Last week I spoke on the SSL search panel at the SAScon mini conference in Manchester.
This is a great conference, with the main SAScon event taking place in May – and to cover main tips and takeaways from this I’ve listed the top 28 tweets:
Ok so the “Top 20,001 takeaways” type posts have already been done, so I wanted to make this more of a general view of the themes emerging from this year’s SearchLove conference. I suspect that summarising general trends in what was discussed might be a pretty good reflection of where the SEO industry is now and where it’s heading.
I’ll start off by saying that I enjoyed SearchLove a whole lot more than the other SEO conferences I’ve been to, and not just because of the great food and excellent Monday night party! I felt there was a great deal of enthusiasm among those present, and I came away from the conference feeling inspired and eager to try out the new ideas I heard.
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!
If you’re already using paid search marketing, how can you improve your results? Here are nine tips for sharpening up your campaigns.
Use conversion tracking & Google Analytics
Which keywords produce what results? Which cause people to make purchases, which result in newsletter sign-ups, which drive traffic to your forum or blog? You need tracking to answer these questions. AdWords (or AdCenter) will tell you what ads searchers click, but it won’t say what they do when they get to your site.
If you don’t have any conversion tracking installed yet, then install it. AdWords and AdCenter have their own conversion tracking, which records a conversion when someone who clicked on an ad subsequently visits a page on your site with conversion tracking code. This is usually a ‘thank you’ page for a sign up, or a receipt page after a purchase – it depends on your website’s goals.
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!
When speaking to small business owners, I often find myself being told that SEO isn’t right for them. Unsurprisingly, I rarely agree. So I thought I’d write about the five most common reasons people give for not adopting an SEO strategy and outline why I think they’re wrong.
Reason one: I’m just a small, local business
There’s a common misconception that SEO will only benefit companies that are already operating on a national or even international scale. Many small businesses only want to attract customers in their local area. Casting a wider net would be a wasted investment as the firm can’t cater for a non-local customer base.
Why you’re wrong
From an SEO perspective, it’s actually much more effective to target geo-specific keyword phrases. Geo-targeting will help attract visitors in your own local area when you optimise your website for search queries with a geographic preference, such as ‘Cheshire chimney sweep’.
I have been working as a full time SEO Exec for just about a year now and a few things have become apparent in that time, most notably that SEOs love tools and are always on the lookout for that elusive competitive advantage to give them a ranking edge. So it strikes me as odd that every agency already has access to a free tool that will (amongst other things) get them high quality links, improve their keyword research, increase their PPC CTRs and conversion rates and keep their clients happy and informed. But they very rarely use it to its full potential.
There are often too many people in the search marketing and social media industry who proclaim themselves ‘experts’, but can any of us really justify the title?
Image credit: Flickr
Mashable noticed that there were 15,740 social media experts on Twitter and this was back in 2009. In fact, with the prevalence of blogs and Twitter, it can be hard to distinguish between the writers with something useful to say and those simply filling space.
As we all wind down for the Christmas week, I thought I’d revisit some of the best comments left on my guest blog posts over the year…
Image credit: Flickr
Regular readers of my Twitter feed will know that I am a regular guest blogger, often appearing on websites such as Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy and Search Engine Land, as well as writing here on the SEOptimise blog.
Some of the responses to posts I write are extremely knowledgeable and often provoke informed debate.
This is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.
I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Yahoo, not only are they seen by most people as a bit of a joke, largely the stick is unwarranted. They’ve got some great little products and services, two of which I use to this great little way of keeping tracking of easy social media interaction opportunities.
The main service is Yahoo Answers, its a hugely popular social site where users ask and answer questions. If you’ve not checked Yahoo Answers recently, go over now and have a look, there will be dozens of people asking questions related to your industry – no matter how obscure or niche it is.
The nightmare though is having to revisit the site everyday to see whether there’s anything new or relevant. Fortunately the main categories have RSS feeds so you could set up the feed in your RSS reader to keep track of the mentions in your chosen category, but your a busy digital marketer, you don’t have time to check through every question asked on the site. That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in.
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