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There's always "take home" value that you can immediately apply after attending Elite Retreat. I, Giovanna have signed an NDA so I can't go into deep details.

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I think conferences are great for coming up with business ideas and making meaningful friendships and business relationships, and I would not have as many opportunities as I have now unless I went to many conferences back in the day. But I think I have been going to about 8 or 10 conferences a year for the past couple years and have got burned out on them. I am going to be at Elite Retreat this year, but am hoping that I can take a break otherwise.

Appreciating Conference Saturation

This past week Elite Retreat was announced and I turned down speaking requests for 4 other conferences! It seems I could do nothing but speak at conferences, but I just have too much fun playing online and see too much opportunity to have to travel once or twice a month. And conference overload leads to burnout, a line I am near more often than I should be.

Appreciation of Online Assets

In the last few years I have seen

• the lowering of the value of typical reciprocal links
• the lowering of the value of most directories
• drastic reduction in cost of market research
• sharply increased domain prices (some people have offered enough to make me a seller, and I get offers about once a week from a rather small portfolio)
• increased cost per click prices
• buying PPC ads getting harder due to relevancy scores that try to prohibit non-brands from advertising
• sales cycles getting more efficient
• the creation of shaddow brands to allow businesses to be bolted on to free offerings that build good will and reduce their marketing cost to zero
• increasingly complex information formats (both free and paid)
• the saturation of markets that were largely created AFTER I got into SEO
• quality links becoming tougher to get (you can see this with how the media is linking internally where they used to link out...you appreciate the trend even more when a few friends send you some private internal documents from said companies)
• increased time commitment to create valuable brands due to increased market competiton (in some rare cases even pure spammers are creating good content)
• people becoming more cynical about content quality due to linkbait attention whoring
• hand edits wiping out once highly profitable websites that were cleaner than competing ones own by large corporations
• the move from one-time sales to subscription based pricing

I still have a few tricks and ideas that offer an amazing ROI, but as more people use them the ideas will see their ROI approach zero, unless I look for ways to layer real value on top of them. And it is hard to layer real value without committing both time and capital to the project.

Comparing Online ROI vs Offline ROI

A few weeks ago my wife held a meetup for bloggers where she and I gave away tons of tips to people with no sales pitch. I also paid for dinner for about 30 people. Out of that mini-conference type event I think only 1 blogger even mentioned it online. Most expensive paid link ever. ;)

When I went to the Blogworld Expo I think there were about 30 or 40 people in the audience. And going to the conference cost me a couple days of work. In about the same amount of time I was able to create the Blogger's Guide to SEO and market it. It got a couple thousand inbound links, over 1,000 bookmarks, over 50,000 reads, and videos I embedded in it got about 300 hundred to 600 clickthroughs to YouTube from my article.

Your Thoughts?

I have way too many ideas and way too little time to implement them. In some cases I have partnerships and my wife is doing lots of development stuff now too, so both of those help, but do you still get the same ROI out of conferences as you did when you first started going to them? If not, what do you do in place of them where you find better ROI?

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Lorna Li wrote a wonderful overview of my wife's blog meetup speech. Jeremy Schoemaker announced the next Elite Retreat, which is on April 3rd and 4th. With Brian Clark speaking, I feel more like I am going to be an attendee than a speaker. Check out Brian's post on creating leading edge strategic content.

Kris Jones launched the PepperJam affiliate marketing network today.

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A number of readers emailed me asking to send them my WebmasterWorld Pubcon Powerpoint slides. Downloads:

• low risk link buying slides
• contextual ad optimization slides

Here they are online as well:

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This is was a document about how optimizing a blog is largely a game of competing for attention, with tips on how to win attention and marketshare.

BTW, I am going to WebmasterWorld Las Vegas Pubcon next month. I think I am speaking on two or three different panels.

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George Kepnick (a.k.a. Werty) and Todd Malicoat (a.k.a. Stuntduble / Tuxedo Todd) will be in Beijing from October 12th through the 18th, and are hoping to hang out with some local SEOs. Just in case you have not yet met them, you can see a video of Todd talking here and a video of Werty dancing here.

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I mentioned offhandedly in a blog post earlier, but I recently got married and am going to have a big wedding on October 5th in Manila. A few days later there is an SEM conference right next door. Marc Hil Macalua, the founder of SEO Philippines, recently announced the 2007 SEM Conference on his blog, which he is giving away free passes to attend here.

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Jay Westerdal recently invited me to speak at the Domain Roundtable, a domaining conference held in Seattle from August 13th through 15th.

If you would like to attend here is a code for $100 off attending: domainseo. That is not an affiliate code, just a coupon code.

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I picked Pat / feedthebot as the winner of the free pass to Search Marketing Expo. Thanks to everyone who entered the contest.

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You must pay for travel costs, but I have a free pass to attend SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 4th and 5th. I bought a pass but found out that I was invited to speak. If you want the free pass leave a comment about why I should give it to you and I will select the winner Monday.

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We are giving away a free pass to the the fast approaching San Fransisco Elite Retreat conference that myself, Lee Dodd, Jeremy (Shoemoney) Schoemaker, Kris Jones, Darren Rowse, and Neil Patel are putting on. We have all decided to hold a fun contest where we are giving away 1 free ticket (value of $4,950) to the conference.

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Recently, in addition to the expansion of Elite Retreat, a couple more smaller niche SEO conferences have been announced. These conferences offer a great value because they allow you to be close to the facilitator. They are like buying under-priced consulting in the form of a conference.

If you are on the other side of the pond you won't want to miss DaveN's SEO Days. In London on the 20th & 21st of March the SEO Days team is holding a hands on two day conference costing £1750 (incl. VAT) per person.

If you are in the New York area check out SEO Class. Stuntdubl, GoodROI, Rae, and Shoemoney are offering a free class for nonprofits on March 23, 2007. On May 27th & 28th they are holding a two day course for businesses. The cost to attend is $2999.

As noted by Lee Odden, with SEO conferences small is the new big. These conferences have already been added to the calendar.

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We are holding the second Elite Retreat in San Fransisco on March 19th and 20th. Jeremy Shoemaker, Lee Dodd, and I will attend again. In addition Neil Patel, Darren Rowse, and Kris Jones will also be speaking.

Capacity is limited to 30 people, so register soon if you would like to attend.

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On December 18th and 19th, in San Antonio, Texas I will be a facilitator at the Elite Retreat. Elite Retreat is a business conference focused on helping businesses integrate their business into the web and take their online business to the next level.

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I think the Las Vegas Pubcon from November 14 to November 17 is probably going to be the SEO event of the year.

Here is my top 18 reasons to attend...

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The number of conferences and other obligations I have been dealing with have overwhelmed me, so I decided to create a calendar of marketing and SEO conferences. It is updated through the end of 2006, although I am uncertain to when WITS is. If I missed anything please let me know and I will add it.

The calendar is heavily focused on search and marketing. It will also list a few of the techy conferences like Web 2.0, Gnomedex, and SXSW.

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I took some pictures while at the Boston.

A few pictures:
Jim Boykin celebrates his 27th birthday.
Tony Spencer had his birthday.
Joe Morin gives me clothing intervention.
Andy Hagans says thumbs up.

View the Boston Pubcon 2006 pictures.

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Jim Boykin is hosting a free SEO gathering on January 18th in Troy NY. Rumor has it Jim is buying the beer as well.

Dan Thies is hosting an 8 week linking teleseminar from January 18 to March 8. It costs $895 to attend. Dan provides personal access and good value for money in his teleconferences.

Perry Marshall is hosting a 3 day seminar focused on AdWords. It will be in Chicago on April 7-9 and costs $1795.

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Patrick Gavin gave similar presenatation as his recent San Jose one.

Stuntdubl mentioned the techniques of Link Ninjas, which is a link building seminar that came out of the presentation.

He posted quite a bit of good stuff like some of the recurring themes on his blog (link naturally, neighgborhoods, use a variety of link types, etc). I will see if he posts his presentation online. If so I will update this post. Todd has got really good at presenting for starting somewhat recently.

Philip Kaplan of AdBrite showed his recently launched intermission ads (mentioned here). Also noted that AdBrite does not do direct links and is exceptionally transparent.

Martinibuster
Online magazines are sometimes underpriced and have great link neighborhoods.

