All posts in seo

I should be presenting at BrightonSEO today on a 20/20 slot (20 slides, 20 seconds each) talking about 20 SEO tools.

Unfortunately I can’t be there. Sadly my dad, Jim Gibbons, passed away on Wednesday morning having battled cancer so bravely for the last year, but unfortunately his health deteriorated very quickly earlier this week. Obviously it puts things in perspective, as these things always do, but I know my dad would have loved me to do this. He was so proud of my career and paid such a great interest in everything I do, especially speaking at events like this – mainly because this isn’t something I’m naturally comfortable at doing and I’d rather not be center of attention (I’m just like him in so many ways), but I am ambitious and want to push myself and company forward by forcing myself into creating and taking these opportunities.

So while I can’t be there today, I still wanted to share the slides with everyone who’s going along to the event.



I love you dad, this one’s for you!

In the last in our series of conference interviews (for now at least), I’m talking to Chris Winfield ahead of the BlueGlass LA conference later this month. Personally I find it incredibly useful attending US conferences in order to keep up with how the industry is developing in the States – this has included SMX Advanced in Seattle and Pubcon Las Vegas in the past – and this year I’m heading over to the BlueGlass LA event.

Image credit: Dana Lookadoo

Thanks to Chris for taking the time to answer these questions – here goes:

Friday saw the Distilled LinkLove conference in London, with an impressive line-up that included Rand Fishkin, Mike King and Wil Reynolds sharing their link building secrets.

Whether you’re agency or client-side, here is a useful little guide to link building tools and resources which Distilled gave out to help you improve on your link building activities:

Tools & Resources

Name Type What is it used for? Free / Paid
My Blog Guest Community Finding places to guest post Free & Paid versions
Blogger Link Up Community Link bloggers with content creators Free
Haro Community Link journalists with sources Free
Boomerang Browser Plugin Helping you with email outreach Free & Paid versions
Rapportive Browser Plugin Finding out more about the person you’re reaching out to Free
Multi Links for Firefox Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time rather than individually Free
Chrome Web Scraper Browser Plugin Scraper is a Google Chrome extension for getting data out of web pages and into spreadsheets Free
Chrome Link Clump Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time Free
Buzzstream Software Managing outreach process Paid
GroupHigh Software Finding people to outreach to Paid
Raven Tools Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Open Site Explorer Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid
Ontolo Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Majestic SEO Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Zemanta Tactic Suggests your content to relevant bloggers Paid
Followerwonk Tool Contacting people & building relationships Free & Paid versions
Tom Anthony’ Link Profile Tool Tool Analyse your competitors link profiles and those of competitors to discover anomalous activities Free
JavaScript Bookmarklets Tool Use bookmarklets to improve efficiency of reporting and analysis Free
We Follow Tool Directory of Twitter users organized by interests Free
Citation Labs Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free
Linkdex Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid versions
Link Diagnosis Tool Backlink analysis & broken link checker Free
Link Builder from Wordtracker Tool Backlink analysis Free & Paid versions
Blog Dash Tool A permission-based blogger database Paid
Seeded Buzz Tactic Allows you to promote content to relevant bloggers Free & Paid versions

Ahead of next month’s ionSearch, we spoke to organiser Fergus Clawson about his vision for the event, what we can look forward to and much more besides…

1. It’s the inaugural ionSearch event; obviously there are a range of search and digital events across the UK, so how do you see ionSearch differentiating itself?
That’s a good question. Rather than trying to explain why ionSearch is different to other conferences I will explain what ionSearch is and what it hopes to achieve.

ionSearch is an advanced search marketing conference where the speakers involved intend to push the boundaries and will explore all things SEM, with the agenda consisting of talks on SEO, Link Building, Content, Social and PPC. The day will consist of three main components; the Main Auditorium, the Experts Panels and the Search Tools suite.

