This week, Distilled's Will Critchlow and I held our 4th "presentation-off" battle against one another as the final session of the London PRO SEO Training Seminar. We both put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into our decks and I think it shows. Enjoy:

A few notes from Rand's Talk:

• The Excel spreadsheet that I invite you to build off, expand and use to help predict the ranking elements for a given SERP can be downloaded here.

• The full slide deck from my talk can be found online at Slideshare here.
• While this process isn't foolproof, it allows any SEO to form their own opinions about the metrics and components that matter, then apply math to get a "best fit" based on that data. This methodology isn't foolproof, but for experienced SEOs who are deep in the analysis field and need to provide a roadmap of how to "beat the competition" and "earn top rankings" for particular keyphrases, it should be very effective.
• Yes - we are looking into building a tool inside the PRO Web App to do this for you (though it's likely a few months off at best)
• In my talk, I referenced Hubspot's growth. Dharmesh Shah wrote a blog post about it here, and you can find their Inbound Marketing Book here.

I hope you enjoy the talks and the Q+A. Feel free to cast your own votes in the comments, though, technically, I've already lost to Will by a fair margin in audience voting. I'll have to work harder next time!

Notes from Will

Firstly, I am never again going to try anything as crazy as auto-advancing slides for a 20-minute talk. It nearly killed me. I got the idea from the O'Reilly Ignite talks which I think are awesome - theirs are 5 minutes long with 15s slides - I went for 25s slides because I had some pretty complex stuff to get across.

Secondly, huge thanks to everyone who came, everyone who voted for me (those who voted for Rand; I saw who you were...), Rand for repeatedly being a great opponent and everyone who had a hand in the organisation (especially Lynsey - our superb events manager at Distilled). It'd probably also be remiss of me not to mention the awesome (and mildly NSFW) exclusive discount code from Christmas gifts site prezzybox.

Here are a couple of quick notes from my talk and the slides on our slideboom account:

• The slidedeck
• The Brylcreem ad in all its glory
• The OK Go music video I meant to mention
• The (now closed) Hacker News thread about fixing open source bugs that is the beginning of our soft-launch of our Hire Marshal web app for hiring (more on that soon)

Finally, we are going to be running more events including 1 day linkbuilding training sessions in London and the US. We'll have more information coming soon, but if you'd like to make sure you are the first to hear about these and our web training sessions, just drop your email address here: