THE iMARKETING CAFE

In 2013, The iMarketing Café team did an SEO survey that literally grabbed the attention of the SEO community. The objective was to take the pulse of the SEO community at a time when drastic changes were happening in the SEO world.

This year, we are back with another survey that we conducted on Twitter recently. We contacted more than 300 SEO experts around the world and requested them to tell us what they thought were the top 3 changes that can possibly happen in the SEO landscape in 2015. Same as last year, we didn’t publicize the survey but we could still collect opinions of some of the leading industry experts.

Our objective was to bring our readers some expert opinions on how the possible developments in the SEO landscape can change the way we approach SEO in 2015.

Gabriella Sannino is a widely-recognized International SEO consultant. She is the managing partner at Level343, an organic SEO and copywriting company based in San Francisco, California.

Gabriella is also the SEO director at Indelible Branding, an Integrated Marketing agency. She has 20+ years of marketing experience and works closely with several agencies as SEO consultant.

Gabriella has been a contributor to the reputable Search Engine Journal, Moz Blog, Click Fire, Search Engine People and various other online marketing/SEO blogs and resources.

In this interesting interview, Gabriella discusses about Hummingbird Algorithm, Panda 4.0, challenges related to International SEO and more. We hope you enjoy reading it.

As most of you know, Jill Whalen has been a voice in the SEO industry for more than 18 years. She started practicing SEO in 1993-94, even before the term ‘SEO’ was around. The 20 year long outstanding career came to an end with the announcement of her decision to quit SEO a few months ago. The news rocked the SEO industry and sparked discussions in various SEO communities.

Over a period of 18 years, she consulted with hundreds of clients across more than 40 industries. The company found by her – High Rankings, was one of the pre-eminent SEO companies in the United States.
The Queen of SEO has always been a strong advocate of good SEO practices. As a renowned speaker, trainer and writer she has always preached about the importance of doing good SEO work in order to sustain organic visibility in the long run.

In this interesting interview, Jill Whalen shares some of her insightful views on SEO. We hope you enjoy reading it.

Twitter is one of the few platforms where SEO community remains highly active. You can even find notable SEO celebrities on Twitter (who usually don’t interact with people on other platforms) and interact with them. You can get tips, guidance and opinions from the experts instantly. Overall, Twittering is fun.

It’s also a great way to get in touch with people quickly. We recently conducted an SEO Survey on Twitter and let us tell you, Twitter immensely helped us to carryout and wrap up the survey within a short time. It was so convenient and full of fun.

This month we bring you an exhaustive list of SEO experts who remain active on Twitter. You can follow all of them or selectively follow a few – staying connected with the experts and interacting with them will greatly help you to stay updated about the current trends and also to learn new things.

Why did we do this survey? As Google tightened the screws on SEOs lately by specifically targeting what used to be one the most important parts of SEO process, i.e. link building, we wanted to take the pulse of the SEO community. We wanted to know how SEO experts viewed this significant change implemented by Google that transformed the whole SEO landscape.

This has been the biggest SEO survey of its kind in this year so far. We conducted it on Twitter. It was not a general survey. We wanted to collect the opinions of only the experts in the field. The iMarketing Café team contacted more than 300 SEO experts around the world. We, as far as possible, expected them to define ‘SEO 2014’ in 140 characters (a tweet) and some of them really came up with great answers. We got a decent response from the SEO community even though the survey was not much publicized. All those who have responded are truly experts and have several years of experience in the SEO industry.

There is much talk about the role of social media in the world of SEO. The importance of social media and how they will overlap with the traditional link building has become one of the most discussed topics among the SEO professionals.

Even though there is no simple answer for this question, the answer is most probably no. Since recently social signals have played an important role in the Google algorithms. And some SEO companies have already started new methods to build these links automatically.

Have you ever stopped to think about how many people may have searched online for the services or goods that your ecommerce business provides, but haven’t found your site despite the fact you’ve spent hours fine tuning your SEO? The chances are that those who aren’t finding your site are using the internet in a language other than English. Could multi-lingual SEO have a positive effect on your ecommerce business?

It’s something you may have completely disregarded in the past, but have you ever stopped to think about how many people may have searched online for the services or goods that your ecommerce business provides, but haven’t stumbled across your site despite the fact you’ve spent hours fine tuning your search engine optimisation to help it rank well on Google? The chances are that those who aren’t finding your site are using the internet in a language other than English. Could multi-lingual SEO have a positive effect on your ecommerce business? And if so, how do you go about implementing such a strategy?

If you are some one who seriously follows web related news, you must have come across the term ‘user experience’ many times. From mobile companies to mobile users, online gaming companies to social networks, website owners to web designers, ecommerce owners to online shoppers, everyone talks about user experience. Can Google lag behind when it comes to user experience, which is one the most important requirements of online user? Though Google has been taking initiatives towards better user experience for years, some creditable initiatives have come from them in the past two years. It’s evident from the Google updates that have been rolled out since 2010 which have completely changed the search mechanism as a whole. Though many updates rolled out by Google have made significant impacts, some have really turned things around. We’ll be discussing about 5 major updates that literally changed the way we do SEO; though these updates brought sea of changes in favor of the users, they rocked the SEO world and drove many webmasters around the world to reconsider their SEO strategy.

Google wages war against spam; its continuous effort towards better user experience is evident from the number of updates and tweaks that it has been carrying out for the last couple of years, some of the major ones include Google Caffeine ( though technically its not an update but Google’s new web indexing system , its widely known as an update ), social signals, Farmer/Panda update ( followed by rollout of various versions ), Freshness update, Search+ your world, +1 buttons, Parked domain bug, recently rolled out penguin and the latest one ‘ April 52-pack’ ( 52 minor updates ). All these updates have been a great set back for the spammers and black-hat SEO practitioners who have always been managed to get desired results. Though still the questionable practices continue and even delivering results at times, the few recent updates have been successful in greatly improving the quality of the search results. In the months to come, Google will leave SEOs with the only option that’s ‘white-hat’, Google’s spam cop Matt Cutts even suggested ‘No SEO’. Now the questions arise; what’s actually white-hat? , how much of optimization can SEOs really do to stay in the race? Can we expect quick results anymore? What works and what doesn’t? With so many questions to be answered, let’s discuss some of the important SEO issues, best practices, ways to survive and some insights.