SES London 2008: A (Very) Short Recap

Last week, I had the chance to addend the SearchEngineStrategies in London, together with three of my colleagues. For me, it was the second time to attend a search engine conference, the SES in New York last year was my first.

Unlike usually, I haven’t seen a lot of reports and recaps of the sessions of the SES London. I’ve seen more than a few, but not as much as normally. Since Lee Odden already discussed the session Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions perfectly, I’ll refrain to the other link building related session only.

Dixon Jones, Matt Paines, Ken McGaffin and Brian Turner were the speakers during the session that discussed Linking Strategies. Receptional‘s Dixon Jones opened this session with an excellent presentation.

Next up was XSEO‘s Matt Paines. He discussed a few of the most popular and common link building strategies and explained which strategy still is effective (according to him) and which one isn’t. I missed the enthusiasm and passion that most speakers have, which resulted in a presentation that I actually didn’t like. No offense, but I really didn’t.

Ken McGaffin was the third to give a presentation. While he left the link building business for a job at Wordtracker a while ago, he showed that he still most definitely knows what he’s talking about. One very important point he stressed out was the fact that, for optimal results, your marketing department, Public Relations and SEO/ Link Building should work together to a common strategy. Ken also gave 6 possible strategies to get a better link profile. In stead of naming the ordinary stuff, he listed some interesting tips that you don’t see every day:
1. Control the flow of your existing links
2. Find out who links to you and how
3. Get the most out of existing links
4. Look at sectors where you’re weak (new market opportunities)
5. Look for emerging markets (gave the example of Mark J. Penn’s MicroTrends)
6. Plan your initiatives for the year ahead

The last in row was SES virgin Brian Turner of BriteCorp. You certainly couldn’t tell that it was his first SES presentation, which means he did a remarkable job. He divided all links into three different categories; Submitted links, Paid links and Editorial links. Brian also explained how you can obtain links from each of those categories and mentioned that the last category is the one where you want your links from.

As you can see, this was a very short recap of two days SES (I missed the first day). While I’m not very good at summarizing PowerPoint presentations, I still wanted to share this.