Gives example Google Search [advertise $15 per month -cpm]

look for websites for stuff like [this website closed]

run Xenu link Sleuth on directories to find broken links...some of those may be easy sites to buy cheaply

emphasizes alternative sources of links

look outside same networks everyone else is using

Q&A: there was a question about Google hating on paid links

don't forget Yahoo! and MSN give credit
stay on topic so you get direct value too

managing link buys?
you can use AdBrite to mine information (this could also be used to help you find what the top posts or topics are on some competing channels)
excel can be used to show link dates, which also helps show the value if you are tracking

Oilman mentioned search for powered by xyz forum + a topic (like sci fi) to look for some potential cheap link buys

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On this pannel sites are reviewed for what they could do to improve their SEO.

ArtInternationalWholesale.com

• use specific page titles on deep pages

• Tim Mayer recommends optimizing for image search since it has lots of traffic and few people optimize for it. Use proper file names, alt tags, and link at the images.
• duplicate content issues (individual product pages are so similar)
• Matt says they need to look harder at link quality
• has the site duplicated on the .co.uk

OnlineHighway or InformationHighway...something like that...I so could not see the URL

• 50,000 to 5,000 visitors per day on update Allegra

• using popunders is just as evil as popups
• unsure purpose of site by looking at a page
• used to have multiple location based URLs...301ed to one central domain. Matt Cutts recommended that.
• Baked Jake said it can take 2 weeks to 6 months for 301s to take effect

TicketsToGo.com

• TicketsToGo seems penalized in Google since October 2004

• also created TicketsToGo.net because
• duplicate content issues
• Jake recommends starting from the bottom up. Building links into some of the subject specific pages and then working your way up.
• target Geo specific concerts
• Matt Cutts said "tell me about your backlinks" ... uber spammy reciprocal linking campaign. said good news is no manual spam penalty, but few of the low quality links this site has are doing it any good.

BargainTravel.com

• Tim Mayer asked what is actually unique about your domain?

• Yahoo! looks to ensure that with travel that the travel box is owned by the domain, not an affiliate form. Would not recommend submitting to Yahoo! paid inclusion
• Matt pointed out bad cross industry linking between his own site (like mortgage and credit sites), but said there were some good links
• Tim recommends making the site more unique from page to page and cleaning up the navigation links. He thinks the site navigation being at the footer and the page content existing primarily of wildcard replace duplicate content makes him think the local pages are for search bots instead of users
• not only link to related pages about immunization, etc., but also create tables of the locatin based related information, etc.

MicroMatic.com

• home page title nice

• site looks good
• individual product pages have good data
  Matt Cutts calls some of their paid backlinks "painfully obvious" to most any search engine. Matt said those links are not hurting them, but they are not helping in Google.

• could probably be rather easy for a site like that to get many links from beer hobbyist sites

LendingTree.com

• question about looking at their sitewide links to IACI partner network

• instead of looking to rank for mortgage Matt recommends looking for 20 year mortgage loan, etc.
• Jake recommends geo targeted pages
• Matt recommends maybe adding more text, but they are already looking at ROI testing and that is why there is limited text
• internal links can help reinforce topics
• Matt said their cross network linking seems pretty organic / not with intent to spam. Note that in Google's spam review guidelines that IACI's travel sites were ones that were whitelisted examples for remote quality search raters

• mortgage calculator link on LendingTree built for a manipulation test on Google...that was the reasoning the guy said and Matt Cutts made a funny face
• Matt Cutts said the partner links section on IACI properties as a technique do not work in Google.
• Matt said the goal of engines is to detect and count editorial quality votes.

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Notes...
Spam is a subset of SEO...not all SEO bad, etc.

Nissan Motors robots.txt blocks all spiders.

Testing fixing 302's. Want to accept destination URL except for like 0.5% of the time. Gives SF Giants URL as an example.

Somethings in index can be perceived in our process as the sandbox...does not apply to all sites.

Does not see Google buying DMOZ or killing reliance on it.

Google does not have the ability to hand boost any sites. They do have the ability to penalize things by hand they believe are spam or illegal.

Autolink...references how it was liked at Web2.0. Thinks the launch could have been better. Would like to allow users to enter their own triggers.

Users and privacy...to take search to the next level you need some information about the users. Matt said he wouldn't work at a company that he felt violated users privacy.

Matt has never worried much about hidden table row type techniques to organize word order. With CSS if you want see how it influences a file test it.

Toolbar does not influence how frequently stuff is crawled. It is too easy to spam, and the toolbar does not have equal distribution across various regions. Many people assume some things provide clean signals which are not so clean.

Matt as a webspam team member said he has no ability or intent to accessing the Google Analytics data.

