Julie McNamee and Hal MacDermot were at SMX London 2013. Here are our 315 tips from the two-day search conference.

Becoming A “Company Insight Wizard”

1) Marketing analytics are worthless without goals.
@Jim Sterne, eMetrics

2) Define what your marketing goals are:
* Raise awareness improve attitude

* Influence influence
* Inspire interaction
Jim Sterne

3) The low hanging fruit of analysis are
* Anomalies - Errors and omissions, complaints, spikes ad troughs
* Microconversions - look at the path to see where you're losing people
* Look at your analytics and reason backwards - the problem that caused them to leave might have been 2 steps back.
Jim Sterne

4) Set up alerts to let you know about spikes and troughs.
Jim Sterne

5) Segmentation is your friend eg, keywords, source, time of day, persona, location, recency and frequency.
Jim Sterne

6) Be aware that there all sorts of biases - eg, I knew it all along.
Jim Sterne

7) Data are like grains of sand. They're interesting, but they move with the wind.
Jim Sterne

8) Correlation is not causation - does ice cream cause drownings? No - it just means the temperature's gone up.
Jim Sterne

9) You need to know what statistically significant means.
Jim Sterne

10) The ability to daydream, study math, read books and blogs, go to conferences, practice, exercise, let your mind drift and have a drink all benefits the creative process.
Jim Sterne

11) Fill your mind with knowledge, exercise your intellect and eat an apple - you'll get an idea.
Jim Sterne

12) "All models are wrong, some models are useful." George Box
Jim Sterne

13) As a marketer your models will have a limited time value. Overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity - keep them simple.
Jim Sterne

14) So build your model as simple as you can make it and use it bo predict the future
Jim Sterne

15) Marketing analysis is creativity - thinking about things in a different way - not about having the best reports - it's about asking good questions.
Jim Sterne

16) Tell stories about your data instead of delivering meaningless reports.
Jim Sterne

17) Leave off the sausage making details (ie, don't complain about the job - just do it).
Jim Sterne

18) Tie everything to the bottom line - it's not more mentions or more tweet. It's about more sales, spending less money and making your customers happy.
Jim Sterne

19) Help individuals achieve their goals.
Jim Sterne

20) Predictive analytics is statistics, probability, likelihood, chances, indicators, projected. It's not certainties.
Jim Sterne

21) Big data is simply more data than you're used to.
Jim Sterne

22) Analytics are worthless without goals.
Jim Sterne

23) Creativity is a skill/gift/necessity.
Jim Sterne

24) A good analyst needs to be a dreamer, a latteral thinking, a mathematician, a puzzle solver.
Jim Sterne

Google AdWords

25) Google Adwords scripting needs some Javascript-based coding skills but can result in some clever ad campaigns.
@nilsson_magnus, Red Performance

26) Use AdWords scripting to create a countdown till when your product is being launched. Google has some examples which you can customize if you have coding skills. Can result in twice the number of clicks for the same budget.
Magnus Nilsson

27) Create ads that only display when it's cold or sunny by tying it to forecast data, eg Wunderground API.
Magnus Nilsson

28) Can only interact with up to 100,000 items - eg you'll have to do it differently if you have 3 million keywords.
Magnus Nilsson

29) Find competitors with SimilarSites
@seanmalseed, SEMrush

30) If several competitors bid on a keyword and you don't, you're missing something.
Sean Malseed

31) Use mergewords to merge your locations with your keywords.
Sean Malseed

32) When creating PPC ads, * Who is searching, who is it for? Understand your audience - age, gender, is it for themselves or someone else.
* The features - is your product better, stronger?
* Does it meet up to your visitors' expectations - eg, in shipping dates.
* Have relevant ads for specific landing pages.
Rebecca Hansson

33) Adding the word "easy" to your ad text may increase clickthrough but not necessarily conversions. Test, test, test, and don't just look at your clickthrough rate. Those clicks may be costing you a fortune with little actual conversions.
Rebecca Hansson

34) Try testing with copyright or trademark symbols.
Rebecca Hansson

35) Try testing short testimonials in your PPC ads.
Rebecca Hansson

36) Don't use 'optimize for clicks'.
Rebecca Hansson

37) Don't test too many things in one ad.
Rebecca Hansson

38) Use AdWords Editor - it saves a lot of time.
Rebecca Hansson

39) The amount of statistical data you have determines when the test is done.
@rebecca_momberg, Marin Software

