So I called the agent and asked if I could see the details with some photographs, maybe. At which point, the very friendly woman I was speaking to proceeded to describe the house to me in intricate detail. It has a white front door, she told me, an 8-ring-hob and range cooker, concrete walls around the front garden…I had to interrupt her, as it could’ve gone on indefinitely.

She’s sent me the details of the property on email instead. Of course, the link goes to a 404 on the agent’s website, and the images embedded in the email are all broken. I think someone out there doesn’t want me to see this house.

In the meantime, I attempted to find the property my own way on their website. Instead, I came across this little beauty – a fairly ordinary house but all means. However, the copy describing this house was anything but ordinary:

Seeing is believing, so take a look at this house and you will notice how many opportunities are about to explode in front of your eyes. Don’t mistake those fireworks for the 5^th November, it’s the electricity of the expectation that you are about to get your hands on what is the equivalent to the holy grail.

I am sure you will be in total harmony as you start your journey of exploration throughout this house. On the lower ground floor you have an excellent sized room which the current owners use as an office or this would make an fantastic bedroom or second lounge if you need that extra space. Relax, inhale and exhale, listen; You can’t hear any noise in this cavern. Just silence, until it’s shattered by your music or television or entertaining.

Weigh up the options, you may want to grasp the opportunity of taking advantage of the planning permission that is granted for another dwelling to be built to the side. Hypothesize about the opportunities that could be unravelled for you and your family as if all your Christmas’s and birthdays have come at once.

Whoever wrote this – I love you.

Follow our journey as me and my partner, Keith, try to buy a property, no matter how hard estate agents try to get in the way.

Day 1

This isn’t technically day one. In fact, we’d come within weeks of exchanging contracts on another property until the purchase unfortunately fell through. So now we’re starting again from scratch.

On Saturday just passed, I registered with about 10 estate agents in the local area, careful to tell all of them exactly what we’re looking for. For the purposes of this blog – I will give you a short list:

Must-haves

• Detached or semi-detached house
• 3 or more bedrooms
• Within 1 mile of a train station
• In Rainham, Rochester or Gillingham.

Like-to-haves:

• Off-road parking
• Downstairs loo
• Utility room
• On a quiet road

Today, I receive a phone call from an estate agent who wanted to tell me about a property desperately. I called him back, at which point he immediately referred to me as ‘Mrs Davis’ (I’m a Miss, thank you) and proceeded to tell me about a bungalow he had for sale approximately 2 miles from the station.

I referred him to my above list of requirements, at which point he said I was on his system as looking for ‘bungalows’. I assured him that wasn’t the case, but he seemed somewhat unwilling to admit his staff had made a mistake. With that now fixed, he proceeded to tell me about a lovely detached property with all the right features in the right area…but £40k over our budget. Thanks!

Secondly, I had a text message from another estate agent. It reads as follows:

‘Hi Mr Davis take a look at this, a 5 bed terraced in Eastcourt Lane, Gillingham. I’m already taking calls on this one.’

So, my name’s wrong, and we’ve told them we won’t consider terrace properties. On top of that, it’s well over a mile from the station.

I’m also delighted to have received this eloquent email in all-caps:

“PROPERTY IN A FANTASTIC AREA OF CHATHAM!

A VERY DESIREABLE AREA CLOSE TO THE TRAIN STATION ON FOR A FANTASTIC PRICE THIS 4 BEDROOMS HOME SET JUST OFF MAIDSTONE ROAD IN CHATHAM.”

Wow – if it’s in a ‘desireable’ area of Chatham I have to see this! but I click on the link and am taken to the website of the agent with no clue as to how to find the details.

All things considered, I’d say that’s a pretty good day one.

The article starts with a teacher suggesting that “girls don’t see IT as creative. It is that image of the geek or nerd in a room typing lines of code”. A different teacher said, ‘Boys are… more confident around the technology, whereas girls are a little bit shy, on the back foot before they start”.

This irks me. These observations are based on such a small sample of children that they shouldn’t be extrapolated out to cover the UK population. But more importantly, I believe that these teachers’ preconceptions of girls’ and boys’ preferences in IT could come to influence the way they teach boys and girls in future – therefore perpetuating the issue.

