BrightonSEO Conference 2012

BrightonSEO – One of the UK’s most popular and respected search conferences

I attended my first #BrightonSEO conference on Friday 13th April 2012 after hearing about it at ThinkVisibility 7, another search conference which I attended earlier this year. BrightonSEO is becoming one of the most popular and respected search conferences in the UK with over a 1000 of the UK’s finest search marketers attending this year. Here is a quick overview of the conference.

Who talked at BrightonSEO 2012?

1. Phillip Sheldrake: Future SEO Vistas – The Semantic Web and the Internet of Things

BrightonSEO Conference 2012 Philip Sheldrake (@Sheldrake) kicked off BrightonSEO with his take on Web 3.0 or “The Semantic Web”. Here’s a few things to remember from his talk:

2. Sam Noble – How to launch or re-launch a brand or product online effectively

BrightonSEO Conference 2012Launching or re-launching a brand or product online can be a very daunting task. Building up on her experience prior to the launch of Koozai in May 2011, Samantha Noble (@Koozai_Sam) provides us with a overview of tips, suggestions and things to avoid, Moreover, her list of tools and resources will assist you to achieve the best results:

3. Adam Lee – Killer Market Research for Peanuts

BrightonSEO Conference 2012Adam Lee (@NoPorkPies) discussed how understanding consumer needs is essential for creating a good marketing strategy. He discussed 3 marketing research processes of people in various positions:

4. Glenn Jones – Microformats and SEO

BrightonSEO Conference 2012Glenn Jones (@glennjones) talked about rich snippets and creation of schema.org, which has brought semantic mark up into sharp focus for the SEO industry:

5. Roland Dunn – Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths? What Do Searchbots Actually Do?

BrightonSEO Conference 2012Roland Dunn (@roland_dunn) presented his talk entitled “Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths? What Do Searchbots Actually Do?” He wanted to explore how and if we can see how Google searchbots have spent their time, when they visited and where they visited a site.

The conclusion is that there is very little data out there that gives us enough info and so we are left with Webserver Logfiles (a record of all requests from sites) these however are lengthy and difficult to pull data from. So, one of the big questions that we want to know is: do google bots request all URLs served by a website? The simple answer is no. So then, are the Google bots spending their time cost-effectively? Again it appears not. Many examples show that they spend a lot of time on irrelevant pages.

Google bots are not quite a lost child or a hungry psychopath but instead can be described as a distracted teenager. We may in fact need to give them a helping hand when crawling our sites – navigation, robots.txt etc.

Points:

  1. Embrace Logfiles.
  2. Check searchbot behaviour
  3. If they become lost or distracted-help them out.

6. Charlie Peverett – It’s only words? Working with Content Strategy

BrightonSEO Conference 2012Charlie Peverett (@cpev) was our first speaker after lunch. In his presentation, he talked about the importance of content strategy for SEO.

7. Lexi Mills – How you can get BIG links from BIG media sites

BrightonSEO Conference 2012In her presentation, Lexi Millls (@leximills) has shared some of her top tips and tricks on how to get BIG links from BIG media sites. She also provided some interesting insights on how PR and SEO can be used to work together by building up the level of report and conversation:

8. James Owen – Maximizing your SEO Agencies

BrightonSEO Conference 2012James Owen (@jamesoSEO), SEO Manager at Hotels.com, shared the steps Hotels.com go through in order to maximize their SEO agency success. Some important points:

9. Stefan Hull – Search marketing – from Panda to Black Swan

BrightonSEO Conference 2012Stefan Hull (@stefanjhull) has discussed the ways in which Search Marketing is changing and the consequences that these changes bring to the way we do things. What to remember?

10. James Carson – I Believe Authors are the Future

BrightonSEO Conference 2012In his presentation, James Carson (@mrjamescarson), focused on Authorship mark up, one of the hottest topics in SEO.

Here’s what caught our attention:

11. Dom Hodgson – I appear to have started a sweetshop (and advertising company)

BrightonSEO Conference 2012Dom Hodgson (@Thehodge) spoke about his latest quest, his online sweetshop and he told us the story of how it came about. From an idea down the pub to his very own online sweetshop as well as combined office and sweet shop combined.

His idea was that everyone loves pick and mix and so he decided open his very own online store. His concept, to make buying sweets online fun. His first attempt mainly revolved around a winking squirrel. “If you ever put a squirrel on a website, make it wink” was his advice.

He quickly learned that his quest had been slightly shortsighted with many hidden costs. He also received complaints whilst the site had only just gone live!

His second attempt at a site involved more sweets a better design and involved the death of the squirrel. To finish the talk, he took the opportunity to make the second site go live, invited members of the audience up to celebrate the countdown with party poppers.

There was even Karaoke!

Matt White from Fresh Egg performed his version “Pass Out” by Tinnie Tempah. Check out the video from The Glitter Ball Bar, Brighton Pier.


Video from Daniel Bianchini

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