It was a beautiful Friday morning when three ADEO employees left their office and desks behind to attend the second edition of the SEO Camp in Montreal. Despite some uncomfortable seating, the conferences we’re very interesting and the atmosphere was fun and casual. Some presenters who were invited last year returned for the second edition and many hot topics regarding the Internet, Google, and SEO were discussed.
Local search and its importance, was a big part of this year’s presentations and a few tips on how to rank well in search listings were shared:
- It’s important to know that the “Local business center” in Canada gets its data from Yellowpages.ca. For the US, the interaction between providers is far more complicated.
- If a good review about your products or services gets posted on a website that Google references, it will help your rankings go up.
- Creating a KML (keyhole markup language) sitemap can help your ranking.
- Citations (mentions of your address on other sites) is another way to improve your ranking.
- Using Google Map Maker can be useful if your ranking is less than superb.
Of course, many other subjects were discussed during the event. The conferences began at 9 am and continued until 6 pm. It was interesting to have longer conferences and shorter ones spread out throughout the day, which was a convenient way to organize the event.
While we were not able to attend the final conference, we did pick up some very interesting and noteworthy tips during the conferences we were fortunate enough to attend:
- Micro formats was a hot topic that was barely mentioned at last year’s conference but this year, we have a clear winner of the format war: schema.org.
- Organizing workshops can be really beneficial to changing your coworkers’ mentalities and getting some buy-in from the client.
- Adwords, local business and other blended results can really destroy click-through rates in their unscientific analysis. On a clean page with no ads, you will be able to receive an 85% click-through rate, on a mixed page; it can be less than 10% of CTR for a first place result.
- Using site search on an ecommerce web site can really help a webmaster decide which items to stock based upon search popularity.
- Google uses partner sites for “social data hub”.
- New this year: HrefLang for indicating translated versions of your content.
Great weather, great catering, great conferences, great day. Despite a few technical difficulties here and there, it is safe to say that this year SEO Camp Montreal was a success and we are all eager to attend the event again, next year.
Congratulations to W3 Québec for organising this event! It was fun and very informative.
