Following on from our coverage of the first day at SMX, here's our roundup of the 128 handiest tips from day two's speakers. Enjoy!
Top Social Tactics For The Search Marketer
- Youtube insights will give you an idea of spikes and interest (@jonquinton1)
- Photos shared on social media gain the most likes (@jonquinton1)
- NetPeak Checker is a tool to use, it will extract your social metrics for you to add to excel (@jonquinton1)
- Challenge in exploring new formats whether it's long format, blogs posts or, news articles. Look at what is already performing well in that medium. (@jonquinton1)
- All the information is out there, go for it and explore! (@jonquinton1)
- Brands can influence the trend by using social, discussion on social mediums influences mind share, which affects the term people search for. (@aknecht)
- Use social to promote your content, social links and shares are used as an indicator by search engines - but they're not a ranking factors that're included in the algorithm (@aknecht)
- If you are not promoting your content and no one is reading why are search engines going to care? (@aknecht)
- Participate where you audience is - if you don't have a community create your own! (@aknecht)
- If you are going to create your own community makes sure you make it clear it's by the brand. (@aknecht)
- Google +1's are definitely an indicator of quality, and quality is a ranking factor! (@aknecht)
- Smaller brands can being a social media campaign on zero budget. Encourage, be creative, and think about your audience. (@aknecht)
- Vine and Instagram are free. Get creative! (@aknecht)
- Treat others the way they want to be treated (@craig_reprise)
- People have access to more content, people are reading more, sharing more, watching more videos, and are more discerning and conscious of material that's being pushed at them (@craig_reprise)
- Let's consider why people unlike pages or unsubscribe from social channels - is it that the page is not being updated, the content is annoying or irrelevant, they're being talked at not to. (@craig_reprise)
- Annoying and irrelevant content is the most important reason why folks unlike a brand page (@craig_reprise)
- Creating an environment that will make people want to share (@craig_reprise)
- A robust and thriving social environment involves a value exchange with the audience (@craig_reprise)
- Create content that has a value exchange for and with your audience (@craig_reprise)
- Net Promoter Score measures the consumer perception of brand around specific criteria (@craig_reprise)
- Small budget? That's ok - have a clear strategy and keep the momentum going! (@craig_reprise)
How To Survive The Death Of Link Building - Use Majestic SEO to compare your link profile with competitors. (@demib)
- A natural link profile consists of no-follow links and low authority links as well as 'great links' (@demib)
- Categories of linkbait that work: (@demib)
Great tools and free help(e-books, free tutorials, video training, etc)
News (e.g. be the first to sue Google!)
Provocation - a great way to engage users, but beware of negative side-effects
Humour - but only if it's truly funny
- If your existing link profile is strong, you can sometimes get away with 'push button' link strategies to add to this - but it won't work as a primary strategy (@demib)
- Links still need to be built, but they need to be earned rather than bought or spun (@kirsty_hulse)
- Even 'dirty' sites can get clean links - pornhub ran a tree planting campaign that brought in links from many authority sites (@kirsty_hulse)
- GA Audience and Interest reports give demographic data of your users that can give you actual insight! (@kirsty_hulse)
- Free or cheap audience insight tools include tailwind, quora, compet, followerwonk, quantcast and brandlove (@kirsty_hulse)
- Use different outreach messages for different sites - customise your emails for the most important targets and use templates for different audience personas (@stephbeadell)
- Little Bird getlittlebird.com helps you learn about who the influential people are in any given topic or vertical (@stephbeadell)
- Followerwonk uses group members to identify influencers, and vice versa (@stephbeadell)
- Outreach is essential - start with big influencers and others will follow if they write about you (@stephbeadell)
- Be aware of how effective your outreach email subject lines are. For example:
BAD: cool new app from acme health
BETTER: track your blood acolhold level with new app
BEST: Exclusive - too drunk to drive? New app tells you
- Use LinkedIn and Facebook to target journalists and bloggers by profession and company (@stephbeadell)
- A/B test email templates to see which perform better (@stephbeadell)
- Target Twitter followers of specialized experts, not Twitter celebs (@stephbeadell)
- Optimize for journalists by using phrases that a journalist would use - this can produce passive links over time (@stephbeadell)
Supercharging Twitter & Facebook Engagement
- If you don't understand your audience you will never get any reach (@basvandenbeld)
- Subscribe to different audiences, and start to understand them (@basvandenbeld)
- Be there at the right time, right place with the right topic (@basvandenbeld)
- When you post stuff, it's not about you - it's to let others have fun (@basvandenbeld)
- Make stuff that your friends will like, so they share it. (@basvandenbeld)
- People don't care about your brand, they care about having fun (@basvandenbeld)
- Yes, advertising does work. Don't start buying right away - think about it first. (@basvandenbeld)
- Don't be afraid to republish, chances are people didn't see it the first time. (@basvandenbeld)
- Most importantly - don't just be social, be relevant (@basvandenbeld)
- You can share the same content on social media but there should be different tactics behind sharing it on different platforms (@basvandenbeld)
- Highlight your "best" tweets with Twitter analytics (@kelvinnewman)
- Learn from your statistics (@kelvinnewman)
- Know where you can go off topic and still be relevant (@kelvinnewman)
- Don't forget about Google trends - there will be trends in your sector that you didn't know about! (@kelvinnewman)
- Promote a tweet -- if you are spending time on social you should be able to spend a little bit of money on promoting (@kelvinnewman)
- Pay attention to your audience, not with what you are told to look at (@mikedcarter)
- Understanding how your audience is exposed to your content with Facebook Insights (@mikedcarter)
From Microdata & Schema To Rich Snippets: Markup For The Advanced SEO
- Schema.org is not the only markup - RDFa works well also (@badams)
- Use the Google structured testing tool. However, note that it doesn't always phrase the structured data properly. (@badams)
- Future proof your content and mark everything up - Structured data is where the internet is heading (@badams)
- Use schema on as many pages as you can, include as much info as you can (@badams)
- Proper markup = meaning (@basgr)
- Search engines and crawlers are stupid, they need to be told abut the relationships between things (@basgr)
- Don't use authorship for every single page- articles only, abuse of schema could lead to you rich snippets being cut by Google (@basgr)
- You can rank at number 1, but if the results below you have appetising images, you may not get all the traffic you'd expect. (@samuel_quincy)
- GWT is your best friend, use it to look at what you're making up - it's not going to be perfect first time. (@samuel_quincy)
Best Practices For Mobile SEO
- Keep all of your resources crawlable if they affect page content or layout - avoid robots.txt disallowing (@maileohye)
- Search for 'google mobile website imrovement' for best-practice guidelines (@maileohye)
- Identify in-demand content: understand your audience personas, and audit social search results for in-demand media. (@soundtrack4life)
- Streamline your mobile site - strip out the fat, just have what's necessary (@soundtrack4life)
- Embrace mobile design constraints (@soundtrack4life)
- Optimize for PageSpeed (@soundtrack4life)
- Responsive web design is the recommended configuration - avoids complication, consilidates everything to one url, and is more 'future-ready' (@soundtrack4life)
- The primary drawback to responsive web design is load time. Just because css hides assets, that doesn't mean they're not being loaded. (@soundtrack4life)
- Pinterest, Instagram and Vine have almost no desktop or laptop traffic. (@soundtrack4life)
- 88% of mobile searchers will take action on the same day (@syantien)
- Use clear icons that state the nature of your app so searchers understand clearly when they're looking at results. (@syantien)
- Reviews are an important component in ASO (App Store Optimization) - reviews whos up on search results and on app details pages. (@syantien)
Technically Speaking: Advanced Technical SEO Issues
- The last thing you want is a user to land on your page and not like your page. (@patrickaltoft)
- Know, understand, and control every single page on your site (@patrickaltoft)
- Set up individual sitemaps for product pages, category pages and so on. (@patrickaltoft)
- Check that your available pages match your indexed pages on Google. (@patrickaltoft)
- Previously SEOs recommended keeping out of stock products indexed - now you shouldn't - users bounce, or return to search - which doesn't look good to search engines. (@patrickaltoft)
- Look at all elements to make sure each page is perfect and good for users, design, content and typography. (@patrickaltoft)
- Incentivise reviews - reward customers to increase the number of reviews you receive. (@patrickaltoft)
- Google won't let you rank unless your mobile user experience is good. (@patrickaltoft)
- If you're putting together your SEO proposal for a client, focus on the users perspective and give clients a manageable list. (@patrickaltoft)
Building Robust Ad Campaigns With Search & Display
- If you don't take up the available ad space on search results, your competitors will. (@alistairdent)
- Find the easy wins. Do lots of them. (@alistairdent)
- Getting started is where the biggest ROI on your time is. If your time is limited, it's better to do a little bit of everything. (@alistairdent)
- Keywords are the obvious (and mandatory) start for optiizing for search - but you need different keyword lists for display. (@alistairdent)
- 3rd party tracking systems know a huge amount about our behaviour online (@alistairdent)
- Remarketing helps prevent leaks from your funnel - but it's not for prospecting. (@alistairdent)
- Testing makes perfect: Write ad > choose best ad > remove poorest ad > refine best ad > plan new message > repeat from the beginning (@alistairdent)
- Start with the basics (search), seed the funnel (display), follow up (remarketing), track it all (think about attribution), and tell a story. (@alistairdent)
- Two useful (and free) tools from Bing are: Bing Ads intelligence- http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-uk/bing-ads-intelligence and Power Maps - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38395 (@CEDRICtus)
You Tube Success Stories
- A number of places to promote video are YouTube, LinkedIn StubleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. (@mannyrivas)
- You can achieve success with long video (@mannyrivas)
- Keep negative keywords below 50 for display campaigns in adwords for video (@mannyrivas)
- Keep in mind that AdWords for video isn't as polished as the general one (@mannyrivas)
- Test the channel page vs the watch page if you're not sure what your KPIs are focusing on (@mannyrivas)
- If your goal is to send people back to your site, focus more on setting up your video as a landing page rather than setting up a YouTube channel (@mannyrivas)
- If you're not invested in making a full brand feel, then at least take advantage of the YouTube facilities to help with SEO (@mannyrivas)
- If you're after engagement, put your video on YouTube rather than self-hosting. (@mannyrivas)
- Uncheck languages you're not interested in with InVideo programming for more efficient search results (@akivadbenezra)
- Powtoons is a place to find creators of explainer videos. There are free & paid options. Fiverr are people doing them for $5! (@akivadbenezra)
- Custom annotations are free, built into YouTube, and can direct traffic straight back to your site. (@akivadbenezra)
- Select the video location option in the advanced settings, and your video will show in local results over competitors. (@akivadbenezra)
- Transcribing your video means your words will be indexed by Google and will help your rankings (@akivadbenezra)
- Always upload a custom transcript - you can use @speechpad for $1 a minute (@akivadbenezra)
- It's worth spending a couple of dollars on YouTube advertising rather than third party sites that share your content as it will help with SEO. (@akivadbenezra)
- If you're building subscribers spend time creating a channel. This can help SEO efforts. (@akivadbenezra)
The Brave New World Of Universal Analytics
- Comscore collects 1.5 trillion digital interactions every month (@martijnbeijk)
- Tablet usage in the UK has increased by 65% in the past year (@martijnbeijk)
- 18-34 year olds spend a full day of every week online (@martijnbeijk)
- Retail sites are seeing less desktop traffic, and more from smartphone and tablet, year on year (@martijnbeijk)
- 81% of the UK digital population is mobile (@martijnbeijk)
- Read the Zero Moment of Truth handbook from Google http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/collections/zero-moment-truth.html (@martijnbeijk)
- Free data gems available from comscoredatamine.com (@martijnbeijk)
Winning Google Through Google+, From Authorship To Personalized Results
- Good click through rates are obviously going to have a positive effect of rankings. (@andyatkinskruge)
- Google+ in the sense of authorship is not going to go away. (@andyatkinskruge)
- Using G+ profile you can indirectly connect together the posts you're writing for third party blogs and your own blog. (@andyatkinskruge)
- Writing for larger third party blogs raises your prominence as an author (@andyatkinskruge)
- Your G+ profile picture - If the face is pointing at the content, you're going to get a higher CTR. (@andyatkinskruge)
- You can now identify if you're a current contributor or a past contributor to a blog on G+ (@andyatkinskruge)
- If you have one author writing on your blog and they leave, you're in trouble. Better to have multiple authors. (@andyatkinskruge)
- A new Google+ brand page means a YouTube account gets created for you, start merging videos within about 2 weeks (@shawnccpr)
- If you have 10 or more local pages, Google offers bulk upload. (@shawnccpr)
- If you start a hangout with someone, they'll see it if they're online or the next time they log in. (@shawnccpr)
Let us know if you picked up any handy pieces of help or information that we missed here - the more the better!
That's all from us from SMX this year - see you again next time round.
