vineri, 26 aprilie 2013

SEO Blog

SEO Blog


Why You Should Use Facebook As Your Main Small Business Marketing Platform?

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 05:38 AM PDT

As a small business, marketing is an important aspect of your business. If you do not continually market your business, it will be difficult for you to gain new customers and increase awareness about your brand. Social media websites, Facebook in particular, are great resources for small businesses when looking...
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Powerful Local Business SEO & Content Marketing Strategies

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 05:14 AM PDT

Ever since the Google panda and penguin have more and greater number of challenges for the online business. But, not only they need to target the keywords and they need to do without sounding like schlepping Google with an abundance of the out of the search phrases. The true fact...
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Just How Secure Is a Virtual Private Network?

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 04:37 AM PDT

Online security is not just an issue for large companies that need to worry about cyber-attackers breaching their confidential information, but is extremely crucial for everyone. Email accounts, stored banking information and other crucial data reside within our PCs, Macs and mobile devices including tablets and smartphones. Every day, this...
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The Best Android App for SEO

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 01:52 AM PDT

"Today, most mobile or Smartphone users tends to go for Android based handsets to be able to conduct business. The demand for SEO applications is going up at an alarming rate. The article below brings you up and close to the kind of best SEO apps available for your Android...
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West Wing Week: "This Stuff's Really Cool"

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, April 26, 2013
 

West Wing Week: "This Stuff's Really Cool"

This week, Vice President Biden traveled to Boston for a memorial for Officer Collier, and President Obama memorialized the victims of the West Texas explosion. The President also hosted the Amir of Qatar, the Teacher of the Year, and the 3rd White House Science Fair -- and visited Dallas with the First Lady for the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

Watch this week's West Wing Week.

West Wing Week 04/26/13

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

Launching the White House Tumblr
The White House is now on Tumblr -- a microblogging platform designed especially for curating and sharing content.

Advance Estimate of GDP for the First Quarter of 2013
Over the last fifteen quarters, the economy has expanded by 8.3 percent overall, and the private components of GDP have grown by 12.2 percent. Real GDP is now 3.2 percent larger than it was at the previous business cycle peak in 2007:Q4.

President Obama Honors Those Lost and Injured in West, Texas Explosion
President Obama travels to Waco, Texas to speak at a memorial service for those lost and injured in the deadly explosion at a fertilizer plant in nearby West, Texas.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

11:20 AM: The President delivers remarks at the Planned Parenthood Gala

11:30 AM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

1:55 PM: The President holds a bilateral meeting with His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan

3:00 PM: The President meets with U.S. business leaders

8:30 PM: The Vice President meets with President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia

9:45 PM: The Vice President attends the opening dinner of the McCain Institute for International Leadership’s annual Sedona Forum

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO Metrics - Whiteboard Friday

Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO Metrics - Whiteboard Friday


Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO Metrics - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 25 Apr 2013 06:19 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

As SEO continues to evolve, the metrics that indicate success continue to change with it. However, many of our client's needs don't seem to be changing as rapidly. With clients focused on specifics like the number of links they're getting and weekly ranking reports, it's tough to move the needle in the right direction for true SEO success. 

How do we push other inbound channels (like search, content marketing, and social) forward to offer a more holistic and strategic approach to inbound marketing that our clients can get behind? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the current broken culture of SEO metrics, and offers advice on what we can do to fix it. 

 

For your viewing pleasure, here's a still image of the whiteboard used in this week's video.

Still image of Whiteboard Friday - Fixing the Broken Culture of SEO Metrics


 

 

 

 

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, I want to share an experience I had with you and then get to our Whiteboard Friday topic, which is going to be all about metrics and how we change this broken culture that we have in the SEO world that's sort of carried over from the past.

I got to go to SMX Sydney, which was an incredible time and an amazing visit, and I spoke there with Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO, who is a well-known SEO guy in Australia, very, very smart guy, leads an agency down there. He asked me some questions that I think are very important and resonated with me because they're things that I've heard from a lot of people and seen reflected in a lot of the questions that we get all the time.

