Learning from SMX West (Without Actually Having to Be There): Day 3 #smxwest
Thanks to Barry Schwartz and Keri Morgret from Search Engine Roundtable for taking the time to live blog many of the SMX West sessions! Here are a few of my notes from Thursday, Day 3…
Ask the Link Builders
(Archived version on SE Roundtable)
- How to stay whitehat when link building:
- Stay away from things that go against SE guidelines; don’t be obvious
- Follow Matt Cutts’ blog and only do things he would suggest
- Have great content - Personnel involved need to know the niche area, social network(s) in area, research fees involved, etc.
- Good to have in-house link building – good, quality links take time to develop (difficult to have a bronze, silver, gold package for link building)
- Stay away from people who guarantee a certain number of links
- Link building = relationship building
- StrongestLinks.com, DirectoryCritic.com, ISEDB.com – other directories besides the “dreaded” DMOZ
- Niche directories are better
- Panel’s favorite link building tools?
- Aaron Wall’s suite of tools
- Linkdomain operator at Yahoo - Link building forums:
- Webmaster World
- Aaron Wall – private forum
- Digital Point
Ask the SEOs
(Archived version from SE Roundtable)
(Ask the SEOs from SMX East)
- If reDEVELOPING, submit your old URLs and spiders will see your 301 redirects
- keywords in URLs aren’t THAT important – don’t consider renaming everything after the fact
- Use dashes not underscores in URLs
- Title tags are about readability
Ask the Search Engines
(Archived version from SE Roundtable)
- How to fix duplicate content:
- Make sure your CMS is solid with 1 URL for 1 piece of content
- Link to one URL
- Webmaster Tools preferred domain
- 301 URLs - Google suggests using absolute URLs
- New canonical link tag to help w/ duplicate content issues:
- What it looks like:<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.maine-seo.com">- What it does: tells search engines to treat the landing page as duplicate content (acts much like a 301 redirect)
- SEOmoz has a really good post on further explanation, SE Land has a good one too
- SE reps caution: be careful with this tag - Link building: “If you have a website about fish, it’s much better to get a link from another website about fish than a random website”
Productivity Tips for the Busy Search Marketer
(Archived version from SE Roundtable)
- One panelists suggests iMacros for keyword research (a FF addon)
- Routines to be productive:
- begin day w/ email, bloglines, twitter
- take care of emails that don’t require a lot of time (get them out of the way)
- categorize blog feeds, sift through based on current priorities
- open new posts in separate tab that I want to write a post about
- click on TwitterFox icon and look for DMs and @replys only - Writing new posts:
- creative/resourceful posts can be scheduled anytime
- posts covering industry news need immediate attention
- read, write, publish - Mange email overload (per one panelist’s habits):
- Extensive category structure
- Keeps “pending” emails only, saves “finished business” to hard drive
- Non-important, non-pending emails are discarded - Panelists suggest notepads (to quickly jot notes without getting tempted to check email or Twitter) and voice recorders that convert words to text (Dragon Naturally Speaking)
- Group “to do” list into groups: especially for projects requiring multiple or related steps
Tags: Link Building, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines, SEO, Time management