This week saw a few momentous events, of which I'll name two: the election and SMX London. The election seems to have been covered in a few other places, so I'm going to focus on SMX. It was a pretty awesome venue and a lot of fun. Here's a picture of me, Jay, Rob and Wiep sitting on the link building panel being dwarfed by Lyndon's lemon-coloured presentation.

Overall it was a very enjoyable conference and was the first real conference I've spoken at, so it was certainly a new experience for me. Below I've tried to give a comprehensive recap of all the sessions, both those I attended and those I didn't through the magic of INTERNET. Since it's a pretty long post here's a table of contents Wow tables of contents are really time consuming to do!!

Day 1

Keynote
The keynote was covered in more detail on the Distilled blog and on SEO Gadget, but in summary the presentations from Microsoft were a little bit too technical for a keynote (the word "pivot table" was mentioned!), but Chris managed to get some good info out of them with some probing questions afterwards.

SMX Boot Camp Track

Keyword Research Tools and Techniques
I didn't attend this but Rob did, so go and read his recap. He seemed to enjoy the session and recommends seeing Christine Churchill speak if you get the chance.

Fundamentals of Search Advertising
Ophir has recapped this session.

Link Building Fundamentals
Covered in more detail by Rob, though he doesn't really add anything to the conversation - I think this session might have been a bit basic.

Search Engine Friendly Web Design
Also covered in more detail by Rob.

Search Issues Track

The Global Search Universe
Richard Baxter has this one covered. As does Ophir.

European Search Marketing Challenges
Richard also has this one covered.

SEO & Social Media Marketing
This was another one of the sessions that I attended and I was thoroughly entertained. Jane presented on the pitfalls of widget-bait and linkbait in general and discussed the evolving landscape of Google-approved linkbait methods. It was an interesting presentation and very timely since Dave Naylor gave a presentation on the second day focused on NOT doing widget-bait, which I thought was a little bit sensationalist. In particular he gave the impression that mingle2 was banned just for doing widget-bait, which isn't quite true so it was nice that Jane set the record straight in her presentation.

Andrew Girdwood from BigMouthMedia gave a solid presentation which looked at the number of enquiries BigMouth has received, which included interest for social media charted over the past few years, and showed that almost 50% of all enquiries they receive are asking for some kind of social media engagement, which is a pretty high figure! He also charted the average salary for social media jobs over the past 6 months and showed that it's on a downward trend (unsurprising due to the current economic climate) but that they were still paid quite a lot on average!

Then Ciaran gave what I think was probably one of the best sessions of the conference, detailing the Altogether social media theoretical and practical strategy which is an adapted version of the Forrester POST methodology.

Read a few more reviews of this session from Ciaran himself and Richard.

International SEO
Duncan was presenting on this panel but I was elsewhere so I didn't get to catch it. Apparently it devolved into a bit of an argument about whether CC TLD or sub-folder is the best way to go in terms of international targeting. I don't think the answer has changed since the last time everyone had this argument in that the correct answer is - IT DEPENDS! :-)

Richard summed up the session in more detail as he was actually there, as did Ophir

SMX Advanced Track: Focus on Ads

Pump Up Your Paid Search
This was a fairly interesting session, I'm not going to talk about it in too much depth since I didn't take many notes (perhaps because it was the first session of the day and I was sleepy). The presentations seemed to focus on quality score and bid management tools quite heavily, which I personally didn't find too interesting, but there were a couple of interesting takeaways. In amongst the talk about quality score, however, was an interesting presentation from Pete Wailes at Searchlight Digital which focused on taguchi testing and PAM-VAR methodology (which is a fancy term for the 80/20 rule I used back in my PPC basics Whiteboard Friday video a while back). It was a little complicated at times but he demonstrated his point well, which is that you should be using this to make your ad testing more efficient. He linked to a spreadsheet from his presentation which does the analysis for you and also mentioned that they're releasing a tool online soon to do the same thing - let me know when you release it, Pete, I'm looking forward to it!

Landing Page Testing & Optimisation
I didn't attend this one but Rob did so he can tell you about it.

Search Marketing & Persona Models
Will was presenting on this panel in place of Gillian from SEOmoz but no one seemed to have talked about it. Sorry Will! Care to share your thoughts and I'll add them in here?

Avoiding PPC Pitfalls
As with the first PPC session of the day, I didn't take many notes at this session. The biggest thing I took away from the session was the presentation from Ian Harris at Search Laboratory, which was both entertaining and very informative - he talked about how you can use filters in Google Analytics to get exact keyphrase reporting for your broad match phrases. While it's not ground breaking to get this data (a few tools will do it), all the ones I'd seen previously required hacking the analytics code to implement. This can be done purely by adding filters, which is pretty neat as it means you don't need to get the techies involved to make changes to the site. Download the guide here, though you'll need to get in touch with him via the contact form to get it.

London SEO

Day 2

Alternative Tactics & Diagnosis Track

Brand & Reputation Management Strategies
Rob went to this one.

Integrating Search & Display Advertising Campaigns
I don't know anyone who went to this one: drop me a link if you know of anyone who's written about it.

