Img source: www.8ms.com


A few days ago I had a chance to attended yet another #BrightonSEO, where I saw many talented speakers sharing their SEO insights/tips and tools. Below are some points gathered from a few sessions I went to.

 Malcolm Coles ‘How I earned loads of links by ignoring SEO’ – its titles however controversial for us SEOs made perfect sense having heard Malcolm’s point of view or I shall rather say experience with link building.
1. Earn links when going viral after releasing some low cost (based on open source code) games. The game ‘Where is Damascus’ has got picked up and shared by such authoritative sites such as Independent or New York Times. Another great piece of content created by Malcolm- a quiz ‘How much are you hated by Daily Mail’ got also naturally shared due to its controversiality and hence popularity.
2. 'High jack the news’ – use hot news to your advantage. This shows that an interesting content triggering people’s emotions get discovered and shared naturally…
3. Adjust content to the device requirements. Great content is worthless if can’t be read on our mobiles/tablets and stats prove that whilst during the week we heavily rely on the desktops we tend to move to phones and tablets in the evenings and at the weekends. So have that in mind when releasing great infographic or multimedia content.
4. Focus on interesting yet somehow mysterious headlines- they get the most attention and convert better.
5. Target your users on Facebook . Malcolm mentioning that even though it is the most successful social platform in the UK we should not get mistaken by Facebook referrals stats tracked in whichever analytics package we use because quite simply most of the analytics software aren’t tracking visits from Facebook
correctly, displaying them under ‘direct’ traffic. Twitter visits on the other hand seem to be tracked correctly.

The Habits that Land You Links #brightonseo 2014 by @staceycav from Stacey Cavanagh


1. Run ‘written’ brainstorming sessions - 6-3-5 method of brainwriting...-6 people-5 minutes- 3 ideas generated by each person...this = 108 ideas in 30 minutes!
This would allow everybody to share their ideas and allow less outspoken members of the team to fully participate in this collaboration. She was also mentioning realtimeboard & coggle - tools which make collaboration much easier and mindnode for mind mapping for Mac users. She suggeste dchecking our ideas using simitator.com (for fake tweets generation). Generate tweets based on your ideas and split test them.
2. Focus on image attribution.
Share images on Flickr Creative Contribution and allow people to use it and credit you as the image author. Use  Image Raider to find people who are using your images and start building relationship. You may want to check freshwebexplorer to analyse mentions of your creative content being used without credit.
3. Optimise the images on Flickr (apparently majority of images appearing in Google Image Search come from Flickr).
4. Create survey based content - use survey pages such as: Google Consumer Surveys, One Pool , Toluna Quick Surveys, YouGov
5. Curate your content.
6. Turn offline campaigns into links generators.
7. Audit your contacts before you start outreach . 
Stacey focus on monitoring mentions about our client when using Google Alerts, FreshWebExplorer from Moz or Pickaanews. Finally use Buzzstream to manage this list.
8. Find some more opportunities and journalist on Journalisted,  Helpareporter or Muckrack
Stacey didn't mention using Vocus but I believe it could be a good idea as well.


From Concept to Completion: Tips for Designing Great Content from Vicke Cheung

1. Get your visual inspiration from sites such as Behance, Dribble or Pinterest not Google Images!
2. To ease the visual content execution process use tools such as realtimeboard.com to allow all the stakeholders actively participate in the project and keep them in the loop.
3. Invest in good visual elements such as fonts (great source of low cost fonts can be found at typekit.com, for free fonts go to Google fonts or fontsquirrel)
4. Drop iStock and visit stocksy for amazing –genuinely looking images. Alternatively use Flickr (creative commons) if you are on a really tight budget.
5. Be consistent!
6. Always test the outcome, use browserstack for cross-browsing tests and responsinator for checking your content being displayed on various devices.

Patric Hathaway – ‘ Cool Shit You Can Do with Wordpress’
Partick was mentioning a few great tools and plugins making our Wordpress based sites even better.
1. Use IFTTT or Zapier to connect your apps and streamline the content or automate loats of routine tasks.
2. Use INDesign altogether with Google Drive and Wordpress to automate the content creation process without the need for journalists/editors to log in to WP.
3. Use a plug in called SlickQuiz for quizzes creation
4. Find some great Wordpress parallax themes if you are a fan of scroll on pages, alternativelty use super scrollo rama - the jQuery plugin for supercool scroll animation.


Dixon Jones from MajesticSEO– ‘Do Links Still Matter in 2014’
1. Links are still important..surprise….surprise…
2. Pay attention to internal links & partial anchor text as they are ranking factors…
3. Nowadays every single link measure more depth, bread better when used in context with topicality.
4. Dixon mentioned also the new feature released by MajesticSEO on a Wednesday the 23rd of April Topical Trust Flow - it categorises the whole web.


Is Responsive the best solution to all our Mobile SEO problems> from Jose L. Truchado

Jose L. Truchado pointed out that responsive design is not always the best solution for a mobile site.


How to deliver cheap (not nasty) SEO - Brighton SEO 04/2014 from Custard Online Marketing

1. Create simple evergreen content : checklists, help/advice pages focusing on people in their research/buying stage
2. Manage expectations & set realistic KPIs
3. Concentrate on conversions (revenue, sales, enquiries or bookings) as opposed to traffic & rankings only
4. Need more traffic? Analyse your website UX with Optmizely, VWO, CrazyEgg, unbounce or ConversionXL.
5. Invest in on-page SEO (carry out technical SEO audit, analyse errors in GWT, focus on page speed, use structured data!)
6. Leverage existing assets for links (track mentions about your images/brand etc.)
7. Blog high quality content - share your expertise- and promote it


Time = Money: Marketing Lifehacks from Ned Poulter
Ned was giving away time saving tips:
1. Maintain your social accounts - use Buffer or IFTTT
2. Tweet when your audience is active - check it using Tweriod or Socialbro
3. Customise your phone notifications and alerts -Ned and I suggest turning off wi-fi and mobile Internet when at work :-)
4. Send SMS from yr PC or tablet
5. Clean -up your email inbox when setting up filters or when using Mailstrom
6. Migrate all accounts into Gmail using MigrateWiz
7. Create multiple aliases in one account
8. Filter out less important messages to a separate folder using the below shown code:

opt—out" OR unsubscribe OR "viewing the  newsletter"
OR "privacy policy" OR enews OR "edit your preferences"
OR "email notifications" OR "update profile" OR smartunsubscribe OR
secureunsubscribe OR yahoogroups OR "manage your account"
OR "qroup—digests" OR "mailing list" OR "ensure delivery"
OR "Manage your subscription" OR "click here to view"
OR "View as web" OR "mailing list"

*Add everything you still want to see in your inbox in the ‘doesn't have’ field.

 9. Schedule email reminders using FollowUP
10. Send & Archive
11. Unsubscribe from many unwanted newsletters using UnrollMe

Other Presentations can be found @SlideShare:
- Matthew Barby: Harnessing the Power of Influencers
- Bastian Grimm – The Need for Speed: How to make your website REALLY fast!
- Tony Dimmock: Pre-Qualifying and Winning New Clients
- Rob Bucci: Localizing SEO Performance
- Andrew Isidoro: Hacking the Knowledge Graph
- Carolyn Jones: Link Prospecting – Step Away from the Search Engine
- Julie Ogden: How Journalistic Principles Will Shape Digital Marketing
- David Sewell: Google as Predator: The Evolution of Search
- Tony King: Breaking Bad SEO – The Science of Crawl Space
- Lukasz Zelezny: Track your keywords like a boss
- Pete Handley: SEO Auditing Checklists & Processes
- Jon Earnshaw: Ecosystems in the age of semantic search
- Matt Evans: Stop Blind Marketing, Start Selling Through Content
- Ammon Johns: Value Your Data – Knowledge is Power
- Shaun Russell: Competitive Intelligence – How to steal your competitor’s lunch
- Adrian Durow: Think Eyes… Not Just Keywords