If SES and SMX London have been two key players of my SEO education this year, then SMX Madrid has definitely topped up my SEO Spanish terminology. This may sound strange coming from a Spaniard, but after I have lived abroad for the last fifteen years I felt like I was bursting out of an Anglo/French bubble.

 Although SMX Advanced, as expected, took the majority of the media attention, there were also some excellent speakers and bloggers at SMX Madrid. Here's a recap of some of the sessions I attended:

Wed 4th June 

SMX Madrid started with two keynote presentations

Keynote 1 by Faisal Galaria,

International Managing Director from Kayak.com, a travel vertical search engine.Faisal gave us an interesting insight in international business development, where he emphasised the cultural difficulties of penetrating foreign markets, emphasising that brand new infrastructure is often needed: new marketing plans, local teams, local support and localisation. He followed with CPA; he stated that comparing CPA from PR campaigns and CPA from SEM campaigns is like comparing apples to oranges. Those two marketing channels need to work together and should have an acceptable blended CPA.Altogether it was a great presentation. 

Although Faisal's Spanish was good I would have preferred it to have been in English, as I felt he had so much to give out to the audience and part of charm of the speech vanished in his journey to try and find the correct words in Spanish. I blame the organisers as they requested Faisal to talk in Spanish. Why not just use the provided simultaneous translation service?

Keynote 2 by Sara Holoubek

Julio Fernandez from Global Strategies could not make it for the SMX Madrid. Sara Holoubek (SEMPO President) replaced him, she spoke enthusiastically about social media, how to use it efficiently at business level, some approaches to social media emphasising the need to be a listener and an observer before you dive into conversations. Sara also spoke about Twitter very keenly and how it can help you improve online reputation. She also pointed out the need to measure and report success achieved through social media as a means of getting ‘buy-in’ from others (senior management teams, partners and clients) to secure a budget increase for the following year. This gave me great ideas to use in my position as an in-house post at the British Council.Following the keynotes, the sessions were divided into 'Fundamental' and 'advanced'.

Case Study : Softonic

Softonic is one of the main free software download websites in Spain. Albert Lopez, SEO Manager gave a presentation about Softonic's strategy in Europe. The main highlights were:

• don’t rely solely on xml sitemaps as means of site indexation, instead Albert advised on a search engine-friendly approach to site architecture
• keep an eye on those searches made by users via the site's own search facility (in order to ascertain exactly what terms users use to find your products)
• don’t buy paid links.
• content is king- SEO training and education for all colleagues and teams, as this is key to in-house SEO success.

Universal search (a classic that couldn’t be missed)

Leading the discussions: Rebecca Steelman from Google Europa and Sara Holoubek, SEMPO president. I thoroughly enjoyed these sessions as I learned a lot of Spanish ‘search’ terminology in the context of Universal search. There was quite a focus on video search optimisation and how video is lately dominating the SERPs, even in Europe where competition on the SERPs is still not as fierce as in the US.Rebecca advised the audience to make use of video sitemaps, thumbnails, and Google Webmasters tools.

After the presentations during Q&A, I asked Rebecca if customer reviews made on Local business Listings actually had a weight on gaining higher rankings on the local search results. More to the point, I asked whether Google gives more credit to those entries on GoogleMaps that boast more customer reviews. But Rebecca didn’t know about this one, so to me, it still remains uncertain.

Workshop landing pages (Paper prototypes, otherwise known as  ‘Oz Wizard' technique)

Without any doubt, this was one of the most useful, practical sessions I attended in terms of actually taking something useful to put into practice back at work.The session was led by Ariel Guersenzvaig,  (Professor de la Escuela Elisava) y David Alvarez (usability Manager de 'lainformacion.com')They both focussed their presentations on usability for design, straightforward, simple, clean landing pages and maximising conversions.

If I am not wrong, this is the you tube video that David and Ariel used to illustrate their presentation

Following the presentations they grouped us into teams and got us to sketch out the perfect landing page with marker pens and paper.The goal was to have a clean, straightforward page, free from distractive elements and purchasing funnel-induced. We emulated the GUI with a marker: navigation, buttons, text and overall user experience, all just with pen and paper.

This is what we produced:

Many of us ignore the power of pen&paper tests, well at least I often do, but... why venturing into wireframing an GUI when we could achieve a lot out of sketching things out with pen&paper? It’s an excellent way to test the GUIs with colleagues and friends to get the first level of usability feedback up and running.

Thurs 5th June

Keynote 1 by Dr Barney Pell 

Dr Pell, the genious behind Powerset started out his presentation/showcase of Bing showing some interesting search engine trends and making the point that search engine users are generally not satisfied with the quality of the search they get. He stated that, according to some research, 42% of user searches require some refinement in order to get their desired results. In order words ‘Search' today doesn’t help.

He gave us a comprehensive tour of 'Bing' by using a few searches related to music, events, travel… I was actually quite impressed. Altogether, Microsoft seems to really have been placing a lot of emphasis on the user experience with Bing.

Some of Bing’s main selling points according to Dr Pell's preso were:

• cut down in the number of user clickbacks
• the average # of pages needed to reach completion of a task on the SE
• the length of time to achieve success (being 2.75 minutes in Google and 2.6 with Bing).