That was:  "Rand, I want to do more of this broader inbound marketing. I want to get more strategic about the way I help people with SEO. I want to get less focused on things like the number of links I send you and your particular ranking report for a week. But these are things that our clients care about. When we talk specifically with clients and we pitch them on SEO, they tell us, 'Hey, look, you're not here for that. You're here to get me more links. I want this many links and I want these rankings. I want my page rank to go up. I want my DAPA to go up.'"

Those kinds of metrics have been ingrained as what SEO is all about, and tragically that's not the way to be successful at our jobs. The way that we really move the needle on search, on social, on content marketing, on any of these inbound channels is to have a holistic and strategic focus on them, not this little tactical, rinky-dink, "I'm going to get 50 links That's going to move this one ranking up." We know this. We've been talking about it for a long time here on Whiteboard Friday and across the SEO world. You can find it on nearly every reputable SEO blog out there.

So Dan and I were chatting and I said, "Well, I think what we have to do is take that conversation a level higher and say, 'What do you want those metrics to accomplish? Why do you want links? Why do you want your rankings higher?'" The answer is often, "Well, we're trying to attract more traffic and expose people to this new branding campaign," or, "We're trying to get more people signed up for this webinar. We're trying to get more people in our salespeople's funnel. We're trying to convert more leads to perform these types of comparison searches and then buy from one of our partners."

Okay, good. That is getting us all the way down from these what I call "leading indicator metrics" down to the business KPIs. Business KPIs, the things that indicate the performance of the business, are where we should take our strategic initiative, our strategic lead, for any sort of online marketing effort, whether that's SEO, whether it's PPC, advertising. I don't care what it is that you're spending money on, it should be focused on this, centered on this, trying to achieve these things, and then, yes, we can use metrics like links and rankings, even something like page rank or crawl depth, as leading indicators, performance indicators that things are maybe going the right way, that they're not going the right way. We can compare them against our competition, and they're fine metrics for that. We just can't focus on them as where we take our strategy.

If the strategy is "go get me more links," I'm probably going to do some gray or black hat SEO because very frankly, that's how you move the needle on that one indicator. If you don't care about potentially getting banned or hurting your brand impression or making a bad impression with the search engines and eventually getting into trouble that kind of way, then, yeah, you're going to do stuff that is non-ideal for your business metrics. So let's have this conversation first.

I'm going to start down here. Business KPIs, things that I think about as being business metrics, and these are just a sample. I don't want you to get the idea that these are the only metrics or that these have to fit in these buckets. But in this purple bucket down here, I have things like conversions. Conversions might even be a marketing KPI for you, depending on what your true business goals are. But transaction value, life time customer value, retention of those customers and recidivism of customers, those are the business KPIs, typically, in most organizations. They're trying to get people to the site, perform some type of action that will lead to revenue, lead to a goal being accomplished.

Marketing KPIs, these are one step up, but not yet at that level of sort of the SEO leading indicators. These are things like visits and traffic, tweets, shares, +1's. Those are signals of engagement and success over social media, so is followers and fans, and these might be in leading indicators, tweets, shares, +1's could easily be in leading indicators rather than marketing KPIs, brand mentions, pre-conversion action. So people, for example, visiting pages that lead to a conversion on your site and following through that funnel that you've got set up on your site, those are the types of marketing KPIs that the marketing team might be reporting and that you particularly, if you're doing any type of consulting working or if you're working in-house and trying to help move the needle, you do want to have a dashboard that's showing you these.

Then those leading indicators, those are much more of a, "Hey, I think this is a signal that we might be on the right path," or, "This is a test. Let's see if moving the needle on links actually moves the needle on these other things that we care about and these business metrics that we care about," or, "Boy, you know, sometimes it seems like it doesn't." Sometimes it seems like other things that we might focus on, perhaps social is really moving the needle, because you're finding that you're having a huge brand impact that's biasing clicks in the search results, that's moving you up in positions through usage and user data types of algorithms, and that's really doing a much better job for you than raw links and raw rankings.