Litmus test of a site for spam is what value does it add to the web. User reviews, forums, community, etc. What makes a site unique.

Matt Cutts hates on paid links. He said they have manual and algorithmic approaches to paid links. Compares effectiveness of paid links going forward to how reciprocal link spam has largely died off with Update Jager.

If you have to something creative and useful it is easy to get quality links that are hard for your competitors to try to recreate.

Not too long ago I interviewed Matt Cutts.

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• Robert X Cringely created Triumph of the Nerds

• he once lost a 96,000 word manuscript and there was no restore function. He created the trash can on Apple's project Lisa, making emptying it a two step process.
• in 1984 he helped build internal and corporate communications for Apple. In 1991 Apple sold that to Quantum Data Physics (later named AOL)
• spooks went to xerox parc and xerox offered a huge price for a computer. the price was too high. the went to Stanford, and although they never originally created computers to sell Sun (stanford university nework workstation) was born. stanford saw no intellectual property in sun.
• cisco came out of the same building as Sun. It used same motherboard as sun. cisco started on credit cards
• typically companies can go to 600K in monthly sales on credit cards then they typically fail if they are still funding on credit.
• Robert could have got 15% of Excite for $1,800 (I think that was the number)
• recently he has been working on PBS GeekTV
• he tracks his accuracy, thinks someone should create something like accuracy in media.com
• talks about consolidation in the space... msn /goog /yhoo only serious competitors.
  • windows and office profitable...nothing else at msft is

  • msft has cost items
  • xbox 4 billion dollars lost
  • they spend tons of money on other stuff as case B if office & windws fail
  • extra expenses there so they can later cut them if profits from office or windows falter in profitable
  • thinks google wanted the 4 billion to buy / create something (but unsure what)
  • google sticks it to competitors
  • gmail 1 gig / user... around 3 million users
  • yahoo matched it with 154 million email users
  • google's largest advantage is their clustering of hardware (see Skrenta's post on Google's source of power)
  • Google has image problem where to busy trying to impress w their brain, not helping you think of how smart ur brain is
  • Robert believes Google will beat msft & define internet for future
  • yahoo will reposition to become something far different than google
  • google search appliance is important in what it represents... it "just works" ... you only have to plug it in
  • if msft tried it you wouldnt trust them or you would think they would screw it up
  • google offer life to struggling companies like the dark fiber ones...get 300 boxes on the network
  • perhaps something like google internet will be more secure etc, just plain works, Robert sees it coming in next 2 years
• on contnet and monetization...
  • Robert has 200,000 weekly readers

  • archives gives him same amount of traffic
  • NerdTV costs $1,000 a show and hosting costs same amount
  • costs about 8/10th cent per download + $1,000 fixed cost
  • 130,000 downloads per show
  • people subscribe to 2-3 times as much as they consume, so sometimes it is not benificial to make data as convenient as possible to access

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Jim Boykin recently gave away a free pass to WMW Las Vegas. Noticing the BOTW WMW conference discount blog post I recently remembered that I had not yet signed up to go.

I signed up, and Brett asked me if I would like to be on this organic search session. I said sure. He gave me one free pass that I can give away, but...

it can not be combined with any other offers ;-) and no people that have already paid, or people that have been comp’d before.

So, tell me why I should give you the free pass for next weeks conference. I will give one lucky winner the pass.

Please note that the conference is in Las Vegas from November 15th through 17th, and you will still be responsible for your travel related costs.

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Shortly I am off to SEO Roadshow.

I feel like I have been a bit lacking in insipration, etc. recently. Am thinking SEO Roadshow should be cool, plus I am stoked that The Search has been released just in time for good flight reading.

Web posts & threads:

• 301 redirects

• Yahoo! changing how they show link counts? I sure hope the new Site Explorer is API interface friendly and does not show rubbish link data or I may have just wasted a few thousand dollars programming Yahoo! SEO tools.
• Google Update Gilligan

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Pubcon 10 Occurs in Las Vegas during Nov 15, 16, 17 - 2005.

Until September 1 they have an early signup discount price of $375.

My link building buddy Debra Mastaler is also holding a link building conference with Eric Ward in Charlotte, NC on October 27/28, 2005.

If you are UK based maks sure you don't miss the amazing SEO Roadshow.

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RCJordan, who's legendary SEO skills go so far back that most of his domains are free, is cohosting SEO Roadshow with fellow SEO champ NFFC.

