Search Engine Tigers

This was my first SES in the country of my birth, but my 6th SES altogether (I did also attend SMX London last year). I would have to say that this was a very enjoyable conference. The sesions seemed to be well put together, with the moderators being encouraged to meet with their presenters in advance of the show, which I think really helped. The moderator for my session was Jon Myers, and given that he works in Manchester, and I was staying at my parents house, 20 minutes outside town… we met at his work the week before, as well as meeting for breakfast the day of the presentation.

Unfortunately I came down sick with a rather nasty cold, so I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I would have liked, but those that I did attend were great, there were a great batch of presenters at this show, and like Li, I didn’t see any blatant plugging going on in presentations…

The only ‘official’ after party was the London SEO party on the last evening, when everyone that didn’t have a raging cold (that would be me) really did their best to try to drink the Camden Head pub dry, but every night there were opportunities to head out to dinner with presenters, organizers, and other attendees, which really went to show what a friendly conference this was (so friendly in fact, that I’ve been receiving emails all weekend thanking me for sharing my cold with everyone).

It was great to see old friends, and meet new ones, so here’s the shout out to one and all: The Incisive / SEW / SES / ClickZ crew (Rebecca, Marilyn, Stewart, Jackie, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin (I think that’s enough Kevin’s)), Conference co-chair Mike, the Ayima crew (Rob, Melissa, Dean, et al), Matt, Nick, Patricia, Jon, Dave, Kristjan, the SEO-Chicks (Lisa & Judith), Lee, Dave, Greg, Adam, Matt, Dixon, Christine & Li from Key Relevance, Scottie, Frank, Andrew, Amanda, Anne, and many others who I either can’t remember right now, or I put their business card in the back pocket of the jeans I washed last night… whoops.

Thanks for a great conference, and a great time, and for those of you headed to NYC in a few week… see you there.

I guess the people at the new Adam and Eve Agency (UK) didn’t do some due diligence to find out about the problems they’re going to face… I wonder how many potential clients will type mistype their adamandevelondon.com url without the ‘london’ part? Although it obviously didn’t stop them from getting Cadbury Biscuits as a client, so congratulations to them on that.

Unfortunately their site doesn’t yet list their services, it’ll be interesting to see if Reputation Management is one of their specialties.

As more and more companies become aware of the issues surrounding online reputation management, more and more are realizing that they need to do something about it. Reputation management issues can be caused by many different sources, such as disgruntled customers / former employees, bad press, self inflicted PR problems, and so on. When you detect that there’s a potential problem, then it can take time and effort to resolve it. So why oh why do some companies insist on muddying their own SERPs with junky results that don’t provide any benefit for anyone searching for their company / product?

Here’s an example. Searching for the Kansas power company WESTAR, I found the following result.

This result was showing up right above the fold, so it was immediately visible to all.  What they need to do to get this listing out of the results is either 301 this page to the new domain, or noindex it.  301′ing would be preferable, as it would move any link equity over to the new site.

How about IHOP?  Here’s the second result for a search for their site:

 Not really informative, but it displays as it’s the only text on the page…  maybe they should think about adding a more informative description tag, or putting some text on their home page?

These are just a couple of quick examples, but take a look at your SERPs and see what’s showing up for your brand and your products.  Is there anything that stands out?  Is it something on your site that you can easily fix?

If you’ve seen the TV show Jekyl, you’ll recognize the lead in this commercial…

…or Spreading myself around like a spready thing.

Despite what Anthony has to say on the topic of writing posts on other people’s blogs, I’ve been busy doing just that, here’s a list of those that I’ve made on other blogs this week that you may not be aware of… (and the last one is what this teaser was all about).

Don’t Panic, Plan for Disaster (my last regular article on the In-House column)

Google Adwords: Geotargeting Options

Nonprofit Video Comparison

Facebook Ads for Nonprofits

The Motivation behind this Weight Loss Contest