Maybe you're expanding your portfolio of content, and that's what's moving the needle for you. You could easily put things like content production in here. You could put that in a leading indicator, or you could put it in a marketing KPI. You could put content engagement, things like comments or registrations. Those could fit into marketing KPIs. It's okay to have different things in these different buckets. Just know what they are and make sure if you're working with someone, that you're getting the right answers here so that you can make the right decisions here.

Don't focus on these. If you focus on these from a strategic point of view, your tactics are probably going to lead you in the wrong direction, and, by the way, those of you who might be buying consulting services or hiring an in-house SEO or an in-house marketing team and having them focus on this stuff, you're really going to be misleading your marketers, and they're going to be focused on the wrong kinds of things that aren't going to move the needle for the business. They need to be up here.

Let me show you in a more precise fashion how I love to see this visualized and illustrated, how I love to see this done. We actually do this right now at Moz. We've got an internal tool that does some of this stuff, and then we have a big Google docs spreadsheet that I would love to make more sophisticated, and we probably will after we release some of the big, new things we're working on here. But basically, there are three categories up in this leading indicators column that I pay attention to, and those are things like I want to look at the leading indicators, whatever they are, and compare them versus my budget and my goals.

So I might have, okay, this was our goal, and we are +x over that goal. This is our goal and we're -y over this goal, and this is our other goal, we've got +c over here, compared to last year this time, Q1 2012. Q1, January 1st to April 1st of 2013, here's what we've done so far, and here's how far ahead we are of where we were this time last year, what we performed in Q1 of last year. I like doing this because seasonality plays a big role in many, many businesses, not every one but many, many businesses. So comparing year over year is really healthy for this.

Then compare versus the competition. The wonderful thing about leading indicators, and often one of the big reasons why a lot of folks use them is because we can compare. We can see where our competitors are ranking. We can see what sort of links they're getting. We can see their DA and PA. Maybe we can't see their crawl rate and depth, but those other sorts of leading indicators, even things like tweets and shares and +1's, followers and fans, those indicators we can put in here, and we can compare against our competition.

Once we get down a layer, and I would encourage you to have the top layer, which we care about and it's interesting, but it's not the focus. It's just a leading indicator. When we get to the marketing KPIs, we've got, again, budget year over year and competition. Then when we go to the business KPIs, we almost never can get competition, the data on what the competition's doing. So we just have budgeting year over year. But being able to see this, being able to visualize this, it doesn't necessarily have to be in this funnel view, but being able to see this and compare and then to show your clients, your managers, your team members what you're doing and how that stacks up against what the business is trying to accomplish, this is incredibly powerful. It's so much more powerful than saying, "I want links and rankings."

If you're hearing from folks, "I want links and rankings," please have them watch this whiteboard video, have them leave comments, have them e-mail me. My goodness, I don't think that this is going to be how successful SEO gets done in the future. This is how tactical SEO was done in the past, and, unfortunately, it's how a lot of black and gray hat SEO became the norm – well, I don't want to say "the norm" – but became very popular in our world. By focusing on bigger things, we can be smarter. We can accomplish a lot more.

All right everyone, look forward to your comments, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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IonSearch 2013 recap – our favourite tips & thoughts

IonSearch 2013 recap – our favourite tips & thoughts

Link to SEOptimise » blog

IonSearch 2013 recap – our favourite tips & thoughts

Posted: 22 Apr 2013 08:49 AM PDT

Two days, three tracks, over 50 speakers. IonSearch 2013 certainly didn’t lack in ambition, nor in potential for some insightful search marketing conversation and thought.

