I arrived Thursday and like any Bristol lad spent part of the time wandering around the streets of London trying to find my hotel. I admit I’m more used to strolling around open fields and hills where I can see more and get a better idea of my surroundings. Eventually I reached the hotel after walking past it twice (hmmm), checked in and then hooked up with:

Gianluca Fiorelli of iloveseo.net, an expert in International SEO Services

What a great chap and looks just like his avatar! We had a decent steak dinner and a couple of beers and really had a top level conversation on web marketing/seo techniques, our experiences in life that help us and our approach with customers. A great discussion I’ll certainly remember for a long time and our conversation stoked me enough to share some link building tips we know work well and helps everyone based on a “sharing and caring” society that I believe will become increasingly important.

The next day after a somewhat sleepless night (I was a bit like the kid the night before heading to Disney) I hustled over to the Conference Centre a little earlier than planned. Finding the doors locked I headed off to grab breakfast and by the time I bolted that down and returned the doors were open and entrance was gained.

I’m always nervous in gatherings, never really one for crowds to be honest so I signed in, grabbed coffee, stood on the sidelines, spoke to a lovely chap called Jas and then took someone’s tip on grabbing a seat at the back of the conference room (no change from my school days then) as the last 3 rows had tables which makes it easier to write notes or use a laptop being close to power outlets.

Pleased to see that all of the panel are recognised as experts in their field and their findings on how to get more links via content and other strategies are going to be of immense use (no selling from the stage here). Reassuringly I found them ALL to be highly approachable – so a big thanks to the following:

• Will Critchlow of Distilled
• Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz
• Martin McDonald of Expedia
• Jane Copland of Ayima Internet Marketing
• MIke King (@ipullrank) of iAcquire
• Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive (I’m already implementing some of your ideas, I’m so JFDI right now lol)
• Branko Rihtman (aka @neyne) of SEO Scientist
• Tom Anthony of Distilled

Rather than write up another post on what was presented, there was way too much to note down (plus my notes were written so fast they are a little hard to decipher, yes i am one of the hard core who use pen and paper, so that I don’t have to rely on battery juice!) I have found and listed below an excellent blog post from Alex Tanner for you to check out on what was discussed by the speakers (cheers Alex!):

Notes on LinkLove London 2012

Overall a great conference on the joys of link building and I am now persuading the other half to let me fly out for MozCon in Seattle but with developments elsewhere with All Things Web growth (watch this space) and family issues upcoming it might be I don’t make it this year. Ah well, I can always buy the video!

In a nutshell Distilled’s LinkLove conference was worth every penny and I would strongly recommend anyone working in the web marketing industry to book onto the next one.

PS At the end of the LinkLove London conference I also met Kath Dawson and Pete Wailes from Strategy Internet Marketing – a fellow Bristol SEO, we had a really fun talk about SEO over dinner and it was extra nice to see there are other dedicated web marketers in Bristol and South West UK.

…becoming a member of SEOMoz’ Customer Advisory Board to help give feedback on their awesome set of SEO Tools!

We can’t say more than that as we are under a NDA and everything we see is confidential but to have been invited on by the team at SEOMoz is a real honour (and we believe shows our dedication to using only the best tools to help our clients get ahead).

So what else has been going on at ATW HQ?

Well as mentioned there is a move to new office space, so you might have noticed that our address has changed as we are moving in tomorrow (February 1st). Our new contact details will be on the website but for those of you who want to know right now they are as follows:

All Things Web
9 High Street
Highworth
Swindon
Wiltshire
SN6 7AG

For now our Wiltshire office telephone will remain the same – 01793 729326.

With expansion very much on the agenda for 2012 we also have plans in place to open a satellite office in Bristol. SEO in this city will never be the same again, though, to be honest, the area has been our primary location for targeting new and existing business for many years. We are also looking forward to increasing our SEO client base in the Swindon and Wiltshire area – as well as London where our rates have been found to be extremely attractive for clients we work with there (part of the NHS and Bank of Ireland to name but a few).

