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If you happened to have read my previous post, you would already know that last week was SMX Sydney 2013, where the best brains in Search and Social headed to Sydney to present a wide variety of topics to do with Search Engines Optimisations (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Search (PPC) and Social Media Marketing.
We had a legendary international guests as well as awesome local speakers take to the stage over the 3 day event. I only attended the first 2 days, but I'll try to summarise the key learnings from the event for those who couldn't make it.
I tried my best to capture all the highlights from the conference on Twitter using #SMX. I posted over 35 Tweets on Day 1.
Marty Weintraub from @AimClear took to the stage full of energy and the quote the following slide stood out in my mind...
But the the best tip he provided was how he uses a tool by SEOmoz.org called FollowerWonk.com to filter and find followers & influencers.
Michael Motherwell from Lined Media (@motherwell) then provided an excellent array of SEO Tools. Rather that paste them all into this post (making it very long) here are the links to my TwitPics: The Best SEO Browser Plugins, Stats and Measurement Tools for SEOs, a great tool for measuring page speed, but this was a tool I had never heard of before that allows you to find influential people that follow/mention you called mentionmapp.com.
Motoko (@motokohunt) is a seasoned SEO (a veteran in the industry) and she provided excellent stories on the challenges she face trying to get C-Level Executives to commit budget to doing SEO. Here was a key slide from your presentation that is a highlevel summary of her "Missed Opportunity Matrix."
She also goes on to show the importance of having "Search Team Alignment" so that SEM, SEO and On-Site Search as all working together off a single Search Term dictionary. I had the pleasure of chatting with Motoko whilst on the Harbour Criuse and she was amazing to speak to and I had a great time getting to know her and here her stories and plus... she's married to the legendary Bill Hunt - International SEO mastermind.
Philip Shaw (@philipshaw) of CleverClicks awed the crowd with the amazing reports you get when you connect Google Analytics to Google Adwords. Unfortunately I don't use GA at Salesforce, but my gosh I wish we did.
I'm really glad I attended this session not only for the excellent thought provoking content by Ben Bale (@BenBale) from Weber Shandwick CMG, but also from the QA Session. Ben's talk focussed on being authentic, being a "Real Person". There was an interesting question around whether brands should allow staff to talk on behalf and about the company and brands they represent. The issue arises when that person leaves for a competitor, what happend then? This created quite a stir but Ben stood his ground and I agree with him, if that person leaves then it's about messaging to your audience what has happened and transition to a new spokesperson to then pick up the batton and do an even better job than the predecessor.
Brian White (@BrianWhite) flew out from Google's HQ at Mountain View to take to the stage to tell us all about how Google combat's spam. A key learning for me was that the manual spam team are focussed on (a) Impact on the User experience, and then (b) whether the spam report was submitted by an authenticated user (via Google Webmaster Tools).
Below is a nice chart that shows the amount of work that his team is doing to combat spam.
From my Tweet: "This chart shows how google fights spam. blue = 'pure spam' pages that hav been removed."
After a very busy day, it was great to chill out on Sydney Harbour with the Internation speakers and attendees.
That's a wrap for Day 1 highlights. I hope you enjoyed my coverage of the event.