And it did not disappoint; we thoroughly enjoyed our in time in Leeds, and came away with plenty of takeaways. With so many talks (over 40 different talks/panels), we sadly couldn’t see everything there, but we’ve put together some of the key takeaways from our favourite sessions of the conference.

Andrew Dumont – Exploring the differences between Web and Marketing Analytics

Andrew Dumont of SEOmoz kicked IonSearch off with a look at marketing analytics, and what you need to look at differently from your everyday web analytics.

  • If web analytics is how your site is performing, marketing analytics is how your campaigns are performing – and the sweet spot to site success is in the middle of these two sets of data
  • We need to dig deeper, and ask performance questions of the entire data pie, and there’s some great places in addition to Google Analytics to get this:
    • Topsy – superb tool for measuring content success by seeing how often it is mentioned
    • Fresh Web Explorer – the new toy from SEOmoz can help you quickly see mentions of new content, or your brand in the wake of a new campaign
    • Buffer – excellent tool for social media sharing and tracking
    • Open Site Explorer, for link generation (note: although OSE releases are getting quicker, MajesticSEO and Ahrefs can also give you further backlink data, and potentially more quickly if it is a while before next OSE index update)
    • Kapost – content marketing software platform that helps manage the entire process (for a price)
    • Use all this tasty data to help analyse your marketing performance, alongside its impact on the site performance
  • This data is great, but a common pitfall is you set it all up, but then forget to collect it, or don’t spend the time to analyse it thoroughly
  • Another common issue can be that even if you do the work, you don’t communicate it with the rest of the team – you must tell your team what you are doing, and how your content is performing – content must be part of everyone's job

Key takeaway: Think broader about what data you can get to make smarter marketing and content decisions

Panel – Sha Menz, Tim Grice, Martin Woods & Christoph Cemper – Link removal

Link removal has become an increasing part of the SEO landscape, and many agencies have picked up new clients who are desperately looking for help having been penalised by previous link building work. This panel looked at some of the lessons learned about link removal and re-inclusion requests:

  • Have you been caught by Penguin? Check your analytics data to see the exact date of a decline in traffic. If the timing does not correspond precisely with a Penguin update, then it is not Penguin causing your trouble
  • If you get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools, you need to at least be aware of what your link profile looks like, even if your warning was of the ‘Google has taken action in this case’ variety
  • To analyse your backlink profile, you need to grab all the link data you can from every available source, including finding records of links you built years ago through different sources like Fiverr, or guest posting, that the link database tools don’t find – you want to have the picture possible
  • Use the historic data set from MajesticSEO
  • Although Google Webmaster Tools only gives you a sample (10-20%) of your links, Bing Webmaster Tools is a great source of link data
  • Disavow at a domain level – don’t worry about if you think it is a good site or not, if you are worried about the link, disavow the domain and let Google decide what it thinks are good and bad sites
  • Disavow reported links even on 404 pages and no-followed links – Google might not recrawl the site for weeks, and do you want to wait for them to catch up?
  • Pre-empt Penguin by tidying links now – if you get caught by Penguin you will have to wait a long time (months) for your changes to take place, as Panda updates are infrequent (there have only been three iterations so far, far less common than Panda updates)

Key takeaway: Make backlink profile modifying part of your SEO routine – look at your links on a regular basis

Ross Hudgens – Rapid-fire content marketing

Ross gave some great examples of methods he uses to make the very most of the content marketing work he does. With so much competition emerging in content marketing, you need every promotional advantage possible. This rapid-fire list of methods to improve the way you market your content were given thick and fast!

