Last week, I was lucky enough to spend my first day on the job with Majestic SEO in sunny San Francisco at BrightEdge’s #Share12 event.
Packed with over 300 delegates, the rooms of the impressive Bently Reserve building were entertained and enthused by well thought-out informational sessions and panel discussions aimed to educate and inform about what’s next, not just in SEO, but for the digital marketing industry as a whole.
An expert panel moderated by Search Engine Watch’s Jonathan Allen was a highlight, as marketing leaders from Quora, 3M and Macy’s came together to give their opinion on how brands should be navigating a world of changing algorithms, new social platforms, and debates on what to measure, when and how.
My role for the day was largely to listen and learn. Accepting the role to bebe Majestic’s US representative has thrown me headlong back into one of the areas of the internet marketing industry I love most, and I was keen to know if things had changed that much.
Well, they have and they haven’t. Search marketing is still about getting your site set up correctly from a technical point of view and then building plans based on keyword research, testing and learning principles, but what has changed is SEO is now not seen as some crazy voodoo art form by mainstream marketers and CMOs. Businesses – large and small – are really recognizing its value, especially as part of an integrated digital marketing approach, where you combine email, social, display and some offline components too. One did not have to look far to get evidence about the shift that’s occurred. Share12 was packed with big players like Macy’s, Microsoft, Amex, Mariott, 3M, Cisco, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Williams-Sonoma, HP, and Paypal and digital powerhouses like Adobe, Kenshoo, Marin, ResolutionMedia, Razorfish, and Rosetta. Wow! So yes, the world has indeed changed!
Helped by technology like the BrightEdge platform which uses Majestic SEO data for backlink reporting, site owners and marketers now have resources where scattered data can now be gathered, housed and made sense of.
As learning about the power of Majestic SEO’s data was also on my menu for the day, I attended the white hat backlinks session lead by Chris Boggs – Director, Search & Media Thought Leadership at Rosetta, one of the top agencies in the US, and Chairperson of SEMPO.org. Chris delivered a cracking masterclass in how to use Majestic’s backlink checker within the BrightEdge platform to help inform your linkbuilding strategy. Boggs’ spectacular backlinks session followed on the heels of another standing-room only Adobe talk about how they do SEO globally with BrightEdge – also now leveraging Majestic backlink data.
The jam-packed audience was treated to Chris giving away a succinct, digestible and brilliantly simple guide to responsible white hat backlink best practices based on a BrightEdge–Rosetta white paper, an especially important and timely topic given recent Penguin updates.
The session was so well received, and the hard copies whipped away quicker than Usain Bolt, we’ve [been allowed to publish it] (or…” got a link to download it”) for your delectation:
White Hat SEO Backlink Best Practices White Paper
Download it, share it with your followers and colleagues and let us know how you put the knowledge into practice.
(Note: maybe mention other Share12 links here?)
There’ll be more from me at my next Majestic stop which will be SMX East! Hope to see you there!
Cheers,
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Sounds like a fantastic event! It does seem SEO is mainstream as an inevitable part of a larger marketing strategy. I look forward to reading the white paper.
September 22, 2012 at 5:51 amthis really hit home for us – we love majestic!
September 22, 2012 at 8:16 amWith the changes that Google is making, White hat is the only way to be safe.
September 22, 2012 at 10:21 pmGreat article. Thank you.
September 25, 2012 at 3:14 amthis really hit home for us – we love majestic!
September 25, 2012 at 4:24 amI attended this event, what a great talk! Download the whitepaper now and bask in its warm glowing warming glow!
September 26, 2012 at 1:30 amWow – Majestic is coming a long way – it’s true though that google is changing everyday.. I imagine one day that all SEO will be is content and backlinks and search engines become smarter
September 26, 2012 at 5:05 pmI’m most anxious to see what Facebook decides to do with their billion plus users. It has been fun watching all the little tweaks and updates recently from the search engines.
At this point, white hat is the way to go. Search engines need to become smarter and actually be able to evaluate the content it is reading. As it is right now, you can have mediocre content (Wikipedia) and rank at the top of just about every search result. The engines can really only identify if words belong together and if something seems strange. There is some horribly written articles with completely false information that have high rankings.
November 17, 2012 at 3:59 pm