Moderator:
Christine Churchill – Key Relevence

Speakers:
Patrick Altoft – Branded 3
Rob Millard – Distilled
Kelvin Newman – Site visibility
Pete Wailes – Strategy Internet marketing

This session was about the age old topic of link building and various panellist’s tips and experiences.

Patrick Altoft – Branded 3

In their experience page rank from social sites does NOT flow throughout the linked-to site and will not carry trust, etc to the rest of the site. The great thing about twitter is many people syndicate their tweets on their websites and sidebars so your link is not only on twitter but also on many other sites. This is great for getting multiple IP’s and TLD’s. In this way you can get loads more links and traffic than you could ever get from dig or delicious.

I’ve always been a fan of the Joomla CMS system, well, for as long as it’s been around anyway. However, having more recently become more involved with SEO I’ve come across many individuals, Search marketing specialists and developers who claim that Joomla isn’t very search engine friendly and that other CMS systems, WordPress in particular, are more effective. As usual when faced with this sort of conflict of opinion, I decided to do some research and have a look what others have to say. Here is what I found out…

The fact is, when a Joomla website is used correctly, it is just as effective SEO-wise as any other CMS or regular website. Yes, in its most simple state it is not very effective, but this can be overcome by simply installing the Joomla sh404sef which effectively deals with clean URL’s and URL re-writing. It is extremely important though that you correctly use the SEF module from day 1 as this Joomla module does not re-write existing links to a web page that has recently changed its URL.

Search marketing specialists will agree: having a company blog and updating it regularly can be a time consuming task, but after you’ve read the benefits discussed in this article, you will realize that it’s all totally worth it. The two main areas in which a blog can help promote your company include SEO rankings as well as your relationship with your customers. Let’s take a look at these below, one at a time:

Company Reputation:

Company blogs are dynamic and can be regularly updated (unlike your website), thus you can effectively keep clients informed of the day to day happenings of your company. It is also an effective way to communicate your company’s true personality to your customers as blogs tend to be more opinion based than information based. Through this, readers feel like they are getting a peep into the real personalities of the people behind the scenes of the business.

I recently referred a colleague to an article written about duplicate content and why it is not good practice to regurgitate old content onto your website. My colleague read the article but struggled to make sense of it all as the article was just too technical for someone who is just getting started in SEO. So I had to go through the article with him and break it down into a more a more understandable format. This blog entry is a dummy version of what we discussed.

What is Duplicate Content?

This question has been on my mind for a while as I try to see the bigger picture of micro blogging for SEO marketing purposes. When you consider the fact that it sounds like glorified stalking; as Louis said about in his post about the dark side of Twitter, if your eight year old told you she was being followed, you’d probably freak out. And what can you really say in one sentence?

A lot, in fact: Oscar Wilde conveyed a great deal of meaning in short succinct sentences. I love Oscar Wilde’s wit and in one of his quotes he says that “Everything popular is wrong”. (Wilde would be such an entertaining tweeter). Twitter is certainly popular, but is it the right thing for SEO or is it just a waste of company time?

Jacqueline Zenn from SEOGroup thinks that most people are missing the point of Twitter in their attempts to use it for marketing purposes. She says, “Yes, there is nothing wrong with tweeting your latest post…but if that is all you use the service for you are completely missing the point”.

Whoever said sex sells? Because at the moment it’s causing an internet traffic jam and misleading people into stumbling upon explicit sites when they are, instead, looking for useful sites.

The internet is a wonderful tool when used properly, offering an endless amount of information at anyone’s disposal. It’s becoming the world’s biggest library and database, and with a click of a button, anyone, anywhere can learn pretty much anything. But isn’t it a sad fact that some people always abuse a gift? Give them a library book and some fool always scribbles in it and spills coffee over it. Offer an efficient rail service, cheaply, and someone steals the wires, or sprays unappealing graffiti in the carriages. Give them the internet and they stuff it full of nonsense.  I don’t mean to sound like a cynic but I know some of you are nodding in agreement.

There are many shady SEOs out there; we call these guys Snake Oil salesmen because they’re scammers who would sell their own grandmothers given half a chance.

These are the guys who offer “Guaranteed” first page listings in a ridiculously short period of time. They target small businesses that don’t have a huge budget and are easily sucked into the vortex of deception. Of course, it’s not only small businesses that get approached, but these are the guys who will feel the impact most.

Whatever means these SEOs use to achieve rankings and deliver promised traffic, they cannot be ethical. At the end of the day, many small business owners don’t know any better, all they really know about SEO is what these conmen have sold him. Promises of great traffic and impressive listings, and they are sold. These are the bandits that give us ethical SEOs a really bad name and they must be stopped.

I`ve read many posts on the importance of social media and getting into the “click”, as well as how to get into the “click” and what to do when inside the “click” of a desired community. Now, I agree with most of them (as I`m an easily persuadable person), so I thought I would add my 2 cents worth on the methods and importance of creating brand awareness using the “clicks”.

There is an online community for everything you could possibly think of, from rabbit owners and their furry friends to skateboarders and well, their skateboarding, and one of my personal favorites; the psy trance community. Your choice of community depends on which ones best match the company you`re promoting. In this post I`m going to discuss two ways of creating brand awareness for a company.