Brighton SEO was a half-day conference followed by some drinks and networking in the evening, held at Community Base on Friday 23^rd July, a brilliant and educational event organised by Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility.

I videoed almost all of the content and I’m sorry I haven’t posted it up sooner but I haven’t had the time. Never the less I will be uploading snippets bit by bit over the next few weeks so keep your eyes peeled. The first part features Kevin Gibbons and his wonderfully useful wordpress plugins, Cedric Wooding with an enlightening presentation on facebook advertising and Annabel Hodges thinks out of the box when it comes to search.

Silicon Beach Training offer a full range of SEO and Social Media courses  SEO Training in Brighton, Sussex, as well as HTML5 training, Social Media Courses, Blogging Courses, WordPress Training, and Photoshop Training

First up was Kevin Gibbons from SEOptimise

Kevin started the day off with his very helpful talk:

20 WordPress Plug-ins to Supercharge Your Blog

The link above is all you need to get a list of the 20 plug-ins. Meanwhile these were my favourites:

Blackbird Pie

I wrote about this one when it first came out. You just go the Blackbird Pie page and paste in a tweet url, blackbird pie will generate the embed code for you to paste into the HTML view in wordpress (or any webpage come to that) and hey presto! Complete with links.

RSS Footer

RSS Footer – Adds a link to the bottom of articles in your RSS feed. When your post is scraped (this happens to us all the time), at least it’s going to help by providing a backlink to your site. To see why this is useful look at the quote from Matt Cutts in the post by Patrick Altoft, “How to foil scrapers on your blog“.  There is also the option to add a link back to the post itself, with the title of the post as anchor text – good stuff.

Back Type

BackType – I really like this plugin. It finds conversations on other social media that is related to your content and displays it in-line or alongside the comments on your blog. Great way to effortlessly generate content.

SEO Smart Links – This one can help enormously with internal link structures, but as Kevin points out be careful as it can look spammy when overdone.

Cedric Wooding from Jollywise was the second to speak:

A Practical Guide to Managing a Facebook Advertising Campaign

Cedric told us about some of the factors that affect the price of Facebook ads and explained how careful targeting can make advertising more cost effective. You can refine your target for example by geo-location, age demographics, language, as well as the likes and interests of a users profile. Using WTA as an example – targeting  increased the WTA’s ‘Likes’ from 7k to 225k, with a click-through rate of 0.18%  which is way above the average CTRs for Facebook campaigns of 0.04%. See this video of Cedric talking about the effectiveness of changing your image.

Cedric advises you try different copy and pictures.  Different images can prove more successful than others depending on the demographic it is reaching. Once you have found a successful type of image replace it at least once a week with a similar one.

Once you define your target audience Facebook will calculate how many people your advert will reach, which is very helpful, as you can calculate this before you commit.

Annabel Hodges AKA @SearchPanda

‘When is an SEO Campaign not an SEO Campaign?’

Annabel took us through a couple of case studies for fashion retailer ‘New look’ and C4 Education.

Annabel came up with a creative solution for the C4 Education website, they wanted to rank for keywords used by  teachers for resources, however the content had been created for teenagers. Teachers will use different more subject specific search terms to the teenagers. The solution was to distribute the content to other sites, and the success with the campaign was measured by increasing the visibility of that content on websites that were frequently used by teachers and well ranked for the search terms that teachers will use.

The sites in this project showed a significant increase in visibility, referral traffic for the main resource, more traffic and lots of feedback from the users of the site, users that were previously unaware that they could use it as a teaching resource.

The second campaign was New Look TV- the main site is an ecommerce site, geared up for sales and promotion. What the client had wanted was a microsite to be visible where the retail site wouldn’t be. By using it to promote celebrity fashion launches and other fashion related searches and using video friendly search terms. Annabel’s solution was to make a site that ran completely from YouTube, they also launched a competition to be the presenter of New Look TV where the public could upload there audition tapes and people could feedback to them (we also got to have a little look at some of the entries!).

Having a separate site to the ecommerce site meant that New Look TV was ranking up against media sites rather than retail, which helped them increase visibility in areas where they hadn’t previously been.

Annabel illustrated that SEO is not just about  keywords and links and that sometimes you have to think outside the box to achieve your goals

Silicon Beach Training offer a full range of creative software courses including Photoshop Training, Search Engine Optimisation Course as well as HTML5 training, Social Media Courses, Blogging Courses, and WordPress Training,

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Facebook, facebook ads, facebook advertising, free seo training, search, Search Engine Optimisation, search engine optimisation course, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, seo course, seo tips, seo training, seo training sussex, SEO using Social Media, seo wordpress, sussex

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