In a couple of hours, I’ll leave for Heathrow after attending the inaugural SMX London and speaking on my first session, Linkbait and Viral Marketing. And only twelve hours after I’d finally acclimatised to the eight-hour time difference between Western Europe and the U.S.’s West Coast. That’s a tough one to get used to. I did everything in my power to stay awake upon arriving in London, including drinking coffee with Gillian and swimming in the Hilton Metropole’s rather neat pool; however, I lasted until 6pm and slept for twelve straight hours.
Conferences are different when you know you’re going to speak, especially for the first time. You watch presenters in a different way, figuring out what makes them good speakers and what looks bad from the audience. I decided quickly that “chatting” with the crowd seems to be the way to go. People who appeared to be having a friendly discussion with their audience generally came across very well.
My first day in England, after the twelve hour sleep that made little difference to my internal confusion about what time it was, included a trip to Altogether Digital‘s offices to practice my presentation with fellow panelist, Ciarán Norris. Of course, we promptly decided that our presentations were wonderful, but not before I made Ciarán take me to Soho’s best fish and chip shop for lunch. There are few meals better than genuine fish and chips!
I missed two sessions while I was out feeding my inner fat person and practicing for the next day’s session. Upon returning to the hotel, I ran into Lisa Ditlefsen who was outside the front entrance, nursing a post-speech cigarette. We went back down to the conference halls to catch Cutting Edge Linking Tactics, where Ken McGaffin was already speaking. Sorry about sneaking around the back of the room, Ken!
Some highlights from the session? Ken spoke about looking out for emerging markets and establishing your position early, pre-market saturation. He also pointed out the importance of figuring out whether or not the market really exists, suggesting it best to plan twelve months in advance instead of flying by the seat of your pants. Well. He put it a little better than that. My conference notes tend to translate things into “Jane Speak,” which is sometimes a little more colourful.
Dixon Jones took the stage after Ken, expressing the idea that linking is even more valuable nowadays than it was a few years ago. Getting into Google and being indexed, he said, is the easy part. Google is very good at that; it’s the links that are harder to find, maintain, and have credited in your favor. Dixon explained the difference in quality traffic certain types of content and links will attract to a website. Content and sites that are easy to develop and come with a slew of bad links will attract low-quality traffic.
After a brief discussion about the joys of exploiting the Images Google bomb, Dixon spoke briefly about internal linking: many sites have made sure to link their pages in some way, but rarely do we see them linking in a way that breaks a site down into categories and makes sure the links actually relate to each other, especially in the “eyes” of a search engine.
Rob Kerry, aka evilgreenmonkey, took the stage after Dixon. After the recent directory and paid link crisis thing that I’m not going to get into any more, Rob talked about the values of mature, authoritative directories that come with strict moderation. He cited BOTW, DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory, etc., and directories that have a real value. Rob also covered some of the bad, strange, and ugly ideas people seem to get when linkbuilding, such as creating “Made for Search Engine” websites and noting “premium links.” The ugly tactics included faking PageRank by buying old domains (and thus charging for links from the faked PR sites), promoting link exchanges, and accepting all sites’ links.
Amusing us with stories of creating fake personae in order to ask for links (I guess being evil, green, and a monkey doesn’t do you any favors when digging for link juice), Rob talked about the footprints paid link schemes leave, how “Sponsored Links” and links.html pages are the kiss of death, and how you’re perfectly entitled to be stubborn about the placement of your links. During Q&A, Rob elaborated on the “footprints,” showing how many link brokers use the same CSS styling on all links so that no matter where they are, the links all look the same.
Another Q&A gem? The panel agreed that old school PR agencies can be a fantastic source of links, as they often have contacts within the BBC, CNN, and other news networks. Even if your link is only included on one of these networks’ websites once or twice a year, those links are like gold.
