This week I had an interesting conversation with Dan Milward, the marketing guy and co-founder of the WP e-Commerce WordPress shopping cart plugin.

Let's start with the facts. WP eComm is now on version 3.8.4. Currently, the reports in from front line users are: 4 say it works, 12 say it's broken.

Why People Hate WP eCommerce so much

Dan told me that sources inside Automattic had revealed to him that in the past as soon as Instinct Entertainment publish a new version there are five reports of the plugin being broken on current WordPress. His sources then erased that feedback.

This is a very bad sign: when you need insider help to erase negative feedback. Not the first time I've seen this happen at Automattic: Mark Jacquith has had to warn plugin database maintainers off deleting plugins which compete with their friends plugins. Second bad sign: people who hate your plugins enough to wait for a new version to mark it as broken.

Dan manages it. There are three strategies he uses which bring Instinct Entertainment to such grief.

Strategy one: releasing alpha code as stable branch.

Just don't do it. Or if you are going to release fragile code, be standing by ready with quick fixes.

Strategy two: constantly be out there marketing and promoting broken code.

When my site is broken and I see you pumping your plugin to the masses as if it actually worked, it makes me really, really cross. I want you back in the office, fixing the code, supervising the developers, in constant contact with the users in pain to suss out the issues. Not doing the marketing rounds and making false promises.

Strategy three: swearing at and maligning past clients.

In the LinkedIn conversation which brought on this investigation, a past paying client stated:

WP-eCommerce is the worst thing out there. Nobody likes it. It's the most hated of all WP e-commerce solutions. Google it some time.

Harsh words but neither obsenity nor personal insult. Dan proceeded to swear at his ex-customer, asking him to leave the discussion: "Brian its probably a good thing you do leave because you're talking shit."

Dan's ex-customer Brian then told this tale of woe:

I paid your company somewhere around $250 back in the '06 - '08 era (can't remember when exactly) when I was building my first WP e-commerce site. I found the product to be clunky and buggy, but I muddled through and never attempted to call or contact your company until the gateway malfunctioned. I spent a week sending emails to no avail. I got absolutely no response at all. I then tracked your company down through my journalism connections (because you gave no information about how to contact you) and called your company, but I got a voicemail. I left a message. I got no response. Finally, out of frustration, we paid a coder to fix the problem at a very high cost. I soon after lost the client who had by then lost confidence in me.

These are hard core facts. I have witnesses. Furthermore, mine isn't the only story like that out there about interaction with your company. I soon found I had lots of new-found friends connected only by their absolute abhorrence of the way they were treated by your company....

The client I lost was paying me $50,000 per year (obviously for more than a little e-commerce site) - it was a little less than one-third of my income at the time - and losing them over that experience was very difficult. I had to let go of my assistant. As time went on, I nearly lost my house and my car. In fact, my car was repossessed at one point, but I managed to scrape up the money to pay off the full note in time. My point isn't "poor me," but that customer service for entrepreneurs who are using products like his can be a very serious business indeed. Lives change if things go badly.

There's a reason people hate WP e-Commerce with a passion. Dan is looking at one in the eye here. Time for humility, apology and amends.

To my surprise, the ex-client very graciously offered to try the latest version of WP eComm for his new projects and re-evaluate his past rating. Dan Milward couldn't be bothered to set him up on the weekend:

So Brian. You can count me in but I don't have the time to muck around, its a long weekend here and I can't do anything until Tuesday NZT (unless you want to answer to the missus). Come next week if you want our premium support then you can email my support team directly or you can go via the premium forums where our staff hang out and we'll look after you. I'll hook you up with an account when you return the email that I sent you via your site. I'd like that.

Long weekend. A bit thin as an excuse but better than nothing I suppose. One problem. Dan was back with five long marketing posts in just this discussion alone. I.e. Dan has time for further marketing but no time to make wrongs right.

If I had a chance to redeem Foliovision after being called out in a public forum like this, I'd jump on it. In fact, even without being called out on a public form. Alas every couple of months that we do drop the ball for one of our clients and I do go into the office on the weekend. If I can't go myself, I pay one of my team a bonus to go in on the weekend and deal with the issue.

