Brighton SEO
So we all know that natural search is an evolving game and that it is good to go to conferences to see what the talk of the moment is and to see what others are up to.
Claire and I were sent to the Brighton SEO conference last Friday, which is organised by Kelvin Newman, who is creative director at sitevisibility.
There were a few speakers throughout the day, but the most interesting conversation was the kick off Q&A between Rishi Lakhani (Online Marketing Consultant), Martin MacDonald (SEO Strategy Director at Expedia EAN), Dave Coplin (Director of Search, UK at Microsoft) and Pierre Far (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google).
A few interesting questions were being asked, such as ‘is SEO dead?’ to which the answer was of course ‘No’! It is constantly evolving, but it is not dead! Over the past 10 years it has evolved – and it is now not just a numbers game, but a quality one. It is still very much an infant industry, and as long as search engines exist, optimisation will exist.
Another good question directed at Pierre, was ‘what is a bad link?’ to which he replied: ‘the link needs to be a link to genuine good content and not just a link for a link’. If you are taking part in link farms, then you are clearly going down the wrong route.
The conversation moved on to content and what qualifies as good content. The answer to this was to put yourself in the reader/consumer’s shoes and ask yourself if you got what you were looking for. Another tip given was to think about how people will share your content – make it easy for them and set up the social buttons. Social Buttons count! Take the example of Rishi’s ‘I wrote a letter to Google’, which ranks number one mainly because it was shared en masse and only a small number of backlinks!
This brings us to social signals and how to define a good or a bad one. Dave Coplin mentioned that you will know if there are good as it will be shared. The more it is shared, the better it is and therefore the more weight it will carry. However, once you have acquired your fans, likes, etc. you need to keep them.
And the final question was the one every delegate was eagerly waiting for - it was about the ‘not provided’ data within Google Analytics. Google are ‘trying to protect users’. Most people in the room were angry at this response – and the main issue was where we can find the queries that these users typed to land on the site. The answer was Webmaster Tools – but this convinced no one.
Pierre who was representing Google at this event, chose his words very carefully and didn’t divulge much about what Google has in mind… With Firefox’s latest update, the search engines and now the browsers are going to have an effect on how search traffic will be tracked.
Let’s keep our eyes and ears open on this topic – but big thank you to the organisers of Brighton SEO, it was a great day!
