During my morning round up of BrightonSEO I asked the question ‘Has SEO grown up?‘ For my afternoon round up I’m going to focus on one tip from each talk and why I liked it.

The afternoon was as varied as the morning with topics from linguistics to affiliate marketing, all from good speakers with something interesting to say and wisdom to impart on the audience.

We were also lucky enough to spot one of our Top SEO Trumps in the flesh! Here’s Ralph Tegtmeier enjoying his pack. We left our final packs dotted about at the after party. Did you find one? Let us know!

If you did miss the talks and want to know more about SEO and inbound marketing, we offer a 5 day SEO training package. Pick from a selection of courses including SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing and Google Analytics to create your own custom 5-day course! It’s a great way to introduce yourself to the concepts of earned media or as a way to boost the skills of new employees so they can get to work straight away.

Richard Baxter – How to be a Better SEO

Richard Baxter from SEOGadget spoke about a topic he feels passionate about, deciding to do something different to his usual talks on link building and keyword analysis.

The topic was how to be a better SEO – for yourself, your boss and your clients.

My top tip from Richard’s talk was to ‘learn something new every week – stay relevant, stay challenged and become an expert.’

It’s so important in SEO to stay up to date, best practice is changing all the time and so are the algorithms. If you just plod along doing the same old tricks, your competitors will easily be able to see what you’re doing and be better than you. I recommend the best way to do this is to keep an eye on a few renowned SEO blogs – check them every day and join the conversation.

Learn new things and challenge yourself by testing all the time, it’s the only way to find out what works. When you do stumble across some amazing thing that works, you can then spread your knowledge to others – becoming an expert.

For more info, read Richard Baxter’s write up ‘How to Be a Better SEO‘ on the SEOGadget blog.

Tony King – SEO Deliverance

Semetrical’s Tony King gave a talk on delivering SEO for large corporations, where it is often pigeon holed into a single department. There was a lot of good technical advice and tips for delivering change but my favourite quote was ‘be the guru, the man to go to, the man that can‘ (same advice applies for women of course).

You should never pretend you know everything or you come across as a know-it-all but if you want to help SEO become a respected part of any business you have to know your stuff. The stakeholders have to trust you and see you as an authority, it’s the only way to prevent them from making a silly decision because they think they know better than you. Being seen as the one to go to for advice will give you a lot more freedom with SEO.

You can read Tony’s blog post for more info.

Lynne Murphy – Separated by a Common Language

Hats off to Lynne Murphy for a great twitter handle (@lynneguist) and hats off to Kelvin for straying from the SEO path when choosing speakers. A lot of people left the room before Lynne even started but for those of us who stayed we received an entertaining and amusing defence of ‘Americanisms’. Linguistics is actually important for SEO – queries are what we’re all about.

Lynne ran through a whole host of common misconceptions about Americanisms, something I used to get very angry about but will try not to any more.

I learnt two new words -Amerilexicophobia (fear of American words) and Amerlixicomania (craziness about American words – loss of rationality).

I think I suffer from the second one. I’m a stickler for changing ize to ise, but it turns out that it was actually us Brits who stole the s from the French, while the Americans kept the original use. We will still be using Anglicised English on our site, but we won’t moan so much when coding with American spellings.

James Little – A Decade in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing doesn’t have the best reputation, something James Little of TopCashBack attempted to change with his talk on how the area has grown in size and standard in the last 10 years. Affiliate marketers share many problems with SEOs, especially when it comes to trust.

The main thing I took from this talk was that it’s not just SEO that is growing up – it’s all online areas. There are tighter controls on SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Copyrighting and Social Media that are forcing people working in those areas to become a bit more serious and professional. James quoted ASOS CEO Nick Robertson’s famous description of affiliate marketers as ‘grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales.’ No industry wants to be thought of in those terms, so it will be interesting to see if the new wave of voucher, deal and cashback sites stick around long enough to grow trust.

James may not have swayed everyone in favour of affiliate marketing by the end of the talk but he is probably the only person ever to wear a Crystal Palace shirt on stage at the Brighton Dome:

Lightning Talks

The following talks were all done in 7 minutes. This was a variation on previous events in which the speakers had to use 20 slides and meant they were free to do what they liked. There was still a fast pace and loads of information crammed into each lightning presentation.

Aleyda Solis – 7 Things you Need to Know About Mobile SEO

I wish I could pick all 7 of Aleyda Solis‘s tips but I think I’m going to go with the one that sums up the whole talk - ‘start doing mobile SEO!’

Not only will you anger Sherlock Holmes if you don’t, but you will also be missing out on a key traffic stream. I’ve said it so often but I’ll say it again – mobile sales have overtaken desktop sales and usage is set to follow. Mobile search is becoming as important as regular search so you need to know what you can do to optimise your site to work on these devices.

If you want to see all 7 tips for yourself, check out Aleyda’s slides.

