Linklove | New Orleans | Linkbuilding Seminar by Distilled and SEOmoz

I had the privilege of attending the Distilled Link Building Seminar in New Orleans last Friday. Every speaker and presentation was top-notch and gave intense insight into the current state of SEO: emerging trends, tactics, building relationships, and action items to boost your site’s rankings. They also covered how to do competitive research correctly. This SEO seminar was not like any other in many ways, but the biggest was every speaker’s willingness to give up what was going on in the cloud and what we can do as SEOs that will work now.

Most SEM seminars cover the same old topics covered yearly, such as using title tags, meta descriptions, keyword tags (or not), and why having a blog is so important. These things ARE essential; however, for experienced professionals, they are boring topics. Usually, one would attend a conference all day, listen to topics you’ve heard before, then hit the watering holes and have the REAL discussions about testing that’s been done or lessons we have learned. Conversations might range from basic tests on the value of H1 tags and the importance of link order on a page to even more in-depth discussions on how Google Places results push out national clients. The seminar in New Orleans invited some of the most brilliant minds to a day of unforgettable presentations.

If you could go, the consensus seems that all were impressed. Every speaker covered a separate part of off-page SEO and ways your agency or company could leverage relationships, partnerships, site content, promotions, and features to attract the best links to your site to increase your traffic and rankings. For an extensive (and easy-to-navigate) recap of the Distilled Seminar in New Orleans, check out this one by Tom Harari.

After such an intense day, it would only be logical to follow up with a fierce evening, right? Especially in the town of NOLA! So here are some great shots of presenters with whom I was lucky to discuss SEO in depth after the seminar at the networking event. Yes, that is Cabernet in my glass (remember we were in the Big Easy)! Enjoy.

 

Stephen Galgocy Kris Roadruck Tom Harari
Left to Right: Stephen Galgocy, Kris Roadruck, Tom Harari

 

Stephen Galgocy Will Critchlow
Left To Right: Stephen Galgocy, Will Critchlow of Distilled

 

Rand Fishkin Stephen Galgocy
Left to Right: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, Stephen Galgocy of SG Solutions

 

Stephen Galgocy Wil Reynolds
Left to Right: Stephen Galgocy, Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive

 

Distilled SEOMoz Afterparty New Orleans Street Meat
Distilled and SEOMoz afterparty crew on a New Orleans street eating Street Meat – planning the next pub!