Notes from the Saigon SEO Mastery Conference 2024

I was priviledged to be apart of Saigon SEO Mastery Conference 2024. Lucky for you, I believe in taking notes. This is the first time I’ve deployed conference event notes live but hey! Im sure im not the first. So here is my scattered notes from the conference. Ive tried to make them make sense for you, even went to the trouble of adding a few images.

Jason Hennessy scaling an SEO agency

Jason has a book called Honest SEO and law firm seo

Some things Jason said which really hit home

If you don’t have a. Assistant. You are the assistant. And you are doing a $20 an hour job. As a business owner you should be working on the business. Not in the business.

Have a process for email so that you can keep a “zero inbox” this process for “zero inbox” requires four folders.

Don’t just give away titles as it restricts growth. Just because you have a small team doesn’t mean that the one person in social media is automatically the “the head of social media” don’t waste that title if it’s not warranted. Hire smart people and get out of their way. You have a lot more options for employees when your company is remote. If you have a physical address and insist on people physically checking into work every day. Your options for talent will be more limited.

Define your core values.

As a business you need to clearly define your core values. At henessey digital the core values are:

• Always learning
• No jerks
• Honest and transparent
• Do what’s right always

Give awards for people following the core values

Take care of your employees and they will take care of your clients.

Share care program where staff can trade pto days

What is the company vision?

Employees need to see the vision.

How to create the vision

Go to a really nice environment to create your vision. Like an expensive hotel. Hire a copywriter and designer to create your vision as an engaging story brochure or story for your website - ensuring your team reads it.

Key takeaways

• Sop for creating a vision.
• Seo for law book. Its free
• if something goes wrong, Don’t blame your people. Blame your system.
• Cameron herald - teaching kids to be entrepreneurs

Take action because action gets results

Jason Bernard

• Build a knowledge panel.
• Create an exhaustive list of faqs about your company - this will give ai bots a really good understanding of your company.
• Perplexity, copilot, google ai, ChatGPT, these are all the machines that need to know what you do.

Kazra Dash - niche sites are not dead

Planning your keyword research

1. Top of the funnel
2. Middle funnel
3. Bottom of the Funnel

Use Google keyboard planner for keyword research.

You need a homepage to tell google what your site is about. checkout nerdwallet for a good example of a well structured homepage. Google hates homepages that are just a list of blog posts as google cant work it out what the site is about.

Kyle Roof AMA - Ask Me Anything.

• Do a knowledge panel
• No follow links from pages that get tonnes of traffic will pass on the link juice.
• Create a forum where ai bots are talking to each other
• as google is cracking down on affiliate websites that only exist for traffic. You need to hide affiliate links behind captcha or no index page
• Create a topical authority map of your competitors
• Seo press

SEO link building in 2024 by Karl kangur

History of link building

• Xrumer or forum backlinks - rip
• Scapebox and blog comments - rip
• Nuke - rip
• GSA see - not effective
• Social Bookmarks - rip
• Seo Buttler for citations and directories- still worth doing for citations
• Web 2.0 links
• Web 3.0 links
• Broken link building - see video by hrefs. It’s also hard to get roi on this technique
• Pbns - they are not dead. They work for a while and still kinda keep working. Don’t leave footprints. Keep publishing more content, keep doing links. Make it look legitimate.
• PBN 2.0 buy sites , merge together to grow DA.
• 301 redirects- really strong, the price is expensive. Redirect each URL individually. Or redirect whole domain. Redirect all remaining links to an acquisition page.
• Niche edits. Usually trash. They don’t do anything. Quick turnaround. Decline overtime
• Guest posting - 90% of link building is guest posting. Anyone can do it it’s cheap. Google spots guest posts sites easily and kills the links from the site. Most links from guest posts won’t work because google has already identified and penalised the source.
• Haro fantastic, very good links. Cheapest way. Lots of alternatives to Haro.
• PR links. Good links, it’s hard and expensive
• Editorial links - high level guest posting. Very expensive. Reach out and create deals.
• Linkable assets - true assets stay forever and keep growing links. building tools and assets is hard. It Takes time to grow in links. Stats can make for a useful asset.
• Link exchanges - exchanging links is great way to meet other site owners that are willing to trade links.
• Tiered linked building - garbage links that point to different sites then to your site. Works for casinos links but better just to link to your site if your not shady.
• Traffic is not relevant. If a page has a high DA but gets no traffic. That does not matter.

The problem with seo is all the rewards are at the top. As a business it’s important to diversify. You can’t have all your eggs in the SEO basket. You must have traffic coming in from other sources.

How fast do links take to rank - this topic was discussed in the book “seo by the sea”.

Google is watching to see if you start manipulating your ranking.

Disavowing links is a bad practice as it’s probably cutting out valuable links. The links may seem spammy but you don’t know. They could be helpful.

Nathan gotch bought socially stacked website for 5k. All the links going to social stacked was worth 60k.

Building links using Digital PR with Fery Kaszoni

Digital PR requires you to Launch a campaign news story that you have created.

In order to create some original content that journalists will be interested in. Try Combining 2 datasets to create unique content. Ie parking fines in Melbourne- which suburb are you most likely to get a parking fine?

This technique is what I like to call “Independent News based on data science “

Then send out press releases to your network of journalists.

It’s like Haro but reversed engineering- journalists need stories. Write the story for them. And send it to them.

How to find Journalists?

• Roxhillmedia.com
• Muckrack.com
• Vuelio
• Cision
• Prowly, cheap good starting point
• Buzzstream
• Send out mass emails to the journalists 500+

You can do this for your clients. Tell the journalists the study / story was done by the client. The. Journalists publication links back to your client

Article can be published on your client’s site and also sent out to journalists to use. The article should include links back to your clients website stating that the study was conducted by your client.

Scrape websites review data for certain strings to support your argument. Ie search trip reviews for “hair on food” to find countries with the hairiest food.

Data is available from

Census Data.gov And there was many more on this list