Brighton SEO – The Key Points I took Away
It probably comes as no surprise that we were at Brighton SEO last Friday mingling with other SEO folk and being inspired by the many speakers that were booked to speak. Not all speakers were great at delivering useful, actionable information (in fact, some seemed a little reluctant to give much useful information away at all) but nonetheless it was a great conference that helped me learn just that little bit more about SEO – and marketing.
Firsly, Pinalytics. A beautiful tool that will help anyone get a handle on a difficult link building campaign. Created in BETA by Forward3D, Pinalytics is a free tool that allows you to search Pins based on keyword. It then grades the pages that each of these imagines appear on showing number of repins, likes, shares and +1’s as well as Citation Flow and Trust Flow, taken from majestic SEO.
These sites can then be targeted for potential advertising opportunities and can breathe new life into a tired old campaign that lacks inspiration. Definitely something I’ll be looking into more and more.
Next up, Tynt Publisher Tools. I’ve seen this in use on some major news sites but never dug any deeper than that. It turns out they’ve been using Tynt (or at least something very similar) to help their link building campaign and gain credit for their news stories when they are reposted elsewhere.
Simply, every time someone copies-and-pastes content from you site when Tynt is installed it also copies a footnote explaining where the content was sourced and links back to your site or your page. Not only does this help with link building a little, it also helps prevent content from being automatically stolen and reposted online without a care for the original author.
Finally, a nifty little Google Analytics trick from Sebastian Page, who explained how you can get Analytics to offer you more informative statistics when it comes to referrals. With the new Analytics Google groups all referrals by domain and you can’t delve any deeper than this. So, when you get a referral from a site, you only know the domain that referred you, when it would likely have been one particular page.
With this workaround you can see the exact page that the user was referred from so you can see which of your links are actually working at generating traffic so you can track this and offer suggestions as necessary to pull in more traffic. Or maybe your link is mentioned by the by, but in knowing this you can then contact the website owner and ask for a more prominent link and they’d be much more receptive to this kind of request rather than a standard link request email.
There are a few other points that really are worth a mention but I run the risk of creating a long and boring blog post that nobody wants to read, so why not drop me a line on Twitter (@AshleyCreare) and I’ll happy point you in the direction of more information on anything I may have missed out.
Maybe next time, I’ll see you there!
September 18th, 2012
Thanks for this. I was exhibiting so missed nearly all the talks. These are interesting.