Wordtracker took a trip to beautiful Brighton on the south coast of England to report on the latest tips and tricks from the search marketing professionals speaking at BrightonSEO. Here's the best of that advice.
SEO
1) SEO will never die, it will just change and evolve
Pierre Far, Google
2) SEO has no ethics board and no standards of practice, but it needs these to become a formal and well recognized industry.
Rishi Lakhani
3) Dig deep into your site so that you know it like the back of your hand - this will help you identify SEO opportunities.
Tony King
4) Remember to switch off paid channels (PPC) during scheduled downtime.
Tony King
5) Don't get hung up on rankings - if your call to action's better on position two you may still get more traffic than the position one site.
Tony King
Social
6) Bing confirmed they are giving greater weight to social signals in ranking - Twitter and Facebook.
Dave Coplin
7) A good social signal is the speed and fluidity of it getting passed around. It's not necessarily about the number of followers you have.
Dave Coplin
8) Google and Bing don't worry so much about people buying Twitter followers - you'll only lose them if you don't provide them with decent content, after all.
Dave Coplin and Pierre Far
Content
9) Martin Lewis' site MoneySavingExpert.com is an example of a site with great content - they use images and tips, and phrase their text uniquely.
Rishi Lakhani
10) The first thing to think about on a new site is how the content is going to be shared. Worry about that before you worry about getting links.
Rishi Lakhani
11) Be white hat and don't buy links. Stick to the Webmaster Guidelines and you won’t be penalized.
Pierre Far
12) Web 3.0 the semantic web is understanding the meaning of web content and social web participation.
Phillip Sheldrake
13) Read all about Web 3.0 at semanticweb.org linkeddata.org and philipsheldrake.com
Phillip Sheldrake
14) Content includes words, pictures, video, audio, tools, data etc, ie the assets with which we communicate with our users.
Charlie Peverett
15) Read "Content strategy for the Web" by Halvorson & Rach. It's the best book about content strategy for the web.
Charlie Peverett
16) Be aware that in 2001 the creators of content were IT, SEO and early e-commerce sites. Now it's IT, SEO, e-commerce, customer services, brand, PR, CSR, the CEO, six different retained agencies, that bloke down the street, your gran etc ...
Charlie Peverett
Launching a brand
17) Have a name to link all your brands eg Virgin or Nestle but don't necessarily do this if the product is strong enough to stand on its own eg Coca Cola's Vitamin Water which was strong enough.
Sam Noble
18) Pick a name that doesn't mean something else but stands out from the crowd.
Sam Noble
19) Looking for a branding agency? Look for credibility, location, price/time investment, ownership and the wow factor.
Sam Noble
20) Your new brand name should be easy to spell, easy to pronounce, memorable, and differentiate you from the crowd.
Sam Noble
21) Check that the TLDs (top level domains) are available for your name, and the social profiles. Is your new name protectable?
Sam Noble
22) Don't launch a new brand on a Friday, in case something goes wrong!
Sam Noble
Market research
23) Brandwatch DoubleClick Ad Planner and Scrapebox will give you a network of sites related to specific topic so that you can discover what your audience are talking about and want.
Adam Lee
24) Filter your results by need/want/like/don't like.
Adam Lee
25) Use primary research observations, polls, questionnaires, online user testing, interviews and focus groups.
Adam Lee
26) Use Google Consumer Surveys (only available in the US at the moment) or Google hangouts to get people's views.
Adam Lee
27) Google Think Insights is a free insights tool.
Adam Lee
Microformats and rich snippets
28) Read all about rich snippets and microformats at Google
Glenn Jones
29) A useful microformat is the digital business card <p class="vcard">
Glenn Jones
30) Useful codes for more techie SEOs are scope, itemtype and itemprop in HTML5.
Glenn Jones
31) Use microformats rather than microdata/RDFa because they're simpler for simpler things, but microdata/RDFa for more complex or unusual items.
Glenn Jones
32) Recipes, dates, reviews, author hcards (contact details of people, companies, organizations, and places are useful microformats.
Glenn Jones
33) A 30% uplift in clickthrough rate has been seen using rich snippets but more typical figures are anywhere between 10 and 25%.
Glenn Jones
34) Google will remove your rich snippets for misuse of Schema markup (eg fake reviews) but in future you could see a loss in rankings because of it.
Glenn Jones
Googlebot
35) A check in the log files of a large website showed that 40% of Googlebot's time was spent on only two URLs. This meant that a lot of pages weren't being seen. If that's the case you should help the Googlebot focus and visit where you want it to visit.
Roland Dunn
36) The problems that could be causing this are on-site search, additive filters/faceted URLs eg "shoes?size=3&colour=green&price=10&brand=smith" and thin or similar content.
Roland Dunn
37) Embrace your log files to find out where the bot's going.
Roland Dunn
38) Check the bot's behavior and alter your internal navigation and linking where necessary. (Try flattening the hierarchies, for example).
Roland Dunn
PR
39) Ask for a follow link from the word go when communicating with journalists and editors - say something like "Could you credit us with a link?" so you don't have to plead with them afterwards.
Lexi Mills
40) Discover the right and wrong ways of getting your stories out by searching for #prfail #prwin #journorequest on Twitter.
Lexi Mills
Search
41) Use advanced search queries in Google to find specific things, eg:
Negative keywords- inurl:blog "golf" -vw -volkswagen
inpostauthor:guest "keyword"
inurl:blog "keyword" AND "powered by wordpress" AND "name" AND "comments"
inurl: "http:// keyword.com/"
42) Use alternative search engines Duck Duck Go Blekko and TinEye to find sites you want to link to you. They'll have been less spammed than Google.
Steve Lock
43) A black swan event is one that is surprising, has a major impact, and is later rationalized by hindsight (read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for more detail). Identify areas of vulnerability in your campaigns to turn the black swans white.
Stefan Hull
44) Work for the search engines as well as users and you should be safe.
Stefan Hull
Tools
Although Kevin Gibbons was unable to attend BrightonSEO, he has recommended some great tools in his presentation
45) Find people on Google+ findpeopleonplus.com
Kevin Gibbons
46) Clean your Twitter feed with slipstre.am
Kevin Gibbons
47) Get started with microdata using schema-creator.org
Kevin Gibbons
Authorship
48) Where a single author contributes to a site use rel=author. Where multiple authors contribute to a site Google says to verify by email, but using rel=author/rel=me is better and doesn't expose email addresses.
James Carson
49) Use parse.ly to analyze authors.
James Carson
50) Build up an authority but don't give out weird endorsements as your authority can be knocked down quite quickly.
James Carson
51) Don't have an anonymous persona as an author - it won't work.
James Carson
52) Will rel=author mean that journalism will come back from the dead? (Giving the authority back to the author, rather than to the site).
James Carson
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