40) Use seasonality, discount, keywords in your display url, price a unique selling point and a call to action in your ads.
Rebecca Momberg

41) Look at your data until you have statistically significant data, then move on. Don't keep going back.
Rebecca Momberg

42) Mak sure you change to rotate evenly
Rebecca Momberg

43) Make sure you're tracking properly.
Rebecca Momberg

44) Have functional, promotional and emotional elements in your ads.
Rebecca Momberg

Google Display Networks (GDN)

45) Google Display Networks can be the goose that laid the golden egg if targeted correctly.
@mvanwagner

46) Target by keywords, placements and topics but don't use topics as a single option - combine it with one of the others.
Matt Van Wagner

47) Target the keywords that are populated on the perfect page you'd like to see your ads on.
Matt Van Wagner

48) Keywords in GDN are all broad match.
Matt Van Wagner

49) Try to stay away from single keywords - have two or three words for specificity.
Matt Van Wagner

50) Keep keywords tightly themed -10-15 per ad group.
Matt Van Wagner

51) Use automatic placements to find good sites, then change to managed placements to fine tune.
Matt Van Wagner

52) Look for sites with reasonable volume and good clickthrough rates.
Matt Van Wagner

53) Use topics to drill into sections of large sites eg, the New York Times.
Matt Van Wagner

54) Don't target on interests, but do use remarket targeting to target people who have already been to your site.
Matt Van Wagner

55) Use AdGooroo for campaign analysis (a US only tool).
Matt Van Wagner

56) Use MixRank and Search Metrics for analysis.
Matt Van Wagner

57) Check sites your competitor runs on, and create placement campaigns based on their their best looking campaigns.
Matt Van Wagner

58) Push your competitors' sites off the page for a few days and analyze that data to see if it will suit you.
Matt Van Wagner

Conversion optimization

59) Customization for users with different devices looking for different things is becoming more and more important.
@georgepmg, PMG

60) Amazon has seen a year on year growth of 87% on mobile.
George Popstefanov

61) Limited content, slow load speeds, non-compatible images and videos are all problems for mobile optimization.
George Popstefanov

62) A 22% increase in clickthrough has been seen by changing servers and increasing the site speed.
George Popstefanov

63) Do not use Flash on a mobile website - too many devices can't read it.
George Popstefanov

64) Say no to pop-ups for mobile.
George Popstefanov

65) Stay brand-consistent with your domains.
George Popstefanov

66) Understand how clients interact with your mobile website.
George Popstefanov

67) Adapt your value proposition to what your customer needs.
George Popstefanov

68) Measure your mobile data correctly, analyze and iterate.
George Popstefanov

69) Make sure you have proper tracking for your mobile sites. Three of the biggest companies I've worked for didn't have theirs set up correctly.
George Popstefanov

70) There are 1300 different mobile devices out there. A responsive website will help your site look good on most of them.
George Popstefanov

71) Usability tool suggestions Clicktale and Crazy Egg.
George Popstefanov

72) Targeting tools BTBuckets Personyze
George Popstefanov

73) Testing tools Optimizely, Adobe Test & Target
George Popstefanov

74) Customer Voice tools Kampyle or User Testing
George Popstefanov

75) Attribution platforms can act like a data warehouse with a purpose - connecting all of your marketing data and advertising interactions.
George Popstefanov

76) The new metrics are impression impact - average impressions per order.

George Popstefanov

77) And full funnel ROI - ROI of an ad unit irrespective of their place in the sales funnel.
George Popstefanov

78) Google Universal Analytics helps with mobile and multi device attribution.
George Popstefanov

79) Drawbridge - Early multi device attribution tools are Drawbridge, Google Universal Analytics, Kenshoo SmartPath, Tag Man
George Popstefanov

80) When visitors drop out of the sales funnel need to put them back into it at the right stage.
@mannyrivas, AimClearBlog

81) First impressions are everything. Pull out all the stops.
Manny Rivas

82) Creating content makes you impervious to algorithm changes.
Manny Rivas

83) Figure out the personas of who you're going to target eg, by age and gender.
Manny Rivas

84) ClickTale is good for heat maps, mouse moves, clicks, scroll reach, attention and real-time monitoring.
Manny Rivas

85) The best conversion optimization is a product that doesn't suck.
Manny Rivas

86) Conversion science - crappy input equals crappy output. Quality traffic is the first part of conversion science.
Manny Rivas

87) Book Tip - Web Design for ROI
@chrissherman, Search Engine Land

Google+

88) Identities + Creation of content = Authorship
@maileohye, Google

89) Gives you the ability as a searcher to discover credibility.
Maile Ohye

90) Ties unstructured text to identity and crediblity.
Maile Ohye

91) Google has five teams working on authorship data.
Maile Ohye

92) Identity helps disambiguate and refine people's identity.
Maile Ohye

93) Your profile creates a person node with cluster of information, each edge bi-directional.
Maile Ohye

94) Articles published prior to email verification are brought to the authorship cluster.
Maile Ohye

95) Authorship is a subset of structured data (eg, rich snippets).
Maile Ohye

96) Best Practices: keep author consistent on the article URL, verify markup with structured data testing tool, include authorship only on relevant authored articles (not product listings).
Maile Ohye

97) Personalities and authorship can be used to leverage business.
Maile Ohye

98) It's good to use a personal profile for your authorship.
Maile Ohye

99) Quality content is Trusted.
@simmonet, Grantisms

100) Quality definiition - Old: Trust = Links, New: Trust = Authority, But links are still important.
Grant Simmons

101) Authority is a known credible topic expert.
Grant Simmons

102) Establish credibility - it comes from worthy, shareable content.
Grant Simmons

103) Topic expertise: you need focus and consistency.
Grant Simmons

104) What signals? Links, citations, associations, social mentions, digital footprints.
Grant Simmons

105) Build your digital footprint, it's key to how search engines and people see you.
Grant Simmons

106) "Kingier" content (better than "king" content inspires interaction.
Grant Simmons

107) There are no short cuts to building a great identity with authority.
Grant Simmons

108) Builidng authority: claim and connect (Google+ etc) , create great content, expand your footprint, follow the rules, engage (inspire interaction).
Grant Simmons

109) Google will try to rank you more highly if you have some authority.
Grant Simmons

110) Useful resource to check if your social username is still available NameChk
@ChelseaBlacker

111) "Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verifications" (Eric Schmidt, Google)
@jimboykin, Internet Marketing Ninjas

112) "Penguin 2.0 is a web spam change. It will have more of an impact than the orginal Penguins." (Matt Cutts)
Jim Boykin

113) Businesses can use rel = "publisher".
Jim Boykin

114) Google is connecting sources, influencers and industries.
Jim Boykin

115) SEO by the sea blog has analyzed patents on Authorship.
Jim Boykin

116) Target your content marketing to authors.
Jim Boykin

117) If you're not going to write great content, then don't write at all.
Jim Boykin

118) Use rel= "me" from all your profiles, use rel= "author" for articles.
Maile Ohye

Content

119) Ranking factors: are about signals - content, anchor, clicks, social, user (location, history, interests).
Vincent Wehren

120) Focus your content on people.
Vincent Wehren

121) Search engines are machine learners.
Vincent Wehren

122) If you put up content only to serve ads, that's a negative factor.
Vincent Wehren

123) If content is king, let it lead design. Design responsively: HTML5 and CSS give you the tools.
Vincent Wehren

124) Bing loves responsive design!
Vincent Wehren

125) Search is evolving, but in these new searches, content remains king.
Vincent Wehren

126) Function is better than words when it comes to content, if you have a new business feature, the words are about that.
@dixon_jones, Majestic SEO

127) It's better to be unique than to be big (it's the odd one out that stands out).
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

128) Content needs to be useful to a sector of society.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

129) If you have a new feature or product, write a press release: make it easy for bloggers, give them an embargo date, tell them the go live URL, give them pictures, give them an edge, tell them about a week in advance.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

130) Give people something visual.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

131) Before the launch, link in the "Ambassadors": typically clients and advocates of the brand. Help them keep ahead of the curve.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

132) On launch day: use social media.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

133) Send a newsletter out 24 hours after the product launch. Just a short article linking to the blog post.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

134) After the launch date: hold a webinar, post a YouTube video.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

135) Get all of these planned beforehand: message planning.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

136) Piwik - a free analytics tool and an alternative to Google Analytics. Majestic SEO uses it.
Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