The next more entertaining session of the day included Dave Naylor, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Kristjan Mar Hauksson, and Dixon, who were meant to be discussing What’s New with the Algorithms, but spent their hour generally entertaining the crowd, picking on Google, directing questions to Microsoft reps, and ignoring Yahoo. Upon being questioned as to where he’d like the SEO industry to be in five years, Dave decided he’d like to ask the crowd, “Who remembers Google, yeah? Hands up. No one? Ah, good.”
Later that night, Gillian, Dave, and I went to dinner with Nathan Buggia and Mel Carson from Microsoft. The five hours of sleep I managed to get that night wasn’t so much due to staying out late (I was home by midnight, Rand!), but was because of being wide awake at 5:15am and deciding to go swimming again. Gosh, how I love hotels with swimming pools. Gillian’s session, Search Marketing for Financial Services, took place at 9am and was interrupted by Rebecca, who’d just returned home from bar trivia in Seattle and wanted to chat on Gtalk. I told her that I was insanely busy and to go away. [Note from Rebecca: You’re such a liar, Jane. I got a real-time update of Gillian’s presentation from you, and Ciarán can attest to that!]
I’d like to say that, being a naturally gifted public speaker with nerves of steel, I didn’t practice my presentation at all before I gave it, but I actually went through it a couple of times in my room, presenting it to my own reflection and to the pictures on the wall behind my head. I’m glad I did. It helped a lot once I got down to the conference hall.
For a first time speaker, the lighting situation was wonderful. The bright lights meant that I couldn’t really see the audience at all. Or maybe I just have crappier eyesight than I like to imagine, but I couldn’t see any of you, sorry. I felt like I got a pretty good reaction from the audience, although I was trumped by Ciarán, who came armed with a video of a girl in a bra, playing the drums. No amount of screenshots can top that!
Ciarán should really have tried to look less blurryI was a bit worried that Q&A would be littered with questions such as, “I have a site about [industry that’s really boring]. What can I do for linkbait?” While I think I’m quite good at thinking up appropriate yet effective linkbait for [boring industry] sites, I knew it would be hard to think things up on the spot. However, we didn’t get questions like that; the questions and comments were some of the best I’ve heard from a linkbait audience.
I knew the adrenaline and lack-of-sleep crash was coming. You get all wound up about something like that – speaking for the first time – and then once it’s over, you’re pretty much done for. I went upstairs and slept for a couple of hours before Rob Kerry’s awesome LondonSEO party at the Harcourt Arms.
Lisa Ditlefsen and I celebrate a conference well done!
I had one extra day in London before flying home to the U.S. (in case you were interested, I’ve now left my hotel and this is being composed in a cafe at Heathrow…), so Lisa Ditlefsen took me out on Saturday for a tourist day in town. I couldn’t very well have gone to England and not seen the Tower Bridge, the London Eye, the Tower of London, and Big Ben.
That evening, Tom Critchlow and Duncan Morris from Distilled took me out to a Scottish restaurant, where I ate haggis for the first time. My grandmother, born in Stirling, will be very pleased. I have to agree with Rebecca, Scott, Gillian, and everyone else who’s ever tried haggis: it’s delicious! Much like some sausages, you just have to not think about what it’s made from!
Don’t we look pleased with having eaten haggis
While I was In England, I came across plenty of fun oddities. The beer bottle opener in my room is mounted in the bathroom cabinet, next to the bathtub. It seems that the English like to party in style. Cab drivers can’t be trusted to take you to where you want to go. After saying, “Hilton Metropole. London Hilton Metropole at 244 Edgware Road” twice, this guy apparently thought I said something completely different and took me two miles in the wrong direction. British immigration officials are much nicer than their American counterparts. After asking me why I was coming to England and when I’d be leaving again, the officer stamped my passport. I almost felt like asking, “Really? That’s it?”
If this reaches your Internets before I get home, it’s because Heathrow’s wireless network has kept me connected for long enough in order to post. To all you London SEO people: thanks so much for helping make this a fantastic trip. I’ll see many of you at Pubcon… those of you who aren’t coming to Vegas in December, I hope to see you again soon thereafter!