Why WP e-Commerce is still broken six years later: Development Analysis

In our telephone conversation, Dan and I spoke frankly about the difficulties of managing a team and long term development of sophisticated plugins.

1. Starting with wretched code but lots of publicity

The first problem WP eCommerce ran into: the original code was just not very good. The developer at the time and co-founder Tom couldn't code very well at the time. The great name "WP e-Commerce", first mover advantage and Dan's marketing skills overwhelmed the quality of the code and what should have been a very small failure ended up being a public shaming.

We have just one really bad plugin at Foliovision, WP Link Robot (it's better now but still not very good) which started on a bad codebase and it's difficult to reform. Getting off on the wrong foot is very difficult as you have bad calls and bad data structure right from the beginning. It's like laying in the foundation of a house: get it wrong here and your palace will always sink and slant like the tower in Pisa.

In any case, that's what happened to Dan and WP eComm out of the gate.

Advice: Don't promote broken code. Particularly knowingly.

2. Constantly switching horses in mid-stream

WP e-Commerce has had about a dozen developers work on it seriously in six years. That's just too many cooks and the soup is spoiled. You want one, maximum two developers on any software project. If you go with two, you have to divide the coding in half. With an e-Commerce plugin, that would be say core shopping cart and payment gateways.

Clearly, Dan has not read The Mythical Man Month. More developers equals less code per developer on almost an exponential basis. Here's the group intercommunication formula: n(n − 1) / 2. I.e. 50 developers give 50 x (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication. Or in Dan's case, six of them: 6 x (6 - 1) / 2 = 29 channels of communication.

Two developers maximum. Long term commitment to the project. Wins every time. I have so many awesome sophisticated programs on my computer coded by a single developer. To make a list of what's running right now: Seasonality, Radium, Fluid Browsers, LaunchBar (at the beginning, probably not now), Movist, 1password (team of two to start), TextSoap, Acorn, Keyboard Maestro, Witch, MenuMeters.

Among other WordPress shopping cart solutions, both Market Theme and Shopp have a single core developer. Both work very well.

Advice: Formula for great plugin or application: single, great long term developer. Just say no to programming teams.

3. Engaging Remote Developers for Core

Dan is working with remote developers. Not a good recipe for long term success with a core plugin. We worked with our first CTO very successfully when John was in Prague and I was in Vienna. When he moved to China the relationship gradually broke down, even though Foliovision was doing well and expanding.

Big projects eventually need face to face. Dan, a working ecommerce solution for WordPress is a big solution.

Even David Heinemeier Hansson eventually relocated from Europe to Chicago where he and Jason Fried can collaborate more closely for the long term. It's worked for 37signals and it could work for Instinct Entertainment. There's lots of good developers who'd like to live in New Zealand, there are hobbits in the dales and dwarves in the hills.

Advice: go local with development.

4. Saying yes to new features

Dan has a fatal case of featuritis. In the marketing thread, he trumpeted far and wide about 200 hooks, hundreds of new features, dozens of plugins. Dan admitted as much in our telephone conversation:

I said yes to too many features. Every time someone would ask for a new feature, we'd add it. It was too much. We're trying to cut back now.

Yes, it was. Less is more.

Developer Michael Visser nailed it with this comment:

To be blunt, the rapid expansion of new features back in WP e-Commerce in 3.6 -> 3.7 (2008-2009) may very well have been the reason for it's bad wrap over the years, as a small store owner come WP Plugin developer I'll patiently wait for new features while critical - even non-critical - issues are being sorted.

Dan should read five times Start with No followed by a close reading of Features are a one way street. Keep in mind when Dan was making the mistakes of adding all these new features, the plugin was already on version 3 and on the market for five years. These are beginner mistakes. I really don't know what he was thinking about.

We use Market Theme to develop WordPress shopping sites. Market Theme is great for catalogue type sites. It would be a lot of overhead for a few pages with shopping. I'd be more inclined to use eJunkie for just a few items for sale and post the shopping cartcode into my site.

But what's great about Market Theme is the core code is reliable and easy to work with. There are lots of features missing but as the core is clean it's very easy to add whatever our clients happen to need for their sites.

For Stager's Source, our client didn't need to take money, just orders as she preferred clients to pay on pick up (lower fees) or delivery.