137) Don't be one dimensional with your content marketing, it needs to tie back to your business KPIs.
@97thfloor, 97th Floor

138) Don't disguise your marketing as research.
Chris Bennet

139) Make content that is for the reader, not just for you.
Chris Bennet

140) Repurpose your content across media, each has a demographic.
Chris Bennet

141) If content works, use it again.
Chris Bennet

142) Using content to solve internal problems in a company is an option: make information accessible to employees.
Chris Bennet

143) Use creative content to build retargeting lists.
Chris Bennet

144) Adapt your content to its audience, make it useful.
Chris Bennet

145) Slideshare can be a useful way to repurpose content.
Chris Bennet

146) Develop hero content that is shareable.
Jonathan Stewart

147) Behave like a publisher: produce a strong, steady and up to date stream of content.
Jonathan Stewart

148) Hero content can be a great infographic.
Jonathan Stewart

149) Great resources/ideas: the Guardian data blog. Hereistoday
Jonathan Stewart

150) Leverage content to diversify SEO signals.
Jonathan Stewart

Tools

151) Trello: integrated project management tool. Integrates with Dropbox, Google docs and Harvest. 1 million users.
@SteveJ Lock, GPMD

152) RSSOwl: alternative to Google Reader (being done away with).
Steve J Lock

153) Udacity: an education site - learn to build crawlers.
Steve J Lock

154) Rafflecopter: build social media competitions.
Steve J Lock

155) Gephi/NodeXL: visualize social links.
Steve J Lock

156) Rapidminer: for crawling.
Steve J Lock

157) Many Eyes by IBM: data visualization.
@staceycav, BlogSession

158) Power tools Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/stevejlock/hardcore-seo-power-tools-smx-london-2013
Steve J Lock

159) Easel.ly: infographic building.
Stacey Cavanagh

160) Piktochart.com: infographic building.
Stacey Cavanagh

161) Infogr.am: interactive infographics.
Stacey Cavanagh

162) One Poll: survey data.
Stacey Cavanagh

163) Toluna Quick Surveys: very cheap survey tool.
Stacey Cavanagh

164) Google Hot Searches
Stacey Cavanagh

165) Trends Maps: local Twitter trends.
Stacey Cavanagh

166) Portent's content idea generator
Stacey Cavanagh

167) Journalisted: search journalists by name or keyword.
Stacey Cavanagh

168) Followerwonk: for findng influencers on Twitter in your niche.
Stacey Cavanagh

169) Your telephone! :) : for link building
Stacey Cavanagh

170) Zemanta and Outbrain: for content promotion of published content.
Stacey Cavanagh

171) Stumbleupon paid: provides cheap traffic.
Stacey Cavanagh

172) Image Raider: image SEO - who is using your pictures. It emails you when someone uses your image.
Stacey Cavanagh

173) Cyfe: reporting (free and pro versions) integrates with many other tools.
Stacey Cavanagh

174) Venngage: turns social analytics data into pretty infographics.
Stacey Cavanagh

175) Chrome plugins - SEO for Chrome SEO SERP
Stacey Cavanagh

176) Big Data tools: Majestic SEO, blekko
Stacey Cavanagh

177) IfThisThenThat: curation tool
Samuel Bueno de Mezquita
@buenosam, Googledigook

178) NodeXL is a plugin for MS Excel use with Social Importer Plugin to analyze sentiment by looking at comments.
@aaronix, Deseret Digital Media

179) Use Google Fusion Tables to visualize social geolocation data.
Aaron Wester

180) Twitter Feed: share from Twitter to other accounts.
@basvandenbeld, Bas Van Den Beld

181) Social WordPress plugin: broadcast links to blog posts when published.
Bas van den Beld

182) TweetOldPost to circulate older content. You can set the oldest date you want to go back to to avoid re-sending out of date content.
Bas van den Beld

183) Brandwatch: watch brands.
MIke Essex

184) Trackur: social media monitoring.
MIke Essex

185) sproutsocial: social media management.
MIke Essex

 Link building

186) Google has 30 trillion pages in the index.
@marcustober, Searchmetrics

187) You need to care about the overall number of backlinks.
Marcus Tober

188) Make sure that you have a healthy link growth. If you get rid of poor links, build new links at the same time.
Marcus Tober

189) The page with the most high quality, relevant signals wins.
@puriprashant, AdLift

