Search Engine Strategies London
We’ve always been a big fan of the Search Engine Strategies events http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/this year looks like it won’t disappoint. We’ve been attending the London events since 2006 and they seem to be doing what the marketing guys say
“getting bigger and better every year”.
Why do we love going so much? It does seem odd that a conference would excite such Ice Cool people like ourselves but the SES events are a little bit special. First and foremost – they’re not full of nerds. Search Engine Marketing is a young, vibrant and exciting place to be and the attendees reflect that. Secondly, it gives us a chance to take time out from the day to agency work and think of some of the bigger questions that we’re going to have to answer in the future if we want to stay on top of our game.
Oh yes and we almost forgot the parties afterwards.
I just want to jump back a couple of blog posts first of all to thank Matt for my Globehead experience, it was truly memorable – possibly the most annoying flash site ever and yet I feel strangely fond of it now.
So back to today and my musings…I have read lots of other blogs recently about the phenomenon of blogging itself and whether you should blog for blog’s sake, or not?
I’ve since actually spent a few days thinking about whether you should blog only when you have something to say or whether you should think of something to say to blog. What a dilemma!
A lot of the time people blog for SEO purposes but I think the most interesting blogs really are those that are written to express an opinion or thought about something. Writing something for the sake of it usually sounds contrived and unnatural – unless you are an exceptionally gifted writer I suppose. For the rest of us minions it is surely better to wait and write naturally or just write nothing at all.
Luckily I don’t have to worry too much about this blog as Matt is brilliant at posting interesting little snippets – mostly useless – but loads of fun!! And now you can even watch him work (or not) by watching our webcam.
So while I haven’t got anything to say I’ll just sign off and leave you with Big Bro.
Hope you like it.
P.S did you see Globehead?……… just be patient.
One of our web designers Matt asked me to write a post about Flash versus SEO and he basically wanted me to fight the corner for Flash as he thinks there should be more of it about on the world wide web. I said I’d see what I could do knowing that it would be a hard job but thinking that some thorough research may throw up some arguments supporting the Flash team…….Sadly this hasn’t really been the case, sorry Matt!
All my research has done is reinforce my initial belief that Flash is bad for SEO. Bad as in avoid it at all costs unless you are a huge brand (huge like in the realms of Coca Cola or Nike) and then you don’t need to really worry about writing your content for SEO purposes. Everyone else should avoid Flash like the plague. Don’t listen to your creative web designers who like to make things look pretty, it doesn’t matter how pretty your website looks if it can’t be found.
Now I realise that this is a subject pretty much discussed to death, over and over at the very least, but I promised to look into it some more so here we are. And it is still a subject worthy of attention as some camps claim that Flash can now be indexed by search engines (news and comments on this welcome) and it still creates a chasm between web designers and SEO consultants – who let’s face it are two very different kettles of fish. As different as chalk and cheese, like “lipstick on a pig” (the most used phrase in our office since Hannah thought it was a good concept for a marketing campaign following the recent coining by Mr. Obama).
But back to Flash versus SEO, I accept that Flash can be useful for “progressive enhancement” and there are ways to get your site indexed still when using Flash but I still stick to the opinion that less is more – I personally can’t stand waiting for Flash to load and I am definitely one of those users that immediately hits the back button before a site even loads if it is built entirely in Flash (they shouldn’t even be allowed to exist they’re soooo annoying).
So not a strong defence I realise but a little Flash here and there, a banner or two I would argue for as it makes daily life on the internet a little more pleasant. And more to the point does exactly what it is supposed to do – it “progressively enhances” a website built to web standards. That way if a browser doesn’t support Flash a website’s functionality and the availability of it’s content won’t be compromised. So no problems or annoyance.
So that’s my conclusion – use Flash on well built websites when necessary to show videos or for animation to illustrate something already in text form or use sparingly for design enhancement, beyond that that I can’t find an argument for Flash if SEO is required – I hope that’s a fair comment Matt? (please feel free to respond, just don’t be too horrible to me)!
Since we’ve managed to get over the launch of www.finditinsandwell.co.uk, we’ve found that things have changed quite a bit around the office. The work load is still there of course with 11 new clients coming in this week alone but somehow we feel that thngs aren’t quite as pressured now. One of the reasons for this is the fact that although we have these new clients, we are dedicating time to each member of staff now for pure training purposes, whether it’s surfing the net for inspiration, tricks and tips, attending a more structured course or putting on our own in house training sessions, we’ve decided that, save for an imminent deadline, training is now top priority.
I kicked off the in house sessions with a training session all about…. how to give training sessions, using the structures that I learnt from my career in the Royal Navy I taught everyonen the principles and structures they should be applying to their in house lessons and now we can see the results coming through the ranks with the more senior designers, programmers and client side staff able to pass on their knowledge to everyone else. The result hasn’t beeen a drop in production from the people attending the sessions but a massive increase in productivity and motivation. The teachers feel valued as their skills are recognised and shared and the students can now do things better and faster.
It is too easy to put training onto the bottom of the list of priorities when it comes to workload but by giving everyone a seperate training plan and work schedule, we have overcome this trap tha we fell into with our last large design project. Now instead of having and relying on just one person to perform a task, we can rely on several, it just makes good sense all round really. As for my own personal training. I like to take an hour out of each day to look at the different seo blogs and sites to see what’s new. Internet world is on in London in May which hopefully I can find time to attend the whole show or if not then definately one day, in fact, I want everyone in the office to spend at least a day there as you can’t beat talking to other people in the industry to give yourself a lift, it’s definately not the most sociable activity, sitting behind a computer all day and it will be good to see who else is out there and share some ideas. Also the Miami search engine strategies conference 2007 is looming on the horizon so I’m in the process of sorting out if and who gets to go there (always a lot of competition) which is a good thing really as it shows how keen the staff at www.iceblue.co.uk are to learn as much as possible about search engine optimisation and search engine marketing (or then again they could just be wanting to go to Miami (I know I’ll be taking my surfboard if I let myself go!)
Uncategorized, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, search engine strategies, seo, web design | Emma | 
January 28, 2010 4:46 pm | 
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