ArtDriver attended the outstanding Distilled SEO seminar in London on Friday, March 18, 2011. We’ve been waiting for this SEO event for a while! The day was packed with great presentations, top industry speakers and SEO give aways that kick ass! Our team has absorbed a lot of useful information and link building know how to digest and implement.
Wil Reynolds was the first speaker who covered some of the most painful link building mistakes he has made. One of the lessons to take away from Wil’s talk is that “diversity of backlinks” is critical. One should not rely on simply high PR sites and backlinks with 100% anchor text. There must be a mix of backlinks that contain anchor text as well as branding of the company.
Jane Copeland stressed out how important it is to analyse the competition and not to replicate the competitors’ backlinks strategy.
Russ Jones uncovered some black hat SEO tricks as well as pointed out the importance of social media and real time analytics in trying to achieve top search results. Russ talked about the growing importance of Reddit for link building…specifically he advised that it makes sense to find highly popular posts on Reddit and introduce subreddits that can generate attention and then after some time publish a clean backlink that may not be spotted and removed.
Tom Critchlow from Distilled talked about what it’s like to work for a top SEO company and how to properly structure an SEO link building campaign.
Paddy Moogan touched on an oftentimes ignored strategy of link building – outreach. You’ll be surprised how much you can get if you ask! It is critical to write a personal and not spammy email while asking for a backlink or link exchange. In addition, if you decide to approach someone and ask for a link, think what you can give in return. Paddy said that one should never put “link request” in the subject line of a link request email.
Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz shed some light on the future of link building. Having extensive SEO experience and building SEO software, Rand advised that the role of social media is extremely important in Google’s ranking algorithm. We can assume that having more retweets may oftentimes be more important than having more backlinks. Rand also shared his preference for canonical links rather than for 301 redirects.
Martin McDonald from SEOforums gave a couple of hot lessons from the darker side of SEO. One take away tip that we got from Martin is to capitalise on the egocentrism. Everyone likes reading good things that people may say about us. So, as a strategy, we can create a competitor review website and start collecting feedback on our competitor from random users. Then the competitor may link to this review site without having a slightest idea that you own this site. After some time, all you need to do is to create a rel=canonical from this review site to your site and you can get a sweet link from your competitor without them even know about it!
Finally, Will Critchlow, Founder and CEO of Distilled, talked about scalability in white hat SEO. Content is king!
John oftentimes takes the lead as the Agile Project Manager and SEO expert, which allows him to be hands-on with the latest trends.