Site icon Bloom

My Journey to Pubcon Las Vegas 2019 – Day 1

Pascal Côté
PubCon 2019

Today marked the very first day of the Pubcon Las Vegas 2019, the 19th edition of the digital marketing event. I got the opportunity to attend the conferences again this year and follow the new developments in the SEO industry and in overall digital marketing.

Like every year, Brett Tabke, Pubcon’s founder, kickstarts the event accompanied by Pubcon’s Lead Moderator and Brett’s long time friend Joe Laratro, by inviting all attendees to enjoy breakfast while both were discussing Pubcon’s growth and future.

Once the intro completed, all 6 conference salons are opened and attendees may choose their own learning path during the day, depending on their preferred subject.

Pubcon Master’s Group Workshop

The Pubcon Master’s Group Workshops (shortened MG) are intense training sessions regarding a specific topic, given by industry leaders and well known figures in digital marketing. Each year, the very first day of Pubcon is exclusively reserved for these MG sessions, which are only available to Platinum pass holders.

I did have the opportunity to get my hands on one of these passes, I chose to go re-learn my link building skills. Since this is a pretty controversial topic, it’s hard to find good resources online, I was glad to be able to get consistent information from 3 different sources about this. The experts giving the talk were Ann Smarty, Dixon Jones and Marie Haynes.

Every time I go to Pubcon, I do my best to revive my Twitter from its ashes. In fact, I used my Twitter as a notepad and this article will have the purpose of beng a good recap of what I experienced during the conference. I’ll link the most relevant Tweets and add some comments on them in order to provide context. If you want the full feed, you could always check my Twitter here.

Relevant since many people (including clients and colleagues) always ask me “What makes a good link?” I always answered the same thing: “It’s a link that people will click on.” Not to hard to understand, right?
I often use the “semantic” work during my client pitches. Not only because it sounds fancy, but because it is very relevant when looking at what search engines are doing these days. The web isn’t just a series of pages with words in them, search engines now understand much more that what we think they do.
A more advanced, but very efficient link building technique. Sites like Help A Reporter Out (HARO) are constantly looking out for experts with in order to get their point of view of a particular topic. Perfect opportunity to get a link!
What we call “linkable assets” are whatever type of content that encourage users to share it. Popular examples of such assets are: industry reports, expert or group interview, an industry-specific tool, etc.
This type of content is highly appreciated by people that consume it and such people will have a much higher chance of sharing your content online.
A bit more details on what qualifies a “good” link. Always ask yourself if this links exists only for SEO purposes. If so, it’s not a good link.
Dixon was showing how it was possible to identify which type of link works best in the SERPs by doing a very simple Google search with your target domain.
Many people think they must publish content on all channels, regardless of their performance, simply to get links from them. Ann prefers the famous “Quality over Quantity” and carefully picks where she wants to post content.

Hungry for more? Read what happened on Day 2 of Pubcon Las Vegas here.

Exit mobile version