Client Survey

Here at ATW we love working with our clients and are always interested to hear how they rate the work we do and how we can help them further.  So in December we kicked off an independent client survey and the initial results coming back are very positive (so we know we’re doing the right things!).  Once full details are available we will be using the results to help shape our services going forward.  We will share the results of the survey in due course so watch this space for more information.

Guest Posts and MORE Content

This year we are looking to increase our blogging activity and are in the process of sorting out some guest bloggers to share their insites not just on SEO but web marketing as a whole.  Lets just say we’re really excited about what’s in store so stay tuned for more!

LinkLove London

As we grow this year and have additional resources to help us look after our clients I am looking forward to spending more of my time at Industry conferences  and events.  One that stands out at this stage is LinkLove London, being run by the team at Distilled on Friday 30th March. Attending this conference with industry leaders is going to be a highlight of my year so far and I hope to come away with many new link acquiring strategies (on top of a few of my own) to help our clients beat their competition online!

New SEO Projects

With all of the above – phew! – you’d think we wouldn’t have time to take on more SEO work, but guess what? We do! We’ve secured a host of new clients in January already from large multi million pound businesses to start-ups looking for help with their first SEO activity.

For the rest of 2012…

It’s going to be a busy year of growth for us, we continue to invest in the right SEO tools and work towards becoming an active member of our industry – if anyone knows where to start speaking on the SEO conference circuit I’d love to hear from you so do get in touch or leave a comment, I would be most grateful.

For the guys at Majestic SEO and OSE – one word for you – KER-CHING! 

I’d love Yahoo to announce what the last ever backlink search on Site Explorer was…

Bye Bye Sphinn (it’s closing) – Hellooo Marketing Land

Closing down Sphinn

I hear that Sphinn is being spun into Marketing Land – shame I have always kept an eye on Sphinn to keep up with what was going on in the industry – though the idea behind Marketing Land should not come as a surprise as more and more “SEO” activity is moving into the mainstream (web) marketing arena.

Pinterest Gaining Traction?

I’d not heard of Pinterest until this morning – it seems like its taking the world of social media by storm – though how long it lasts before it gets spammed is anyones guess… still it looks like a lot of fun posting up interesting images, go take a look and let me know if it works for you (probably better for image optimization) – I’d also recommend you make your photos unique as possible…

SEM Clubhouse seems to give it a pretty detailed first look – do go check it out…

Clear up everything you didn’t know about Duplicated Content

I love this post, its highly detailed and really does dig deep into the types of duplicated content us Internet marketers can come across. It’s usually a problem more with large e-commerce sites in my opinion but this timely post by Dr. Pete is one that is likely deemed to become a classic…

Post Panda Duplicate Content

Let me know how you get on with your web marketing this week, any questions feel free to get in touch!

Stuck trying to create unique content for your website to get it ranked and found on search engines?

Desperately trying to think of a way to make yourself stand out from the crowd to get those all important links…?

Thinking you’ll be outed and crucified for even slightly mirroring the competition’s work?

STOP.

All that negative thinking is making you procrastinate, worry and do nothing whilst your competitors are ranking higher and higher based on content they’re putting up that’s supposedly “unique”  but you know you’ve  seen time and time again in a slightly different guise elsewhere on the web.

Believe us it can be infuriating, depressing and frustrating.

We still see blog posts now dealing with how to write a title tag or how to get creative, high quality links (whilst your competitor in the real world is buying up directory links like there is no tomorrow). You know its stuff that’s been around for years… and you’re thinking I am not going to “lower” myself to that level… but many do coz it helps set them apart as industry leaders… and why is this?

Because your most appreciative audience (newcomers to your world) is hungry for information, desperate to soak up every ounce of knowledge you’re prepared to give away – to help them make a decision.

Don’t let your pride get in the way of writing content you think is far too simplistic – someone somewhere will value it – though if you’re not high enough up your industry’s own foodchain it won’t be receiving the recognition of your peers anytime soon, trust me on that.

Don’t think your competition is generating completely unique content either – likely 98% of them are using others copy for inspiration (or at least their SEO or copywriters are) and a few literally are just scraping, duplicating or spinning someone else’s work. Not that you should do that, you should be rewriting content in your own hand, using your own style, experience, voice and opinion.

