All posts in conferences

Last Thursday was the first Search Firestarters event, hosted by Google and Only Dead Fish – and we were lucky enough to get an invitation. Here are our top takeaways!

Martin McNulty, from Forward3D

  • Don’t try to attribute your way out of a rubbish marketing campaign. If your marketing is rubbish no attribution model will fix that.
  • Modelling is not measuring – it’s about statistics and odds.
  • Concentrate on what you can control – it’s all very well finding out the volume of search depends on cloud cover, but you can’t control the weather so you can’t do anything about it.
  • Some companies will get most conversions from just one click – there’s not much point doing attribution modelling if it’s only for a couple of conversions.

Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.

Glenn Jones presenting on Microformats and SEO at BrightonSEO 2012

Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.

Today I’ve presented a few tips and tricks to gain the favour of marketing directors at #BrightonSEO.  Whether you are in-house or agency side, selling the value of SEO lacks the glamour of TV advertising, the accountability of PPC, and the buzz-factor of social media.  Here are a few tips and tricks to better promote SEO to marketing directors.



I should be presenting at BrightonSEO today on a 20/20 slot (20 slides, 20 seconds each) talking about 20 SEO tools.

Unfortunately I can’t be there. Sadly my dad, Jim Gibbons, passed away on Wednesday morning having battled cancer so bravely for the last year, but unfortunately his health deteriorated very quickly earlier this week. Obviously it puts things in perspective, as these things always do, but I know my dad would have loved me to do this. He was so proud of my career and paid such a great interest in everything I do, especially speaking at events like this – mainly because this isn’t something I’m naturally comfortable at doing and I’d rather not be center of attention (I’m just like him in so many ways), but I am ambitious and want to push myself and company forward by forcing myself into creating and taking these opportunities.

So while I can’t be there today, I still wanted to share the slides with everyone who’s going along to the event.



I love you dad, this one’s for you!

In the last in our series of conference interviews (for now at least), I’m talking to Chris Winfield ahead of the BlueGlass LA conference later this month. Personally I find it incredibly useful attending US conferences in order to keep up with how the industry is developing in the States – this has included SMX Advanced in Seattle and Pubcon Las Vegas in the past – and this year I’m heading over to the BlueGlass LA event.

Image credit: Dana Lookadoo

Thanks to Chris for taking the time to answer these questions – here goes:

Friday saw the Distilled LinkLove conference in London, with an impressive line-up that included Rand Fishkin, Mike King and Wil Reynolds sharing their link building secrets.

Whether you’re agency or client-side, here is a useful little guide to link building tools and resources which Distilled gave out to help you improve on your link building activities:

Tools & Resources

Name Type What is it used for? Free / Paid
My Blog Guest Community Finding places to guest post Free & Paid versions
Blogger Link Up Community Link bloggers with content creators Free
Haro Community Link journalists with sources Free
Boomerang Browser Plugin Helping you with email outreach Free & Paid versions
Rapportive Browser Plugin Finding out more about the person you’re reaching out to Free
Multi Links for Firefox Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time rather than individually Free
Chrome Web Scraper Browser Plugin Scraper is a Google Chrome extension for getting data out of web pages and into spreadsheets Free
Chrome Link Clump Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time Free
Buzzstream Software Managing outreach process Paid
GroupHigh Software Finding people to outreach to Paid
Raven Tools Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Open Site Explorer Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid
Ontolo Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Majestic SEO Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Zemanta Tactic Suggests your content to relevant bloggers Paid
Followerwonk Tool Contacting people & building relationships Free & Paid versions
Tom Anthony’ Link Profile Tool Tool Analyse your competitors link profiles and those of competitors to discover anomalous activities Free
JavaScript Bookmarklets Tool Use bookmarklets to improve efficiency of reporting and analysis Free
We Follow Tool Directory of Twitter users organized by interests Free
Citation Labs Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free
Linkdex Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid versions
Link Diagnosis Tool Backlink analysis & broken link checker Free
Link Builder from Wordtracker Tool Backlink analysis Free & Paid versions
Blog Dash Tool A permission-based blogger database Paid
Seeded Buzz Tactic Allows you to promote content to relevant bloggers Free & Paid versions

Last week we ran a series of blog interviews for the up-and-coming search conferences and events, including SMX London, International Search Summit, BrightonSEO and ionSearch – today we look at SAScon, with answers from co-organiser Pete Young.


Ahead of next month’s ionSearch, we spoke to organiser Fergus Clawson about his vision for the event, what we can look forward to and much more besides…

1. It’s the inaugural ionSearch event; obviously there are a range of search and digital events across the UK, so how do you see ionSearch differentiating itself?
That’s a good question. Rather than trying to explain why ionSearch is different to other conferences I will explain what ionSearch is and what it hopes to achieve.

ionSearch is an advanced search marketing conference where the speakers involved intend to push the boundaries and will explore all things SEM, with the agenda consisting of talks on SEO, Link Building, Content, Social and PPC. The day will consist of three main components; the Main Auditorium, the Experts Panels and the Search Tools suite.

The main auditorium will play host to the nine keynote speakers. Each speaker will have 40 minutes to present their thoughts and insights to the delegates. We feel that 40 minutes will allow the speakers enough time for them to delve deeper into their subject areas, allowing delegates to take away actionable skills from leading experts.

Following on the theme of conference interviews with Danny Sullivan from SMX London and Kelvin Newman for BrightonSEO, todays interview is with Andy Atkins-Krüger ahead of the International Search Summit (ISS) in London on 14th May 2012.


Following on from my interview with Danny Sullivan last week – I decided to give our readers some insight into some of the other up-and-coming events, so that they can get an idea about what each has to offer and why they are different etc. We’ll be running a series of similar interviews during the next week, starting today with the host of BrightonSEO Kelvin Newman.

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