  • Content marketing is painful. It requires repetition and constant iterative action if it is to be evergreen in nature
  • How to get links:
    • Advanced Search – allinurl:/tag/brand/ – search where your brand has been mentioned recently
    • Check by time in Google
    • Create personal pages for every employee, the journalists and other sites have direct place to link to rather than social accounts
    • People link to twitter pages, do link reclamation by asking them to link to website as well – do the same with Google +
    • Reverse image search to find links to images
    • Search for links to domain name misspellings
    • Monitor stolen images with imageraider.com
    • Look at links to your YouTube videos and contact links. – Check YT analytics for embed locations
    • Broken link building, using tools such as http://www.brokenlinkbuilding.com/
  • Getting social shares:
    • Be deliberate with tweets – Use followerwonk to understand when your followers are using twitter, then schedule your tweets to the appropriate time
    • Every time that content is on the web, there should be some kind of social action
    • Slideshare Gold – Allows you to add URLs and Twitter accounts
    • Build relationships with Twitter Favourites/+1s
  • Find influencers on YouTube, Hackernews, Twitter, Followerwonk, Pintrest, and act upon what these people are saying
  • Ego Appeals – Indirect mention of influencers likely to see content
    • Chose the influencer for the content, not write the content for the influencer
  • How to get more CTR & safe links from infographics: siegemedia.com/infographic-embed-codes
  • Use content platforms (such as Slideshare) to rank for search terms by using their authority – get the traffic
  • Pre-check buttons as people generally won’t uncheck, especially on newsletter sign-ups
  • Use co-citation to your advantage – be very deliberate around adding additional information, for example Brand (link), a content marketing company
  • Not much will change with Link Building going forward – Ross explained he builds links that competitors can’t take / defensible links
  • Don't worry about controlling anchor text – under 20% commercial anchor text
  • Where target demographics are not socially active, create more educational pieces

Key takeaway: Link building might not change that much moving forward, but being smarter in how we promote content is key to success

Marcus Tandler – What's next in search?

One of the talks of IonSearch 2013, Marcus Tandler gave us his very entertaining thoughts on where the search engines, and the search industry as a result, might move in the near future. Boasting 477 slides in less than 45 minutes (!), Marcus delivered a captivating talk on what Google might use next as rankings signals:

  • Marcus showed some examples of spikes in traffic thanks to strong content marketing, but traffic often died down after – with content marketing it is important to rinse and repeat constantly for best effect, and for a steady rise
  • It is vital to see what type of content has worked before – examine what the audience/bloggers/news sites in your niche have actively liked before
  • SearchMetrics has an excellent 'social visibility' tool that works very well for measuring the impact your content marketing is having
  • Searchers want to see the experts or authorities in a field talking on news and events, and the search engines will respond in kind by presenting this information, so Google+ Authorship (rel=author) may become more important as time goes by – to connect with your audience you need to have people on your site positioned as experts
  • Author-Rank is a great tool to help see where authors are writing, and their areas of expertise
  • Traffic will become a ranking factor in the future. Google are searching for patterns in how people are searching, and they have a lot of data on how we are using the internet
  • Google want to highly rank sites that satisfy the user – and traffic patterns that indicate a site is solving people's problems help them do this
  • By building links for users (where you will get traffic from), not search engines, you help start building these patterns

Key takeaway: Building for traffic encourages better SEO, and better content, and this will reap rewards as Google evolves

Nichola Stott – Link earning: Marketing strategies for earning your Links and how to survive the grey borderlands

Nichola spoke on how we can gain meaningful content from real stories from each client we work with. She examined what makes an engaging story, and how we can get such angles into our content work.