The feminine developer

My first proper computer – an Acorn Archimedies A3010

The article moves on to discuss a successful female programmer called Ms Chessell. She claims that “You can become a leader and you can lead in feminine ways”, including a greater emphasis on collaboration – a supposedly feminine trait.

But in my mind, this constant focus on ‘men’ and ‘women’ in IT (and in society generally) is part of the problem – we’re not ‘people’ anymore – we’re male and female. And when successful female developers choose to emphasise these differences (albeit in a ‘positive’ way), I don’t think it helps anybody.

This article goes on, but I feel compelled to move on myself before I fly into a blind (oestrogen fuelled?) rage.

How college finally broke me

I grew up with computers and have been a very keen gamer since I was 11 (much to my mother’s disappointment). So, when I came to leave secondary school, I decided to buck the IT stereotype and become a developer!

I was one of three girls (out of a class of 50ish) on the IT course at my local college. I got the impression that the boys on my course were surprised to see a girl there – perhaps I’d taken a wrong turn at the ‘health and beauty’ block just opposite? And from day one, they made no bones about showing it.

It’s difficult not to be self conscious in a class full of the opposite sex at a young age – particularly when so much attention is drawn to your differences. I could cope with the mickey-taking, the sexist/sexual jokes, the boisterousness and so on.

But the main problem came with the constant derision of my supposed ability to deal with ‘logic’. Yes, you need an element of logistical aptitude to succeed as a developer. Yes, maths is a helpful skill too. But many hours were spent telling me how I could never be as good as the boys because girls are naturally terrible at these things.

I done a logic!

Until I got to college, I’d always believed that a love of computing would help me make it through. But after years of being told by my peers, the media and industry that girls simply aren’t made to have these skills, I started to believe it. When the coursework got hard, I was embarrassed to ask my classmates for help and eventually, lost all my confidence.

11 years later I’m frustrated and regretful that I let those things get to me, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. I cannot stress how damaging it is to continuously persue scientific research and publish articles which aim to prove that women are genetically unsuited for jobs in IT.

Update: I found my Insights profile

The night after I wrote this post, I stumbled across my Insights profile from 2010. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a complex personality test used to work out your working styles. I found some excerpts which I thought were quite interesting, based on the post above.

‘Jennifer is a systematic and organised thinker, with highly developed analytical skills.’

‘Jennifer is painstakingly accurate and methodical.’

‘She tries to use logical principles to make sense of the ideas that constantly arise in her mind. Logical, analytical and objective, Jennifer is unlikely to be impressed or convinced by anything other than reasoning based on solid, concrete facts.’

‘Valuing logical and impersonal analysis highly…’

Just sayin’.

As my parents likely remember, Tomb Raider 2 was the first game I owned on the PC at the tender age of 11. And boy, did I love that game. It was thrilling, exciting, atmospheric and just plain fun. I gave her feminist credentials little thought at the time, but now I wonder how positive a role model Lara really was for me.

Lara as a positive role model

Even at 11 years old, I was fiercely aware of how few female characters featured in games, particularly as playable characters. In fantasy games, women were healers and magicians, in fighting games they were weak but ‘nimble’, while in many other genres they were simply side characters.

So here I was, presented with the curvaceous, beautiful, achingly well-spoken, terrifyingly athletic Lara Croft as the main protagonist in an action adventure game! Typically a genre dominated by hyper-masculine characters, I was excited to be able to play as a woman for once.

Lara is introduced to us a super-rich heiress with endless funds with which to fund her adventures and expeditions. I’m not sure how much that devalues her ‘independent woman’ status, but I’m willing to overlook it. Within minutes of the first level, we also discover that, provided the terrain she’s faced with is perfectly flat, she can overcome physical feats the likes most ‘real’ humans could only dream of. In fact, she can handstand, swan dive and shimmy her way through the world’s most challenging landscapes without so much as breaking a sweat.

And what else? She’s awesome with a gun. And not just pansy pistols, but massive guns including M16s and grenade launchers. Even more impressive, she carries her entire arsenal in this backpack.

So to sum up – she’s witty, eloquent, smart, physically capable, exceptionally talented with a range of guns and vehicles, and can take out 2 T-rexs on her own. As a young girl, what’s not to admire about Lara Croft?

