Category: Blog

I haven’t quite made it all the way home to Seattle from Pubcon, and I’m still working on the write up of my sessions. I did a few interviews that I’ll link as soon as I see them online. The video during which I imagined myself as a real estate agent is already up. We all had limited internet access during the conference (it was like I was missing a limb!), so things are a bit slow coming online. It was awesome meeting so many new people and seeing what people had to say in the sessions.

Speaking of sessions, you all may have heard that the first major, chock full ‘o searchy goodness conference held by Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is coming at the end of February. SMX is the conference series put on by Third Door Media (which also runs Search Engine Land, Sphinn, and Search Marketing Now) and is programmed by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman (who previous programmed the SES conference series).

SMX started ramping up conferences in 2007, but these were niche conferences for specialized audiences (such as advanced, local, and social media). Those niche conferences will return in 2008, but new to 2008 are two general three-day conferences with tracks and sessions for all levels and all specialties.

SMX West will be February 26-28th in Santa Clara, CA and SMX East is October 6-8th in NYC.

SMX West has sessions on everything about search marketing, from the fundamentals and basics, to the advanced coming trends.

I’m coordinating several sessions, and pitches are currently open for speakers. If you’re interested in any of these sessions, use the handy speaker form to send me a brief description on what you’d like to talk about. Below are my openings, but take a look at the form and the agenda to see all the sessions.

Space is filling up, but there’s still a bit of room if you’ve got something super awesome to talk about.

Search 3.0 Track
This track is all about how the search engines are moving towards blended results. I wrote an article a few months ago for Information Today magazine about how each engine has been incorporating more than just web pages in their search results.

The Blended Search Revolution
The first generation of search engines ranked pages based on the content of those pages alone — the words-on-the page. The second generation increased relevancy by analyzing links. The third generation, Search 3.0, is upon us now in full force. Google Universal Search, Ask.com’s Morph, Microsoft Live Search Scopes and Yahoo Shortcuts are different names for the same core concept — automatically blending in results from specialized or “vertical” search engines such as video search or local search. This session looks at the revolutionary change happening with blended search and how search marketers can ride the wave to success.

Video, Images & Blended Results
This session looks at how video and image content is being blended into the main results at major search engines and provides tips on increasing the odds that your content makes the cut for the first page of results.

I’m specifically looking for people who can talk about how they got video and images into the regular search engine results.

Local Search & Blended Results
This session covers how local listings are being blended into the regular results of major search engines and offers tips to increase the chances that your listings will be among those folded in.

As with the images and video panel, I’m looking for people who can talk about getting local entries into the local results and what the impact of that was.

Online Retail & Blended Results
The session focuses on how online retail listings from shopping search are being mixed into the regular results of the major search engines and how to better ensure your products are positioned in front of searchers.

For this session, I’m looking for people who’ve gotten products, reviews, and other retail-specific items into the regular search results.

Wonder Twins Track
So here’s the thing. Both at Buffy night at my house a couple of weeks ago and last week at Pubcon, we did an informal poll and way too many people don’t know who the wonder twins are!! How can anyone not know about “wonder twin powers… activate! Form of steam rising from boiling pasta water, the good kind of pasta that you toss with parmesan and olive oil!” Apparently some of you are younger than I am.

They were part of the superfriends cartoon on Saturday morning and were twins with these matching rings. All they had to do was touch rings and one of them could be something crazy out of water (a dancing tidal wave! a giant screwdriver made of ice!) and the other could be whatever animal she thought of (a tiny zebra seahorse that lives in Parisian streams!). If you haven’t seen the wonder twins, you can conveniently use Google to return blended search results that include YouTube videos.

Ahem.

The Wonder Twins track is all about how you can pair tactics that aren’t search specific with SEO for well, activated wonder twin powers. Only instead of getting rain and prairie dogs out of it, you get better rankings and increased traffic. Now go watch those YouTube videos so I stop feeling so old and unhip.

SEO & Social Media Marketing
More and more, people are finding that social media marketing — SMM — can help with SEO efforts. Getting your content into the major social media sites can generate links or provide rankings you might not be able to tap into with your own site. In this session, SMM essentials that SEOs need to know.

SEO & Blogging
Blogging can help SEO in a variety of ways. Blog posts are “syndicated,” meaning your content — and your links — spread across the web. There are also dedicated blog search engines with readers you might be missing, if you’re not blogging. This session introduces you to blogging and the SEO advantages it offers.

SEO & User Generated Content
Search engines love good content, but good content can take a lot of time to prepare. So why not turn to your users and visitors? User Generated Content — UGC — has the advantage of often being full of passion plus the “authors” who create it in turn may turn into marketers for your site. Learn more in this session.

If you’re not ready to speak at SMX, but would like to attend, I think early bird pricing is still available.

I’m sure I’ll be recovered from Pubcon by the time SMX West comes along…