want to learn and make sure the conference has the relevant content. Ask questions at forums and blogs with industry experts and ask them for their view on a particular conference. Tell your boss that you have researched all of the conferences and have picked the best one to go to.

Hopefully these tips should help you sell the idea of going to the next search conference with your boss, maybe you have some other tips or ideas that you would like to share.

See you at SES in Feb!

I have just returned back to Brighton after a busy couple of days at SMX in London.

SMX is a search marketing conference organised by renowned search experts and ex Search Engine Strategies organisers Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman.

Smaller in comparison to Search Engine Strategies, SMX took place at the London Hilton Metropole and included advanced and fundamental sessions and some industry specific discussions on the final day.

It proved another great oppurtunity to meet up with new and old friends and it was nice to see the Brighton SEO’s were out in force.

I will be posting up details about the best of the sessions over the next few days and will include some take-aways from each.

In the meantime check out the SEOMoz style London SMX comic strip over at Apple Pie and Custard for some “Pow” “Wow” and “Kazam”.

I’ve just finished writing a column for travel trade newspaper Travel Weekly about how travel agents and travel companies can utilise social networking. Here is the column in full…

Selling holidays via the booming social networking sites, such as Facebook, Myspace and Yahoo Answers, is actually easier than you may think!

Although they are virtually free advertising mediums, they do require the investment of “time”. Most business however can generate this time at no incremental cost, by simply analysing staff “down time” and encouraging staff to use this time effectively by interacting with potential customers via social networks. Don’t worry this can be accurately measured and assessed to stop virtual skiving.

Knowledge sharing between like-minded people is one of the primary functions of a social network. Reputation and being a trusted source are very valuable commodities within these networks that can be easily monetorised. However it is vital not to be overtly commercial! For example when contributing to a forum or answering a question online, simply make it clear that you are a professional travel agent and insert a link to your web site within the copy. You will be amazed by how many people are enticed to click through by this softly, softly approach.

Building a reputation requires a commitment to answer questions and deal with community concerns. However, you do not need to sit waiting on the Internet all day for opportunities.

If you find a topic that requires your expertise within a blog or forum, simply sign up for blog alerts or RSS feeds. These act like emails and will send you alerts to your inbox every time something new is being added that you may want to respond to. Easy!

If you do not understand these things just ask a 19 year old you employ . . . I can guarantee most of them will.

Online Polls are incredibly cheap at 10p per response and provide a whole new route to understanding key trends and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Again they can also act as an effective means of creating brand awareness and reputation if they are on interesting and thought-provoking subjects.

Like most forms of online activity it is possible to track cause and effect of your social networking activity by placing simple web analytics on your site, to track where customers have clicked through from. Secondly it is easy for agency managers to set up web alerts so that every time their company name or brand is mentioned an alert arrives on their desktop. This serves to both monitor activity and provide an element of quality control.

The social networking phenomenon has been taking the Internet world by storm; reviews, comments, articles, video, images and blog posts are now vital sources of information about your company. Used correctly, social networking can provide valuable brand awareness and market trend tools at little or no cost. Do not ignore it!

A great night was had by all, the weather tuned out to be perfect as most of the evening was spent sitting out on the promenade right by the beach, drinking beer and talking supplemental results and duplicate content…it doesn’t get any better!

Great to hook up with everyone last week, a special thanks to Propellernet, Juretic Media and Click with Technology for providing the beer and tequila tokens, everyone went home suitably merry.

The next event will be arranged to include a club solution for after the event. Pride weekend, one of the busiest of the year, proved difficult to try and get a large group of guys and a few SEO chicks into a club… although DJ Randal is supposedly an excellent Drum’n'Bass DJ, I’m not sure it was to everyone’s taste!

This didn’t prevent us all from having a great evening which went into the wee small hours…

Here are a few photos from the event…

The Propellernet Team:
Jack Hubbard, Paul, Jim Jenson & James O’Connor

Lisa Ditlefsen & Ammon Johns

Frank, Mike Nott & Kelvin Newman

Neven from Juretic Media & Jack Hubbard, Propellernet

Ecky propping up the bar…

Alicia Gough in deep discussion.

