For the past couple of days, I’ve been enthusiastically describing how impressed I was with MozCon Day 1 and MozCon Day 2, in which I share some of the strategies and tactics I learned, that you may find useful for your online marketing campaigns.
Seattle, home of the SEOmoz MozCon Seminar
At the end of Day 3 most MozCon attendees I talked to were just as eager as I was to go back to the drawing board and start implementing what we’ve learned at SEOmoz’s seminar. Below I share some of the takeaways from Day 3.
How Big Brands Can Compete in Tough SERPs without Risk
Adam Audette, AudettteMedia (@audette)
Adam Audette sharing some fun and advanced insights
Once again, Adam managed to impress me with the depth of his knowledge and innovativeness. SEO is simple but it gets complex to execute; it is a long, hard road. Best practices only get you so far but you need competitive advantages, risk and innovation.
When talking about how to rank item level URLs, think about surfer patterns, different types of links, page segmentation, anchor text , clean canonical crawl paths and links among many other things. Categories are the secret, and cross-linking needs to be strategic. Don’t do link building to product pages but rather to category pages. Adam brought up Zappos as a good example and looked at how they did it. And then he covered many more simple and advanced topics around strengthening those item level pages, from SERP presentation and internal auto linking to faceted navigation and site architecture. Excellent presentation!
Adam Audette sharing some fun and advanced insights
Creative SEO
Martin MacDonald, OMD Group (@seoforumsorg)
Martin MacDonald introducing the Fishkin-Rains Scale for measuring movement from white hat to black hat SEO
The most exciting part of Martin’s presentation was his query volume experimentations, which started with his goal of changing the auto suggest in Google. The interesting part was that the search volume appeared to not only replace the auto suggest with the term he was pushing, but to influence his rankings as well. Of course this got the entire MozCon audience excited.
Going Viral on Facebook: How to Earn Gobs of Likes + Shares
Brian Carter (@briancarter)
Brian Carter going into details on comparing AdWords to Facebook ads
An average 16% of fans see daily posts from a page they’ve liked. Feedback is low on Facebook but you can manage awareness, demand generation and fulfillment. Create customer profiles to do great marketing. What are their interests and education? Where do they work? Facebook ads are great for unique, low search volume niches. Remember that fans don’t go back to your page, and see you very little in their feeds. Use sponsored stories. Post smartly so you engage fans; ask questions, ask to “like,” etc. Sell the dream; find out what their dreams are and write about them. Here are nine things people dream about: Luxury, Awe, Options, Connection, Freedom, Belonging, Fun, Love and Relaxation.
How to Brainstorm + Design the Best, Most Viral Content You’ve Ever Made
Kate Morris, Distilled (@katemorris)
Kate Morris sharing some creative infographs
You can’t create viral content. You can create great content, and viral happens. Start with understanding who you are talking to. What are the goals? They will influence the direction of the content. Brainstorm and filter ideas. Find and analyze data. Kate stressed that there are no boring industries and challenged the audience to come up with the most boring one they can think of. She then did on-the-spot brainstorming and gave some ideas to get started with.
Measure the Right Things and Achieve Magical, Analytics Awesomeness
Avinash Kaushik (@avinash)
Avinash Kaushik rocking the boat once again and showing us SEOs how we can make more money
Avinash got a standing ovation at the end of his presentation. He was simply phenomenal… as he usually is. We were asked to swear that we would keep his presentation secret among the MozCon attendees and not release it. Avinash focused his presentation on why we SEOs can’t make more money and then showed us some mind blowing tips on how to make more money.
Avinash Kaushik sharing his approach to horizontal and vertical funnels
Among other things he talked about the five-step process to success: consider why do you exist; make specific goals and strategies; identify KPIs (key performance indicators); set targets; segment people, sources, behaviors or outcomes.
Social Design: How to Co-Mingle Social Features & Earn Traffic
Mat Clayton Mixcloud (@matclayton)
Mat Clayton presenting about the power of social media and sharing tons of tips
Search solves factual questions but not subjective ones. Friend recommendations outweigh unknown third parties. Mat talked about relationships in social networking sites and how social graphs include many different elements; photos, events, groups, apps, etc. He covered how to use the Facebook platform and had tips on Open Graph tags, Facebook linter, sharing and liking, FB.ui() feed, news feed optimization, and social analytics.
Head to Head: Stealing from the Web’s Best
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz + Will Critchlow, Distilled (@randfish + @willcritchlow)
Rand Fishkin presenting in the Head to Head battle for the best presentation
Will Critchlow of Distilled presenting at MozCon
Trying to make the tough decision on whosepresentation was the winner; Rand vs. Will
And the winner is: Rand Fishkin! Congrats Rand
Rand and Will had their sixth head-to-head battle for the best presentation and Rand won the ridiculously expensive dinner this time. They both presented their impressive presentations, packed with advanced marketing tactics and strategies and great examples.
“Give it Up”
All Speakers in Attendance
The awesome MozCon 2011 speakers “giving it up” by sharing some of their “secret strategies”
The awesome MozCon 2011 speakers “giving it up” by sharing some of their “secret strategies”
This was a fun way to end a conference. All speakers in attendance shared the stage this time and each one “gave up a secret.” People shared some great things – but I am not at liberty to reveal them. I’d have to kill you…
It was the perfect ending to an information-packed conference, which covered more advanced marketing tips than I can enumerate here. I’ll be digesting it all, and applying a lot of what I learned, for a long time to come.