Surfarama

I had the very great pleasure of attending the Morgo conference Thursday/Friday last week. Morgo is “an annual recharge for executives of high growth companies”, and I was there representing Netconcepts sans our CEO, Nigel, who was held over stateside (Nigel you would have loved it).

Like Rod Drury, one of the highlites for me was hearing Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian talk about how they’ve grown their business funded entirely on revenue and with a model which targets enterprise business but cleverly avoids the typical overhead associated with large enterprise software sales by pricing within discretionary budgets (<$5000), ie. it isn’t a sale that requires any in person sales presence…Mike likes to say that their support team is their sales team. This is absolutely a repeatable model based on itch/scratch product development (isn’t the best stuff always developed this way?), and probably suits the typical MO of small NZ software companies.

I was also impressed with Aaron Ridgeway from Datasquirt. They look likely to list on the ASX in the near future, raising the capital they need to really push into new markets around the world. I saw a demo of their product, Contact, when I was in the travel business and it was impressive. I think they will be succesful.

The conference has an off the record policy, but I think it’s safe to mention that the last session I attended touched on search. It was a bit frustrating though because the timing of the session didn’t lend itself to a detailed discussion of all the moving pieces…

Case in point, the demonstration that Rod gave of the power of blogging. It is absolutely true that blogs generally do well in search results, and Rod was demonstrating this by showing that his blog was the number one result for a google search on ‘rod’. Rowan posted about this today and a couple of commenters have pointed out that this only works for searches based in NZ, which is important to know. Google does serve different results based on where you are based (per your IP), and in fact is starting to serve different results based on your personal search history as well if you happen to be a Google account holder.

The point Rod was making is still valid though that blogs will often do well in natural search, as long as (here’s the kicker) you are an active and meaningful participant in the blogosphere. This means commenting on other blogs, sending trackbacks, linking out etc. Do this and you’ll probably get an equal measure of inbound linkage, trackbacks and comments, which is a big part of what Google uses to rank your blog based on specific keyword queries. So, go forth and blog but know that you also have to get out there and start participating in the blogosphere if you want to rank well for specific keyword queries.

Talking of keyword queries, that is another part of search that it is really important to understand, and I wish we’d had time to talk about. If you are a business I wouldn’t start celebrating if you are the number one result for your own brand name…that should be a no brainer. If you are a business it is much more important to rank for those popular and relevant generic product terms that real people are using to find information about products that you market.

For example, if you are searching for ‘Sony’ it probably means you already have a strong brand preference, and quite possibly you are not using Google to search, but rather to navigate. So while you would expect Sony to rank for brand related keywords, it is actually more important for them to reach those consumers in the buying cycle who are searching on generic keywords such as ‘HD TV’ or ‘mp3 player’ or ‘LCD television’ etc…in this example those are the terms which Sony as a business ought to be trying to rank for…which means you have to go into your web and content development knowing what are the popular and relevant keywords.

Then there’s paid search marketing, and…um…actually, forget it. This post is already long enough. Long story short, I was really stoked that the presentation turned to search as an important part of the mix you should consider when marketing internationally, but I just wish there was more time to discuss. In all honesty I could have piped up louder at the time, so I’m kicking myself a bit also.

In summary, it was thoroughly inspiring to listen to and meet so many sucessful people at Morgo, and I definitely had my thinking widened as a result.

If you are interested in learning more about really optimizing your blog for natural search then check out these blog posts:

• Internet retailers who blog: doing it right
• Optimize wordpress for search engines
• The most important wordpress plugin for SEO

And if you are too lazy to read, here’s some tips on You Tube:

• Make your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly