SMX London 2009 – SEO Tips
Last week I attended SMX London, a leading search marketing conference series. The reason I attended was to try and gain insights into the SEO industry and discuss techniques we use with our SEO peers.
I found it very interesting and thought provoking. Below is a summary of the latest search engine optimisation tips from the conference:
- Domain authority and trust is now probably the most important factor to improve the overall ranking of all pages in your site
- Improve it by getting high quality links from authoritative sources eg BBC, Yahoo, Newspapers etc
- Releasing a quality piece of PR is a fantastic way to improve your domain authority and trust.
- Creating a blog and writing regular quality blog posts will attract high quality links naturally. This is something that we strongly recommend.
- Getting external back-links from page footers can actually harm rankings. Avoid this at all costs.
- There are numerous analytics tricks that will enable us to report better and identify areas that need attention most. We are currently developing and testing these methods, they include:
- Separating Google.com from Google.co.uk, Google.fr etc…
- Multi Touch Tracking – Where a user finds a clients site by searching on a non-brand term and then leaves to browse competitors. The user may then return to convert either directly (via history / favourites) or using a brand term. Up until now we haven’t been able to tie up the initial keyword with the conversion.
- Identifying terms getting traffic & conversions from page 2 of Google. These terms are the low hanging fruit- it may be worth putting more effort into optimising for these terms, as they would achieve page 1 rankings quicker.
Post by Jimmy McCann, SEO Account Manager at Search Laboratory.
