USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

With the last day of SES Toronto passing on the 10th, there are quite a few things to talk about. One of which is the first keynote speaker of the event, Tara Hunt. She’s the author of “The Whuffie Factor” who is hailed by the founder of Wikipedia and the co-founder of Twitter to be the perfect author for a book about building business via social networks. One of the reasons for the endorsements is because she’s done just that.

Within the first section on their agenda, they jumped right into getting sites internationalized for the companies that targeted a number of countries or markets. Covering everything from technical keyword research to cross-border management issues. Great for the bigger business, but for more localized companies, this session provides little, unless they’re close to hitting it big.

Of day 1, I personally think the two most important sessions were about linkbait and Twitter. With  linkbait, it seems to me that Tara Hunt should have been one of the speakers. The “Beyond Linkbait” session provided major tips on how a company should portray themselves online. Instead of caring a horrendous amount on getting that link, care about how that community or authority takes a look at them. Last thing you want is Biz Stone of Twitter mad at your company. While the publicity would be nice (regardless of the fact that you’re being slammed) wouldn’t you rather they be talking about it in a good sense?

Day two disappointingly started off with paid search coverage. While yes, paid search is a very good way to get that exposure for certain terms, it can end up being quite expensive. Not to mention a good deal of people ignore the paid search results entirely. Analytics coverage seemed like a much better topic to open up with as the analytics to any given site hold the information that shows the owner where people are coming from, what they’re searching for, how often they bounce away, and what pages they’re looking at. Google Webmasters is another incredible tool that should have been mentioned with resources on how to set it up.

Covering social media was also a big topic that everyone was on edge to see. There are an astounding amount of companies that are supposedly big game that are just missing the mark in the area. Also telling you which bits of social media are just falling off the wayside, this session was surely an eye opener to a good deal of attendees.

The last day was helpful to many, since the workshops seemed to be divided between the SEM and SEO aspects. The only problem is that you couldn’t attend both. Unless you had a friend go and take notes in one while you took notes in another. Needless to say, if you missed out on SES, you really did miss out.

It’s a joy to be in the changing industry of SEO, and it was very refreshing to see what was going on during the second day of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference. We also covering the first day of SMX yesterday.

At the conference, they covered many things that are good to keep in mind, and touched on good habits that everyone should keep in mind when working on Web sites. There were two things that I got the most joy out of reading, the first was how to better add flash in to a site and not lose out on all the rankings. I am someone that enjoys the look and feel of a good flash site and likes adding audio and video, and I like to learn new things that will allow me to do this and not lose rankings. To add to it, most major search engines are also working hard to index sites that are composed mostly of flash. In my mind this just makes for an all around better web experience, but it is still far from being perfect and not for every site.

The other interesting thing covered at SMX was conducting an SEO Audit and the many sides to consider in doing so. The presentation was very well laid out and gave many tips to consider when performing an audit on a site. Some of the tips included looking at URLs, site navigation and site latency. There is also a great list of tools that were talked about that can help you in your quest of making the most search friendly pages. I would have to say that the key to having a good audit is being able to keep proper track of problems and what actions you tried to do to correct the problem. This will let you see over time what has worked and what effect everything had. Sometimes it will not just be one thing keeping you from getting high rankings, but it will be a few small factors working together that have a negative effect on the site you are working on.

I think that every SEO tech out there can take a little comfort in knowing that most true techs out there are dealing with the same issues. This conference shows just how true that is. I would say if you have been in the business for years or are just starting out, reading the articles at searchmarketingexpo.com are well worth the time. I know I have enjoyed the experience and can’t wait to see what others have to say about it.

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.

When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click), it can be difficult to tell which one is better for business. It’s a debate that has gone back and forth for some time, and the truth is, both are needed to have the biggest effect. But just because both are useful ways of advertising a business, doesn’t mean they are equally effective. With most businesses, SEO is the best way to get traffic to your website with PPC being a nice compliment, and that’s now becoming obvious to a bigger section of the business world.

A recent study by Hitwise shows the amount of traffic coming from PPC is decreasing, while the amount of traffic from organic search engine links is going up. This suggests that SEO is becoming more effective while PPC is becoming less-so. PPC isn’t dead yet, but if this trend continues, there will be little reason to pay search engines for traffic. Instead of paying search engines, it is becoming much more cost effective to hire an SEO company to get you ranked well in organic search results.

The data Hitwise used for their study compared traffic from the last four weeks to traffic from a year ago. The amount of searches being performed aren’t going down, but the amount of traffic coming from PPC is. While the reason why PPC traffic is decreasing could be attributed to a number of things, the fact that it is decreasing is really all that matters.

The fact is: PPC traffic is going down, the reasons don’t matter as much as the end result. If PPC traffic is going down, it doesn’t make much sense to invest in it over organic SEO. It’s becoming obvious that SEO is the wave of the future when considering how to go about Internet marketing, and those who jump on the bandwagon earlier will reap more rewards.

If you need a crash course in the differences and benefits of PPC versus SEO, the video below has interviews from some prominent professionals in both fields and has some valuable information for people who are looking to get a better grasp on both concepts.