Friday the 13th, a packed schedule, awesome speakers, 20 x 20 Pecha Kucha, a new use for Pinterest, Street Fighter, Swingball, Magicians, and the launching of a new website on stage… closely followed by Chips, Beer on the Pier and Karaoke can only mean one thing – yup – Brighton SEO!
Brainchild of State of Searcher Kelvin Newman, Brighton SEO kicked off on the Thursday with a series of training workshops including; PR Link Building (Chris Lee – VP of Digital, Emanate PR) , Advanced GA (Dara Fitzgerald – Head of Insight, FreshEgg), and an intro to coding (Dom Hodgson – CEO, Ember Ads). The conference itself took place on Friday with a format of one-speaker-after-another, meaning that you could sit through all talks, in comfort, nipping out for complementary coffee as and when.
This was the first time I have been to Brighton SEO and what a lovely surprise! Firstly, I was lucky to get a ticket seeing as they ‘sold’ out in a record number of minutes, secondly the conference had the same level of speaker that I have seen at many other paid conferences (but this one was FREE and friendly), and thirdly, this all took place in the beautiful Georgian building that is the Brighton Dome – let’s face it, sitting in a darkened theatre on plush velvet seats adds an atmosphere and charm that is unrivalled on the conference circuit. Combine that with pre lunchtime cabaret in the form of Magic Sam and you have your perfect seaside weekender!
Speakers:
● Panel - Ask the Engines with Pierre Far, Dave Coplin, Martin McDonald, Rishi Lakhani & Tony Goldstone
● Phillip Sheldrake – Future SEO Vistas – the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things
● Sam Noble – How to launch or re-launch a brand or product online effectively
● Adam Lee – Killer Market Research for Peanuts
● Glenn Jones – Microformats and SEO
● Roland Dunn – Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths? What Do Searchbots Actually Do?
● Charlie Peverett – It’s only words? Working with Content Strategy
● Lexi Mills – How you can get BIG links from BIG media sites
● James Owen - Maximizing your SEO Agencies
● Natasha Davids – A Starters Guide to Display for SEOs
● Stefan Hull & Gary Preston – Search marketing – from Panda to Black Swan
20 x 20 Pecha Kucha Sessions:
● Kevin Gibbons – 20 Tools You May Not Have Heard Of, But Should Be Using
● Chelsea Blacker - Sell the Sizzle, Not The Search: Tactics for Appeasing Marketing Directors
● Tony King - Enterprise SEO Titties
● Craig Lister - SEO & PPC Working Together in Harmony – on Pinterest Slides!
● James Carson – I Believe Authors are the Future
● Nichola Stott - Mobile Serendipity: How Google Plans to Send Search Results to Users, Before You’ve Even Thought to Look
● Dom Hodgson – I appear to have started a sweetshop (and advertising company) [no link slides - ahem]
The Sessions
I did not attend every session but here is the run down of the ones I did!
Ask the Engines with Pierre Far, Dave Coplin, Martin McDonald, Rishi Lakhani & Tony Goldstone
Many topics covered including the now regular debate of whether SEO as a term or industry is soon to be a thing of the past, what’s with the de-indexing and how to work out the good and bad links, how to shape a content strategy, Google re-designs, Bing and Social media, and not provided. Bing even updated their home page with a picture of Brighton Pier for the day.
Main Takeaways: As with many panels of late the answer to ‘is SEO dead?’ is a big fat NO! With no industry standards of qualifications SEO may have to re-vamp its own image to attract graduates into the industry and to move forward, we still aren’t sure if rich snippets are a ranking factor, do we really care about Google re-designs, and in most peoples experience, Webmaster Tools cannot be trusted – even though Google says they can!
How to launch or re-launch a brand or product online effectively – Sam Noble
Fellow State of Search blogger Koozai Sam took us through the trials and tribulations of re-branding using the experiences Koozai had with their own re-brand. Sam covered reasons to re-brand, what to think about with visual identity, sub brands under your main banner, different audiences, the importance of research, working with specialists, how to come up with a name, trademarks and domain names… all that in 20 minutes – Go Sam!
Takeaways:
● Do your research
● Engage a specialist!
● Choose a name, make it memorable
● Secure the Trademarks
● Register everything, social entities, domain names
● Don’t keep checking your domain or it might mysteriously be registered under your nose
● Register all the domains even if you aren’t going to use them – someone else might
● Avoid Fridays for Go Live
● Keep up with negative press
http://www.slideshare.net/Koozai/final-final-relaunching-a-brand-online-brighton-seo-v2
Microformats and SEO – Glenn Jones
A technical rundown of schemas micro data, microformats, RDFa, with examples of code, and published examples of Yorkshire Pudding recipes.
