Roy Huiskes

Well i actually wrote a small piece on the newSearchCowboys blog about it. Please check it out and comment your ideas to it.

Searchwiki: Google’s solutions to be more social?

Well the search news is kinda slow. I’ve been in this cycle a couple of times now and nothing really new and exciting is happening at the moment. Things are a bit slow, so to say. Only thing that I do notice these days is that a lot of traditional search companies broaden up their services (onetomarket included). Taking over ‘old’ media or marketing tricks, without actually knowing the specifics and basics of the old way of handling things, isn’t really the smartest thing to do in my humble opinion.

For example, a lot of people are talking about A/B testing and conversion optimization. It would help them a lot if they actually took a course in old school DM and sales letters writing. A lot of ‘new’ techniques have been used and proven since 1930 by creative people like David Ogilvy.

Same goes with al this online PR stuff we continually read about. We all know that online PR is kinda different then regular PR. But if you don’t know the proven methods of offline PR, you really have to ask yourself if you want to reinvent the wheel to get the same result in Internet Marketing. It’s better to adapt the current services and improve it like we know how you get free PR in the “new” media age.

If you want to crank up your ROI, please also look at the past, because we all know that optimizing is more easy then starting from scratch.

Ow boy, it was so much fun. Meeting great people, seeing amazing presentations and hearing stories from the old days, back alleys of the internet and really smart people doing great stuff with their websites. Matthew at existem did a great job.

First night there was a pre-party where you could pick up your passes already. Spotting Marcus, Dave and his lovely wife becky got us into some SEO talk, but mostly good clean fun. My old colleague Joost joined us pretty fast (us being my friend Evert from veroworx and me). Auke from Affilinet was there are also, and we’ve been drinking a beer or two till the bar closed down, a great start of this conference.

Next day was starting out for me a 8 o’clock. My girlfriend had her birthday so I had to call her. Next up was some time to plough through my presentation, since I’ve started to get a little nervous. Didn’t matter, Joost his presentation about WordPress started at 11 and I wanted to see that, since he’s a good friend with great presentations. It rocked, and i’ve heard a lot of great feedback about that presentation. Nothing new for me, but the crowd loved it. And a big crowd it was!

Then there was the extreme SEO session, with a great line-up. Joost, Marcus, Dave and Rob were moderated by Ciaran which did a great job! Some other sessions could have used his moderation as well. It was an good session. Focused a lot on negative SEO and buying quality links and ’silver bullets’ (links that kill a site immediately). Had a lot of fun, and the quality was high. Nothing I could ever use for our customers, but knowing what’s possible is never a bad thing.

After that my presentation was up. Getting in the room looked good. 5 minutes before the start the room was packed already and people had to stay out, so the people of a4uexpo decided that we should switch rooms again so more people could see it. I guess there were between 100 and 140 people were in there. That would double the fun. Went through my presentation about Internal link building. I think I’ve made my point that it all was about contextual relevant links to you money pages and consistency. Andrew Girdwood did his talk about external link building and being controversial as he is, he advised that if your merchants were buying links, you’d report them and start ranking for the brandname as being a publisher. I think people liked his presentation as well.

Then we had to rush to catch the bus to the silver sturgeon which would sails us across the Thames, from buckingham palace till the millennium dome. That was pretty fun as well, although the food dividing was a bit fucked up. Some people literally were diving like vultures on the food since there wasn’t enough of it at the same time and people were starving. Didn’t matter that much since drinks were good and there was great red wine. There are some great pictures on the flickr page.

Hmm, this is actually enough for day 1 and the pre-party. I’ll write up a review on day 2 on our company blog since this will be live in a couple of days from now with a great revamp.

You can find other reviews at:

• Keith Bond
• Geoff’s blog
• Patrick altoft
• Dixon Jones
• Codswallop
• Yoast

Update:

• Peter Coles
• P Anderson
• The big bad A4U wrap up!
• Mel Carson’s Cost per Monk
• a4u expo – Conversion Rate Experts Reveal Conversion is All a Matter of Persuasion
• Lammo.net
• Befuddled me

Well, it’s done. I gave my presentation about Internal Link Building and it went pretty well. Got great feedback and people were telling me they liked the talk.

If you want to see my slides they are on slideshare now:
http://www.slideshare.net/chapter42/a4uexpo-internal-linking-structure-presentation/

I’m still having a blast in several sessions and I’ll be back in the Netherlands tomorrow. Let me know what you think!

Cheers!