The main auditorium will play host to the nine keynote speakers. Each speaker will have 40 minutes to present their thoughts and insights to the delegates. We feel that 40 minutes will allow the speakers enough time for them to delve deeper into their subject areas, allowing delegates to take away actionable skills from leading experts.

Like it or not, the deadline for complying with the EU cookie directive is drawing very close. No matter how nonsensical this law seems, the sad reality is that it’s the law – and website owners have no choice but to comply. With the deadline for compliance now less than two months away, the aim of this post is to give you all the facts you need to know, including practical suggestions for ensuring that your site is in line with the new regulations. I’ve put my personal opinion at the end; clue:  like everyone else, I think this law is ludicrous!

What is the EU cookie directive?
For those not already aware, the supposed aim of this legislation is to increase online security and data privacy, giving users more control over what data can be held about them. It addresses concerns with how personal information is held and used. Some users – albeit a small minority – are concerned with what they see as the development of a ‘Big Brother’ society in which their every move is being recorded.

The legislation forces websites to be transparent about how they are using cookies, detailing exactly what information each cookie holds and how long it will be held, and requires them actively to request permission from their users before cookies can be used.

Previously, the law dictated that websites had to explain how they were using cookies and how users can ‘opt out’. Most sites did so in their Privacy Policies, but this isn’t enough under the new law:  users now have to ‘opt in’, having been made fully aware of the implications of doing so.

Following on the theme of conference interviews with Danny Sullivan from SMX London and Kelvin Newman for BrightonSEO, todays interview is with Andy Atkins-Krüger ahead of the International Search Summit (ISS) in London on 14th May 2012.


Following on from my interview with Danny Sullivan last week – I decided to give our readers some insight into some of the other up-and-coming events, so that they can get an idea about what each has to offer and why they are different etc. We’ll be running a series of similar interviews during the next week, starting today with the host of BrightonSEO Kelvin Newman.

Today I spoke at the UK Search Awards Conference – presenting on how SEOptimise won a UK Search Award last year for best blog!

Here are my slides:

10 Steps to How We Built an Award-Winning Blog

View more presentations from Kevin Gibbons

If you have any questions on this, just let me know in the comments. We’re also attending (and presenting) at a lot of UK conferences coming up during the next months, including; BrightonSEO, IONSearch, SAScon and SMX London.

Like many agencies, blogger outreach constitutes a significant proportion of the time we spend link building. In our experience, it gets great links whilst maintaining a natural link profile. Until recently, we’d been recording our blogger outreach interactions in multiple spreadsheets in a rather inefficient manner. So we decided it was time to streamline the process and we’re currently trialing a blogger outreach tool called BuzzStream.

We’ve just wrapped up a successful blog-based campaign for a client during which we relied heavily on BuzzStream and as a result, I have a few comments on its effectiveness, usability and flaws which I thought I’d share. Perhaps it would be useful to divide them into pros and cons:

Pros

Tracks all your communications in one place – you can set it so that any communication between you and an email address in BuzzStream gets saved in the contact card for that person. It automatically updates the ‘last communication’ field so that you can immediately see when you last interacted with that person. This means that someone else working on the project can see communication between another team member and the person being contacted, which is really useful if you have more than one person working on the project.

Doing a few queries this morning, I’ve noticed a range of local sites being listed in Google alongside the regular SERPs for generic queries. Digging a bit deeper, this looks like much more than a personalised search feature, in fact Google seem to be emphasising local websites very heavily for competitive queries when completely logged out too.

Google have announced this week that they have applied 40 algorithm updates in Feb, with the Google Venice update rollout affecting local. So I’ve tested this out by performing the following queries in Incognito mode in Chrome – so hopefully this will restrict the amount of personalisation that is going on here. But Google does know my location – which is automatically set as Oxford. So I’ve compared the set of results for a range of queries – and have changed my location settings, from the automatic selection of Oxford – comparing this with Manchester.

Google Venice – Local Algorithm Update

View more presentations from Kevin Gibbons

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →