blog

8 SEO Tips From BrightonSEO 2013

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:16:18 +0100

It originally started with only a few people in a pub talking about the jobs they found interesting, and now Brighton SEO has now grown into one of the largest events on the SEO calendar with over 2,000 attendees, a plethora of expert speakers, and hundreds of actionable SEO tips to be shared.

At GPMD, this is one of our favourite events and so we took the whole team up to make the most of it. In the post below, we have documented our 8 top tips to help you get a flavour of this brilliant event and apply SEO best-practice to your site.

1. Pre-Build FAQ Content For Social Outreach

via Sharon Flaherty from Confused.com

Research frequently asked questions in your niche (using tools such as Followerwonk) and then build content which answers them. You can then use this content to provide creative and engaging answers as part of your social outreach, if you’ve done your research correctly then such answers are far more likely to get links and be shared throughout your target niche.

2. Technical SEO to Try – Prerender, Powermapper, & Grepping

via Rich Falconer, LBi

Prerender is a meta tag which downloads and fully renders the file or page you request and holds it until clicked, this improves page speed which is an important ranking factor.

However Rich was keen to stress that you shouldn’t overuse this technique. To identify certain pages on your site you should start with, you can use the Visitor Flow in Google Analytics to see the biggest bounces and exits and aim to reduce these rates first.

You can also mix up your crawling by using Powermapper which provides a great alternative to industry standard crawlers like Screaming frog. This tool is highly visual (as pictured above) and provides several brilliant presentation templates for use internally or with clients.

“Grepping” allows you to use RegEx to pull trends and identify problems from your crawl data. To start grepping, run a crawl on your site (or the site of a link prospect), save the files, then install grepWin and search for potential issues and opportunities such as:

404s or other error pages
Anchor text & keyword saturation (aim for less than 40% non-brand anchors)
Pagination with Rel=”next” Rel=”prev”
Authorship with Rel=”author”
Schema.org markup

In a comical real life example, Rich highlighted that whilst crawling and grepping the Daily Mail site, he found that 40% of its pages contains the word “immigrant”. These tools can find all types of data stories, some more useful than others, but the key tip is that grepping allows you to save and run these text searches across multiple crawls and spot opportunities for both onsite and prospecting optimisations.

3. Use Big Data to Predict the Future

via Dixon Jones from Majestic SEO

In a particularly interesting talk, Dixon explained how you can position your content (and therefore brand) at the top of news feeds and topical search results by using data to glean likely events.

Nowadays social and user-generated platforms can often break news stories way before mass media sites do, so you can use this knowledge to ensure that you set up various alerts for specific stories and then position your brand at the top of trending results. For instance, celebrity deaths and weddings are often hinted at first on social media, so you can set up Twitter alerts and start creating content as soon as you get a hint. You can also scan social platforms and scrape Wikipedia for any changes so that you can preempt news sites and create engaging content before anyone else has time.

Another easy way to create newsworthy stories from data is to scrape download sites or social media platforms to see how many of your clients’s products (or related products) have been downloaded or engaged with i.e. "Widget X reaches 100 downloads/followers". These make great news stories and you can easily preempt them (i.e. at 91 downloads/followers), to start creating content in advance.

4. Don’t Ignore Internal Search

via Alan Ferguson - Central Bedfordshire Council

Internal search can often be ignored but Alan argued that by making a few optimisations you can significantly improve the user experience and conversion of your site.

Firstly, look at the most popular internal search terms and ensure that you add these phrases to your information architecture. For instance you may find that one of your top searches is “Blue Widget”, and one solution may be to include this term in your navigation or sidebar.

Secondly, you should ensure that each of these popular searches leads to the right page. If they don’t then edit the target page so that they do i.e. ensure that the search phrase is included sufficiently and test until it does.

You can find more tips and best practice for internal search from Louis Rosenfeld’s Search Analytics.

5. Issues-Based Content Gets Links & Engagement

via Sharon Flaherty from Confused.com

Create videos and articles on controversial and newsworthy topics that surround your niche. Don’t just create the same kinds of content but think about every issue that your audience might be interested in or affected by. Sharon highlighted a video created by Confused.com to illustrate the willingness of strangers to let a clearly intoxicated man get into his car (as above). This video aims to encourage people not to do the same with their friends and family and emphasises the danger of drink driving. This video received numerous likes and shares, and helped align the Confused brand with important issues that people care about.

Not every company you work with will have the most linkable or engaging product/service, but every brand in the world can be related to issues that matter and that will always give you strong options for content.

6. Are you suffering from Negative SEO?

via Julia Logan from ContentMango

Negative SEO has unfortunately become more commonplace since Google’s Penguin and it has now become too easy to buy 10,000 “bad links” and point them to your competitors. So how do you know if you’re being attacked?

Firstly, it’s always good to check that it’s not actually a self-inflicted penalty so here’s a list of checks:

Check for duplicate content
Setup & fix robots.txt (check errors with an expert)
Check the security of your plugins
Check your link profile for violations of Google’s Penguin

Secondly, keep a frequent watch on your anchor text and look out for a sudden surge of incoming links or an inexplicable drop in rankings (to do so, you can use tools such as Open Site Explorer and Advanced Web Rankings).

Thirdly, for Wordpress users, Julia shared three crucial rules to add to the robots.txt of your WP blog. These rules help reduce the likelihood of you inadvertently duplicating content and thus getting penalized in a manner similar to Negative SEO:

Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /search/

If you’ve tried all of these and it still looks like you’ve got a problem, then the chances are you’ve been hit by a Negative SEO campaign and it’s time to get professional help. Many agencies specialize in SEO recovery and it’s worth investing as it can be a costly process in the wrong hands.

7. Starting an International SEO Campaign

via Aleyda Solis from SEER Interactive

Getting into International SEO should not be taken lightly, but once again it can be a move well worth making: it can literally double your target market in a matter of months. Here are a few steps to take when starting out:

Firstly, decide how much time and resource you can put behind this, obviously the more you do the higher the return. At the minimum this could simply mean translating a few landing pages, but at the other end this could mean running and marketing an entirely separate site, so be realistic on your resources right from the start.

Secondly, check to see who your competitors are in that country and what their main keywords are. Different cultures will have different search behaviours, for instance many non-English speaking users will use English phrases because they think it will glean the best results. Spend significant resource researching the search-behaviour of your target culture, (you can use Google’s Keyword Tool to find the CTR of a phrase from specific locations but there’s no substitution for asking native speakers).

Thirdly, is your offering cross-nation or nation specific? Use the research above to work out whether you should be targeting a culture or a language. In other words, are you targeting all Spanish speaking countries, or just Mexico? The answer to these questions will decide your content strategy.

Fourthly, use auto-detection of the country by IP but always give people the choice to navigate to their local site. Therefore use auto-detect to add a link to your site for those users, instead of auto-redirecting them: this can cause frustration and ultimately bounces.

Fifth and finally, identify local leaders using tools such as Social Crawlytics and Followerwonk and target them for local link building and social campaigns.

8. Gamble on Big Content for Link Building

via Hannah Smith from Distilled

It’s a gamble but creating complex and well-researched content can pay dividends and will future proof your link-profile, as Google inevitably tightens the algorithmic net. Hannah recommends spending around 40 hours on a piece of content not including outreach, so it’s clear just how big a risk this kind of content is. Nevertheless the ROI can be immense, Distilled have found the success rate to be twice as effective, to increase organic traffic by 45%, and noticeably increase conversion.

To achieve this, it’s worth making sure of the following checks:

Content needs to support brand positioning (for engagement but also more likely to get signoff)
Evergreen content is far less risky than topical/seasonal content
Use your best idea first, but have plenty more ideas in your back pocket
Set benchmarks for success before launch
Don’t believe the hype – great content doesn’t get links by itself. Big content opens doors, but it doesn’t do all the work

Images courtesy of: Prespectiva NegSEO iWebMonster

---

You can follow Fraser on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on his personal blog

Introducing the new Budd Shirts ecommerce website

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:15:07 +0100

Earlier today, we launched a brand new ecommerce website for London-based shirt retailers, Budd Shirts. The new website was built on Magento and is fully responsive, ensuring that it’s optimised for mobile users.

Budd Shirts, established in 1910, are one of London’s finest shirt makers, distributing the highest quality bespoke and ready made shirts across the world.

We've worked closely with the Budd Shirts team in order to build a website that caters for their main demographic and fits their branding. The new website is Budd’s first ecommerce venture and it’s launched with high expectations from both GPMD and the Budd Shirts team.

You can visit the new website at www.buddshirts.co.uk.

#LinkLive London 2013: Key Takeaways

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:05:25 +0000

Part of me was really sad to hear this was going to be the last LinkLove ever, although I would bet at least a hundred quid this is reincarnated as a content marketing event *snore* (Distilled - I hope this doesn’t happen!). Anyways, it was still sad as it’s probably my favourite conference and I’ve been lucky enough to go to loads over the years.

The speaker line up was really strong including Wil Reynolds, Rand Fishkin, Will Critchlow, Ian Lurie, Richard Baxter, Lyndon Antclif, Hannah Smith, Ade Lewis and Claire Stokoe. There was clearly a ton of drinking going on last night, but I’m still confident it’s going to be awesome...

Duncan Morris (Distilled): Introduction

Image Credit: Foliovision

Fresh Web Explorer: freshwebexplorer.seomoz.org
Find mentions excluding your own domain.
Look for citations for leads and link opportunities.
Visualise mentions over time versus different terms.

Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive): No finish line... EVER (image: http://www.affiliatesummit.com/)

Image Credit: Foliovision

What would you do if getting the link isn't the end, but the beginning?
Clients that are into publishing high quality content to educate their customers are a godsend.
Nudges are important, when signing up to a newsletter or engaging on social networks they are signs of trust and opportunities to build relationships and cross promote other content.
SEER does #RCS like buying books for its employees and sharing this on social networks, this led to building relationships with Zappo’s because they do the same thing.
Builiding relationships is the first step to building links.
Reaching out to brands and companies you work with that you love. Wil Reynolds tweeted about Rackspace because he loves them, this resulted in them asking for a guest post.
Feeding back to Basecamp on how their new features lead to a really strong testimonial link.
Sharing stuff they do at SEER has got them links from the likes of Google from sharing AdWords advice.
Wil wants to build a booth to help people like @garyvee, helping people means they are more likely to help you (and give you links that will probably come later).
Focus on being awesome and building relationships, not building links.
Encouraging users to upload images leads to social engagement and improvements in conversion. Conversions are better than links, the conference should be called Revenue-love.
Wil recommends Google suggest for brainstorming and discovery keywords such as “when did company”, “how to convince your wife” and “how to convince”. Great for content and link baiting ideas.
Look at who your link targets link out too - linkfromdomain:domain.com, download from SEO Quake (scraping Google SERP’s for queries) then run through Screaming Frog for link prospects. (I recommend also looking at Xenu to scrape outbound links by domain).
Looking at people who the White House link to with queries like linkfromdomain:whitehouse.gov intitle:software in Bing gives you lists of good companies doing good things.
Followerwonk supports regex e.g. location philidephia|philly and company microsoft|ibm
Google Ripples - use to research a URL and then search for influencers that can be seen with the big circles, these are the influencers you need to connect to.
twtrland.com and scrape similar plug in to find influencers friends and who they talk to.
Little Bird is a SEER beta tool for looking at emerging influencers by topic.
Build relationships with emerging influencers and listeners (these people can often be journalists).

Lyndon Antcliff (Linkbait Coaching): How do I get them to link?

Image Credit: 123 People

Attitude versus knowledge.
Psychology and theory are important, some people are naturals and don’t need to learn the process.
Most people find difficult and need to practice.
Link bait sounds weird, always use content marketing for clients.
Practice leads to a better attitude, link baiting is turning into publishing.
Content publishing is ancient.
Producing content for people is becoming essential, not producing content for Google.
People link to people, not websites linking to websites.
POMP (Pyschographic Mass Publishing)
Pyschographic - how people get an emotional, engaged response.
Build Pyschographic profiles of who you want to link to you.
You could only need one link from a “tribe” leader like Stephen Fry, this could lead to many more links.
Social signals help propel content and get more links.
Tabloid mindset helps to scale link baiting.
Primal brain is ancient and wired to keeping you alive, with survival instincts. Responds to fear, danger, death, sex, greed etc.
Primal brand controls hormones and loves headlines.
Sub-conscious brain is emotional, irrational e.g. impulse buying (or linking). It can perform 11 million processes at once.
Conscious brain is what we think our brains are. It can only do 40 processes at once, deals with auditory and visual input. What interests this brain? Likely to be visual.
How do you link bait the brain?:
Primal brain likes a headline
Body content for the sub-conscious
Let the conscious brain think it is making the decisions
Think like the Economist and write like the Sun newspaper.
Link baiting headlines:
10 ways to stop cannabalistic serial killers in their tracks
10 locks that keep out flesh eating zombies
How to stop serial murderers breaking into your house and eating you
Link bait the news:
Fits any niche
A way to scale link bait
There is always news
Cost of going to Mars in 100 years 30k people would have been. Link baiting can get links from the high authority sites by targeting topics everyone is talking about.
Don’t be the junkie, be the dealer.
Lyndon got a pay day loan link from Wired through a Mars story.

Hannah Smith (Distilled): 23,787 ways to build links (sustainable ways to build links)

Image Credit: Distilled

Type links into Fiverr and you get 23,787 results (that will probably get you slapped by Penguin).
Zemanta puts content in front of bloggers as they are blogging, effective and builds editorial links. One case study gained 200+ links in twelve months, pulls in links and its easy, costing on average $14 per link. They are good quality links and the payment is for impressions not links. It really helps campaigns as you get a constant flow of links each month.
Make all your images embeddable and Paddy Moogan’s tool can generate embed codes for you paddymoogan.com/embeddemo.
Creative commons licenses on Flickr where you need to link back to your website to use.
Image Raider runs reports using reverse image search that is perfect for infographics, reach out to people that are stealing your media.
Reverse image search has led to the best success rates on any campaign at Distilled 16 out of 17 emails generated links off the back of a PR stunt. Asking for image credits is easier than links. The lesson is to stop talking like an SEO.
Be careful not to build links for your video hosting platform. Phil Nottingham has a video embed generator that you can use instead of building links to YouTube and Vimeo. Find tools to report on video embeds.
Target communities, the easiest way is to buy advertising and make sure the adverts are nofollow. This makes the communities more open and accessible. You’ll get traffic and can develop linking opportunities potentially as a result.
PR coverage, but no links? Generate people pages, these are the easiest way to build links if your site is commercial or difficult to get links to such as a pay day loan client.
Rapportive is great for contact details and finding people, it’s great for following up on PR activity.
Following up on emails is really important, Boomerang is the easiest way to do this in Gmail. It’s excellent for scheduling emails and reminders. John Doherty has blogged about this and other Gmail tips on SEOmoz.
Simply Business is a great example of content marketing. Be prepared to build great content for guest posts as a follow up for top-tier sites.
Write for people when you use their tools e.g. WordPress and Camtasia.
Stop talking and behaving like an SEO. Don’t behave like a one night stand, follow up and become a contributor for the best sites.
Use all of your wins to publish as case studies, works great if your clients generate the content too.
Get great data and visualise it, like the Michelin star restaurants data that can be downloaded by the Guardian. It was visualised by Distilled and got DA 100 links.
Charity activities can generate great links like Innocent smoothies bottles with hats, it gets links, but they didn’t do this for links.
Doing great things that attracts links, when not trying to get links gets great results. Building really useful tools and content will get links anyway.
Open source software directories can be very authoritative such as CNET and Sourceforge. Open source technology can help you get links.
Leverage your existing assets, clean your link profiles and do awesome stuff that gets links.

Ian Lurie (Portent): Enterprise Link Spam Analysis

Image Credit: Videopress

Get links from GWT, Majestic, SEOmoz you need all of the links.
Put them into Excel with an extension like the SEO Gadget extension.
Look at URL’s, very spammy URL’s can be spotted without visiting the sites.
Look at title tags, look for bad grammar and spam signals.
Cleaning link profiles is like cleaning a cat's litter tray for the fussiest cat in the world (Google).
Learning machine learning can give you a little insight into how Google is working.
Machine learning in 60 seconds:
Start with a question.
The answer is a classification.
Put a training set together (the data is really important, the most fundamental part). Steve recommends going to Quora.
Put the training data through an algorithm.
Generate classifications or answers to the question is it spam?
Ian used Python, NLTK, scikit-learn, logical regression and looked at similar factors to Google such as readability measures.
Ian’s tool can be tested here: isitspam.portent.com
Clean up your backlink profiles now.
You need to futureproof SEO by looking at links that could harm you in the future.
Machine learning and data processing is becoming easier and incredibly popular for marketing.
Machine learning is easy to understand, but hard to build tools.
Ian’s slides and references are available here: http://bitly.com/bundles/portentint/x

Richard Baxter (SEO Gadget): Build agile tools and actionable link reports with API’s

Image Credit: Foliovision

Talk designed to learn how to build tools with API’s (really glad I don’t have a hangover like 90% of the audience ;-)
Wipmania.com is one of the easiest API’s to use.
Richard showed live examples of using concatenate to build API requests in Excel with =DownloadString.
Sharedcount.com is a great API which aggregates several social API’s in a JSON format.
=JsonPathOnURL helps to parse JSON for specific data and works well with Sharedcount.com to get social metrics on a URL easily.
The Links API Extension for Excel from SEO Gadget is designed to help get data into Excel really easily and supports SEOmoz, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs (soon).
You need to understand how the flags and response fields work to use the SEOmoz API, Richard has values to make it easy to pull of the free data from the SEOmoz API.
Building tools in Excel / Google Docs is amazing for prototyping tools without spending too much resource.
Using lists is great for making API calls easier to manipulate e.g. changing domain_to_domain to page_to_domain.
Richard will be making examples available and gave examples of using Majestic data too.

Morning Session Q&A

Look for examples of things people are looking for like “the history of...” then reach out to people that are looking for it.
Recommended books for psychology:
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness [Paperback]
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion [Paperback]
Put awesome tools and content on pages where you want links, such as building tools on your homepage e.g. site speed test.
Directories aren’t necessarily spam, but as a tactic with a lot of them it becomes a manipulative linking practice in Google’s eyes.
Download everything from all link sources and reverse sort, SEO’s need development resource to build their own tools.
Recommended coding book: Mining the Social Web - Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites
Open source SEER tools in Google Docs: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/seer-open-sources-everything
Programmable Web is the best resource for API’s.
Know what you are good at and stick to it, don’t get distracted.
Traditional marketing is becoming really important in SEO.
Build a marketing agency and not an SEO agency, its now shifting toward people.

Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz): How to transform your CEO into a link building, social sharing machine

Image Credit: iLoveSEO

Set the vision, live, breathe and spread the core values.
Become the brands chief evangelist.
Companies without brand evangelists - this can be a signal of poor marketing.
Nobody knows the business better than the CEO.
The CEO often has the best reach, this can be shown looking at Facebook CEO mentions versus any other position there.
The CEO has the most authority and can determine the companies messaging and direction.
Great leaders are often great marketers like Obama.
Awesome CEO marketers:
The Richard Branson - leverages his position for great marketing.
Ben Huh - Cheezburger
The Daniel Morrill - builds a great social presence
Ray from Ginza Metrics - comment marketing from the CEO
The Jeremy Stoppelman - Yelp
Chris Lindland - Betabrand.com
Options - you can delegate, pay for marketing and celebrities or decide not to make inbound marketing a major channel.
Tips for CEO marketers:
1. Understand your funnel.
2. Be a proactive contributor.
3. Leverage the press wisely e.g. paid paid vacations.
4. Empower your marketing team with developers that just work on internal marketing.
5. Get good at content. Get really good at one.
6. Recognise marketing accomplishments the way you would other major milestones.
7. Optimise your online bio (with links and vary the anchor text, always keeping updated).
8. Leverage favours and ask for shares, links and guest posting.
9. Use the CEO’s contacts.
10. Embrace authenticity and storytelling behind brands e.g. Louis CK promo video on HBO “it’s not a big deal”.

Ade Lewis (Teapot Creative): Small business SEO for £350 per month

Image Credit: Distilled

You need to be opportunist and say yes to anything you can.
You also need to be really good at one thing at least.
Know your clients business, visit them, have a cup of tea with them.
Educate your clients, explain why you are doing what you are doing and that it can take time.
Be realistic with what you can achieve.
Build a great website, your site needs to deserve to be on the first page of Google.
Building a site that looks good makes a lot of things easier.
On page SEO is the cheapest way to improve a site.
Distilled U, SEOmoz On Page Tool, mod_pagespeed and local SEO can provide quick wins.
Local SEO can enable sites to rank for really competitive terms.
Adding a blog can be a high ROI activity for small businesses. Focus the blog on content your customers are interested in.
Fix broken links and orphaned pages there are examples of fixing pages that had links from The Telegraph and Guardian.
Easy links - ask your clients for a list of contacts and outreach to them. Many people miss this step.
Outreach send a nice email with content. Really streamlined prospecting and there is a free tool Ade has given away: www.teapotseo.co.uk/prospector-tool (requires server). Guest Post Blitz mode runs a very advanced query for guest posting opportunities. Works with the SEOmoz API.
Outsourcing guide: http://www.mattbeswick.co.uk/outsourcing-guide/
Matt Beswick recommends “double researching” and only contacting people that two outsourced workers recommend to validate. This exercise can be as cheap as £33.
Ade recommends BuzzStream.
Ade focuses on 23-30 emails, in batches of ten emails. They pitch content ideas then get TextBroker to write articles for approx. £8.
The TextBroker tip is to use 4 star writers then add to favourites and build teams.
Allow writers freedom to increase quality of the content.
Leverage existing links.
Niche directories are also used with great caution and only a handful.
Make sure you are an asset to your clients business and they know that you are.

Claire Stockoe (MediaWorks): Out of 5 million infographics only 1.3% give you an orgasm in 0.3 milliseconds

Image Credit: Distilled

Infographic 101 - a visualisation of data.
You must find the data, it can be really hard.
Florence Nightingale even published an infographic! It’s true and it’s here: http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2009/11/25/florence-nightingale-causes-of-mortality-infographic-from-18.html
Infographics process:
Clients needs
Research
Select topic
Gather data
Plan a narrative
Sketch ideas
Edit
Design
Test and gather feedback
Finish
Hosting
Well researched, presented and placed as the three main factors.
Training and timelines are more evergreen, the links and distribution can go for many months after publishing.
Testing ideas on social networks before launch can work really well to tweak and iterate the final version.
How to dress like James Bond worked really well, getting the data right is the most important part.
Make sure you have 3 targets e.g. James Bond appeals to film fans, 007 fans and fashion bloggers.
Hit the top sites first e.g. Mashable.
Outreach via Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn works really well.
Take time to build relationships.
Gorkana PR database for journalists, then collaborate and work together on content. Create content for the journalists.
Seasonal infographics are much easier to get placement.
How to make an infographic:
Header should tell you what the infographic is.
There needs to be a hook that annoys or engages e.g. men versus women.
Paths are good for walking you through the graphic.
Be arty and actually draw things.
Use icons over text.
Colour pallette, don’t use too many. Colourlovers.com is good resource.
References and creative commons. Use references as people can get annoyed if you don’t. Creative commons means legally people should link to your infographics.
Know where you want the infographic to be placed.

Will Critchlow: The future of link building

Link building is a terrible name, we do so much more.
Good to Great and the flywheel concept should be applied to building websites that generate links and traction.
Everyone hates SEO’s and especially link builders.
We break directories, we ruined commenting and destroyed forums.
Ugly infographics on Pinterest, we are close to destroying them too.
Ad agencies are better at creative than us, artists are better than us too.
Case study: Snow Fall from the New York Times.
Stop worrying about hosting on IP’s and start worrying about users.
Stop worrying about nofollow and linking C-blocks.
Start worrying about how many journalists you know instead.
Stop saying link juice.
Start worrying about links you acquire that drive traffic.
Hire the Right Type of VP Marketing — Or You’ll Just End Up With a Bunch of Blue Pens with Your Logo On Them: http://saastr.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/hire-the-right-type-of-vp-marketing-or-youll-end-up-with-a-bunch-of-blue-pens/
Technical skills for marketers: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/every-marketer-should-be-technical
Focusing on earning attention, not links.
Will gave access to an analytics setup for finding your best traffic.
Entrepreneurial Design: http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/how-to-learn-entrepreneurial-marketing/
Make yourself feel uncomfortable.
Full stack marketer, design a full digital strategy and execute it. These will be the best marketers.
Spidering Hacks: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596005771.do
Try to make something and sell it online as a challenge.
The best marketers are a mix of creative, technical and extroverts i.e. traditional sales and marketing skills.
Full stack is the intersection between content, fame and technology.
Do your homework tasks in Will’s slides and email him!

The Final Adventure - New Adventures in Web Design Conference 2013

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:10:27 +0000

Back in January I attended the (last?) New Adventures in Web Design conference in Nottingham. What follows is a summary of the day.

The Nimble Process

Jason Santa Maria
@jasonsantamaria

Jason spoke about design process. Here at GPMD we’ve been developing and refining our design process over the past year, so it was interesting to hear how other people are doing it.

Iterate: Test, revise, test, revise
“But people will see it!” - “Yes, that’s the point.”
Design process is about continual communication
Clients aren’t idiots - Bring them into the fold
Avoid common pitfalls:
- Don’t worry about details initially
- Grids
- Sketchbook templates (eg. templates with browser chrome)
Where to start:
- Paper (“F**k fidelity!”)
- Gather your assets
The problem with wireframes:
- Wireframes should show content placement and visual hierarchy (i.e. using grey boxes), not detail
Some people find Indesign useful for experimenting with multiple grids and layouts
Once into the visual design phase it’s all about the text/content!
The problem with style tiles:
- They’re a bit like a Jedi mind trick
- They’re all about style, not content
- They’re better as an internal tool
Should I design in Photoshop, or the browser?
- It only matters when it matters
- Whatever is appropriate to get the idea across
- Use the right tool at the right time
It should be about “deciding in the browser” (Dan Mall), rather than designing in the browser
Interaction prototypes:
- Wally Wood’s 22 panels: http://www.flickr.com/photos/warrenellis/4043479776/
- moqups.com
- Keynote
- Gridset
- Typecast
- Bootstrap
We should be doing “Shitty first drafts” - it’s easier to revise than create

Overall Jason’s talk was engaging and interesting. I didn’t agree with everything he said, particularly with regard to style tiles, but that’s fine - every company has to find a process that works for them.

So far style tiles have been an incredibly useful part our projects as they’ve enabled us to nail the look and feel of the sites quite early on, but without having to worry about the layout. And because we’re talking to the client all the time they’re right there with us - we don’t just shove a load of photoshop mockups in front of them and expect them to choose one. This has enabled us to move into the prototyping phase much sooner.

Appropriate Tension

Tyler Mincey
@FictiveTyler

Tyler spoke about the strengths (and tensions) of working in a team, based on his own experiences as head of the Apple iPod team.

Strong design in deep partnership with strong engineering
Appropriate tension - how to work with a team
There should be an element of pushing and pulling
Impact requires interdisciplinary teams
Get good at collaboration
Recognising a healthy team:
- The burden of responsibility - held to a high standard and striving towards it
- Loyal to your discipline and product
- Respect experience and youthful exuberance
- Nurture a culture of respectful challenge - “Help me understand...” / “Why?”
- Longevity (wants to stick together)
- Understanding of constraints
- But also... innovation happens by moving constraints, not just designing within them
Good product as communication
Seek good people to build your life around

The Inertia Of Ideas

Michael Heilemann

“Follow your f**king bliss!”

That says it all really.

Responsive Teaching

Tiago Pedras
@tiagopedras

Tiago spoke about the importance of passing on knowledge and teaching in a responsive way. Tiago not only works in the web design industry, but also ‘lectures’ at ESAD, Matosinhos (Porto) in Portugal.

Be “devoted to the art of making and thinking” - Standardistas
Our mission - to give something back
There’s no point in comparing ourselves to others, we are each unique
Keep trying to do things better, never be satisfied
Be aware of what’s around you (like a ninja - Ninjitsu)
Belief - Perfectionism - Commitment
Passion!
Be good at what you do
The Golden Coconut Award - learning through gamification (project based)
Deep knowledge + creativity + passion
“Schools kill creativity” - Ken Robinson, TED Talks
Cultivate new talent
Be a mentor
Share your knowledge

Billboards and Novels

Jon Tan
@jontangerine

Having heard Jon speak at FOWD last year I was looking forward to hearing him speak again. His love of type gets me excited - my own background is traditional design and typography. There’s a lot to be said for people who have an understanding of type, but it’s often sadly overlooked these days. No doubt technology/services like @font-face have been key in re-awakening an interest in typography and typefaces.

