SMX New York 2011: Day 1: Best of SMX Advanced Track: Google Survivor Tips
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SMX New York 2011: Day 1: Best of SMX Advanced Track: Google Survivor Tips

14th September 2011

Coverage of SMX New York 2011 is provided by our guest author Jackie Hole.

First Session of the Day in the Advanced Track was hosted by 3 speakers:

  • Mark Munroe, Everyday Health
  • Alan Bleiweiss, Click2Rank Consulting
  • Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Become, Inc

Speaker #1 Mark Munroe – Panda Recovery – building a quality SERP experience

“Whether or not you were hit by Panda, you need to pay very close attention to survive and to thrive”

Mark MunroeMark Munro discusses the difference between SEO strategies; Pre Panda and Post Panda and that Google know more than you do with regards to user interaction. Pre panda was all about ways to create new content and pages – Post Panda is all about the SERP experience, so be prepared for global sweeping changes across a large selection of your website or affected content. The message loud and clear is don’t get smug, just because you weren’t hit, it doesn’t mean you won’t be.

Top 10 Takeaways:

  1. Concentrate on fixing the pages that drive your traffic not just the default home page
  2. Bad pages can bring down good pages
  3. Reputation is based primarily on user metrics – how the user interacts with your site in the SERPS and on site tells Google whether visitors are happy or unhappy. To recover from Panda – improve the SERP experience
  4. If you get hit, you get less traffic, less data collected. It could potentially take a long time to collect enough new, good data to counter your bad history
  5. Google Loves Brands – they inspire different behaviour so inspire that same behaviour for better results
  6. SEOs need to think about user experiences / Designers & Developers need to think about search
  7. Understand who lands on your site – use Survey Monkey on the pages that drive your traffic and make sure it is representative of your overall traffic
  8. Titles, Titles, Titles
  9. De-index content that does not deliver
  10. Link Freely to relevant content – if you can’t provide the answer – link to it

View Full Summary and PDF presentation: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/preso/east11/MarkMunroe-GoogleSurvivorTips.pdf

Speaker #2 Alan Bleiweiss – Bringing sites back from the dead

Alan BleiweissIt is possible to recover from Panda and Alan Bleiweiss has the proof.

The discussion centres on how to recover from Panda and make sure you don’t feel the effects in future updates. It’s easy to say but “Panda is all about the user experience” and then move on, but Alan shows us real examples from 17 sites consisting of 43 million indexed pages.

The presentation centres around the concept of’Myopic SEO’ (Google based magic bullet methods), and ‘Sustainable SEO’ (Focus on User Experience as per bots and Algorithms)

Top 10 Takeaways:

  1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
  2. Don’t get caught up in doing 1 thing – SEO needs to be a broad range of tactics and techniques for long term success
  3. Be clear about topical relationships, focus, do not overwhelm the user experience
  4. If you weren’t hit, you could still be missing out on opportunities
  5. Remove some of your ads if necessary – more users will come, more will stay, you may just increase your revenue
  6. Inbound link profile – if you want powerful results in search engines – spread out how you communicate what you are offering with anchor text
  7. Look at the overall link to route ratio – more links from less places = high link to route ratio.
  8. If you confuse the user, you confuse Google as well
  9. If you are neglecting Bing, you could be missing a trick – many pages are not indexed – submit a Bing sitemap to Bing webmaster tools to boost rankings.
  10. SEO 2012 – schema.org is going to be a ranking factor

View Full Summary and PDF presentation: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/preso/east11/BleiweissAlan-GoogleSurvivalTips.pdf

Speaker #3 Micah Fisher-KirshnerDealing with Algorithm Changes

Micah Fisher KirshnerMicah creates a ‘Panda Attack’ checklist to help watch out for Algorithm changes.

The general takeaways from this presentation

  • It is really important for teams to be close, stay informed and communicate with each other in order to act quickly.
  • Not all changes are algo updates
  • Check that nothing has broken or forgotten to avoid accidental ‘black hat’ appearance
  • Act like a ‘White Hat’ SEO, but think like a ‘Black Hat’

Instead of typing out the checklist, you can see the full list from the speaker notes.

View Full Summary and PDF presentation: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/preso/east11/Fisher-KirshnerMicah-GoogleSurvivorTips.pdf

More posts about SMX East 2011

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Be sure to also look at our overview page of SMX East 2011

The coverage of SMX East on State of Search in part made possible by a sponsoring from Majestic SEO who have the largest Link Intelligence database in Search. To get your free trial, give a card to this blogger in person at the conference or drop us an e-mail.

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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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