SEO Roadshow is free, so if you are a self respecting SEO living in the UK I can see no reason to not attend [even if I use double negatives in my sentences when mentioning it]. In fact, people have been known to fly all the way from New Zealand to attend. It occurs Saturday September 10th at The George Hotel in Edinburgh.

Although the even is free, rumour has it they may have already sold out the hotel (it happened early last year). Some nearby hotels are recommended here.

It looks like the Vikings may be hosting the event next year. Keep up with all the latest news and the like at the new SEO Roadshow blog.

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Another SEO conference :)

A smallish non commercial type get together. August 19, 20, and 21st, in Havre de Grace, Maryland.

official SEO by the Sea blog

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Brief review of WMW search engines and webmasters panel.

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Mike Grehan:
Stressed why people should link at you. Don't spread articles too thin just to get page views. Make things convenient to read and link at. Mike also said that some search engines might be looking at the text around links.

He stated why waste time building a link directory when you can just build good content, but I think a good directory can be good content.

Mike also stated that ezines and the like can yield underpriced links.

Bill Hartzer:
Went over a bunch of link strategies, including many of the tools and things I post about on the blog often.

Jim Boykin:
Jim Boykin stressed who you link to and your linking neigborhood. Mentioned tools such as Google related: search function and Google TouchGraph.

Jim manually sends link exchange request emails, and said he finds it works well to tell others what it is in it for them before asking for a link.

George Kepnick:
Went over finding / hiring / motivating link builders. Said he had great luck on Craigslist, and that many people hire interns & students.

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Patrick Gavin:
I think a good part of his presentation came from his link building guide.

link value is based upon:

• direct traffic

• boost in rankings
• brand lift

Getting links from pages that link out to shady sites can mess up your link profile.

He also went through many ideas about evaluating the value of a link (much of which is covered in his free online guide).

Todd Malicoat:
He placed his presentation online here. Emphasized creating natural link patterns and using creativity in link building.

Martinibuster:
Building and leverging your social currency is a huge way to build links when you are first starting out.

Emphasized mixing variety of link building mechanisms, not relying to heavily on any one type of link (reciprocal, directory, paid ads, etc).

Buying old sites is a great way to build cheap link popularity and authority. Searching for things like "temporarily down for maintenance" can help you locate underperforming sites. I also have seen some good ones by searching DMOZ and the like, of course if you do that you will want to try to get them before they expire.

MartiniBuster also tries to keep his link profile away from heavy SEO clusters, like high PageRank low quality link farms that pose as directories.

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Brett Tabke interviewed Tim Mayer. Tim think feedback from webmasters is useful in helping them keep up with indexing issues. They include publishers in their mission statement.

Spoke briefly about My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Subscription search, and Yahoo! Mindset.

The human feedback from people blocking or saving sites will be one of the biggest things that will effect search quality in the next
few years. PageRank has been around for a long time and has become heavily manipulated. Tim says that there has to be a better way.

Sees the problem with local search as getting small businesses to want to make information available. They made it free to get a local
website on Yahoo!.

Yahoo! Search itself is one of the most underutalized products Yahoo! owns because there are so many other features offered on the home page. Tim also mentioned the Yahoo! Search Developer Network, recommending people pull their linkage data and rank check queries from there.

Brett asked what are the biggest things you are fighting right now. Tim said he prefered to focus on the possitives. He mentioned that
Yahoo! has been winning RustySearch relevancy challenge. One problem many engines have is finding and indexing new content.

Looking for a manager for AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Feel free to apply. Each has a slightly different userbase and slightly different
indexes and relevancy algorithms to accomidate that.

Yahoo! has over 60% marketshare in Japan.

Good to get feedback from friends prior to sending a site to a search representitive.

Not sure whether or not or how they will use the feedback features to help sort relevancy. If the signal is good enough they want to
use it. Many of the feedback features are designed to help people find stuff they had found before, which may have got hidden in the
index dring a relevancy shuffle.

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So day 2... I slept through a good bit of it due to Bourbon Street blues. Lots of fun down there, but the smell is sorta weird.

Barry apparently was blogging all day while I took a nap. I was thinking of some of the non SEO marketing that was going on.

Size of Conference:
I think I overheard Brett Tabke say there are about 1,100 people at the conference. I believe there were around 800 people at the last one. Some of my friends have booths and said the conference is slow and some said the conference is going good. Food at the booths is key.