For Hawaii Fun Tours, our client needed to take a small deposit but not full payment and he needed to do so via First Data. No problem. We wrote the custom code to allow for deposits. He didn't want to keep any payment info for security reasons.

Advice: less features, but all features work as advertised.

5. Chasing WordPress/Automattic

WordPress itself has become an awful solution for business websites. Hear me out.

What business and commercial websites need is stability and security. WordPress is constantly releasing new versions adding unneeded new features and which break old features and many plugins. The upgrade path has become a never-ending merry-go-round.

As a commercial development house working with businesses, our concern is keeping our clients' sites running reliably. Wordress/Automattic makes this very difficult. Automattic are also WordPress consultants and the more they can change and upgrade, the more press they get, the more users and the more help their existing clients need.

Automattic takes about $15K/year off its smallest VIP clients, in no small part as a major company cannot think about deploying WordPress without help from the founders (or Foliovision, albeit our VIP program is at a fraction of the price).

In short, WordPress is a moving target. Dan has jumped on the hype and every time WordPress releases a new feature like Custom Post Types or automated theming, WP e-Commerce has to be there first. He admitted to me in our conversation that it's been very frustrating to update WP e-Commerce to work with the latest WordPress features only to have the hooks change or disappear.

My advice: stop chasing your tail. Develop towards stability and wait for new WordPress features to stabilise before trying to work them into an ecommerce plugin. To repeat myself, ecommerce and business sites are about stability.

6. Not helping users, marketing instead

When you do your own support and you do it intensively, you know what works and what doesn't.

Dan is not active on his own forums helping people. Dan's posted there just 10 times in 10 months. While marketing, Dan has posted more times on our LinkedIn discussion in three days than in his own support form in 10 months.

Here's how WP eCommerce user kgaspeed feels about support:

Thank you very much for passing on my request and trying to rally assistance. But to try to tell me "hey, it's free and open source, so why complain?" I don't see that as a valid argument at all - sorry. I have a business outside of this - we offer a free service for a niche industry so when it doesn't work do I say "hey, it's free...what more do you want?"

No way on earth. Our customer service is impeccable and responds to every call and every email we get. That's the policy I've put in place - we likely do not have the customer base you have, but as we grow, that will always be in place. I don't see that as valid at all. You're offering a product that offers very specific functionality and why should I not expect that functionality to work as advertised, right? Therefor, if we all paid a set fee for it, all of these issues would magically work?

Don't be so sensitive - I've read a lot of reviews on this plugin from various other sources, and if people have issues, your staff comes in and attacks. Not the right way to go about presenting your business. I will retract some of my comments, but my concerns are valid. Free plugin or not.

Advice: Feel your user's pain and fix it. Stop looking for new suckers.

Dan Milward WP eCommerce support: MIA (missing in action)

What Dan Milward does right: Marketing

There's been a lot of criticism of Dan Milward, Instinct Entertainment and WP eCommerce here.

There is something which I admire though. He is an indefatiguable marketer. Dan Kennedy didn't say it first but has probably said it loudest: As the entrepreneur your first job is marketing. Serial entrepreneur Michael Masterson among others repeats the advice in his book Ready, Fire, Aim which seems to be Dan Milward's bible. Masterson did not mean shooting yourself in the foot though: Masterson talks about responding to feedback quickly and "fixing a winner". Milward seems to have skipped chapter 14.

Despite a wretched plugin, an incredibly hostile and disillusioned userbase, WP e-Commerce and Instinct Entertainment continue to prosper while treating existing customers poorly, releasing shoddy alpha code and swearing at past customers. Thanks to Milward's relentless marketing.

Milward is a one man marketing machine. He makes hundreds of appearances per day promoting WP eCommerce. Our code is way better but most of our plugins only get a tiny fraction of the downloads which WP eCommerce gets. In particular, Thoughtful Comments which makes moderating WordPress comments a pleasure instead of a chore and Foliopress WYSIWYG both deserve much larger audiences, as does our FV Simpler SEO (although SEO is a more crowded space). Oh and we have a great testimonial plugin with a pro version with categories, FV Testimonials which makes sales even without promotion.

