www.targetlocal.co.uk/seo-tips-and-tricks-brightonseo-2013/

 Although it has been exactly a month since BrightonSEO I decided to share with you my favourite takeaways from BrightonSEO. It is an awesome free SEO conference in a beautiful city, so if you haven't attended yet try to do that next time because it is well worth it!


International SEO –Aleyda Solis SEER Interactive
·         Check where are my current visitors coming from? What keywords and pages are attracting International traffic right now (GA&GWT).
·         Do a keyword research for other countries, use tools such as SEMrush to see SEO visibility in particular countries
·         International SEO isn’t all about translating – It’s about customer behaviour and penetration of services - Research your potential audience using TNS Digital Life or comScore Data Mine.
·         Lexipedia to identify the relevant localized terms.
·         Analyse competitors and their USP, targeted keywords etc. use Google Display Network site to find out more about them 
·         Consider the best website structure for your international site (subfolder, subdomain or sub-directories) – pros and cons
·         If the international versions are country targeted but aren’t using ccTLDs geo-target them through GWT
·         Place rel=”alternate” hreflang”x” tags on the international websites to let Google know you have the same website available in different languages. Place the tags in the XML Sitemap.
·         If there is still little potential to go international you can always create custom alerts in Google Analytics for the most important countries/languages to be notified when they bring some decent traffic
·         Do a thorough analysis on your international traffic (The SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool supports international markets). If you don’t have the volume or potential to be starting international SEO, at least purchase your localised ccTLDs.

Paul Madden Manual Link Building– ‘How to spot a shitty link’
·         Paul said that every link we build brings a risk. We need to accept that any link we build to impact the search results in our favour is un-natural, and therefore un-ethical.
·         As part of his presentation, he also discussed his experiences with penalty removal. Having collated reams of web data, he explained that there are multiple clues that help Google recognise un-natural link building.
·         Paid links are a bad idea, and if spotted are likely to get you penalised. Gifts are banned by Google, and Advertorials resulted in the situation with Interflora being temporarily knocked out of search results.
·         Use Majestic's historic advanced report to analyze your backlinks and decide which are the bad ones.
·         These include having a large volume of backlinks from 40X/50X pages
·         Having an un-natural number of links from foreign domain names
·         And having an un-natural percentage of exact anchor text links.
·         Sitewide links
·         We can audit our backlinks using ScreamingFrog (Mode à upload URL  list and select “Does Not Contain” in the filter 1 dropdown, then enter your website URL in the text input field) and see where you have links -- > remove the dodgy ones or disavow if you cant remove (when using the Disavow tool, make sure the entire domain is removed instead of removing each ‘dodgy’ link).
·         He also suggested that recognizable brands such as Interflora and BMW never get penalised as badly as other sites. The simple reason being that Google makes its money so long as it provides the best search results. If a well-known brand is seen to be missing by the average search user, then their confidence in Google’s ability to display the most relevant results would dwindle.

Berian Reed Autotrader – ‘Automating SEO on large websites’

·         Set up monthly or even weekly boosts/drops alerts in Google Analytics (Google Intelligence Alerts).
·         Automate your link building when using for example tynt (82% of content shared on the web occurs via copy &paste – take advantageof that with tynt.

Speed up your SEO tasks using SEOTools for Excel from Neil Bosma

Julia Logan ContentMango ‘NegativeSEO: Myths and Reality’
·         Bad SEO can be self-inflicted and not the result of a negative SEO campaign.
·         What you think is a negative SEO campaign against you could be an error on your own website, eg duplicate content, de-indexing your own site, robots.txt problems.
·         Check your plug-ins are working properly, up to date and secure.
·         Make sure you are not producing any duplicate content and beware of any changes to your keywords or peaks in links that are disproportionate to any SEO you are doing
·         Self inflicted in Wordpress - indexable searches, e.g.:
·         www.domain.com/search/buy+Viagra
·         www.domain.com/?s=buy+Viagra

·         Add to your Wordpress following directives:
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /?s=*
to your robots.txt to arm yourself against negative SEO

·         To identify negative SEO watch your anchor text, links
·         Avoid mistakes that can make a negative SEO campaign against you easier 
Find out more about negative SEO from a fantastic infographic about testing negative SEO.