Well, Think Visibility 3 was on at the weekend, and it was a great event. Many people I know couldn’t make it (shame on you), so here’s me rubbing it in with what I learnt from the weekend. Here I cover some of the things that I learnt from the event (keeping the very best stuff to myself!).

To those of you who haven’t heard of Think Visibility, it’s a conference covering a range of aspects from blogging, search engine optimisation, affiliate marketing, conversion optimisation, domaining, and more. The event is a pretty intimate affair, with around 150 people attending. As a result, the event is very friendly, interesting and a spectacular opportunity to meet your fellow digital samurai.

Speaker Tom Critchlow – Local SEO Strategies

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Tom Critchlow (@TomCritchlow) discussed how to get the best from Google Local, particularly with how you can improve the quality of your local business listing and improve your rankings within the map results. Tom had plenty of practical advice, particularly around citations and reviews.

What I learnt #1: Use your company name as your business name. The emphasis was very much a case of not trying to stuff keywords into the title of your business to improve your rankings. Why? Google actively discourages it and it can damage your rankings rather than improve them.

What I learnt #2: Reviews and citations matter in a big way. Tom said that at the moment, the quantity of reviews from different domains matters at the moment (a bit like backlinks), but quality of reviews (and the trust associated with the source domain) are quickly becoming a major factor.

Speaker Judith Lewis – SEO Case Studies

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Judith Lewis (@Judithlewis) had some advice based on her experience as an SEO. Judith specifically asked us not to blog or tweet about what we heard during the presentation. Therefore I am respecting that request.

What I learnt #3: Judith will do anything for (good quality) chocolate! Additionally, Judith’s presentations usually feature free chocolate!

Speaker Stephen Pavlovich – Conversion Rate Tips and Tricks

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Stephen Pavlovich (@BonyToad) runs a successful conversion optimisation business with some pretty significant clients. Stephen clarified what conversion optimisation really was, which is not just about changing your button colours!

Stephen covered the optimisation process, which included researching your traffic, coming up with solutions, testing, and reviewing your improvements. I also spoke to Stephen on one of my sites, where he kindly gave me a few more tips of things to test.

What I learnt #4: Use more tracking tools as well as Google Analytics. Some tracking tools will allow you to work out where people click on your website, which can identify potential issues on your site. One of many tools Stephen suggested was CrazyEgg.

What I learnt #5: Test different pages, but only do a few variables at a time. Testing too many variables makes it very hard to work out which variable is causing the improvement in conversions.

Speaker Kenny Goodman – Dynamite Domains

Photo Credit: sk8geek

The talk by Kenny Goodman (@KennyGoodman) was on “Dynamite Domains”, which was effectively about how to make money from domains and how to get hold of some really juicy domains. Kenny also announced a new tool he’s launching called Domain Face, which is designed to help you find some of these great domains. Kenny did get a little excited whenever he mentioned “dynamite” or “explosive”, I think he thought we were Americans!

What I learnt #6: Ask, and ye shall receive. Kenny kindly provided me with the opportunity to try the tool for free. Thanks Kenny!

Speaker Al Carlton – Making more hours with Outsourcing and Automation

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Al Carlton (@AlCarlton) of Self Made Minds and Coolest Gadgets was sharing his tips on how to save time and things he does personally to reduce his workload. Al covered a whole range of resources that you can use in order to outsource time consuming or complex work.

What I learnt #7: Don’t create a job for yourself! Essentially you don’t want to outsource in such a way that creates you extra work. You want to minimise the work you do to only work on aspects you enjoy.

Who I met at Think Visibility

I met a whole range of people at ThinkVis, many of whom shared with me some great tips and tricks for my own affiliate websites. Here are a few of the people I wanted to thank for advice they gave me.

