Heini van Bergen's Blog

I’m very blessed and proud to announce the birth of my son, Tim. My wife gave birth to Tim on New Year’s Day at 22:05. All though Tim arrived pretty early (week 34), he’s doing very well and already charming all the nurses. My wife is recovering after a very intense delivery, but is doing well too.

If you take a look a the picture below, you can imagine I’m the proudest father in the world. And yes, Tim is really the cutest baby on earth.;-)

This is what I call a happy new year!

I’ve decided to pay more attention to my weblog. So the last days I’ve spend quite some time on updating my Wordpress installation to the latest version, added more plugins, created connection to HelloTxt, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc..

From now on all my blogposts, tweets, Flickr additions and more should be updated automatically. From this point on it’s up to me; creating killer content.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Yes, I’m a Mac fan. After I purchased my first gen iPhone it didn’t lasted long before I was ready for the real deal, a MacBook Air. I must admit that buying the Air probably wasn’t the best value I could get for my money, but switching to a Mac made my life even more worthwhile.

The user-friendly, intuitive and solid Mac OS felt like a great relieve after years of struggling with Windows XP. In combination with the sexy design of the Air I could show off with my nerdiness for the first time in my life. Took some time for me to get used to that.

Unfortunately I was the only switcher

While I was all happy with my shiny new MacBook Air, all of my colleagues were still working in a windows environment. Being enthusiastic with my Mac I believed that everything should be Mac, no matter what. That lasted for exactly 3 days… Working with Office for Mac was a complete disaster, although I was able to read my mail via IMAP, using any Calendar features on the Exchange was out of my league and sharing files on the network was a pain, let’s not mention building Excel spreadsheets.

There I was, very proud, but way behind on my todo-list and inbox.

After those first 3 days I went through all stages of integrating a Mac in our network, let’s sum up some stuff I tried:

• Microsoft Entourage; I could connect to the Exchange server but Entourage was to sluggish for normal productivity, besides the lack of features
• Create network shares using Thursby’s Dave; Did work fine until I found out I didn’t really needed it
• Crossover for Mac; I managed to get Outlook 2004 and Excel & Word 2004 running, but after time the 25th crash that day begins to bother you
• Virtual machine with VMWare Fusion; Quite ok, but after a rude Windows blue screen I decided this one didn’t either helped to improve my productivity
• Virtual machine with  Sun’s Virtualbox; Never managed to get it installed
• OpenOffice and NEOoffice for working with Office documents; Not bad, but too many compatibility problems with original Office documents
• Remote desktop connection (RDC); Used Office on a secondary desktop to which I connected by RDC
• Google calendar and Plaxo for syncing my Exchange calendar with iCal and iPhone; worked quite nice, but due to different timezones all my friends’ birthdays are set one day early… Hey, at least I’m never too late for the party.

Exploring all these options cost me a lot of free time, frustration and weakend my initial love for the Mac. Next to that, I stopped explaining to other people what I was trying to achieve. There is a point where you just get laughed at too often.

Current setup

One of my strenghts is that I don’t give up very fast, at the same time that’s also my shortcoming. This time I’ll look at it as a strenght. Cause finally I managed to fully enjoy my Mac but being very productive in a Windows environment as well.

What’s the trick? Well, no tricks at all. After I decided to completely reinstall my Mac OX, I also created a partition for Bootcamp. Setting up Bootcamp went pretty fast and installing Windows XP was peanuts. Running XP on a Mac feels strange, but works amazingly well.

But because I’m addicted to the Mac I couldn’t live with a shiny MacBook Air running only windows XP. So, for the second time I installed Parallels Desktop (had already bought it the first time, didn’t work well then). The renewed acquintance was not love at second sight immediately, but after making some configuration changes (increase video memory, use only 1 CPU, adjusted performance settings, etc..), XP in Parallels started running better and better. The last adjustments I made that really made a difference were screen settings in Windows XP to avoid shadow, fluent scrolling, etc.. All features that you could do without very easy. Together with the Parallels coherence mode, XP works almost seamingly in the Mac environment.

