Yesterday we discussed what makes a quality speaker at conferences. The conclusion can be that becoming a quality speaker is hard work. And it will be even harder staying a quality speaker.
Today we are going to get into ways of becoming that top speaker you always dreamed you could be. With the help of Kevin Gibbons, Andrew Girdwood, Sri Sharma, Lee Odden, Bryan Eisenberg and Anders Hjorth you’ll get some top secret tips to becoming that quality speaker. (more…)
This is a guest post by IrishWonder, who has been practicing SEO since 2000, is an independent SEO consultant at irishwonder.com and a CMO for ContentMango.com.
Search engine optimisation, albeit often rumoured to be dead or about to die, is getting more and more popular as a career path. It’s hardly taught anywhere formally, one of the reasons being its ever-changing nature (by the time you get a University course prepared and approved it’s already largely outdated). The bars to entry into the industry are ridiculously low – or insanely high, depending on how you look at it. There is no formal certification but there are plenty sources of information and too many of them are either outdated or complete garbage. There is no lack of SEO conferences and workshops – but many of them are quite expensive, speakers sometimes pitch their services rather than provide useful information, and travel costs do add up as well. So how do you learn SEO without making costly mistakes and spending a fortune?
Believe it or not, there are ways to do it completely free or almost free. The ways listed below range from easily doable by anyone to ones requiring certain skills/knowledge, but it all depends on your character and how willing you are to learn. Majority of these ways also require serious social skills – so while our industry is known for stories about making millions from home in your pyjamas never having to meet other people, you probably cannot afford not having social skills at all. (more…)
This month we started something new, on our Facebook page we give away one SEO tip per day. Each day a tip from one of our bloggers or from one of our readers is displayed. For learning purposes.
At the end of each month all the tips will be collected in one post. And that is this post. Find below all the tips from October! If you would like to stay up-to-date every day of the new tips be sure to like our Facebook page so you will see the updates every day. If you have additions, do send them in!
Without further ado, here are the 101 Tips for October: (more…)
State of Search is going to give you the ultimate overview of SEO tips in the world. Coming from the entire blogging team and with your help we will create the best list ever.
SEO is changing, Google is using different metrics than 10 years ago, people search in different places and people are behaving differently. Every now and then this means we get to see posts proclaiming ‘the death of SEO’ in one way or another. The truth is: SEO is far from dead, the opposite actually, it is just turning into a ‘real’ part of the marketing funnel. It is being taken out of its corner and integrated into proper marketing.
But still, with all the changes that are going on, there is a lot of ‘elementary SEO’ you can do. I would almost call it ‘basic’, but in fact it is more than just basic. It is elements which are part of optimising your content on your website we all need to do. Relatively simple things you can do to make your content more visible to search engines and thus to the people searching for answers. (more…)
This post was originally posted March 8 2010 and has been updated. One of the best ways to get quick access to what is hot or not in search and to learn a lot in a short amount of time is visiting one or more of the bigger or smaller conferences in the world about search marketing and related topics.
The conferences serve another purpose also: talk to those who can help you take the next step in your search experience and the way you work in search. With that I mean the people who are doing groundbreaking work in the industry. They not only find out what works, they are also willing to share that information. (more…)
Venice – the lovely, little Italian city by the sea. Gondoliers, singing to you and your beloved as you slowly work your way through a beautiful city. Or is it the lover that just ripped your face off this past week? I think many readers would agree with the later. All apologies to a lovely city, but Google is using its name to wreak havoc on its SERPS!
Google defines Venice as, “Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.” Reading that, you are likely to think that you are in the clear – you rank well in the main index – hell, you may even completely control the SERP. Do not give into a false sense of security! This algorithm change is designed to rock your SEO world. (more…)
There always tends to be a little bit of an “us vs them” attitude between SEOs and developers. A lot of developers think SEOs = spammers and a great deal of SEO’s don’t understand enough about architecture, language and data structures to have a meaningful conversation about development. So when things do go wrong it’s very easy to point the blame at the other party.
The aim of this post is to hopefully bring us a little closer together and provide a checklist for a site migration, if you avoid these issues you will go a long way to not destroying your clients search performance followed by that dreaded phone call. I personally consider these to be in the remit for both developers and SEOs and they should definitely be checked on the testing environment. (more…)
Google News can really be a great traffic driver. It was already a good source of traffic when Google News was only accesible through the special “news” tab. Now Google News is also integrated in Universal Search it gets even more interesting to get your content out there.
Getting your content in Google News requires a little bit of work. First of all you need to make sure you live up to the regulations Google has set up for Google News. Second you need to understand how it works. You need to know for example that the position of the news items can change based on how ‘hot’ a specific newsitem is at that moment.
There are many articles out there already about how you can get your content in Google News. Our very own Barry Adams also wrote a post about that on Searchenginepeople for example. But there is one other item which can get you into Google News which gets a little less attention: video.
I want to highlight a few items here which can help you get your video content showing up in Google News, thus driving even more traffic to your site. (more…)
As you may have noticed State of Search is a group blog. Which means that its not just one person writing all of the content, but many more. On this site we have a few of the best bloggers in the business producing great content just for you.
There are many group blogs out there and running a group blog seems easy. After all, you don’t have to produce all the content yourself, and with a bloggersteam like we have it should be easy as hell.
Well…: wrong! Yes, the fact that great content comes from the different bloggers is the absolute plus for this website. It makes or breakes the success. But to get to that success you need to lay a good foundation. And if you are blogging for business it can even be hardere. In this post I’d like to share with you some tips on how to run a group blog. Based on my experience here and on Searchcowboys. I know, it’s not about search, but I hope it will benefit you. (more…)
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