Barcamp Leeds 2007 – My SEO Talk

I was really nervous about yesterdays Barcamp in Leeds as I’d been called out by The Hodge after slating his SEO presentation at a previous GeekUp and asked to co-present an SEO critique session with him. In addition it wasnt until around 8:30 yesterday morning that i realised that the event was an all day thing and not a 7pm start as GeekUp usually is which meant I had to rush to get there.

For those of you who havent been to a BarCamp yet (theres loads all over the world) its a strange format thats basically ‘web2.0′ only in human form with everyone opting on the day to do presentations on something they know about and its all worked out on post it notes on a board so you can see who’s scheduled to talk about what in each room. Althgether it workded really well (apart from anything that relied on technology *cough* The Hodges live linkup with Barcamp Toronto *cough*

With time-slots being roughly 20 mins, many people opted to simply introduce a product or service and there were few actual practical sessions which was something Ive been striving for.

…so I attended seminars on:

• Futurology (we came up with a dog version of Match.com based on the cryptic connections between a dog and disposeable camera)
• Drupal (which everyone agreed was too hard to get into and customise)
• Case study on a social loan company who’ve set up a whisky distillary based on community monies
• Case study on some interesting nodal tagging for the BBC

…and lots more.

Our presentation on SEO went well, tho I found the touch sensitive digital whiteboards a complete nightmare to work with and couldn’t really figure out how to jump into wordtracker etc to give some real impacting feedback so I opted to talk to interested people on a 1-2-1 basis afterwards. Read an impartial review here and SEOMOZ.org has a nice document that supports my comments on link juice and control of your websites internal link structure.

Loads of beer didn’t turn up due to someone not ordering it in advance. And the pub we all ended up in smelt like an armpit lol.

So will I go to the next one? Hell yeah!

Oh and I won an iPod lol!