Lara croft and her bad points

Lara Croft is physically improbable. Her breasts are enormous, her waist is tiny and, with a pony tail that long, her split ends should be atrocious. Her proportions are so unlikely that even an 11 year old me had to ask how many of her physical feats were technically possible. Sufficed to say, I don’t think Lara has a body image that should be aspired to. Which brings us to the question, why did the developers make her that way?

Lara Croft was coded largely by men, for men (and women to a degree). It can’t be ignored that the large proportion of gamers at that time were men, and one can only assume that Lara’s sexualisation was driven by a need to cater to that audience. But is her physical representation so out of kilter with the real world, including her unlikely measurements, her sexy hip-swing when she walks and the sexual ‘grunts’ she makes when she’s physically damaged, that her physical-self becomes a sort of parody? I’d like to think so, but I think that may just be a side effect. Maybe those elements are what helped me to side-step that particular ‘diminishing’ effect on her character.

Why I forgive Lara her foibles

So, visually, I don’t believe that Lara represents a good role model for girls or women. But the game’s sympathetic treatment of Lara as our lead character and their slightly parodist treatment of her physicality helps me to think more positively towards Lara as a feminist role model.

After all, the viewpoint of the game is such that Lara never looks us in the eye. It does not allow her to be sexualised to a point where there’s an impression of ‘control’ or ‘domination’ that supersedes her own strength and independence as a character. She never gets naked, she never engages in romantic relationships with others and ultimately, she is a positive, female lead.

I’m not going to engage in any debate about Lara Croft in the movies at this point, as I feel a lot of these ideas are ‘broken’ with negative results (despite being a HUGE Angeline Jolie fan). I also won’t discuss the desexualisation of Lara’s physique in the latest incarnation of the Tomb Raider series (a prequel to all the games so far), nor the supposed ‘character building’ aspect of her attempted rape in said game as these are entirely different arguments.

I’m always open to alternative ‘readings’, so please point out any positive or negative aspects of Lara’s characterisation is the Tomb Raider series that may support or go against my conclusion! But for now, I leave you with this:

A conversation I had on Twitter today started me thinking about the concept of ‘gentlemen’.  I have a tough time reconciling the idea, as it feels like an outdated concept.

Before I started to label my desire for gender equality this way, I think my drive to be taken seriously as a woman has led me to shy away from special treatment based on my gender. Let me cite some small, yet pervasive examples. As a disclaimer – I know to some of you – these examples sound petty and I will address that shortly.

Always 50/50 in relationships

A particular bug-bear of mine is a door-situation where a man, in his eagerness to be ‘gentlemanly’, will insist of letting me, a woman; go through it first, even if it would be significantly easier for both of us if the man had gone through first.

A second example involves the few occasions I’ve been offered a seat on the tube/bus/train by a man, despite his being at the seat first and being equally deserving of it (I am a woman, not disabled.) I never take the seat.

Another (silly) example is my boyfriend, who always insists on taking the curb side of the pavement to shield me from ‘splashes and dangerous drivers’ etc (he explains that’s what they did in the old days, when they had horses and carts). Frankly, I’m significantly less clumsy than him and therefore a much safer bet for the curb-side, but he simply won’t have it.

I can imagine droves of commenters (perhaps unlikely considering the average of 8 hits a day my blog receives) posting that I should appreciate this attitude from men when I’m exposed to it – but my reasoning is this: if I want to be treated equally to men, how can I accept (and appreciate) special treatment that I don’t deserve simply because I’m a woman?

I believe we should treat everyone we meet as we’d like to be treated. I know it’s an old adage, but wouldn’t the world be a better place if we treated each other with a little more respect and consideration?

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I have difficultly reconciling these concepts because it sounds like I’m encouraging men to be less pleasant to women (I’m not – see above). But on a very subliminal level, I feel that the special treatment aimed at me as a result of my sex disempowers me. It implies that, as a woman, I’m not able to stand, walk through a door or protect myself from horses and carts as capably as a man.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure most men only have positive intentions – so this isn’t a dig at them. And I know that the notion of being a gentleman is positively reaffirmed constantly by our society and that, in fact, many women love a ‘gentleman’ type.

But do any of my examples or feelings resonate with you – both men and women? Could gentlemanly behaviour ever be considered subversive (even on the deepest, most unconscious levels) or should we be grateful for all politeness?