Impact vs Immersion
Interruption / disruption
The web is about reading - language
What is reading for? (Robert Bringhurst)
- Words are gestures
#vss Very short stories
Aesthetics can be influenced heavily by how well interactions work
People are amazing - poor typesetting doesn’t slow us down
However, good typography makes people think they’ve read things quicker
Good creative tasks make things easier
Good typography induces a good mood - time flies!
Georgia and Verdana, by Matthew Carter
Font test text - agh! iIl1 0O
Css kerning and ligatures: text-rendering
Css hypens
Prevent orphans:  
Css font-feature-settings
Optimum column widths - R. Bringhurst:
- 45-75 characters
- Multi-column 40-50 characters
Squint test - look for contrast
- Use careful, deliberate interruptions
- Position, density, space, hue, luminosity, size, style, case etc.
ilovetypography.com - The Origins Of ABC
“Don’t think. Feel.” - Bruce Lee

New Adventures In... Code

Seb Lee-Delisle
@seb_ly

Not many notes on this one, but for me it was one of the best talks. Seb had a very natural, relaxed and funny way of talking about creative coding and did a few live coding examples, one of them even on a Commodore 64! As a result of Seb’s talk I will be looking to improve my javascript skills over the coming months, and maybe even attend one of his courses...

creativejs.com
Hybridify yourself! - be a creative coder
Book - 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (Software Studies)
Doing personal projects? - Finish them!
Robert Hodgin - artist/coder: http://roberthodgin.com/

Wayne Tells it Like it is!

Wayne Hemingway
@HemingwayDesign

Another inspiring talk from a well known designer. Wayne spoke a lot about his humble beginnings and his rise to fashion ‘stardom’. Despite all that though, he has remained grounded and does a lot to promote social housing issues around the country. He is particularly involved in regeneration projects, such as Dreamland in Margate.

The design industry = £40 Billion
It’s the second biggest employer
And has the highest return on investment of any industry
Design classes at school have the lowest truancy rates
hemingwaydesign.co.uk - Dreamland Is...

Procrastiworking

Jessica Hische
@jessicahische

Let’s not beat around the bush, Jessica is lovely! She has one of those easy-going, a little bit bonkers personalities that you just can’t help but adore. In her own words she “is a letterer, illustrator, and crazy cat lady known for her silly side projects and occasional foul mouth”. Jessica shared a little bit about her life, the way she works, and what she loves doing.

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should do for the rest of your life!”
There’s a sweet spot in the middle of ‘the work you love’ and ‘the work that pays the bills’
What do you have?
- A job - Pays bills
- A career - Rewarding. Sets you up for retirement
- A calling - Try and pry the mouse from my dead hands
Find out what you love doing
Simplex process wheel - creative problem solving tool
How to avoid creative block and burnout?
What inspires you?
- Have enough on your plate to feel satisfied
- But not so much that you want to throw-up!
Word association - process before starting to sketch

A number of the talks, including Jessica’s, served to remind me how lucky I am to be in an industry and job that I love. Thanks to all involved for your hard work and for putting on a great conference.

---

You can follow Matt on Twitter, Dribbble and Google Plus.

Recommended Magento Modules - A Crowd-sourced List

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:58:00 +0000

With the Christmas period firmly out of the way, online retailers can finally start looking at improving their websites ahead of their busiest periods in 2013.

With this in mind, I’ve compiled a comprehensive, crowd-sourced list of Magento extensions that are guaranteed to help Magento retailers get ahead this year. I was lucky enough to get contributions from a host of Magento professionals, all of which have provided details of their favourite modules for Magento.

Arush Sehgal, CTO of GET BRANDiD

SMTP Pro (Price: free)
Onepica ImageCDN (Price: free)
Sweet Tooth Platinum (Price: free) - This is a great module (and I hear they are working on a new product - like IFTTT for ecommerce, sounds crazy good)
My own Geckoboard and Olark modules (github.com/arush)
Zendesk module (Price: $19.99) - This module looks pretty good
SagePay Suite Pro (Price: $240) - This module has never failed me
Ebizmarts Magemonkey (Price: free) - This module is pretty good too, but a bit buggy

Paul Rogers, Head of Digital Marketing at GPMD

SEOpack (Price: free) - This is our own Magento SEO module which is primarily designed to prevent faceted / filtered navigation from being indexed by search engines.
SEO Suite Ultimate (Price: $399) - This module provides an all-in-one SEO solution for Magento. Although I feel there are some areas that could be improved, this module allows you to set meta robots rules, create more effective sitemaps, implement the canonical tag and much more.
Yoast Meta Robots (Price: free) - This module allows you to quickly and simply assign meta robots to pages and sets of pages.
Mageworx Extended Sitemaps module ($79) - This module, which is part of the full Mageworx suite, allows you to make changes to the very basic Magento sitemaps.
The Categorisation Module (Price: TBC) - This module, which will be launched soon will allow users to create new categories in Magento and automatically populate them with products based on rules from attributes.

Martin Dines, Web Developer at GPMD

Magento Wordpress Integration from Fishpig (Price: free) - This module allows you to relatively simply integrate Magento with Wordpress.
Fooman Google Analytics + (Price: free) - Comprehensive Google Analytics module.

Mark Slocock, Managing Director at GPMD

Locayta Merchandising extension (Price: Get in touch)
Wyonmind Shopping Feed (Price: $30) - This module allows you to quickly and easily create Google shopping feeds from your Magento products.
GPMD Checkout (Price: TBC) - We're really excited about launching our new Magento checkout (which is based on lots of research).

Ade Lewis, Director at Teapot Creative

Probably our most used Magento extensions (other than SEOPack) is OneStepCheckout (download here). We try to get any new clients we work with to include it in to their Magento stores.

We first started using OSC a couple of years ago when we were asked to refresh an existing Magento site for a new client. After creating a new template and launching the refreshed version of the site the conversion rate was better but the level of abandoned carts was still pretty high. One Step Checkout paid for itself in the first day that we installed it, the conversion rate went up again instantly. It isn't the cheapest extension around and there are free options for creating a one step checkout process but this is by far the best out there.

Installation of the extension is amazingly simple but one of the biggest factors for us is the level of support that you get from OneStepCheckout, they always go above and beyond their remit and their response times are always super-quick.

When we use OSC on a completely new site it is impossible to say what effect it has on conversion rates other than the fact that abandoned carts are always lower on sites that have One Step Checkout installed compared to those that haven't.

Tom Robertshaw, Director at Meanbee

Sweet Tooth (Price: free) - There are other loyalty extensions in the marketplace, but this is more than that. It's a focussed, extensible and innovative product which is perfect for our clients looking to engage and reward their customers more. Especially good at tying together online and physical world commerce.
Brightpearl (Price: $99) - although not technically an extension, is the new kid on the block to shake up Linnworks when it comes to inventory management. Also positioning itself as a replacement to your Sage accounting package it's going to see huge growth in the next couple of years.
Blast Lucene Search ($148) - Everyone knows the default Magento search is incredibly basic. This is a cheap, quick and effective solution for many stores and is one that we use regularly. Just the weighting of different product attributes is worth it in itself.
Nitrogento (Price: $299) - For those clients that don't investigate Varnish, Nitrogento is another full-page caching extension provided by NBS systems that speeds up sites for our clients.

Michael Kreitzer, Certified Magento Developer at Demac Media

Dn'D Patch Index URL (Price: free)

Description: This extension dramatically improves the performance and time frame for indexing the Catalogue URL Rewrites. By default Magento creates URL's for all products and all situations whether it is necessary or not (if the products are disabled or for all possible product category combinations even if short URL's are being used). This module takes these situations into consideration and allows you to configure it so only the URL's you need are created.

Opinion: I have found this extension to be a great asset when dealing with Magento installs that have large catalogues with non-visible or disabled products. Depending on the install you can have tons of disabled products and/or ones that aren't visible individually (children of configurables), this will effect (some times drastically) the time it takes to index. Using this extensions helps address this issue, taking indexing from never completely and timing out, to completing in a couple minutes. A bonus side effect of this module is URL maintenance for child/configurables URL's when they are generated using the same name. If the child product was created first, normally it would have priority over the URL key (even though there typically not visible on the frontend), causing the parent products URL to have a '-1' appended to the end. Because these URL's for hidden products can now be disabled, the parent products can now have the desired URL's

Demac Media’s Attribute Sort (TBC - Not yet launched)

Description: This extension allows greater control over the sorting of the options within product attributes, giving the option to sort alphabetically, numerically and even drag and drop into the desired position.

Opinion: On a typical Magento site there is always a couple filterable attributes with a large number of options (brands, authors etc.). It is important to present these options in a customer friendly way, typically alphabetical. In the default Magento install you are forced to do this manually and this becomes unmanageable and very time consuming. This extension was created to address this issue allowing quick and easy control, thus it has become one of the default extensions installed on almost all of the Magento projects we work on.

Corey Slavnik, Certified Magento Developer at Demac Media

Velite / Massredirect (Price: free)

Description: Velite’s Massredirect has been a very pleasant (free) extension to work with. The extension easily allows you to define a bunch of redirects. This is especially helpful if you are moving to a new site and have old URLs. The module essentially uses an observer to hook into the controller_action_predispatch event and then checks to see if the request is on a list of defined paths. (You define your own list in the module’s etc/ directory - the file’s called redirects.csv)

Opinion: We use this extension quite a bit even if the site says it has been deprecated. It still seems to work with our latest version of Enterprise Edition. It is very lightweight and unobtrusive and takes an inherently simple concept and keeps it simple. I would highly recommend at least trying this extension if you need to define any redirects, and I would recommend it over creating your own catalog URL rewrites as those change constantly.

Listrak / Remarketing (Cost: free)

Description: Listrak’s Remarketing module allows you to integrate Magento with your Listrak account. Note: it is free but you need a Listrak account to actually use this extension and find it useful. From the Magento Connect page, Remarketing allows you to integrate:

Shopping Cart Abandonment
Buyertrak - refillable/replenishable order reminders
Customer purchase metrics
Post purchase follow-up campaigns
Newsletter subscriber synchronization

It also automatically syncs order information to your account, and if you have customer purchase metrics setup it will sync that data as well. It actually extends the API to create its own endpoints which in turn allow it to sync to your Magento install and collect the most up to date information regarding subscribers and orders. It is quite unobtrusive and has not caused any difficulties.

Opinion: I have thoroughly enjoyed working with this extension as it’s very well coded. The code often runs in the background, implements it’s own sessions and tables, and the API is correctly done and refined. I have built on top of this extension to allow me to integrate with Listrak further, and it has allowed me to do so. It also has been useful to track cart abandonments and visually collect information for a shopping cart abandonment program. The only additions we have made to the actual extension is to add our own logging functions for more visibility into the API calls Listrak makes to our Magento sites.

Keegan Galea, Certified Magento Developer at Demac Media

WDCA Enhanced Admin Product Grid (Price: free)

Description: Enhanced Admin product grid allows you to add some information to your admin product grid, making it easier to manage your products. Information such as the image, date created, special price, descriptions and any other attributes you are using, can now be shown in the product grid. This gives you a wider range of options to filter by when editing or searching for particular products.

Opinion: This is a great extension (not to mention free!) that comes in handy on any site. As with any extension, there is the possibility of problems arising if you have any modules that are already changing the product grid, but if not, then you shouldn't see any issues with this extension.

Vinai Kopp Customer Activation (Price: free)

Description: When a customer creates an account, a message is displayed that they will not be able to use the account yet, and that they will receive an email when the account is active. To activate the account, the admin will then need to change the account active attribute on the customer in the backend. An email will then be sent to the customer informing them that they can now use the account.

Opinion: Clients often request for the functionality that this extension provides. It does exactly what it needs to do and it does it well. This is a great extension that I have used many times in the past and will continue to use in the future.

Allan MacGregor, Certified Magento Developer at Demac Media

Demac Media’s Visual Sequencer (Price: TBC)

Description: The Demac Visual Sequencer helps retailers that need to update and tweak the product position per category frequently. The extension provides an intuitive product drag and drop grid on the Magento backend and a series of default filters that can be used to arrange products in a quickly and effective manner.

Opinion: If you frequently need to change the products positions and you are frustrated by the lack of visibility of the product grid or the fact that it doesn't keep track of the position between grid pages, then the Visual Sequencer is a true time saver and a must-have tool for retailers and store managers.

Demac Media’s Canada Post integration (Price: TBC)

Description: If you need to integrate your store with Canada Post look no further, The Demac Canada Post extensions provides full integration with the Canada Post API and full support for all the day to day shipping operations, this extension not only offers rating integration but full support for the full shipping flow. Rating, shipping, printing manifests, shipment cancellation, detailed tracking and returns (EE version only).

Opinion: There is no other extension to provide complete integration with Canada Post, you don't even need to go to the Canada Post to create an account you can do it from the Magento backend, it supports Post office delivery, integration with Google maps, full tracking details and multi-shipping integration. If you truly want to support all what Canada Post has to offer this is the extension for you.

Paul Donnelly, Magento developer at Pierce Communications

Magic Zoom Plus from Magic Toolbox (Price: $70)

Customers like to see up close what they are buying, it’s not just an overview they want. When buying a car you don’t stand back and think OK I'll buy it. You want to get up close and see the fine details and Magic Zoom Plus for Magento does this with ease.

As well as the slick zoom functionality I really like the plethora of advanced settings available to you, it allows complete customisation of the extension to suit your needs.

Who Viewed This Also Viewed from aheadWorks (Price: $89)

Crosssells are important as we all know but they can be very time consuming adding them to each product. With WVTAV from aheadWorks, it does all the hard work for you or should I say your customers do all the hard work. Who better to inform customers of appropriate crosssells than the customers themselves. Each time a customer visits a product it displays products other users visited before and after visiting that particular product. WVTAV is pretty intelligent in that it logs the customers product views and only serves relevant products as crosssells.

