Since the founding of Matan Media, the company had been using the Editgrid free web-based online spreadsheet service. For almost two years, Editgrid was of great benefit to the company, and allowed us to easily create spreadsheet documents and share them amongst ourselves and with clients around the globe.
All good things must come to an end, however, and i am reporting to you that we are no longer using Editgrid. The lack of online and product support offered, aligned with a number of other issues, led us to the conclusion that our partnership with Editgrid could no longer provide us with the service and security that our business demands.
Thus begun the arduous task of firstly finding a new service, and then moving all of our shared documents over to the new service. I was entrusted with the task of comparing and contrasting the main competitors, and quickly narrowed the search down to two - Zoho and the new and improved Google Docs.
In the end we decided that Zoho was the best option for us. This was, at least in part, because of the ease with which we could move all of our documents over from Editgrid. Matanmedia mostly uses the spreadsheet function, and we found that Zoho’s version (called zoho sheet) was really easy to use and full of interesting and useful features. A little Youtube promotion video/guide to Zoho sheet can be viewed here (please do note how similar this guys voice is to Stephen Hawking).
A month in, and we are really pleased with Zoho, even though we still all miss Editgrid a little. There are a few quirks and issues, but overall we have no complaints about the quality of the service, and of course the value.
Phew! What an awesome week we had in London. Me being the ‘token yank’ of Matan Media, it was my first significant amount of time in London. Despite fears of being frozen to death or affected by SAD due to lack of sunlight, we had an incredible time.
The Imagination Gallery - We were on the roof of this bad boy!
Marc chatting away during one of the breaks
The Audience - It may look male lopsided, but for an SEO conference there were a fair number of women in the audience - I’d say the ratio was 1:5 - photo credit: foliovision
The 5 stories we had to walk up and down - good to get the blood pumping between the many sessions. photo credit: foliovision
So much has been said about how professional, worthwhile, and smoothly the conference went. There have been tons of great reviews, specifically these two from foliovision, and this one (from within the walls of Microsoft!?!) so I don’t want to compile all my notes from each session. Quite frankly, I’ve got tons of work to do after listening to some of the smartest folks in the industry. However, I thought of highlighting what I saw as some of the most significant take-aways from the entire two-day seminar. Granted each person or agency focuses on different areas - these seemed to be the most relevant and important to us.
- Start becoming an Excel ninja. It was mentioned and demonstrated time and time again. Check out Richard Baxter’s tip of using tables as opposed to cell references when preparing data. Furthermore, start using pivot tables to combine useful data like search volume alongside your own rankings for awesome graphs.
- I’m the Analytics monkey of Matan Media, so you can be sure I was delighted to see how much of it was covered at the seminar. My biggest take-aways are the Dafizilla Table2Clipboard Firefox plugin which allows you to properly copy and paste an html table (from Adwords or Analytics for example) directly into Excel. Another awesome tool is the Excellent Analytics Excel plugin, which allows you to pull in massive amounts of data at a time directly into Excel. From there you can pivot table, chart it, and compare multiple metrics at a time in manner impossible on the Analytics web platform itself.
Excellent Analytics - Pull your analytics data into Excel
- Start diversifying your page strength metrics. For all you link builders out there, you can pretty much forget about Page Rank. Dave Naylor pretty much flat out said that by January Google Page Rank (that evil little inconsistent, already-irrelevant and unreliable green bar) will be laid to rest for good.
Tweets quoting Dave Naylor’s assessment on Page Rank
Dave Naylor vs. Matt Cutts on Page Rank - Ripped from the guys at Fuze Optimisation - (Don’t be upset I stole it from your site, … your link bait is working!!)
Whether or not Dave’s claim is true - the point is we all know it’s become increasingly unreliable and that its accuracy is questionable at best. Why not start migrating to a different metric like SEOMoz’s MozRank. Now it’s not perfect, but once you get used to it, I have a feeling it’s accuracy will provide with you some great results. Heck, I’ve just written a nifty php script that uses their free API which automated a massive amount of domain analysis. Switch now, or you’ll have your link building team and your clients wondering how to measure the quality of your links!
- Google’s Vince and Caffeine updates have gotten people speaking about Vertical and Universal search more than ever before. While it doesn’t mean you should go into hysterics, understanding how and why certain pictures, news results, blogs, videos and forum posts get included into the SERPS is vital. Now while I won’t give away all the secrets from Patrick Altoft at Branded 3, but I will tell you the following.
**XML Video Sitemaps hosted on your own site can provide incredible results in getting your own domain to rank a specific keyword, display the thumbnail of your choice, and link back to the content of your choice (even if that video/swf/flash file doesn’t really exist where you say it does). Now while this does seem to be very black-hat, if implemented properly and ethically, I think it is a golden technique for indexing video on your own domain and driving traffic to your site instead of youtube, break, google video, etc. Try out Video Sitemap Pro - for Mac & PC - it seems to do the trick without a massive dev team.