Buttons:
PR Web has buttons with numbers on them. There are three matching sets out of a ton of buttons. If you find your matching number you win a few hundred dollars. Fairly cheap good viral type marketing there.

Drinking:
Lots of that going on.

Food:
as a big eater :) I notice food often. Nobody at any of the booths had any food. They might just be feeding tire kickers, but someone should have food at their booths for those hungover people who have not yet ate.

Spam:
I think DaveN had different spam shirts on each of the 1st two days.

Where to Spam: Meet the Engineers:
Google had a meet the engineers session. A different engineer sat at each table and fielded various questions. People were on some of them like hawks and the accoustics in the room were not good. Demand sorta outstripped supply, but some of the engineers also took time to chat in the bar afterwords, which was good on them.

I got 3 sites manually reviewed and booted from Google while asking questions. I am joking, but one of my buddies said some people were asking specific questions about their own casino URLs. Not a good idea IMHO. Those of my friends who did talk to the engineers said the SEO answers were usually a bit generic.

As time passes Google is making SEO harder and harder and advertising easier and easier. If you heard any cool nuggets today you would want to share please post them in the comments.

Collectors Item:
Google had good food and gave away huricane glasses that change color when you hit the bottom of them. So long as I do not break it before I get home I will give one away on this blog soon.

Google AdWords coupon status:
They appear to be a bit harder to get than in the past. I have grabbed one $100 coupon so far. I will continue to try to grab more as time passes. Here is the redemption code of the first one: 304555452508. It is for new accounts only. Of course whoever reads this first and redeems it first wins it, and if you tried it and it was already redeemed please comment on the blog.

Name Tags:
Most name tags say
name
job
company

mine says
Aaron Wall
Aaron Wall
Aaron Wall

I can't tell you how many people have loudly asked me why I was not putting SEO Book.com on my name tag. I like not taking myself seriously, and when people ask that they help market my site. hehehe.

I also liked Shak's dot communist tag :)

Personal:
I am usually a bit quiet and reserved in person (perhaps due to a bit of social anxiety from not leaving the house as much as I should). I find it cool how many people have said hi and chatted with me.

It is also interesting meeting people in person. Sometimes you guess them perfectly, and sometimes people are way different on and off the web.

Test Sites:
Many of the best SEOs use a variety of sites to collect algorithmic feedback. By running your own sites of various size and quality you can help grab a ton of market research data about what the search engines are doing, of course some people tend to find facts that match what they want to prove.

Converging Business Models:
It is interesting to talk to various people and learn how business models at different companies are converging.

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Brief review of WebmasterWorld conference writing for engines and the web session.

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Brief review of Webmasterworld Competitive Analysis panel.

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Brief coverage of the webmasterworld conference niche marketing panel.

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History:
John helped found Wired. In 1994 the first comercial banner ad was placed on Wired. He also founded The Industry Standard. Went back to Berkley after the Industry Standard business model stopped working in 2001. While the market was doing bad he noticed Google and Overture was doing well and started SearchBlog. He started Web 2.0 conference. About a year and a half ago became the ban manager of Boing Boing.

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I am going to WMW New Orleans conference. So is Yahoo! Search. They just issued a weather report saying there will be a major Yahoo! Search index change tonight and that it is going to be humid in New Orleans.

I may do some review stuff or I may not. Depends on the motivation factor and how much time I spend in the speech areas. I want to maybe set aside a bit of time to interview a few people if I can while I am down there.

I think one thing my ebook is lacking is that it is all wrote from my opinion or perspective, this is a good thing in that it means it is not huckster upsell upsell lock-in upsell upsell, but it is also bad because others have experiences I could / should be sharing. My experience is somewhat diverse, but I have only been in the game for a few years. Interviewing a few key SEO players could make the voice of my ebook much more diverse. And so I will. More on that later. :)

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Stansted Pics:
Watch Aaron sleep, & many other pics. I am very photogentic while tired, or maybe not.

In London I got to enjoy eating some pan king, and as Mick G can attest, thats not something everyone gets to do.

It was cool getting to meet everyone.

It has to be said:
yuck. Lots0 is once again right on the money.

Hopefully he will be attending Edinburgh, although a friend has warned me that the town sucks.

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ThreadWatch in 6 weeks, weekend of the 28th May, in Stansted. Right before SES London.