Use the Google Rich Snippet Tool to test code and watch the slideshare file to get your hands on the example code!
http://www.slideshare.net/glennjones/microformats-and-seo-12527640
The following talks, I only caught part of, or they were too fast and technical to write down, but you should get plenty from the slides!
● Future SEO Vistas – the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things – Phillip Sheldrake
● Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths? What Do Searchbots Actually Do? – Roland Dunn
● It’s only words? Working with Content Strategy – Charlie Peverett
● How you can get BIG links from BIG media sites – Lexi Mills
20×20 Pecha Kucha
If you’re not familiar with Pecha Kucha. The participants are required to use 20 slides with 20 seconds on each (a more recent version ‘bettakulcha’ requires 20 slides of 15 seconds each!). This results in fast paced informative sessions and a lot of information in 40 minutes!
Dom Hodgson stole the show by spending half of his slides talking about a winking squirrel, the rest talking about his accidental sweetshop click n mix, and announcing the launch of his new venture Ember Ads on stage with Party Poppers (to the horror of the venue cleaners) – great end to a great day!
I have linked to the slides as otherwise, we’ll be here all day 
● Kevin Gibbons – 20 Tools You May Not Have Heard Of, But Should Be Using
● Chelsea Blacker - Sell the Sizzle, Not The Search: Tactics for Appeasing Marketing Directors
● Tony King - Enterprise SEO Titties
● Craig Lister - SEO & PPC Working Together in Harmony – on Pinterest Slides!
● James Carson – I Believe Authors are the Future
● Nichola Stott - Mobile Serendipity: How Google Plans to Send Search Results to Users, Before You’ve Even Thought to Look
● Dom Hodgson – I appear to have started a sweetshop (and advertising company) [no link slides - ahem]
A Big Thank You
To Kelvin for an amazing day and more fun than one can shake a stick at! Roll on next years’ Brighton SEO – make sure you are on the mailing list or you could miss out when the tickets are launched!
For photos of the event
- Brighton SEO by Day on FB
- Brighton SEO on Google Plus (includes networking & karaoke!)
Silicon Beach have also recently put up videos of Brighton SEO
Posted in Events | Tags: brightonseo
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Hi JackieGreat roundup article – such a good show, can’t wait for the next one.Just to let people know that BrightonSEO commissioned a souvenir poster from myself for the event and you can see a digital version here:Brighton SEO Infographic | April 2012
Shelli
[...] BrightonSEO’s Evolution, Community and some Karaoke Fun! 0 April 28th, 2012ismepeteUncategorizedBrightonSEO has changed a lot since my first trip down to Brighton in December 2009 (I think) to go for a drink with some fellow SEOs. This was my first trip out into the wild that is the SEO community and I haven’t looked back since. That first night I got to meet some industry type folks that I still speak to today, such as Anna Lewis, Any Keetch & Kelvin Newman, although its still with some sadness that I remember it was Jaamit that persuaded me to actually get my arse in gear to go and visit it. Still missed mate, still missed.The First BrightonSEO Mini-ConferenceThis was the first conference of any description that I’d ever been too, and with a few short days warning and not a great amount of prep I was actually talking at it too!I don’t think anyone really knew what to expect from it all really – it was upstairs in a pub called the Quadrant, which in many ways still feels like its spiritual home, although sadly the conference itself appears to have massively outgrown that venue now. It felt like I was talking in front of quite a large crowd, and it certainly got bigger as the day went on, although I suspect I spoke in front of far fewer people than I thought at the time!(Thanks to Silicon Beach Training for getting me this picture)I did quite a big write up of this at the time, and whilst I quite enjoyed speaking, I think I would do a better job with it now that I’ve seen a wide range of speakers on a wide range of topics. I’ve certainly learnt a lot more about SEO in the following years.A mercifully brief section of my presentation is on YouTube if you are interested.Growth of the ConferenceOver the following couple of years, the popularity of BrightonSEO exploded.I first met my now business partner Nichola Stott at the next one where she was talking, and met a wide range of hugely interesting folks within the industry over the course of them as a whole.From the top of my head, I think the next event was about 150-200 people in a large room upstairs in a community centre, growing to 400 odd at a university building with the next, through to filling the corn exchange at the one before last.I think this was around about 500 booked in, although there were some inevitable no-shows (and I could be totally wrong with these numbers).A recurring theme for me at all of these events is the amount of people that I’ve met for the first time that already feel like they’ve been friends for years. Social