Cats are good for SEO. Fact.

So, how to capture this in words… The 19th and 20th of October 2009 were the best two days any SEO (in house, agency or hobbyist) could have taken out of their calendar year.

OK so that doesn’t make for a very exciting blog post but I don’t say that lightly; the last two days have been filled with genuine actionable tips and tricks, hardcore analytics and the unholy love between one man and Excel.

My problem with conferences and gatherings throughout the search world is that you always get one of two things; great content (i.e. aimed at the right crowd – which as an agency SEO is not usually me) OR great people.

Distilled and SEOmoz however have managed to pull together both for a fascinating and useful two day session. Will Critchlow cemented my opinion on this afterward ‘We told people don’t bring your slides telling people how to do stuff, just bring the tips’ (apologies for the terrible paraphrasing Will but you get the gist!).

So my top self improvement takeaways from the Pro Training sessions this year are:

1. Excel
I thought I was good, I was wrong.

Will kicked off the two days with a hard core session of advanced (and amazing) analytics. What he also showed us was how Excel can not only make kick ass graphs but can be your best friend – how? With pivot tables. I actually need to learn more about these and how to use them properly before I say more but if you want to know – as Will!

Will went on to discuss (as did almost every other speaker – don’t want to do anyone a disservice!) how we can all use Analytics to inform action, rather than just reporting. This may seem like an obvious thing to say bit the categorisation of types of data into ‘leading indicators’ and ‘signature analytics’. This essentially is the ‘does it look like it will work’ and ‘does it look like it has worked’ basis of using analytics to inform action for yourself or your clients.

The whole session was amazing and illustrated an intelligent, strategic use of data analysis and analytics which everyone can use to improve their campaigns or business.

2. Excel
When you’re good at Excel, get even better at Excel.

Excel kind of became a running theme really – Duncan did an awesome sign to illustrate this, get the DVD to see him in action!

3. Recruiting SEOs
I’m sure everyone has had this problem; there is not formal training or qualification for SEO outside of the industry itself, so how do you know if a sparky young junior will be a great SEO rockstar a year down the line? Richard Baxter (of SEO Gadget fame!) provided the excellent recommendation of group interviews. According to this (proven) theory; grab 8 people, get them in a room and set them paired tasks. I believe Richard’s example was ‘pair up and sell me your partner in two minutes’.

This allows you to assess their communication skills, how well they listen and generally how personable they are. Depending on the complexity or nature of your task you can basically assess whatever you like and save time with this method – great tip Richard!

4. Penalties vs Filters
Lovely Jane Copland gave an excellent presentation on why you probably don’t have a penalty. Google has massively increased their algorithmic filtering to (try) to increase the quality of their top results. As such a lot of sites can get filtered and assume they have been slapped with a penalty.

This tied in with some later content about Google’s ingenius ‘learning’ tests which seem to be happening a lot lately… However the important takeway is don’t panic, your haven’t been banned! Do some analysis and check your link profile and/or content for anything that might cause your site to be seen as anything less than the answer people are searching for.

5. Data. Is . Sweet.
Ben Hendrickson from SEOmoz did the most amazing data analysis which said everything and nothing at the same time. Awesome. You should probably contact him direct for more because I’m still digesting his presentation.

6. Use PPC to inform your SEO campaigns
PPC is easy right? Just joshing PPC guys it really really hard… Do you look at a PPC campaign and use it to inform organic keywords to target? PPC can tell you quickly what is converting and how much, thus you have a quick cheeky win to help you shape your campaign early on.

7. Use Your Assets
A big theme from the Pro Training was engaging with your site, your client or your industry and really leveraging your USPs to help you Linkbuild and form lasting business relationships. Rand, Tom, Will, Duncan, Rob – pretty much everyone touched on this subject and it’s easy to say – but harder to do. As Tom so succinctly put it ‘I can stand up here and tell you to go do it (linkbuilding), but you actually have to do it.’ Seems obvious but it’s not the flippant point it appears to be.

8. Google loves video (probably too much)
A very interesting post from Patrick Altoft over at Branded 3 highlighted Google’s current hunger for video indexing. HE even noted that they are actually indexing some flash files which are not video (admittedly on pretty long tail search) in an effort to universalise the results.

Patrick also talked about how to maximise your use of image and video in a number of ways, such as branding up your images and hosting your own video to increase your CTR. Good stuff!

I won’t leak any more super secret SEO tips as I know there is a DVD coming of the whole session which I would highly recommend you buy – it’s well worth the money.

So I suppose my final thoughts are that the last two days have been filled with useful, actionable, interesting content which has literally set my mind racing with ways I can now improve what we do internally at Bloom – the team and I are clearly having a weekend in the office to watch the DVD and eat pizza – win!

Ok final final thought – get yourself down next year.