Search Marketing Expo 2008 Round Up

04/11/08

This year's SMX London was attended by three members of Crafted Media's search marketing team; all keen to keep on top of latest developments and theories put forward by representatives of both the search engines themselves and other search marketing professionals.

Information given across the two days was rich, varied and plentiful - some of the key points though were:

Growth of long-tail searches
Statistics provided by Hitwise demonstrate that users of search engines are becoming more sophisticated with their queries with trends showing a decrease in phrases such as "cheap flights" being replaced by a wider range of more targeted "cheap flights to Barcelona" and "cheap flights to Madrid". The key point is that the primary keywords used in longer tail searches have a search weight that far outweighs their stand-alone generic version.

International SEO
Gaining great positions and traffic in multiple countries is understandably no simple task. Not all firms have access to every country level domain nor is it a five minute task building links from locally targeted websites to each country edition. When undertaking multi-country and language optimisation there are some important factors to remember:

• Don't "translate" your content, think about localising them using phrases used in each country.
• Wherever possible, source the relevant ccTLD. Even if you plan to use a single dot.com with sub-sections for different countries, these can be redirected in.
• Source local links. If you have setup an Italian version of your website, make sure the domain is not overwhelming linked from US or UK hosted and localised domains.

Being sociable
Social media channels are growing. In the US there is evidence that referalls from search engines are declining in relation to increases in referalls from social websites. Recommendations from "real people" are, as we know, the most trusted method of reference. Positioning a commercial website within these mediums is a delicate task - providing information and buzz around your offering without presenting it in an overtly self-promotional way. In the same breath, don't maintain a blog for the sake of it - make sure you provide useful, readable content that people can engage with.

Since returning from the event, the team have been busy picking over the new tools (including MSN's new plug-in for Excel 2007 - when the UK version is launched it will be incredibly powerful!), discussing new methods and understanding the key to great search engine positions is to not worry about them, or links; but to provide sound content and interactivity with your audience.