USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

The SMX (Search Marketing Expo) has already made its stop in London this year, and some interesting tips were brought up during the event. There have been several posts that list some of the more helpful tips that were discussed, and we’ll summarize some of those in this post. USASEOPros already does most of these things, but a lot of people seem to be behind the times. It’s important to keep on top of the SEO community, or it’ll leave you behind pretty quickly.

One of the posts about SMX London is a list of quotes from the event and it can definitely be helpful for marketers and SEOs. Most of these quotes come from two people who really seem to know what they’re talking about when it comes to SEO: Rand Fishkin (from the SEO authority SEOmoz) and Patrick Altoft (from Branded3). They both had some very interesting (and sometimes obvious) things to say that people should think about.

One of my favorite quotes from Rand is, “Alexa data is slightly better than random guessing.” This has always seemed to be the case, but for some reason a lot of people still believe that Alexa is an authoritative source for data that they don’t actually produce. One of the more obvious, but still little-known facts that Rand covered was that Google devalues links in sidebars and footers. If you want a link to have power, make sure to put it in the main body.

Patrick had some good things to say at the event as well, and one of the quotes that stuck out to me in the article was, “It doesn’t matter if a link is paid for or not. Important is if the end product looks like a paid link or not.” The debate between whether or not buying links is kosher has been argued for a while, and this is an interesting outlook on the situation. While Patrick obviously doesn’t mind buying links, he brings up a good point: make sure they don’t obviously look like they’ve been bought if you do decide to go that route.

A different blog post includes an attendee’s notes that he wrote up after going to the event. The post lists 41 tips that he heard while listening to presentations, and there’s some good stuff in there. Some of the better tips in the list include paying attention how your competitor’s site is set up for SEO, and also optimizing for popular misspellings (but make sure to do this in a professional way.

For an Internet marketing, the SMX events can be a great benefit to your profession. The events happen all across the globe, so when you’re unable to attend one, it’s great to see that other people are willing to spread the knowledge like the creators of the above two posts do.

There has been a debate flaring up recently. It isn’t a new debate, but with some heads of the industry taking a stand on one side or another, it’s beginning to be talked about more than usual. The discussion is about exactly how much of an effect social websites have on an SEO campaign. It isn’t difficult to see that social networking/bookmarking definitely has some effect when it comes to exposure and branding, but what about actual SEO efforts?

Some SEO companies are now selling campaigns that include social networking as part of the overall package, explaining that it effects SEO in such a way that it needs to be a part of the overall effort.

Others in the industry are on the other side of the debate and say that social accounts have a minimal effect on actual SEO. These people say marketers should stick to more traditional SEO in their campaigns. These professional don’t argue the idea of exposure, but say that the social accounts aren’t worth the effort if your concern is strictly SEO.

At USASEOPros, we have numerous social accounts all over the Internet. As an SEO company, it’s important to at least test the waters and see for yourself before you go listening to other people. Our findings seem to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to this discussion. There are definitely some benefits to be had when using social accounts for SEO, but it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as some other companies may try to make it out to be.

Social accounts are great for a number of reasons: they can increase brand exposure, bring in new people to see what you have to offer, and can even get you a few fans. As far as regular SEO goes, social accounts do have an effect, but traditional SEO is still a very important. Social accounts aren’t a replacement for traditional SEO, they are a compliment to it.

Social accounts can be tool to help a website gain more links. If you post links to a good article or something interesting on a site, there’s a chance other people will link to it as well, and more links means more search engine power. In the same respect, there are some social bookmarking sites that have the potential to give you some good SEO juice if enough people vote on your link submission. As long as you produce things people want to see, social sites can be a useful tool for SEO. Otherwise, it may just be a good way to get exposure and do some reputation management.

If you’re curious and want to sign up for some sites that may be good to test out some of the facts of this debate, we’ve posted a blog with the eight most important social sites for marketing on our company site.

Also, here’s some video of professionals discussing social networking and marketing. The first part is embedded, the rest can be found on YouTube.