My first excursion from the Vertical Leap office last Friday was to a large SEO event on the south coast, BrightonSEO now in its 4th year has now become a pretty important pilgrimage for many in the SEO industry and this year the 500 event tickets were all allocated in 26 minutes!
I hadn’t attended an SEO focussed event of this size before so I was particularly keen to see what all the Twitter buzz was all about, I had heard mixed opinions about these events so was a little unsure how it would go. My colleagues Pete Handley and Nick Pearse joined me on the early train journey on Friday morning, upon arrival at the event venue in Brighton we quickly settled down to a morning of very interesting talks given by a range of people who work in a mixture of web based disciplines. I’m not going to write in-depth about all the talks we were given as this blog post will fast become an essay rather than an event report, instead I will try and cover a variety of the talks we were given to give you a flavour of the event as a whole.
The first talk was given by Jonny Stewart from ReviewCentre.com who had found their website penalised by the Google Panda update earlier this year, Jonny showed us analytics charts which clearly demonstrated how their site had been impacted by the Google update and then talked us through what measures they took to try and get their site back up in the rankings, these measures were quite far reaching and for many would be quite a big bullet to bite. To get out of the penalty Reviewcentre.com found themselves having to decrease Google Adsense density and also demoting it to lower positions down the page, they blocked the Googlebot from weaker content and removed duplicate content all together and increased the social sharing of content. After giving us a good general overview of the action that was taken we were also talked through some general thoughts on the Panda update, Jonny reckoned that if a site has been impacted by this penalty a site owner should expect it to take a least 4 months to get out of it assuming that they know what they are doing!
The next talk ruffled a few people’s feathers according to the Twitter hash tag for the event, I felt it was certainly a little bit unconventional but very interesting none the less; we were given a quite technical talk by John McElborough on building a private blog network. The general idea is that if you own a network of well ranked sites covering a variety of topics you then had a good base of sites to use for linking. I was viewing Twitter throughout the conference to gauge opinion on what we were hearing and I think it is fair to say that this talk attracted some criticism from conference goers, many people would view this kind of activity as gaming the search engines and I am inclined to take this view myself, however it was still very interesting and I guess useful to know what tactics are being used by others in our industry. It was interesting to see that a few people who were in the event hall were able to heckle this talk via Twitter yet were unable to say anything publically when the microphone was offered to the audience.
James Carson from Bauer Media gave a talk entitled Dr Social Love: Or how I learned to Stop worrying about Google Algorithms and Love the People. The SEO industry does now have social media as part of our lives and so to get the perspective on how large media companies are dealing with it was certainly of interest and it certainly gave me a few things to go away and research such as Edgerank which is the algorithm that powers the newsfeed within Facebook.
Erika Ungar gave a good talk about choosing and implementing URLs which was of particular interest to my colleagues and I as we work with ecommerce sites on a daily basis and advising clients on URL structures is something we find ourselves doing often. Erika devised a URL strategy for a new ecommerce site- BouxAvenue.com which she was fortunate to have the opportunity to implement whilst the site was in its early development stages.
By this point in the morning we had been treated to presentation slides mainly containing images of scantily clad women as James Carson had used images taken from the FHM publication his company has in their publishing portfolio, Erika working for BouxAvenue.com which is a lingerie site also used eye pleasing presentation slides and so it was the next talk of the morning that was highly anticipated by the men in the audience. Malcolm Coles talk entitled How to win at SEO with Duplicate Content: Featuring Pipa Middleton’s Arse.
Sadly Malcolm’s computer had been stolen prior to the conference and this device apparently held all the slides he was going to use for this talk including the images of Pipa! Despite this Malcolm delivered a very good talk and he may have convinced me to start blogging in my spare time (although I’m not sure where this spare time may come from yet!)
At this point in the day’s proceedings we took a timely break for lunch and the 500 SEO conference goers fanned out across Brighton to locate culinary delights, my colleague Pete homed in on an excellent little restaurant which he had been to at last year’s event, his recommendation was well received!
Some of the afternoon series of talks were in my opinion a little bit too far off the SEO subject perhaps, but still none the less very interesting. Neil Walker gave a pretty insightful talk named Links – SEO Value vs. Client Expectations vs. Cost.
I got the impression that the audience was lulling in attention at this point; perhaps a few people had one or two more shandy’s at lunch than they ought to, perhaps it was that Friday afternoon feeling or perhaps it was the rather warm conference hall which had people slouching and generally looking a little distracted. This general post lunch malaise did not have time to develop any further as Toby Barnes took to the stage we were all in laughter throughout his talk, particularly when he likened the event to an “algorithmic arms fair”.
With Toby Barnes raising the bar in the humour rankings I was not sure to what expect next but my expectations were surpassed with the next talk from Dom Hodgson, this was a very entertaining talk about Hack Days, these are events where developers, designers and ideas people come together to develop some code or an app in the space of 48 hours. Dom’s passion and energy rubbed off on everyone and personally I think all events like this should have a good portion of talkers who are personally dedicated to their subjects. Judging by the comments on Twitter at this point it looks like a few SEOs may have now been inspired to learn a little bit more on coding which can only be a good thing.
With the afternoon nearly halfway through the format of the talks changed and the pace increased, each speaker had a maximum of 5 minutes to deliver their talk and a maximum of 20 slides to show. In theory I really liked this concept, however my note taking on the iPad had to be replaced for the traditional paper and pen as I could not keep up with the speakers! Sam Crocker delivered a quick talk on How to Pitch SEO. Graeme Benstead-Hume spoke about the accuracy of search volume. Dara Fitzgerald gave a fascinating talk on multi-channel funnels in Google Analytics, I think this talk could have been given a bigger slot as there was a lot of information to try and consume in five minutes and I don’t think five minutes is long enough to do this topic justice. Kane Bartlett spoke about driving SEO with PPC. Rosie Freshwater gave an incredibly fast paced talk on the importance of market research in SEO. The final five minute stint was given to Rae Lovejoy to talk to us about customer satisfaction.
With the talks all finished for the day there were a few thank you mentions and a couple of prizes to be dished out and then the crowd all headed to a pub at the end of Brighton Pier for a few hard earned beers and some good old fashioned networking. For me this event was very useful, I always like attending event like these as for me it firstly always gives me some useful knowledge to take home, but also I find that it somehow helps to bring old ideas and knowledge that has been filed at the back of the mind in to play again. It is also useful to see how the industry is developing as a whole and see where it heading. I must also mention that this event is a free event, which for me is how it should be really; my inbox is always getting invitations to SEO events which cost hundreds of pounds to attend! So full credit to Kelvin Newman and his team for organising a great day and keeping it free!
