The aphorism A rising tide lifts all boats resonated from last Friday's Link Building Seminar in London, hosted by Distilled. It was industry first, me second--how refreshing!

A newcomer to the SEO conference circuit dominated in recent years by the likes of SES, SMX and PubCon, the seminar differentiated itself from the pack by aiming to elevate the conversation and industry's collective knowledge rather than promote the consulting and/or e-books of a few individuals or firms.

Expert speakers were put on the spot to "give up" their best secrets, and even appeared at the end to compete with one another for revealing the best nugget for the attendees to take home. The result: heaps of practical tips to start putting to use immediately!

The seminar, the first dedicated solely to link building, did not cover the more basic elements of on-page SEO that still get recycled year after year at other SEO conferences. The speakers assumed upfront that the foundational elements of sound on-page SEO and quality content were in place. The primary goal was to get quality links!

What follows are highlights of main takeaways from each of the speakers...

Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) kicked things off with some genuine admission of past mistakes, and stressed the importance of striking the right balance between strategy and actually getting links. Wil also pointed to the importance of having a natural looking backlink profile from a diverse group of sources.

Jane Copland offered her methods for competitor research. She shared a killer spreadsheet that walked us through how she measures movement across several metrics for the top 30-50 ranking sites across several keywords in the hyper-competitive online bingo niche. When she spots competitor movement, she checks out their newly acquired links for cues on what to do next. A very scalable process.

You knew that Russ Jones (@rjonesx) was giving up the goods just by the sneaky grin he had on his face. After I gave up link building on Digg.com, I drifted away from social bookmarking as a link-building strategy, but Russ made me a believer again. He peppered his talk with several advanced tips for getting even more out of sites like Reddit.com and Delicious.com.

Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow, who turned out to be a damn good bowler) recently moved out to Seattle to take the enviable job of doing SEO for SEOmoz.  His presentation revealed, among other things, ways to move up in the rankings when you actually have enough links (turns out that SEOmoz.org does), but not enough pages "worthy" of the #1 spot for competitive terms.

Since shifting from consulting to software, SEOmoz's keyword profile has shifted from the long-tail, which its legendary blog is perfect for, to head keywords such as "SEO tools." Tom forecasted the huge benefits in content consolidation... essentially redirecting tightly-themed yet outdated blog post pages--and their related link juice--to newly created super-resourceful pages that aggregate the best of that particular topic (e.g. "link building"). Tom also recommended starting a Google group or similar network among trusted peers for the purpose of sharing notes.

Paddy Moogan (@paddymoogan) reminded us all that link outreach--or the art of asking for a link--is still vitally important. He shared his disciplined and scalable approach and revealed link acquisition "conversion rates" often north of 50%. His tips for using Polladdy.com as "ego-bait" to acquire links from influential people, companies--even competitors--was priceless.

Rand Fishkin (@randfish) wore a suit. He pointed with dismay to several examples of how spammy sites still achieve top rankings for highly competitive keywords on Google. Something is fundamentally broken. Such poor quality from a company with the enormous amount of data and algorithmic sophistication of Google simply cannot continue for much longer, or Google will loose its dominance in search... and Google surely knows it.

Stopping just shy of declaring that "link building is dead" (would have sounded heretical at this particular conference), Rand's message was clear: yesterday's SEO is a losing strategy! He argued that new signals such as citations, brand mentions, and social signals are the "new links." They are the more trustworthy, better vetted and harder to manipulate votes for quality on the web today. These are the signals triggering second-order effects. They tell Google that there is a real person giving an editorial endorsement to a real company.

As quality sites emerge as legitimate "go to" starting points in certain verticals (Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.), it's safer and smarter to decrease your reliance on Google as a traffic source and adopt a more diversified inbound marketing strategy. Firms should sacrifice short-term wins on search for long-term gain across the broader web.

Martin McDonald (@seoforumsorg) countered Rand's position by arguing that an optimal balance can be found between the short and long term goals. He pointed to examples of now hugely-successful companies like TripAdvisor.com that started out with some questionable link-buying activity before scaling back on paid links just in time. Such companies took a calculated risk for a certain period of time... they bought links to get an initial spark of momentum in the short-term, but then pivoted at the right time and rode organic, content-driven white-hat SEO to long-term success. Martin's most memorable tip, though, was to check out Twitter's advertising program, which is now available to everyone and relatively cheap.

Will Critchlow (@willcritchlow) wrapped up the seminar with his musings on how to make white-hat link-building--and content-generation in particular--scalable. He also prefaced his presentation with this post on the SEOmoz blog. Taking a page from Demand Media’s process (whose top online property, eHow, emerged seemingly unscathed from Google’s recent Panda update), Will wondered how best to combine algorithmic automation infused with just the right amount of talented human editorial touch in order to scale link-worthy content.

At the heart of Will's quest for scale is his desire to create a Flywheel, a inspiring concept introduced by Jim Collins in Good to Great.

For those in New Orleans who are on the fence about attending the upcoming Link Building Seminar, pull the trigger. You won't be disappointed. This is one of those conferences that really moves the industry forward. It's an opportunity to plug into a great community whose goal is to make your SEO and link building more effective.