SMX London 2009 – SEO tips

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Jimmy McCann

Head of Digital Strategy


Technical SEO

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 backlinks 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.

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