  • There are myths around content-led link building that need to be busted:
    • Build it and people will not just come
    • Videos aren't 'viral' as a trait – this is something that happened to them, you can't build it in
    • Data doesn’t make an infographic – a story does
  • The stages of content creation: Ideation -> Creation -> Distribution (then repeat)
  • Why you need an earned link strategy:
    • 82% average visibility drop for the top 100 affected by Penguin
    • 3.1% of all queries dropped in Penguin.
    • 73 places dropped by Chrome for 'browser' keyword for link buying
    • Using genuine news stories delivers diversity of link sources, audience targeting, plus reinforces brand story
    • Compare the brand perceptions of Innocent smoothies (story telling) with DFS (constant sales pitches)
  • So, what is newsworthy?
    • Quantifiable – humans are obsessed with wanting to measure items, so use this in your content (such as 'world's smallest' or 'industry first')
    • Celebrity content – our obsession seems to know no bounds
    • Emotive content (either feel-good or controversial)
    • Recommended book – Contagious (Jonah Berger)
  • Where do you start?
    • Your product and USP (marketing 101)
    • Qualitative angles such as face-to-face interviews; these need senior buy in, or try stakeholder groups
    • Surveys – Google Consumer Survey (used on the display network) work very well – set your demographics, screening questions and prudent questions on pressing topic. Data can give you excellent qualitative angle ('64% of consumer think x'), backed by survey data
    • For ubiquitous products, look for USPs or a point of difference; for boring products you need to find a human application, can be service or policy related – bring your product to the human conclusion that suddenly makes it less boring
    • Data-led content has to be a story – infographics and slides are the mechanisms to deliver that story – the story is the 3rd dimension of the data you have got
    • Don't discount infographics because others are starting to, just find the better angle
    • Find stories by defining what normal looks like, then create some filter alarms to let you know when something newsworthy is happening
  • Tools:
    • HARO – subscription service that sends two emails a day of reporters seeking a source for a story
    • Media Agility – a media contact database
    • Some agencies are teaming with PR firms, changing names of link builders to 'promotion executives'

Key takeway: Great content needs a reason – find that, in any niche, and you've got something to build links to with meaningful content from real stories

Sam Crocker – Enterprise SEO

Sam went into fascinating detail with his tips on succeeding with SEO for enterprise-level sites.

  • When pitching, do your research. Get to meet the client first hand
    • Understand the business objective of the client, and speak their language; ROI, TVR, Cost of Sale, etc. rather than just DA and so on
    • Know your audience – who is in the pitch meeting with you that you need to connect with?
    • Create a scoring mechanism – score outreach similar to PR, what it would of cost in ad spend? Look at brand related terms
    • Don’t call it SEO, call it 'fixing the website' for example for technical jobs
  • Advantages of working with big brands are when there is a big brand with poor website or agency which you can immediately improve upon. You can get people to do your job, such as the PR team
  • Budgets can be big, but it needs to be unlocked- you have to be prepared to play the long game.
  • You have to play nice, working with other agencies/partners, but integration is overrated – it can work but is sitting down in meeting for 8 hours the most productive use of your time?
  • You need to always strive to get on their radar, and try to present to senior leadership – do not wait to be called, be proactive
  • And remember, SEO is just a single cog in the wheel
  • Traditional brands are generally weak at getting things implemented, so understanding the structure & process in updating the site is key – define how the business works through regular meetings, training of in-house staff, working in deliverable 'chunks', transparency of costs, and streamline the approval process wherever possible
  • Compliance/brand guidelines slow you down, but big brands often do some really good branding plays that you can use for SEO, RedBull being a notable example
  • Working with a global business it can be difficult to meet all people involved, get in the diary to talk quickly and earn local control
  • Pick your battles, you will lose some!
  • Enterprise SEO generally competes with itself.
  • Choose portfolio, different brands can target different price set.
  • As site grows, information architect goes wrong, and duplicate content issues are hugely common – see slideshare.net/SamuelCrocker/duplicate-content-ses-london for some examples
  • Outsource where you can is a great win, but you need to ensure that all is signed off, and that quality is checked thoroughly
  • Big sites generally rely on more on-site work as outreach to sites with millions of pages are impossible ethically
  • Technical audits can be like going down a rabbit hole – look at top level and identify symptoms
  • Good results are common for moving site structure from sub-domain to sub-folder
  • Tools:
    • Brightedge (highly recommended)
    • Woorank
    • ScreamingFrog (not always good for large sites) / DeepCrawl
    • Automate reports whenever possible

Key takeaway: Give full visibility and teach

Martin MacDonald – Why I’ve quit SEO

Martin gave a passionate, and well-argued, talk on how the SEO industry's preoccupation with short-cuts (which he cheerfully admits he was a large part of) has made it hard to gain traction as other online channels have.

