I have attended an extremely large number of SEO-focused events in the past 7 years, planned and run seminars and training myself, contributed keynotes and sessions to major conferences and yet, I believe Distilled’s Link Building day in London has just, in my opinion, grabbed the title of “best single day of content” ever at an SEO event.
In the past, I’ve been impressed in particular by the more expert-level shows like SMX Advanced, SES London and SEOmoz’s own PRO Training (now officially MozCon), but this one took the cake. I’m, apparently, not the only one who thinks so:
I obviously can’t give away all of the phenomenal tips and content from the day, but I can share a few of my notes:
- Martin MacDonald of SEOForums showed the remarkable power of updatable, embedded widgets and how these can be remotely controlled to shift link locations, anchor text, etc. on the fly. He ran a specific experiment to show it off that had the crowd gasping and Tom Critchlow tweeting:
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_ - Wil Reynolds, founder of SeerInteractive explained a tactic his team’s put to remarkable use over the years. First, check pages 10+ of the SERPs for your target keyword and you’ll often find sites that have been abandoned or largely neglected. Use the top pages functionality from Open Site Explorer or Majestic to find the resources those sites built that earned links, then remake modern, updated versions on your site (or for your client). Now, simply contact the sites/pages that linked to the old version and presto – a huge opportunity for the revitalization of great content and a direct path to links.
- Jane Copland, link specialist and SEO extraordinairre at Ayima talked about the problems with aggressive anchor text links, even if they come from good sources. She explained that risk can be mitigated by diversifying with branded anchor text and “click here” style links. Her recommendation, strange though it might seem, is to use the trusted, relationship links for non-optimized anchor text to help build a greater profile of trust. Even good links from partners and completely white-hat endorsements can look suspicious if they constantly use your top keywords as anchors.
- Russ Jones of Virante looked deeply into how to leverage classic “linkbait” now that Digg has (mostly) died. His findings with regard to Reddit are remarkable – even a few votes on a medium-popularity subreddit have sent him 35K+ visits (which is as high as Digg in the past). What’s more, though links are hard to come by, Facebook shares/likes and Tweets aren’t, and these can help with rankings, too.
And there’s good coverage from a few bloggers, too:
Tickets are still available for New Orleans this coming Friday, but sales close Tuesday, March 22nd around 12 noon Eastern (less than 40 hours away).
I can promise you’ll get more value and link building goodness in that one day than anywhere else, and at a great value. I just checked Kayak, and many US cities have roundtrip rates under $400 for a ticket.
p.s. Just to be wholly transparent, while SEOmoz does not benefit financially from these events, we do have a long-term partnership with Distilled. I really do feel that this was the best day of content at a conference I’ve attended, including ones I’ve organized. Suppose I’ll just have to step up my game 🙂
