IonSearch 2012 – The New Conference Kid in Town – Round Up
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IonSearch 2012 – The New Conference Kid in Town – Round Up

24th April 2012

Putting on an event to target the same audience as SMX or SES before and after they hit the UK may be a daunting prospect for some, but not for Fergus Clawson at BlueClaw. It seems like only a matter of months that the idea of IonSearch – an advanced search marketing conference in Leeds – hit the Twittersphere, so to pull off such a professional event, when even at the last minute speakers had to drop out, was a job well done.

Held on April 18th at the Carriageworks in Leeds, Ion Search hosted an impressive line-up of national and international speakers, and although there were some first conference hiccups such as Wi-Fi not being readily available at the venue, (hence no live blogging from us!), the day was a great success!

There was so much great content in fact, that I have split the post into two parts!

Ion Search Line-Up

There were a few last minute changes, so I apologise if this is not 100% correct!

? Lee Odden – CEO of TopRank Online Marketing – Optimize and Socialize for More Customers
? Tom Anthony – SEO Consultant at Distilled – How Authorship & Google+ will affect linkbuilding
? Patrick Altoft – Director of Search, Branded3Link-Building In Competitive Industries
? Jono Alderson – SEO and Data Insight Manager, twentysixWhat’s the Big Deal about Semantic HTML?
? Roland Dunn – Partner at Refined Practice
? Ralph Tegtmeier – fantomaster.com GmbHTurning Black Into White: Automatic Content Generation For SEO And Social Network Marketing
? Dave Snyder – CEO, Steelcast – Content Marketing In The Post-Panda World
? Matt Bush – UK Head of Agency, Google G+ and Search
? Nick Garner – Head of Search, Unibet – Google Plus My Experiences So Far At Unibet
? Andy Atkins-Krüger – CEO of WebCertain Group
? Last Session Panel: Black/Grey/White/Hat SEO: Where do you draw the line?

Expert Panels Suites: My SEO Toolkit, Mobile SEO and SoLoMo, Killer Keyword Research, Maximising ROI for high-turnover ecommerce PPC campaigns, Creative Link Building Tactics, How to Use Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for SEO, Future Proofing Your SEO Efforts

SEO Tools Suites: SEO Speakers’ Corner, Linkdex, Kenshoo, CognitiveSEO, Analytics SEO, Searchmetrics, Wordtracker

Part 1 – 3 Great Sessions from IonSearch 2012 (Morning)

How Authorship & Google+ will affect linkbuilding – Tom AnthonyDistilled

“All links are equal, but some links are more equal than others!”

Back in 1998 when Google first started, a link was a link and signal = ranking factor. As search has become more complex, Google have been forced to scrutinise links. Tom says that whilst links are still the core of the algorithm, Google has ‘trust issues’ with them.

So how do you establish trust?

A hot topic at the moment – Authorship is one of the ways that Google are trying to boost ‘trust’ for links. ‘Authored Links’ and verified authors with Google+ will enable Google to assign trust. In essence, if an author can be trusted, Google ‘could’ pass more link juice.

This will take effort, but it can also be advantageous for building links. According to Tom – there is a great deal of data available about an author if you crawl the authorship mark-up. You can ‘pull’ an author’s  Google+ profile and follow that to their Twitter profile. If used at scale, you can find out *who* is linking to you/your competitors.

Tom showed us a nifty Link Profile Tool and Author Crawler Tool from Distilled that helps quickly identify influencers in a new niche, see who is linking to you, and pull the ‘Contributes to’ field from Google+ so you can see where else these authors write if you want to target them for additional links.

Tom’s takeaways:

? Google Webmaster Tool can give insight into future ranking factors.
? Social Shares affect sites/pages rather than links.
? AuthorRank will originate from the Social Graph but links will also help.

? Author’s will enhance the power of their links according to their AuthorRank
? Trusted authors will augment links more than lesser known authors.
? Google+ isn’t a black box to Google, as Twitter was.

What SEO Techniques Should We Stop Using In 2012?

http://edgyseo.com/seo/seo-tips-2012/

http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

Technical, Content and Local SEO – Daniel Bianchini – Search Manager at SEOptimise

A Great session from Daniel from SEOptomise discussing e-commerce website solutions.

Takeaways:

Layered Navigation – create static pages instead of ?2345, NoIndex,follow filtered pages, ensure display URL’s are not indexed, don’t embed navigation links in JavaScript

Pagination – the majority of eCommerce sites have pagination issues. Unless you have hundreds of pages, create a ‘view all’ page and rel=Canonical all pages to it

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

Duplicate Content – eCommerce sites often suffer from duplicate content and there are a number of solutions.

? Multiple URL’s – Rel=canonical
? Filter Pages – robots.txt blocking
? Print Pages – add filter parameters for GWT

Google Shopping – Add as much detail as possible, check feed quality, create filters and use campaign tracking, get product reviews, keep shopping feed updated

Content – don’t use manufacturer descriptions, start with high converters and work through, think about the long tail, give affiliates manufacturer descriptions to keep yours unique, create a variety (listings, buyers guides, events, blog, tips, tricks, how to’s etc.)

Rich Media – video, video, video – good to watch, good to share!

Rich Snippets – mark up your product pages – schema.org or see the Glen Jones slides from Brighton SEO

Local
Google: use local profiles, include photos, collect reviews, use getlisted.org and whitespark for improvements

Location pages: single page for each location, location based keywords, local link building

The Good, the bad and the Spammy – Steve LockAnalytics SEO

A fantastic list of Tools – I can list them all, or I can just link to the slide!

The good, the bad and the spammy!

 

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Written By
Jackie Hole is an Award Winning Search Marketing consultant specialising in Paid Search, Conversion Improvement and Organic Search / SEO for the USA, Canada and European markets. Starting out in Multimedia & Interface Design, Jackie has over 15 years experience in online marketing and was recently awarded European Search Personality...
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