Brighton SEO is a firm­ly estab­lished fix­ture in the SEO cal­en­dar, and this year Linkdex had the plea­sure of the being the offi­cial pre-par­ty spon­sors of the event.

So after a fun-filled night meet­ing and greet­ing indus­try friends, and “offi­cial” break­ing of ice — name­ly, a few drinks to keep our search-hun­gry minds lim­ber — we rose from the post-par­ty slum­bers to take in a excit­ing sched­ule of talks and pre­sen­ta­tions.

This year’s event took place at the Brighton Dome, not a small venue by any means, yet absolute­ly packed by 10 o’ clock.

Talks took place across the five rooms of the venue, and were grouped into cat­e­gories includ­ing: links; con­tent; ecom­merce; ux; and tech­ni­cal SEO amongst oth­ers.

What­ev­er route you chose, you were sure to see some great talks.

High­lights, for me, includ­ed James Per­rot­t’s Guar­an­tee­ing Suc­cess with your on site strat­e­gy which tied togeth­er some clever SEO fore­cast­ing, oppor­tu­ni­ty analy­sis, con­ver­sion opti­mi­sa­tion and on-site strat­e­gy.

In the Dome Con­cert Hall, Lisa Myers and James Fin­layson gave a fan­tas­tic talk on Why SEO needs to get emo­tion­al.

Draw­ing from sci­ence, psy­chol­o­gy, and the work of Anto­nio Dama­sio, Myers and Fin­layson explored the rela­tion­ship between SEO and the human con­nec­tions that peo­ple make which influ­ence their deci­sions. To illus­trate their point, they unveiled Lava the “emo­tion­al search engine”, which mea­sures sen­ti­ment over time for celebri­ties (although it’s assumed the tool could also be used for oth­er enti­ties and brands) across 8 mil­lion media arti­cles. Lava con­firmed that Katy Hop­kins, per­haps as expect­ed, is the most hat­ed per­son in Britain (above Don­ald Trump and Vladimir Putin), but per­haps more sur­pris­ing that amongst promi­nent democ­rats, Bernie Sanders is actu­al­ly bet­ter received that Clin­ton or Oba­ma. Do check out the slides above if you missed the pre­sen­ta­tion as it was a fan­tas­tic talk.

Greg Gif­ford, Direc­tor of Search and Social at Deal­erOn, gave a pre­sen­ta­tion, Mar­ket­ing to Local Busi­ness­es, packed with SEO good­ies, local-search insights, and no less that 88 movies ref­er­ences from car movies.

Greg’s talk was a mile a minute and cov­ered every­thing from best-prac­tice local SEO, Face­book tar­get­ing, and iBea­cons, and I’d strong­ly rec­om­mend hav­ing a look through the slides if you have an invest­ment in local SEO.

Col­lette Eas­t­on, from Linkdex, gave a pre­sen­ta­tion in the Corn Exchange on The Secrets of In-House SEO Teams. Col­lette has the inside track on in-house SEO, and spoke to heads of SEO from in-house teams at uSwitch, JD Williams, and Sky­scan­ner to gain some insight on the secrets, as well as the chal­lenges brands face, when it comes to in-house SEO.

It was a fas­ci­nat­ing per­spec­tive on in-house SEO, but there were lessons there for all orga­ni­za­tions invest­ed in the chan­nel. Key take­aways includ­ed the notion that in-house need to oper­ate in a con­sul­ta­tive man­ner for oth­er in-house depart­ments, and that com­mu­ni­ca­tion and per­ceived avail­abil­i­ty are very impor­tant. Teams, also need to be very flex­i­ble and be able to piv­ot and change direc­tion as required, which is often a chal­lenge for in-house teams. You can view the slides from Col­let­te’s pre­sen­ta­tion below.

All in all it was a fas­ci­nat­ing day of talks. If you want to revis­it any of the speak­ers slides from the day, you can find them all here cour­tesy of Nick Wils­don.