SMX has a history of inviting speakers who share good information. There were a few mutterings about the validity of the ‘Advanced’ tag but I didn’t speak to a single person who said they didn’t learn anything. I hope you can use some of it in your own work. Here goes…
SEO ranking factors

The power and quality of a link may be affected by the following:

1) Font size and anchor text.
Rand Fishkin with credit to SEO by the Sea

2) Position on the page, eg, within ‘editorial’ content rather than a menu.
Rand Fishkin

3) Position within a list (top being better).
Rand Fishkin

4) Number of words in the anchor text (less being more).
Rand Fishkin

5) Some measure of how commercial it might be (less being more).
Rand Fishkin

6) Text or image.
Rand Fishkin

7) The words around a link (are they unique, ‘natural’, related?).
Rand Fishkin

QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness and Google’s QDF algo determines to what degree a search query (or keyword) requires new (fresh) content. If QDF decides a query deserves fresh pages, eg, a topic is in the news or has a rush of searches, then newer pages and news results will rise up the ranks. Mark Nunney

Tweets appear to influence QDF.
Rand Fishkin

Correlation is not cause. Eg, higher levels of smoking might correlate with higher levels of poor diet but one doesn’t necessarily cause the other. Mark Nunney

The following on-page factors correlate well with higher SERPs ranks:

9) Keyword at the start of page title tag.
Rand Fishkin

10) Keyword in image alt attributes.
Rand Fishkin

11) Keyword before brand name in page title tag.
Rand Fishkin

The following on-page factors do not correlate well (or at least ok) with higher SERPs ranks:

12) Keyword in H1 tag.
Rand Fishkin

13) Increased keyword density.
Rand Fishkin

14) If you put your brand name in your title tag then put it after your keyword.
Rand Fishkin

15) It’s easier to rank home pages for competitive keywords, so use homepage for your most important target keywords where possible. If you’re using internal pages, build links to them first.
Rob Kerry via Attacat
Link building

16) Export your anchor text from MajesticSEO and then import it into TagCrowd to get a visual impression of themes and words used. Dixon Jones

17) Good Google ranking might be determined by just a handful of links.
Kelvin Newman

18) Links from university and government sites aren’t inherently better but they are often more likely to have a profile that means the site is trusted and the link higher quality.
Kelvin Newman

Eight of Kelvin Newman’s 17 tips for getting links from .ac.uk and .gov links are:

19) Reach out to academic and university site blogs.
Kelvin Newman

20) Offer students and staff discount.
Kelvin Newman

21) Write a positive story and let the press department know.
Kelvin Newman

22) Sponsor a student event.
Kelvin Newman

23) Give a careers talk.
Kelvin Newman

24) Advertise a job.
Kelvin Newman

25) Become a case study eg, for a business department.
Kelvin Newman

26) Submit to government site’s business directories
Kelvin Newman with some help from Jaamit’s SEO Insight post

27) 301 redirects are less useful across domains than they once were – Google is removing relevancy, so you’re better off using the canonical tag rather than 301 for external redirects
Rob Kerry

Rob obviously has examples of 301s not working well but I’ve recently done lots of 301s with no problems, ie, no noticeable loss in rankings and traffic. This suggests that what Rob is seeing is selective. Mark Nunney

28) It’s far more effective to get websites to change a link than to try to use 301 or rel=canonical. This method involves using email and the telephone, and talking to real people.
Rob Kerry

Maybe. But if you’re confident 301s work for your site then you might be better off spending that ‘telephone and email time’ getting new links. Mark Nunney

link building e-book
Local

29) 20 to 40% of the search queries on Google are local.
Search Cowboys

I think that will change a lot from country to country. For example in a big country like the US, many services have to be local. Mark Nunney

30) Most true local conversions happen offline or on the phone. Track offline conversions by using phone call tracking, discount codes, add ‘in-store pickup’ option, etc.
Search Cowboys
Analytics

31) Don’t focus on the numbers on a specific moment, but on the changes in a specific period.
Search Cowboys

32) Reports without actions suck.
Alex Cohen

33) If you can’t figure out an action after looking at a report, don’t use it, it’s crap.
Pere Rovira

34) Top 10 keyword reports are lazy. A lot of people use top 10 keywords as a report for clients, but they don’t tell you much. 6 of the 10 may be exactly the same month to month.
Alex Cohen via Jaamit SEO Insight

35) Lazy data makes the long tail cry. Alex quotes his hero, Avinash Kaushik, saying “instead of looking at this lazy data, look at what’s changed”.
Alex Cohen via Jaamit