DG's First Annual Backyard Bash is August 20-21st, in Prospect, Tennessee

WMW World of Search is June 21-24, in New Orleans

SEO Roadshow is Saturday 10th of September, in Edinburgh

Apparently SES is going to be held nearly everywhere.

We are tentatively planning a French edition of SES for Paris this fall. We already run SES in Sweden (October), England (June) and Germany (April). Plans are also afoot to run a one-day mini-SES in Milan in the fall.

We had tentatively announced a Beijing, China show in June, but we could not line up all the pieces to run the event this year. However, we have a plan for a new effort for May 2006.

I just returned from 9 days in Europe and leave on Monday for Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia. I will be working on JupiterImage projects in both countries, but will take in the SES Japan show on April 20th.

For the true tech geek you may also want to look at the Document Space Workshop At Ucla's Ipam being held next January

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Hola:
Spainish Ask Jeeves

Lycos:
Lycos to use AlmondNet to target contextual ads

Who Owns Culture?
Webcast at 7pm Eastern tonight. Steven Berlin Johnson is one of my favorite writers, and he will be chatting with Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig.

Like Search Research?
DG's Desk links to a bunch of research papers.

SEO URL Tip:
this looks like a cool new blog about eBay, but why not spend the $8 /yr to buy a static domain name?

also, Gawker media lagunched Sploid. I think they come up with some pretty cool names.

Try Again:
Google alternate searches being tested? that or spyware...

Gel Conference:
April 28-29, 2005 New York City. Looks pretty cool.

Interview:
of MSN Search.

Across the Ocean:
apparently in the UK Online ad spend trumps airwaves

A Good Blog:
about social, legal, and economic issues.

Dirty Words:
Marcia. hehehe

Paris Hilton:
still looking for that video? view the Paris Hilton porncast podcast. you KNOW stuff is overhyped when a megacorp has Paris doing something.

Yahoo! Shopping:
rss feeds

VoIP:
AOL tries to be undead, launching a VoIP service. pricing structure hosed from the word go?

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In the News:
Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett take a stake in Topix.net. With NYT recently purchasing About.com it is clear that newspapers are starting to wake up to the online world.

BlowSearch:
May have launched a new product that "blows"?

You have to respect how quickly they commented on it though. I wonder why more of the small PPC search engines are not actively monitoring their brands and replying to what people say about them.

I'm Feeling Lucky:
Google Bomb for sale. so many creative ideas come to mind.
found on SE Roundtable.

Dear Diary:
Letter from a blog spammer. As long as the algorithms require it people will do it.

SEO Conferences to become the new SEO forum?
SEO Chat is thinking about holding an SEO conference. I can't see the conference medium becoming as saturated as the forum medium with all the associated costs and constraints, but there surely are a good number of conferences.

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Alex Steffen & Bruce Sterling held the final keynote speech at SXSW. Most of their speech was about ecology and creating a sustainable world.

I was about to write this review and noticed there is a good one on WorldChanging already.

The core of the speech is that we are depleting resources at a faster rate than the world can provide them. Things will need to change. Options going forward:

• fold dumps into the production cycle

• create long term stuff
• label everything

They stated that the biggest problems in the world are closely releated to infistructure, not necissarily social, political, or religious ideolology.

Fabricators, computers, and other small fast production technologies will shorten pruduct creation time and thus enhance the efficiency of micropublishing or small scale creation of various items. Actual will become the new virtual.

To show how fast things change Bruce Sterling asked us to imagine describing our jobs to a time traveler from 30 years ago. Many of us who were in the room at the time worked on web related or industrial design type projects. Our jobs would have been a bit hard to explain.

He said the future will be somewhere between unmanagable or unthinkable. We should strive to make it as best as we can.

After his speech I bought an autographed copy of Bruce Sterling's Tomorrow Now, which looks at how the world may change over the next 50 years. On page 65 he explains the exact reason many people are doing well with SEO:

You're likely to thrive if you learn plenty about subjects where the tests and grading papers have yet to be invented. And if you find yourself learning about something unusual and there's no sense of drudgery to it - on the contrary, you find yourself spending long, smiling hours just painlessly soaking it up - take my advice and look for a job there. If there don't seem to be any jobs there, find a way to make one up.

[added: here are some of the videos from SXSW, including Alex Steffen & Bruce Sterling]

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Panel by Tantek Celik, Jonas Luster, Joyce Park, Ernie Hsiung , & Danah Boyd.

