International Search Summit

The International Search Summit kicks off this morning at the British Library with he welcome of Andy Atkins Kruger, introducing speakers and above all the international market where English is no longer the dominant language.

Geo.targeting and linguistics are introduced by Andy, there will be presentations during the day that will drill down and provide details.

Andy Introduces

Rebecca Berkich (Xerox)
166 websites for all countries where they do business and 20 languages. Illustrates an example of a new product launch on a microsite – people think differently about concepts. SEO & Marketing synchronizing SEO with other demand generation – different functional groups, goals agencies … optimisation into existing (or new) workflows (PR, Blogs, designers …) A way is to introduce search into the work flow and show why optimization is important – provide one page best practices, creating a focal point for the activities. Interesting consideration: If SEO isn’t core to web development, SEO won’t happen well if at all. Consistent repeatable process fundamental to any sustainable SEO activities.

Internal Education

• People search but don’t know a lot about it
• continual education process
• set expectations
• determine goals and show results
• plan meeting to measure your success and motivate SEO implementation
• organic search is not a light switch – it takes time …
• show the results – helps keep motivation going
• the website is a nodal point creating conflicts within the corporation – make SEO part of the marketing mix
• talk to the decision makers

Optimisation tips:

• Vocabulary
• new sites
• regular schedules
• meta tags and titles
• auditing
• plan for scope
• systematize where possible
• link build by theme or by section

Technical infrastructure

• educate technical team on coding for SEO
• when functional changes are made on a site make sure they work for search
• careful with
  • local domains
  • duplicate content
  • 302s
  • 404s returning 200 status

They do not have local IPs – duplicate constant is an important issue with hundreds of thousands of pages online.

Resources
requires budget and allocation – education, make SEO and web development the same issue.

SEO is a long term investment that doesn’t get cut if the budget is reduced – it keeps going. Rankings are like billboards. Search is the voice of the customer.

Search Linguistics (Tor Crockatt – Microsoft)

• keyword value & importance
• K/W research
• products & services
• language patterns
• tools
• algebra and keywords

K/W definition – concept of significance and de-cyphering – a keyword is a question. Concept of pull – keywords connect to customers – need to connect. Keywords define worlds and domains, different segments and needs related different users.

Expectations from words are fundamental – intent will make or break your conversions.

Language patterns in translation differ in different languages – understand how the keywords render and might turn up in the search engines.