I’m excited to share some news with you all…
Following a successful 4 years of running conferences in the UK and US, we’re now looking to expand to the West Coast of America. We’ve been having an absolute blast over the past few years hosting conferences and meetup events in London, New Orleans, Boston and New York. Over the 4 years we have had up on stage no less than 140 incredible presenters, watched by a total of 2581 online marketers! Were you one of them?
When SEOs talk about navigation, we tend to stick to the technical side of things: “Make sure that you have internal links to every page on your site.” “Don’t put too many navigation options on a page because you’ll have too many internal links.” “Load your drop down link content before JavaScript so that search engines can read it.”
Website creators have to put navigation together on their own, gathering bits and pieces from different articles around the web. So, I’ve put all the tidbits together, creating a guide to building site navigation that’s optimal for search engines (and visitors, too, never forget your visitors!).
The Seattle office took the reins in the last DistilledLive video as Mike Pantoliano and Geoff Kenyon talked you through where to focus your e-commerce efforts in the coming months, as well as sending kudos to those brands already doing it well.
For the latest edition, we thought we’d take the opportunity to get a bit more technical - particularly following the news of our latest DistilledU module release; an interactive guide to meta information. So, without further ado, Distilled London consultant’s, Dave Sottimano and Tom Anthony get stuck into one of the key elements to consider when it comes to International SEO; the hreflang attribute.
Working in online marketing for two years or less? Want to learn the latest advancements and stand out amongst your peers? Make connections with industry leaders (and get a day out of the office?)
Well, we’re running a competition to help you do just that! We are giving away one free ticket to our LinkLove London conference this March 15th, plus a year’s free subscription to DistilledU – our online SEO university.
How can I get involved?
To enter the competition and be in with a chance of winning this exclusive prize, we want you to publish a blog post to your site*; tell us your thoughts on the industry, what you have learnt so far and what you predict for the future of online marketing.
The closing date to publish and send the blog URL to us is 28th February 2013. Submit your post to events@distilled.net and our panel of experts will judge the posts internally and let the lucky winner know around one week before the conference.
Entrants must have only worked in the online marketing industry for two years or less.
We know that anyone can create a blog, but the numbers show something worse – that everyone is creating their own blog. WordPress alone sees 100,000 new sites created every day – adding to the over 60 million current WordPress sites. Tumblr claims over 90 million blogs. The list goes on.
The above link/image show that there are about 1 million new posts per day on WordPress alone. How many blog posts have you read today?
New faces, old favourites and killer content…
This May we will be seeing the summer in on the east coast as we return to Boston for our annual SearchLove Boston conference.
We’ve slowly been revealing a few of the faces you can expect to see on the speaker line-up, but now is the time to reveal the full ensemble…
Don’t forget, if you haven’t already got your early bird ticket, there’s still a couple of weeks left to take advantage of the best available rate (only $699!) Get your ticket now!
Now without further ado, we can reveal the full speaker line-up…
Will Critchlow, Distilled.
Usually pitted against Rand in a ‘head-to-head’ battle, this year he will be giving a solo presentation packed full of actionable tips and tricks that he’s learned from my day job ‘making Distilled famous’.
Mackenzie Fogelson, Mack Web Solutions.
Mackenzie has been working in the SEO and web design industry for ten years so she certainly knows a thing or two about building a community! Mack will be sharing her insights and giving away her pro tips at this year’s conference.
It was the one thing standing between me and the ‘Submit!’ button on my Distilled job application:
“Anything else we should know about you? (this is your opportunity to impress us)”
Well, damn it. I had reached the online equivalent of the, “So tell me more about yourself?” question in an in-person interview—you know, the one filled with the awkward rambling of mish-mashed facts about your life accompanied by the sinking feeling you just verbally completed an eHarmony profile page.
The world of Paid Search has been buzzing today with news of ‘Enhanced campaigns’ that Google will be rolling out over the coming weeks and will be taking over from the current campaigns entirely by June. For those who haven’t already read about it the short version is that you will no longer be able to create campaigns by device anymore. Replacing that will be the ability to bid on mobile separately from desktop using a multiplier. If you are wondering where tablets come into that scenario, they don’t.
According to Google, “consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar” so you will not be able to bid separately for tablets, it will be bundled up with your desktop bidding.
Here’s their bullet point list of key features;
Or as Google put it:
The benefits, they claim, will be in greater simplicity, without the need for large sprawling accounts with duplicated campaigns due to location, device and other factors. This will make life easier for account managers.
However, we are already seeing the same message from most paid search managers, we don’t want this so called simplicity.
This isn’t a tactic heavy post. Instead, I want to focus on something more foundational. Effectiveness.
Being an effective SEO consultant is about more than knowing SEO and doing the work, it’s about getting things done. Paddy wrote about this in length on his blog. From what I’ve found a lot of this boils down to trust; you need your clients to trust you, or they won’t implement your recommendations and let you try new things like cutting edge link building ideas. Sure, you can do things like show the opportunity associated with a project, but ultimately, they have to trust your data and your plan to execute.
The speaker line-up was revealed back in January but (drum roll please) now it’s time to unveil the topics they will be covering at this year’s LinkLove London…
First up, Wil Reynolds will be giving us all a wake-up call with his session on “Head Smackingly Simple: Post Conversion Link Building Tips” So, you have done the hard work, you have succeeded in getting people to submit a lead form or buy something from your site, but now is not the time to congratulate yourself, it’s a time to start link building in full force. Buying something or submitting a lead form is a big trust step and once someone has gone through that step, it’s far easier to lead them to the next. This is going to be Wil’s big project at SEER in 2013, and he wants to give us a sneak peek into his plans.
Next up, Lyndon Antcliff will be answering the eternal question on every SEO’s lips, “How do I Get Them to Link?” As one of the foremost experts in producing link bait which attracts, persuades and influences, Lyndon will talk through how he draws on the principles of psychology to create content designed to attract links. Discover the real reason why people link and how to go about building a linkalicious, content building machine.
