Last weekend saw the 7th Think Visibility conference at the Alea Casino in Leeds. Not only do Think Visibility conferences have great speakers, they also have butties for breakfast, plenty of food for lunch, pick and mix and a well stocked bar.
SEO for eCommerce
Though I’ve never been the lead developer or architect of an eCommerce site, I’ve worked on quite a few before. Barry Adams gave some very interesting advice for people looking to optimise the experience. Thinking about things like ‘basket countdowns’ is really fascinating – for example, people are going to spend more if they think they’re going to get free shipping.
Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni
Jon Quinton from SEOgadget gave a talk about how he does link building. The most important take away from this for me is that lots of different tools are required to capture, scrape and analyse possible links – a problem that I’m actually trying to solve with the various SEO tools I’ve built.
So, I’m #1 in Google, Now What?
Kean Richmond gave a super interesting talk about design, which is something really different for the usual crowd of an SEO conference, and he gave an insight into how best to design stuff to make things easier for the user. He’s also published an interesting post about the Think Visibility experience (and his slides) which I suggest you check out.
25 Useful Things you can do with WordPress
Dan Harrison of WordPress Doctors gave us all a rundown of 25 tips for WordPress administrators. A few of these I’ve already implemented on a couple of my sites. You can find an ebook of WordPress tips on his website.
Saying Stuff is Dead… is Dead
James Carson gave a very entertaining talk about why people say that stuff is ‘dead’. My favourite part was his introduction to something he calls The Inbound Model, which is a great read.
Understanding Google Crawling & Indexing
The last talk of the conference was a high level explanation of how Google will crawl and index pages by Pierre Far of Google. I found this super interesting, though I guess it’s all stuff I kinda knew anyway. Pierre didn’t comment on ranking factors though, instead just referring to it as ‘magic’ – hmm.
For me this was the best Think Visibility I have attended, and I’ve had so many ideas since. Thanks to Dom Hodgson for arranging everything, and my buddies from Branded3 for keeping me company.