A Few Thoughts from SMX East 2011

As another SMX East Conference in New York City came to end this week there were a few interesting subjects to reflect upon.

Google was the primary topic of discussion and the event provided numerous  insights on Google+ and how search marketers can take advantage of the company’s new social network  by publicly seeing how real people are using the Web.  Of course, it wasn’t all Google+; SEO was a big topic and sessions on pagination, link relevancy and mobile generated a lot of buzz.

Here are a few quick top-of-mind takeaways coming out of the event:

• A common problem for Local SEO is that your NAP (Name,Address, Phone number) is altered or entered incorrectly at some point on a site, then scraped by other directory sites throughout the web. This causes inconstancy in your citations, which brings harm to your local listing.
• @mattmcgee also mentioned that tracking phone numbers and click-to-call numbers are best left out of the equation to keep your NAP and citations consistent.
• Add a unique phone number for EACH of your local businesses – never use your national, corporate number.

Google+

• There isn’t a set launch date for Business pages yet and inquiries to Google reps only yielded vague response such as “coming soon.”
• The same reps also mentioned that they “currently have no plans to include ads in Google+.”
• Google is currently testing “celebrity endorsements” in the SERPs (see screenshot below).

Pagination

• During Pagination session, Maile Ohye of Google, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, mentioned that the search giant is “looking for ‘view-all’ pages and prefers to serve those pages to users.
• Also mentioned was the fact that link relevancy and canonical tags can be together as well as separate, based on the nature of content within the page sequence.

Social, Local, Mobile

• During the Social, Local, Mobile session panelists provided interesting insights on offline conversions that should be attributed to online marketing in respect to mobile:
  Start tracking mobile check-ins, point-to-point directions to stores, and click to calls to take more credit for offline conversions.

Stay tuned for more in-depth coverage next week.