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When you’re running your small business, it’s hard to find the time to put your ‘marketing hat’ on.  Marketing often tends to be reactive.  Maybe you post a social media update through guilt of not having posted for a while, or perhaps a phone call from a local newspaper pressures you into taking an ad you never knew you needed.

We’re always excited to head to Brighton SEO. Twice a year the UK’s top digital marketing and SEO experts descend on Brighton for the best conference the world has to offer.

Over the last three year’s Google has really pushed the idea of creating quality online. Great content, respectable natural links – essentially good marketing practices.

Content marketing is undoubtedly the SEO buzzword of the last 5 years. It has revolutionised the way we conduct SEO and has put the focus firmly back to where it should be – delivering users and audiences exceptional content that they actually want to read.
It’s fantastic that we have moved be what were, ultimately, spammy techniques.

In the early days of SEO we could get away with a lot of low quality links and low quality content promoting our businesses. Today this results in algorithmic and manual penalties that can ruin your income overnight.

Link building has become a somewhat dirty word in the SEO community. We are all actively trying to push creative marketing, content marketing and a variety of other terms that try and avoid the words “Link Building”. Google’s algorithm changes have made us all scared of actively trying to build links. However, links are still one of the most critical factors in determining how a website is ranked. What has changed is that we are now ultimately looking for quality over quantity. We want links from authorative sites to authorative content.

When it comes to online marketing many companies have a simple plan – increase the traffic to our website and we will increase sales. This is, of course, fundamentally correct. However, it is only part of the picture when it comes to effective online marketing.

Recently we have been working on a project to launch a new business portal in the crowdfunding sphere. The site aims to provide information and sell services to prospective crowdfunders. Launching a crowdfunding campaign itself is much akin to launching a website – you want to get as many people interacting with your brand as quickly as possible.

If you’ve been investigating SEO you’ll have undoubtedly been exposed to the idea of outreach. Outreach is a process of securing exposure and links on other websites to increase your own marketing reach.

Traditionally we did this simply for links. In the days of SEO gone by we built as many links as possible to achieve better rankings in the search engines.

The internet has evolved considerably since this point and quality outreach now has a different role to play – we are more selective and we want different things.

I was recently fortunate enough to spend a day out of the office at BrightonSEO – the UK’s top SEO conference. I thought it would be good to share with you some of the key insights I gleaned from the excellent speakers and workshops I attended throughout the day. With SEO there is a constant source of new inspiration and I came away feeling excited about a host of new concepts and ideas.

The best SEO techniques or practices change as Google’s guidelines evolve, but the thing that remains unchanged is the significance of links. Besides the existence of other basic concerns like crawlability, indexation, architecture of the site and duplicate content, link acquisition or link building needs to be a primary consideration.

I am becoming more and more convinced that Google wants to utilise all the data collected in Google Analytics and utilise it to determine page rank.