Woah. On to the final session of day 1 at SMX London.  My brain currently resembles some rather watery scrambled eggs so I’ll try my best to give you the highlights.

Christine Churchil, KeyRelevance

Christine is going to be looking at a technique to mine data and examine long tail keywords.  This technique relates to the concept of an editorial calendar which is used in the publishing industry.  This is basically a timeline of editorial stories planned out for upcoming issues of a magazine / newspaper – used to attract advertising.

The same concept can be applied to keyword research.  You can use it to plan which keywords you will be targeting with all the stories scheduled for the future (ie you need to start with a content plan I guess).  Look for forthcoming events, seasonal trends, launches / publication dates etc.

The point is you can be doing the keyword research ahead of time (tools she mentions are Adwords KW tool, Insights and Yahoo Buzz) on topical events and start writing content / producing videos / strategising ahead of time.  Example (US-specific) – Renaissance Festival (RenFest) which features a bunch of total dorks dressing up in medieval shit [I may have loosely paraphrased that].

Basically what she’s saying is ‘plan ahead for topical events with related keywords’.  Not really an advanced keyword research tip, more an SEO planning tip.  ”It’s so painfully simple that some people just don’t get it”, says Christine. [Erm..would those be the same people who go to Renaissance Fairs?]

She talks about using Twitter trending topics to look for keywords. [Um, yes, but that doesn't quite fit with planning ahead does it?]

One final tip which I think is useful: create ‘evergreen’ content for topical terms all year round so you have a page waiting to capitalise.

Barry Lloyd – Microchannel Technologies

Barry’s talking about “Finding Great Keywords” using broad and phrase match.  Let’s see if this is ‘beyond the ordinary’.

Um – not really. He says:

• use kw research tools (duh),
• both free and paid tools
• Use analytics – very important (really? tell me more!)
• Find keywords that actually convert (never heard that one before)

The dude then goes into PPC mode and starts talking about broad match buckets putting things in exact match keywords.  Not sure he realises he’s in the SEO room.  I guess the basic point is, use your paid search campaign to help you identify keywords for your SEO campaign.  However I think I might just be tired and cranky, Rob Hammond next to me says he got some useful ideas out of it so sorry if I’m being harsh!

Sam Crocker – Distilled

Sam’s presentation is entitled “Becoming a KW research Ninja” – sounds much better Sam!  His entire presentation is based on a quote from Tom Critchlow cracking the whip and saying “I don’t want you to work harder. I want you to work smarter” (just outsource all your SEO  Sam!)

Sam is going to go through a number of kick ass tools and how to use them smartly, including Xenu (there is an awesome ‘Xenu kicks ass’ graphic that I want to get!), Mozenda and others.

First Ninja Tip is Google Suggest.  It’s a great way of finding long tail KW opps.  But it would take all day to go through all your keywords and what google suggests, and it would take years.  Enter the magic that is Mozenda.  Take an excel spreadsheet of your keyword list, upload it to Mozenda and stick in the Google suggest XML output.  I’m not entirely sure how to get this XML output from Google Suggest but this tip sounds awesome.  From the Q&A Sam confirmed that he is going to share the URL to get XML output for Google Suggest in his slides – look forward to that one. update: here’s the link!

Ninja Tip #2 is using Mozenda to trawl through user generated tags (ie folksonomies, what people use for bookmarking) like Delicious and Hulu (in the example of a TV show like ‘glee’).  Again not entirely sure how to set this up (I’m assuming there’s an RSS feed you can get to, but another great one to look into.

Ninja Tip #3 is ‘the Popularity Contest’ – essentially look at other sites (incl competitors) which produce lists of the ‘top pages’ or even ‘top searches’ and then use Mozenda to go forth and gather data using these lists.  This combines keyword research with competitive analysis.

Other Ninja Toys and How To Use Them:

• Xenu Link Sleuth – crawl entire websites and look at the URLs (assumes kw focused URLs)
• Microsoft IIS – like Xenu on crack – use to crawl entire sites and not break your computer / server – also check out SEO Toolkit
• Mechanical Turk.  No time to go through results, no problem. 24/7 workforce for hire
• 80 Legs – similar to Mozenda but more user friendly? Sam himself needs to check this one out more (me too)
• Your noodle - use it! its the most important keyword research tool.

Great stuff from Sam, Ninja skillz as expected from a Distilled SEO warrior in training

[Update: Sam has published his slides along with a little blog post about keyword research - see below!]
Crocker, Samuel, Keyphrase Research Beyond the Ordinary [Final]