So for my day to day work I run XP in Parallels in Mac. When I really need to do some powerfull stuff on my Mac I switch of Parallels. When I need to get all out of XP, I switch to Bootcamp.

This setup currently works great for me, at least until I’m getting bored and want some improvement again…

With this trial and error way of working (mostly error), I must say I became quite experienced in inegrating Windows into Mac, so if I could help someone and save him/her a lot of time, please let me know.

This Monday and Tuesday I was lucky enough to attend SMX London. Like the 2 previous editions it was a great event. Cathing up with great folks from the industry and the already traditional LondonSEO party at Covent Garden Jewel bar made the atmosphere even better.

On Tuesday I was on the “Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues” panel, together with Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz), Richard Baxter (Cheapflights and SEOGadget) and Luisella Mazza (Google). I think the session turned out to be great with me doing a general overview of available free tools, Rand and Richard going more in depth on specific issues and Luisella talking about Google’s point of view on site issues. My presentation can be found below, next to links to some great people who had already wrote a more thorough recap of this years SMX.

Hope to see you all again next year!

Recaps already online:

• SEO optimise – 41 ultimate tips from SMX London 2009
• Datadial – SMX London round up

By now, or in the coming days, Google Searchwiki will be activated within all Google search results. After incorporating blended results, this is one the most significant changes to Google’s SERP’s over the last year. Next to that it also seems that the long awaited personalized results are finally coming into play.

First, what is Searchwiki actually about? Searchwiki gives users the ability to favor or delete a certain search result. You can also leave your comments about a specific result. A great insight with all ins-and-outs (currently available) on Searchwiki is available on SearchEngineLand.com.

Well, now let’s take a look at what Google Searchwiki could, should or wouldn’t bring us:

1. Searchwiki will be disabled after 9 months
   As SEO’s Searchwiki comes to us as a (kind of) revolution. But what will “normal” users think of it? Will they even notice the Searchwiki options, or know what to do with it? Do they even care about “composing” their own search results or do they just want the best result for their query and then leave Google?
2. Google get’s sued for not having an opt-out option
   Currently you are unable to opt-out of the Searchwiki. Once you agreed on using this feature, it’s enabled and hard to disable. This could be really a problem if you make a comment and forget to realize that it will become public automatically. Probably this will contrary to privacy act regulations (I’m no lawyer though).
3. The Indian economy get’s a boost
   Next to the extreme flourishing Indian link building industry, there might be a new opportunity for them; commenting on search results. Offcourse Google will try filter this new kind of spam out, but since Indian link building still seems so to work in some occasions, it will work from time to time to enhance your search comments and therefore will increase your Searchwiki clickthrough.
4. Ranking software becomes worthless
   Who wants to report on rankings that can be totally different from user to user. Nowadays it’s also hard to determine the right rankings, but you still have an indication. When a lot of people use Searchwiki, it’s impossible to know where you rank for a specific user.
5. Now more discussions about paid links, but now about paid comments
   Finally the paid links discussion is over, since links are worth less. But a nice discussion arise, as short term SEO’s will be to manipulate rankings with paid comments. No, I don’t want your link, just comment on my site in Google….
6. Searchwiki ratings will become part of the Google algorithm
   Allthough Google underlines that ratings you give aren’t used in the algo yet, they don’t rule out the possibility that this will change. As search marketers will already know that this is just a mather of time
7. The SEO ball game will change
   As more user input will be used in the SERP’s, the value of current ranking factors will change and will be lowered. Power to the people, but not to the SEO. On the other hand, this will give us new opportunities, since we have a new ingredient we can optimize for. Blackhat SEO’s will have a hard time though.
8. Google will fire manual SERP raters
   This is not caused by the economic hazzle, but users will take over the work that currently 10,000+ (this is an assumption) manual raters are doing. The Google management will probably encourage this in a down  economy.
9. Matt Cutts’ job description will change
   Where Matt is currently primarily reading spam reports and keeping track of the SEO industry, spam reports will decrease in value and the user comments and deletions will replace them. Maybe not as accurate as spam reports, but in a far higher volume.
10. Searchwiki will be a huge success
    This feature was what users always wanted and now they can use the most popular digg, wikipedia, etc… options on their favorite search engine. Google will outrank competitors and increase their market shares in markets where this is still possible.