190) Sustainable SEO requires scaleable long term investment.
Prashant Puri

191) Unnatural link builiding is easy for Google to detect.
Prashant Puri

192) Blogrolls are easily detectable and badly affect the link profile.
Prashant Puri

193) Identify target sites, follow bloggers on Twitter, comment (not spam) on their blog articles, reach out with quality articles and opportunities.
Prashant Puri

194) Tools that help identify broken links: Domain Hunter, Xenu
Prashant Puri

195) If you trip a manual penalty, you need to act. Get rid of the bad links, build new quality links, contact webmasters, use the disavow tool, submit for reconsideration to Google.
@Tim_Grice, SEOWizz

196) Trying to hide from a manual review is not an SEO strategy - you need quality.
Tim Grice

197) You need qualty assets to leverage quality links.
Tim Grice

198) Manipulative lnk building is dead: quality link building based on real business objectives is healthy.
Tim Grice

199) Link clean-up is crucial: removing, rebalancing, reprofiling, readjustments.
@DaveNaylor, Dave Naylor

200) Create a brand for SEO: be on Google Local, Google+, use some PPC, give out trust signals.
Dave Naylor

201) Creating a brand for PR: demonstrate through leadership (white paper), regular media engagement, be the first to market, react to industry milestones and movements.
Dave Naylor

Twitter

202) Think about letting employees have a personal/professional Twitter account. But teach them to use it responsibly. This will help connect your employees to your brand and will enable you to reach a wider audience.
Mike Essex

203) But, make sure the Twitter rules are in your employee handbook. Establish the line they musn't cross.
Mike Essex

204) Whether or not the employee can keep the account should be in the contract as well.
Mike Essex

205) Reclaim ex accounts so that others can't claim them.
Mike Essex

206) But don't forget about your corporate account, and try to make it fun occasionally.
Mike Essex

208) Less is more: keep tweets brief.
Brent Gleeson

209) Use hashtags in the copy in your tweet instead of at the end.
Brent Gleeson

210) Include a call to action in your tweet.
Brent Gleeson

211) Shorten and track URL clickthroughs with Bitly
Brent Gleeson

212) Find journalists on Seek or Shout
Brent Gleeson

213) Cision: PR software
Brent Gleeson

214) Using hashtags in your tweets to enhance searchability.
Brent Gleeson

215) Twitter strategy - introduce an early audience to your brand by talking about things that relate to your website.
Brent Gleeson

216) Social distribution on Twitter - distribute content pieces with targeted keywords in proximity to the target landing page.
Brent Gleeson

217) SEOs in your team should share their keywords with your social media team.
Jim Yu

218) Capitalize on strong trending keywords - time is of the essence.
Jim Yu

219) Do topics overlap with existing campaigns? If so, prioritize some relevant keywords.
Jim Yu

220) Map existing pages to trending keywords.
Jim Yu

221) Tweeting isn't just about volume - it's about quality.
Jim Yu

222) Know your Twitter metrics - a/b test as you would your website.
Jim Yu

223) Driving Twitter traffic to landing pages can increase your organic search rankings.
Jim Yu

224) Twitter case study: http://www.brightedge.com/twitter-seo-tinyprints
Jim Yu

225) Facebook - use open graph tags (http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/03/25/social-media-meta-tags-how-to-use-open-graph-and-cards/) to help your content get shared properly.
Jim Yu

226) Make use of lists so you don't end up following 1000s of people and not be able to keep track of them properly.
Mike Essex

227) Beware automated tweets - MWB were providing links to rival Regus on a regular basis in a paper.li without realising it. If you do use automation make sure a human is checking it.
Samuel Bueno de Mezquita

228) You wouldn't send out a press release that a machine has written, so don't do it on Twitter either.
Samuel Bueno de Mezquita

229) Automated tweets when someone follows you might work if you have a gift for the recipient. But in all other circumstances, don't do it!
Bas van den Beld

230) You can't get an audience without delivering value.
@brentgleeson, Internet Marketing Inc

231) Create content based on strategy.
Brent Glesson

232) Understanding the correlations between Twitter and Search offers great opportunities.
@jimyu, BrightEdge

233) Bring SEO and Social together - create a super group.
Jim Yu

234) Understand which content converts well.
Jim Yu

235) Twitter can drive rank performance for targeted keywords.
Jim Yu

Google+

236) 500,000,000 followers on Google+ - smaller than Facebook but not tiny!
Jim Yu

