Here are some top tips from the SMX Melbourne Search Marketing Expo conference at Hilton Melbourne, including the SMX Melbourne Online Marketer Boot Camp 2010.
SEOmoz was there, their tool Moz Link Explorer (aka Open Site Explorer) is great for seeing the backlinks your competitors have.
Brent Payne from the Chicago Tribune (@BrentDPayne) had a neat little trick: Put the keyword first in the headline, followed by a colon, then followed by a typical headline e.g. Gmail down: 5 things to do when Gmail is down
Many mentioned SEOQuake SEO Extension for Firefox which is a great free add-on for Mozilla Firefox, you can see the Alexa Rank, Google Backlinks, Page Rank, Yahoo Backlinks etc for any website, when you search Google it will also show you all of these metrics for the search results. Great for checking whether the keyword is worth targeting. Use SEOQuake to see how many other sites link to your site and to competitors.
Another free tool many mentioned is SEMRush – find out how many times your website and competitors come up in searches and for what keywords.
Also popuri.us, for checking links and rankings of sites (now defunct, popuri.us alternatives include SEMRush, Moz or SEO SpyGlass)
Each target phrase should ideally have its own landing page, one page can only rank for so much (Mike Motherwell, WMS Consulting)
Great Free Directories for Australian Businesses. Submit your small business to these online Australian business directories (Recommended by Monte Huebsch, Aussieweb)
Paid directories for Australian businesses:
Truelocal – powers Yahoo!
Yellow Pages
Chris Dymock (Cogentis) had a great quote, he said the Google Content Network Display Ads were more suited for low cost products, like “candy at the checkout in the supermarket”
Kalena Jordan (@Kalena) said if you are on Twitter for your business, the best thing you can do is shut up about promoting your business and just help people.
Social Media Viral Marketing Examples at SMX Melbourne
Alan Long from Experian Hitwise gave a few examples of viral marketing at SMX Melbourne Social Media Boot-camp 2010:
– Tourism Queensland’s Best Job in the World – went viral, they used viral video, posted classified ads for their job (which was to be an island caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef and be paid $150,000 a year to have fun snorkelling and swimming the barrier reef). They placed all sorts of online recruitment ads and users submitted videos to apply.
– Hey Hey it’s Saturday – was a popular TV show in Australia but got cut from air. A girl from Adelaide started a Facebook Page to bring “Hey Hey it’s Saturday” back. There were a few reunion shows and over 100,000 facebook fans, and Hey Hey it’s Saturday returned to air.
– Comcast Guy – Comcast guy fell asleep in a girls apartment while on the phone back to comcast about how to install, she took a video and uploaded to youtube and it went viral. Embarassing at first but Comcast turned it around, they used the guys face and slogan “Comcast Cares” to show they helped customers with problems.
After the conference, I went up to the top of Eureka Tower Melbourne, check out the sunset view!
