Brighton

Here’s a roundup of our top 5 takeouts from Friday’s excellent BrightonSEO event:

Start using rich snippets

This seemed to be a common theme running through most of the presentations. Rich snippets are becoming an increasingly important part of SEO. Get involved or get left behind.

Rich Snippet

Go beyond Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics

Google’s controversial decision to hide keyword data is an indication that as it gradually becomes more and more evil, insights from its products will become more difficult to obtain. SEOs need to start thinking about third party analytics and even examining log files to decipher where exactly their traffic is coming from, and how users are moving around their sites.

Content is still king

Charlie Peverett’s content strategy presentation outlined the need for SEOs to think about content as more than just words. The importance of sharing content socially is becoming a greater part of Google’s algorithm, so make it easy for your visitors to do so.

Content is still king...

Own social profiles to dominate brand SERPs

Koozai’s Sam Noble did a great presentation on branding and highlighted the importance of owning all of your brand’s social profiles in order to dominate the SERPs for your brand term.

Have a Plan B

In my opinion, the most useful and insightful presentation of the day came from Propellernet’s Gary Preston, in which he discussed Google’s latest ‘Black Swan’ algorithm updates and how they could be rationalised. If you are focussing on SEO activity that Google is likely to crack down on in the future (e.g. obviously paid links), make sure you have a plan B.