I know it was half term
Maybe the kids drove YOU round the bend
Could it be that YOU were too busy?
Or that biscuits were YOUR only friend?
I’m no schoolteacher & I’d never tell YOU off
I’m only here to help YOU make sure
YOU get that weight loss
So this week come what may
I want YOU to come back
If YOU’RE losing motivation
Let me help YOU get back on track
I will give YOU a tracker
For YOU to write it on
Soon YOU’LL be amazed at how
Quickly those lbs have gone!
Follow YOUR dream; Take one step at a time
And, despite the challenges; Continue to climb.

Why does she keep capitalising the ‘YOU’? And no, biscuits aren’t my only friend ACTUALLY. In fact, I couldn’t attend the meeting this week as a result of a prior social engagement! With real, HUMAN friends.

If this is what I pay £20 a month for, I want my money back.

Working in digital, I’ve rarely needed to extol the virtues of content. But recently, someone suggested to me that on-site content could actually distract customers from the main goals of a website: to obtain new customer leads.

How could content distract web users?

If you have a company whose operation is based almost entirely offline, your web operation could simply be viewed as a lead-generation tool.

And this makes sense – you have a highly trained call centre that converts customers expertly. Naturally you want to drive people to call you, not to mooch around your website for hours.

And this raises the question – if you weigh down your website with too much content, are you cannibalising your leads?

What do I mean by ‘cannibalisation’?

Joe Bloggs comes to your website with the idea that he might like to buy business insurance (for example). He has a few questions, but he manages to find all the answers using your comprehensive website content (win!).

But now he has all the answers, so he doesn’t need to call your highly trained call centre to ask for help.

Is that an opportunity lost?

I don’t think so.

The overriding suggestion is that businesses can lose opportunities as a result of over-educating their prospective customers. Here’s why I think this argument is flawed:

• Comprehensive content makes your site more discoverable. There’s a good chance your customers found the site in the first place due to a natural search query. With skeleton content that is rarely updated or added to, your site is unlikely to increase its rankings and attract new leads in the first place.
• Detailed, well-written content helps gain prospective customers’ trust. Content is a brilliant way to show potential customers that you’re experts, thought-leaders and that you’re trustworthy. In fact, it’s one of the only ways.
• If web users don’t find what they need – they will leave. If a potential customer can’t find what they’re looking for on your site, it’s highly unlikely they’ll pick up the phone to call you. It’s far more likely that they’ll simply leave and go somewhere else that does have the answers.
• Content is vital for customer retention and social engagement. Customer acquisition is important, but retention is equally so. If there’s nothing for customers on your site, what will make them come back? How can you hope to engage them in social spaces if you’ve nothing relevant to share?

I want to be impartial and consider the counter-argument. So if anyone reading this disagrees with my argument, I’d love to hear your point of view.

Econsultancy looked after us with lots of free tea and drinks, a tasty lunch and a very nice venue. I was only slightly queasy by the end and decided to end my boat-themed day by catching the Thames Clipper home. in the picture below, you can just about make out the HMS President to the right.

The talks I’ll be covering were:

Change – A World In Flux. Will Francis, Social Advertising Consultant at DDB UK, Co-Founder and Director at Harkable
It’s not a numbers game anymore. Community Management. Andrew Davis, Social Media Trainer, The Worst Kept Secret
Leverage your presence on LinkedIn. Roger Jones, Digital Management Consultant, Actionable Insight
Content strategy and storytelling. Tim Tucker, Content Strategist and User Experience Designer

Change – A world in Flux

It’s not a numbers game anymore

Leverage your presence on LinkedIn

Roger Jones, an obvious fan of LinkedIn, gave this interesting presentation that covered all the brilliant features the business networking site has that many people don’t know about.

LinkedIn define themselves as an ‘information and sharing space’. It’s still the business network of choice with 2-3 million new users signing up every month across 180 countries. It’s not just used for recruitment – it serves 50m searches per week and the UK is taking it on far more than the rest of Europe.