Matrix Rate from WebShopApps (Price: free)

Magento's default shipping methods are pretty poor and even for the smaller businesses selling online, I have found they are just not good enough. With Matrix Rate from WebShopApps, it gives you that little extra functionality which suits many, if not all, of our clients. It allows you to ship by destination and by price, quantity or weight of a product. It also allows you to attach custom labels to each shipping method (Express, Standard, Next Day etc.).

Shipping Tracker from WebShopApps (Price: free)

Another WebShopApps extension we regularly install is Shipping Tracker. Shipping Tracker allows us to add custom carriers to our Magento stores. Carriers differ from client to client but with Shipping Tracker we don’t need to worry about that as it allows us to add any carrier the client requests. Shipping Tracker has a neat little feature where it has pre-set tracking urls as well as the option to add your own tracking url. When a tracking url is defined, the customer can link directly over to the carriers website to track their order via their confirmation email or customer account.

Extension Conflict from Boost My Shop (Price: $19)

We have all been there, you install a few extensions and one stops working or worse breaks your site. It can be a real pain trying to manually find conflicts but I have found this little extension is a time saver.

Extension Conflict scans Magento and alerts us of any extensions that are conflicting. It also has a handy feature where it gives you a little help and suggests resolutions to the conflict(s).

You can also follow me on Twitter or Google Plus.

13 Awesome Resolutions for Digital Marketers in 2013

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 13:30:00 +0000

After the smoke had cleared, I found myself wearing a crap jumper and all the mince pies had been eaten. When reflecting upon 2012 I realised it must have been a crazy rollercoster of a year for many in the digital marketing world! There is no time like the present to plan for 2013...

Bizarrely, and by complete coincidence I had a creative moment and managed to brainstorm 13 awesome resolutions for 2013. Thought it must have been a lucky (or really unlucky!) sign. Either way it motivated me to write this blog post.

After being off for a few weeks over Xmas to have my twins, it was an emotional time where I felt compelled to plan for the future, starting with things I want to do better this year. I thought it would be great to share this on the blog (and yes, you guessed it blogging more is also going to be one of my resolutions!) and as usual I will include lots of resources to help make 2013 as awesome for you as it will be for me!

1. Get More Organised

18 Minutes by Peter Bregman was a fantastic book I read over the Christmas period, which I thoroughly recommend. I have been hooked on business and productivity books in recent years to try and help further my career and deal with the torrents of noise that busy digital marketers need to deal with on a day-to-day basis. The genius behind the book is building structured to-do lists which ensure you group tasks into your main area of focus for the year. This means you can make sure that you are focusing on the right tasks and not building never-ending task lists that can make it really tough to prioritise whats actually important. It also encourages mixing up business and personal goals to reflect the challenges of getting your work life balance correct, recommending daily rituals to make sure you are getting s%&t (and the right s%&t!) done.

January is the ultimate opportunity to turn over a new leaf and implement Inbox Zero, the iconic approach to email many digital marketers swear by. It encourages you to keep your emails down to zero and extract actions with both ruthless speed and precision. Sounds like just what I need! When I first started here at GPMD I managed to use Inbox Zero and keep it up for a number of months, it was an awesome feeling not to have too much email hanging over you and I thoroughly recommend testing it. January gives you the opportunity to create a “2012 Archive” folder to clear last years mail and test the system. You can check out the famous video here or alternatively check out the articles where Inbox Zero was born here. Over Christmas I also found an interesting looking iPhone app built around making Inbox Zero as easy as possible.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a must read for anyone with a busy lifestyle and lots of spinning plates. It recommends approaches to use if you have to handle a heavy workload, helping to build a number of good habits including the collection habit, “waiting for” lists and someday/maybe approach to things you are never likely to actually get around to doing. I have read many people refer to his approach to prioritising getting tasks of under two minutes done as life changing. If all this jargon doesn't make any sense to you and you need help getting on top of your workload, go read the book you won't be disappointed!

Remember The Milk and Astrid for Android are systems I have used for years, they are designed around Getting Things Done (GTD) and currently I am using them to capture things as someday/maybe lists to get down ideas quickly.

Trello is a super simple project management and organisation tool that I have been using for some time. Just recently I have just got back into it and learned about some of the advanced options of using it including Harvest, Dropbox, Google Docs integration, using Google Docs scripts to access their API and building calendars. In short, I love Trello and there is so much to cover Trello will need to be the subject of a future blog post.

Something which stuck with me at one of the Distilled LinkLove conferences was Tom Critchlow recommending “top tens” for digital marketing. I am keen to try and use this approach for increasing the focus of campaigns e.g. top ten keywords and top ten landing pages, as often trying to cover too much in SEO (especially without the resource to back it up) can completely kill a campaign before it's even started.

SpringPad is a tool I have been using more and more, it's a free alternative to Evernote and is invaluable for grabbing quick notes on my phone. It's a great option for trying to consolidate and sync all of your notes, its also great for research as you can compile information into workbooks with text notes, checklists, images, audio and much more.

Pomodoro Technique is something I have tested and had success with for certain tasks, it works best for large tedious pieces of work such as preparing a tax return or revising for exams. Pomodairo is a free Adobe Air app I use sometimes and really like. One of the best things about this app is it's one of the few I have come across that encourages estimation for the length of tasks and reports on how accurate your predictions are. Really useful!

2. Build More Links

One of the best resources I found for link building that I recently revisited was Paddy Moogan's presentation from MozCon where he outlined 35 different ways to build more links in a fantastic and actionable presentation which included everything, but the kitchen sink. It even included some advanced search queries for Amazon contributors, new tools and strategies for generating links through content writers. It's essential reading for anyone interested in building more links in 2013. If you're feeling lazy there is even a video over on SEOmoz you can watch here.

In case Paddy's ideas don't keep you busy enough I came across this epic post over at Kiss Metrics which is a massive round up of post-penguin link building posts which includes many of my favourite posts from last year. You can check it out over here...

Eric Ward's newsletter is something I have heard practitioners talking about ever since I started in SEO, but I never got around to trying it out. Eric Ward is one of the industries best known link builders and has been around longer than any other link building veteran I can think of, so I'll be expecting great things!

There are lots of services I have been meaning to test out and revisit more in 2012, but unfortunately failed to get around to it, these included BrokenLinkBuilding.com, Citation Labs, Ontolo, Zemanta, Guestr, Outreachr, Blog Dash, Group High and a number of PR databases. This year I am going to be trying to make it a priority to test these services as I bet they'll make my life a little easier...

Reviews FTW! Particularly in ecommerce we are fans of recommending outreach around product reviews to achieve two things for our clients. Firstly it's an easy and straightforward approach for blogger outreach, but even better it can directly lead to sales and towards the end of 2012 we had a number of examples of reviews we got published on high profile blogs that lead to multiple sales as well as the obvious SEO benefits.

Testimonials are still the easiest and most “white hat” method I know to get homepage links and links from highly authoritative domains. Simply brainstorm all of your suppliers, partners and service providers, then get in touch with them offering testimonials which are often win-win as they will help their websites convert more users and you get the SEO benefits of great links. It's a tactic I have seen some of the most experienced practitioners use time and time again. There is nothing new about this technique, but it can still one of the most effective.

Universities are often overlooked as being too difficult and time consuming to target, yet still to this day three old school quick wins can include advertising jobs, offering discounts and offering sponsorship or competition prizes. I still regularly see examples of this and often working with Universities can be a great win for PR and recruitment for your business generally. An old client of mine in Edinburgh never fully utilised link opportunities from the University, but often referenced the location and channel for recruitment as a key driver to their success as a business.

This year probably the smartest link building resolution is to get more creative and make sure content you are publishing both on your own website and for outreach are generating both engagement on social media channels (e.g. consistently generating shares and tweets) as well as links from industry sites and bloggers organically. If you don't know where to start often getting involved with offline events, like trade shows and conferences, then networking, speaking, covering events and offering expert content can be an easy win depending on the vertical (and your experience!).

3. Remove more links

Since the Google Penguin update it's become essential to understand backlink profiles and natural linking activity. Unfortunately, this is something which can take years to fully understand and can be highly subjective. A number of pieces of advice that we can give you that are easy to understand are that building a small number of highly relevant, contextual and editorial links from authoritative blogs or industry sites are a really safe and future proof way to go. Generating a high percentage of links with branded anchors is also wise as well as is being careful not to optimise too aggressive for key landing pages.

An awesome tip from Dave Snyder is that some practitioners have been reaching out to bloggers and asking them to add the links themselves however they like editorially. This creates perfectly randomised links. This year I will be generating lists of anchors for key landing pages to make sure there is variance to avoid over optimisation penalties and filtering. These should include at least 15-20 variations and some agencies are reporting success mixing keywords with branded anchors such as; <BRAND KEYWORD> collection from <COMPANY>.

Anchor text ratio is really important especially since 2012, natural linking activity includes high volumes of branded anchors, particularly to a websites homepage and I would expect branded anchors to become increasingly more important in 2013. Some large brands I used to work with often attracted tens of thousands of natural links from traditional marketing and PR channels, nearly always over 90% of time (and sometimes even 100%) of the links anchors didn't include keywords and were branded links to the homepage. Strangely this even included authoritative sites with popular industry resource sections.

Inevitably taking the above points on board for many websites will generate the following actions for this year; contacting website owners to change anchors to more natural and/or branded links, asking for links to be removed completely or using the Google Disavow Tool to flag links to Google as low quality. The pressing action all website owners should do in January is to start (if you haven't already of course) to review all of the websites that link to you and look for the lowest quality candidates that you may want to remove this year. You should ideally get the links removed as a preference over the Google Disavow Tool as it is less proven in terms of effectiveness if they are indeed deemed to be potentially toxic. A great way to qualify candidates includes looking for spam sites with low quality content including grammatical errors, bad neighbourhoods such as blocks of sitewide links to contextually irrelevant sites (usually including gambling and/or adult sites and bizarrely often UGG boots?!) and sites that are generating next to no traffic in tools such as Alexa.com. There is a great article over at SEOmoz here on spam links which is also essential reading.

I have also heard whispers of possible filters where Google may start to ignore links that are unnatural, such as exact matches for target keywords, getting deep links built across a domain i.e. not just to the pages you want to rank for! Has also been reported as a possible quality signal by practitioners this year.

4. Get more social

Social media is probably the number one underutilised channel when thinking back across many clients I have worked with over the years, often as it is potentially so time consuming, requires constant and relentless monitoring often from with time required from senior stakeholders (and even sometimes teams of lawyers!) in the company. In 2013 social will become even more of a ranking factor as a trend that has been increasing over the last few years. There is absolutely no excuse this year not to get more social especially as we are predicting more major updates with social becoming a key ranking factor in terms of local, mobile and traditional SERP results in Google.

It's definitely a long term strategy, but a really important one that requires time and dedication. The real kicker is that as so often needs time and commitment from the most senior members of a company such as founders and Directors (who most often have the least available time – doh!) especially as they understand the business and vertical better than most other employees. The key is often (especially if resources are limited) to focus on combining with lead generation and a formal inbound marketing campaign. Building resource sections, lead capture forms and really high quality digital assets if executed correctly can generate regular leads (and links ;-) every month for years to come if you are brave enough to take a leap of faith...

Some fantastic resources to check out are this book and the below infographic from Eloqua that helps to plan and analyse content marketing from a lead gen perspective: http://blog.eloqua.com/the-content-grid-v2/

5. Get a content strategy with a calendar and content that engages

Content marketing is hot at the moment (and strangely annoying for experienced digital marketers like me). One of the key recommendations I am making for all of our clients is to make sure that content is performing and generating social engagement. If it isn't it is relatively straight forward to fix; either the content isn't good / engaging enough or more effort is required to promote it. One of our favourite tools for analysis of content and engagement is Social Crawlytics, it's especially powerful for running reports on domains that are doing a great job with their content marketing, especially sites that include blogs that consistently perform well. Social Crawlytics makes it really easy to identify the top performing pages and gain insights into what is working well.

Building a calendar is one of the areas where most people fail. A good editorial calendar will compliment other marketing initiatives and seasonal activities, helping to create a sustained approach to publishing. Often the most successful blogs use a mix of publishing regular articles with big pushes on higher value content such as video or infographics.

SEOmoz posted a great article on checklists for launching content that can be found here, it's one of the most comprehensive guides I have seen for quite some time and thoroughly recommended.

Anyone that missed Lee Odden's book “Optimize” last year should add it to their reading list ASAP. It's become increasingly more relevant and recommends mixing of SEO, social media and content marketing. From seeing Lee speak last year, wise words that resonate the most with me are Lee's tips on developing content strategies that are at the centre of a wheel with channels including SEO and social media platforms acting like spokes that require development. His background evolved from a blend of PR and digital, which I have always believed is super-powerful.

One of the quickest wins for a great content strategy, especially if you are not sure where to start, is curation. Rounding up the best articles in your industry is a solid approach and has never been easier with Twitter and services that analyse popular social platforms. This can even help you make make a great newsletter like SearchCap or Moz Top 10. Helping to create valuable blog posts and emails with content that's ideal for capturing email addresses for lead generation.

Quick wins are lists, interviews, event coverage, newsletters, reviews and getting the best people you can schmooze in your industry to create content for you. Here is one of my favourite resources for brainstorming content for clients over at CopyBlogger.

6. Do more research

A few of my favourite sources are SEOmoz, Econsultancy, Distilled Conference Videos, Twitter, Google Newsletters, Moz Top 10, SEO by the Sea, SearchCap and Search Engine Land. If you're anything like me sometimes you can find it overwhelming keeping up with the latest changes at Google, keeping an eye on a small number of sources is highly recommended from personal experience and specifically for algorithm updates this resource over at SEOmoz is worth its weight in gold.

Google Currents is a fantastic app for offline reading of RSS feeds for free. Recently I have been able to catch up on digital marketing news on the way into work, this has worked really well especially on my busiest weeks.

T-shaped skillsets are really important, and once you master one area of digital marketing you should explore areas you are less familiar with such as analytics, CRO, PPC, email marketing, usability, design, social media. It's something I have spoken about before and as digital marketing keeps getting more diverse its going to be really important to have a diverse skillset.

7. Review your design and usability

Something I am a big believer in is investment in good design and usability. Everything is easier with an awesome website; from generating more sales, happier visitors and customers to reaching out to bloggers (who wants to link to site that looks like its from the ninties?!). I have also seen an increasing number of link building strategies around images and image credits that can be a really solid tactic to develop links especially using Google reverse image search or TinEye for searching images.