36) “While we obsess about our brand terms and our top 10 keyphrases the reality is that the long tail of search means that our organic and search campaigns focus on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of keywords. One effective strategy to deal with this purely data problem is to focus on what’s changed”
Avinash Kaushik, via Alex Cohen

37) Depending on your budget, it’s better to use free tools and hire an analyst than it is to spend huge amounts of money on tools and just use them to count page views.
Tami Dalley
Video

38) 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Martijn Bertisen

39) Video will often get higher clickthrough rates than a standard result.
Shmulik Weller

40) 68% of top retailers are now using video.
Shmulik Weller

41) Embed video on product pages. Page needs to have titles, descriptions, etc, to help search engines understand what the video is about. Make the embed part of the initial load of page.
Shmulik Weller via Attacat

42) Submit a video sitemap with compelling thumbnails – don’t leave it up to Google to choose your thumbnails.
Shmulik Weller via Jaamit SEO Insight

43) Video takes up to 1/3 of web traffic and will increase to 90% in 2013 (Cisco)
Search Cowboys

44) Upload your videos to a wide range of video sites.
Rob Sheppard
News

45) News is for everyone – not just news sites.
Rob Kerry via Attacat

46) News can be a quick and short term way of getting on to page one of Google SERPs for competitive keywords.
Rob Kerry

47) Images are important for getting into news (use standard sizes 300×250 or 180×150). Make alt tag same as headline.
Rob Kerry via Attacat

48) Separate company news (put it on the blog) from industry news (put into news content).
Rob Kerry via Attacat

49) If you get rejected from Google News then be Billy Big Balls and go back to the editors. ‘How dare they?’
Rob Kerry via Attacat
PPC

50) Isolate your brand keywords into separate Campaigns as they get lower CPCs, higher Quality Scores and so distort ad group and campaign metrics.
Craig Danuloff

51) Impression Share data is problematic. Try ‘opportunity cost’ instead – how much exact match traffic could you get and how much would it cost?
Alex Cohen

52) Don’t obsess on Quality Score, focus on each keyword’s ROI.
Alex Cohen

53) One problem with looking at Quality Score at keyword level is it’s like using a microscope vs a map – think about the map – it gives a lot more data and shows you where to prioritize, so look at the distribution of Quality Score across the campaign rather than keyword by keyword.
Alex Cohen

54) Group keywords based on modifiers, eg, ‘download’ is different to ‘guide’.
Pere Rovira

55) Use Google Webmaster Tools’ new clickthrough rate (CTR) feature to judge the effectiveness of your copy.
Pere Rovira

56) Many people focus only on the search result – not the user, or the landing page – and are therefore only looking at one third of the picture.
Pere Rovira

57) Google Ad Planner can help with segmenting your target group and offering insight into where those users can be engaged.
Martijn Bertisen

adwords success e-book
Reputation management

58) Google and Twitter search results pages are your brand’s new home page.
Kevin Gibbons

59) 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
Kevin Gibbons

60) 70% of people trust online consumer opinions from people they don’t know.
Kevin Gibbons

61) 41% of people trust search engine results.
Kevin Gibbons

62) Build brands around reputation not products.
Kevin Gibbons

63) It’s not always true online that all publicity is bad publicity.
Kevin Gibbons

64) Claim your social media brand profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed etc.
Kevin Gibbons

65) Real-time search is increasingly important.
Kevin Gibbons

66) Look at Google’s ’suggested’ search for your brand.
Kevin Gibbons

67) Even for misspellings. See image below:

Google Suggest results

68) Negative comment on a page about you? Find a less negative page on the same site and link build around it to push more negative one down.
Source anyone? Claim your link

69) Flood out negative mentions of your brand on Twitter using a network of fake twitter accounts.
Rob Kerry via Jaamit
Social media

70) Infographics with lots of data that are pleasing to the eye and informative can be great viral fodder and linkbait.
Chris Bennett

71) Test. And if it doesn’t work, move on and try something else.
Chris Bennett

72) Spend good quality time with your customers.
Parks Blackwell

73) Find someone in your organization who can speak the same language as your customers for your social media campaigns.
Parks Blackwell

74) My avatar is bright red because most social media sites use muted colors. Red stands out, provokes reaction.
Lyndon Antcliff

75) Time your social media involvement to tailor to your market. The US may be in bed when you tweet to the UK.
Lyndon Antcliff

76) If the product or content sucks, social media will not fix it.
Lyndon Antcliff

77) Websites do not link to websites, people do. Appeal to the webmaster.
Lyndon Antcliff

