The Death of Page One Position One & TDD All the Things

This month is a joint SyncNorwich and SyncDevelopHER event.

The Death of Page One Position One - Chris Green

In digital marketing, SEO has always been one of the seemingly mythic areas, people on the outside saw it as a dark art, people on the inside started life as hobbyists and quickly came to realise the value in their "tinkering” with websites and playing with Google.

Everyone knows how much money the coveted top spot within Google is worth, and what started as a game for bragging rights become a huge industry in its own right. But what was once a relatively straightforward battle, page one position has become vastly more complex and ultimately more difficult to achieve.

Google’s paid advertising platforms, their social media aspirations, the “knowledge graph” and many other services have ensured that Google’s (and therefore “Search" by extensions) ubiquity has never been so apparent.

This, whether we like it or not, will likely change how we consume information and this all starts with how we search for it.

"Search", as we know it will change beyond recognition within the next 5 years, and whilst this will be a hugely complex process I will consider:

• The shift towards semantic search and the growing power of context

• Google’s massive gains in machine learning and what it means for chasing the algorithm

• The device diversification, possibly the single greatest change in search we’ve seen

• By way of a brief history of Google, I will cover what this change will likely mean for the user, the marketer and the developer.

• What the new world of search could look like and the ramifications.

• The shift from keywords to audiences and how that thinking changes how we interact with search.

• How to find your audience, whether it is for your website, app or business.

Chris Green is SEO & Content Manager at StrategiQ Marketing (http://www.strategiqmarketing.co.uk) an Ipswich-based, full-service marketing agency. Chris has worked in digital marketing for +5 years, primarily as a technical SEO and general “Search” Consultant, working with Multi-National corporations and SMEs through to Small Business Owners and Start Ups. With a strong background in literature and the media culminating in a Masters degree from the University of Essex, he works from a broad creative base and mixes that with his passion for technology and the digital world.

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TDD All the Things - Liz Keogh

Test-Driven Development, with its cycle of "red, green, refactor", is something that we're used to using on classes or small pieces of code. What would it look like if we tried to use it at scale? Or on things which aren't software? What does refactoring look like if we do it in real life? Can we perform TDD on ourselves? And why would we want to?

In this talk we look at the patterns and principles behind TDD, and how they correlate to other frameworks of change and growth in the real world, gaining a better understanding of how TDD works when it's done well, and how the same principles can apply to everything else too!

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