International Search Advertising Opportunities
I don't know anyone who went to this one: drop me a link if you know of anyone who's written about it.

Paid Search Checkup
I don't know anyone who went to this one: drop me a link if you know of anyone who's written about it.

Heavy Duty SEO Track

Industrial Strength SEO
Henry Elliss from Tamar Search Conversion Agency wrote about this session.

SEO for Web 2.0 Sites
This was the second panel I was speaking on at the conference, and I enjoyed it immensely. Dave Naylor and Mikkel deMib are a hilarious double act to hang around with, and I got the impression that Nathan from Live got drowned out a little in the Q&A, which got bogged down in a discussion of cloaking. Still, there was some great content - Dave gave a warning to web 2.0 sites to make sure you keep control of UGC, which fitted quite nicely alongside my own presentation that discussed how you can leverage UGC for fun and profit. Nathan gave a good presentation on how to best integrate rich media into your website without sacrificing design. Mikkel then discussed the technical ins and outs of using Ajax. All in all, it was a fun session to be on.

Richard and Tamar Search Conversion Agency have covered this session in more depth, so go check them out.

Search 3.0: Video & Blended Search Results
Ciaran, Tamar Search and Lucy all covered this session so I won't go into too much detail, but suffice to say Ciaran was entertaining as always and I picked up a few solid tips on optimising videos for YouTube. Brian talked about the future of video indexing, which was interesting but perhaps not that useful (for me at least), and Tom discussed image optimisation, which was actually quite enjoyable although I think he shot himself in the foot a little by saying that image search never converts (which isn't always true).

Search 3.0: Local Search & Blended Results
Again, Lucy and Tamar Search both covered this one in more depth than me, so I won't dwell on it but I did pick up a few key points - the most important one being that 3rd party reviews are one of the most important factors in getting in the one-box. Interesting.

SMX Advanced Track: Focus on Organic

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques
This was actually the first session I spoke on at SMX, but due to the way I've formatted the post it's below the other one. Whatever. Being my first proper speaking gig, I was a little nervous but actually think it went really smoothly, despite a few errs here and there. It was a lot of fun presenting alongside Jay, Lyndon and Wiep. While Jay's session focused on link buying and so did the Q&A, actually there were loads of organic, white-hat link building methods discussed so hopefully we managed to present a range of options.

Wiep and Lucy both recap the session in more detail and Rishi was kind enough to forward me his series of Twitter updates which describe the session quite nicely:

Lyndon:
Psychological hooks in viral content for linkbait. Exciting people on a fundamental level. Linking is like buying into the story – the more that buy into it, the more they spread the story.
 
Hooks in viral content are like velcro, the more hooks you use, the stickier the story is. E.g Lyndons famous linkbait story was loaded with a range of emotional hooks.
 
Tom Critchlow:
 
Donating to charities! Trusted sites high value.
 
Use expired pages to build links, eg high profile sites that don't update but page is still live. Mine the page for back links and diverting.
 
Use advanced operators to find expired pages e.g “intitle:no+longer+available”
 
Once you have found a site with an expired page, don't just use the resource once, run a site wide query to find other expired pages on site
 
Forums are a great way to mine ideas for viral link bait. Let the community help you build the viral content! No need to be a genius writer.
 
Wiep: Wiep.net Talking about leveraging the recession for links
 
Tip: Train your staff on link building. Improve internal efficiencies.
 
Leverage news sites to talk about recession in your industry and offer your business as a study, positive or negative effects
 
Link mine back links of businesses no longer operational. Tip: use sites like www.insolvency.gov.uk to find these.
 
Develop recession related content, humorous, factual, widgets etc that will encourage links. Recession link bait FTW!

My Secret Weapon
Will was speaking on this panel and thankfully Lucy has this one covered.

Buying Sites for SEO
Anyone attend this? Anything to add?

What You Should Be Measuring But Aren't
Anyone attend this? Anything to add?

Expert Website Reviews with the Search Engines
As Rand mentioned, SEOmoz was submitted to the site review panel, which made the session fun if not actually that enlightening in terms of SEO knowledge. The most important thing I would imagine for people from this session is a look into what tools the guys use to analyse a site. Most of them either aren't publicly available or I already knew about them, but it was a fun session nonetheless.

Summary
Phew - this has been a long blog post, sorry about that! Hopefully it's been informative though. To summarise, I was really impressed by the conference despite it being quite small. The content of the sessions was on par with SMX Advanced in my opinion, which makes it a pretty useful conference. Things I particularly liked include the venue (awesome chandeliers), the food (as always it was delicious) and the people. Even though I picked up a few things here and there from the sessions, by far the most useful part of these events is the networking. The only thing I didn't like about it was the lack of wifi. The wifi was £20 per day and apparently was patchy at best. This was a bit disappointing and I think it meant overall a lot less coverage of the sessions via Twitter/blogs, etc. The only other constructive criticism I'd add is that there were a few sessions (Global Search Universe, European SEO and International SEO) which all seemed to cover very similar things. However, both of those points didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying the experience! :-)

In case you can't be bothered reading all of the above, here are 25 tips picked up at the session.