I’m a recent college graduate from the Advertising program at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario. This was my first time attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, and I loved every moment of it. This entire event was a great way to “kick off” the start to my new career and (ultimately) my new post-graduate life.
I wanted to do more live blogging, but my beastly laptop kept me confined to a pen and notepad. I don’t mind writing things out by hand, but it does make for some difficulty when you’re trying to keep your site up-to-date at the same time. (I had to substitute my lack of blogging with updates on Twitter.)
A huge shout out to the organizers of the event, the live bloggers and the tweeting twits, as well as everyone else that I got a chance to meet during my brief stay in Toronto. It was a blast, and I’m definitely returning to Kingston feeling more confident and comfortable with the industry as a whole.
Day One gave me a good idea of what to expect from today’s panels and sessions. The activity on #sesto (Twitter) started to die down a bit, but I suppose it was for the best… my phone didn’t die this time! Mitch Joel was in town for his speaking engagement at the Cool Mobile Apps session, but I ended up spending time at the Analytics & ROI session instead. (I also missed out on Emanuel Rosen‘s keynote, which is unfortunate.)
Here’s my take on Day Two of SES Toronto ’09 (I’ve tried to keep things more concise today, outlining key “takeaways”):
10:30am – Analytics and ROI – An overall strategy should guide everything. SEO and creative should go hand-in-hand. Define points of conversion (“value events“) and start measuring, segmenting and evaluating data. Based on your findings, take action to improve your performance and effectiveness. If you’re trying to convince clients that organic search is a viable alternative to PPC, start thinking of organic SEO strategy in terms of a campaign. Build a strategy, measure everything, take action, and prove the ROI! Oh yeah, and you can’t buy a solution to hard work, either!
12:45pm – Information Architecture, Site Performance Tuning & SEO – Break everything down (taxonomy) and build a site structure that makes sense. Start with the foundation and work your way up. Define your goals, build a solid IA, a solid website, and conduct usability tests. Everything is about the strategy and the planning, and everyone should understand the basics. Marketing, creative, developers, everyone.
2:15pm – Paid Search Quality Scoring - Research, implement and observe. Always test your stuff, and don’t try to mislead your customers. Better quality = better results, not to mention a reduction in cost on PPC advertising. Use Campaign and Ad Group tools to help manage your campaigns and keywords. Optimization of PPC landing pages are a must.
If you haven’t noticed, careful planning and consistent testing popped up in every session I attended. I don’t know if this trend carried over into the other sessions, though (mobile apps, social media, etc).
Anywho, that should hit on most of the key points from the sessions I attended today. If you’re looking for more concise coverage, Montreal’s NVI Solutions has done a wonderful job of live blogging the entire SES Toronto event.
Once again, a huge thanks to everyone who attended – I’m off to find some dinner. Cheers!
I started using WordPress several years ago, and I’ve continued to use it for most site projects since then. The community is large, the resources are endless, and it’s extremely simple to develop and distribute templates. There’s very little reason for me to change platforms; WordPress works, and I’m not about to complain.
The following presentation was produced by Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google who is also one of the most notable members of the search engine community. He does a solid job of outlining the various SEO benefits of WordPress, and also touches on a few other theories that I happen to share (content is king, yada-yada).
I’m a recent college graduate from the Advertising program at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario. I’m hitting the ground running – this is my first time attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, and I’m pumped!
Monday June 8th @ 11:00pm – I just returned from an awesome evening at the SES Toronto meetup. It was a great experience. I met up with @MrMunchWeb and @davidcorcoran, which was a nice opportunity to bring the Twitterverse down to earth and meet some new folks face-to-face. We discussed a number of different topics: traditional advertising, affiliate marketing and content quality, just to name a few. It quickly became one of my favourite moments of the day.
Day One of Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2009:
There were a lot of folks tweeting throughout the day (a trend that I expect to see continue tomorrow, as well). #sesto was buzzing with highlights from the various keynotes and sessions. My phone died by the evening, leaving me without Twitter (or email, or search… or a phone, for that matter) and I didn’t have my laptop with me (this 17″ Dell Inspiron is too much of a beast to carry around!), but I did take some notes.