78) Return on Investment = old thinking. Return on Involvement is the new thinking
Lyndon Antcliff via @hakandahlstrom

79) The battle for the link occurs in the mind of the linker.
Lyndon Antcliff

80) Linkbait: We like … we link.
Lyndon Antcliff

81) Linkbait: Find what people want: create it, show it.
Lyndon Antcliff

82) Linkbait doesn’t have to be wacky, just informative or interesting.
Lyndon Antcliff

83) Headlines are crucial in linkbait – not necessarily about things people agree with (or like). Tap into the dark side.
Lyndon Antcliff via @maxormark

84) Make headlines sparse.
Lyndon Antcliff

85) The best headline writers are poets, not copywriters.
Lyndon Antcliff

86) If a blogger doesn’t take up your story the first time, be persistent. They’re probably playing World of Warcraft.
Lyndon Antcliff

87) Social media is like a dinner party – have outside interests, and don’t be boring.
Melissa Campbell

88) No-one wants to be a part of a community that isn’t genuine.
Parks Blackwell

Make it genuine by:

89) Allowing feedback. Parks Blackwell

90) Don’t delete the feedback. Parks Blackwell

91) Post real updates to feedback.
Parks Blackwell
Facebook advertising

92) People spend 3x more time on Facebook than on Google.
Guy Levine

93) Facebook advertising lets you target users’ location, demographics, likes and interests, education and work.
Guy Levine

94) The real difference between Facebook and Google ads is that on Google users are searching for information but on Facebook they are arranging dates or playing Farmville.
Guy Levine

95) Don’t write off Facebook advertising. Learn how to use it. Use special offers, link bait, make ads local, personality and be event driven.
Guy Levine

96) The look and feel of the landing page should match the ad.
Guy Levine

97) Include Google tracking code in URLs.
Guy Levine

98) Works well for products and subjects that people ‘love’. May be harder for b2b and technical subjects.
Guy Levine

99) Facebook is social so start a conversation.
Guy Levine

100) Long-running ads suffer. New ads do better.
Guy Levine

101) Deliberately put the wrong people off clicking.
Guy Levine

102) Use 2-stage marketing: generate leads to build your list.
Guy Levine
General top tips

These first three should be in the local section (sorry Christine .

103) Don’t forget to write phone numbers in common formats for easy machine interpretation.
Christine Churchill (of Key Relevance) via Search Cowboys

104) Contact pages shouldn’t just be a contact form. Add address info, phone info, Google maps and driving directions.
Christine Churchill via Search Cowboys

105) Optimize employee names as people search for people.
Christine Churchill via Search Cowboys

106) Microformats can give smaller sites an advantage as few sites use them.
Rob Kerry

‘Universal search’ is search results pages that include videos, images, news, products, maps and more along with regular search results. [Mark Nunney

107) Universal search is an opportunity to get ranked for less effort eg, by targeting products results.
Ian Strain-Seymour

Page download speed is now a ranking factor for Google. Here are six tips from Mikkel DeMib Svendsen for improving page speed:

108) Get rid of view_state if you use .net. Try cookies instead. Mikkel DeMib Svendsen with some help from Richard Baxter

109) Compress objects with gzip. Mikkel DeMib Svendsen

110) Keep your text to code ratio above 10%. Mikkel DeMib Svendsen

111) Remove meta tags that do nothing. Mikkel DeMib Svendsen

112) Put your CSS into one file. Mikkel DeMib Svendsen

113) Put your Javascript into one file. Mikkel DeMib Svendsen

114) Visit Yahoo Developer Network for good advice on how to speed up your site.
Mikkel DeMib Svendsen

The easiest way to make your images visible to search engines is to help describe them. You can:

• Use a filename that describes the image
• Use hyphens to separate words in the image name eg, my-name.jpg
• Use a descriptive image alt attribute to describe the image
• Make the alt attribute 2-5 words long including words related to the pages core words. (So not a long list of keywords separated by commas.)
• Use a descriptive image title to describe the image.
• Generally less important than the alt attribute, the image title can be a bit longer and read like a sentence.

Each of these methods helps search engines better understand what the image is about.

Web pages are created out of hypertext markup language (HTML). Here is an HTML source code view of what a descriptive image presentation may look like for a picture of a navel orange:

<img src =”navel-orange.jpg” alt=”Picture of a navel orange” Title=”Picture of a delicious navel orange.” Height=”200” width=”300” /”>

In recent months, the automotive industry has quickly established a sizable presence on Twitter, the Web’s most popular micro-blogging service. A high-level review of its presence, however, reveals that – like many industries – it’s making the leap to the still newish communication venue with varying degrees of success. While some participants have taken to the medium swimmingly, it’s surprising how many treat Twitter almost solely as an opportunity for naked self-promotion, seldom or never engaging directly with their customers, providing customer support or other useful information.