If you don’t have a dev team at your beck and call, try Video Sitemap Generator to create your properly formatted XML video sitemap and then submit through Google Webmaster Tools
**Consider sponsoring the top ranking images for your competitive keywords. It may be an unaware blogger who has an image ranking for a top term. Slapping your website’s logo on there for a nominal price may prove worthwhile. Granted it takes the extra step of someone typing in that domain manually - but for a high volume search term you might be surprised!
**Get yourself in Google News if you have a blog. Follow the guidelines properly, and you’ll be surprised by the traffic you can get from universal search news results.
- Leveraging your client’s USP - Unique Selling Point - to gain links can be huge. Whilst a lot of the link building techniques we saw are already employed at Matan Media, watching how Tom Critchlow thinks about link sources gave me huge amounts of ideas: including sponsoring events related to the sector, developing useful and simple widgets, product giveaways, and implementing your link building strategy into other areas of the client’s business.
Well that about does it. Obviously there were tons of other tips and tricks given away. I wanted to focus on some of the most actionable things I think can lead to great results and insights into your campaigns. That and I have a $%#& load of work to get through! We had such a bloody brilliant time, that I can safely say with my worst british accent, we’ll be back next year, mate! :).
Here are a few shots of us at the pub during the second after party - this was where the real SEO conversations went down!
Where the REAL SEO work gets done! (photo from this YouMoz post)
Marc and Ian having a drink at the LondonSEO after party. I was feeling sick, so I got myself a Hot Toddy - you Britts are good for something! 
By the way, It was great meeting so man you at the conference and at the bars. Here are some shoutouts:
@matanmedia: Thanks for being a great company- flying me out to London, sending me to the Pro Series conference, and letting me spend quality time with my girlfriend who’s studying at LSE!
@gustavobacchin: Gustavo! Tudo Bem? Nice to meet you in the flesh. We had some good coffee breaks standing around in an awkward man-circle. hahaha.
@Searchpanda: Great talking to you - Not sure what it was we spoke about for a long time, those jack and cokes and hot toddys make for some interesting conversation!
@jaamit: Only met you for a sec, but great tweets during the seminar.
@randfish: Was awesome to meet you in person after watching 100’s of whiteboard fridays. Glad I got to thank you in person for helping out with a Q&A on seomoz.org - your advice worked after a few months and helped me keep my job 
@everywhereist: Great to meet the beauty behind the beast! Was great talking to you about your roots - really incredible stories. You’re welcome to do an exposé on Tel Aviv for your travel blog at any time - we’ll take you guys around!
@coplandmj: Wonderful meeting you. It was nice meeting someone who deals with the same competitive sector - sorry for putting that Yankee American pressure on you to spill who your clients were! Loved your presentation on Penalties/Filters - great stuff.
As a company that hires staff to work remotely as well as from the office, the importance of quality management tools can’t be underestimated. It’s every manager’s nightmare; what are staff working on? Are they being proactive? How effectively are they using their time? In fact, the list is endless.
With this in mind, we went searching and found ‘Basecamp’. It’s a leading web-based project management and collaboration system. It enables all staff to share schedules, projects, deadlines and documents with one another. The ‘administrator’ has the ability to share people into relevant projects and manage the whole system, hence users have access to what they need and nothing else. Each Basecamp account is directly linked to a respective email address so all and any notifications arrive directly into your inbox.
Basically, Basecamp democratizes project management and makes it a team effort. It lets everyone get involved in managing a project–the thinkers, the builders, the managers and the client. Anyone who has access to the project can subscribe to the RSS feed and be updated about anything that is posted to that project.
Designed and built by 37signals in 2004, they have since added a wider range of web based management tools.
We’ve been using Basecamp for a few months now and feedback from staff has been very encouraging. People are more organised, the self imposed deadlines help people manage the workload too and overall productivity has increased.
I’m now playing with a new Firefox plug-in also related to increasing productivity, but more about that another day!
I recently put together a collection of my favourite and most used SEO add-ons for Firefox. So check out my SEO Tools Advanced collection. Feel free to subscribe to the collection which I will be adding to and updating as more great SEO add-ons come along.
These tools are not only easy to install and use, but extremely useful on a day to day basis. TBH, I don’t know where we would be without them - so a big thanks to all the creators for putting such great and useful tools out there!
There are a few additional Firefox add-ons I use, which are not listed on the add-ons website so are not part of the collection. See them here:
Link Diagnosis: You need the firefox add-on installed to properly use the link diagnosis tools. Pulls some great data on site back-links.
Mozbar: The SEOmoz Toolbar - Get access to all the SEOmoz tools and ranks via the toolbar. (Only available to PRO Members)
RankChecker: The RankChecker from seobook is a great tool for seeing where your site ranks for chosen keywords quickly and easily.
Do you have other SEO Firefox add-ons you recommend? Let me know!
