This past week, a team of us from Blend Creative Minds travelled down from Birmingham to Brighton for the BrightonSEO conference. The bi-annual show is a beacon for SEO practitioners the world over, providing them with a place to interact, discuss, and share new information.
The conference was split across three stages – the Concert Hall and the Studio Theatre were housed in the Brighton Dome, and the Old Courthouse across the road served as the 3rd venue. We attended many interesting talks from world leaders in Search Engine Optimisation across these three venues. The talks were organised into blocks, each focusing on a certain topic.
Gisele Navarro speaking about international outreach
We really enjoyed the block focusing on Links. Aleyda Solis, International SEO specialist, opened with a talk on content curation, link building and growing your search visibility. She was followed by Laura Crimmons, Social and PR manager at Branded3, who discussed how SEO teams can better integrate with PR teams , through including them in SEO campaign planning, helping them hit their KPI’s and showing that SEO adds a lot of value. The segment closed with Gisele Navarro, Head of Outreach at NeoMam, talking about International outreach. This one was actually one of our favourite decks in the “Link” block.
Gisele shared some really actionable tips and this is what we like. The talk included an eye opening fact - 72% of internet users don’t speak English!
Some of the "Keep Calm and Trust SEO" t-shirts available at brightonSEO
After a lunch break, the theme shifted to Semantics. Jan-Willem Bobbink, of Acronym Media, brought out his thoughts and ideas on the “Semantic Web and Structured Data”. It included insight into Google’s attempts to build a unprecedentedly large database of information - called the Knowledge Vault - which automatically gathers and merges information from across the web. Dawn Anderson, of Move It Marketing, had arguably the best presentation, discussing how to make Ontology work for you in the wake of Google’s Hummingbird update.
And these two blocks where just the tip of the iceberg. Topics such as Strategy, Data, Content and Analytics were discussed on the stages, and there were innumerable debates all around the floor, as SEO experts from around the world came together to exchange all the latest news in the SEO world. It was an invaluable weekend, and we are certain to book for the next show in April the second tickets are available!