But with a fresh start after the summer holidays a lot of stuff happened. My buddy Joost left, my job description changed a bit, got some more and other responsibilities now and my colleagues wrote a book which I read and did some quality checks on. I also made some of the images in the book. Meanwhile the deadlines for the A4Uexpo came nearby pretty fast. Gladly I’ve finished the whole thing today. Now it is time to work a bit on my blog and prepare for the presentation.

I’m really looking out for it. Joost and Marcus are really enthusiast about it and I’ve only heard good stuff. I’m very proud to speak there! All in all I hope to met you guys over there.

BTW. DaveN does a small dinner with Joost, Marcus and some more. Therefore he invited the readers of his blog and the listeners of Strike Point to give him a good reason to invite one more person. Well here’s my reason: since Joost left Onetomarket I can’t keep in the shadow anymore. I’m fun to hang out with and if that isn’t enough then I’ll get drunk on a boat on the thames I guess

If you play the SEO game you should not wine about losing the ball (or the whole game) every now and then. The Search Quality team is doing a fine job in the Netherlands right now by giving +30 penalties and blocking old school directory like linkfarm pages like www.goedbegin.com and www.startnu.nl.

Rule number 1.

If you game the system, really; Don’t wine! Get up, LEARN and try again.

Rule number 2.

If you game the system, game it good. Go Full Monty or don’t do anything at all.

Rule number 3.

If you game the system, do it on disposable domains. Don’t take risks on your brand-name.

I’m really getting sick reading the Google Help Groups with all people who believe Google stole their traffic. Especially if you’re not ranking for Jiba in top 5 anymore. Do you really think your website with some ratings should rank top 5 for brand-names? Of course it was comfortable like a warm bath getting all that Adsense money, but is it really that good of user experience? Get a hold of yourself, improve your website, add value and don’t be stupid. If you can’t live up to that, you should not play the game at all.

Well? On my macbook (yeay!) I did a fresh install of Firefox and it never was this fast and stable. Which firefox extensions are still necessary for SEO? I already have: Firebug, SearchStatus, SEO Link analysis and the web-developer toolbar.

I know there are lots of good extensions out there, but which one is really a killer one that every SEO needs?

While searching for lego stuff for my son I started out with a query about [lego]. Either this is a canonical issue, or good online reputation management. I do not doubt about the greatness of Lego but is this really what you think is useful for your users? Maybe it’s a better idea to use all these subdomains as sitelinks and provide some choices for your customers, so that they really are able to compare and buy some Lego.

What’s on my mind now? Well Tuesday I went with five colleague’s to the Affiliate day, which was organized by Paul Schoenmakers (Shoemaker, coincidence?). The keynote that day was done by Kris Jones, from pepperjam network, an affiliate network started only because he was tired by the networks that didn’t listen to the super affiliates. Now here lies the resemblance between Paul and Chris, they both strive for the same goal: More transparency by the affiliate networks.

Kris did a great keynote about all the opportunities laying ahead for us. His message for every attendee was clear: The future for affiliate marketing is great and the time to react is now! One of the speakers got ill and Eduard (Dutch blog, working for outrider) replaced his spot with a nice introduction about search engine marketing. Well done Eduard!

After that there was a great lunch for all 600 people and room for networking, which we did a lot. A lot of familiar people and a very nice ambiance. The Fabrique is really a cool place for conferences, being an authentic old factory.

Joost did his thing in the last session. His presentation (in Dutch) woke up the affiliate world in the Netherlands a bit. Talking about affiliate management, transparency and opening up and especial cooperating wasn’t what they were used too. Great stuff and really impressive.

Time for beer, uh networking and dinner. Kris went home already, because Robyn was feeling kind a tired by the whole Amsterdam Experience and we talked a lot with our friend from M4N and Afili.net, a couple of customers and people just wanting to know a bit more about SEO. Drank a couple of beers with some guys from GroupM/Outrider and just having a good time.

After that, I’ve got my hands on a good bottle of Champaign (thank Zylom girls!)which Joost and I drank in the car on the way to Kris and Robyn to have a small after drink/dinner in Amsterdam. The car was driven by our Managing Director for Germany, Evert who brought us home a bit closer to home as well! Thank you Evert

Overall a great day, a great event and props to Paul and his team of setting up such a great experience and step forward in affiliate marketing!

We all know Goatse (I actually have t-shirt about that, call me a nerd) and today sugarrea (twitter) pointed the people on twitter to this site. It’s not filthy like goatse is, but it sure is funny as hell. Check it out: http://thingsididlastnight.com/ This definitely deserves a link from me. Great link bait, too bad of the anchor text.