237) Encourage engagement with Google+ Hangouts.
Jim Yu

238) Connect through Google+ communities.
Jim Yu

239) Promote your Google+ across channels.
Jim Yu

240) Google + is taking up more real estate on the SERPs pages - you've seen the big boxes of content on the right hand side - that's Google+.
Jim Yu

241) Google+ added 94x followers since December 2011.
Jim Yu

242) The top 10 brands account for 4 out of 5 followers.
Jim Yu

243) H&M are the biggest player on Google+, because they're creative and engaging.
Jim Yu

244) The auto industry dominates the top 10 brands in Google+.
Jim Yu

245) 20% of brands now have Google+ pages.
Jim Yu

246) Resistance to Google+ may well mean your brand loses out.
Jim Yu

247) Think SEO keywords and include relevant links on your about page.
Jim Yu

248) Use Google+ hangouts, apps, events and communities.
Jim Yu

249) Optimize your Google+ posts for search results: at page level and the about page, the keywords in your post.
Jim Yu

250) Don't forget about authorship.
Jim Yu

251) There are 1 billion active users Facebook, 135,000,000 in Google+.
@linkvendor

252) Growth in Google+ shares have risen by 788% since it began. By Feb 2016 they'll have overtaken Facebook shares based on their current rate of increase.
Marcus Tober

253) The thumbnail you get with Google+ authorship is an enormous advantage: it increases clickthrough and takes up more space in the SERPs which means you stand out.
Marcus Tober

254) Your profile image may make a real difference in your clickthrough rate so it's worth testing. See this study http://t.co/PJssR1q8pL
Marcus Tober

255) The number of Facebook shares doesn't necessarily impact rankings. It's the quality of the shares.
Marcus Tober

256) Last year @kevgibbo saw a 42.6% increase in organic search for clients who are using Google+ and a 19.5 decrease for those who weren't. But this probably wasn't a direct correlation: the companies who weren't using Google+ probably weren't doing other things the right way.
@Kevin Gibbons, BlueGlass Interactive

257) Only 3% of Fortune 100 companies use authorship markup and surprisingly, only 45% of tech blogs.
Kevin Gibbons

258) Eric Schmidt has confirmed that information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without.
Kevin Gibbons

259) Is guest blogging becoming risky?: useful article.
Kevin Gibbons

260) Google+ Ripples: creates a visualization of the shares any public post on Google+ has received.
Kevin Gibbons

261) Journalisted: track down journalists and read their articles.
Kevin Gibbons

262) Use Google+ authorship to support SEO, not replace it.
Kevin Gibbons

263) Your Google+ profile has pagerank, just like your website.
97thfloor)

264) As you build up your authorship page rank, your posts will rank higher.
Wayne Sleight

265) When you post in Communities you get a follow link back to your profile.
Wayne Sleight

266) If your post is shared you'll get a follow link back.
Wayne Sleight

267) Commenting on someone's post you'll be giving them a follow link and passing authority.
Wayne Sleight

268) People tagging you will give you a link.
Wayne Sleight

269) In a boring industry? Join a Google+ community for your industry or create one yourself.
Wayne Sleight

270) Make sure you comment and share others' content - don't just spam the community with your own.
Wayne Sleight

271) Corporate branded accounts can generate more engagement, mention and followers. People are interested by people.
@koozai_mike, Koozai

Facebook

272) The number of Facebook likes will definitely increase if you start posting funny pics, pics of cute animals, pics of babies ...
@basvandenbeld

273) By tagging the author of your blog post on Facebook it will be seen by more people, because their friends will then see it as well.
Bas van den Beld

274) Use Facebook and Twitter scheduling to schedule your posts.
Bas van den Beld

275) A huge amount of internet traffic consists of Facebook.
@kelvinnewman, Clockwork Pirate

276) If anyone can build a Google-Killer, it's Facebook.
Kelvin Newman

277) Facebook search is based on things and the relationships between them, not documents and things.
Kelvin Newman

278) Graph Search is not a search engine, it's a filtering system for a structured database that Facebook ha.s
Kelvin Newman

279) Facebook has one trillion connections of a thousand different types.
Kelvin Newman

280) In the Graph Search system, you search relationships: the "Nodes" which are nouns (things), and relationships, or Edges, which are verbs, like friendships.
Kelvin Newman

