I set up SEO Jo Blogs in February 2009, five a half years ago now. Back then I created the blog to keep up with the updates in the SEO industry and also provide tips for those in SEO.
I have had a few different themes since I set up the site, but tried to keep it consistent. I wanted to celebrate SEO Jo Blogs’ 5th birthday with a new site.
I was fortunate enough to attend BritMums last month and speak at the event on the second day. If anyone has questions about my SEO session please get in touch. There are so many areas of SEO, it is difficult to cover everything.
There were lots of great presentations over the course of the two days. I really enjoyed the Keynote speaker on the Saturday, Benjamin Brooks-Dutton. He is the author of the book “It’s Not Raining Daddy, It’s Happy” and his blog Life as a Widower where he talks about bereavement following the death of his wife. His talk was inspirational and thought provoking and reminded us to not take our loved ones for gran. Ben concluded the presentation by asking everyone to tweet their #BestMoment of the day. I will always pause to think of what my best moment was every day.
There were also many brands at BritMums marketing their products and services. As it was my first time at BritMums, I wanted to speak to some of the brands and find out more about they work with bloggers in the marketing.
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.
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.
