The second day of SES London began with an Orion panel discussing SEO and its future. The mouth watering speaker line-up of Jill Whelan, Rand Fishkin, Kevin Ryan, Brett Tabke and Chris Sherman looked certain to deliver some interesting discussion. It didn’t fail. It was very interesting and entertaining to watch some of the biggest names in this industry debate on stage on the same topics and the same manner we do in our very own office!

The topic of link building eventually came up and the general agreement seemed to be that you need to get more creative with your link building, reviewing the psychological triggers for linking and playing on those.

Twitter was also discussed along with Facebook. These were seen as applications that could take away some of Google’s search dominance in certain areas, especially local search. One of the examples used was of when looking for ‘London restaurants’, one of the panel stated they don’t use Google local for that because the search results are so manipulated. Instead they use twitter and ask for advice. Now, this may work for Rand Fiskin or Mike Grehan but is that going to work for the average joe?

Overall I really enjoyed the discussion, one stat I would like to quote Mike Grehan on was that there is now a ratio of 5:1 on user generated content to mediated content. I just thought this to be very interesting to find out how much UGC there is actually out there.

I next attended SEO through Blogs and Feeds. Which began with Maile Ohye from Google talking through the basics of blogs and feeds including what’s available in Google base, how the overall blog post and Google indexing process works, etc etc. Dane Naylor was also present and it was refreshing to see him tell it like it is. His corporate SEO experience really shone through in his discussions and his frank comments were just what the doctor ordered. I never got the chance to chat with him but on almost every comment our beliefs seemed aligned. One of the issues Dave covered was where to put your blog, either on a sub-domain or sub-folder and the agreement was that it depends on your situation. I have to agree. Having it on the main domain adds value to that domain, having it on a sub-domain means it is effectively its own entity. Therefore you can gain link juice from it and also use it as a reputation management tool.

The next session was on News Search SEO, very good information for big news corporations with some real power players speaking. I couldn’t help but think that a lot of this session was aimed at huge news corps, not really at the majority of the audience. However there was some good information for journalists, showing them how online is completely different to print. One line I particularly liked was ‘the art of the headline is dead’. Ciaran Norris provided this and I thought he was particularly good despite his presentation problems.

The final session I would like to report on was the Organic forum right at the very end. Surprisingly quiet for an interesting topic. I just want to quote one of the lines from it:
“It used to be Google vs Yahoo, it’s now Google vs Twitter and Google vs Facebook”
Which for select search areas I might agree. I’m not sure how much of the UK market is influenced by these sources, Twitter has seen a recent explosion, but I’m certain the bigger commercial search terms will not be affected by these. If they are the impact would be so minimal I’m not sure how anyone would notice.