  • SEO's don't need spam techniques any more, but much of the public (at least, any that work with a site in any capacity) often thinks that's what we do
  • The public perception of SEO hasn't evolved as the actual job has over the past several years
  • SEO is now incredibly complicated, and focus is on scale – not in amount of data, but the amount of data points to be measured
  • We used to manufacture links, now we make incredible content, and we make websites 'work' properly
  • Industry needs to keep moving from the 'next trick' mind-set, and concentrate on being remarkable
  • SEOs are online marketing heroes, understanding important concepts and methods no-one else does
  • There are remarkable people in this industry, and they need to be aiming toward becoming the next generation of CMOs
  • But SEO is just one part of the modern online buying cycle, there's PPC, social, Adsense, email and more
  • If you just do SEO you miss out on 50% of the potential conversions, but if you don't include SEO you miss out on up to 80% of the traffic – you need to do it all
  • Wherever the eyeballs are, that's where you should be, and investing in SEO-type activity, answering searcher's questions
  • Use PPC for transactional keywords – people using such terms are informed searchers who have done their research, and you now need to be in front of them with your selling page

Key takeaway: SEO has a reputation-management issue, perhaps fatally so as a name, and co-joined thinking needs to be more prevalent in the online-marketing industry

Panel – Aleyda Solis, Daniel Bianchini & Andrew Girdwood – Local SEO

Our very own Daniel Bianchini joined the discussion on local SEO before a packed room for the first session on day 2.

  • Quality is more important than quantity with reviews for local listings
  • Use rich snippet markup for reviews, events and addresses to help your local listing stand out
  • Create individual pages for each location in your chain for local SEO, this allows you to add individual information for each listing, and allows relevant markup without spamming
  • The way local works might well change drastically soon, with full Google Plus local around the corner – Google Plus is going to be key hub for local listings, and a great way to potentially interact with other businesses and customers
  • Diversifying your channels, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, email, Foursquare etc., otherwise you could be missing on the channel that appeals to your niche
  • Reviews are still very significant – so you need to encourage them. Follow up sales with emails asking for reviews, preferably with links that require no sign-up
  • Small businesses can be agile, and can engage more directly with the local community more often, so use this to your advantage via social media, and getting involved in events (even sponsoring of possible)
  • 70% of local queries come from mobile search, indeed there is a close relationship between local and mobile overall. Making sure your local listings look good in mobile versions, especially your Google Plus and Maps presentation, as well as your contact information on mobile site key

Mike Essex – 86 billion free SEO tools: Why your brain is the best tool of all

This talk focussed on productivity, and how using your brain, and time, more effectively to encourage creative thinking makes it the best SEO tool available. Drawing on his own experiences, Mike Essex presented a whole raft of potential work-hacks to get your mind on the job at hand.

  • As SEOs we love tools, but knowing how to make the most of these required being a better you – your brain has 86 billion neurons, that's a lot of potential – how many do you engage to do your work?
  • Using a tool always needs a human element, a sense check if you will. Mike told the example of how a tool suggested over 200 places to have a site mentioned, and then gave you a tick once you had outreached; the tool was happy, but none of the submissions went through, so the site was no better off!
  • Tools are static, and can't always adapt to the changing landscape, so be aware of the limitations
  • Why fill your head with tools, when we need to learn to constantly adapt to be great online marketers
  • Trying to make everything scale and work automatically leads to a robotic process, which anyone can do
  • Creativity is the best way to become better than any tool
  • Time management is vital, however works best for you – Mike recommended checking out the Pomodoro technique which breaks work into 25 minute sprints
  • Inbox Zero can lead to much greater time to concentrate, and greater efficiency and creativity through focus
  • Step away from your PC, get a clear head, and find new inspiration
  • Being bored is a great way to be creative – look at how children are creative when there is no obvious stimulus
  • Walking the dog, the daily commute, exercising – all great times to become creative as you are bored
  • Find a mentor to help give feedback or guidance
  • If all else fails, copy President Obama – each day he has three moments, his workout, dinner with his daughters, and at night after everyone else is asleep, away from his work – this he credits with enabling him to work better at other time as it gives him time to step back and process. If the most powerful man on earth makes time to be creative, so should you

