Just follow ionSearch and let us know which speaker you are most looking forward to seeing at ionSearch 2013!
Up for grabs is a TWO-DAY conference ticket - this is the final chance to win your place at ionSearch.
To enter, simply follow the ionSearch Twitter account and tweet us with your favourite speaker and why you are looking forward to seeing them…
We will pick the best and most imaginative use of 140 characters to win!
To familiarise yourself with who’s speaking take a look at the agenda.
Good Luck!
Terms & Conditions
Competition is open to UK residents aged 18 and over only.
There is 1 prize available consisting of a two-day ticket to ionSearch.
Prize is non-transferable and non-exchangeable and there is no cash or credit alternative available.
In the event of circumstances outside of its control, ionSearch reserves the right to substitute an alternative prize of equal or greater value should the prize be unavailable for any reason.
The competition closes at 5pm on 15th April 2013
Winners will be announced on Monday 15th April 2013.
Travel and accommodation for the conference are NOT included.
Entries to be counted will be following ionSearch on Twitter and have tweeted with a chosen speaker
If you work in SEO or digital marketing, you’ve heard of us; Searchmetrics the leading supplier of search and social analytics software.
I want to tell you a little bit about the latest version of our flagship software, Searchmetrics Suite V6. We wanted to create something really special so we threw a team of 35 designers and six product managers at the project (equivalent 40.4 man years of development time). In the process we even developed a spin-off search and social analysis product, Searchmetrics Essentials, which many people are already using.
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and has been a hot topic for the past couple of months. An update in February from Google which focussed on this saw many webmasters reporting a drop in rankings. More recent updates have also penalised sites which don’t feature enough variation. LSI isn’t all bad though, more than just protecting yourself you can use it to your advantage and gain more relevance for your pages.
Back in January Blueclaw put a post on their blog entitled “Is your SEO Company Damaging your Backlink Profile? Tips for 2012”. This went through the top ways in which SEO’s were likely to accidentally damage their rankings. They were bang on the money when they listed the number one danger as over optimising backlinks:
“1. Anchor Text – Don’t JUST focus on the money terms. If you constantly use the same anchor text you will get burnt, it’s just a question of when. Instead, build brand, compound and generic links.”
In February Google decided to get serious about LSI, something it had been playing with for years, and as a result many sites suffered which had overly focussed their backlinks and onsite content. This results in a profile focused on a few core terms and not enough related terms. Read More »
I leapt at the chance to pen a guest post for IonSearch. The original idea was a blog post discussing what’s changed in SEO and the conference scene. Let’s briefly linger on that before getting stuck into the topic du jour – evil links.
A lot remains the same in SEO. I think my first task at bigmouthmedia was drawing large red circles around H1 tags in a website’s source for a design agency that apparently did not understand their own code. I then had to try and justify why adding keywords would be a good idea in terms of ROI. Sadly, that still happens today.
A lot has changed in SEO too. We’re in an era where a large number of signals are looked at by the algorithm. Today’s SEO is a multi-signal world. The conference landscape has changed hugely too; we’ve progressed from nearly amateur meet-ups to professional, large, events that have escaped the confines of London and New York.
A nostalgic post would have been fun to write – but I can’t prove it’s ROI. Instead let’s tackle this week’s hot topic and a likely candidate for SEO buzz for weeks to come. Let’s talk about Unnatural Links.
Google’s become more vocal about asking webmasters to deal with their own unnatural links. That’s to say the search engine is emailing webmasters with notification that unnatural links have been detected and the site has been caught. Webmasters will probably see the rankings slide for related terms within a few weeks and many will be well advised to clean up their link profile.
One of the things that I’m passionate about from an SEO perspective is the idea of constantly aspiring towards technical perfection.
Obviously, this is something of a pipe-dream; there aren’t many real-world, commercial scenarios in which it’s practical, achievable or even sensible to invest in the technical foundations of a website beyond a certain point. Time, budget and resource limitations (and a healthy dose of common sense) will always result in ending up with a finished product that “could have been better” from an SEO perspective – I’m sure that there’s a pretty much unlimited ceiling for the amount of extra bells and whistles we’d all like to see included in every project we work on! However, even if you’re in the development phase of a new project (when there’s the maximum flexibility and appetite for technical investment and development), requests and requirements for additional or ‘nice to have’ SEO features and functionality inevitably get pushed down the priority list in the name of pragmatism.
The position, then, that we often find ourselves in is that we need to identify small, tactical changes and improvements to a site which will result in a worthwhile ROI. What’s often missed is that there’s generally a huge amount of opportunity to take the technical platform you’ve already got and to make it work much harder – without requiring significant amounts of extra development, or resulting in you giving up and looking for easy wins off-site or in other areas. Read More »
