The day is nearly upon us – 24th November just 7 days to go for what promises to be a great event. THe Mini Conference sponsored by the fantastic Majestic SEO folk is featuring some of the greatest SEO and Analytics minds in Manchester and the UK including Kevin Gibbons, Samuel Crocker, Chelsea Blacker, James Lowery, Richard Gregory, Barry Adams, Gary Taylor, Dr Karl Blanks and last but not least Mindy Gofton.

THe conference is pencilled in to finish around 6 o’clock however we will be providing some drinks at the last session of the day – an unconference in honour of Jaamit Durrani – the OMD SEO who so tragically lost his life nearly a year to the day of the mini conference event. We would obviously like people attending to help contribute to this by sharing tips and tricks – and we will be providing some sparkling wine during this period.

We are then planning to head down to the Blackdog Ballroom for around 8 for further fun and drinks for those that would like to network further and speak to a number of the speakers who are attending the event. Obviously you are more than welcome to get their before if you want however it will give folk a chance to grab a bite to eat before joining up with everyone afterwards. It should be noted that the Blackdog do sell food if you wish to eat there.

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Due to very high demand for tickets we are pleased to announce the release of another 90 tickets to the Sascon Mini Conference sponsored by Majestic SEO on the 24th November 2011 – starting at 2pm. The 90 tickets will go quickly so if you want to be there on the 24th and see the likes of Sam Crocker, Gary Taylor, Kev Gibbons, Chelsea Blacker, Barry Adams and Mindy Gofton to name a few and we are looking to have around 200 attendees there on the day.

If you haven’t got your tickets, this is the last round of tickets being released – so get your tickets now!

As a sidenote tickets will shortly be available for the main conference itself. Further details of the dates involved and speakers will be announced in the near future

Further to the announcement this morning of the Sascon mini conference we are pleased to announce that tickets for the event are now officially on sale.

Speakers confirmed for this years mini conference include

• Gary Taylor – Operations Director / Head of Search – One Result
• Barry Adams – Senior Digital Marketer for Search – Pierce Group
• Karl Blanks – Conversion Rate Experts
• Mindy Gofton – Head of Search – iCom

Unlike last year, tickets for the event are a mere £10 however this will allow us just to make this event just that little bit more special particularly with regards to some of the special planning for this one that is taking place.

Following on from last years fantastic success of the mini-conference and the huge success of Sascon 2011, we are pleased to announce that November will see the return of the Sascon Manchester SEO Mini Conference. With a revised format – and some great new speakers this year promises to be a fantastic event.

We are also pleased to be announcing a fantastic new Headline sponsor in Majestic SEO who have been a fantastic supporter of the Sascon conferences since they started back in 2010. Further to that we are also extremely greatful to Manual Link Building who have also been kind enough to sponsor the event again for the November event – with potentially a number more to be confirmed soon. That said there are still opportunities to sponsor this event.

The event will again take place at the Hive where both the mini conference last year and the main Sascon conference took place this year. We will be formally announcing the ticket sales at the start of next week. Please note ticket numbers are limited and these will be confirmed on a first come first served basis.

We are also in the process of organising a special event for the evening of the 24th in memory of Jaamit Durrani – who passed away a year more or less to the day at the day of the event. Further information regarding this will be released soon – once a couple of extra bits have been confirmed.

So keep the 24th November 2011 free – it promises to be a fantastic event.

Friday 20th Introductions

Keynote — Richard Dennys, Chief Marketing Officer, QYPE

Feeds and Microformats — Optimisation beyond the site

Chair: Ben McKay, Speaker 1: Joost de Valk, Speaker 2: Richard Baxter, Speaker 3: James Lowery

Credit where credit is due — Conversion Attribution

Chair: Karl Banks, Speaker 1: Lewis Lensenn (DC Storm), Speaker 2: Adrian Hands @Tagman

Analytics 2.0

Chair: Darren Herbert, Speaker 1: Paddy Moogan, Speaker 2: Tom Betts, FT

Running a Global Search Campaign

Chair: Gary Beal, Blue Claw , Speaker 1: Bas Van Den Beld, Speaker 2: Andy Atkins Kruger

Location, location, location

Chair: Richard Gregory, Speaker 1: Jenny Simpson, Speaker 2: Kristal from Welcome to Yorkshire

Cutting Edge Search Technology

Chair: Ben McKay, Speaker 1: Ross from Ad Insight, Speaker 2: Joost de Valk, Speaker 3: Dixon Jones

Search & PR

Chair: Nichola Stott, Speaker 1: Stuart Bruce, Speaker 2: Claire Thomson (SEO PR Training), Speaker 3: Barry Adams

WordPress SEO

Chair: Joost de Valk (Solo Panel)