Roger’s talk was brilliant but largely covered the cool functions that LinkedIn has – so I’ll run through a list of those here quickly:

• Advanced search – an extremely powerful and granular search tool
• LinkedIn skills – tag your skills to make yourself easier to find
• Apps – use LinkedIn’s multiple apps to help syndicate your content
• LinkedIn Labs – LinkedIn have many experimental features here you can help them trial, with successful tests often being integrated into the site full-time
• Groups – use groups to become an influencer in your industry
• Job seeker accounts – upgrade to a job seeker account if you’re looking for a job – you’ll be prioritised in searches for example
• Integrate your LinkedIn with Outlook to get additional insights on your contacts before you get i touch
• LinkedIn app for smartphones – take LinkedIn with you wherever you go – share a virtual business card with other LinkedIn users
• LinkedIn resume builder – does what it says on the tin! Handy if you’re in a rush.
• LinkedIn Today will provide you with a newsfeed that shows you what all your friends are looking at.

Roger added an interesting statistic that for every 1 thing a person posts, 9 people interact with it and 90 more get to see it. He added that getting people to interact with your brand can be liked ‘pulling teeth’, stating that “nobody talks about something that’s not worth talking about”.

Content strategy and storytelling

This talk was probably the most inspiring of the day for me (although they were all brilliant) and came from Tim Tucker; content strategist, user experience expert and all round digital expert.

Tim approached the idea of content from a ‘storytelling’ or narrative point of view. He said that, instead of interrupting people with our TV advertising and getting in the way of what they want to be doing – we should create engaging content that they are seeking out.

Then Tim covered the ‘science of stories’. It is scientifically proven that, as human beings, we used narrative to make sense of a world chock-full of attacks on our senses at every moment of the day. Our memories are interwoven in such a way that forming them into narratives makes memory recollection far quicker and more powerful. In short – narrative appeals to our human nature.

Successful brands are stories that resonate with their customers’ world view. We don’t have the time or power to change people’s stories – we need to understand people and their stories to understand them. 

Try to listen to your customers and find out their stories by keeping your eye on the places where they interact. Create personas who represent those users and further to that, create scenarios that represent the average user experience with your company. Then, when you undertake your marketing, aim it at those personas specifically – it will help you to keep a tight focus.

Good stories should:

• Communicate your message
• Establish relationships
• Demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership
• Persuade your audience to take action.

People themselves are engaging subjects for content – tell your cusotmers’ stories, tell your employees’ stories – feed all of this into your content. Project your personality. Use your copywriting to ‘show’, not tell.

Tim added that there are three vital elements to a successful story:

It must be memorable. Make it simple, unexpected, concrete, credible and emotional.

A good story is authentic. Embrace your own story – live the story you’re telling.

A good story evokes emotion. We buy based on emotions. A good story is human.

I really enjoyed Tim’s approach to content as it gave me an interesting new perspective on how readers digest content and what my company could potentially do to stand out. It simply made very good sense.

So I’d like to thank Econsultancy for a brilliant, insightful day and all the interesting and friendly people I met in between seminars.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the very decent and very free BrightonSEO conference.

Although I’m not an SEO specialist, I’m interested in the subject and wanted to take the opportunity to see my friend and ex-colleague, Erika Ungar (@erikau) give her first public talk.

Gratefully, I was among the like-minded as I sat with 3 other copywriters who shared my interest. I won’t summarise the whole conference as I’m sure there are plenty of bloggers doing that – but I will summarise what I found particularly interesting/enjoyable from the day.

If you want to jump to a specific talk, please use the quick-links! You can also watch the presentations on YouTube, although it seems they’re not all uploaded yet.

How to win at SEO with duplicate content – featuring Pippa Middleton’s arse
Google Panda:  A case study
Choosing and implementing friendly URLs for eCommerce
My Hack Day addiction
Building a private blog network
Beyond the last click: Finding hidden SEO value with Multi-Channel Funnels
Market research: Informing SEO and Link development
James Bond: Architecture critic
Attracting Links
Dr Social Love: Or how I learned to stop worrying about Google algorithms and love the people

How to win at SEO with duplicate content – featuring Pippa Middleton’s arse

A talk by a man who can obviously write a headline (which I’ve shamefully ripped off in this post!) – Malcolm Coles, Director at Digital Sparkle, gave an interesting talk about how to get featured in Google search results multiple times for the same piece of content.

