SMX Israel 2013 Take Aways
This year I got the chance to visit SMX (Search Marketing Expo), a well-known conference among marketing geeks that takes place several times a year in different places. The latest one was in Israel on Jan 6th, which is where I went to warm up during the harsh winter.
This wonderful event was organized by the legendary Barry Schwartz who we know from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land.
There were many interesting sessions covering SEO, Paid Search, Mobile, Analytics, Social, YouTube, useful tips on responsive design, pagination, and a little bit of Blackhat.
Here are the most important facets of information that I took away from the conference:
Keywords: A lot was said about keywords and ways to search for them. Google Keyword Tool is not for SEO. It’s apparently more for PPC. There are some good keyword tools that are widely used, such as Semrush, Wordtracker, Keyword Spy and Searchmetrics. There was a good point mentioned concerning longtail by Mark Ginsberg – Long Tail Potential of Keywords, which is Broad Match vs. Exact Match Ratio. In other words the bigger the difference between the Broad and Exact, the longer tail you may have and the more relevant content you may write. Simple and Brilliant!
Marty Weintraub told us about Automatic Keyword research. Don’t waste your time collecting keywords when Scrapebox can do it for you. Use your time to select the best ones. And of course we can’t forget about all the suggestions that are around us. Just use Google, Amazon, YouTube, and Shopping.com.
Linkbuilding after Penguin is now more about relationship building. Be helpful and people will link to you. Just make sure that your content is great. No one wants to link to poor sites. A lot of talk was about links with exact keyword matches. Jim Boykin in his presentation showed the results of Microsite Masters Analysis. It showed that sites that had over 60% of links with exact keywords were the ones most frequently hit by Penguin. Jim shared his presentation and you may check it out here. There are a lot of parameters you should pay attention to such as the quality of the site you have a link from, who else they link to, and whether they are done by real people or just by ghost writer. BWT Jim is bringing ThreadWatch back, which is one of the oldest SEO communities.
John Mueller from Google emphasized the importance of using the Disavow Links Tool regardless if you have received any messages from Google. In other words, just use it every day once you discover a link to your site and report it just to be on the safe side.J Well, no wonder that no one expected John to tell us about tricks and how to do good SEO.
Another interesting thing was the Mobile section. Here are some facts to emphasize the importance of this trend: there are over 2.2 billion monthly searches on Google mobile. US smart phone infiltration is around 46%. In 2015 there will be more mobile users than PC users. Therefore, it’s about time to think about going mobile.J Do you still plan to be in business and reaching your target audience in 2015? Then you better go for it! Is it a WAP site or an APP? Analyze your audience before investing time and effort. There are always pros and cons with both. Better to develop both but it is even more important to prioritize. Check the analytics of the devices your visitors use and see how you can make their mobile experience better.
Barry told us about the importance of responsive design and how to do it right so that your site looks good on any device you audience may use. Check all the pros and cons Barry mobile seo.
And one of the most interesting sessions was the Aggressive SEO. The room was packed to the point that people were sitting on the floor and standing at the door just to listen about blackhat tricks.
Speakers shared their case studies like linking with spam links and working on Clickjacking. Cheap crappy links still work, despite all the updates, but your site’s lifetime will become a lot shorter. If you are working on the brand and are not already in highly competitive niches then you shouldn’t do that to your main site.
Networking
The conference was a great place to meet new and interesting people from the digital marketing sphere (webmasters, SEO, SMM guys, PPC gurus, and business owners). Guys from Kahen Digital organized a great after party, where people shared their experience in an easy atmosphere with some drinking and laughing.
A great experience with great minds that certainly needs to happen more often.