For tranactional websites I would expect design and usability to always achieve an ROI on any investment in usability, design, performance and testing. Our own Mark Slocock is also a big advocate of these approaches and experienced practitioners will generally all agree that making key parts of your website easier to use is normally the most cost effective way to improve conversions and revenue. CRO is something we love at GPMD as it then acts as a multiplier to get a better return on any marketing activity you participate in afterwards.

Usability, good design and faster websites should be considered the holy trinity of web based businesses and are core to the very biggest ecommerce sites on the internet including Amazon and Zappos.

8. Stop chasing algorithms (but do keep an eye on them and on top of the latest initiatives e.g. authorship)

Experienced practitioners will all tell you how unpredictable and increasingly pointless it is to chase algorithms, especially Google's. With discussion of evolutions in ranking factors such as co-citations and with Google testing on average between 50 to 200 variations of its algorithm, ranking factors have come a REALLY long way.

However, despite algorithm chasing becoming a less valuable way to spend your time, as Google is becoming increasingly more accustomed with legal action they're being forced to become increasingly more transparent. 2012 saw unprecedented examples of detail published around algorithm updates and you can even sign up to a newsletter and have updates sent straight to your inbox :-)

On the flip side to trying to chase algorithms is to gain insights and clues to where Google is going through initiatives like Authorship, structured markup and rich snippets definitely shouldn't be ignored. With a mix of Bill Slawski interpreting patents and keeping up to date with changes over at Google Webmaster Central it can become increasingly more clear (at least broadly speaking) to see where Google is going.

9. Get tooled up

Most people in the industry know me from the time I spent at Analytics SEO and speaking at conferences, usually about SEO software. It's something I have written about previously on this blog too and I have even put together a huge resource of awesome free tools you can access here. One of the most surprising insights I have from working with lots of SEO's over the years is how many people fail to get around to using tools to save them time and make their lives easier, especially if they've being doing it for a long time. A great resolution is to work smarter, not harder this year. As the industry has evolved there is an app for almost anything you can imagine...

Mike King gave an awesome presentation in 2012 at Search Engine Strategies New York where he rounded up all the different software he uses. You can find the slides over here and it's one of the best round ups of software I have ever come across.

Annie Cushing deserves a medal for an epic collection of software for digital marketers over here, but be warned there is so much there even I was overwhelmed at first! If you save these three resources to dip in and out of you won't be disappointed and you'll be able to piggyback from all the hundreds of hours it took to put these archives together...

10. Do more testing

One of my biggest regrets over the years has been ring-fencing the time to do more testing. This year I intend to try and break this tradition by testing as much as possible and it's a great time to do this as there are so many things happening in the digital marketing world from authorship to co-citations and social ranking factors.

Danny Dover has written a section on tests he used to conduct over at SEOmoz in his book Search Engine Optimisation Secrets. He used a smart approach by creating clever test keywords and targeting them, which is one of the exact approaches I have seen both Google and Bing use themselves for testing search results.

One of the easiest wins is to incentivise employees to launch their own blogs (which can also be great training), which will also give multiple domains to play around with and run tests on without getting too spammy ;-)

Great candidates to test specifically are; authorship, citations / co-citations, structured markup, rich snippets, rel=canonical, Google Disavow Tool and all of the various markup recommendations that have been coming thick and fast from Google such as rel=next, mobile and international initiatives. Other options also include testing whether certain links are passing value and if you haven't got much time you could even test building certain types of links to competitors domains, which is a pro tip I learned from an industry peer.

11. Do more blogging

If testing was my number one regret, blogging would probably be a close second, which in a way has kind of encouraged me to write this so early in the year. To start the year as I mean to go on. Blogging is single handedly one of the highest value activities you can do as a business, but it can be tough and more of a marathon than a sprint. Blogs should help become hubs for content marketing approaches and developing genuinely useful and authoritative blogs can help to make many of your digital marketing efforts easier. I also believe over the next 12-24 months building a blog that naturally attracts social engagement and links will help to future proof your link building efforts as Google is getting so much better at spotting natural signals. A quality signal that is becoming more prominent are sites that generate more deep links and inbound links to more pages across the domain (not just the landing pages you want to rank). Developing a popular industry blog can help you achieve this and if you do it right, also help you generate a ton of leads too!

The difficulty with blogging is finding a way of generating decent content in a sustained manner over a long period of time. Often with blogging and social media there is no overnight success, rather success that is developed overtime generating more of a snowball effect. One quick win that can be had is video, if you are fortunate enough to have access to real experts in your industry (ideally in your team) video can be the most cost and time effective ways to generate good content, which Google loves, converts well and is ideal to syndicate to other websites including the video sharing sites. A great service I have found that makes this really easy to use is Screenr, where you can make short how-to videos really easily and it's free!

Curation as previously mentioned is also really powerful and if you do it right it can create amazing resources, because people are busy (and often quite lazy too!), curating content well is a successful approach to blogging I have seen across nearly every vertical.

Incentivising the blogger community and staff members for content is another really smart way to work with examples including Nettuts who pay for expert content.

12. Do more networking

Networking is something I have worked on for a number of years and now it's become one of my biggest assets. It can be hard, scary and to be completely honest nearly impossible sometimes without beer. One of the easiest ways to get involved is through meetup.com, conferences and related trade bodies. Forward thinking companies should also be encouraging their staff to attend industry events specifically for networking.

Similarly to blogging I have seen a snowball effect a number of times where forcing yourself to network over a couple of years can yield great rewards in terms of personal development, your career, leads and some of my best friends I have met through industry events. I am also a big advocate of forcing myself out of my comfort zone and if you didn't do much networking in 2012, this year will be the perfect time to start. If you pick one resolution of this list, networking could yield the greatest rewards for you.

13. Training – spend 2013 becoming a ninja

Training is a key focus for both myself and GPMD this year and I have been really excited about a number of courses and amazingly most of them are completely free. There was also a great blog post over at SEOmoz that covers recent trends in digital marketers increasingly needing to develop technical skills. Some of the most interesting courses I have found include:

Google Analytics – a completely free course that is probably the most useful for internet marketers, you just need to pay for the exam. If your an agency you can even get agency level certification.

DistilledU – a relatively new course, we know they guys over at Distilled pretty well and the most useful thing about this course is having everything in one place. They also recently added their conference videos, which I love.

Excel for SEO – this course is really useful for reference and to learn how to crunch data for SEO campaigns, with really actionable examples to test. If you're not using Excel to its full potential you should be and you should definitely check out this course. They also created a similar course for ImportXML which is an equivalent for Google Docs, the ImportXML functions are really powerful and can help you learn how to build your own agile SEO tools.

Udacity – is one of the highest profile free course providers, they include some of the coolest projects I have ever seen in online courses including learning how to build your own search engine and even a Google self driving car!

Codeacademy – I am really excited about Codecademy as for a long time they only supported JavaScript, but after checking the site out again recently they now support many other languages which you can see here.

Learn Python The Hard Way – is a fantastic course from Zed Shaw which is famous for teaching thousands of people to code who struggled with other courses. I am currently about half way through, I'll finish it one day ;-)

I hope you like my guide to resolutions for digital marketers. Have you got any resolutions? If so let me know through Twitter or in the comments and I hope you have a great 2013!

Image credits: chicagonow.com, memegenerator.net, eloqua.com, frabz.com, motivatedphotos.com

Top takeaways from SearchLove London 2012

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:00:00 +0000

On the 29th and 30th of October 2012, I was lucky enough to attend the second ever SearchLove London conference, which is organised by Distilled.

The SearchLove conference covers a variety of topics related to SEO, including content marketing, link building, analytics & attribution, conversion rate optimisation and much more.

As always with the Distilled conferences, SearchLove had a great line-up of speakers, which can be seen below.

Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive), Stephen Pavlovich (wish.co.uk & Conversion Factory) and Hannah Smith (Distilled) – Live site reviews
Justin Briggs (Big Fish Games)- The life of an in-house SEO
Guy Levine (Return on Digital) – The future of small business SEO
Mark Johnstone (Distilled) – Beyond linkbait : First steps to content strategy
All Speakers – Let’s get real (actionable tips from each speak)
Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive) – Chasing algorithms: Think deviously, act angelic and never get hit by a penalty
Heather Healy (StickyEyes) – Do social signals actually play a part in search rankings
Mat Clayton (MixCloud) – Marketing hacks
Will Critchlow (Distilled) vs Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) – Head to Head
David Mihm (GetListed) – The need to know of local SEO
Richard Baxter (SEOgadget) – How we build links at SEOgadget
Lauren Vaccarello (SalesForce) – Conversion tracking & online / offline attribution
Dave Peiris (SharkSEO) – The unexpected value of creating things
Lisa Myers (Verve Search) – International SEO – one size doesn’t fit all
Paul Madden (Automica) – Building an outsourced & automated infrastructure from scratch
Phil Nottingham (Distilled) – The building blocks of great video
Patrick McKenzie (Kalzmeus) – Eating CRO – Real world case studies for 20 ~100% increases in revenue

Here are my notes from the event (apologies for the slightly sporadic structure, I only made limited notes).

CRO / UX Takeaways:

Present a coherent argument to the user / new proposition
Best content doesn't come across on the homepage
Use on-site communication tools, such as Qualaroo and live chat
Look at ModCloth, they have really good product descriptions
Maximise product reviews on product pages
Utilise benefit bars
Don't have unnecessary steps in your checkout

SEO Takeaways:

When working in-house, it's really important to evangelise SEO
Getting input from your target audience can help a lot with infographic outreach
Providing exclusive content to editorial websites gets them more interested
Providing customised versions of infographics can get more buy-in from top sites
Creating sneak-peeks for product launches can generate links
Make sure you always have a landing page for things - can result in a missed opportunity if people talk about your product / campaign
Small companies think that an SEO agency is their web development agency
PPC should be on the radar for every SEO
The best type of content is the content that people want to read or they're currently reading
Small businesses should be targeting the longer tail terms, people who are aware but aren't ready to buy
Use Google suggest for content ideas
Use Mintel for content ideas
Use Google Analytics 'what' and 'how' keywords for article ideas
Look at what people are talking about at MoneySavingExpert to get ideas for content
Look at live chat transcripts to get ideas for content
Vocus is a PR tool that allows you to gain access to journalists within niches
ResponseSource allows you to see when journalists are looking for content
Infographics do not succeed if you know nothing about the topic, so work with someone who does
Show your infographic ideas to your friends and decide on if it's good by their response / reaction
Google registers lots of patents, but they may not implement them - and if they do, it might be in 10 years
Responsive infographics can often be more effective
Design Taxi - a resource that aggregates interesting content online
Use the #journorequest hashtag to see what journalists are looking for
Tweet archivist archives twitter searches
Think carefully about what your audience would find useful with linkbait
No good creative ideas have ever been designed by a committee
Searchga.me, hackerbuddy and grndctrl.com are great examples of creations that got links (by Dave)
There are 8.26 billion web pages online
ccTLDs are the best for international SEO
ccTLDs are best for physical locations - so if you have offices in different countries
You don't need to have hosting in the given country with a ccTLD
Use Google Webmaster Tools for geo targeting
Use seperate Google Webmaster Tools accounts for international subfolders
Use different sitemaps for each folder
Don't use ip redirection / detection
Only use the href-lang tag for indexation, it won't help you rank
Link development is the most important thing (apart from geo targeting) for international SEO
Use oDesk to automate SEO processes and tasks
Quix app is an auotmation resource created by Yoast
Video isn't content, it's form
Use JW player for indexable videos
Use the html5 video tag to get video content indexed
Video XML sitemaps are fundamental for rich snippets
Appliances Online visitors who watch videos are twice as likely to convert - they also spend 9% more money
Product videos are not sales videos
Use speechpad for transcripts
YouTube is the world's second biggest search engine
Advertising on YoiTube means you can add clickable links in video content
If you put video content on YouTube, put it everywhere

Local SEO Takeaways:

30% of all searches are local
20% of desktop searches are local
50% of mobile searches are local
Google wants to show everything they know about a business
67% of results are blended since the Venice update
Google hasn't removed any of the previous ranking factors for local, they've just added to them
Geositemapgenerator.com - creates KML and geo site maps
Use schema.org to markup your local info
Crawlable store locator pages are important for sites with multiple stores
Links are still important for local search
Branded anchor text in local does seem to play a larger role
Locally-relevant sites and links from articles on local blogs are good for local SEO
Larger sites should be leveraging internal links (good local anchors etc)
A citation is a mention of your business name, address and phone number - or a combination of the three
The four sites that are the most important for local SEO are LDC, 118 info, companies house & market location
Niche citations are valuable (job listings are an opportunity for larger companies)
Look for duplicates for your business, then report a problem to Google (one consolidated listing will rank better)
In the US you can use Google mapmaker
Search for your full address to see what shows up
Google takes a long time to incorporate data into its local index
+local reviews are slightly more important than they were
External reviews are still really important for local SEO
Sentiment analysis: Google can look at how good the experience was for the reviewer
Reviews is a huge part of Google's local algorithm
Google are looking at most helpful reviews
Segment customers with Gmail addresses
Yahoo local is better for the everyday user to do a review - no login required
Incorporate feedback into your processes
Try and reach the Yelp elite users
Use advanced search operators to find users on social sites
Search for a business within an area on Gplus, results come from maps
Use google suggest for local keyword research
Look at regions of users who go to your contact page

Fontdeck Display Problems

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:21:16 +0100

We have been having problems with the primary font on The Watch Gallery, the font we are using is only available from Fontdeck, a service that allows you to use licensed fonts on your website. We currently pay a yearly fee for the privilege, but are less than impressed with the results.

I've taken a video of my experience browsing the website and you will see that on every page there is a 'flash' where the font is loaded and rendered on the screen, this is because the font is loaded via JavaScript after the page is loaded, so the page is rendered with a standard font first and then re-rendered using the font once downloaded.

In the video below you can clearly see the flash of the font being rendered, something I believe is unacceptable for a service that charges a yearly fee. This rendering of the font is likely to adversely effect a customers experience when browsing the website.

There are serveral reasons why this method of delivering fonts is fundamentally flawed:

The font can't be cached meaning it is downloaded on every page view - rather than once on the first page view.
The JavaScript adds unnecessary weight to the page, causing additional load time
The 'flash' does not build the customers trust in the website

We contacted Fontdeck about the problem and were told our only option is to upgrade to the enterprise edition which would allow us to store the font in a CDN, the cost? $2,000 per year just to use the font.