Half way through the presentation I started to think that we were being sold something instead of being given an insight into a topic.  Is this a keynote on 'semantic search' as per the programme? I thought. It was 11:02  and the Bing talk was still on: new features, rich multimedia, cashback…  uuumm.., here’s looking forward to the next keynote at 12.30.

keynote 2 by Russell E. Perry

Russell E. Perry spoke about 123people.com  a vertical search engine for people. I hadn’t heard about it before, and have to admit that it looked like a good tool to find people’s profiles on the internet. The main legal point to highlight is that the tool doesn’t actually retrieve people's data but the websites that contain such data, which is, in fact, on of the reason why they can act within a legal framework in the EU, where data protection laws are slightly more rigid and severe than in the US.

Algorithms and SEO

I expected this session to be entertaining in the light of the recent 'nofollow' revelation made by Matt Cutts during SMX Advanced. The night before, I happened to be checking my emails and suddenly spotted 'Google Changes Course on Nofollow'. Gosh, this is news! I ended up reading D. Sullivan's article also on search engine land and of course, Rand's post on SEOMoz. As I searched further, I also found Andrew Girdwood’s slightly more M Cutts’ biased post.

The next morning I also read some of the tweets going on and about the 'nofollow' blasts at SMX Advanced and the furore it generated, but to my surprise, at SMX Madrid, nobody seemed to care about it. Or at least that’s the impression I got judging from the words I exchanged with a few SEOs that morning.When I sat down for this session, I was surprised to see Andrew Girdwood there (he wasn’t expected on this session but he was replacing Julio Fernandez for the session on algorithms and SEO), so I got even more excited thinking that Andrew would add his angle to the expected debate about 'nofollow'

When the session started, the moderator began by showing a past video of Matt Cutts talking about the ‘nofollow tag’ where he confirmed that it was find using it for pagerank scultpting but that there are other things an SEO could do to bring visibility to a website.... Andrew then asked the audience if someone had been reading the blogs/news about ‘nofollow’ the day before. Virtually no one had. He then asked how many people  knew or used the technique called PageRank sculpting. It seemed that only a small bunch of 2-3 people knew about it. So the 'nofollow' debate ended there unfortunately.

Andrew went on to talk about what the presumed criteria Google uses to rank web pages: •    information, •    referencing •    and lastly, sales websites He went on to saying that one smart move could be was to try and find a niche market and target it with the right keywords. Overall, it was a good session but not as good as the debate I had expected it to have been.

Vertical Search engines (los buscadores verticales a examen)

On the panel, we had Javier Etxebeste, from Nestoria and Russell E. Perry from 123people.comThey spoke about the challenges that vertical search engines were facing in competition with mainstream search engines.  Javier stated that search is a very scientific business:  as noboby is certain about anything happening with the search engine algorithms, the best way forward is to test in order to make decisions. Both Javier and Russell agreed in that when it comes to promoting their online businesses SEO is not everything. The clarified that SEO is essential, but when it comes to creating awareness about a product/company and actually getting users to think about it from a vertical standpoint, developing a strong brand identity via brand marketing campaigns is the best approach.

The perfect Pay-per-click campaign

Alexis Meyners from Findasense gave out a very charismatic presentation on PPC campaigns best practice. I am sure everyone appreciated her down-to-earth nature, the candour in her presentation approach, and her impeccable Spanish, which was even adorned with jargon and slang. Energy flowed around the room and that helped everyone be more receptive and enthusiastic. Alexis entertained us all with her brilliant 10 points approach to a perfect PPC campaign. She gave everything to the audience, no secrets, no half batched information, no mysteries and/or anything.

At this point, you are thinking: tell me those 10 PPC best points to a perfect campaign now!  Well, I have decided not to enlist those 10 points here as I feel it is a bit like intellectual property, but I'll mention two. Perhaps Alexis can come around and disclose the remaining 8 points. 

• no flipar con la 'long tail' ('don’t let the long tail to drive you bananas', to the best of my translation)
• Campaign documentation: document everything properly throughout the campaign, particularly if something you did well, brought good results)

The latter is by far the best advice I could have taken with me because I, personally  never do that, which is bad practice.

The second panellist, Eric Peyrelongue (on the photo, sitting next to Alexis), from Relevant Traffic equally left us all jaw-dropping mouth open with his presentation on best practice for PPC campaign with a focus on ROI for big accounts and big fish clients. I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, albeit slightly fast pace but I prefer that to feeling bored during a slow presentation. Eric enlightened his speech with quotes of real-life project examples and experiences with clients of all kinds. One of the things he made clear was that we should really spend time with the client trying to clearly set the objectives for the campaign, what's the key objectives for the campaign?

• Inform customers
• Sell
• Generate contracts

If the clients asks for the three above, that’s an ‘impossible’ mission.

Another great tip was to stop thinking with your own head and look inside at what the client can offer about how the org works, most of the intelligence about product knowledge that resides within the boundaries of the client, eg: interview the call centre as they are the ones who know what the customers want.

That’s all about it , sorry for the length of this post this is my first Youmoz post.

David Carralon runs his own SEO Consultancy in Paris while working as an in-house SEO for the British Council