Today I spoke at BritMumsLive on how to implement SEO to drive traffic and grow your blog. SEO is more than keywords and I gave useful tips and examples on how easy it is to incorporate SEO. Marketing offline as well as using tools such as social media can have a big impact on traffic and overall visibility of a site.
When I was in Sydney, I met two fellow entrepreneurs – Huan Nguyen and Martin Pham who were founders of YourScene. As an entrepreneur myself, I wanted to find out what inspired them to create this unique product.
How did you come up with the idea for YourScene?
YourScene was originally devised as all good businesses start, with drinks and a group of friends.
The original idea was to start up a website where models, photographers and make up artists could connect. They would post jobs and bid for jobs using the same business model as Freelancer.
To promote this, we thought we’d run a photo booth at different events to get our name out there as people would be going home with our print outs with our logo and details on them.
We got so good at it that people started approaching us to service their weddings, birthdays and corporate Christmas parties. When we started doing this, there were only a handful of companies doing photo booths and within a year, there were over 50.
Soon, the market was flooded with too many photo booths offering lower prices but for substandard work. We didn’t want to get sucked into the war of reducing prices because in the end, no one wins.
So instead of competing with that, we thought we’d create something new to bring to Sydney and Australia as a whole. This is how we created our Tag’N’Print service.
BrightonSEO was just over a week and there have already been a lot of posts written about one of the best free conferences in the UK. I particularly like the post by Receptional on over 100 Tips and Insights. Ben Harper from Daitfy covered five great speakers from the day including Stacey Cavanagh and Vickie Cheung. Jamie Faulkner shared his actionable tips on Firecask. The Verve Team wrote three posts from BrightonSEO and there are some some great lessons on Technical SEO from Briony Gunson.
Here are some of the take aways I liked and wanted to share with you:
At Ad:Tech Sydney, I went to an interesting presentation about rebranding interesting. The presenter, Ray Bull, has a background in design, spoke about the brand design of one his clients, (the Church) and the results. When talking about a brand, it is important to be on the same page. Everyone has a different interpretation of what a brand is . Ray confirmed the definition of the brand as the below:.
Brand – all the feelings, thoughts and perceptions people have about products, services and people.
At AdTech Sydney, I attended this session where Telstra shared their experience of integrating their search strategy to deliver better results. Kevin Tunney, the Search Account Director from Resolution and Robin Stafford, the Search Manager from Telstra presented.
This past month, there was a lot content written about link analysis, link removals and link building. In this post I wanted to share with you “Link Earning”, in 2014, companies want to earn links. This was always the case but in the past as you know, people have been naughty and bought links.
Before you can earn links, it is important to analyse your old links. In a post last July, I wrote about How to Recover From an Unnatural Link Penalty. Jon Ball wrote a very interesting post earlier this month on Search Engine Land about back link clean up. As Jon mentioned, only clean up your links if:
1. You have received a manual penalty or an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools
2. Your site is not ranking high as it used to which may be due to an algorithmic penalty
I am excited to announce the next Search London event in 2014 “How to Create Award Winning Content”
The UK search market is very competitive and it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. Therefore I wanted to ask two people who had won awards for their campaigns and blog how they were successful.
I have invited Mike Essex and Richard Kirk to speak at the next Search London meetup which takes place:
Location: The Warwick pub – 1 – 3 Warwick Street, London W1B 5LR
Date: Tuesday 1st of April
Time: From 6:30pm
There were many positives from 2013. A few were the result of the first State of Digital Roadshow which I took part in 2012 and met over 16 SEOs all over Europe. I was able to interviews these SEOs and they shared their Search predictions for 2013.
Elena Farinelli predicted the biggest change in 2013 would be how to get valuable links. She was correct as we have found and this will continue into 2014. Elena said people will have to find new ways to earn links.
Webcertain organised a great International Search Summit 22nd of October in London. There were some key speakers from the search industry sharing their tips on how best to approach SEO in multiple markets
I have recapped some of the highlights from the day on this site and a few more on SEO Jo Blogs and written a full day write up on State of Digital.
International Content Outreach
Lisa Myers, CEO of Verve Search
Lisa as always, gave a very insightful and detailed presentation about International SEO. She also referenced a case study for a piece of work her company Verve Search completed for Hotel Club, it was a video about “Brighton on a Skateboard” and was called Sk88ssing. The point of any campaign that is made is that it has to be beneficial for social media which in turn will generate links back to the site.
The Link Removals and Avoiding the Wrath of Google presentation took place on the 30th of October, 2013. This was a very topical subject to speak about at Search London , considering many sites have been penalised by Google. We had two great speakers at the event; Kirsty Hulse, SEO Strategist at Digitas LBi and Jose Truchado, Head of SEO for Expedia Europe.
Digtias LBi were the sponsors for the event and let us have their amazing venue for Search London – thank you Digitas LBi.