Of course we could just use a different font, but this font is part of their branding and is supposed to be available for use on websites. What does everyone else think - am I asking too much for wanting a beautiful font that can be cached and served from our servers without paying $2,000 per year?

&lt;/p&gt;

The Ultimate Free Search Marketing Toolkit

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0100

This week I had the pleasure of speaking at a new conference called On The Edge Bristol 2012. I was really impressed by the organisers and their attitudes, they focused on giving the delegates really high quality content and even offer a money back guarantee if the attendees aren't happy. This is a really smart move as marketing conferences are starting to become a much more competitive space.

I spent some time thinking about how I could deliver the most valuable content and takeaways, so I decided to put together a round up of all of my favourite free digital marketing tools and resources, it has come from years of personal research and testing. I even gave away free licences for Analytics SEO and Pinalytics, if your looking for those please just get in touch...

I was blown away when moving predominantly to Linux several years ago how many amazing free tools there are available when I had to find alternatives to Windows based tools I used to use. Initially I fell in love with all the digital marketing related browser extensions, these were the quickest wins, as they are guaranteed to work on all operating systems.

Since then there has been an explosion in SaaS and web applications, especially as business owners understand the power of free tools as a marketing channel. Dharmesh Shah, a leading expert in startups and entrepreneurship, even considers web applications as part of his content strategy. He has spoken at conferences and believes the best ROI's he has seen at HubSpot have been from using free web applications, versus the high costs of maintaining one of the most popular blogs in digital.

My presentation featured over 65 free digital marketing tools and resources, I also focused on all of the tools that I feel don't get talked about enough, so I've missed out tools like the Google Keyword Tool that everyone already knows about. This is a celebration of all my favourite digital marketing tools, many of which have saved me hundreds of hours of time! You can access my full slide deck here, this post will focus on my favourites of the whole collection. Enjoy!

1. SEO Pack for Magento is a module that has been delivered by the team here at GPMD. I was really surprised to hear that the module will continue to be available for free. Its one of the first modules we install on many of our client sites and it makes optimising Magento much easier and more cost effective, especially from the savings in development work required to make Magento more SEO friendly. You can download the module here or read about how it can be used here.

For more information on how to build a really well optimised Magento site you should check out our guide here and also Paul Rogers' recent talk at ThinkVis 2012 here.

2. SEO Tools For Excel is a really powerful and free extension for Excel. A common theme across many SEO conferences is how much SEO's rely on Excel for analysis and to get stuff done (and this one was no different!). Many in fact would be completely lost without it. Currently I am working on solutions to use the Windows version of Excel in Unix environments, probably the best bet is VirtualBox with Windows 7. Often to leverage the powerful Excel extensions a native Windows version of Excel is required, however if you are using Apple Mac OS X or Linux it is well worth the effort to install and configure.

SEO Tools For Excel enables you to pull in SEO metrics straight into your spreadsheets meaning you can work much more efficiently and even build your own SEO tools. Martin MacDonald even wrote and awesome post over here on ways he likes to use it for link building.

3. ImportXML Guide For Google Docs I can never make up my mind about whether I like the term ninja or not for SEO and digital marketing, but I do know if you wanted to become one you should be all over this training course from Distilled!

Some of the most inspiring innovation I have seen in our space relates to the creative thinking behind building your own agile tools in Google Docs. The original ideas I believe first came from Richard Baxter over at SEOGadget, but the guys from Distilled grabbed them and really went to town. The original post came from Tom Critchlow here and since then there have been many other epic posts.

Best of all is probably this guide put together by David Sottimano, where by reading this and the original post non-coders can learn how to build their own SEO tools for free including scrapers, keyword ranking tools and I also really like Tom Anthony's Link Profile Tool and Competitor Analysis Tool.

You can also combine these resources with the SEER Interactive ImportXML Cookbook by Chris Le to extend your tools into working with many popular social networks. As content marketing becomes such a hot buzz word, Daniel Butler also built this tool for content analysis and finding influencers. If you have always wanted to build your own SEO tools, I strongly recommend you block out some time and learn how to hack around with ImportXML. I have also secretly always thought it was kinda awesome to scrape Google using their own tools ;-)

4. SEO Bookmarklets surprisingly often when I speak to people in the industry they are often not as familiar with bookmarklets as they should be. They are simple snippets of JavaScript that can be added to your browser as a bookmark that can then automate many common SEO tasks. The original post contains many handy tools and tricks. The post also inspired this bookmarklet from Troy Mayer. They can help you save lots of time and are really nice and lightweight tools. As JavaScript is also not exactly rocket science, I would also expect smarter folks than me to be able to hack, extend and build their own tools without too much trouble.

5. Grab Y'All Links is one of my all time favourite Chrome extensions. It enables you to quickly export all of the tabs in your browser into files when doing research. You can also mass open lots of URL's to different tabs making it easily to analyse websites or to test and review webpages that have been recently modified.

6. Quick Markup is a screengrabbing extension from Chrome that I love. It enables you to screengrab and annotate the images on the fly, making your life much easier (as sometimes I have needed to do this a lot!). The only negative thing is at the time of writing they added some nasty advertising, but you can go into options and disable it (highly recommended!).

7. Pencil Project is by far the best free solution I have found for prototyping and wireframing. It can be used as a Firefox extension and I prefer it to many paid tools I have used previously.

8. Ubersuggest is a really simple, yet powerful keyword research tool that helps to generate long tail keyword suggestions. It rotates all of the letters of the alphabet after your selected keyword and scrapes Google Suggest to help you expand your keyword lists. Long tail keywords are great as they tend to convert better and are easier to rank for because they are less competitive. Recent members of the community have also discussed strategies where they go after a selection of new long tail keywords every month as a long term strategy, this can be really effective for small businesses or campaigns with small budgets.

9. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is probably the best available crawling tool for SEO. Its really versatile and with the help of some Googling you can find posts that cover many different ways you can use it, from technical auditing to competitor research. I also personally like using it as a content marketing research tool. You simply run it across websites that you know are well optimised and have decent blogs, you can then use the tool to scrape content ideas out of them and get insights into what keywords your competitors are targeting. They are a UK based team who are really nice guys. The tool is available for free to use on up to 500 URL's, which I actually found is really generous from experience.

10. Analytics SEO is probably the most underrated tool on the market. I am slightly biased as I used to work there, but I believe their free offering for one website makes it one of the best free SEO software options available. It is a full platform that is good for technical auditing, keyword research, competitor analysis and link building. I also found it great as a training tool and prefer using it to Google Analytics (it connects via their API). There really are no excuses now for not using it now its free! You can grab free licences here.

11. Microsoft SEO Toolkit is an amazing tool, its highly configurable, you can design your own reporting and it can be heavily automated with C. Unfortunately, it requires setting up an IIS server, but the good news is that this can be done with most copies of Windows 7 and some patience. Every time I have installed this its either been really easy or a real pain, but those who take the plunge to learn how to get this up and running will be rewarded greatly ;-)

12. Bing Link Explorer is part of a new suite of tools released by Microsoft, it could offer the best replacement for the sorely missed Yahoo Site Explorer. One of the things I love about Bing is one member of their senior management team Duane Forrester used to be an SEO himself and has promised to release a series of tools for the community, in an obvious attempt to rival the tools provided by Google. Bing Webmaster Tools has also seen some noticeable upgrades and I would recommend keeping a close eye on their roadmap.

13. Duck Duck Go may be a surprise to some, but I absolutely love this search engine! So much in fact, that I tried really hard to switch to it permanently. The only thing that stopped me was the fact I am so used to using long tail searches in Google, and Duck Duck Go has a smaller index. I did however find that for head and mid tail searches Duck Duck Go was fantastic and can be controlled via the keyboard, making it a real pleasure for geeks like me to use!

However of the back of some research at Analytics SEO I tested Google, Bing, Yahoo, Blekko and Duck Duck Go for link prospect generation and found Duck Duck Go to be far the best. I would recommend checking out the syntax here and playing around building operators, such as using the advanced operator for titles when looking for blogs. The most impressive thing about the search engine is because it contains far less spam than the other engines in most searches it helps you to generate high quality link prospects, even in the really competitive (and often really spammy) verticals.

14. Tynt Publishing Tools is a system I first heard about over at SEER Interactive. It is a snippet of JavaScript that you can add to your website that appends your URL every time someone copies and pastes text from your website. Recently they have been gaining a lot of traction and Berian Reed at BrightonSEO shared a case study that showed some publishers were gaining over 10,000 links per week for adding a free code snippet into their websites. However there is no such thing as a free lunch and I believe that Tynt Publisher Tools are gathering data as part of the deal, but I would strongly recommend checking them out and getting some easy links!

15. AuthorCrawler by Tom Anthony is a really impressive tool that allows you to easily analyse who links to you. I was really excited at how quickly Tom managed to release this tool (it was the first I have seen to market) and its really useful to help you get your head around who is linking to you a.k.a authorship, as this will become increasingly more important for both content marketing and due to the increasing weighting this has in Google's algorithm.

16. BuzzStream Blogroll Scraper is an underrated tool that can help you to scrape thousands of relevant link prospects in minutes. Anyone who knows Paul Rogers knows he absolutely loves both BuzzStream and this tool. I would recommend taking the time to only put very high quality domains into it, as if you put rubbish domains in you can expect rubbish domains out. The beauty of it is they will give you a well qualified and relevant list of link prospects to work with really quickly and easily.

17. Social Crawlytics is a relatively new tool that enables you to analyse domains and find out which of the pages are performing the best in terms of social activity. This has two really nice applications; firstly you can run the tool across really successful publishers for general ideas on how to improve your content and secondly you can run the tool across your competitors to analyse their content to emulate their most successful elements.

18. Pinalytics is a new tool from the guys at Forward 3D. This tool scrapes data from Pinterest by keyword phrase and enables you to find bloggers in many different niches. One of the things I love about the tool is the fact that Pinterest is a relatively new platform so can offer really fresh data. Forward 3D have been using the tool and claim to have increased their link building efficiency by over 500%. It is also recommended for testing in boring verticals where they have also experienced success with Pinterest.

19. RSS Owl is a secret weapon I have been using for a few years. Its a really powerful RSS reader that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Its open source, free and more powerful than 99% of paid alternatives. For best results you can set up folders for industry news, search engine reputation management (SERM), competitors and market defining keywords (MDKW's).

You can organise everything into folders and view either individual feeds or combined views, you can filter all of the feeds with additional keywords and alerts. To set up this up you can simply connect into Social Mention, Topsy, Google Alerts, Twitter and anything else you fancy. There are also some well publicised hacks for dynamic Twitter searches, I used to have a lot of fun mining competitor mentions (this might be one for a future blog post!), you can even find out who their socially active customers are ;-)

20. News.me is a service I found out about pretty recently, I was a massive fan of Summify and have been devastated since the service stopped. News.me is not a bad alternative at all, you connect it to your Twitter account and it will analyse your feed, then email you the most popular blog posts that are being shared each day. This means you can catch up on all the hottest stories in your vertical without having to spend hours on Twitter every day.

21. Rapportive is a really cool Gmail extension that we love at GPMD. It enables you to easily connect your contacts social accounts and can be really effective for helping to build relationships when you are reaching out to bloggers for your campaigns. You can also use the tool to find out peoples email addresses.

22. BufferApp is a really smart tool to help manage the timing and queuing of your social media updates. Experienced social media practitioners will tell you that timing is really important for social updates. BufferApp analyses your social media accounts, then you send it updates and it will automagically pick the best time to publish for you on the fly. It can save you loads of time and take all the hassle out of social media scheduling.

23. IFTTT is a service I was a really early adopter of when it first launched, that I have always loved. It pitches its USP as being “glue” for the web and you can connect lots of different social media services and API's together in one place to automate things, IFTTT like to refer to these little pieces of automation as “recipes”.

One example is you can setup your mobile phone to save photos to your Dropbox folder that can then be setup to automatically share and update your Twitter and Facebook accounts. You can also integrate with Evernote to save things, email to send messages and pretty much covers every service you would ever want to use. This only scratches the surface of what IFTTT can do, you can also check out “recipes” people are sharing here.

24. MentionMapp is a really interesting tool. I have been spending a lot of time learning about social media network analysis and have found amazing tools including Gephi, NodeXL and even coding my own Python scripts. Unfortunately, all of these have barriers to entry and take time to learn and play with. MentionMapp is the only tool I know that you can connect to your Twitter account and get up and running really quickly. It enables you to analyse your network and quickly generate complex visualisations of your peers.

25. The Email Game for me is the ultimate example of gamification. This incredible application integrates into Gmail to turn your email into a computer game. It has timers, funny messages, animations, high scores it encourages you to beat and its even based around the iconic Inbox Zero to help you be more productive. It does a great job of actually making email fun and helping you to churn through your emails quickly. Also if you don't use Gmail, don't worry any email account that supports POP3 can be integrated and you can use Gmail as a mail client. Google explain how to set this up here.

Final Thoughts

I have found throughout my career that nine times out of ten its worth taking the time to learn about new tricks, techniques and tools. Its really important working in digital to make sure you are working smart as well as working hard. In todays world the internet is exploding with free tools and apps to the point that if you dedicate the time, you can automate almost anything.

You can view my full slide deck below where it includes over 65 digital marketing tools and resources. I would recommend downloading the slides, use them as a reference to dip into and play around with them to hopefully make your digital life a little bit easier!

If you like this post don't forget to follow me on Twitter where I try to share and tweet about as many new tools as I can!

You can read Steve's slides from the OnTheEdgeLive Bristol event here: http://www.slideshare.net/stevejlock/ultimate-free-digital-marketing-toolkit-edgebristol-2012

How To Create a Suite of Modules in Magento

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0100

In a recent project, I had to deal with creating a suite of modules in Magento (a module that contains other modules). After several searches on Google, I realised that nobody had created a proper solution for this - I was looking to create the following module structure:

app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Core
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/OtherModule

After setting up the above structure, I started testing whether Blocks, Helpers and Models could be instantiated correctly by Magento Factory methods, and I also tested setting up resources for each module to ensure that they would install correctly.

