SMX London is one of the better SEO events and is being held at the Chelsea football ground, with a plethora of exciting topics advertised and some amazing speakers.
This year, we have headed down to SMX London en mass, a great SEO event, so that we can attend both tracks and feed more of the latest information back from the industry leaders to our client campaigns. Today, the topics have been split along the traditional lines of SEO and PPC.
While there is far too much information to fit into this piece, we just wanted to share some of the excitement prior to posting more detailed pieces in the coming days.
The morning SEO track featured a breakdown of the periodic table of SEO, kicked off (in his usual inimitable style) by Grant Simmons who discussed the table and how to mix the elements for success.
Next up was Searchmetrics who brought their own data to the table from their ranking factor study, which supports many of the points in the table. Janaya Wilkins (Ayima) ended the session with the resonating note, to take a step back when dealing with big data and begin with the end in mind.
Next up was a discussion on the Hummingbird update and how Google basically changed their entire search engine with barely anyone noticing.
This session was led by David Amerland (HMS Media) and Justin Briggs (Getty Images) and the recurring theme was Entities and how to utilise them within the copy of your website for best effect.
After lunch, we headed to the longevity of SEO session, in which each speaker echoed the sentiment that the best long term strategy remains as focusing on the end user.
While there will be changes to how search as a whole moves forward, this simple concept will remain. Whether, we move to wearable tech or delve deeper into semantic search (or perhaps they are on the same branch of technology) ultimately the users will always have the final say to the success of a site.
Tim Grice (Branded3) led an interesting talk on engagement, which echoed the sentiments drawn from our own presentations back in the March Digital State SEO Surgery, in that you can use Analytics reporting to draw information about how people use your site. He also added, that we perhaps should shy away from removing content that isn’t working.
The second afternoon session was a lively q & a led by Danny Sullivan (founder of Search Engine Land and general SEO god) with search engine representatives from Google and Bing.
The topics of this session have been vast, ranging from legal considerations, is link building dead? and rich snippets. Danny Sullivan asked the questions and made the statements that every SEO dreamed of asking.
After the break we are heading into the SEO toolbox and then the keynote speech is “will data save marketing” by Ajit Sivadasan (VP of Lenovo Corporation). This has been one of the best SEO events and one we will return to.