How many tequilas!

The LondonSEO crew. Rob Kerry and Ekrum Ashgar with Shimrit Elisar and Mike Jacobson

Look out for news about upcoming events in London and Manchester and stay tuned for details about the next SEO event beside the sea.

A date, venue and sponsor has now been arranged. We’ll be drinking beer and talking search, right on the beach next to the burnt out West Pier!

A big thanks to Propellernet for sponsoring the event and enabling us to have a free bar for the first part of the evening. When the drinks kitty runs dry we will have to start paying for drinks, if there are any other potential sponsors out there who wouldn’t mind chucking a few more quid behind the bar, please get in touch.

For those who are traveling down to the seaside for the weekend, there are plenty of hotels along the seafront all within close proximity to Alfresco.

Put the following date in your diary and please let your availability be known, it would be great if we had some idea of numbers, I’ve had some great feedback from everyone and it should prove to be a popular event.

Sun, sea, search and beer!

When: Friday 3rd August 2007

Where: Alfresco Bar

Time: 8pm til late

See you all there!

The travel industry is embracing social networking like never before and there are a few relatively new online communities which are making a big impact.

Boo.com is a user generated travel guide offering reviews, blogs, photos and tips. There are destination, restaurant, sight seeing and nightlife guides, all with an ever increasing amount of content and traffic.

The DK Travel website not only looks fantastic but presents the DK travel content really nicely. The site allows you to create your own guide using travel information, reviews and user recommendations and you can then share and print your personalised guide to take on your trip. You can also download a Podcast guide which can be added to your destination guide and transferred onto your iPod.

A bit on the flashy side and not as pleasing to the eye, the Sheraton Resorts website is an example of a travel company trying to engage with its consumers. Users can add photos and comments on each of their hotels through the guest gallery. Content is displayed on the hotel information pages with weather, photos, offers and of course, booking information.

Web 2.0 and social media has been bubbling around the surface of travel for a while now but many of the offerings have not been engaging enough to make an impact. There are now new and improved websites which are becoming increasingly popular and the travel industry is having to adapt to this form of marketing.

There is a large proportion of holiday goers and travel enthusiasts who prefer this new way of communicating with the experts. They can offer their own thoughts and views and become part of a community where they can share experiences, photos and videos. The travel companies can now engage with their customers like never before, advising and presenting their own expert information whilst building a profile and raising the awareness of their brand.

Travel search is progressing and user generated content is king!

Do you know of any other travel related websites which deserve a mention?

Mike Grehan has written an interesting article stating that SEO Is Dead… I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mike on a few occasions and he is an extremely colourful character… the article speaks a lot of truth although the title is 100% link bait material.

I agree with some of what he is saying though, I personally come from a marketing background and agree that the old days of SEO geeks optimising description tags and tweaking code is pretty much gone. However, web users will always want to find stuff and online marketeers will always need to sell stuff – SEO is all about branding, content and information and making it all readily available and easily accessible. Optimisation is more about usability; the use of title tags, breadcrumb trails, well structured content and sitemaps is as much about the user experience as it is about spiders and crawlability.

SEO is not dead, it’s just evolving. It’s all about writing compelling content that web users can interact with, image and video optimisation has been going on for ages now so a lot of us SEO’s are ready for the new and exciting looking SERP’s which will only improve the overall web experience for everyone.

I regularly attend the London SEO pissup. I recently expressed an interest in moving a future event down south and a bit more closer to home. Rob Kerry who organises the London Pissup has asked me if I would like to organise something in Brighton for the summer.

I know there are a lot of SEO agencies and consultants also based by the seaside so I wanted to start the ball rolling and see who might be interested in attending…

If you’re based in Brighton and you’re an SEO, let me know if you would be interested in attending a piss up in a local pub, preferably by the sea to talk all things search.