• Jon (@JonTiffany) of About Loft Conversions – a long time friend of mine online, so it was great to meet in real life for the first time! Jon gave me some great advice on how to move forward with my career.
• Simon Barker (@simonbarker) of Zath – we had an interesting little natter about the practicalities of running gadget sites.
• Martin Wright (@mawawa – I spent a lot of time drinking with Martin, where he got to appreciate the finer side of my humour. I appreciated someone laughing at my crap jokes.
• Rob Cole of Focus Online Management – who doesn’t do twitter. Rob had some really interesting stuff to say on the topic of bingo websites.
• Patrick Moogan (@paddymoogan), who kindly mentioned my guest blogging platform BlogSynergy.com in his presentation on link building.
• Elaine (@ElaineAllkids) and Lee Forth of All Kids – Elaine gave me a simple tip of how to earn more from a niche website if I have a handful of successful products.
• Richard Kershaw (@QualityNonsense) of Quality Nonsense – a fascinating chap, where I got plenty of interesting ideas to test out on my own websites.

Finally, thanks to the team at ThinkVisibility (@ThinkVisibility) for a great event. You can see the photos of the event on sk8geek’s flickr stream.

For most people the upcoming holiday season will be one for relaxing and spending quality time with the family. But, for some of us it gives us the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and do some SEO work. Here are 10 suggestions for SEO work which can improve your ranking in time for 2010.

Image Optimisation Tweaks

Optimising images across the site can help drive up web traffic from Google image search and normal search.

1. Rename your images – To help the search engines index and rank your images, you’ll need to help them just a bit. Each product or service should have its own image with a descriptive name as close as possible to the product or service. For example, blue-mobile-cover.jpg has much better potential to rank well for the term ‘blue mobile cover’ than blue-4567-s.jpg.

2. Save in the correct format – Another important factor for optimising images is saving them in the correct format. The best results I’ve seen are when images are saved as .jpg as apposed to tiff or bmp.

3. Populate the ‘alt text’ field – The search engines cannot see the image however they can see its name and alternative text. You can view your ‘alt text’ by surfing your site with the images switched off. Take the time to add ‘alt text’ to each image including the product or service title.

3 Content Optimisation Tweaks

Here we are increasing the worthiness of each page to rank better.

4. Forget the manufacturer’s description and write your own – We all do that at times. We get the product live and use the manufacturer’s description word for word. While it might save you some time, other sites have used the same text as well which will make your version less unique. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just add some notes of your own which could be as simple as ‘recommended for…’ or ‘product benefits….’. 

5. Use keywords within the text – The keywords for which you’re trying to rank for should appear in the text. Avoid keyword stuffing because mentioning terms 10 times won’t improve your ranking. Instead place the keywords within the context of the page and make sure it reads well. Remember the search engines aren’t your customers, you and I are!

6. Add quality content – One of the best ways to increase your worthiness is to add quality content that your competitors don’t. It could be in the shape of editorial reviews, customer reviews and even how-to guides.

3 Code Optimisation Tweaks

7. Unify homepage versions – Your homepage is your most valuable page in terms of SEO potential. So it makes sense that you’d have one version of it instead of multiple versions. The most common versions of homepage duplication which will require your intervention are www and non www versions, .co.uk and .com versions and the biggest perpetrator is different file extensions such as sitename.co.uk/index.php / index.html etc. You should unify around one version of your homepage and set 301 redirects from duplicates to the source.   

8. Speed up the site – Google recently announced that at some point during 2010 the speed of your site will effect your ranking. SEO aside, it has always affected your conversion so you should look to improve its speed regardless. The more costly option is to invest in more hosting resources and the cheaper option is to display less products or services on one page,  save images as jpg (see tip 2) and improve your text to code ratio. 

9. Find and fix error pages – These 404 error pages could prove to be a pain. Some of them, such as old product pages, old press releases and newsletter copies might have some SEO value as back links. Try and point them to more appropriate pages on your site using 301 redirect to such pages as the product’s category or a closely related product.

A final piece of advice

10. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – Optimising your site to achieve high levels of web traffic can take time, sweat and a few tries to get it right. In the mean time, look at other channels of traffic such as social networks, paid search and even affiliate marketing.

Good luck in 2010!

This is a guest article by Joseph Eitan founder of Photo Paper Direct. Inkjet consumables online store selling products from Inkjet cartridges to photo paper.