This is the third time, I've been to an SEOmoz / Distilled SEO conference. Yet again, it proved to be a great opportunity to learn new SEO stuff, our refresh knowledge, and have a chance to network with people from all over the world.

You can imagine how difficult it is to summarise two full days of detailed sessions into one post; hence, I’m going to cover some of the key points that should be helpful for agency and in-house SEOs alike.

Building Communities – The Key to Start-ups

Rand Fishkin kicked off the first day with “Everything’s easier with fans” session. According to Rand, building communities is the key to start-ups. There are different platforms available to build communities, such as Media Piston, however some key principles are:

• Find people and reward them.
• Write about other people and communities and engage with them.
• Create a common enemy – this will help to keep the community together. A common enemy could be a concept, e.g. black hat practices / practitioners within the SEO community.

Corporate SEO – Pre-deliver the Big Vision

Tom Critchlow gave a good commercial session on pitching the big idea to potential clients, yet ensuring you break this down into bite-sized chunks the client can understand and tie in to KPI’s.  

He made a key point of reporting and ensuring SEO not only reports on keyword rankings, traffic and conversions, but also focuses on industry movements. Whilst I agree with this statement, you do need to be careful that your clients don't get lost in the dark!

Modern SEO Toolkit – Magic Tool to Achieve Top Rankings

Everyone was hoping Will Critchlow would present a magic tool that achieves number #1 rankings for all your target keywords; however this was not the case! The useful productivity and SEO tools he presented were:

• Skitch - Easy-to-use, free app that helps you capture, edit, and markup your screen captures and images with shapes and comments.
• Screenr - Instant screencasts: Just click record. Screenr's web-based screen recorder makes it a breeze to create and share your screencasts around the web.
• Smartsheet – Good project management, collaboration, and file sharing features, Smartsheet's intuitive spreadsheet-like app is used to track and manage diverse types of work.
• Screaming Frog - A desktop SEO program that crawls websites' links, images, CSS, scripts, and apps.
• Tamper Data – A Firefox Add-on to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters.
• STAT Codex - A free resource made for the SEO community, providing sophisticated real-time analytics for top performing websites in a dozen categories.
• Data Couch – Share and collaborate on open and public datasets. Help share the burden of releasing and formatting messy data.
• Server Density - Server monitoring, e.g. CPU, memory, disk, network, Apache, MongoDB, MySQL, and more. E-mail/SMS alerts. iPhone / Android server monitoring apps.
• Face.com – A technology company with face recognition software that automatically detects and recognises faces in photos.

Links – Key to the Success of SEO

There were a few sessions relating to link-building / bait, and here are some tips on how to build effective link building strategies:

• If you’re planning an infographic, then start your research by analysing your competitors and their infographic links' profile.
• For infographic design inspiration, you can search similar images within Google image results.
• Government and charitable trust foundations pay for huge research reports, and these reports could be converted into infographics.
• You can pitch to potential publishers first for any infographics ideas you may have before you start a design to ensure your target market is interested in your ideas or their suggestions may help refine your ideas.
• Give away free images, videos, presentations, graphs, and charts for link acquisition.
• iPhone is the recipe to success for linkbait. Put  “iPhone” in headings and win links.
• Creating widgets is an old technique, but a good way to generate inbound links to the interior product pages.
• You can engage with bloggers via voucher codes or other incentives.

If you're looking more link-building tips, Patrick Altoft’s link-building presentation, "Real World Link-Building," is available for download.

Social – It's All about SoLoMo

Ciàran Norris kicked of the second day with "Personalisation, Profiles, and Privacy" session. According to Ciàran, the future is all about SoLoMo (social, local, and mobile). Key points are from this session are:

• We’re all focusing on what we know, but people might be interested in what they don’t know or what they need to know. Have a look at the unsocial app, and all will make sense!
• The EU Cookie Law is important within the European search industry despite its lack of bite in the UK. (Implementation is postponed within the UK until 2012.) Make sure that if you are operating within the EU that you are compliant with local country cookie laws.

Google HTTPS – sorry, there was no clear direction on this.

During the Q&A session, there were questions about Google's recent move to the HTTPS and its impact on SEO keywords reporting. As there are no clear instructions available from Google, speakers were unable to give a definite verdict on this. However, Martin MacDonald has setup a Google Petition about Keyword Transparency and is seeking people like us to sign the petition so spread the word.

Useful Resources & Tools

There were some sites and tools that were mentioned repeatedly, either as link bait examples or for sites that could aid efficiency:

• Attensity – Text analytics solutions for customer experience management.
• Cotweet – Helps teams manage one or more Twitter accounts by providing tweet assignments, notes, and on duty status.
• Evernote – Highly recommended by Stephen Pavlovich during his conversion rate optimisation presentation.
• Followerwonk – Find users by searching their Twitter bios, compare Twitter relationships with others, visualise social graphs, and track and measure relationship performance.
• Free Digital Photos – Download free images for use in corporate and personal projects.
• Oyster.com – An example how a business can create a website with real photos and expert reviews.
• Quora – A collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organised by everyone who uses it.
• Radian6 – Tools for real-time social media monitoring and analysis designed primarily for PR and ad agencies.
• Simply Measured – Helps marketers get social media data and create beautiful, custom reports in Excel and online.
• Take This Lollypop – A great example of true link bait and demonstrates the power of social media with more than 5.7 million Facebook likes.
• The Museum of Me – Another example of link bait with 800K Facebook likes, which shows how big brands can engage on social networks.
• Trackur – Offers white-labelled social media monitoring tools.
• Zemanta – This is the ultimate tool to blog smarter.

I have to say that Duncan Morris was a great host; but it would have been even better if he was one of the speakers as well!

All the speakers were great; however, it’s difficult to cover all of them and write about each session in one blog post. Here is the list of SearchLove London speakers with Twitter details, so you can follow them:

• Ciàran Norris - @ciaranj
• Duncan Morris - @duncanmorris
• Hannah Smith - @hannah_bo_banna
• Joanna Lord - @joannalord
• Joost de Valk - @yoast
• Martin McDonald - @searchmartin
• Mat Clayton - @matclayton
• Patrick Altoft - @patrickaltoft
• Rand Fishkin - @randfish
• Richard Baxter - @richardbaxter
• Rob Ousbey - @robousbey
• Stephen Pavlovich - @conversionfac
• Tom Critchlow - @tomcritchlow
• Wiep Knol - @wiep
• Wil Reynolds - @wilreynolds
• Will Critchlow - @willcritchlow