First night there was a pre-party where you could pick up your passes already. Spotting Marcus, Dave and his lovely wife becky got us into some SEO talk, but mostly good clean fun. My old colleague Joost joined us pretty fast (us being my friend Evert from veroworx and me). Auke from Affilinet was there are also, and we’ve been drinking a beer or two till the bar closed down, a great start of this conference.

Next day was starting out for me a 8 o’clock. My girlfriend had her birthday so I had to call her. Next up was some time to plough through my presentation, since I’ve started to get a little nervous. Didn’t matter, Joost his presentation about WordPress started at 11 and I wanted to see that, since he’s a good friend with great presentations. It rocked, and i’ve heard a lot of great feedback about that presentation. Nothing new for me, but the crowd loved it. And a big crowd it was!

Then there was the extreme SEO session, with a great line-up. Joost, Marcus, Dave and Rob were moderated by Ciaran which did a great job! Some other sessions could have used his moderation as well. It was an good session. Focused a lot on negative SEO and buying quality links and ‘silver bullets’ (links that kill a site immediately). Had a lot of fun, and the quality was high. Nothing I could ever use for our customers, but knowing what’s possible is never a bad thing.

After that my presentation was up. Getting in the room looked good. 5 minutes before the start the room was packed already and people had to stay out, so the people of a4uexpo decided that we should switch rooms again so more people could see it. I guess there were between 100 and 140 people were in there. That would double the fun. Went through my presentation about Internal link building. I think I’ve made my point that it all was about contextual relevant links to you money pages and consistency. Andrew Girdwood did his talk about external link building and being controversial as he is, he advised that if your merchants were buying links, you’d report them and start ranking for the brandname as being a publisher. I think people liked his presentation as well.

Then we had to rush to catch the bus to the silver sturgeon which would sails us across the Thames, from buckingham palace till the millennium dome. That was pretty fun as well, although the food dividing was a bit fucked up. Some people literally were diving like vultures on the food since there wasn’t enough of it at the same time and people were starving. Didn’t matter that much since drinks were good and there was great red wine. There are some great pictures on the flickr page.

Hmm, this is actually enough for day 1 and the pre-party. I’ll write up a review on day 2 on our company blog since this will be live in a couple of days from now with a great revamp.

You can find other reviews at:

• Keith Bond
• Geoff’s blog
• Patrick altoft
• Dixon Jones
• Codswallop
• Yoast

Update:

• Peter Coles
• P Anderson
• The big bad A4U wrap up!
• Mel Carson’s Cost per Monk
• a4u expo – Conversion Rate Experts Reveal Conversion is All a Matter of Persuasion
• Lammo.net
• Befuddled me

If you want to see my slides they are on slideshare now:
http://www.slideshare.net/chapter42/a4uexpo-internal-linking-structure-presentation/

I’m still having a blast in several sessions and I’ll be back in the Netherlands tomorrow. Let me know what you think!

Cheers!