SMX London One Week On

It has been a week since SMX Advanced swept through London leaving behind a flurry of exhausted bloggers and square-eyed Twitter enthusiasts who no longer recognise a world outside of 140 characters. However, for those of us furiously scribing down notes, what did we learn?

Well the event is a myriad of different suggestions, tips, ideas and how-to guides. So with a note of caution that not everything will work for everyone, we have cherry-picked some of the important things

Page Speed is Now an Important SEO Factor

So after all the talk that site speed was only a minimal ranking factor, used more as a sudden death type deciding factor, it appears it has quickly grown in importance. To this end there were plenty of useful tips flying around on how to improve this. Some of the best were:

• Ensure your text to code ratio is higher than 10%
• Remove unnecessary meta tags
• Remove poor excessive code from pages and optimise html

Getting to Grips with Wolfram Alpha

The answer generator was a central theme of the keynote speech and people were being encouraged to use this for research purposes. However, don’t get caught calling it a search engine – because it is not! Instead it prides itself on an ability to find a direct answer, from trillions of resources, to create an almost real-time source of information.

Established SEO Ranking Factors Losing Importance

Times are a changing indeed, especially when H1’s have lost some of their importance. It is now more important to ensure keywords are mentioned a few times in the opening paragraphs. Also losing out are 301 redirects with rel canonical replacing them.

Embracing the Social Sphere

Yes, yes, we’ve heard all about this but it appears that people still aren’t making the most of marketing opportunities with Facebook – despite the concerns over privacy! Plus, did you know that if you add up all the users of Facebook it would great the third most populated country in the world?

A nice little tip for social media marketing is using guest bloggers. It appears that utilising this option is great for cultivating links.

So there we have it, a nice digestible breakdown of some of the key things we found at SMX Advanced London.