SMX Advanced Seattle – An Unforgettable Adventure

Yup! We’re back from SMX Advanced!

And, as you may have guessed, we did not come empty handed. The backpacks that we came back with are stuffed with new ideas from fellow SEOs, old friends and new ones, tons of pictures and, of course, good stories to tell.

Let’s open these backpacks together and see what we can find inside.

Takeaways

Here are the best tips from SMX this year:

Link Building

• The days of easy links and easy SEO are over (Rae Hoffman-Dolan)

• Good links should be built for people, not for search engine rankings (Danny Sullivan's rant)

• Credibility is everything in getting high authority links (Eric Enge)

• Build relationships, that's how you build links (Casie Gillette)

• Search engines are faster and smarter than ever before (Thomas Schmitz)

Ranking

• Pagination and Canonicalization help big e-commerce sites avoid duplicate content (Adam Audette)

• Considering Universal Search, we may soon see only three organic results on Google's first page (Bruce Clay)

Social

• Google is about interconnectivity of the web and Social is on top (Todd Friesen)

• Google+ does not have enough critical mass to make it a real signal for rankings, Facebook does (Greg Boser)

Content Marketing

• Content marketing works better than ever. It involves more effort, but it's more effective (Brent Csutoras)

• People convert when we solve their problems (Vanessa Fox)

An awesome experience

Speaking in front of hundreds of people is not easy, especially when your conclusion is: “Stop building links the hard way! Spend your time making great products and great content!”.

Philip Petrescu (CEO of Caphyon) was very excited to share our knowledge on Authority building versus Link building. If you're interested to see the story behind the slides, check out this post that was featured on the SEOmoz blog.

Funny memories

The paparazzi on duty caught a few funny moments during the trip. The most exciting is this one, embedded below, where our lead programmer (Stefan Matei) traded his keyboard for a set of drum sticks and tried to play “Wild Thing” (does anyone remember The Troggs?).

There’s a rumor that this masterpiece is also on camera, but I’m guessing it sounded so bad that our guys here decided to share only the pics. :)

Will we be there next year?

You bet! And we’re so enthusiastic that we’ve already started packing our bags and dressing accordingly!

Thank you SMX for a great conference! This event was an amazing opportunity to get to know new people and discuss about the latest challenges in the industry.

Special thanks go to Emily Breeze for organizing this great event and helping us with all the details and Akvile Harlow for being a great supporter of our team and for making us feel at home with her smiles.