But marketing seems like crack cocaine to Milward. If he could just disappear for awhile, lock down a long term partnership with a single ace developer and release a clean and reliable version of WP e-Commerce, he'd be doing himself and the world a favour.

Don't count on it.

Milward's Advice to Kinnear: I've got to do more marketing of our great tech.

I hope my own advice and analysis above helps Dan Milward/Instinct Entertainment find their way to better code and less angry users.

Takeaway for shopping site developers in the meantime: Stay away from WP e-Commerce if you value your time, your reputation and your sanity.

By Alec

WP e-Commerce 3.8 Review: Why WP eComm code is still broken

Post from: Foliovision

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Head to Head: Keyword Strategy – Will Critchlow (Director, Distilled)

Will Critchlow beat Rand Fishkin shirt

• keyword strategy depends on how many writers you have.
  • if you have a lot of writers, long tail is great
  • if you have fewer, you will have to focus on a smaller set of keywords
• conversions by keyphrase length (excluding branded search) useful statistic
  • 2.7% on three word phrases
  • 1 word on .8%
  • two word 1.2%
• what does that mean:
  • for ecommerce: more deeper product pages. Three word keyword phrases convert like crazy.
• set up your site hiearchies: attribute/location
  1. start with full keyword list ordered by volume
  2. then divide it by category.
     • for camping, keyword phrases divide up like this:
       • in
       • or
       • with
       • friendly
     • use excel array to pull them out
       • campsites
       • caravan parks
       • holiday parks
• getting at the hidden data in your PPC data.
  1. define your report
  2. add&limit=50000 to your URL
  3. export as CSV (excel export doesn’t work)
• use the conversion data to uncover gems:
  • found four or five 3 keyword phrases which were converting like crazy for which we didn’t have pages.
• split test open rate:
  • “download the call” or “download the video” and “donload the video” won.
  • “training” vs “conference call” and “conference call” won
• based on history, anticipate event spikes for searches and get ahead in organic, i.e. world cup 2010.
• run xenu on your competitor, look at internal links, look at site structure. Find his weaknesses.
  • category pages: great category page for leather sofas but he doesn’t have 3 seater leather sofas.
  • add 3 seater leather sofa category page and watch the traffic roll in

Head to Head: Keyword Strategy – Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Rand Fishkin - Keyword Strategy

• Online Marketplace
  • Google has been growing in last five years, other search engines, barely.
  • 80% of clicks from organics, 80% of SEM budget to PPC. numbers are backwards.
  • 160 billion dollars of revenue online.
    ecommerce referral: 31% organics seo, paid search 9%, social media 7%.
    wife getting the bird
  • Market is growing madly. Bought wife laptop: my zappos viewing machine has arrived.
  • Brands should pay attention to online. Offline purchases are influenced by online research.
• Search results analysis
  • 31% click blended search
  • 68% of search engine users click data on first pages.
  • does high organic ranking higher make people think you’re a better brand?
    39% agree 42% neutral 19% disagree.
  • Keyword phrase length over time: grew then contracted. Search engines got better.
    conversion rate by kw phrase length:

The charts backing Rand’s presentation are located at http://seomoz.org/dp/free-charts.

News site SEO – Rob Ousbey (Search Marketer, Distilled)

Rob Ousbey - News site SEO

Rob started his presentation by quoting Richard Murdoch:

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph

News sites’ USP are dependent on the following factors:

• brand & age
• variety
• contentcreators

What’s special about new sites?

• regular new content
• old expiring content (go to archives or deleted)
• varied conversions

Some big stories can be planned: Obama inaugration.
Other big stories are unplanned: Michael Jackson’s death.

In news, one of the best ways to get ahead is to get other SEO’s to do your job by linking to your stories. You have to let people link.

Some things to be careful about:

• print version pages. Make sure that your print pages contain enough navigation to the main site.
• duplicate content: try to keep your content single URL
  • Example not to follow The New York Times.
    • times.com
    • www.times.com
    • nytimes.com
    • www.nytimes.com
• news sitemap
• If you are running a new site or even a site which publishes occasional news, you want to get into Google news. The technical requirements include about 15 items.
• When trolling for new topics, use the suggest feature on google news: updates quickly to see what people are looking for.
• Tag your images right: 10% of organic traffic and image visitors are some of the best.
  • new visitors
  • more page per views per visit
  • lower bounce rate

You want to be among the early links on Google. Read Brent Payne’s personal weblog, he’s director of seo for Chicago Tribune.

