SEO Secrets We Don’t Usually Blog About

Yep you read it right. This is the topic of our last year’s SEO Summit 2014. It’s been a year since that time and we’re thoroughly excited to finally be able to make the make the sessions of local SEO superstars Jason Acidre, Benj Arriola and Sean Si – public!

Webmaster’s Note: You can download all of the videos, Powerpoint decks and AMA sessions of SEO Summit 2014 (for a Tweet or share) here. Also, I apologize in advance for our readers who are not familiar with Tagalog as some of the videos here are not in straight English.

It was an awesome event with over 200 people in attendance. First off was Jason Acidre with his talk “From Zero to Hero”.

In the video he explains his journey to SEO as a pro gamer, a bum and basically a guy with pretty much no vision in life. Looking back, he says that the first part of his life has molded him to who he is as a business person, strategist and SEO specialist.

He goes on to elaborate how he started as an in-house SEO guy working remotely for a company abroad. At the same time, he works on the side on his own project. The funny thing is, he never thought of starting his own company – much less speaking in front of a crowd.

His obsession with SEO fueled his now unintended popularity in the SEO scene.

Here’s his Powerpoint Deck so you’d get a better grasp of his presentation:

The crowd was also able to ask a few questions towards Jason on the AMA session. You can watch the AMA video below:

After Jason, Benj Arriola stepped up on stage. He was actually the highlight of the SEO Summit since he came all the way from the USA. He spoke on a very interesting topic entitled “A Web Developer’s Journey From Blackhat to Whitehat” which pretty much gripped the audience’s attention.

He goes back to the past and tries to lay out how he learned SEO through being a web developer way back in the year 1994. His technical SEO background led him to explore some stuffs that we now call ‘black hat’ practices.

Don’t take my word for it. Watch the video and see for yourself!

I took the liberty of embedding his Powerpoint deck here in case you find it hard to follow it in the video:

Benj’s Ask me anything portion isn’t any less interesting. The questions range from issues on reputation management, to parallax designs and its effects on SEO, to ranking an unwanted page for a target keyword and so on.

Lastly, I gave the presentation on “I’m not doing SEO” which got quite a controversial discussion. While Benj and Jason tackled SEO on the operations side of things, I tackled the business development side of things and how to make SEO ‘work’ for you in terms of monetization – which is acquiring clients and maintaining clients.

I tackled some things like how I started SEO Hacker as a freelancer, built it to a team of more than 20 people and a brand that is well known in the local SEO scene.

Watching it now, I must say my speaking style has changed dramatically since then. I had the shortest talk at 33 minutes.

Here’s my Powerpoint Deck if you have difficulty following it through the video:

I thought that people would’ve ran out of questions by the time it was my AMA session. So I asked Benj and Jason up the stage with me so that people would be able to catch up on some questions they might’ve missed on the earlier speakers.

Check it out!

That’s a handful – over 4 hours worth of content combined. We’ve learned a lot from the previous SEO Summit (it was our first time organizing an SEO event – ever). And we hope to bring what we’ve learned to the table on this year’s SEO Summit.

Speaking of, we’re at our last stretch of days before the SEO Summit 2015 comes around! Make sure you’ve reserved your slot today!