A perfect post lunch session as we move closer to the dark session. ‘Organic with a twist’ was an information packed session with tools and tips galore from some big names and big brands!
Speakers:
- Brent Payne – Tribune/BaldSEO
- Motoko Hunt – Adobe
- Barbara Coll – WebMama
- Sepita Ansari – Catbird Seat
Social Media to Improve SEO – Brent Payne – Tribune/BaldSEO
Brent Payne is bald – he does SEO, so he called his company ‘Bald SEO’:-)
Opening by asking how many of us are not on Facebook. Brent D Payne takes us on an amusing adventure in social media and manipulation. Brent suggests that all social content should consider the ‘rule of thirds’
- 1/3 Intellectual – give reasons for people to engage with you, what you do for a living, an intelligent aspect of things
- 1/3 Personal – be emotionally engaging, help people feel they know something about you that they wouldn’t know from any other place – this is a social platform
- 1/3 – Promotional – you can use social media to promote
It is important to consider ‘social rank’ when talking about social media and how the search engines are going to see what you’re talking about being tied in with the things you want to rank well for.
- Popularity – how many replies, interactions, followers, shares
- Authority – who is following you – do they have followers
- Relevance – history of your account, content density
Handy software tip – if you’re not already – use Tweet Adder to:
- Follow people with keywords in their description
- Follow someone else’s followers
- Follow by location
- Tweet from an RSS feed i.e. Google News feed
- Follow/follow automatically
We then moved on to slightly black hat practices with an amusing adventure in manipulation of auto suggest lists and the Google drop down menu using Mechanical Turk.
Why should you do it?
- Google has not better option for suggest and related search removals
- It can fix forum attacks and site review spam
- Reputation Management
- Helps small business compete with big business
- To annoy Matt Cutts!
Search Keywords, SEO and The Sales Funnel – Barbara Coll – Webmama
Co-founder of SEMPO and mama of the industry – Barbara Coll knows what she is talking about in the B2B space.
You have to catch people where they are, and make every piece of content that is produced is visible in search. Once you have achieved that – what do you do next? You pick up the new content and start again.
Think about providing
- Content for education – what the industry or category is about – own certain words
- Content for Product space – for comparison shoppers, familiars of the industry and for very qualified follow up
- Content for Brand Product Names – for serious leads, current users (upgrade, cross-sell), for new groups, or people that don’t know what they want
In-house SEO – Motoko Hunt – Adobe
Adobe is a lot more than Photoshop in today’s market, they own many of the top software in the SEM space so they are more qualified than many companies to take SEO in house. The in house model does not work for every company, but neither does the agency model but needing to have more control over guidelines, Adobe brought all of the SEO & PPC in house.
Motoko explained management procedures and challenges of setting up an in house team and how they put SEO into every process.
Takeaways:
- Understand SEO operations – conduct interviews with key team members
- Devise and overall strategy – based on business goals and best practice
- Identify gaps and refine current operations
- Have Uniform KPI’s
- Standardize reporting and goals
- Educate and train your team
- Organise your programme and SEO tasks by country
Large Scale Link building – Sepita Ansari – Catbird Seat
Really excellent and useful session on how to scale your operation using tools for large scale link building.
Without link building there is no chance of ranking in many markets. Google has made link building more complex by adding social signals and trust elements. So if we want to do link building we have to avoid flags and build natural links.
However, large scale link building and building a natural link profile are not always compatible.
There are 3 main areas to consider automating for larger scale:
Link prospecting
- competitive tools such as Majestic SEO, LRT, SEOmoz
- Enlarge keyword set (GSuggest, SEMRush, Adwords, Ontolo)
- Grab domains by scraping Top 100-200 (scrapebox)
- Remove duplicates and cluster backlinks
- Retrieve SEO metrics like PR, MozRank, ACRank, DomainPop (API’s. Backlink checker)
Link acquisition
- Outsource email generation
- Buy content externally
- Quick browser
- Tout App
Link Maintaining
- Link Management / webmaster management
- Track upcoming competition (RankTracker)
- Analyse backlinks
Software to use:
- Link Research Tools
- Ontolo Tools
- Socialmention.com
- Twitlert for Twitter
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