It’s more important than ever tobuild strong relationships with influential bloggers, especially those who are considered experts in your field. It’s easy to send out blanket emails requesting opportunities to post on influential sites, clumsily fitting in a link to your site at the end of the post, but with the latest Google updates, this is no longer a technique that will get your rankings soaring, nor win you many fans.
Instead you must focus on the bigger picture which means you need to be thinking about more than just links. Brand awareness and quality over quantity is key. One great link can be worth a thousand low quality links. In this sense, making the most of your contacts and regularly building new ones is crucial for a successful strategy. This is something we emphasise on our SEO Training courses.
Imagine trying to sell a new energy drink that has no name, no logo or branding on the can and tastes exactly the same as every other energy drink on the market. Your only sales method is to shout at everyone you see in the street telling them that your energy drink is great and they’ll love it. Sure you might sell one or two but you’ll never get anyone coming back to buy it again.
A lot of guest blog requests are a bit like that: impersonal, badly written and no different to what everyone else is doing. Most bloggers will be receiving guest post requests on a daily basis, the overwhelming majority being from completely ‘cold’ sources, often written in broken English or with terrible grammar. Read the rest of "How to Catch a Blogger’s Attention"
Here is the Matt Cutts Google Webmaster Help video on Disavowing Links:
Whereas Bing’s user friendly tool simply asks you to submit a page or domain that you don’t like, Google’s comes with multiple warnings and is marked as an ‘Advanced Tool’.
This is very interesting. In the official announcement, Google’s Jonathan Simon recommends using the tool only as a last result if you have received an ‘unnatural links’ warning from Google in Webmaster Tools.
In Matt’s video, he also says you should be emailing webmasters multiple times with link removal requests before using the tool to disavow the last few links. He has obviously never tried to get hold of the owner of a spammy links directory…
Hopefully, if you’ve been on our SEO course this won’t be a problem for you! We follow a sustainable SEO practice that’s all about making your site better, rather than trying to con the algorithm. It takes a bit more effort, but the rewards are worth it.
During my morning round up of BrightonSEO I asked the question ‘Has SEO grown up?‘ For my afternoon round up I’m going to focus on one tip from each talk and why I liked it.
The afternoon was as varied as the morning with topics from linguistics to affiliate marketing, all from good speakers with something interesting to say and wisdom to impart on the audience.
We were also lucky enough to spot one of our Top SEO Trumps in the flesh! Here’s Ralph Tegtmeier enjoying his pack. We left our final packs dotted about at the after party. Did you find one? Let us know!
Last Friday we attended BrightonSEO at the Dome. There was a marked change from the previous event and I don’t mean the 27 algorithm updates in the past year, or the extra 500 people attending.
There has been a shift in attitude. The talks were varied and focused on the bigger picture of SEO as a marketing tool, not an elite club where we sneer at Google and keep everything close to our chest.
People who were there just to find out what small trick they can do rank better would have gone home disappointed. Those who want to improve their businesses, make better websites, keep up good relationships with clients and evolve an industry would have gone home with big smiles on their faces.
There was a lot to learn about the psychology of marketing, the importance of language, the benefits of teamwork and overall the need to grow up as an industry, to stop being seen as snake oil salesmen and seen as a viable marketing channel for global businesses. Congratulations to Kelvin for putting on such a diverse selection of speakers.
Of course, amongst all the seriousness there was still time to be a bit silly:
Professor Puppet welcomes some familiar critters on to the stage
There was a lot less Google bashing than the last BrightonSEO – other than the penguin and panda carcasses hung from a coat rack on stage of course. When panda and penguin were mentioned, it was as a warning of what happens when you relentlessly go after the algorithm and try to con the results.
In this round up, I’m going to run through each talk and explain what we can learn to become better at what we do. How SEO can evolve from the common misconceptions in the media and many boardrooms to a recognised and trusted industry. Read the rest of "BrightonSEO 2012: Has SEO Grown Up?"
Today we’re at the 2nd BrightonSEOof 2012, blogging on all the topics that interest us! We were also at Brighton Digital Marketing Festival yesterday, so if you have some spare time why not read our full coverage of #bdmf12 Day 1 and Day 2 keynote write ups?
First up we had a great talk from Dave Trott, but not before an opening video from Professor Puppet followed by a dancing Panda and Penguin (Kelvin was the penguin). Here’s a picture of Kelvin – Post Penguin.
I’ll admit that we were dreading the day being about link building, keywords and lots of boring SEO stuff that doesn’t really mean anything anymore.
