Nielsen says that 70% of Australian companies are looking to get into social media. People in Australia spend 6 hours a day (or week, Cathie is not sure, hmmm).

Effective Social Media

• Integrated at strategic and tactical levels
• buy in from the top down
• opt-in from the bottom up

Developing a SM startegy

• Social web audit-measure the start point in order to demonstrate ROI
• Develop insights from data
• Monitoring and management
• Integrate touchpoints-make search social, know where people are talking about you

Nestle’s share price plummeted when they were embroiled in a PR nightmare and exacerbated this by trying to strong hand people on their Facebook page.

Free SM tools

• Tweetreach
• Twitter Sentiment
• Issue Crawler
• Social Mention
• Bit.ly

Main points

• track
• measure
• iterate,measure
• rinse and repeat

A nice presso, thanks Cathie

Dennis YU is next up, he has had some bad publicity lately from some pretty respectable people. So lets see what he has to say.

Facebook is not AdWords. It is about identity, not queries.

Top 12 keywords, I did miss one, sorry.

• Simpsons
• House
• Family guy
• Music
• Barack Obama
• Dormir
• Grey’s anatomy
• Chocolate
• Friends
• Nutella
• Sleeping

Facebook is the top of the funnel, its for demand generation, not demand harvesting.74% of Facebook comes from local. Facebook=Adwords circa 2003. Interest trageting is a really useful feature. The best thing is targeting when directing them to your page, you can target friends of a fan of a page. Forget CPC in Facebook advertising. Use CPM, it’s more effective. Micro targeting by demographic and company in addition with conversion tracking is NB.

Big differences between Google and Facebook, FB is evolving and getting better at things. Pictures on FB help a lot! FB has to decide what’s ‘interesting’ to show in newsfeed. The greater the amount of fans, the greater each fan is worth to you, due to the viral multiplier effect. Asking questions, promotes interactions, ask people to take action. Bruce Clay gets a shout out for their good FB page, nice work Mr Orliac.

Show your clients how many fans that their competitors have.Not a bad presentation Dennis,nicely done.

We have been having some periodic problems with the commenting system at the BCA blog. I think we have just about cracked the problem, so comment away all you fantastic readers.

Developing a crawlable infrastructure

Speaker: Michael Motherwell, SEO Rainmaker – MMIT Consulting

The session started with Michael Motherwell and his presentation on developing a crawlable infrastructure. The most important points included the following:

a) Content – Create unique and valuable content. Avoid duplicate content, most common errors are caused by session ids, tracking codes, capitalization (www.example.com.au vs www.Example.com.au), sorted list, etc. The solution is to use a 301 redirect, canonical tag or chose a good tracking system (for duplicated content caused by tracking URLs parameters)

b) HTTPS status code is important – 200 Ok pages are good. Avoid using 200 for error pages (you need to use a 404 errors status). Customise your 404 errors page (e.g. Apple)

c) Your pages indexed might depend on page rendering speed, page rank and how often a page is updated (fresh content)

d) Have an XML & HTML sitemap

e) Hierarchy is important – organise your hierarchy to make your most important pages on the top of the hierarchy

f) Fix your broken links

g) Tools available: Xenu (to crawl your site), Webbug (to check what it’s sent to a Web Server and, when the response is received and to check what the Web Server sends), Selenium (testing tool)

Rich Applications – considerations when developing rich internet applications, including technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and AJAX.

Speaker: Danny Dover, SEO Consultant – SEOmoz.org

Danny presentation was about rich applications. The most important points included the following:
a) HTML – This is still the most popular and search engine friendly code, it’s very straight forward and was initially designed for academic papers.

b) Flash- This is very useful, however it is not SE friendly. sIFR is an alternative and recommended by Google. Google is attempting to crawl flash, but it is not great at this.
iPhone does not support Flash. Apple says that the reason behind this is because ,any system crashes are caused by Flash.

c) Ajax – This is a JS technique. Google is still working to make Ajax crawlable “Proposal for making Ajax crawlable “

d) Silverlight – Microsoft version of Flash technology. It’s new and not adopted by Google, and not supported by the iPhone. This is not recommended for SEO.

The main recommendation is to find a compromise. Build pages that are SEO and people friendly. But go nuts and use Flash or Ajax for pages that you don’t want to be indexed and are only used for usability. Use HTML 5, this has new tags to make rich applications.

Danny also mentioned about CSS image replacement, a technique used for example for serving an image of flash replacement through CSS styling. This technique is commonly used by spammers so be careful.

URL rewriting, redirection & canonicalisation
Speaker: Greg Boser, Founder – 3 Dog Media

Greg defined himself as a marketing person not a developer. His session was about URL rewriting and canonicalization. The most important points included the following:

a) URL rewrite is good for click-through, not for SEO
b) Keywords in URL – beneficial in Google regardless whether in the filename/directory names or variable values in query strings
c) Hyphen in URL – it’s the preferred way but don’t overdo it
d) 3 approaches to rewrite unfriendly URLs:
- URL rewriting server module such as mod_rewrite for Apache
- Recode your scripts
- Proxy based solution – not the best solution
e) If you are on Microsoft IIS server, use ISAP rewrite 3.0
f) Regular expressions for Mod_Rewrite – good to handle rewrites, easy to find on the web
g) Canonicalisation: rewrite is only the first step, make sure any piece of valuable content has only one URL . Prevent to index duplicate pages. Methods used include:
Conditional redirection: Most effective but somewhat complicated, results for an SEO perspective are the same

Canonical tag: good enough but not as good as the 301 redirect. Initially the canonical tag worked only across single domain, now Google allows it across different domains (cross domain canonical). This might become a good tool for syndicated content.