Last week, SMX London graduated to SMX Advanced status. We in the UK eagerly anticipated the fresh new tips and tricks which are usually left until several beers later in the networking bars!
And we certainly weren’t disappointed. I thought it would be useful to share with Search Engine Land readers the top ten advanced search marketing tips which I gleaned from the show.
Link building: Offer a student discount. Among Kelvin Newman’s excellent 17 ways to build university and government links, the one I found most thought-provoking was for e-commerce sites to offer a student discount. This means that the generous offer instantly encourages university sites to link and may also generate further student blog and online coverage too.
Online reputation: Turn a negative into a positive. Mikkel deMib Svendsen talked about how if The New York Times has a negative article ranking in Google’s top 10 for your brand name, this can be very difficult to outrank. Instead of attempting to force this down with new listings, try looking for positive content on the same domain and building some links into this. The objective is to convince Google that the positive version is more valuable/relevant, so that this replaces the negative result with the positive article instead.
Keyword research: Use Mozenda to find new opportunities. A superb presentation from Distilled’s Sam Crocker saw a host of new keyword research ideas and tools being discussed. Most notably, Sam suggested using Mozenda to scrape Google suggest results and download this into a spreadsheet of keywords. This tip was clearly a winner with the audience!
Paid search: Use capitalization to erase poor quality score history Richard Fergie spotted that if you have a keyword with a poor PPC quality score, and still want to persevere with it, try creating the same keyword using different capitalization. Google currently allows you to insert multiple keywords in the AdWords interface for the same keyword (when using different cases), despite this not being case-sensitive when the query is made. So this could be a quick way of getting back on track, without that poor quality score keyword bringing down the whole account.
Google: Twitter links influence QDF and likely to impact organic search. Rand Fishkin shared experiences of seeing noticeable increases in “query deserves freshness” rankings, spotted following a link being retweeted several times on Twitter. He also spoke about Google and Microsoft’s data deals, which means that they have link information available from Twitter and Facebook and are likely to apply this to their algorithms for organic search in the future.
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