Some more tips:

• new URLs for hot topics
• find volcanic topics
• create relevant content
• published optimised page at new URL: double visit from Google for news page and comes back a second time to pick up corrections: speed is of the essence come back and correct it.
• be sure to link from related pages and home page. Build it into your CMS
• 301 related but outdated content (immediate link juice)
  rotate linking pages through front pages
• Old URLs for repurposed content

Rob spent some time breaking down the technique of repurposing old URLs using the example of Michele Obama’s dress.

• find term
• change title & description
• link to from homepage
• when story returns
• keep title, h1, h2, description, the same (otherwise loses weight)
• replace content with updated story
• link from similar content, 301 old content

Who should do all this SEO? It’s too much for a single SEO to handle.

• journalists: make them make it happen.
  • journalists will do the day to day SEO for you
  • not “jacko snuffed it” but “michael jackson died today”: you can have different header than page title. Best of both worlds. Page title: “Michael Jackson died today”; header: “Jacko snuffed it with drug overdose”.
  • how to motivate journalists?
  • two trainings not one: expect only 25% success at first training; six months down the line, 75% will do something about it
    • congratulations go a long way: copy their boss
    • analytics, dashboards, reports
    • exposing their personality: in the newspaper you can’t really add much, but online you can create special section, bio, photo

What is the difference between blog vs news?

• does it matter?
• news is reporting and blog is editorial sections.
• does the site look like a news site?

How a smaller organisation can compete…

• you cannot compete on quantity, but you can compete on editorial quality, especially if you are focusing on paid subscribers.
• the pay wall: ft.com up 10% for online and up 22% for the overall group.

How to use the pay wall and not get excluded from organic search…

• the Google News solution: first click free.
  • First click free doesn’t fix the linking problem.
• solution for external links:
  • become a premium news website
  • extend first click free to all referred traffic so your referrers can send you traffic.
  • how do the first wave of media find you: give them free content, get referrals

News Pricing

• studies show 13% of visitors are willing to pay 6-10p per article
• focus on these high value visitors for mini payments
• Rob’s suggestion: use a micropayment system Oyster with the following scheme:
  • 20p for first article
  • 20p for second article
  • cap it at 50p per day for the rest of the paper

His argument is that 50p/day is still cheaper than buying a newspaper.

How do you get people to want to pay you?

• making your content exceptional
  • turn great content into purchase
  • turn great content into links
• calls to action that match your conversion

If you are a news source, Rob points out that Wikipedia loves newspapers. go get a bunch of links to your news site.

The Pacman Chunk of the Piechart: Getting Links – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled)

Tom Critchlow - Getting Links

Tom got started by talking about the role of your USP in both content generation and in brining in links. Your USP will change what content you post and what links that content brings.

For Tom, modern link building is not separated from strategy. In traditional SEO link building, link building could be done separately via:

• manual directory submission
• manual article submission
• social bookmark submission
• creating web 2.0 properties

His top advice is to leave those old-fasioned methods behind, let’s get away from it.

Case Studies

HamiltonBilliards – A Niche supplier of high end billiard tables

How can hamiltonbilliards beat topofthecue?

• special relationship with all of the huge national castles? get a link back!
• warwick university pool club. give them free cues, sponsor organisation, sponsor a tournament.

Hippobox

• ontracks delivery doesn’t fit into postbox, now links to hippobox
• howonearth delivery doesn’t fit into postbox, now links to hippobox

Competitor analysis

• how can you understand your USP without understanding your niche?
• basic links in each niche. get them all.
• reverse engineer each competitor’s strategies.
• identify successful strategies and repeat them (including sophisticated ones like those of Hamilton Billiards and HippoBox
  • using linkscape
  • order linkscape data by DmT (Domain moz-Trust) for quick categorisation (not so easily spoofed).

Who are your competitors? They aren’t just competing suppliers. Competitors are people who rank in your targeted SERPs.

