I had a great time at the Share 13 conference organized by BrightEdge this past week. BrightEdge definitely knows how to treat their customers well, and they put on a great event with some great speakers capped off by a wine tour in Napa Valley. Hard to beat that.

I started off the day feeling pretty sleepy, and was pretty much in a state of torpor, hibernation, and estivation (source). However, after a couple cups of coffee I started to feel human again, and I was able to stay awake during the conference sessions.

One of my key takeaways from the conference was the growing importance of mobile, which was a recurring theme throughout the conference. Of course, everybody should know by now that mobile adoption is growing at an exponential rate, but as one of the speakers pointed out, businesses have still been lagging when it comes to developing a mobile strategy. It definitely lit a fire under my ass to accelerate mobile optimizations on both my business and personal sites.

There were also some cool demonstrations of upcoming features to BrightEdge around content and social media analytics that were very interesting. With the recent content marketing push our company is engaged in, these tools will come in handy in easily measuring the impact of our efforts.

Share 13 also provided a great refresher course on BrightEdge, with a Certification program on Saturday morning. I’m happy to say that despite my hangover from the night before, I passed with flying colors. With the popularity of BrightEdge among the leading online businesses in the world, it’s a handy certification to have on hand (source).

The attendees at the conference really reflected the diversity of BrightEdge’s customer base, with top SEOs from major brands in attendance from all over the world. It was really fun networking and talking SEO with all these professionals, as well as live tweeting the event over Twitter.

Overall, it was a great event, and I’m looking forward to attending Share 14.