281) Facebook uses query independent signals to come up with a numeric value for importance.
Kelvin Newman

282) Edgerank algorithm is: Affinity (how well you are connected), Weight (a video may have more weight than a status update), Decay (how recently the content was created).
Kelvin Newman

283) The edgerank algorithm is likely to have a role in Graph Search.
Kelvin Newman

284) The value of legitimate likes from well connected people just increased.
Kelvin Newman

285) Mark up using the Open Graph Protocol - it need to be a part of your SEO work.
Kelvin Newman

286) Generate affinity by using questions, votes, bait and controversy. Tease, get people to tag you, or check in.
Kelvin Newman

287) Own more real estate for each search: pages, places, people, apps and games.
@MediaWhizInc, Media Whiz

288) Local business wins big with Graph Search - have your business address on your properties.
Marc Purtell

289) Encourage reviews, (foursquare, Yelp, TripAdvisor). People pay attention to stars.
Marc Purtell

290) The AND operator in Graph Search is becoming powerful to target.
Marc Purtell

291) Planned results types will include Posts and Open Graph Actions.
Marc Purtell

292) Graph search on mobile, when it happens, has great potential (Facebook is the second largest mobile property.)
Marc Purtell

293) Search, social and CRM (customer relationship management) are converging.
@justinsanger, Justin Sanger

294) The sales funnel reopens at the point of purchase: people inform others about their experiences.
Justin Sanger

295) The opinions of others serve as qualitative signals in consideration.
Justin Sanger

296) People generate the signals needed to inform local search.
Marc Purtell

297) These online signals are just like real world word of mouth.
Marc Purtell

298) Customer acquisition and leads (not retention) are the most important for businesses.
Justin Sanger

299) Every lead/customer is an opportunity to obtain a signal for the business.
Justin Sanger

301) 92% of people would give a review if they knew who they were informing.
Justin Sanger

302) Lack of privacy, trust, organization and lcoal focus are inhibiting people from giving signals online.
Justin Sanger

303) Facebook Search Graph is still in its early days, with few users. It's valuable to get in early and understand the process.
Justin Sanger

Keyword research

304) Start with the why, understand what people want.
@kaydenkelly, Blast

305) Be aware of the customer life cycle: awareness, consideration, decision.
Kayden Kelly

306) Don't just focus on the buy phase, not all customers are ready to buy
Kayden Kelly

307) Data does not equal reporting.
Pete Wailes

308) Think about categorization: Intent (why are they searching), Demography (who are you), Content (what terms are being used).
@bizwatchlaura, Bizwatch

309) Think about Indices: search volumes and conversion volumes.
Laura Thieme

310) You can test a new keyword's potential in eight minutes with PPC.
Laura Thieme

311) To improve conversions and clickthrough rate you need to study your keyword data.
Laura Thieme

312) Consider brand vs no brand and first vs last click as part of your analysis.
Laura Thieme

313) Google keywords "not provided" can be found in Google Webmaster Tools (with certain limits).
Laura Thieme

314) The data provided in the Google AdWords tool is not very accurate. Other tools are necesary, for example Wordtracker.
Laura Thieme

315) Use engagement metrics in combination with conversions. Use bounce rate, time spent on site and number of pages used.
Laura Thieme

PS: You'll see some old comments below because these tips replace last year's SMX tips. Here's a link to those SMX 2012 tips

Take a free 7-day trial of Wordtracker’s Keywords tool

If you don't already have access to the Keywords tool try Wordtracker free for 7 days

• Find more long tail keywords - long tail keywords can be highly relevant, give you a much better chance of ranking well, and often convert well too. That means more visibility for your business.

• Steal your competitors’ keywords - Pst! Don’t tell anyone, but we get our Related Keywords by trawling your competitors’ websites. Wordtracker helps you piggy-back on their successes.

• Easily organize your work - Wherever possible, Wordtracker removes the grind from keyword research. Our keyword map helps you plan your site without loads of spreadsheets.

Take a free 7-day Wordtracker trial today

About Julie McNamee

Julie McNamee is part of the marketing team at Wordtracker where she's been working for over five years. She's also a blogger with off the beaten path travel blog Quirky Travel and TargetLocal and offers SEO writing services and web marketing on Web 'n' Words She's on Google+ Get in touch on Twitter