BrightonSEO was just over a week and there have already been a lot of posts written about one of the best free conferences in the UK. I particularly like the post by Receptional on over 100 Tips and Insights. Ben Harper from Daitfy covered five great speakers from the day including Stacey Cavanagh and Vickie Cheung. Jamie Faulkner shared his actionable tips on Firecask. The Verve Team wrote three posts from BrightonSEO and there are some some great lessons on Technical SEO from Briony Gunson.
Here are some of the take aways I liked and wanted to share with you:
1. You can still love links, but it is the by product of creating great stuff
2. Think creatively – through IDEATION (generating ideas)
3. Work as a team of 6 to create ideas. Each person comes up with 3 ideas in 5 minutes, putting them down on a spreadsheet, then passing the spreadsheet to one another who then add more 3 ideas.
4. It is easy to come up with ideas when working together. In 30 minutes, 6 people come up with 108 ideas.
5. If working on your own, use crowdsourcing ideas looking at Twitter, FB.
6. There are lots of Ideation Tools in the market such RealTimeBoard, MindNode and Coogle.it
7. Test your ideas by uploading them to fivesecondtest.com. This is a simulation Twitter tool and is a great way of seeking feedback.
8. Another way to seek feedback is through NUF Testing
9. Link attribution is an important part of an SEO strategy.
10. Image attribution – find out who is using your image without linking back through image raider.
11. Who is talking to you but not linking – use Freshwebexplorer
12. Use surveys to create interesting stories Quick Surveys and Google surveys are free.
13. When you create good stories, links will flow.
14. Start outreach from day 1 with the content audit.
15. Use monitoring tools such as Freshwebexplorer, Picakanews and Google Alerts
16. Manage your outreach – BuzzStream and Inkybee are great tools
17. Find journalists through Journalisted.com and MuckRack
18. Old fashioned outreach works – send hand written letters.
19. Links still matter (not that we thought they wouldn’t) but Matt Cutts confirmed at SMX Advanced in 2013. Matt said “The web is huge, links are going to be around for many years to come.”
20. Moz did a survey asking people what they thought was most influential in the industry. 8 out of 10 factors said links.
21. Searchmetrics also carried out a survey and Marcus Tober, the founder said the social factors are taking over, these are link factors.
22. Links lead to authority Information and trust flows through links. Now Matt Cutts is talking about topical page rank. They are not saying it is about the link but about the context.
Thanks to Kelvin Newman and his team for organising another great BrightonSEO.