Key takeaway: Get creative by:

    1. Controlling your time
    2. Freeing your mind
    3. Finding inspiration

So that's our summary of our key takeaways. Of course there's plenty more that we haven't covered here, there was a huge amount of information on offer. For a complete summary of all the talks in bite-sized detail, take a look at:

We hugely enjoyed IonSearch, and will be back in 2014. If you made it, what were your favourite talks and panels, and what tips, tricks and thoughts did you come away with? Let us know in the comments!

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. IonSearch 2013 recap – our favourite tips & thoughts

Related posts:

  1. SMX Advanced Tips &Takeaways | SMX London 2012
  2. SEO & Social Media Tips & Takeaways | SMX London 2012
  3. 23 reasons to improve your content in 2013

Seth's Blog : In search of resilience

 

In search of resilience

Most of the time, we build our jobs and our organizations and our lives around today, assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like now. Resilience, the ability to shift and respond to change, comes way down the list of the things we often consider.

And yet... A crazy world is certain to get crazier. The industrial economy is fading, and steady jobs with it. The financial markets will inevitably get more volatile. The Earth is warming, ever faster, and the rate and commercial impact of natural disasters around the world is on an exponential growth curve.

Hence the need for resilience, for the ability to survive and thrive in the face of change.

A non-resilient hospital in New York City closed for months because the designers failed to design for a flood. A career as a travel agent ends when, fairly suddenly, people don't need travel agents any longer. A retirement is wiped out because the sole asset in the nest egg is no longer worth what it was.

The choice is to build something that's perfect for today, or to build something that lasts. Because perfect for today no longer means perfect forever.

Here are four approaches to resilience, in ascending order, from brave to stupid:

  • Don't need it
  • Invest in a network
  • Create backups
  • Build a moat

Don't need it is the shortcut to living in crazy times. If you don't have an office, it won't flood. If you have sixteen clients, losing one won't wipe you out.* If your cost of living is low, it's far less exposed to a loss in income. If there are no stairs in your house, a broken hip doesn't mean you have to move. Intentionally stripping away dependencies on things you can no longer depend on is the single best preparation to change.

Invest in a network. When your neighbor can lend you what you need, it's far easier to survive losing what you've got. Cities and villages and tribes with thriving, interconnected neighborhoods find that the way they mesh resources and people, combined with mutual generosity, makes them more able to withstand unexpected change. And yes, the word is 'invest', because the connection economy thrives on generosity, not need.

Create backups. Not just your data (you do have a copy of your data in two or three places, don't you?) but anything that's essential to your career, your family or your existence. A friend with a nut allergy kept a spare epipen at our house—the cost of a second one was small compared to the cost of being without.

Build a moat is the silly one, the expensive Maginot-line of last resort. Build a moat is the mindset of some preppers, with isolated castles that are stocked to overflowing with enough goods to survive any disaster**. Except, of course, they're not. Because they can't think of everything. No one can.

We're tempted to isolate ourselves from change, by building a conceptual or physical moat around our version of the future. Better, I think, to realize that volatility is the new normal.

Putting all your eggs in one basket and watching the basket really carefully isn't nearly as effective as the other alternatives. Not when the world gets crazy.

**Henry Mason describes a friend who said, "My dad had one job his whole life, I'll have seven, and my kids will have seven jobs at the same time."

**and not just preppers, but corporations that act like them


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