One of the benefits in speaking at the conferences such as the Search Engine Strategies is to have the opportunities to meet industry professionals and to learn from them. As the SES London approaches, I had an opportunity to interview Mr. Michel Leconte of SEO Samba, who will be on the Organic Listings Forum on February 18.

Q1. Before we talk about SEO, can you tell me about your company, SEO Samba?

SEO Samba is the sole “organic search management platform.” We’ve coined the category name to distance ourselves from PPC management platforms that SEM specialists are already familiar with. SEO Samba’s focus is on maximizing web site performance with search engines and other “free-to-play” digital marketing channels such as blogs, news, video, social, and others. It enables SEM firms and SEO experts to manage an unlimited number of organic search clients, projects and web sites from a single interface—and change SEO best practices across them all with a single click. From a conceptual standpoint, we propose that web marketers and professionals deploy and enforce best practices from a single point rather than manually coding these evolving best practices into each of these sites while hoping that end-users will not gradually undo these practices.

SEO Samba also generates additional sales for our SEM firm partners by referring businesses who come directly to our web site. These businesses, mostly small and medium sized, are in need of extra services and want make the most out of the SEO Samba platform.

Q2. In United States and Western Europe, Google is pretty much the focus of SEO and SEM, but can others who wish to target other engines and other European languages benefit from the Organic Search Management Platform, too?

At the expert level, SEO Samba’s users have the flexibility to build SEO automation rules that best suit their market and any associated targeted search engines. As a result, any web marketer can benefit from using an organic search management platform.

SEO Samba’s rule engine is immediately portable to other languages and markets. However, some other important functionalities, as well as interfaces, need to be localized in order to take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities. We will start actively recruiting SEM firm partners in European countries in the second quarter of the year.

Q3. SEO is no longer just about the web site. Blog, video sharing and so many social media applications are out there. I am sure that it is getting to be very challenging to all the site owners especially to small-medium businesses with limited budget and manpower. Any advice on where to start?

A number of applications (.http://www.twhirl.org/,  http://ping.fm, http://friendfeed.com/ ) have hit the marketplace recently that seek to aggregate social channels into a single broadcasting interface. While interesting and useful to their target users, most focus on building as large of a distribution network as possible for individual mass-market users.

We address this challenge differently with SEO Samba and focus on the needs of small and medium business web marketers and giving additional ammunition to our SEO firm partners. We see organic search as a field increasingly going beyond text results indeed. Social applications, news, blogs, video are all “free-to-play” marketing channels but are costly to research, select, manage and integrate with other marketing endeavors. And from a SERP standpoint, there is more to it. As Google puts it in their FAQ, “Social media is great! But there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.” At SEO Samba, we discriminate and prioritize channels to focus on the ones that have the potential to generate highest volume of direct traffic and business activity while improving your rankings in search engines.  In addition, we address the manpower challenge faced by SMB by providing a high level of integration and minimizing web marketers’ content creation efforts. For example, our first universal search module (provided free of charge) is a news module that provides a Google News-ready structure, news articles that are search optimized according to your chosen best practices, search friendly scrollers, automated RSS feeds creation, integrated with email newsletter platforms such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response etc. You can publish news across all your sites with a single click then aggregate news items across web sites to create unique newsletters and market to a cross segment of your email list, and, finally, save these newsletters with one click to any of your web sites. Each of our upcoming modules will provide the same level of details to ensure web site visibility, while expanding the least time possible from a user, content writer, marketer and SEO experts’ perspectives.

Q4. What do you think will happen or would you like to see in the search industry in 2009?

Search industry is not immune to the economic environment at large, even if it will hold up better than most. I think that most will revise growth plans according to the new deal. As a result, we will see some consolidation in the marketplace at the agency level. At the same time, some historical brick-and-mortar players who are still searching for their online model will be pressured to hunt for acquisitions and purchase platforms that can help them overcome their current digital strategy shortcomings. On the established search engine level, I would not be surprised if Microsoft finally cuts a deal with Yahoo for their search business and starts to aggressively circle Google by buying major players internationally in order to build a market share position they can hold on to. Meanwhile, Google will consolidate its online/offline ad products offering strategy and increasingly tweak its algorithm, weighing in more heavily on the social/buzz side of things, but in a very discriminating way. I expect to gradually see more variability in page results. However, this will not change fundamentally the playbook for good SEO work built around sound, engaging content and relentless optimization execution. Of course, we hope that web marketers will see SEO Samba as a good venue to help with this.

Q5. You moved from the RSS panel for scheduling conflict, what would have liked to tell the audience about RSS feeds?

As David Gilbraith put it, search engines answer three questions—How relevant? How fresh? How much? RSS answers the ‘how fresh’ question, and is therefore extremely valuable for SERPs. With improved standards for ping, RSS will become even more useful and could even replace crawling as a way for search engines to get results on pages. Some work needs to be done in terms of authentication and payload, but the general concept of delivering only fresh content/data at the time of publishing in place of have search engines crawling everything and looking for what’s new makes a lot of sense from a scalability stand point. So I believe SEO professionals should keep an eye on this.

From a corporate setting, RSS can have immediate and direct operational and marketing benefits on top of enhancing SERPs for web site owners. A good way to go about this is aggregating external RSS feeds and internal content through a publishing platform which will filter and repurpose content for distribution to a selected audience of employees, customers and partners. Here, the key is to harness the firing power of blogs,      aggregating and search optimizing the content and architecture (particular attention has to be paid to Google “juice” pass through when tracking subscriptions), and distribute automatically through specialized channels. This opens the door to creating new ad revenues as well. Some good platform resources for this include:

PressFeeds (news - standalone)
SEO Samba (web/news + Google news distribution)
Attensa (enterprise)
KnowNow (enterprise)
NewsGator (enterprise)

Thank you, Michal, for great insignt of the industry. I could sense your passion for the work you do, and I’m looking forward to meeting you in London!