Engage with your audience

Twitter offers such profound reach for very low overhead, it’s a shame to see some companies using it with so little actual engagement. As you’d hope, Ford Customer Service does a great job of engaging with customers on Twitter. A recent review of FordCustService activity on Twitter indicates that the marketing specialist managing the account is responding directly to customer inquiries and researching answers for those customers where necessary. So, too, Honda is regularly engaging with U.S. customers via the Alicia_at_Honda account created by a corporate communications staffer.
And, quite smartly, Toyota USA is interacting with its customer base, via the toyotanewsroom account, rather than simply posting press releases. That’s an example the folks running the BMWConceptX1 account could benefit from examining. They’ve posted eight updates since Sept. 30th, 2008 and all have them have been simple links to promotional content – photos on Flickr, a new Facebook page, a microsite, a trailer. Not exactly a visionary use of the medium.

Provide helpful contributions

Twitter shouldn’t be all about explicitly pushing your product. You build more good will by providing helpful contributions – which, of course, contribute to building and presenting your brand in the best possible light, as well.  How specifically do you engage your audience then, if spraying them with press releases and video clips isn’t enough? Well, in addition to responding to consumer inquiries, consider linking to information, which may still relate to your product and brand, but would also still be relevant to your audience member’s specific interests and needs. For example, Alicia_at_Honda recently linked to a Chicago Tribune article about the best cars for dogs, which listed just one Honda among several other makes in various classifications.

Similarly, GMblogs recently linked to a Kelly Blue Book piece, which listed the 2009 Pontiac G8 as just one of  5 Great Car Deals. This sort of linking still bolsters your brand by communicating a sense of authenticity and transparency about your product and company and where they fit in the scheme of things.

Monitor your brand

Any company not monitoring mentions of its brand on Twitter is missing an extraordinary opportunity to be a fly on the wall, observing perhaps the most open and authentic discussion of their company and products imaginable.  You have the opportunity, not only to passively observe, but also to actively intervene where your brand is being misrepresented or maligned.  Sometimes, of course, your product simply fails and how you speak to that in a public arena can have an immediate impact upon your brand.
Witness the deafening silence that follows Anthony Quintano’s tweet last month that a Hackensack, N.J. Toyota dealership left the plug out of his oilpan, causing his “car to seize while in motion.” Scary stuff. He later claims the dealership’s work almost “killed me twice” and links to a lengthy blog post on the incident.  Despite addressing the Toyota Newsroom directly on Feb. 26, the results of a Twitter search indicate that at the time of this posting a response had not been addressed to Quintano’s account, quintanomedia. What a wasted opportunity. Quintano was waging a self-declared war against a Toyota dealership and no one reached out. While Quintano was asking fellow Twitterers to Digg his blog entry, little was being done to maintain –- and in this case certainly repair –- Toyota’s brand.

Not only is it important to respond to brand- or dealership-specific complaints, you need to be mindful that managing a Twitter account can be a 24/7 responsibility. One evening earlier this month Angela Teeple tweeted Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, to say “my ‘08 Escape w/ 40K mi, AC compression unit broke, directly affects powertrain but not covered under warranty. Buying Toyota.” Within an hour, Monty replied to Teeple, suggesting she notify FordCustService. It appears Teeple may have been on the phone with Ford the previous day, so perhaps Monty’s prompt response to her situation may not have been too terribly undermined by FordCustService’s ironically tardy response. Nonetheless, Monty appears to have done his best to both meet a customer’s immediate need, while also attending to mentions of the Ford brand on the web.

It’s not hard to find angry customers venting their feelings on Twitter. Sometimes the appropriate response may be to ignore the angry and irrational. However, you should be sure you’re not actually missing an opportunity to burnish your brand and help a customer in need.

Don’t overshadow your brand

Accounts transparently maintained by individuals tend to tweet more often and more effectively. One drawback, however: heavy participation by such individuals on behalf of their companies can sometimes be perceived this as self promotion -– perhaps the wrong sort of auto-promotion for a car company.
The aforementioned Scott Monty, for example, has recently received more attention than he’d probably have preferred. Ray Wert, Editor-in-Chief of Jalponik, claims that Monty draws more attention to himself than his employer. Arguably, Monty is simply trying to do Ford a favor by forging a well-rounded presence on Twitter in contrast to many of the anemic, infrequently utilized profiles of his competitors. Referring to the incident in Ad Age, Critical Mass’s David Armano saddled Monty with the unfortunate moniker of “brandividual” for the name he has built himself online. Armano also complimented him, however, for “leveraging his personal network to help jumpstart Ford’s initiatives.”  As I’m sure Monty could attest, it can be a delicate balance.

