All posts by Kevin Gibbons

Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

Conversion Conference LondonWe’ve managed to get our readers a discount to this years Conversion Conference in London.

This is running across two days (30 November – 1 December) at The Business and Design Centre in London and has a great line-up of conversion optimisation speakers, it looks like it’s going to be a very interesting event!

To get a 15% discount off ticket prices, all you need to do is sign-up using the promo code: SEOPTIMISE011 – see you there!

Having attended and presented at A4UExpo this year, I thought I’d write a recap on the top tweets, takeaways and presentations – in no particular order:

#A4US2 opportunity = search vol * max CTR * conversion rate * Rev per sale #boom
October 18, 2011 10:03 am via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite
@APSG
Amrit Gill

Brand-name IBLs must outnumber keyword IBLs! Getting this wrong is the greatest red flag for Google. (via @ @ #a4uS2)
October 18, 2011 10:27 am via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite
@rouninmedia
Rounin Media

Superaffiliate SEO is more about ranking #1 for all of your top keyphrases, not conversions @ #a4uexpo #a4us2
October 18, 2011 9:57 am via TwitterrificReplyRetweetFavorite
@kevgibbo
Kevin Gibbons

Today myself and Daniel Bianchini gave a presentation at a4uexpo London 2011 on how to survive Google’s panda algorithm update.

In case you missed it, we’ve posted both sets of slides online here:

The 4 Hour Affiliate Week – Kevin Gibbons, A4UExpo London 2011
A4 u panda-slap-db

If you have any questions on this please let us know in the comments.

Today I’ve been at Econsultancy’s Jump conference, this is the second year for the event and it’s already a hugely popular event.

This is run with 8 tracks alongside each other – so obviously I didn’t attend them all, but I have listed the top tweets and best bits from the day:

$50 billion will be spent by US organisations in 2012 on Facebook advertising. #cometojump
October 12, 2011 8:54 am via MyPad for iOS (iPad)ReplyRetweetFavorite
@connoan
Alan Connor

Personalised Direct Mail resulted in a 30% sales uptake online for Net-A-Porter #CometoJUMP
October 12, 2011 11:36 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@CometoJUMP
Come to Jump

Earlier in the week I ran a poll to ask if people thought Google AdWords remarketing was a great marketing tactic, or just annoying.

There’s often many mixed opinions when talking about this, which fall into two groups:

  1. People who find that they are constantly being re-marketed to and almost stalked across the web, often to the point that it puts them off making a future purchase from a brand because the ads are so annoying.
  2. Advertisers who find that AdWords remarketing yields a positive ROI and is a great marketing tactic to re-connect with potential customers, who didn’t quite make a purchase last time they visited your site – but are likely to in the future.

So I thought it would be useful to run a quick poll to see how these opinions are divided, here are the results:

September was a very busy month on the SEOptimise blog – so here’s a monthly recap, just incase you missed any of top posts – ordered by number of retweets.

Top 12 SEOptimise posts in September:

  1. 30 Google SERP Changes That Impact Your SEO Strategy by Tad Chef – 224 Tweets
  2. 74% of SEOs Buy (or Would Consider Buying) Links! by Kevin Gibbons – 172 Tweets
  3. International SEO Strategy – Domains, Subdomains or Subfolders? by Kevin Gibbons – 149 Tweets
  4. 5 Low Profile/New SEO Tools You Should be Using by Matthew Taylor – 136 Tweets
  5. Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes UK Brands Are Still Making by Kevin Gibbons – 124 Tweets
  6. How to Write a Social Media Audit by Marcus Taylor – 124 Tweets
  7. SEO Metrics Everybody Can Use – 124 by Daniel Bianchini – 122 Tweets
  8. 44 Google Webmaster Tools Resources by Tad Chef – 121 Tweets
  9. Klout Score Optimisation or Influencer SEO by Tad Chef – 103 Tweets
  10. Facebook Insights for Domains – Measuring Social Media Success by Shaad Hamid – 74 Tweets
  11. How to Pass the Google Analytics Exam by Mike Browne – 62 Tweets
  12. 9 Ways to Sharpen Up Your Paid Search by Tamsin Mehew – 56 Tweets

Last week I asked on Twitter to see what common SEO mistakes were still being made by retail websites. This received a great response, so I thought I’d share the top replies with our readers.

I’ve picked some UK high street retail examples to help display the issues raised, but please note that we have no connection with any of these websites – so this is an outside perspective. There may be logical reasons for the examples which we are unaware of, but these have been used in order to highlight where SEO mistakes are commonly made.

Non-descriptive URL structure

Ideally you want to keep your URLs concise and keyword descriptive. So automatically generated, ID-based URLs aren’t going to help your SEO, unless you’re aiming to rank for g474502s2 - in which case Next.co.uk have dominated market share!

Next SEO

 

Last week I ran a Facebook poll to ask what people considered to be their favourite search conference in the UK.

This received a great response (197 votes in total) – and we can now announce that the winners of the competition were Think Visibility, who collected 63 votes!

SAScon Manchester and BrightonSEO made it a great result for the smaller events as they finished second and third respectively, with 56 and 29 votes – ranking ahead of some of the much bigger organised London events. Thanks to everyone who took part!

Earlier today I thought it would be interesting to find out what peoples favourite search conference in the UK is.

Update 15th Sept – the votes have started to settle down now and the top results are very interesting, with the smaller organised and 1-day events such as SAScon, Think Visibility and BrightonSEO coming out on top of conferences which are considered much higher profile.

Here’s the results, from 171 votes:

  1. SAScon Manchester – 51 votes
  2. Think Visibility Leeds – 49 votes
  3. BrightonSEO – 27 votes
  4. a4uexpo London – 19 votes
  5. SearchLove London – 15 votes
  6. SMX London – 5 votes
  7. SES London – 4 votes
  8. Conversion Conference London – 1 vote

The results are in! We now have 202 votes for yesterday’s ‘do you buy links for SEO‘ poll – and it’s fair to say the results are very interesting.

The reason I asked this question in the first place was because I wanted to forget about the usual best practice advice we always hear and get an honest and realistic representation of what it actually takes to achieve top rankings in Google.

So let’s get straight to the answers:
Link buying results

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