Last Thursday, the 22nd of October 2009, Outrider participated as one of the speakers at Search Engine Bootcamp in Sydney, which was held at Cliftons Sydney.
For those who don’t know much about Search Engine Bootcamp; it’s a series of Search related conferences held across Australia and internationally to educate businesses, individuals and pretty much anyone who wants to know about SEO, Pay-Per-Click and more recently Social Media, such as Twitter. The founder of Search Strategies, Barry Smith, also runs annual Search Marketing Expos (SMX), with the next one coming up in April 2010.
Back to telling you a little bit about Bootcamp Sydney and some of the topics discuss throughout the afternoon:
Session #1: What is SEO and understanding the basics of what works and what doesn’t
This session was really to get the audience interested in the whole concept of Search Engine Optimisation. It started off with…
Jeremy Bolt from Bruce Clay who spoke about Understanding SEO and what’s it all about? – It was a good introduction to the day as a lot of the overall SEO components were covered; including SEO jargon, stats about the search engines and the key factors that should be remembered when optimising a web page.
Next up was Andy Jamieson from Switched on Media who discussed Search Engine Friendly Web Design. Andy flowed on to speak about the top 10 important factors of search friendly site design; addressing things such as having a clear hierarchy to a page, and including elements such as text links, sitemap, content, title tags and proper HTML.
The final speaker for the first session was Zari Kotwal from Panalysis who drilled home the importance of measuring the success of Search. She predominately spoke with reference to Google Analytics and its power to help measure the performance of a website, including funnel visualisation metrics. She also spoke about some of the advance features of Google Analytics including tracking a brand through advanced segmentation.
All in all, the first session was quite insightful to people who knew little of SEO.
Session #2: The three key pillars of SEO success – Keywords, Content & Linking
Now we move onto the second session which went into more details of the three core factors of SEO.
I spoke on behalf of Outrider on the topic of Keyword Research. Essentially this topic was introducing people to the processes of finding the right keywords that customers were looking for using keyword research tools and out-of-the-box techniques, such as using Social Media keyword clouds and leverage results from other marketing campaigns such as Paid Search. The presentation was structured in a way to show people the systematic process of keyword research and how to then takes these pertinent search terms and incorporate them back into the website copy.
Flowing on from my presentation was Glenn Murray from Divine Write, who discussed the essence of proper copywriting for Search. Glenn spoke well on the topic about how people should write copy for their users and then look at optimising it for search engines.
The final speaker from our session was Chris Thomas from Reseo who brought the crowd to life with his presentation on Link Building Basics. Essentially, Chris talked about linking strategies such as articles submission, directories and blogs. He also touched base on what linking practices are good and bad through the eyes of a search engine, such as ‘paid links’, which is frowned upon by Google.
Session #3: Search Engine Site Clinic
To end the whole conference was the infamous Site Clinic done by Mike Motherwell from MMS Consulting. This has always been a great way to conclude Search Strategy conferences, where the audience can get some insightful SEO tips about their websites. Mike as usual made the final session as fun and to the point!
All in all, the conference was great to attend and a good way to get to know SEO on a 101 basis.