Facebook Steps Up SEO for Brand Pages with Millions of New Indexable Links

This past November, in a move that increased the amount of Page Rank and traffic Google gives to Facebook Pages, Facebook launched a new feature that essentially added hundreds of millions of new internal links to Facebook’s brand Pages in users’ public search listings.
Public search listings are Facebook’s way of exposing user information to Google.

Before November, the default public search listings included users’ name, profile picture, network, and a few friends’ photos. Now, Facebook has added Pages that users are a fan of to users’ default public search listings.

This means that if a user is a fan of The Gap, U2, or Barack Obama, that information is now listed in that user’s public search listing. In addition, each of those items listed point back to Facebook Pages – such as The Gap’s Facebook Page, U2’s Facebook Page, and Barack Obama’s Facebook Page.

The net result in essence is 112,000 links to The Gap’s Facebook Page just appeared this weekend. 188,000 links to U2’s Facebook Page just appeared, and 3,100,000 links to Obama’s Facebook Page just appeared.

Considering that Facebook turned on links to Pages from about 120 million profile page public search listings, the number of new internal links to Pages on the facebook.com domain this November likely increased by several hundred million.

The SEO experts in the crowd will be able to gauge how impactful this change will be in light of the thousands of complex factors Google looks at when deciding who to give SERP real estate to.

Facebook describes the update to users as a way to make it easier for friends to find you in search results, and that is surely the case:

But ultimately for marketers, this step by Facebook increases the weight Google will give to brand Pages. Brand and marketing managers should not be surprised to see their Facebook Pages rising in Google search results in the months ahead.

So how does this benefit Me for SEO?

In principle the more networked your business’ page is (via customers, friends, vendors, etc.) the more likely you are to show up in Facebook and be found by a potential customer. These pages are also getting indexed in Google and certainly help drive search engine traffic to Facebook, but based on a small sample, most businesses are getting no local search engine optimization help from these pages.

For example, this page for an Arizona adoption attorney may be helping promote this business, but there is a “nofollow” tag on the link to the business’ website, meaning no pagerank is being passed on.

So how does this relate to me as an SEO marketer?

How to Get Local Search Engine Optimization From Your Facebook Page

1. Set up a blog on your website.

2. Go to your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page”, then “More Applications” and browse for a RSS reader application like Simply RSS. Add the app to your page using your blog’s feed url – Make sure your feed urls are on your domain, or if they are going through an RSS manager make sure that the RSS manager 301 redirects to your domain else the links will be redirected and not pass pageran). Now your blog posts will show up on your Facebook page and the posts will not carry the “nofollow” tag. As long as the links are pointing to your domain (and not 302 redirecting via your RSS manager) you should be able to pass pagerank from this page to your site.

3. Post regularly with target keywords in the headlines so that you can get the SEO benefit from keyword rich anchor text.

4. Network your Facebook page as much as possible. The more profile pages that link to your page the more likely your page is to get crawled and the stronger the page rank that will get passed on to your site.

For those of you who don’t know – or maybe didn’t notice, Google Personalized Search is the latest advancement in search results added into the algorithm at the search giant. It literally “customizes” your search based upon past searches you’ve made in order to attempt to help you find what you’re looking for even faster.

What’s raising the hairs on the backs of many necks is Google’s latest revelation that it is now personalizing searches for people who aren’t even signed in.  This of course set off a maelstrom of concern regarding privacy, personal choice, etc.

For example, let’s say you enter a search for “Auto SEO”. The search results appear and you click on the link for Carrera-Fiorini.com.  The next time you do a search for “link building,” Personalized Search will remember where you went last time, and rank Carrera-fiorini.com  (as well as any other pages you may have researched) on the first page. These are your “personalized” results.

However, those results are not necessarily the same results that your customers are seeing when they search for your business. To find out what your actual rankings are, you’re going to have to make sure that you have personalized searched turned off on your browser.  Here’s the easiest way to do it.

1. Sign out of Google.
2. Click “Web History” in the top right corner of your search results page.
3. On the next page, you should see an option called “Disable Cutomization.” (This disables the personalized search cookie. Keep in mind that if anybody else is using your computer, their searches on your computer will be blocked, too.