Farewell To LinkLove
So last Friday a small bunch of colleagues and I took a trip down to the big smoke to attend the famous LinkLove conference put on by the great people at Distilled. Despite previous visits to the sister conference SearchLove, we had never been to LinkLove before so were intrigued to what we’d find. This seemed especially fitting as it was the last ever LinkLove we soon found out – it was nice to be there in person to wave it goodbye (something to tell the grandchildren too eh!).
With the intangible sixth sense us SEO’s have, we’re all fairly aware that the nature of link building is changing, maybe even dying (but it’s not dead yet, eh Will Critchlow?). Link building is still super important and probably remains the most influential ranking factor – but the link building of previous generations may just be expiring to be replaced by a more natural, social focused form of building (not to be confused with social shares however, just yet).
Here are the key takeaways from my favourite speakers of the day;
- Will Reynolds – At SEER they’ve added a video of why it’s great to work for them on the page you get to when you’ve submitted your CV; very nice touch and sure to help recruitment.
- Lyndon Antcliff – Think of developing link bait as publishing; people see content, and people link to contact. So develop it to appeal to people and their emotions.
- Hannah Smith – the best tip of the day here for me, use a content curation plugin called Zemanta. This great tool helps with your blog production and aids natural link building.
- Richard Baxter – some great stuff on API’s in excel, bit over my head to be honest but some of my colleagues loved it!
- Ade Lewis – Great tips on how to look after and manager smaller SEO campaigns. Also gave away a fantastic tool to use to find potential links – www.teapotseo.co.uk/prospector-tool. Also great tips of finding orphaned links for your clients – head over to his site for more info on that.
- Rand Fishkin – Tips on how to turn your CEO into a link building machine! Some real good advice, just need to convince your CEO to take on the tips – really good if you have active management.
- Will Critchlow – always keep me engaged, this lad! Very entertaining and thought provoking speech about links. Best point made – for Distilled, the links that send the most engaged users on their site are either nofollowed or behind a paywall! Future of links maybe…..
There were many more great speakers, too many to mention. But it was definitely a fun and information filled day! Lot’s to think about and to implement on our clients websites.
Big thanks has to be made to the people at Distilled for putting on a such a great day, lovely venue and the food wasn’t too bad either. Also, free alcohol
at the after show party was a great idea and went down very well with the Creare lot!
