Organics Listings Forum - SES London 2009

There are 3 special speakers on this forum today:

Michel Leconte, CEO of SEO- Samba, a full-fledged SEO automation platform has consulted with small business and Fortune 500 enterprises to develop their search engine marketing strategies. Michel answers some great questions from the audience.

Brett Tabke, CEO and founder of WebmasterWorld Inc, expert on the subject of Internet traffic, and a source of information for who is looking to get better traffic from the search engines. Brett knows what he is talking about and gives some great tips.

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, is a pioneer in search engine optimization, beginning in the field in the early 1990s is also the author of The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines and a moderator of the search marketing industry's social networking website, Sphinn.

Below are some of the interesting questions that were asked, and a combination of the answers given by our panel...

Question: Is SEO recession proof?
Answer: It is going to be a good test for the industry, so far it is looking good and the biggest cuts seem to go to the advertising side of things.

Question: Searchwiki and Personal Search, this lowers our leverage, is this bad?
Answer: It is going to force people into creating better websites. Searchwiki can be a great thing for good websites. These things evolve over time and its not sure if it will apply to the algorythme. We are seeing SearchWiki being tested trough cookies and not based on being logged in to the google account. The fundamentals of SEO will stay the same.

Question: Is it worth considering other searchengines than Google?
Answer: It is not game over for the others but is changing, it is now Google vs Facebook, vs Twitter etc. This trend will start to develop even more the next years. Small websites are closing the doors on the bigger players because of local search and Social Media.

Question: Off all the things you saw happen what surprised you the most?
Answer: Google manipulating algorithms to make their earnings go up with AdWords was a first. We have an industry that basicly lives off Google so all the changes wich apply to Google are always big on the impact list like Search Wiki this year and Universal Search last year.

Question: Do all the articles from submission services like PRweb will go down in value?
Answer: Google is great in detecting duplicate content and those releases are being devalued. But they do have some buzz and PR value. Good news articles can still generate tremendous amounts of traffic out of newssearch.

Question: How does twitter etc affect SEO?
Answer: If you are too promotional on it people are not going to follow you. It´s not a publising medium. Its important to note there is no direct benefit to SEO, it for engaging with your brand. Social Media needs to be a dialogue.

Question: How about geotargetting for different countries and showing different content
Answer: The last for a penalty or ban is a hand-check by Google checking for intent by the website. If your intent is good and not to cheat the search engines Google should not have an issue with it.

Again a very exciting day with tons of excellent speakers and information from troughout the world.

All our stories on Search Engine Strategies London:

• Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
• Universal & Blended Search
• SEO : Where to next?
• Online video update – The next wave
• Link Building Basics
• SEO through Blogs & Feeds
• Organics Listings Forum
• Brand & Reputation Management
• Landing Page Testing & Tuning
• Social Media Optimization
• Local Search Marketing Tactics
• SES London Day 1 in pictures
• SES London Day 2 in pictures