The following structure would work perfectly in Magento without any modification:

app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/etc
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Helper
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Model
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Core
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Core/etc
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Core/Block
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Core/Helper
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/Core/Model
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/OtherModule
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/OtherModule/etc
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/OtherModule/Block
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/OtherModule/Helper
app/code/local/Company/SuiteModule/OtherModule/Model

Magento Factory methods would look as follows:

Mage::helper('suitemodule');
Mage::getModel('suitemodule/model');
Mage::helper('suitemodule_core');
Mage::getModel('suitemodule_core/model');
Mage::helper('suitemodule_othermodule');
Mage::getModel('suitemodule_othermodule/model');

The problems with such a module structure started when I tried adding controllers to nested Modules. Magento could not correctly route the request to the correct controller. This sent me back on Google big time!!!

After a bit of searching I found a post on the Magento Forum that put me in the right direction...Read post here.

I had to find a way to have my own implementation of getControllerFileName method defined in Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard class. After a bit of thinking I decided that creating custom routers for the suite of modules would have allowed me to implement getControllerFileName as I needed.

I didn't want the new router's classes encapsulated in the suite though, as projects with similar requirements could come up. Because I was not overriding any already defined Magento class, I thought the best way would be to put the new routers in local/Mage/Core namespace (extending like this Mage Core codebase).

I added app/code/local/Mage directory and defined the following:

app/code/local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Suite.php
app/code/local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Suiteadmin.php

In app/code/local/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Suite.php I defined getControllerFileName method as follow:

public function getControllerFileName($realModule, $controller)
    {
        $parts = explode('_', $realModule);
        $realModule = implode('_', array_splice($parts, 0, 3));
        $file = Mage::getModuleDir('controllers', $realModule);
        if (count($parts)) {
            $file .= DS . implode(DS, $parts);
        }
        $file .= DS.uc_words($controller, DS).'Controller.php';
        return $file;
    }

All I did in the above method was change the following line:

$realModule = implode('_', array_splice($parts, 0, 2));

to:

$realModule = implode('_', array_splice($parts, 0, 3));

The final step was to edit config.xml for my suite modules and set them to use the suite routers instead of Magento Standard/Admin ones.

Firstly, I had to register the router in 'default/web' config area:

	

<default>
		<web>
			<routers>
				<suiteadmin>
                    <area>admin</area>
                    <class>Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Suiteadmin</class>
                </suiteadmin>
				<suite>
					<area>frontend</area>
					<class>Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Suite</class>
				</suite>		
			</routers>
		</web>
</default>

And then to specify routers for frontend and admin config area:

<frontend>
	<routers>
		<othermodule>
			<use>suite</use>
			<args>
				<module>GPMD_SuiteModule_OtherModule</module>
				<frontName>othermodule</frontName>
			</args>
		</othermodule>
	</routers>
</frontend>

<admin>
        <routers>
            <othermodule>
                <use>suiteadmin</use>
                <args>
                    <module>GPMD_SuiteModule_OtherModule</module>
                    <frontName>othermodule</frontName>
                </args>
            </othermodule>
        </routers>
</admin>

That's it!!!

Top Ten Actionable Tips From BrightonSEO 2012

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 16:49:50 +0100

BrightonSEO is probably my favourite UK search event, which in recent years has been growing like wildfire with attendance this year reported at over 1,500 people. This would mean that Kelvin Newman's event that started with a few people in a pub, has evolved into one of the biggest search conferences in the world, nipping at the heels of some of the hugely popular US events, like SMX and Search Engine Strategies.

The format has been tweaked and changed and this year many of the talks felt shorter, punchier and more actionable. This meant there were a lot of really good tips flying around, but don't worry if you missed the event (or drank too much the night before – there were an INDUSTRIAL amount of hangovers!). Here are my ten favourite tips from the event including some new tools, some really niche and underutilised techniques with a sprinkling of research...

1. Pinalytics.co.uk

Forward3D released a new free tool that has helped their productivity in link building increase by 500%! The tool scrapes data from Pinterest via keyword and combines with APIs to add additional metrics meaning you can find people (and lots of bloggers) who are really passionate about their subject matter. One key advantage is because Pinterest is relatively new much of the content is really up to date and actionable because the data is so fresh. It can even help you with uber boring keywords like “sheds”. The tool is free, but requires an invite, however all you need to do is head over to Pinalytics.co.uk and drop them an email. They promised me the tool will always be free in some form and its currently in beta (however unfortunately reliable API access normally does cost money).

2. Tynt Publishing Tools

I first learnt about this tool via Seer Interactive where I heard that some websites had been implementing a system where if you copy and paste content from their pages it appends a link referencing your webpage. This makes it infinitely more likely that if someone is doing research or copying and pasting a reference from your website you will get a link back. Major publishers have been generating as many as an extra 10,000 links per week using this technique and incredibility its free (although I do believe they are capturing data for research). However if its free and gets you thousands more free links for adding a snippet of JavaScript then why the hell not? This tip came from AutoTraders experienced search practitioner Berian Reed.

3. 89% of All Advertising Spends Are Totally Wasted!

Dave Trott the events keynote shared some incredible advertising stats that show us nearly 90% of all adverts are completely forgotten by their audience. This can make sense for advertisers like Direct Line who spend over £83m, because when you have that kind of budget you can afford to speak to everyone (and even shake their hands!). The best insight was that for those of us with less epic advertising budgets you need to focus on opinion formers, not opinion followers. This means your message will disseminate through your target audience, where your message will spread (like the gobby guy in the pub, whos the world leading expert on football!). This is the most effective way to spread your message, but requires much more edgy and daring content. It has to be worthy of starting a conversation with your audience. If it doesn't hit people and cause an impact your message will be forgotten and a waste of time like the other 90% of adverts nobody can remember.

4. Customer Decision Journeys from McKinsey

This tip came from the Brilliant Noise presentation from Anthony Mayfield. Bizarrely enough I have only ever read two copies of the Harvard Business Review, but one of them was the one he referenced! It published a piece of research from McKinsey that shows two main things; in these journeys search is often the most important channel and search is often the most underutilised channel. From memory I also recall their being a new trend emerging around activity after purchase where surfers will look for reviews to confirm they have made the right decision. This is a new touch point brands need to optimise for and the insights from the research are like gold dust for anyone currently selling SEO related services.

5. Social Crawlytics

This is a new tool released that has attracted more buzz than any recent tool I can remember from Yousaf Sekander. The free web app is particularly strong for analysis of content marketing research and what is being shared. You can even run the tool across domains such as The Telegraph, Guardian or even The Next Web to get creative inspiration for ideas on what content is working, in terms of being shared on social media channels. An even better use of the tool is to run it on your competitors sites and emulate their most successful content.

6. Learn From Your Competitors Mistakes

I would actually consider this quite an old school technique, however the way Berien Reed explained this was first rate. SEO's should be constantly testing and learning, however AutoTrader like to learn from their competitors mistakes through analysing keyword ranking reports, then checking what changes have been made through ChangeDetection.com. Berien reverse engineers why his competitors have dropped in rankings, which could be due to algorithm updates, penalties or over optimisation, then makes sure his team doesn't make the same mistakes.

7. Shape Your Skill Sets

In recent years I have been fascinated with developing my own skills and researching ways to become as specialist as possible, this has included adding to my search skills with other disciplines such as Linux, Python, Prince2, analytics and many more. Anthony Mayfield expanded upon ideas I first read about over at Econsulatancy where digital marketing is evolving in requiring practitioners who are “T-shaped”, in other words they have one very strong digital skill such as SEO, with a broad understanding of all the digital disciplines including analytics, social media, content, PR, PPC, UX and email marketing. Anthony described ideas that built on this research including variations such as flat, square and even table shaped skill sets. This is a really interesting way to consider both your own digital marketing skills as well as developing both teams and staff members.

8. Leverage Your Own URL Shortener

In a rather “cheeky” example as Yousaf Sekander put it, by getting your own URL shortener you are able to gain granular control of the links that are passed through it, so you can potentially route links to different pages other than the authors intended target. This would enable the site owner to spread authority to other pages across the site as they needed it and would potentially work really well with infographics for example. I wouldn't recommend this technique for any client sites, as it could be seen as manipulative, however its always interesting to test things and understand some of the more experimental and advanced techniques the search community are using.

9. Free Google Analytics Dashboards

From the last talk of the day delivered by experienced analytics practitioner Anna Lewis, she was kind enough to give away seven Google Analytics dashboards including SEO, email marketing, PPC, affiliate and much more. You can grab them all here. I would particularly recommend these to people who are less experienced with analytics to get a head start in the right direction!

10. Video Interviews FTW!

Interestingly while hundreds of search practitioners were scrambling around trying to blog through one of the most hammered internet connections in the country, Analytics SEO took the initiative (and my brother!), to become opportunists and churn out video interviews all day. I would expect them to be publishing them very shortly over at their blog. I am a big fan of both video and interviews as content, as although it takes some investment and effort, you get a lot of fantastic content for your blog. You can also read a great review of the SEO tools workshop from BrightonSEO here. The interviews included Ralph Tegtmeier (Fantomaster), Richard Baxter, Dom Hodgson, Dixon Jones, Kelvin Newman, Ned Poulter, Alex Moss, Nick Garner, Kristal Ireland and yours truly ;-)

You can follow Steve on Twitter and Google Plus.

Magento SEO Slides from ThinkVis Sept 2012

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 14:47:54 +0100

Earlier today, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak at ThinkVisiblity, a Leeds-based digital marketing conference. My presentation was focused on Magento SEO and I’ve embedded my slides below.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me (paul at gpmd.co.uk).

&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

NB: I recommend removing the actual review pages when the review content is featured on the product page as well.

Beginners Guide to Setting up a Basic Custom Block Module in Magento

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 09:01:57 +0100

Working with Magento can be a daunting task for beginners or non-developers, but it needn't be. Following the simple instructions below you'll see how easy it is to set up a custom block module and then display it on the front-end of your site.

Step 1: Global Config

Create a global configuration XML file for your modules (throughout the example I'm using GPMD as my namespace, but obviously you can use whatever you like):

app/etc/modules/GPMD_All.xml

In its most basic form this file would contain the following code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <GPMD_Mymodule>
            <active>true</active>
            <codePool>local</codePool>
        </GPMD_Mymodule>
    </modules>
</config>

Step 2: Directory structure

Next, set up the directories for the module:

app/code/local/GPMD
app/code/local/GPMD/Mymodule
app/code/local/GPMD/Mymodule/Block
app/code/local/GPMD/Mymodule/etc

Step 3: Module Config

Create a config file for the module:

app/code/local/GPMD/Mymodule/etc/config.xml

Note - This file must be called config.xml

In its most basic form this file would contain the following code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <GPMD_Mymodule>
            <version>0.1.0</version>
        </GPMD_Mymodule>
    </modules>
    <global>
        <blocks>
            <mymodule>
                <class>GPMD_Mymodule_Block</class>
            </mymodule>
        </blocks>
    </global>
</config>

Step 4: Block class

Create the class file for your custom block:

app/code/local/GPMD/Mymodule/Block/Mycustomblock.php

In its most basic form this file would contain the following code:

<?php
class GPMD_Mymodule_Block_Mycustomblock extends Mage_Core_Block_Template
{
    // Methods (optional)
}
?>

Note - You can use this file to extend the functionality of Mage_Core_Block_Template or other Magento classes.

Step 5: Template File

Create a template file that will be used to output your custom block data on the front-end:

app/design/frontend/gpmd/default/template/mymodule/mycustomblock.phtml

The contents of this file will depend on what you wish to achieve, but as basic test that things are working you could simply output some text like this:

<?php echo "Hello world!"; ?>

Step 6: Display the block

This can be done in one of two ways - In one of the layout XML files, or programmatically.

For example, in...

app/design/frontend/gpmd/default/layout/layout.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<layout version="0.1.0">
    <default>
        <reference name="root">
            <reference name="content">
                <block type="mymodule/mycustomblock" name="mycustomblock" as="mycustomblock" template="mymodule/mycustomblock.phtml" before="-"/>
            </reference>
        </reference>
    </default>
</layout>

This code is telling the custom block to display before the main content block. You can change the position by altering this parameter. For example:

before="-" positions the block before all other blocks
after="-" positions the block after all other block
before="some_block" positions this block before another block with name="some_block"
after="some_block" position this block after another block with name="some_block"

Alternatively you can output the block in one of your theme template files, in footer.phtml for example, like this:

<?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('mymodule/mycustomblock')->setTemplate('mymodule/mycustomblock.phtml')->toHtml(); ?>

One of the benefits of defining your custom block as a module in this way, is that it can be easily disabled in admin:

And there you have it - a simple custom block module.

---

You can follow Matt on Twitter, Dribbble and Google Plus.

Introducing the Spirited Wines ecommerce website

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 15:13:09 +0100

Following the recent launches of The Watch Gallery and Dewhirst projects, we’re delighted to introduce the new Spirited Wines ecommerce website.

The new website, which we worked on alongside Andrew Fairhurst, is adaptive to mobile screensizes and features a wide range of wines, beer and spirits that can be bought online and from their nationwide stores.

The website was developed on Magento commerce and also features a Wordpress blog.

We’d love some feedback so please feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.

New Dewhirst website launched!

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 20:20:24 +0100

Dewhirst are a global clothing manufacturer who works with a host of household names.

Today, GPMD are delighted to have launched their brand new international website, after months of hard work from ourselves and Dewhirst’s team.

Dewhirst's new website is designed to help them increase their online visibility across the world.

To find out more about Dewhirst you can check out their new website here: www.dewhirst.com.

Worldwide SilverStripe hack day!

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 16:17:36 +0100

We're excited to annouce that we will be organising a SilverStripe Hack Day in conjunction with Better Brief. To celebrate the launch of SilverStripe 3 we will be calling on all UK developers to come and help us make development modules and themes for the the new version.

SilverStripe NZ have organised a worldwide event with hack days being arranged in London, Wellington, Melbourne, the USA and Germany.

The London event will be hosted by Better Brief and places are limited, RSVP on meetup.com or contact mark@gpmd.co.uk

Responsive Web Design - Lessons From FOWD

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:41:46 +0100

In May myself and a colleague attended the Future Of Web Design (FOWD) conference in London. For me it was an opportunity to stay up-to-date with current developments in the web industry, specifically the challenges involved in Responsive Web Design.¹

Responding to 'mobile' usage

As a company we recognise the importance of delivering content to users in a way that is appropriate to the devices they are using.

