If you have never been to Thinkvis before I would highly recommend you go. Although it is one of the cheapest SEO conferences about it is probably one of the best, in my opinion, but I am sure plenty of others would agree.
Arriving at the Alea casino bright and early Saturday morning you recieve a warm welcome and a small bag containing a LEGO man, a cardboard Dom (the organiser), some sweets and a schedule.
Making your way up the stairs or elevator you are greeted with plenty of bacon sandwiches, tea and coffee. Whilst here there is a great opportunity to meet alot of new people, before making your way into the conference.
Dom gives a small introduction about Thinkvis (which slightly wakes the hung-over people up), before making your way to the events. There are two events running simultaneously so there is the option to pick and choose. If you feel there is anything you missed out on, there are blogs posted to help provide any missing information.
Below is the review of the events I atended.
Playing Football Manager is good for SEO
If you don’t play football manager already, now is probably the time to start. Kelvin’s talk this subject shows how you can learn quite alot from football manager, in respect to how you manage your SEO campaign. To do justice to the subject here is a link to the slides from the seminar, enjoy. Playing Football Manager is good for SEO by Kelvin
Becoming an SEO Business Ninja
This was an interesting talk with the speaker in a karate suit. Unfortunatly this seminar may have been slightly too early in the morning, as it involved alot of crowd participation, and was hindered as people hadn’t brought laptops and ipads with them. The talk was a lesson in learning to use tools such as spiders and crawlers to your benefit. The speaker gave a list of tools, which I highly recommend you check out, unfortunatly there wasn’t a link to the appropriate slides, however I have included the URL for you all. www.strategyinternetmarketing.co.uk
Regular engagement is vital for social marketing
This was a very good and unusual presentation as Jenifer gave a very honest and open seminar on the pit falls of holding events on social media sites. As well as showing what worked Jennifer actually talked about how they failed and importantly, why they failed and what could be done to improve next time. The whole presentation was about social trial and error, some ideas worked extremely well, some were alot more challenging than anticipated and not as successful. One key aspect was that people just want simple engagement. The idea doesn’t have to be massive and doesn’t have to be giving away diamond rings, just keep your ideas simple and it’ll be a success. Also if it doesn’t feel right to you then the idea most likely won’t work.
WordPress Security 101
This was possibly one of the best talks of the day. Alot of people are using WordPress and actually don’t realize just how venerable they are to hackers. The company I work for currently uses wordpress for 95% of its websites because of its functionality and how easy it is to use and update. Simple things like making sure you don’t use obvious passwords and usernames, which you would think people would know, but in fact they don’t realise. Also removing your config and deleting the readme.txt file from the root directory is highly recommended, as you are telling hackers what version etc you are using and what plug-ins it is running. There was lots of useful hints and tips and I had a great chat with the speaker afterwards.
Unfortunatly I missed the last two events, however I strongly suggest that if you haven’t been to Thinkvis before you should make sure you attend Think Visibility 7. There is also the pre-party and after party to attend where there is just as much, if not even more here, as there is in the party conference. It is very sociable and everyone talks to each other so there is plenty of help and discussion on offer. Anything you wanting to know or something you want to learn you will probably find advice from some aspect of the conference.