I’ve been watching Leo Laporte for years, and it’s thanks to him that I started to become interested in new media (such as podcasting) and the social web (I found out about Digg years ago via. Laporte’s This Week in Tech podcast). I’ve never seen Leo become as infuriated as he does in this video.
Some context: Leo is about to give his opinion of the Palm Pre, Palm’s entry to the multimedia smartphone world (in the same vein as the BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, etc.) when Arrington cuts him off, thus causing Leo to explode after a brief back-and-forth spat.
It’s understandable, though. Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch) essentially calls Leo’s integrity as a journalist into question. Arrington’s justification was that he thought it was all a joke. Watch the video, though – if this was a joke, Laporte certainly wasn’t in on it.
I’m partially relieved, though – Leo usually seems way too nice and bubbly to be normal. Now I know he can get ticked off, just like the rest of us!
Most users don’t have tons of followers, but is it a bad thing? Do you need to tweet every hour? Is there even a defined “right way” to use Twitter?
I started using Twitter a couple of years ago, at which point I described the service as a “real-time RSS feed with more interaction and more intimacy”. Earlier this year I even went as far as to describe Twitter as an opt-in chatroom. But it seems that I was off the mark, at least according to the figures put forth in a recent TechCrunch article.
A full 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers, according to an analysis of seven million Twitter accounts provided to TechCrunch… what’s more, 30 percent have zero followers.
Does this mean nobody is using Twitter? Or that they are using it more as a one-way information consumption service?
But does the successful use of Twitter really require you to have thousands of followers? Is having followers even a requirement of using Twitter? Maybe Twitter is divided into two camps: the messengers and the readers? And on that note, what defines proper Twitter usage, anyway? Do you really need to be tweeting away on a regular basis to “get” Twitter?
Several weeks ago I openly acknowledged my lack of direction with this blog. It was an admission of guilt, but it also gave me a chance to step back. I’ve done a fair bit of thinking since that point – trying to figure out what I want to do with this site, where I want it to go, and (ultimately) what justifies its existence.
The following list sums it up nicely:
This blog is a personal endeavour and a chance to have a concrete existence on the web.
I don’t want this blog to be dedicated 100% to “business talk”, but it should still have merit.
All aspects of my personality should shine through.
There should be no goal, no conversion, no sale. It’s just a guy talking about what he’s interested in.
I’m ultimately blogging for myself.
In a nutshell, andymci.com is – and will continue to be – a personal blog, and nothing more. I won’t use it as a platform for sales and services. It’s my personal soapbox from which I can share my thoughts.
UPDATE @ 11:50am EST: The story has been going strong. What started as confusion over a Twitter trend has become mass coverage of China blocking social media sites. The silver lining: this goes to show just how influential social media really can be. I’ll leave it to crowdsourcing @ Now Public to cover the growing story. Hopefully we can start getting more opinions siphoned out of China…
UPDATE @ 9:30am EST: As a couple of the comments to this post point out, we’re quickly approaching the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, and it appears that China is attempting to shut down access to the outside world for the next several days.
Popular sites – including Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress.com, Blogger and even Microsoft’s recently launched Bing - have been blocked by the Great Firewall of China.
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At the moment of this post, one of the trending topics on Twitter is #fuckGFW. The active tweets are written almost entirely in Chinese. So what’s going on?
First of all, a quick dive into Google reveals that GFW – when applied to the context of China – stands for Great Firewall. Tie in a history of Chinese search engines (including Google China) blocking certain content, and the issue at hand is clearly related to internet censorship in China.
A subsequent search brings up the Wikipedia article for the Chinese “Golden Shield Project“, another name for the firewall. From Wikipedia:
It has been nicknamed the Great Firewall of China in reference to its role as a network firewall and to the ancient Great Wall of China. A major part of the project includes the ability to block content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internetgateways. The system also selectively engages in DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested. The government does not appear to be systematically examining Internet content, as this appears to be technically impractical.
So this is all well and good – we now know that the Twitter trend has something to do with internet censorship in China and the aforementioned “great firewall of China” – but why the trending topic? Why now?
I’m still not entirely sure, myself. I’ll be keebing tabs on this trend for the rest of the day. If you can provide any additional insight, feel free to leave a comment.