Instead, Dave Trott of CSTTG set the tone for the morning sessions – SEOs need to start learning from marketers and from other disciplines. Stop the silos, stop the SEO church (term used by Anthony Mayfield in the second talk) and start thinking about consumers, brand, business and taking tips from marketing tactics that have worked long before search engines existed. Funnily enough, Dave only learnt what SEO was 5 minutes before he was due to speak, thinking it was the name of an organisation! But as he said, SEO is about beating your competitors, just like any other business.
“Whatever you do, you need to stand out.”
The focus of Dave Trott’s talk was how to separate ourselves from our competitors so you stand out from the crowd and don’t get ignored.
Creativity
Creativity is the new buzzword – from creative thinking to creative football managers. But does anybody know what it actually means?
Dave Trott – BrightonSEO
Pure creativity and applied creativity are different. Pure creativity is what you find in art galleries: it doesn’t do anything, but takes you forward in your thinking.
Then along come designers/ media who take that pure creativity and turn it into applied creativity. This is the wrong way round, and marketers should instead adopt the Bauhaus method of form over function.
We’ve written up all the speakers in this post, but still have some video to work on so keep your eyes peeled for that. If you want to see more photos taken on the day head over to our Facebook page where we’ve added all our favourites.
Follow us on Twitter for live tweets, talking points and a good dollop of controversy.
Charlie Peverett, iCrossing
BDMF Day 2
Keynotes
Allister Frost, Managing Director, Wild Orange Media & Ex-Microsoft Microsoft, Marketers & the Psychology of the Social Web
Yesterday’s keynotes were something special, so Allister Frost and James Hamlin had a tough job on their hands. Allister from Wild Orange Media certainly got us off to a great start with his psychology focused presentation. Neuroscience is tough work at the best of times, let alone a Thursday morning, but it definitely got everyone’s brains into gear.
It’s often easy to just do in marketing, without really thinking why. If you think that’s you then it’s a shame you missed the talk! We will hopefully be providing video next week.
Here are the key points:
10 years ago, there was a scarcity of spectrum. There has been a major switch to a scarcity of attention. The number of channels we have to pay attention to is staggering.
What people want and what businesses think they want is often very different – especially on social media
Marketing is a dirty word – people hate us. We have to make marketing noble again.
So how do we combat this?
Using social proof, contrast, hidden delights, commitment, reciprocity and visual stimulus.
We will go into a lot more detail on these next week as the whole subject deserves its own post!
As an example of what to expect – have a look at the FedEx logo. Have you noticed the little arrow before?
James Hamlin, Marketing Director, Seatwave How to Market 6 Million Great Times Using the Right Combination of Email Marketing and Social Media
The second keynote was from James Hamlin of Seatwave who took us through a week in the life of marketing an online ticketing service.
Turns out James only finished the talk this morning as it was based on last week and the build up to Lady Gaga’s gig at Twickenham and how they adapted their marketing style through the week and focused on mobile and social to drive last minute sales.
One of the most interesting points was that the closer to an event, the heavier the use of mobile and social. 10 minutes before the event was due to start there were people tweeting tickets for sale for £8!
There was also a good example of driving engagement – providing a photo booth at venues and running campaigns where people would take a photo in the booth (with props) and set the photo as their Facebook profile picture.
The most useful lesson for other marketers was about Facebook integration. Seatwave.com is heavily integrated with Facebook – you can see tickets your friends have bought and artists they are interested in for example.
They’ve also worked out that not everybody wants the same service or advertising – a hard rock fan isn’t going to be interested in Britney Spears tickets - so they’ve introduced a personalised area where you tell them which bands you like and receive updates based on your preferences. If you can do this, we highly recommend you do. It’s very easy to put off customers with a wide marketing strategy that alienates different niches.
Oh, and apparently marketers like boobs – this was the second talk of the event featuring them!
If your site(s) aren’t sticking to those rules, then look back to the first print out – “Google doesn’t own you anything”. Read the first few lines very carefully:
“Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action.”
If you break the guidelines, you risk a penalty.
You may be wondering why we’ve chosen to publish such seemingly obvious advice, especially as the guidelines have been around for years and years. It’s something we teach on our SEO courses, and seems to be common sense.
The reason is articles like this and comments like this that essentially boil down to individuals and companies who are either venting their anger or seeking damages against Google.
Read through the other comments on that second post to get an idea of the anger felt towards Google by large portions of the search industry. So why is everyone so angry? Read the rest of "Google Doesn’t Owe You Anything"
Yesterday we brought you the complete coverage of 
Yesterday’s keynotes were something special, so Allister Frost and James Hamlin had a tough job on their hands. Allister from 