• look for people who list other sites in directories
  • investigate the links to sites already listed in niche directories
• gingerlily.co.uk, ranked for “silk duvets”. Link from allergy.co.uk: go get links from all allergy sites.
• accountingpage.com service $50 for submission. Directory networks can be effective in the right niche.

Some people are ranking:

• for massive link buy
• for massive directory submission
• for great content and wide bookmarking

Understand why you’re building each link. There are three things links can bring you:

• authority – from top sites
• trust – from trusted sites in an area
• anchor text – from any site

Diversity of links is very important. Never rely on a single strategy or even two strategies.

Different link need scenarios:

• you might have anchor text, need trust
• you might have trust, but need anchor text strength.

Embed seo in your business processes. Example: in each thank you note for business purchases include a link request: “if you have a website, please consider placing a link”.

Make sure your PR agency is using specific pages on your website and using links in their releases.

Pay for high quality directory links. Quality paid directories are curated and somewhat exclusive so the links do have value. Example: JoeAnt speed pass.

Generic directories:

• joeant
• aviva directory

Directory Tips:

• More useful are stronger links from niche directory.
• For a crafts site, links in a craft or housetohomedirectory.
• Before paying for a link check that that directory passes link strength.

Email

If content is king, email is the pupper master pulling the strings.

A common truism: just write content and the rest will take care of itself. Perhaps but if you want to accelerate growth, you have to do some legwork for your content.

• Email some people and ask them to link. How do you motivate them?
• Don’t forget about international social media sites. Nice traffic, nice links.
• perform competitor analysis on who published competitors linkbaits or area linkbait.

Duplicate Content

• Duplicate content does not cause sitewide penalties. Back in the day, perhaps no more.
• Duplicate content does not hurt you at all if you outrank everyone who publishes your post.
• Syndicate your content for links.

Product Giveaways

• product givaways for links. get them something to do with your products.
• send product but give them something to do with it. paints=painting contest.
• for high value items, use disount codes/exclusive offers. 15% off orlebar brown swimwear. people have to link to you to write about it.

Widgets – Custom Programming

• widgets tip. syndicate exclusively to major publishers with custom branding built-in.

Paid Links

Paid links – step outside paying for them in the traditional way:

• association membership
• conference sponsorship
• charity donation

TIP: Use adwords content network to discover sites in your area who are open to publishing paid links and are in your niche. Then approach them directly for permanent advertising.

API and open data.

Often with a popular API you can get links into your site.

Affiliate Links

SEO friendly affiliate links are like paid links, but free.

• allows you to get links from sites you’d otherwise have had to pay
• pay people to put affiliate links on their website

Keep in mind that Google is trying to shut down link juice from affiliate sites so this may be a six month strategy.

Local communities

• this is bath.co.uk
• thebathweb.co.uk
• bathfm
• thebathchronicle

Expired sites

1. find expired sites in your niche
2. get a list of all the pages linking to the expired page
3. contact those site owners and suggest that they link to your replacement page instead. Most site owners would like to replace any broken or expired pages to which they link.
   • TIP: if the expired page links are affiliate, make sure to offer an affiliate replacement program.

Profit:

• long run business strategy which wins is trust
• people who win are those who build quality links. Build awesome links. Awesome links start with great content.
• people are more important than links: high ROI on engagement.
• link-savvy PR is better than traditional SEO.
• build links for traffic not for SEO.

Finding Modern Linkbuilders

Best linkbuilders Tom has seen:

• business development managers
• community managers
• developers

In long term people with business and community or special tools skillset will build you the links you want, the links which count.

SEO is Nothing Without Content – Rand Fishkin (Founder, SEOmoz)

Rand Fishkin - SEO is nothing without Content

Building the Content: Your Own and UGC (user generated content)

