Starting work on a new website, or reviewing work done on an existing client site, is an exciting and daunting task. The importance of a link analysis on the top pages of a website cannot be overstated, because by doing so you gain important insights into why a website is ranking, the current strength of […]
After Rand came Martin MacDonald of SEO Forums.Org, who I mistakenly called by another name on Twitter (sorry Martin!). His talk was entitled “Lessons from the dark side”, which makes me think of Star Wars, but that is a discussion for other times and places. His slidedeck is also available here. I did not take […]
Here is a quick summary of the conference, with a few quotes from each speaker. Wil Reynolds “Believing in ‘quality links’ as the way to dominate competitive SERPs is the biggest SEO mistake.” “Over 30% of exact anchor text links is too aggressive.” “Backlink research can show you who is ranking for the longtail. Pay […]
The final speaker of the day was Will Critchlow of Distilled. Will’s topic was “Scaling white hat link building”. He started by saying “Any sufficiently scalable technique is indistinguishable from blackhat” in terms of the number and quality of links it produces. He also said that you have to be willing to give up short […]
After lunch came Rand Fishkin, CEO and Founder of SEOmoz. His talk was entitled “The future of linkbuilding”. Rand took this time to talk about brands and where search engines might be heading with their ranking signals. Rand started by pointing out that links still rule the Internet. If you have enough text and anchor […]
Paddy Moogan from Distilled was next, speaking on “Myths and studies of outreach success”. For those of you who do not know, Paddy is an incredible linkbuilder and is always offering great insights on his blogs for Distilled and SEOmoz, and is an approachable guy on Twitter. Paddy’s talk was full of insights and rich […]
Next speaker was Tom Critchlow, a VP at Distilled and the leader of the new Distilled office in New York (the #bigdistillednews). Tom is currently in-house with SEOmoz, helping them increase their visibility on the web by working with linkbuilding tactics and their on-site optimization possibilities. Tom’s talk was great because of SEOmoz’s penchant towards […]
Up next was Russ Jones of Virante. Russ talked about “Where to get the old ‘linkbait on Digg’ effect”. Russ has been around since Digg was born, and has seen the demise of Digg as a link opportunity. The main issues with Digg 1) Home page links are 301d to an internal page, then to […]
Up next was a speaker previously unknown to me, Jane Copland. Jane worked for SEOmoz for a few years, and is now back in the UK working for Ayima. Her talk was entitled “Getting actions from competitor research”. She talked About some new ways of doing competitor research, and then how to build a linkbuilding […]
Wil Reynolds was the first speaker. Wil is the founder of SEER Interactive, a Philadelphia-based SEO consultancy. Though he was tired from his flight across the pond the previous day, he gave an impassioned talk entitled “Pitfalls, mistakes, and traps for the unwary”. One of the things I respect about Wil is his immense openness […]
The Distilled Linkbuilding Conference, hashtagged #linklove, took place on Friday, March 18th at the Congress Centre in London, UK. I was fortunate enough to attend, and was one of very few Americans present (I assumme all you Americans are going to the New Orleans Linkbuilding Seminar next week, right? The conference began with a bang […]
Social media as a ranking signal has been a hot topic of conversation in SEO circles for the past few months. Talk has occurred for years, yet both Google and Bing have recently confirmed independently that they use Twitter and other social media channels as ranking factors. We are also seeing many more instances of […]
I was trained as a web developer. Therefore, often many of the technical on-site details and issues get passed on to me, because I have the technical knowledge. Here’s a free tip: if you don’t know the answer and you don’t have anyone to ask, search for it. This happens with sitemaps around my office. […]
Sitemap (n): A file placed on your web server, in XML format, to alert search engines to a website’s existing pages. Submitted manually to search engines using Webmaster Tools. I just made up that definition, but it is also deceptive. I’ve been in web development for about 5 years, and I still hate sitemaps. At […]
Today I’ve been thinking about brand SEO (again) and how branding your site may be good for SEO purposes as well, for ranking important keywords even. Most of my thinking has come about in the past week, after a webinar given by SEOmoz a week and a half ago. Today I also watched a WhiteBoard […]