If I understood correctly – the technique he used was as follows:

• He undertook some keyword research and found a popular subject that there wasn’t much content around. In Malcolm’s example, he used the keywords ‘Pippa Middleton underwear’ (following a recent scoop whereby Pippa was pictured in a bikini).
• Malcolm then wrote a piece of content targeting these keywords on his blog under an original URL. This content was crawled and then indexed by Google.
• At this point, Malcolm went into his post (made on WordPress) and added an extra character to the URL to change it.
• This caused WordPress to automatically 301 redirect the original post to the new URL. Google crawled and indexed the new URL that leads to the same piece of content, without initially realising that the content is the same.
• Malcolm then repeated this process a third time. By the time Google had indexed the third link to the same content, a Google search of ‘Pippa Middleton underwear’ returned 3 links to Malcolm’s blog (all on page 1, pictured below), each pointing toward the same piece of content.

The result of Malcolm’s experiment was an exponential rise in traffic to his blog, up from the usual 1000 visits a day to an enormous 30,000 visits at the peak of his experiment.

It didn’t take Google long to realise that the old URLs were simply redirects pointing to the same content and they were soon removed. But – Malcolm demonstrated how this technique could gain your site thousands of extra visitors.

That’s not to say it’s the ‘right’ thing to do of course – but it was interesting to learn that Google could be used this way. Malcolm has since been in touch on Twitter with a link to his blog post on the subject – Winning at duplicate content. Read it!

Google Panda:  A case study

Being a former employee of Reevoo (the reviews and price comparison site), this talk by Jonathan Stewart, Head of Search and Social Media at Reviewcentre.com, was of particular interest to me.

To cut a long story short, Reviewcentre.com was hit hard by the Panda update (watch the talk for actual stats). Having reviewed their site following the release, Reviewcentre made many efforts to improve their site. They carried out a redesign, moved the ads on the page to make them more conspicuous and they put more, relevant content above the fold.

However, despite their efforts, they have so far seen no recovery from Panda whatsoever. They have also made the interesting decision to place their ads back in their former positions. Personally, I thought this might be a little hasty (after only 2 months of trying the ‘new look’). But hey, I’m not the expert!

I was most interested in Jonathan’s ideas about why Panda may have targeted them so severely (assuming that it wasn’t the design and spammy ad placement). Going through Google’s webmaster checklist, Jonathan picked out a number of questions that it seemed his site, (as well as Reevoo’s and many other review sites), would be susceptible to failing on. Eg:

• Does your site content contain a lot of spelling and grammatical mistakes?  (Yes – because it’s full of unedited, user generated content)
• Is your content well edited? (No, they have a policy of not editing user content)
• Is your contact produced en-mass from outside sources? (Yes, it’s user generated content)

And so the list went on in a similar vein. However, I was unconvinced by this argument, considering that a number of other review sites were not hit with a penalty anything like as severe as the one received by reviewcentre.com.

However, the talk was interesting and it was nice to see Jonathan admit, with some humility, that reviewcentre.com was flawed. It’s only a shame that he couldn’t deliver any positive news or results on his attempts to recover from Panda, if only to teach us a lesson on how to do it.

Choosing and implementing friendly URLs for eCommerce

My friend and ex-colleague Erika Ungar, Search and Usability expert at BouxAvenue.com (a really lovely lingerie website), gave this talk.

Erika explained how she devised a friendly URL structure for BouxAvenue.com (having been on-staff at the site since before its launch – a rare opportunity!). She described how she had to compromise both with the developers and the database system she had to work with, while also attempting to make URLs readable and friendly for the users.

Check out BouxAvenue.com to see what she came up with – I thought it was very inventive!

My Hack Day addiction

This talk was given by Dom Hodgson, Head of Stupid Projects at Pizza Powered. Being an advocate of Hack Days myself (although sadly, never an attendee), Dom spoke passionately (refreshingly and hilariously) about the benefits of Hack Days and the inspirational results they can have.

By the end of the talk I wished I could code (or design, or do anything useful!) so that I too could take part in one. Do it!

Building a private blog network

Sitting among a gaggle of copywriters (possibly the wrong collective noun?), this talk from John Mcelborough, SEO Consultant at Ioptimal, proved to be a little controversial.

John talked about how to set up your own private blog networks to basically provide reasonable quality incoming links to your main website. His idea was to set up blogs across loads of domains (as many as 50 – 100), launch them with 10-15 pieces of content and then continue to maintain and grow them. Once they gain enough authority, you can start using them to give good quality links and traffic to your main website.

John admitted that this was an activity he partook in himself, using copywriting services whereby you submit an article title and a freelance writer produces the article for you for a fee (a service like Copyblogger for example. Hmph.)

