The first session on the Pubcon after the keynote speaker was about in house SEO. Cleary when working in larger organisation, that do development, web design, graphics, social media plus all other traditional marketing, it is very easy for SEO to be pushed down the priorities. This session discusses the difficulties that SEO specialists have in keeping SEO at the top of the priorities and and how all other functions should fit in with SEO.

FOK Marketing don’t have these issues in house as we only do SEO, but clearly when working with sites that have been developed by other people, the same issues arise if not greater. Clearly communication between people is the key, but when someone does not understand why flash can harm SEO, or why the size of images can affect load times and also rankings, it can become challenging.

So clear instruction and priority setting with everyone working to the same goal, even if personal artistic preferences are out on the shelve, is key, as the client is obviously a priority and without customers they often have nothing. We have also had these challenges, but fortunately we have now a network of developers who work within our guidelines, so many of the challenges stated in the conference, we do not suffer any more.

There is a tradition at the Vegas Pubcon to hold an initial networking event the night before the seminar starts for real and last night was no exception. On arriving, it is clear many have been here before and start the night catching up with older and newer news. When it settles down, there are opportunities to mix and meet new people, find out what they are doing and share thoughts and ideas and with beer in the hand.

People I met ranged from someone who has started a network of 75 intro branded sites, to on page marketing consultant, a lead generation company in Spain for the education sector an a Google reputation specialist, which is right up my street.

Google reputation is critical for good sustained rankings, so to find out that 95% of what I do is just what others are doing, was good news, but it was the 5% that was the most interesting, and  how external links strategies have changed recently. In short it was  where the outgoing links went to, with authority sites now being just too common. Linking out to good sites, which are different to the norm, is good providing it directly relates to the subject matter in hand.

The pan is to do some blogging as it occurs, some after the event, I won’t be revealing everything, but hopefully some information that will be useful.