On Friday the 30th of March the 2nd Link Love conference organised by Distilled was held in London. With 8 SEO celebrity speakers, it was a day of actionable tips and insights for the MEC Manchester Link Building team on creating relationships and gaining prized links.
Rand Fishkin undeniably probably the biggest SEO ‘celebrity’ at the event spoke about creating the right content for your audience and how when promoted in the right way the battle is half won.
Mike King presented valuable insight into his own research of over 1000 outreach emails in order to give tips to help create and perfect the ideal outreach in order to get better response. Unfortunately though for newcomers to the event there was no rapping this year.
Branko Rihtman a new speaker at LinkLove, went into detail about how he applies scientific practises to his work in particular the methodology behind how he gains link by determining what kind of content is being shared via social media.
Wil Reynolds a popular speaker with the Link Love crowd, gave a passionate talk with actionable take away’s about how to identify key influencers in your niche and effectively stalk them in a way to develop great contacts.
Jane Copland who also spoke last year proclaimed that no link is impossible - there are just different ways that you have to go about gaining high authority links, using old fashioned PR techniques is just one of ways to create a buzz and get those golden links.
Martin McDonald SEO Strategist at Expedia spoke about creating armies of communities and mobilising the troops to get them to do things for you, and if you were unable to do that, hijack someone else’s.
Tom Anthony an SEO consultant at Distilled went into in his talk how new social tools are changing the ways that we recommend and share pages. By changing the attributes of the pages and using smart development we can build smart links.
Will Critchlow the founder of Distilled, presented on checklists and the methodology which he goes through to evaluate and control a link building campaign and how we can use those to get better success.
As there were several people from MEC Manchester who went to LinkLove – Here are their best bits!
Emma Drury – For me the best session of the day was the research from Mike King, we have been noticing similar trends on some of our clients in MEC Manchester which related to his research, so was great to get further insight into what really works from an outreach perspective.
Alex Wade – I felt that Wil Reynolds talk about targeting leading professionals in niche industries and becoming an active part in their community was totally unique and a refreshing look towards link building. This is something MEC can use to their advantage by allowing client brands to be seen as a ‘hub’ or service centre to a number of search queries.
I will definitely be incorporating Will’s techniques going forward!
Paul Delaney – Overall a very good conference which had some good tips to take away, for me Wil Reynolds was the standout speaker with lots of JFDI tips on RSS (Really Simple Stalking) for professionals in an industry or niche to engage with. Branko’s talk on SEO and social provided insight into tools to harvest data, 5 API’s to use Topsy, Facebook Open Graph, Twitter, Goolge+ and Majestics SEO as well as every SEO’s favourite “SEO Tools for Excel” from Neils Bosma.
Matt Beks- I went last year as a link building novice and really helped in understanding how link building works. I decided to go 12 months on to see how link fluent I’ve become. Most of the speakers provided some fantastic tips we as an agency should implement. More importantly, I related to Mike King’s presentation the most as much of what he was talking about link builders do on a day to day basis. I also believe his tips can improve our blogger outreach output moving forward.
Paul Chisnall – This was my first ever Linkbuilding conference and it was a fantastic experience. Mike King and Will Reynolds we’re stand out speakers for me too but I still felt that every single presentation offered something to take away and try on our own clients. Most of the topics demonstrated how creative thinking and action can be applied to clear the many hurdles that are thrown in front of you as a lnkbuilder and this really influenced me to try out some new tactics. Most importantly I returned back to work with and increased level of enthusiasm for the subject and a hatful of ideas so I would like to say big thanks MEC for sending us to such a high quality conference and for investing in our development.
