Brighton SEO Conference 2011

Brighton SEO took place on Friday; a full day of pure SEO geekery! (yeah, so what? :P). The event has grown over the last 3 years from what was a handful of professionals in a pub, to 160 enthusiastic SEO and digital marketing pioneers.

The proceedings kicked off early from 8.30am, where a bombardment of keen SEO's starting registering and taking their seats in the theatre.  People were pushing through the queues, eager to get in. This was typical form for an SEO, always desperate to get to number 1! :P


The day started with a debate on the future existence of SEO, which was actually great! You could see a few bodies squirming in their seats questioning their job security, but the message at the end was constructive. SEO needs to move away from a technical exercise and be treated with more of a marketing discipline. Anticipating the site users wants, needs and behaviour. Things not even Google can know.


Speakers for the day included expects in their relevant fields from Fresh Egg, iCrossing, White Hat Media, Clearleft, Leapfrogg, Propeller Net and Site Visibility. All the talks were well recieved, short and sweet at 20mins a piece, they packed punch, content and some humour. The day was smoothly run by Site Visibility and Kelvin Newman deserves a lot of credit for keeping the day running so smoothly!


What were my highlights? I found the Social Media metrics that Fresh Egg demonstrated early in the day fascinating. It's good to see that social media is starting to become more measurable. Another highlight was from Clearleft, a Brighton based UI company. Harry spoke about Dark Patterns and bad practice in terms of user experience and site design.


It was a great day and there's very positive feedback across the board. It was a great place to network and i really did discover the digital marketing scene is full of nice guys, it isn't cliquey or arrogant. The next Brighton SEO will surely be another great conference.


Twitter:


@FreshEgg
@SiteVisibility
@LeapFrogg
@WhiteHatMedia
@ClearLeft
@iCrossingUK
@PropellerNet
@KelvinNewman


Check the stream out too @ #BrightonSEO