It is no secret that ‘mobile’ internet use has seen a dramatic rise over the past couple of years and this is only set to increase. I’m sure you’re familiar with the scenario - you are at home watching something on the television and want to check something out online. Do you get up, find your laptop, turn it on, wait for it to boot up, start your web browser and so on; or do you simply reach for your mobile or tablet device and find what you want in a matter of seconds? The answer is obvious.

The solution is to create a site that ‘responds’ to the screen size/width/resolution of the user’s device, displaying the content in a way that is appropriate, whether that be a single column on a Smart Phone or multiple columns on a widescreen monitor.

Changing the way we think, and work...

The way web designers have traditionally worked has been to open up Photoshop, set up some kind of 960 pixel grid, design a few key pages, submit those designs to the client, then build the site based on those designs (obviously it’s not quite as straightforward as that, but you get the idea). The problem now is that we have to design for an almost infinite number of possible screen sizes. Of course you could pick just a few key widths, but even this creates an enormous amount of work we didn’t have to do before.

Imagine the scenario. You agree to present two design routes to a client, each design route showing three key pages. That’s six visuals straight off the bat. Now let’s say that you need to show how those designs are going to look on an iPhone, an iPad, and a regular desktop monitor. That’s six visuals shown at three separate sizes, making 18 visuals in total. Now imagine the client asks you to change one of the fonts... on all the visuals... You can see how our traditional way of working is completely impractical for the responsive web design era.

As a designer and front-end developer I actually find this challenge incredibly exciting. I’ve seen things change so much over the past 15 years. I’ve seen (and done my fair share of) table based layouts, Flash based sites, the emergence of the web standards ‘movement’, the rise of jQuery, and now Responsive Web Design.

I love that our ‘community’ is built on the foundation of sharing information, techniques, and skills, and it’s through this sharing that new ways of approaching our design processes are coming to the fore. At FOWD I went to Steve Fisher’s workshop on Rock Solid UX Deliverables, and I’m going to sum up some of the things that stood out for me and that we’re going to start implementing in our own thought processes and workflow.

Rock Solid UX Deliverables - Workshop by Steve Fisher from Yellow Pencil

The workshop took place over the course of a whole day, so naturally I can only give you a summary of what was covered. Hopefully it will still give you a useful overview though, and a few tools and things to think about.

There is also a wealth of information online. Here are a couple of great example articles to get you started:

Responsive Process (Yellow Pencil’s own site on the subject)
Design Process In The Responsive Age, by Smashing Mag
Responsive Workflow, by Viljami Salminen

Start with why?

It’s through asking why, that we find the how and the what? ²

The Golden Circle

Why do we do things?
How do we do them?
What do we do?

General points

The web is not fixed width
85% of mobile usage is in the home (people are often too lazy to turn on their computers)
The same content should be delivered to to any device - “Tread very carefully when making assumptions about your users and limiting content as a result” ³
Ask your client the right (not leading questions)
Look for trends/patterns in design and UX strategy - conventions become conventions because they work - use them...
... but be aware that conventions are constantly changing
Test with few people and often
Make it obvious (Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug ⁴)
Does it need to be responsive, or just something simple?
Does it need to be responsive in IE8 and below?

Personas

Creating personas of our users helps us understand their motivations (the ‘why?’)
Design for people’s motivations

Sample process

Content strategy (important!)
Research (users)
Visioning
Interaction design
Deployment

Content strategy

Bring unification from fragmentation. Use tools such as Gather Content ⁵
Content should be chunked out and well structured
COPE - Create Once, Publish Everywhere (future friendly)
Not mobile first, but rather small screen / low bandwidth first
Create a design principles / vision statement for each project

Style Tiles

Style tiles help you to abstract the look and feel from any particular layout ⁶
They keep you out of the interface (layout), making it much easier when using a ‘mobile first’ approach
They help inform the design moving forward

Presenting

Critique should be a regular part of your process
Present your designs as part of a rich media presentation or video, that shows your thought processes, sketches, style tiles, prototype etc.
This gives your designs a context and stops people making unhelpful comments.
Never show the designs to anyone unless they’ve seen the video

Prototyping

Prototyping allows you to quickly and cheaply test layout and functionality ⁷
Use real content!

Deploy

Having done all the preliminary sketching, wireframing, style tiles and prototype you are now in a position to fully implement your designs

In summary

The reality is that designing for a responsive web is a multi-faceted, fluid process that simply cannot be done justice in an article like this. It is through experimenting and implementing your own processes that you will learn what works for you. You will also find that each project has it’s own challenges and that you will have to adapt your workflow to suit. That, for me though, keeps things interesting...

I’m thrilled to be a part of the web industry at such an exciting time as this, and in another 15 years I can’t even begin to imagine where we will be. But I hope I’ll still be there at the cutting edge, being inspired, learning and pushing myself to continue honing my skills, and probably being put to shame by a new breed of young designers who’ve grown up in a world where super-fast internet and touch interfaces are the norm.

---

You can follow Matt on Twitter, Dribbble and Google Plus.

¹ Responsive Web Design, coined by Ethan Marcotte in his, now famous, 2010 article of the same name: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
² Start With Why, by Steve Sinek: http://www.startwithwhy.com/Read.aspx
³ Design Process In The Responsive Age: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/30/design-process-responsive-age/
⁴ Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug: http://www.sensible.com/dmmt.html
⁵ Gather Content: www.gathercontent.com
⁶ Style Tiles: http://styletil.es/
⁷ Foundation: http://foundation.zurb.com/ and Twitter Bootstrap: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

Review of The Future of Web Design (FOWD) Conference 2012

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:30:00 +0100

This year the GPMD design team attended the Future of Web Design conference, which took place in London venue, The Brewery, on 14th May - 16th May. It was a truly great experience, very inspiring and highly beneficial for our learning and design process. We’ve expanded our knowledge in responsive web design, web typography, user experience, accessibility, HTML5 & CSS3, ways to improve your creative flow, ideas generation and more!

On the first day we had a choice of workshops, and the two following days were scheduled with amazing talks by some of the biggest names in the web industry.

For the workshop I chose ‘Good Ideas Grow on Papers’, which was presented by Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson from The Standardistas. The guys explained the principles of how our mind really works and how the greatest ideas can be generated away from the computer. These were the topics:

A Plethora of Tips to Move From Ideas to Execution
Five Idea Generation Techniques to Unlock Awesome Sauce
How to Think Through Paper
Master the Art of Using Typewriters, Scissors and Glue

All the conference talks were fantastic, but my very favourite ones were:

Notes On Design - Brendan Dawes;
Inform to Inspire: Perfecting Your Creative Workflow - Stephanie Troeth;
Web Typography, The Good Bits - Jon Tan;
You Are A Channel - The Standardistas;
Failing And Doing It Well - Mark Boulton.

I really loved the philosophical and psychological approach to the creative process in some of the talks. The way we communicate our ideas and what messages we send into the world.

We came back very inspired and excited, thank you Future of Web Design!

Our latest ecommerce project: The Watch Gallery v2.0

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:30:00 +0100

After several months of research, planning and general hard work - we’re delighted to announce the launch of our latest ecommerce project, The Watch Gallery v2.0. The new website, which is fully responsive, is a hybrid build and features both SilverStripe and Magento installations.

In January 2012, our client DM London completed the takeover of The Watch Gallery, a highly regarded watch retailer with a rich heritage. We were then tasked with migrating the website onto the Magento platform (as a beta release), whilst maintaining the existing design and feel of the website – this had to be completed in just a few weeks.

We’re all very proud of the new website and are looking forward to introducing new features and improvements in the coming weeks.

Key features of the website:

Fully responsive design
Hybrid build – Magento Ecommerce & SilverStripe
Advanced Google Analytics tracking
Highly customisable landing pages (back-end functionality)
Custom site search engine (to be launched soon)
Pay by finance options
Product videos
Magazine-style blog – ‘The Guide’
Customisable forms

Here are a few more screenshots from the new website:

An example of a product page:

The Bremont brand landing page:

You can check the site out for yourself here: www.thewatchgallery.co.uk. You can also read the case study.

If you have any feedback on the website, please feel free to leave a comment below.

You can follow Paul on Twitter or Google Plus.

SilverStripe UK Meetup: How can we help SilverStripe evolve?

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:48:56 +0100

On Tuesday (17th of April 2012), we organised and attended the latest UK SilverStripe meetup, which saw over 20 eager SilverStripe evangelists turn out to discuss the future of the popular open source platform.

This time around, we decided to go with a slightly different format for the event – a panel discussion, consisting of SilverStripers Aram Balakjian (SSBits and Aab Web), Josh Holloway (Better Brief), Richard Johnson (GPMD) and Will Morgan (Better Brief).

The overall intention of the event was to identify how SilverStripe can evolve moving forward and how it can become more popular with different demographics (beginner-level developers and marketing-lead users etc).

Here are the notes that I took at the event (edited by panellists Aram Balakjian and Josh Holloway):

SilverStripe is a great platform that covers a large set of use cases. While Joomla and particularly Wordpress are primarily targeted at the end user and the developer wanting click-click-done style implementation, SilverStripe is targeted at developers and agencies who are willing to get their PHP hands dirty in order to provide their clients with a truly bespoke solution.

The ease of use of the SilverStripe admin system was also commonly mentioned as a key benefit of using the CMS.

SilverStripe is a flexible platform and although does not have the module count of some of the larger systems, instead allows you to develop your own modules and functionality more easily.

Therefore SilverStripe should be promoted to developers as a great platform for their clients. SilverStripe would benefit from a lot more evangelists (turning up to the right events and generally promoting it), clearer more complete documentation and coverage online.

SilverStripe can be sold as a platform that has a really user-friendly back-end system, Drupal is too complicated for clients. SilverStripe should have the publicity and the profile too be sold to potential clients – as an agency we should be able to show why SilverStripe is the ideal platform, all documents that sell the platform should be open-source.

Because the CMS shares it’s name with SilverStripe the company, it has a slightly odd position that creates uncertainty when it comes to contributing.

Ingo is keen to push things into the community, however it’s difficult to know when SilverStripe’s developers are speaking as programmers or product managers.

People should be writing lots and lots of module to help grow the community, we’ve got to start somewhere and there’s not too much out there at the moment.

Are there any ideas for commercialising SilverStripe themes and plugins like Magento?

Having a revenue option for developers would give them more of an incentive to build the modules.

There aren’t enough developers to make a lot of modules worthwhile and generate money.

If the functionality and coding was more freely available more people would pay for modules. We need to get other developers excited about SilverStripe and then they can make things into modules.

SilverStripe are looking to change the module repository on the website – its currently ‘unusable’. There’s also no quality control, very few of the modules have extensive information and images.

There is a discussion on the SilverStripe developer forum at the moment around making a modules.silverstripe.org area and open-source it.

How much time is given to open-source development within SilverStripe? 10% is allocated to developing the platform.

SilverStripe need to relinquish more control and give that to the community – they’re not giving it enough time at the moment.

Developers are often going to GitHub rather than the module area for modules due to the lack of usability.

We want to move away from the responsibility being with SilverStripe which is currently a limitation. SilverStripe can have a way to verify modules, however the process needs to be quicker and maybe vetted by the community.

Having a rating system and adding comments would help to build the module area.

Another great feature for SilverStripe would be an auto-install and update feature. To have this feature, you would need more processes with modules to say what they’re compatible with.

How has Wordpress structured the process of updating the CMS and modules.

One of the biggest problems with SilverStripe is that there’s no revenue stream for it – it’s not like Wordpress where they make money from the .wordpress.com sites.

A tool that enables webmasters to sell their modules would be a good resource.

The incentive of revenue would also mean that the modules cost – which may prevent new developers from using SilverStripe. Why buy from SilverStripe when you can get them for free for Drupal and Joomla.

A paid version of SilverStripe would mean the best features are in the premium version – that’s the perception. People want to steer clear of paid systems or paid modules.

There’s a big dependency on SilverStripe 3.0 – as 2.4 is not very nice.

The sitetree is being pulled back into the newer version now.

SilverStripe has very small company focus – there’s around 30 people in the company and they’ve grown very quickly. SilverStripe are still working on a trial and error basis with the community – they’re still working out how the company works with the community.

SilverStripe is operate in a very strange way – they’re heavily relying on the community and people stepping up. They need some people to step up and really building SilverStripe with them.

SilverStripe lacks the structure that WP and Drupal have – people need to help develop SilverStripe in their own time. We need to use the interested people to create some structure – they’re waiting for a response.

The benefits of SilverStripe 3.0 need to be sold – it needs to be pushed on their website.

It’s hard to see what’s going to happen with SS3.0 – they’re trying to improve the UX, but they’re not necessarily going the right way.

Squiz is very similar to SilverStripe – they were originally open-source and now they’re closed source and they don’t embrace the community. They’re working on £1m+ implementations. Squiz Matrix is open source.

What would everyone like from the community?

More modules
What you put in is what you get out – people need to contribute
Developers can get a lot of credit for contributing
SilverStripe need to focus on introduction to new developers – they need to ensure that they’re helping people at the start
Documentation isn’t there at the moment
Questions are being left unanswered in the forum

SilverStripe’s learning curve does keep out ‘low-level users’ – Wordpress forums are full of amateur-level questions and some of the plugins are poorly built.

Drupal and Joomla’s code base isn’t up to the level of SilverStripe.

There should be guides for people leaving Wordpress – these people could become strong SilverStripe developers.

Developers and popularity are the building blocks of a CMS.

Awards & accreditations etc:

SilverStripe powers a host of big-name sites, such as the BBC, Debenhams Finance, NHS, Greggs, Activision, SCC, Devon County Council, Shell NZ, Talk Talk, Westfield and the NZ government.

SilverStripe needs to be sold to clients with a list of large names that use the CMS.

SilverStripe is aimed at presenting information rather than being interactive.

---

Moving forward as a community, we're now looking to introduce a new SilverStripe UK community website, organise a SilverStripe hack day and generally promote the many benefits of building websites using SilverStripe.

You can find out more about the SilverStripe UK meetup event here, or you can follow the dedicated Twitter account.

You can also read Josh Holloway's blog post about the event here.

This post was written by Paul Rogers - Follow Paul on Google Plus or Twitter.

If you have anything to add to this post, please do so in the comments below - we'd love to hear your thoughts!