Simon Penson – Using Content Flow Variation and Visualisation to Win

Simon Penson of Zazzle media claimed that good blogs work in peaks and troughs and recommends varying your content for bigger impact. Combine regular (daily) posts with occasional big bangs so that they stand out more.

The regular content is for your current audience, the big bangs gain you new fans. The ‘troughs’ can be quick tips, top fives, know your… etc. – nothing ground breaking but high quality nonetheless. ‘Big bangs are big ideas’ and require a lot more thought and careful planning.

Read Simon’s blog post on Understanding Content Flow Using Visualisation for more info.

Yousaf Sekander Social Media Reverse Engineering

Elevatelocal’s Yousaf Sekander may have made everyone groan with his ‘content is not king, content is kingmaker’ quip, but he had some great tips on competitor analysis for content.

He advises to look at what content works for your competitors – what was shared the most and why? Who was sharing it? Who are their most shared authors? You can then see what works in your industry and find out who the most influential sharers are.

Berian Reed – Future Proofing SEO on Large Websites

My favourite tip from Berian Reed (head of search at Auto Trader) is a tool that could potential drive a lot of traffic and build tonnes of links, but could also be a bit of a nuisance for your readers. Berian recommends using a tool called Tynt to exploit the number 1 method of sharing online – copy + paste.

What Tynt does is add a link every time somebody copies and pastes content from your site. If the sharer leaves the link on then you gain a link and a potential traffic source without having done anything. We’re testing it out at the moment (not on this site) and we’ll report back with a full analysis once we’ve figured out the pros and cons.

View Berian’s slides.

Sion O’Connor - Client Checklist for SEOs

Early on in Sion O’Connor‘s talk a question flashed up that got me thinking. It was to do with negative perceptions of the SEO industry and whether it is testing & learning or trial & error.

I believe SEO can go either way, with the main difference being whether you know what you did to produce a result. If you just hammer away and do as much as possible, you’ll never know what works and what doesn’t, if you test and learn then you will always improve. This is most important for agency SEOs who need to prove to clients that what they are doing works. You might only have to do it a couple of times before they trust you but it is an important step towards gaining that trust. You never want a client thinking ‘do they know what they’re doing or are they just fumbling around in the dark hoping for wins?’

Read Sion’s Client Checklist blog post for the full talk.

Danielle Fudge – Pinteresting Images

Danielle Fudge‘s talk produced another fantastic tool that we can’t wait to get to grips with. It’s called Pinalytics and it allows you to gain a huge list of link prospects by scanning Pins.

I haven’t used it yet but in theory you plug in a search term (Danielle used sheds as an example) and you’re presented with a list of Pins, Pinboards and Pinners to do with sheds. One step further and you get a list of the originating URL of every pin plus page and domain authority of the URL and social metrics. You can then export that list into Excel and you have a huge list of link prospects relating to your niche, which you can order by authority and social metrics. That’s pretty awesome and I can’t await to try it out.

Tom Lewis – Attributing Beyond the Last Click

This was a subject covered in detail at BDMF Day 1 by Dara Fitzgerald, but Tom Lewis still had some interesting insights to add, especially regarding alternatives to current attribution methods.

Tom claims that until attribution gets better, valuable areas at the top of the funnel miss out and no-one will value SEO. Typical conversion models reward unfairly and attribute far too much value to branded SEO and PPC while overlooking other areas. Get attributing!

Jason Woodford – The Business of SEO and How it Can Make our World a Better Place

Site Visibility’s Jason Woodford came close to admitting that SEOs are paid too much – apparently it takes SEOs 2-3 years to earn as much as most people do in 10-19. It’s a very well paid industry.

Rather than smiling and rubbing their hands with glee, Jason says that SEOs need to use this to make the world a better place by giving something back. He believes that SEO can plug the skills gap by offering apprenticeships, work placements, training schemes and internships. By collaborating within the industry to get young people into employment or training.

By doing this and other acts of kindness (charity etc.) won’t just make you feel good but will go a long way towards gaining trust in the industry. It will help clients and businesses distinguish between a trustworthy SEO agency and the sort that sends out blanket emails offering SEO services for £99 a month.

You can see Jason’s slides and a small write up on the Site Visibility blog.

Anna Lewis – Quickfire Analytics

The best takeaway from Anna Lewis‘s talk is that you can grab all the Google Analytics dashboards straight from the Koozai blog. They’re great if you want to make Google Analytics more useful but don’t have the time or skills to customise dashboards yourself.

If you’re wondering what the 14th lesson is, it’s that people love free things. A lot of the buzz around the event was on the various giveaways, trials and competitions. Everyone was trying to give something away. Even the conference itself was free, although I’ve a feeling that contributed to the many empty seats during some of the latter talks.

After the final talk it was time to head to the bar for some free ale (!) and think about what we can learn and what we can do to be better SEOs. See you at the next one!

Similar posts you may like

Tags

affiliate marketing, Brighton, brightonseo, content, linguistics, mobile seo, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Web Analytics

Share This Post