Thursday 19th Introductions

Keynote – King Yiu Chi, AR Strategist at Layar:

Stat-o-rama — An Industry in numbers:

Chair: Bas van den Beld, Speaker 1: James Murray (Hitwise), Speaker 2: Emily Dent

SAScon Market Focus – Retail

Chair: Simon Wharton, Speaker 1: Paul Cooper, Speaker 2: Gareth Owens(TBC), Speaker 3: Rishil

Paid Search Innovation

Chair: Peter Cobley, Speaker 1: Jonathan Beeston (Efficient Frontier), Speaker 2: Guy Levine, Speaker 3: Duncan Fisher

Enterprise Level SEO

SAScon Market Focus – Gaming

Chair: Richard Gregory, Speaker 1: Nick Garner, Speaker 2: James Lowery

Mobile Marketing goes Mainstream

Chair: David Murphy, Mobile Marketing magazine, Speaker 1: Andrew Barke (Google), Speaker 2: King @ Layer, Speaker 3: Duncan Fisher

SAScon Market Focus – Travel

Chair: Paul Cooper, Speaker 1: Dan Robb, Speaker 2: Kevin Gibbons, Speaker 3: Neil Hardy Co-op

Regulation in Search — Is it Viable?

Chair: Rishil, Speaker 1: Malcolm Phillips – ASA , Speaker 2: Judith Lewis, Speaker 3: Andrew Girdwood

Compressing content

By enabling compression on your web server, you’ll speed up the load times of pages on your site by compressing, both ASCII and binary files on the server side, as requested. This will leave the user to decompress them on the other side. Options to enable this are available for both Apache and IIS (Windows), and are supported on all modern web browsers. If a user doesn’t support compression, the server will simply revert to responding with uncompressed content.

• The current standard choice is: mod_deflate (compatible alternative available for IIS).
• Straightforward gzip compression is less popular, with deflate now being the preferred option: mod_gzip (compatible alternative available for IIS).

CSS and JavaScript tricks

There are a few quick and easy ways that you can optimise the use of, and structure of, your CSS and JavaScript code to enable quicker page loads. Performing these simple optimisation techniques is a time-efficient way to squeeze that little bit extra out of your load times.

• Make CSS and JavaScript external to your HTML, basically, don’t embed any JavaScript or CSS in your HTML code. Making this external will cause a handful of extra connections to be made on the first visit, but once that happens your browser will cache these files. This means the files and the code contained won’t need to be downloaded again for some time.
• Minification – This is the practice of stripping out white space, comments and other unnecessary data from scripts in order to reduce the over-all size of the code. While it won’t make the code run any faster, this has the advantage of enabling the data to be downloaded more quickly. Minification also works really well when used with the compression techniques mentioned above. We’d recommend Yahoo!’s YUI Compressor to handle the minification of your code. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/

OpCode caching (or code acceleration)

Compilation is the process of turning code written by people into a language that the computer understands. Typically, this only needs to happen once. During run-time, high-level programming languages, such as PHP, operate in the same way that other languages behave in compilation.

Scripts written in languages like PHP are compiled “on-the-fly” by an interpreter, which translates them into lower-level code that the computer understands. This happens every single time the PHP script is executed. At this point, I’m sure you can see why this can be wasteful in a server environment!

Fortunately, there are various tools and frameworks available to help reduce the waste. They help by caching the compiled code, so that it’s not re-compiled when it’s not needed. These tools include (but are not limited to):

• eAccelerator for PHP, available from http://eaccelerator.net/
• APC (Alternative PHP Cache) available at http://pecl.php.net/package/APC
• XCache for PHP, available from http://xcache.lighttpd.net/.

The truth is that there’s always more you can be doing, but we hope you’ve found something in these blogs to help you along the way. Do feel free to give one of the team at Melbourne a shout if you have any questions and enjoy SAScon.

http://www.melbourne.co.uk/

Chris Merrett, Senior Linux Engineer at Melbourne Server Hosting has pulled together a blog post on thoughts on how to reduce page load speed – something that could be helpful for organic rankings too. So here you go – enjoy!

At Melbourne, the burning idea we’re always asked is how can we improve web page load times? Everyone understands the speed of your site can make all the difference when it comes to holding the attention of potential users. What people don’t realise is that there are a lot of tweaks you can make to your code and server environment that will drastically improve performance across the board.

In our two-part master class, we’re going to take you through a handful of recommendations and briefly explain ways in which you can put them into action. Do click through the links as hopefully, you’ll find that one or two of our top tweaks will make a big difference.

Minimising connections

There are loads of ways in which you can minimise connections to your web server and us connections that are made more economically. Most modern web servers allow you to enable a KeepAlive on connections that are established. This allows a client to re-use the same connection many times, instead of constantly opening and closing connections, which increases the competition between everyone trying to access the server. This will help reduce load times and improve connection management. But what about actually reducing connections?

