Cuker at SMX West

Hitting the road for SMX West 2013, it was unclear what we could expect. The sessions and speakers seemed to be top notch, ranging from editors at search marketing publications to the search engine representatives themselves. The lineup of topics seemed to be very diverse, hitting all spectrums of search marketing from paid search to local search, mobile search, and organic search.

The goal was to see as many sessions as possible, making sure to attend the most advanced topics from the most seasoned minds in the industry. With the trip being such a success, here are five highlights worth sharing:

1. Semantic Markup: Schema.org, Open Graph Tags, Good Relations – if you’re not using these already, the time to start is now.

2. Metrics: Take advantage of the insight you can gain from free sources like Google Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics.

3. A few words from Google’s Matt Cutts & Bing’s Duane Forrester:

  • “If you’re not using HTML5 and microdata yet, you need to be doing so within the next year to keep up” - Duane Forrester
  • “SEO is no longer a pinnacle marketing activity, it should be the baseline of any effort online” - Duane Forrester
  • “Usability testing is crucial, you really never know how something will be used and navigated until your audience actually does it” Duane Forrester
  • “Encourage more social sharing” - Matt Cutts

4. Duplicate Content: It’s more common than you know. Your website is shooting your SEO efforts in the foot by having multiple versions of each page such as www.site.com and site.com and site.com/index and site.com/home.

5. Pagination: All paginated pages should use rel=”prev” rel=”next” and canonical tags on each subpage pointing to the root.

There were so many great topics and sessions and we look forward to attending SMX East in the fall. With so many topics worth sharing, these five should help you look out at the horizon and know if your search efforts are headed in the right direction or if you need to start addressing some new areas now.

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