This is the way to unique content and that’s what will make you stand out.

Note we’re not advocating you copy everything you see. We’re not.

What we are saying is start mirroring competitors, look at their content, look at their messaging, look at their web design elements, look at their link profiles, work out the best bits, create your own and improve on them.

Before you know it you’ll stumble onto something, really go to town and make it your own, your very own “unique”. It may take you a week, it may take you 20 years but you will, we just know it. 

A lot of SEO activity is looking for more juicy link building opportunities and one great way to do this is to identify and gain relevant links via comments you leave on niche, well written blogs – the holy grail being “do follow” comment inks though these are increasingly rare due to abuse from link spammers. Commonly once a blog is found to be passing link juice it usually get spammed to death by link spammers. Not surprisingly many blog owners are rather picky at what is left as a valid comment – especially if a link has been set on a keyword rich user name which is linking (conveniently ahem) to an exact match domain.

Unfortunately this also means it’s proving harder to have your genuinely valid comments approved so here’s a way that can work for you!

When looking to get your links accepted in a blog comment it’s the small things that count… and what I mean is carefully read the author’s blog post and using one or two of the following:

• How…
• What…
• Why…
• Where…
• Which
• When…

ask an open ended question that should work to generate a further response from others (and of course allows the blog owner to better show off their own expertise to a potentially wider audience).

Avoid the urge to only post generic comments complimenting the blog post or just agreeing in a buttered up attempt to get your post approved – we get dozens of these types of blog comments here almost everyday and we never post a single one… if the link spammers built up a few comments without links and asked a couple of relevant questions allowing me to respond its likely when they come to dropping in a link down the line then I’ll be much more happier to let it slide i.e. you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!

Another way is to find a blog in your field and link through using your company name rather than forcing in “Blue Widgets” as the username – this a preferred way to start getting oher people’s attention in your brand, especially useful for smaller companies starting out online.

One of my preferred ways for comments is to look for blogs that predominantly use photographs as blog content, carefully assess the content of the photo and ask questions on the smaller detail in the subject matter – here’s a typical example you could ask about the photo above:

• Where does that track head to?
• How did you get the lighting looking so good?
• What type of camera did you use?
• Where exactly was the photo taken?
• What animal is that in the image? (its actually Rex my retriever)

By looking into the photo rather than just looking at it I can quickly ask a few pertinent questions that would display to the blog owner I have spent time looking at their content and compel them to answer – allowing me to comment again… in a non spammy way….

Finally once you have your blog comments accepted it wouldn’t hurt to find out if the blog owner uses twitter – so that you can retweet their content to your social media sphere or email them directly to see if they might accept a relevant, recent guest post… its all a matter of building up trust over time, but carried out this way will likely see more of your blog comments accepted.

Let me know how you get on!

Yup we’re on the lookout for a new office in the wilds of Wiltshire or Gloucestershire… so if you’ve got an office to let (allowing us to provide web marketing and SEO) near Swindon, Cirencester, Lechlade or Fairford then give us a call!

Thankfully a quick check of GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) had shown us that bots had been blocked from the site – which is odd as when we checked the robots.txt it was not disallowing anything – kind of gave the game away that someone had been tinkering… and then put things back when they realised something had gone AWOL.

Our client was seriously concerned (indeed as were we) that they couldn’t be found on search for their own name so our team swung into action and quickly implemented an Adwords campaign to ensure that if the company name is searched for they at least show up at the top of Google!

So if you do find your website cannot be found on S/E’s then first check there is nothing stopping a bot reaching and crawling your web pages…. for even more info check out the highly authorative links below for more info on Robots.txt and how to deploy it successfully for your site:

• Wikipedia – Robots Exclusion Standard
• Google – Block or remove pages using Robots.txt

Damn, I missed PubCon Vegas baby!