• copyblogger: 10 sure-fire headline formulas that work
• SEO is part of how you show your content
  • same content in focused way and it attracts people
  • wrap it with a bunch of ads and crap, it doesn’t succeed. Example: SEOmoz is non-commercial format. SEOmoz is .org: strategic.
• Nick Denton’s publishing model: Pay your writers on page views and on incoming links.
  • for every domain which links in you will pay more.
• use Amazon’s ranking system for reviewers: involve users in your site.
  • send people a badge to put on their website
  • give registered users ownership of their profile.
  • example: linkedin’s profile completeness. 5 x as much content contributed. you’re not done yet.
• give a website a vibrant community before you invite general users in
  • check answers.startups.com
    • build a community before you launch, don’t be empty
  • don’t turn weblog comments on until you have a community already. 0 comments looks terrible.
  • give them a profile worth sharing
• how to maximize UGC (user generated content)
  • seed with high quality members: why are comments good, depends on seed members
• focus on a niche, then build wide
• reward/recognize contributors: check stackoverflow for an example.
• provide analytics for users: show them page views, comments
• make it a competition

How to get people to link to your site

• Fun widgets: boozedeathcalculator from bar shot
  • post your results to your weblog, twitter, facebook, myspace: simple, simple sharing
• reward links with trackbacks
• designing content which will gain links
• use old domains and URLs.
• ranking #5 for “social media”
• measure incoming links to each page, quality: do it to your competitors
• citation will get an incoming link
• anticipation in a teaser kind of way
• humour: really hard to do right
• controversy: not a fan, but draws in a lot of links.
• how to turn a tweet into a link
  • make an embeddable link
  • close discussion on own site
  • create an expervience vs read & forget
  • don’t discount the value of a tweet: Google is seeing tweets as fresh content

Google Local Search – Tom Critchlow (Head of Search, Distilled)

Tom Critchlow - Google local search

• a lot of factors for Google ranking
  • verified listing
    • bulk upload: white listing for many locations
      • separate bulk upload files, one for each country, country selection drop-down, country selection drop down to change country each time
      • data formatting avoid: capitalisation, odd phone number formatting, URLs in the description field
    • worst thing to do: not on whitelist, not claiming your own listing, unverified edits
  • number of reviews
    • number more important than the rating
  • citations: like links only different
    • mike blumenthal (blumenthals.com) david mihm
    • citations: mentions of your brand, sometimes a link
    • phone number mention is usually a citation
    • address listed
    • how to find them? look at competitors.
  • distance to center
    • google says it doesn’t matter: it does. can’t do anything about it.
  • categories
    • can add up to five
    • use keywords
    • analyse competitors

Case Study – SEOmoz

SEOmoz doesn’t rank in google local search for “seo company seattle”

• there are four sites verified and provided by business owner.
• both addresses are also verified and provided by business owner.
• reviews of the old address
• category fail: only one there make sure you are using all five

Job number one: getting rid of the old listings and consolidating on a single listing. Job two: getting in some reviews.

Universal Search – Patrick Altoft (Director of Search, Branded3)

Patrick Altoft - Universal Search

• Google’s main results page now clogged up with all kinds of results:
  • local
  • video
  • image
• you want to try to get into those alternate results as well
• video results: up to eight results.
• put up a video sitemap: if you are a trusted site
  • get some people to give some good ratings
• google is now indexing flash as content
• imagine if you have your logo on google’s image search
• rather than buy links from weblogs, put an image on website but with logo on top.
• google images cares about the text nearby
• google news citations:
  • rectangular
  • size 250×150px
  • interesting image
  • alt text! and have it next to image
  • images will get more clicks than the headling
    • interesting image

The limits of automation – Dave Naylor (Founder, Bronco)

Dave Naylor - Limitations of Automation in SEO

Tools to Analyse

• Best single tool for tracking SERPs: Advanced Web Ranking
  • never search for your brand terms (don’t get a penalty)
  • remove them
• Google webmasters tools
• MajesticSEO
  • good backlink set
• Google wave (get everybody in)
  • can have one wave per client
  • people can get you automatically
• SEOmoz tools
• raven tools
  • best of internet into one management suite
    • post content to blogs
    • manage social profiles
    • integrates with Google analytics
• Bronco tools
  • free tools, not working don’t care
  • Geo targeting
  • like excel spreadsheet but brings it all together for you and makes it pretty
  • link recording tool
    • keep track of links
    • future links to come back and get
  • common link finding tool
• fresh tools
  • 80 legs: on demand web crawler
    • .25 per 100,000 URLs
  • backlink planner
    • automatically analyses competition for a keyword: you need 300 directory links, 50 blog comments, 100 site widgets
  • backlink analyser
    • some links are actually bringing you down
    • analyses link and shows how risky they are: some links can bring you down
    • sponsored links: you can buy a link
    • decreasing toxic links give a boost
    • not passing equity: stop paying for it
• microsoft has an SEO tool.
  • shows you the violation
  • like xenu on speed
  • check with a malware checker
  • vista and above
  • free download
• davidnaylor.co.uk special tool
  • let’s you see what’s going on
  • about to clean up toxicity and see if it makes any difference

