On the 18th of April some members of MEC’s SEO team attended the ION Search conference in Leeds. The conference covered a variety of topics ranging from creative link buildings techniques, content optimisation and an insight into white/grey/black hat techniques.
The conference was made up of 30 guest speakers including our very own David Towers who put his black hat on for the day to moderate panel of guest speakers who discussed the ‘dark side’ of SEO.
Here are some of the key aspects that were covered:
SEO Content
- David Harling (Razorfish) explained how social monitoring and social trending topics generate good content, whilst emphasing “ideanation” as the key criteria behind all copy.
- Lyndon Antcliff (Cornwall SEO) discussed how we should produce SEO content to appeal to the brains subconscious.
- Jono Alderson (TwentySix) explained the importance of marking up HTML content with different class categories for microformat and rich snippet visibility. He also explained the benefits of schema.org for grouping multiple classes and multiple content together.
- Roland Dunn (Refined Practice) emphasised how Google bots do not crawl online content as frequently as you may think.
- Dave Snyder (Steelcast) explained how infographics are becoming ‘overkill’ in the SEO industry and how we should be seeding more viral content such as video and images that draw their own traction (e.g. Meme’s).
SEO Tools
- A wide number of speakers including Steve Lock (Analytics SEO)Matt Roberts (Linkdex) and Neil Walker (SEO Mad) provided a detailed overview of the most influential SEO tools in the SEO market, playing particular attention to Analytics SEO, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, SERP Turkey and many many more. A comprehensive list can be found here
Social
- Alex Craven (Bloom Media), Martin Woods (Blue Claw) and Heather Healy (Sticky Eyes) explained the importance of engaging you niche environment within the social media market, importance of votes/coupons and paying particular attention to the open graph protocol within Facebook.
- Danny Gray (Google) After a few words about why the search giant thought G+ was so integral to the future of the web (and, no doubt, its own continued domination of it), Danny explained a bit about some of its most interesting features. Under the tagline of helping people share information ‘more like they do in real life’ he highlighted a few of the ways businesses might want to enter the conversations when looking to connect with the world and more specifically potential brand advocates.
Link Building Techniques
- David Harling (Razorfish) talked about the importance of microsites tailored to specific campaigns in order to attract link bait. One specific example David shared was how Razorfish launched the ‘little black dress’ campaign for retailers to celebrate the anniversary of Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Grey/Black Hat SEO
- Ralph Tegtmeier (Fantomaster) shared a variety of new techniques for article spinning in the SEO community. Ralph’s talk gave insight into how SEO’s can spot automated content that can be deemed as ‘black hat’.
