SEO Nuggets from SEOmoz Pro Training Event London 2009

We recently attended the excellent SEOmoz Pro Training in London which was without doubt one of the best SEO events we've been to, both in terms of the quality of the speakers and the general level of discussion.

Over the two days there were presentations from industry leaders such as Will Critchlow (Distilled), Richard Baxter (SEO Gadget), Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Rob Ousbey (Distilled), Patrick Altolft (Branded3) and Dave Naylor (Bronco) covering Advanced Analytics, Link Building, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Vertical and Universal Search, SEO Strategy, Automation and much more.

Here is a rundown of some quick, actionable tips from the event:

• When reviewing analytics data pay attention to referrals from your own site – this indicates that you have a page which is not tagged.
  
• When link building use mozRank instead of Page Rank to establish the value of target pages – Page Rank is rumoured to be disappearing soon.
  
• When running social media campaigns decide right from the beginning exactly what you want to get out of it.  Branding?  Conversions? Identify metrics and track accordingly.
• When reviewing the link profile of a site, pay attention to the class C IP’s of inbound links - if you find many links which share the same class C IP address then this is indicative of a link network which could harm your site.
• When using the canonical tag it is important to apply it to duplicate pages only – it does not work otherwise.
• According to research, body text content is one of the most important factors for SEO.
  
• When link building it is more important than ever for anchor text distribution to appear natural, i.e. use many related terms not just one.
  
• When optimising your conversion rate pay attention to the thank you page – it is overlooked by the majority of online marketers, yet it is seen by all of your converting customers so provides marketing opportunities.
  
• When doing SEO work on a site set up an SEO timeline spreadsheet and record all actions and expected outcomes – this will allow you to track the effect of your changes over time.
  
• According to research 36% of users clicked on a “news” result within Google blended search results.
  
• When link building identify your USP and use this to leverage links to your site - it will differentiate you from your competitors and also make it more difficult for them to copy your link building campaign.
  
• Make it easy for your site users to share your content – use big buttons for share links.
  
• When using video on your site always make sure you have an xml video sitemap – this will help Google to rank your videos.
  
• Microsoft have developed an SEO toolkit which is well worth checking out - http://www.iis.net/extensions/SEOToolkit (Vista and above required).
  
• Sponsorship can be an effective and legitimate way of generating inbound links to your site.