Posts tagged 2011
PubCon 2011 Wrap Up
From November 7-11, the SEOwebhosting.net team took part in PubCon, the premier search and social media conference and expo in the lovely city of Las Vegas. With over 200 speakers and a vast sea of exhibitors, there was a lot to cover, but the SEOWH team found time to play the role of “Welcome Wagon” for weary conference-goers by supplying free limo rides to the Luxor and MGM Grand hotels from the airport.
Judging from the outpouring of Twitter love and the 100+ smiling, bleary-eyed people that were jettisoned to and fro over a period of 16 hours, the gesture was well received.
There were two particular sessions I attended that stood out. The first was “Essentials Overlooked by 90% of Affiliate Managers”, which provided a look into trends and strategies within the affiliate space. Panelist Keith Posehn (@kzorz) made a few great points:
- Contact startups with relevant web 2.0 apps to be an affiliate
(like hipmunk.com)- Read blogs like techcrunch to find those companies
- Be a good gate keeper and don’t let just anyone sign-up for your program
- Get a demo or explanation to make sure the startup is real
I also attended “The Convergence of Social Media and Search” which discussed the blending of social media into search results. Rebecca Murtagh (@virtualmarketer) had some terrific tips on what to pay attention to as these worlds blend together, and David Wallace (@davidwallace) provided some insight on infographics.
Here’s a brief rundown of points from each.
Your brand can dominate the SERPs with a YouTube channel, social media profiles.
Google+ and Linkedin profiles/pages are essential for business.
Optimize your social media profiles to push traffic to the main website.
Survey your clients to see when and where they use social media.
Focus on quality of audience and conversions, not on the size of your following.
Infographics should be…
Time sensitive
Historical
Resourceful
Entertaining
Chock-full of facts, trends, and ideas
List your citations
Publishing on your domain to get links but also provide embed code and other tools for easy sharing.
Bottom line? We had a great time, and got to meet a lot of fantastic folks.
Although the SEOWH team soaked up a hefty sum of knowledge, we couldn’t be all places at all times. Click here for the official (and incredibly thorough) list of PubCon wrap-ups for coverage of most of the PubCon seminars. See you at PubCon 2012 in Hawaii!
Dealing With Your Local Search Clients in 2011
Through her work with SEOs, Miriam Ellis has determined a short list of best practices which she believes to be instrumental to a clean, successful local search strategy which she outlines in this article. She offers her advice to SEO practitioners on providing the best guidance possible to clients who seek to improve their Local SEO performance in 2011.
The first step is to identify which type of client you are working with, of which there are three types:
1.The “Total Newbie” Client:
This type of client has little to no knowledge of SEO or Local Search practices and may know nothing about Local or SEO web hosting at all. They should be taught good SEO and Local practices but are desirable as clients since consultants start off with a “clean slate” and won’t have to do any cleaning up of past Local efforts.
2. The “Reluctant Novice” Client
These clients have some working knowledge of SEO practices and may have already implemented some strategy. The bad news is, oftentimes their decisions may not be the right ones for their business and corrections or overwrites may be necessary to get their campaign back on track.
3. The “Black Hat” Client
This client is speeding full throttle towards a campaign completely comprised of dubious Local practices. As a local consultant you must first find out why they believe this strategy to be a good one, then determine whether or not you can help the situation. This client’s attitude will bear a lot of weight on this determination.
Action Items:
Once you’ve developed rapport with your client and you’ve decided to work together, it’s up to you to determine which areas of their Local campaign need the most work. Some of the more common elements where Local goes off the tracks for small business owners are:
The Place Page Business Title, which should be the exact legal name of the business and nothing else.
Place Page Categories, of which the business should have less than five.
Business Description, the best use of which is still up for debate…keywords or no keywords?
Business Duplicates, which are determined by the type of business model.
Reviews, which are best left to legitimate reviewers and not paid review providers.
Poor On-Page Local SEO, which is determined by a full-page audit of the client’s site.
Copywriting, which may need to be outsourced in the page content cannot be written in-house.
Greedy Clients, which are, by definition a handful. Steer them clear of unscrupulous practices.
The Wrap Up:
Remember that we all use Local Search to make our lives easier. Gaming the system penalizes all of us, and it’s our responsibility as Local SEOs to help keep the infrastructure of the system on the up-and-up. The point of Local is to put e-commerce into the hands of small and large businesses alike, so help your clients understand what role they should play.