media does a really good job of the introductions, and so many people I’ve gone on to meet, its just felt so easy and natural. In many cases we actually have been talking for years by that point, so perhaps that’s natural!What has evolved at the BrightonSEO’s is a real sense of community as its continued to grow. Every time there are some familiar faces to catch up with (many that I’ve only ever actually seen at these events), and as each year goes on, its grown further. I really hope that this can continue as it continues to evolve in the future.Spring 2012 BrightonSEO – Fun, Games & KaraokeThis one was the biggest one yet, with over 1000 people at the sold out in minutes event.I won’t do a write up of the content as such of this event, as this has been covered in great depth in some awesome posts elsewhere, including these:http://delicious.com/stacks/view/EwV9qd (great stack of coverage)http://www.samosborneseo.co.uk/brighton-seo-2012-ten-key-things-to-take-away/http://www.seofosho.com/blog/brighton-seo-2012-round-uphttp://seono.co.uk/2012/04/14/my-top-10-takeaways-from-brightonseo-april-2012/http://www.shellshockuk.com/brighton-seo-infographic-april-2012/http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/15-top-quotes-and-takeaways-from-brighton-seo/http://www.coastdigital.co.uk/blog/2012/04/18/brighton-seo-2012-thoughts/http://www.stateofsearch.com/brighton-seo-one-hell-of-a-free-search-conference-brightonseo/http://www.receptional.com/blogs/internet-marketing/brighton-seo-rounduphttp://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/blog/brighton-seo-round-up/http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/brighton-seo-2012-round-up-morning-session/http://interactive.hotwirepr.com/blog_global/industry/top-five-memories-from-brightonseo.htmlhttp://www.freshegg.com/blog/brightonseo-spring-2012-review-2_12519And below are most of the slides etc:Future SEO Vistas(Re)Launching a Brand or Product online EffectivelyMicroformats and SEOSearchbots – Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths?It’s Only Words? Working with A Content StrategyAdvanced Search Queries for SEO20 Tools You May Not Have Heard of But Should Be UsingSell the Sizzle Not the SearchSEO & PPC Working Together in HarmonyI Believed Authors are the FutureMobile Serendipity: How Google Plans to Send Search Results to Users, Before You’ve Even Thought to LookInstead, I’ll look at some of the fun things that went on that day that I got involved with.First of all, I raised my hand to get involved with an on-stage competition:This involved being the first one to hit the target with an awesome nerf gun rifle. Fortunately my opponent didn’t quite manage to hit the target with their first three efforts, and I lined up the shot, had a loosener with the first, shooting just over, and hit the target smack bang in the middle with shot number 2.BOOM – I was in the final, much later in the day (just before the day at the Dome finished up)Whilst Kelvin was getting this setup we had to keep the crowd warmed up. For my bit I talked up the later Karaoke on the pier, and was nearly convinced by the crowd to break in to song A cappella, but fortunately I forgot the words of the main tune I’ve been practising for PeteStock of late, and my phone was mercifully turned off so I couldn’t jog my memory in sufficient time to have a go. But I did promise to sing Bohemian Rhapsody later that evening, and my later fate was sealed (although, I had already promised Kelvin when talk of Karaoke was first mooted a few months ago)When Kelvin was ready for us, we found out that competition involving a head to head match up in Street Fighter 2… I’ll confess I groaned when I saw this – I never had a console back in those days, and whilst my opponent had never played the game, I had and I knew I was bad at it! Needless to say, I put in an embarrassing show that would subject me (rightly) to mockery for the rest of evening (and for some time since).Before leaving for the day, I also managed to get the ShitForLinks stuff that I’d bartered for ahead of the event:I’ve fortunately never really been that fazed by a bit of banter, or doing silly things for the amusement of others.So on that note, here is a little video of me singing Bohemian Rhapsody (badly as ever for those that have heard me sing it before), featuring some awesome accompaniment from some friends:I think the incessant cackle of laughter tells its own story really – hope you chuckled too!Thanks to the SiteVisibility Facebook page for the photo’s I stole, and Ben Norman for the hugely, amusingly embarrassing video!Bigger thanks has to go to Kelvin for organising all these events to. Good work sir, and please, on behalf of all of us – please keep them coming! Now that you are finished here, go watch the “proper” videos of the presentations from the last event. ismepete (26 Posts)I'm an online marketer, specialising in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I write for theMediaFlow Search Engine Marketing blog, write my own personal blog covering online marketing and what's going on in my life and manage and contribute to a food blog. /* [...]