Social relationships only require single directional relationships. Social networks place more emphasis on relationships than personal information. Many of the things which are currently being touted as social networks are community based sites which place greater emphasis on individuals than on relationships.

Danah stated some of the more common problems with social networks are

• social akwardness

• articulation problems
• problems with being public

Joyce also stated another recurring problem is that many networks are created by men and do not take women into account. Another common problem is that some social networks fail to adapt to their audience.

A couple interesting facts:

• Orkut took off in Brasil for two main reasons
  1. Brasil had two large cities which for a long time did not mix much but recently started mixing more frequently on a larger scale.

  2. Orkut originally had many flags on it. This reminded many people in Brasil of the World Cup. Some people joined because they wanted to beat out the other countries. Now the innovation at Orkut is driven by the Brasil community.

• For this next statement you will have to pardon any cultural ignorance I display, but I think this is what they were trying to say :) Friendster is popular in some Muslim areas because with certain segments of that cultural background you have to show how and when you met someone, you can't just meet someone and instantly marry them.

They also talked a bit about XFN and recommended a few books. Jonas recommended John Scott's Social Network Analysis. Danah recommended Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language

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Deliberative Democracy & Interactive Technology

Humor on the Web

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Online panel with Philip Kaplan, Jason Calacanis, Gokul Rajaram, Henry Copeland, & Bill Flitter.

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Ana Marie Cox, who writes for Wonkette, was the keynote speech at SXSW interactive on Monday.

She stated that she has been in reporting for 10 years. She is working on a political book about August in DC prior to a presidential election. As far as good political books goes she recommended The Gay Place: Being Three Related Novels and I think she also recommended something by a name similar to Minor Fall Major Lift.

She stated her past work at sites like Suck.com (I think) helped to:

• make her not care what people thought

• make her willing to offend all parties
• make her more edgy and funny

She was asked many questions on the blog vs journalism theme (which appeared strongly this year at SXSW).

She stated that as some bloggers became scalpers they started to turn into the media they critisized...and thus others will replace them.

She also stated that while blogs make some subjects more notable they also make other topics toxic, which prevents them from getting proper coverage in the national media.

She thought that blogs could be a supplement within the media diet, but should not entirely replace media.

A somewhat complete transcript of her keynote interview exists here. Please note that some of the text may be seen as slightly offensive to some.

Al Franken was the next speaker after Ana Marie Cox. He is an author and hosts a left wing radio show on Air America.

For blogs he recommended Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo. He also recommended people read the 9-11 Commission Report.

Al Franken stated that George Lakeoff, author of Don't think of an Elephant, was good at indentifying framing errors but was not strong at comming up with the best solutions to them. He stated that he thought Frank Luntz was amazing at framing debates.

I tried not to get too deep into the political opinions of the people who were interviewed as I doubt it serves much purpose on this particular blog.

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Panel by Nick Finck, Jeffrey Veen, & Kit Seeborg.

Jeffry Veen shows Haynet as an example of good usability.

He believes that to perform well it is best if he imerses himself in the topic of the clients site. He jots down lots of notes on yellow stickies and covers the wall with the various ideas.

During project definition and research many possible solutions can be quickly eliminated, thereby lowering the overall cost of a project.

To find some of the core ideas behind the sales point of the website Veen collects market research data from people in the real world, often while failing to mention websites, as he feels that the needs overlap. The research ends up averaging out to about $200 per person and most smaller tests usually test about 6 to 8 people.

Veen also feels that analyzing data from server logs also tends to fall off track. Since you are only tracking where people are going wrong with the current system it may not bring about the most effective solution.

I totally agree with this concept. Often people have self fulfilling prophecies about their sites. The first day I talked to a marketer for a major cable and high speed internet provider. He stated that since most of their referals to their website came from direct type in traffic or bookmarks that he did not feel they needed to do SEO. If you don't know what traffic you are missing out on then it is kinda hard to see the need to go after it. This is why only analyzing your referal logs can give you bad or incompelete market data.

Seelong states that it is a good idea to follow the money trail before you get too deep into a project to ensure you will be OK to do whatever you desire. She also likes using survey services such as Survey Monkey.

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A Whole New Mind
Daniel H Pink, who spent 10 years as a political speech writer, stated that the keys to a good Monday morning speech were brevity, levity, and repitition. He then went on to explain some of the concepts in his upcomming book by the name of A Whole New Mind.

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