Some of these scenario’s will become reality, others are just assumptions which will be blown away very soon. But it’s very clear that this new addition to the Google search listing will change the way people use Google and the way you need to promote your business in the organic listings.

The second edition of SMX London took place this Tuesday and Wednesday at the New Connaught Rooms in the beautiful Covent Garden area. After already attending last year, this year was special because I made my first appearence in speaking at this event.

The sessions I spoke were International SEO (day 1) and Local Search & Blended results (day 2). It made it even more exciting since both session were moderated by industry well known Vanessa Fox. Both sessions turned out to be really fascinating, with lot’s of audience interaction. Not least because of the other speakers, Andy Atkins-Kruger & Duncan Morris (International SEO) and Susan Hallam & Jon Myers (Local Search & Blended Results).

I won’t recap this event, since this is already greatly featured by other attendees and beacause Wiep Knol and I already made a short Dutch recap at Marketingfacts. However, you will find some great resources listed below.

For all of you that are interested, find my presentation slides here:

Other great resources at SMX London 2008:

• Searchcowboys.com; several articles about conference
• Andrew R H Girdwoord; fastest blogger in town on the local search session
• Wiep Knol; Did a great job on the Blow Your Mind Linkbuilding techniques session
• Eduard Blaqcuire; Blogged his socks off at the SMX
• Richard Baxter; “High Five” Day 1 recap
• Mark Bovenkerk; He took some great pictures
• LondonSEO: Great party, unfortunately they threw us out at 23.30…

Last week I was reading an article by Aaron Wall on the importance of branding in Search Engine Marketing. Over the last couple of years I’ve seen many examples of companies which could do search advertising with a decent Cost Per Order mostly because clicks on their brand name caused cheap conversions.

The best example of this is the introduction of a new news-paper which we managed. In the pre-introduction period, where you could only do trial subscriptions, the cost per subscription was higher than the actual subscription fee. Once the (offline) media campaign started and the brand became more well-known, we saw cost per subscriptions dropped to less than 10% of the subscription fee.

From this example, and more I’ve came accross, I would definitely say that branding is really important in search. But in the end, it’s all about your objectives and testing what works best for your brand within your selected target group(s).

I’m very curious to read your examples of the synergy between Branding and Search.

Today SEOmoz.org announced a new way to handle SEO. SEOmoz build their own web-crawler which will give SEO’s more insight in the consistency of the web, information which is already  available to all search engines. They claim to have already indexed 30 billion(!) web pages.

This will bring a whole new era in search optimization, since SEOmoz shares this data (after membership registration) to the entire community. SEOmoz created the service Linkscape which will rate a website throughout their own MozRank analysis. Since we’d had to be guessing on what the value of a link or website was, or had to build our own tools, or had to stress the search engines to push multiple queries to get our information, now we might have somewhat like an industry standard that’s available for all.

I really think the entire SEOmoz team did an incredible job to get this train on track, since their team currently only counts 16 members. In my opinion SEO could become a different ball game, cause less guessing leads to more effective optimization. Is this the start of SEO 4.0?

I want to let you know that I’ll be speaking at the SMX London 4 & 5 November at the New Connaught Rooms, Covent Garden. Together with lots of great minds in the Search industry, I’m pretty sure we’ll have a great and inspirational conference. I already attended last year’s SMX in London and was overwhelmed by the great knowledge all attendees bring in.

Next to me my colleague Wiep Knol will also contribute on the “Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques” session, a must see! I’ll be speaking about International SEO (day 1) and Local Search & Blended Results (day 2). If you have suggestions to include in these presentations, please let me know and will try to fit them in. And of course, If you like to join me exploring the London nightlife, be my guest!

With Google already doing a good job with their Webmaster Central, the Google Blog, Webmaster guidelines and offcourse Matt Cutts handling different topics on his weblog, Google has now published a small video which handles issues like duplicate content, local listings, site design and more.

As always they are not giving us insights in how to optimize, however this video from “Reid” does give us answers on some long lasting questions.