This article was summarized by Heather Hendrick
SEO Predictions 2011: Rand Fishkin’s Thoughts
In a recent article, SEO guru Rand Fishkin takes a look back at how his 2010 SEO predictions fared and prepared a new list for 2011 as well. Find the original article here: http://www.seowebhosting.net/seo-hosting-blog/7-predictions-for-seo-in-2011/
Overall, Rand’s past year predictions have been relatively accurate. With a couple of exceptions, he hit the nail on the head in saying that Google’s going to further hone it’s treatment of Tweets and predicting that Google’s dominance would continue to grow closer to 80% of market share through the year. He was less accurate in predicting that SEO spending would continue to rise dramatically and that Conversion Rate Optimization would soon be thrust to the forefront of the SEO industry.
Offering 7 new SEO predictions for 2011, Rand assumes that some trends in the industry will continue. His predictions are:
1. Someone will finally prove that clicks and number of visitors to a site improve the site’s organic rankings. Through search testing or even the engines themselves, we’ll all have confirmation that types of clicks and visitors affect the algorithmic method which will in turn affect the SEO hosting industry.
2. Google Maps will (finally!) incorporate some type of filtering and sorting system for data queries. In an attempt to keep up with Yelp’s superior review functions, Google’s going to have to add additional filters for features like price, proximity, etc.
3. “Social Search” will become an even more important player in SEO. This will come in the form of increased search results created by social networks and will almost certainly involve the big players like Twitter and Facebook.
4. Referral Strings will be used by Google to signal ranking strength to marketers. Google may even go so far as to start offering Google Analytics data to track these strings, but only if they make them more standardized than they are now.
5. Search will not be heavily impacted by Mobile Search and neither will SEO. Mobile will still be important but it won’t be a game changer. Instead, searching will continue to merge platforms and it’s all going to continue to fall under the SEO umbrella.
6. SEO software is about to take off. Once tools deemed “dreams” by SEO marketers, the functionality of products from companies like RavenTools and Search Metrics will start to be seen as a necessity. Search Marketers will have more software at their disposal than ever before as well as more options for SEO hosting products.
7. Someone will come up with a better, more general way to describe “SEO.” Rand himself says it best,
“…with the search engines expanding so far afield in the signals they consider and the verticals/media types they include, I have to face facts – SEO today calls for much more of a talented generalist than a pointed specialist. We need to be savvy about and good at so many facets of organic web marketing that to call us “SEOs” is less empowering and more limiting than in the past.”
These seven predictions make up Rand Fishkin’s guesses for where SEO is headed in 2011. He promises to check back in early 2012 to grade himself on how his predictions fared.
Will 2011 Be The Year of a Social Media “Bubble?”
As Eric Brown recently reported, a lot of voices in the SEO field are starting to talk about the possibility of seeing a “bubble” around social media in the coming year. We’ve summarized his article for you here and discuss the reasons why this topic is getting so much airtime, one of which is that it falls directly on the heels of the well lauded real estate bubble of 2010.
Weeding
Maybe it’s time for the web to do some social media “weeding” of sorts, that is, get rid of the extraneous sites. Nowadays every business has a social media strategist, a term that’s lost a lot of meaning. This strongly echoes the pervasiveness of subprime loans before the real estate crash.
Easy to get into
When the barrier for entry into a field is low, risks of overexposure is high. When there’s no cost to get in and the reward is guaranteed, much like in low-end real estate ventures, there’s no doubt people will take advantage that see an easy opportunity for gain.
Low cost
Costs of running an internet business are incredibly low, as in, just the price of a laptop, which makes the industry wrought with stragglers. Once real results are required from these start ups, many simply move on to the next client, of which there are many.
Looking for Correction
Like in any business, social media requires that a problem be corrected through the help of experts. Since there wasn’t much of a problem in the first place, results are often easy to manufacture and it’s difficult to measure the success of a true social media campaign.
Social media marketing is much more than Twitter and Facebook…it’s all about engaging consumers, making connections, and thereby increasing sales. With so many companies in this new business, it’s inevitable that some will be weeded out.
Summary by Social Media Expert Extraordinaire Heather Hendrick
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