Now is the perfect time to make changes, giving you a good few months of "normal" search traffic to analyze before major events like Christmas begin to make their presence known. Here are some tips to make your PPC campaign stand out from the crowd.

Once again, we are proud to be a blog partner for the SMX Advanced London 2012 conference. The event takes place on 15-16th May 2012 at Chelsea Football Club - Stamford Bridge. In order to receive a 15% discount, just enter the code SEOPTIMISE012 when signing up online . There are different packages available and the prices go up after 30th March so it's best to book early! For coverage of previous events,

Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update - this is a landing page quality update, which looks at "the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result". As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn't this sound very similar to Panda though? At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that: "If you have ads obscuring your content,

If you have a corporate Facebook page, here are some tips for making it extra effective' Treat it Like a Website Your Facebook profile is a microsite in its own right, so be sure it contains all of the information visitors need in order to understand your brand message, or to purchase your product or service. .

We've been quietly working away on a few things here at SEOptimise during the last couple of months, so it's probably about time we made a couple of announcements! Firstly, you may have noticed that in December we opened a new London office in Paddington. Alongside this, we recruited two new SEO execs - Gillian Cook and Pak Hou Cheung - both of whom have written some great posts on the SEOptimise blog already.

It's that time of year again, where everyone is starting to think about which UK search conferences and events to attend. So for 2012, I've put together a conference calendar of search events - let me know if there's any I've missed! February: SES London - London, 21-23 February 2012 March: Think Visibility - Leeds, 3rd March 2012 UK Search Awards Conference - London, 9th March 2012 Distilled - Link Love - London,

Everybody's been talking about search in 2011, but what were the events that helped to shape the search landscape of the year? We ran a poll on SEOptimise in order to find out. While the biggest search impact of 2011 might not come as much .

Last week I setup a Facebook poll to ask people what they considered to be the most significant change in search during 2011. This has received a great response, so here are the results so far )you can still take part on the SEOptimise fan page (: To recap on what these changes were: Google Panda )37 votes( - if you haven't heard of Google Panda, I'm not sure where you've been.

Last week I spoke on the SSL search panel at the SAScon mini conference in Manchester. This is a great conference, with the main SAScon event taking place in May - and to cover main tips and takeaways from this I've listed the top 28 tweets: Testing products not enough - spend time talking to your customers #sascon November 24,

Having been out at Pubcon in Las Vegas this week, I've been going a bit tweet-crazy with my coverage of this. There's been so many great tips and takeaways, that I thought it would be good to share this with our readers. Image credit: Guy Levine So for now here's my twitter coverage of Pubcon 2011: General SEO Trends 1( #7 ranking for a long-tail term can get as much traffic as #2 for head-of-tail!

Planning a start-up? You may need to think about SEO and exact match domains before picking a brand name. If you're about to begin an internet business then you'll probably be planning an online marketing campaign that involves SEO. After all, most website visits begin with a search engine and exact match domains )EMDs( will often dominate the Google SERPs for a given result. The importance of EMDs is a frequently discussed topic,

I had a thought earlier today, funnily enough whist interviewing copywriters, which led me to think how important is the quality of writing as a ranking factor following the panda update? Obviously the panda update has had a negative impact to website's which have low-quality content - but, from the other way around, how has this impacted high-quality content? Forgetting completely about links for now and assuming all things are equal,

We've managed to get our readers a discount to this years Conversion Conference in London. This is running across two days )30 November - 1 December( at The Business and Design Centre in London and has a great line-up of conversion optimisation speakers , it looks like it's going to be a very interesting event! To get a 15% discount off ticket prices, all you need to do is sign-up using the promo code: SEOPTIMISE011 - see you there!

Having attended and presented at A4UExpo this year, I thought I'd write a recap on the top tweets, takeaways and presentations - in no particular order: #A4US2 opportunity = search vol * max CTR * conversion rate * Rev per sale #boom October 18, 2011 10:03 am via Twitter for iPad Reply Retweet Favorite @APSG Amrit Gill Brand-name IBLs must outnumber keyword IBLs! Getting this wrong is the greatest red flag for Google. )via @ PatrickAltoft @ a4uExpo #a4uS2 ( October 18,

Today myself and Daniel Bianchini gave a presentation at a4uexpo London 2011 on how to survive Google's panda algorithm update. In case you missed it, we've posted both sets of slides online here: The 4 Hour Affiliate Week - Kevin Gibbons, A4UExpo London 2011 View more presentations from Kevin Gibbons . A4 u panda-slap-db View more presentations from Daniel Bianchini . If you have any questions on this please let us know in the comments.

Today I've been at Econsultancy's Jump conference , this is the second year for the event and it's already a hugely popular event. This is run with 8 tracks alongside each other - so obviously I didn't attend them all, but I have listed the top tweets and best bits from the day. This will be updated during the day: $50 billion will be spent by US organisations in 2012 on Facebook advertising.

There's lots of mixed opinions on how useful Google AdWords remarketing is - so I thought it would be useful to run a quick poll to see how these are divided: I'll update this later in the week with the results - and if you have any comments please feel free to leave them below. © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter .

September was a very busy month on the SEOptimise blog - so here's a monthly recap, just incase you missed any of top posts - ordered by number of retweets. Top 12 SEOptimise posts in September: 30 Google SERP Changes That Impact Your SEO Strategy by Tad Chef - 224 Tweets 74% of SEOs Buy )or Would Consider Buying( Links! by Kevin Gibbons - 172 Tweets International SEO Strategy - Domains, Subdomains or Subfolders?

Last week I asked on Twitter to see what common SEO mistakes were still being made by retail websites. This received a great response, so I thought I'd share the top replies with our readers. I've picked some UK high street retail examples to help display the issues raised, but please note that we have no connection with any of these websites - so this is an outside perspective. There may be logical reasons for the examples which we are unaware of,

Last week I ran a Facebook poll to ask what people considered to be their favourite search conference in the UK . This received a great response )197 votes in total( - and we can now announce that the winners of the competition were Think Visibility, who collected 63 votes! SAScon Manchester and BrightonSEO made it a great result for the smaller events as they finished second and third respectively,