This made me and my fellow copywriters shake our heads a little, as John seemed to be condoning the creation of endless and quite frankly, ‘not very good’ content with which to fill the internet. He even used the word ‘dubious’ himself.

While I don’t approve of this practice, I appreciate his honesty and realise that it’s valuable to learn how and why others take part in this type of search activity.

Beyond the last click: Finding hidden SEO value with Multi-Channel Funnels

This talk from Dara Fitzgerald, Head of Insight at Fresh Egg, revealed a new feature in Google Analytics known as ‘Multi Channel Funnels’.

Dara explained how, using this feature, analysts will be able to correctly attribute a sale to the multiple channels a user has them visited from before buying. This means that the analyst is able to attribute an ‘assist’ to other channels when a sale is made, rather than having to settle for using either the first (introducing) or last (sale closing) channel to attribute the sale to.

For sites that have online goals, this sounded like a brilliant and invaluable analytical tool, considering that marketing can take place across so many different channels.

Market research: Informing SEO and Link development

Rosie Freshwater, Managing Director at Leapfrogg, gave a talk advocating the importance of customer research before engaging in marketing activity.

This included methods such as focus groups and large consumer surveys to really get to the core of what your audience is like, what they want, what drives them and ultimately, how to sell to them.

I couldn’t agree more with Rosie’s talk (although it was a lot to take in in the 20, 20 second slides she had!), although sadly, I think it’s too often left out of the marketing process.

James Bond: Architecture critic

I’d like to say a big thank you to Toby Barnes, Principle at Mudlark Production Company.

Even now, on reflection, it is hard to pinpoint the ‘point’ of his talk on modernity. However, I can tell you that it was refreshing, extremely funny and woke up the entire audience from a heat-induced lull. Thanks Toby!

Attracting Links

Another engaging and brilliant speaker, Dave Peiris, Freelance SEO (@sharkseo on Twitter), talked passionately about creating brilliant apps and content in order to attract links to your site.

He cited ‘Just Buy This One’, developed by the lovely folk at Reevoo, as just one example of a brilliant, innovative and useful website that really works to attract high quality, un-buyable inbound links.

He advocated the agile idea of ‘failing quickly’; putting your ideas out there quickly and seeing what happens. If it fails – ditch it, if it works – make it better. He argued that, while infographics and apps are becoming over-abundant on the web, there will always be room for more useful content (amen!).

He has kindly uploaded the slides from his presentation: Attracting links.

Dr Social Love: Or how I learned to stop worrying about Google algorithms and love the people

This talk by James Carson, Head of Search Marketing at Bauer Media, particularly interested me.

He talked a great deal about ways to build a social community around your product/site and how that can have an enormous pay off in the long run (for one of their publications, 20% of their traffic comes from Twitter. Quite impressive!)

His talk was convincing and inspiring but (and this is a big but), this guy had magazines such as FHM and Heat in his arsenal. I have to admit that every time I hear a talk all about social from guys with huge brands or super-popular publications, I have to be cynical about how relevant the advice can really be for smaller players.

What I’d really like to see is a talk about how and if social media can work for small companies who don’t deal in glamorous products or services – the plumbers and electricians for example, or B2B marketers who don’t have the same, captive B2C audience. Who knows – maybe one day, I’ll be giving this talk myself!

Edit: James has uploaded his slides and commented on this post. Check out both!

Just for fun

I think all of us at BrightonSEO were pretty star-struck when we were played this personally recorded message from Matt Cutts himself!

As a quick example – say you wanted to get a quote from a business to…refit your windows. You start to fill out the form on their website so they’ll contact you later to provide you with a quote. But halfway through the form you run out of time or, more pertinently, decide you don’t WANT this company to have your information on file. So you abandon the form and leave.

My question is – do you think it’s okay for the window fitting company to collect that abandoned data and, more importantly, use it? 

I’ve encountered this question more than once in my professional career and have vociferously stated that I am against it. I am particularly against using the data to contact someone directly, as they made a conscious decision not to submit that data. The counter-arguments I’ve heard are generally:

• “If they ran out of time, then we are providing them with a useful service by contacting them.”
• “Hundreds of businesses do it. It counts as a semi-hot lead, as the person has shown some interest in your service.”