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.

Following Matt’s SEO ethics post and having had many interesting discussions about buying links with some SEO’s recently, I thought it would be interesting to run a quick anonymous poll to find out whether buying links still has a part to play in your SEO strategy.

So here goes:
Poll now closed – please see our results post

This is intended to show what is actually happening in the industry, perhaps against best practice advice – so I think it will be interesting to see the results. Obviously this is an anonymous poll and only vote information is collected. If you’d like to show us examples, feel free to leave them in the comments. But I’d probably advise against it to be honest!

A bit of an old one, but a common question I get asked by clients is about their international SEO strategy. Which option is best? A new domain, subdomains or subfolders?

I wrote a post on international domain strategy back in 2008, but a lot has changed since then – so it’s probably time for an update.

International SEO is still one of those topics where there is no clear right or wrong answer – but there are different strategies which may be more or less successful depending on given factors and scenarios. So here’s my thought process behind selecting the best international SEO strategy to suit your website or brand.

Having recently assisted a client during a CMS (content management system) pitch selection process, I thought it would be useful to look at the type of features and capabilities I felt were important – or essential – from an SEO perspective.

Content Management System Pitch
Image credit Flickr

One thing I get asked frequently by clients is:  how can we keep in touch with our customers on Twitter?

The answer is actually very easy, but judging by the reactions when I’ve explained this, it isn’t something which many people are doing at the moment. So I thought I’d list the process I’d recommend following in order to import your clients/customers into social media sites such as Twitter and Google+.

1) Export your customer database to CSV - you can do this with social media connections too – for example, exporting LinkedIn connections – or in the case of this example, exporting email blog subscribers from Feedburner:

FeedBurner emails

Tonight I was delighted to be invited to speak at the London Blog Club and presented about the WordPress plugins which I find most useful.

Here are the slides from my talk:

20 Top WordPress Plugins – 2011 Edition – Kevin Gibbons, London Blog Club

If you have any questions on this please let me know in the comments or on the meetup.com page.

Having just presented on natural link building at a4uexpo Europe in Munich, I thought I’d publish my slides from the event.

Kevin Gibbons – a4uexpo Europe – Natural Link Building

If you have any questions just let me know in the comments. The session was alongside Kelvin Newman who did a great presentation which you can find here. You can also find my latest presentations on Scribd from recent search conferences and events.

Yesterday it was reported that J.C. Penney have showed signs that their Google penalty has now been lifted.

The original penalty was imposed at the end of Feb for “shady SEO practices”. Searchmetrics have published a report to show that organic search traffic is back on the rise again for J.C. Penney:

JC Penney Google Penalty

Obviously we can only speculate about the SEO activity that J.C. Penney have employed in order to get this penalty turned around so quickly. The obvious steps would be to clean up their backlink profile and remove any paid or suspicious links and then submit a re-inclusion request (which has been confirmed by Matt Cutts).

Another quick post, but here’s my presentation from SAScon 2011 this afternoon. This was on how to use social media for SEO benefit in the travel industry.

SAScon 2011 Travel SEO Presentation – Kevin Gibbons

If you have any questions about this just let me know in the comments.

Very quick post – but here’s my presentation from SMX Advanced London 2011 earlier today:
Long Tail Keyword Research – SMX Advanced London 2011

If you have any questions just let me know in the comments.

If you’re at Internet World in Earls Court this week (today, Weds and Thurs) make sure you come and drop by our stand (E3056) to say hello! You’ll also have a chance to win a panda by tweeting #highfiveseoptimise to us!

SEOptimise at Internet World

We’re also delighted to announce the winners of our free SMX London ticket giveaway as Hannah Rampton, Dom Hodgson and Rob Nicholson – congrats guys, see you there!

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