I really would have liked to head out to Vegas last week and spent time at Pubcon Vegas – its where the cream of the SEO industry gather to share information and network… unfortunately with other things happening here there wasn’t enough time to get away and benefit so I can only gather information from whats been coming out since, one of the most useful sites being this one (if you’re looking for SEO tips):

Bugger, I missed PubCon Vegas – get recaps on all the Sessions and keep up to date and stay informed! Oh and check out below too…

Matt Cutts – Googles Head of Spam’s Key Takeaways from Pubcon

Another one to take note of is Key Takeaways from Matt – check them out here

Looks like there was loads going on during PubCon so lets only hope I can make the next one in 2012… though the way the SEO industry is squaring up to Google over its SSL privacy setup leads us to this debate on whether SEO is here to stay or if its gonna die on its arse next year…

Matt Cutts (Googles Head of Spam Team ) has said publicly at PubCon that SEO is not dead (though no mention of the word “yet”) so here’s a roundup of what he said:

• Matt Cutts’ Deepest Thoughts

Still who else gets the feeling the storm clouds are still gathering?

How to detect SEO Buttheads

Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing also received an email from a self proclaimed “SEO specialist” and has shown how the chap’s claims are wholly unsubstantiated…

Great read, go take a look!

Detecting Butthead SEO in 5 easy steps

Getting More Links (and why it’s not working)

Love this post from Wordtracker.com! It covers a lot of ground on why your linkbuilding efforts aren’t working… good linkbuilding is not easy, takes time and labour (which costs money) and requires tracking to ensure your links are’t removed or broken

One way to get a link is to telephone someone. Go on, do it now. Pick a local supplier/business ally, give them a call and see if they are happy to link to, not just your site, but a page on your site that’s informative, entertaining or even opinionated!

Thing is too many people have abused link building (as they did the keywords meta tag years ago) so for many a link request from someone they do not know is usually frowned upon (at first glance). Get links from people who like and trust you, if they happily link to your content (not your site) then its likely a wider audience will also enjoy it (so allowing you to promote that content somewhat confidently via social media sites).

Creating Better Link Requests

How to be an Advanced Power User of Google Analytics

I spent last month working with clients SEO and helping them set really good goals to measure the effectiveness of their web marketing campaigns. One of the ways to add value to your SEO work is to become an advanced user of Google Analytics (literally putting the power of GA to use!)  so its important to understand how to use Regular Expressions.

A great site explaining what the following characters can do to help you supercharge your Analytics with regular expressions (or at least look at the data in a new and different way!):

• Dollar Sign ($)
• Question Mark (?)
• Caret (^) (I don’t think many people will have used this symbol)
• Backslash (\)
• Dot (.)
• Asterisk (*)
• Pipeline (|)
• Parentheses ()
• Curly Braces {}

… to name but a few…

Check out Regular Expressions for Google Analytics for more info!

And for those who want to see real Regex examples click here

Right I’m heading off for a busy week… and some disturbing news that a client of ours has had an accident (he’s in recovery and out of danger now thankfully)

See you next week (feel free to leave any feedback, we’d really appreciate it)

Psychology SEO Strategy

http://searchengineland.com/how-to-devise-a-psychology-based-seo-strategy-97390

The pyramid you’ll see is one I have come across before when I trained as a glider instructor and I know it works when training students learning to fly so make sure you give it a good read.

Getting Links with Twitter

We’ve been using Twitter to find good links for a while now and I spotted this post which should be of help as its got plenty of techniques you can start to use to find more links for your site:

Getting more links by using Twitter

Small Change, MASSIVE Difference

I’m not sure why Google has changed the use of the + search operator (though the author states because of Google +1 to avoid confusion) – now you have to use the exact match “” -  which probably brings things more in line with Google Ads exact match… a small change that seems to have gone possibly un-noticed by most???

Google Removes the + Search Command

New Look Google Analytics

Last one and I’d say if you are contemplating changing over to the new look Google Analytics then give this blogpost the once over…

New Look Google Analytics for Beginners

I’ll be back posting again laet this week  (once the end of the month rush is out the way!)

PS Link spammers please stop trying to post complimentary comments on this blog with link text, unless your post is specific about my blog post it won’t get published.