Alan Cairns+ is an SEO copywriter at SiteVisibility. Writing on and offsite copy for a number of key clients and working on SEO and social media campaigns. Read more of Alan's posts here
Dom Hodgson has given his job title as ‘Head of Stupid Projects’ at Pizza Powered, which is an agency comprised of five diverse developers, designers and SEO experts. He is also the organiser of the Think Visibility conference, a northerner and a hack day addict.
Many people have misconceptions about what exactly hack days are, and tend to think of a group of people getting together and hacking the web. Dom quickly dispelled these theories, describing them as a group of designers, developers ect meeting and creating ’cool s***’ overnight. During his presentation he told us about many of the Hack Days he has attended, why he loves them so much and why we should all be doing them. He even gave us some tips on how we could win.
Toby Barnes is Principle at Mudlark Production Company, and has been working in digital since 1995, in publishing, production and development. He is Executive Producer on Chromaroma, Mudlark’s self-published online multiplayer game.
His talk was all about modernism, how we have lost confidence in the future and brutalist architecture. As @jasonwoolley put it on twitter, it was “Funny, entertaining and uplifting… You just had to be there.”
Erika Ungar is an SEO & Usability Specialist at Boux Avenue, a new multi-channel lingerie brand from Dragons’ Den’s Theo Paphitis. She’s been working in Search since 2008.
In this presentation, Erika shares her experiences of working with web developers to create user-friendly URLs for a dynamic eCommerce platform.
James Carson is Head of Search Marketing at Bauer Media, and his presentation was an overview of significant developments in social media marketing, how social activity relates to search strategies and how to “socially charge” marketing content to ensure that it is shared and linked to.
In this presentation Dave Peiris aka Shark SEO spoke about attracting links by creating useful content.
He spoke about using webaps such as hackerbuddy, and how they can be useful as part of your SEO strategy. Two of the best reasons that Dave gave for using them were that they can give strong links and the fact that they are great for branding. The others can be seen in the video. Read on
John Mcelborough runs his own consultancy business, IOptimal, working as an SEO consultant and affiliate marketer, priding himself on this “hands-on” approach. He also runs a number of his own web projects and blogs from his own website.
John talked about Blog Networks and how effective they are as an SEO Strategy. He discussed the practical and technical difficulties of creating a blog network for linkbuilding purposes, a network of sites used to link back to other sites in order to get more links. Read on
Jonny Stewart is Head of Search & Social Media at The Review Centre, and has been working in search for over seven years. He spoke first at BrightonSEO, with a presentation all about the Google Panda update, something which his followers on twitter will know is close to his heart.
Brighton has garnered several “silicon beach” references over the years, and it’s no surprise when you see the number of innovative digital companies based here. In September, Brighton proves its credentials, with several exciting digital arts & media events taking place in the city.
Brighton Digital Festival is an open, Fringe-style festival in which dozens of exhibitions, workshops, performances, meet-ups, conferences and other events are hosted. International artists will showcase their work while innovative experts share knowledge on technological developments and concepts. There are far too many events involved in the Digital Festival to list them all here, so check out their website for a full programme. The festival has been organised by a group of organisations and individuals including technology companies, arts organisations and those with a passion for digital. The aim of the festival is to bring together Brighton’s digital industries and art communities.
For anybody who runs a website, launching a new site can be a nerve-wracking time. A smooth transition between sites requires careful attention to many details, including ensuring that potential customers aren’t greeted with error pages during the transitional period and that SEO rankings and credentials are maintained for the new site. This blog post details some best practices for site migration.
Preparation
The first thing to remember when launching a new site is to not delete the old one! Tweak the new site on development servers (blocking the search engine spiders) and only replace the original site once you are confident about the new version.
If you are not in control of the old site, or want to create a version on your computer for safety, then you can use website copying programmes such as HTTrack. This will create an offline version of the site which should work just like the real thing.
Alternatively you could use programmes like Xenu, which provides a report of all URLs and URIs. This is information worth keeping a copy of, to ensure that these resources are not lost when the new site launches.
It’s often been said that ‘Content is King’ in SEO, and it can be split into two broad categories; on site and off site.
On Site
It’s quite obvious that the content of a website is an important part of any SEO campaign. Google love original content, and that’s why behemoth sites like Wikipedia, BBC and other news sites rank so well in the SERPs. The exception is the “content farms” that the Google Panda Update took care of, but these sites contained lots of outbound links and were surrounded by advertising.
The more content which is hosted on a site, the more chances you have to include not only high volume search terms, but also long tail phrases that can bring small amounts of traffic over a long time. It’s important that onsite content is of a high quality, and it’s increasingly understood that social functions such as commenting, liking, sharing, rating etc. can have a lot of impact on authority.
Onsite content should always be about speaking to customers. In copy, this is where traditional copywriting practice comes in, identifying the right tone for customers and fulfilling their needs and expectations. SEO Copywriting is all about balancing the needs of the reader with that of the search engine – but often these overlap. Images play an important part of presenting products and services to customers, and videos can be an engaging way of presenting information. It could also be that visibility in image, video, blog or news search could bring traffic or conversions. Read on
