I was telling one of my designer friends last week that I was going to an SEO conference, and he grinned and replied with something along the lines of, ‘That sounds incredibly boring’.

It’s so true that everyone else in the industry hates SEO.

Anyway, I was stupidly excited about going. I headed down to London on the Thursday night and stayed with one of my old work friends who now lives in Canary Wharf. I woke up hyper at half six on Friday morning and didn’t stop talking the entire way there. Luckily Rik likes me enough to tolerate me going ‘SEO! SEO!’ on the train and tube (mostly), although I got a few dirty looks from commuters. I was wearing a purple coat and talking loudly, whereas everyone else was in black and silent. Oops. At least I was having fun – they just looked miserable.

I got to the conference, grabbed a couple of pastries, and went to find a seat. Obviously, part of the epicness of a conference lies in the free stuff, and there was a lot of free stuff, including water, sweets, notebooks, pens, etc. Each row even had an extension lead put on it for power, and a jug of water and glasses. Considering I wasn’t even expecting a table, I was pretty happy.

The great thing about this year’s conference was that they fixed some things that were definitely a problem the last time I attended in 2011. People used the Q&A sessions to ask their own, very personal, SEO questions which were generally a) low-level and b) useless to everyone else forced to listen to them. They got around it by introducing a separate ‘SEO clinic’ you could book into, which I thought was a fantastic idea.

Also on the fantastic idea list: coffee/lunch room entertainment. There was a Wii, head massaging chairs, and a racetrack with remote controlled cars. Amazing idea. I didn’t get a chance to try any of them out because I put my name down for an optional lunch session (‘Risky link building ideas’, the whole point of my existence), but other people looked like they were having a lot of fun.

The thing I love most about Distilled/SEOmoz conferences is that the quality of the speakers is insanely high. Higher than any other event I’ve been to (sorry, I do love all the things I go to, but speaker quality varies considerably for each talk). Even the talks I found less useful/interesting had the benefit of being given by very experienced speakers who know how to inject comedy, keep the audience entertained, and generally just show their passion. Unbeatable.

These conferences are always crazily inspirational for me; my brain tends to flick to new ideas when people are outlining their stuff, so whilst they’re talking I’m busy scribbling ideas that I can relate to the main brand I work with. Mostly these ideas will be semi-related to what they’re actually talking about at best, but I make notes on what they say too.

Yep, that’s right. I handwrite stuff. Because I can. Just be grateful you’ve been spared the other 18 pages.

In 2011, I scribbled down idea after idea. This time, although there was a lot of good stuff, I found myself thinking, ‘Wow, they mustn’t know about [insert a particular awesome tool here]’, or ‘Wow, we know where we can get infographics done for a third of that’, and so on, which was actually pretty surprising. And epic.

I had a chance to talk to one of the speakers and mentioned one of the little mini campaigns I’d done, and she (and other people) responded really well saying it was a great idea, so that was a nice confidence boost. I don’t really get to talk to people about my SEO ideas/campaigns very much (if at all), and even when I make people listen, they don’t normally get excited. Or even interested, if I’m honest.

Love Rand Fishkin. Not least because if you close your eyes, it sounds like Kermit the Frog is talking about SEO.

One of the most interesting comments was that it’s getting ‘harder to fake it than make it’. So true, and a good confidence boost for trying to get links from ridiculously well-known websites. I love hearing about other people’s success stories when it comes to getting amazing links.

Late afternoon cake was very welcome, although I was still hyped up and didn’t really need the sugar:

After the conference ended I walked around London for a bit until Rik (and one of our other friends, Stu, and their girlfriends) came to meet me. We went to a pub because it was one of their colleague’s leaving drinks, so I ended up hanging out with some people from Amazon for a bit.

Despite all the free food during the day, I was starving, so we went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner. Mexican isn’t my favourite kind of food, but the salted caramel ice cream I had for dessert was to die for (also, we got some little chilli seeds to plant – amazing). After that we had more drinks and caught up on gossip before heading home.

The next day we had breakfast at a little place called Teapod, and then I met up with one of my uni friends at Borough Market, which was pretty cool, if crowded.

I stayed the night at her and her husband’s house, which was a completely different London experience to Thursday and Friday at Rik’s. They live ‘practically in the suburbs’ of zone 6; it’s still London, but they have chickens instead of skyscrapers outside. We hung out, did some house geek related stuff and some shopping, and generally relaxed. The next day I left them building beehives to catch my train home. Considering I’m so shit with directions, I was quite proud of myself for being able to make my own way back to zone 1 (or whatever zone it was) to get the train back.

When I came into work today I was greeted by this:

The Little Book of Tube Etiquette. Perhaps Rik isn’t quite as tolerant of me as I thought ;)