Tools to Build: Bioware

• Picasso about computers: “they can only give you answers.”
  • human must make a decision over whether to place a link or not. must do approach not machine driven.
  • go after very high value links in a personalised way

The right strategy for your organisation – Will Critchlow (Director, Distilled)

Will Critchlow of Distilled fields QA Questions on Strategy

Possible strategies

• startup
• established
• household name

How do you differentiate yourself? Do it even as a small company.

• ranking factors
  • what you control
    • where usp helps
    • building a custom page into your sales process

Where to your links come from?

• rolex: sponsorship: 15% of links come from sponsorship
• rackspace: testimonials: 25% of links come from sponsorship
• amazon: affiliates: 25% of links come from affiliates

Desirability

• rarity (“uniqueness”)
• you can even get links for a screwup

Richard Brannson’s Virgin brand is USP

• something different from everyone else
• get links from points of difference
• everyone’s quick but you are quicker.
• as small business, pushing 2 ton flywheel. doesn’t appear to move until it does.

International Companies: How to handle multiple countries/languages – Duncan Morris (Director, Distilled)

Duncan Morris - SEO Strategies: How to handle multiple languages/countries

• Should a company develop a separate website for each country?
  • local TLD domain helps? yes.
  • difficulty of getting TLD domains
  • local TLD vs generic TLD
  • single language vs multiple language

Much easier to have a local version when you have your own domain for each one.

Bmw has a site for every country. That’s the right model.

Question and Answer Day Two SEO Expert Training

Distilled SEO Expert Training QA Panel Day 2

Danny Dover SEOmoz reading the questions submitted online

How to burn someone’s site to the ground?

• Dave Naylor: Buy him $500 of TLA links per month for a year, gradually increasing spend. Make it look like you are building a bad neighbourhood.

Distilled SEO Expert Training Question

Should video be stored on YouTube or on your own site?

• Rand Fishkin: Two versions of video. On youtube funny title, on your own site very seo’d straight title. Differentiate.
• Dave Naylor: Put main video on your own site and offer an easy embed tool directly from your own site. Get lots of extra links that way.

Dave Naylor and Rand Fishkin answer questions about YouTube videos

Pub night hosted by London SEO

London SEO pub night

• tab was still running at 10pm. Good job, London SEO.
• music wasn’t too loud to talk.

Some English SEO’s I’d met the night before were murmuring about Distilled’s comments about paid links being unequivocally bad.

I wandered over to the Distilled table and asked some pointed questions about paid links. It turns out Distilled are not as absolutist white hat as they suggested throughout the training (paid links unqualifiedly bad) but they feel the future of SEO is more in community driven links.

So why teach people a bad practice which should be playing second fiddle to good practice.

I think that’s a fair approach.

London Bus on the walk home

Hotel Russell London - a place to rest after two wonderful but long days

By Alec

Review: Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day Two

Post from: Foliovision

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• image navigation
• image text
• badly formatted URLs
• session-cookie dependent content
• no content

All true, but old news. Spender suggests Web 2.0 has just made it worse. Perhaps. But the real value in the entry are in the two following screen shots.

The first is a tabbed web interface of a good looking Web 2.0 ecommerce site.

Standard tabbed Web 2.0 product page

So what? Well take a look at what's under those tabs, what's under the covers.

That's what you get with Javascript turned off.

All the content of all the tabs is right there on a single content rich web page.

One could even argue that there is too much content on this page.

It would be better to have these section under different URLs making five or six pages with cleverly crafted hard URLs with interlinking anchor text in as site subsection. All that''s possible too by turning Javascript off but would require even better programming.

But the single page approache is a very good start.

Product page courtesy of the Hobitat.

By Alec

Web 2.0 Product Pages Done Right

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