Live in Watford. Work in London. These are my thoughts.
I never know what I want for Christmas so am not expecting anything in particular tomorrow.
I decided to take advantage of Link-Assistant.com’s SEO Big Heart Christmas offer. There are just a couple of hours left if you are interested they are offering 60% off their SEO PowerSuite Software if you blog about their deal!
Haven’t started any of my holiday work yet either!
Had a really good time at ProSEO where there were a lot of big name speakers, thanks to Distilled for the free ticket.
Picked up a few ideas for my final year project particularly from Patrick Altoft of Branded3/SEO blog blogstorm. A couple more features I now plan to implement in my Link Analysis tool are a link profile graph showing the spread of links from each domain authority (so you can build links that follow the natural linking profile for your sector) and an indicator that a site may have been penalised by Google if its PageRank value is significantly different from the mozRank (there is a SEOmoz API).
Patrick’s presentation also made use of Wordle.net an excellent tool for visualising word based data (e.g. you can stick an RSS feed into it or, in this case, a list of anchor text point to a domain). Wordle have some advanced features which can enable integration with other software.
Dave Naylor was pretty spot on with his Google is taking over the SERPs talk too!
Although I’m still ahead of schedule on the downside I haven’t coded anything on my project for the last 6 days due to going back home, the conference and a C project to create a “console-based Internet chatting system”.
MSInternet came into uni today along with a game development recruitment company. They were billed as a web development/internet marketing company but after a nice chat with MD Martin Saunders it seems they are mostly focused on php development and iPhone Apps now rather than SEO 
.
Above: Couple of Wordle clouds for (non-weighted) referring search terms in last month - pretty obvious which sites they are for!
On Monday and Tuesday this week I will be attending the Distilled/SEOmoz Pro SEO Seminar in London. Two missed days of University but this is a rare opportunity and I think it will be a lot more beneficial for my future career. My final year project is also to develop a piece of software that analyses hyperlinks so maybe I can collect some new ideas too!
I won tickets to the conference in a competition run by the Distilled SEO agency. It is a very generous prize as tickets normally sell for £700 + VAT. They also gave a ticket to another student who is interning at a local directory website.
It was Will from Distilled who first sparked my interest in SEO as a career and he along with some other big names are going to be speaking.
This will be the first SEO event I have attended. I’ve read the schedule and a lot of the lectures sound interesting – looks like there is going to be a lot of practical advice given out. Not entirely sure what to expect but hopefully I will learn a lot and I’ll try my best not be too terrified to speak to people working in the industry – one of the lectures is about recruiting for SEO so will be of definite interest!