There are tonnes of different ways of doing this, but here are a few of my picks:

• Combining files this involves combining all JavaScript files into one and combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. This could immediately reduce connections into just two. It also has the side effect of making minification for both JavaScript and CSS straightforward. More on that later

• CSS sprites this is the practice of combining all of the images for a page into one image file and then selecting the area of the image required via CSS. This

also results in one connection to load images and has the added bonus of making better use of colour palettes and compression.

• Splitting dynamic and static content If you can justify the cost, it can be beneficial to split dynamic content from static content, such as images, CSS, JavaScript and Flash. It gives you a much finer degree of control over your environment and allows you to apply tweaks either to the static content server or dynamic content server, dependent on your needs. Technically, this doesn’t reduce connections. It splits them instead, but as far as each server is concerned does have that effect.

We’ve only just scratched the surface on what’s possible when it comes to site optimisation, but hopefully it’s given you food for thought. We’ll be back with Take Two, when we’ll take a look at compressing content and code acceleration.

SAScon is all about fresh, creative and smart thinking in search, analytics and social something that has been high on our agenda since its conception. As such, we are creating a new competition to help promote just this, with the best entry winning a VIP ticket to SAScon 2011!

The VIP prize includes:

Exclusive access to the speakers dinner on the eve of SAScon!

Free access to both days of SAScon 2011!

Free entrance to all SAScon 2011 socials!

….and best yet, winning this prize could be really quite easy indeed!

How do you win?

All you have to do is enter the BEST tweet on Search, Analytics or Social. What makes the tweet the best is how funny it is, how helpful it is to the wider community, how well it is promoted, or even how creative it is…it really can be all sorts of things. Just make it stand-out.

A winning post might be a joke following recent news, a top-tip on link-building, or a tweet that has generated tons of retweets we’re expecting to see some great ideas!

How to enter…

Entry is easy. All you have to do is tweet with the hashtag #SASconVIP, and that’s it!

The winner will be announced at the start of May approximately 2 weeks before the big event. Best of luck!

As SAScon 2011 is just around the corner, here we go with the 2011 line-up…

SAScon 2011 Keynote

The ultra-fast expansion of mobile search, social apps and utilities that are supporting and shaping our day-to-day lives means that more and more people are playing, publishing, communicating in exciting new ways on the move. To reflect this, SAScon’s keynote is King Yiu Chi Augmented Reality Strategist for Layar. This is a fantastic thing for people looking to get a taste of a relatively new (augmented and geo-tagged) world that is becoming ever more integrated in to our lives – and as a result, provides new and exciting ways to interact with consumers.

Taking advantage of geo-tagging, compass and cameras within so many Smartphones (now accounting for 20% of all mobile phones a 96% increase year-on-year), Layar is a global leader in augmented reality (AR). Layar provides a framework for developers to add value to what you see around you enabling users to do far more than simply Google for more information.

AR is great merger of complex technology and the real-world so expect a very progressive and forward-thinking keynote. I cannot wait!

King Yiu Chi on Twitter

SAScon 2011 Speakers

By now, you might well know how the SAScon format is, in that we much prefer the insightful debate and banter created from panels, so again for 2011, we will be putting the industry’s highest profile, thought leaders on to range of panels delving in to a range topics at depth, and from a variety of perspectives. In addition to that, we’re also hosting workshops for those wanting more interaction and Q&A time out of a conference. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it!

We had some corking speakers in 2010 so great in fact that we just could not resist inviting a few of them back again this year. 2011 speakers include:

• David Naylor probably the UK’s best known SEO and highly regarded blogger Bronco.
• Ralph Tegmeier (aka Fantomaster) delivering industry-grade cloaking tools to the market. Fantastically frank, honest and insightful in 2010 so looking forward to seeing more of the same this year!
• Richard Baxter always keen to share opinions on new technical development in search and a social on SEO Gadget
• Joost de Valk (aka Yoast) Developer of a huge range of WordPress Plugins and a fantastic bookmarklet, Quix
• Paddy Moogan SEO Consultant at Distilled and contributor on SEOMoz.
• There are a load more excellent panellists on the main speakers page too, and of course be sure to check our the programme outline for 2011 too!

The only bad news is that somehow, I’ve been wangled in to debuting as chair for the “Feeds and Microformats Optimisation beyond the site panel at 10am on Day 2 – so with post Day 1 drinks just leaving my system, I’ll be trying to keep the panel in check (now I see why everyone wanted to duck this one!) – so please be kind! ;)

So hopefully this has begun to whet your appetite, and give you a sense that SAScon’s 2 day format is going to be rammed full of great insight in to the workings of effective and efficient search, social and analytics so why not register for SAScon today!