“MC Hammer is the saviour of SEO” (Part 1)

Although I spend the most of my life trying to maintain a cool, calm and collected demeanour there are certain times when I just can’t contain the geeky, search engine loving, website obsessed nerd that I've grown up to be. This week’s SearchLove London conference was one of those occasions and I literally spent the weekend preceding the event  giddy at the thought of sharing link building tips, and black hat hints with the great and good of ‘Search’; all of those Distilled and SEOMoz faces I’d become so familiar with through ‘whiteboard Fridays’. The conference itself didn’t disappoint, so I thought it might be interesting to share a few highlights, hints and tips I picked up along the way  with you….oh, and also that apparently “MC Hammer is the saviour of SEO” according to Martin McDonald.

Rand Fishkin (‘Everythings Easier With Fans’) was the first to speak and he gave a very professional presentation about the power of building community. He did give some great tips however there was a certain amount of anti climax about the whole thing; Rand Fishkin is an authority on all things SEO so to hear him talk about building community was interesting but I didn’t find what he said particularly actionable; mainly just a lot of common sense (start a blog, engage with community, offer quality non biased content, make profiles a point of pride) …..still, it was Rand Fishkin and it was rewarding to hear him talk about his struggles in doing this; as an SEO I’ll do whatever he says!

The next person to speak was Tom Critchlow (‘Big Business SEO’); another SEO god. Like Rands presentation, I found him incredibly interesting and engaging but surprisingly not a whole lot of actionable tips. Essentially with big business you need to pitch your ideas big; they’re not interested in simply H1 tags but the overall bigger picture. They work on large scale ideas.

Mat Clayton(The Next Level of Social Integration) spoke next and for me it was during Mats talk when the excitement levels that had preceded the conference felt warranted. Mat talked about a social strategy and how that if anyone thinks social media doesn’t apply to their industry then they are incorrect, as almost everyone on the internet uses Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube. He went on to talk about the next level of ‘personal ‘ social media and the power it will have on our decisions and purchasing on the internet; if we see a picture of one of our friends next to a product that they like, then we’re far more likely to investigate further even purchase than if it was simply cold advertising;it makes it seem like a personal recommendation. Putting faces next to an ‘action’ increases completion rate by as much as 200 to 300%.

Will Critchlow (The Modern SEO’s Toolkit) followed Mat Clayton and as one of the leading lights in the SEO world and co-founder of Distilled, I had high expectations. Ultimately he recommended that as SEO’s we needed to perhaps be bit more technically minded, as the kids coming up behind us are going to be far more familiar with SQL. HTML5 and all the skills traditionally associated with developers. At the time a lot of the info went way over my head (I should note that Will Critchlow is a very smart bloke)….. but having had time to go over my notes and review the presentation he gave a lot of sage advice about the direction an SEO’s career path needs to take.

Joanna Lord (are you Keeping up with the Joneses?) spoke about social media and analysing what your competitors are doing with their social pages; if they use it regularly and have designated landing pages set up for social you can tell they’re serious. Also you should use social advertising to see what competitors spend and if they outbid you and if people are bidding on your brand terms.

Rob Ousbey (Outreach: is it all about hustle?) presented about outreach and how it is about building relationships, getting coverage and getting links (in that order). Outreach is not link-building. One off emails rarely work and relationships need to be built over time. A great talk by a passionate guy, but for me there was nothing new here.

The highlight of the day was definitely Wil Reynolds (‘Content based link building’) who talked about one of my favourite topic.. Wil was charismatic and passionate; a fantastic public speaker. Wil claimed that social shares didn’t actually help you rank any better…yet!  This was not to say social didn’t have value as searching social gives you an insight in to what content your clients like and then you can then offer them something similar. As we all know in SEO great content gets you links so why not use Google Suggest and Google Product Suggest to get topic ideas. Also if a competitor’s domain expires that has links to it, register it and redirect.

That wraps up day 1. Check in next week to hear hints and tips from day 2 and find out why MC Hammer is the saviour of SEO……

Winning!

Adam