(Above: Driving to SMX in rainy Seattle)
Search Marketing Expo was a pretty big event - there were quite a few attendees. I enjoyed it a lot - I spent the entire day there for Day 1 of the expo. I didn’t attend Day 2 due to school.
The Exhibits
(Above: Google’s booth at SMX)
The exhibits were great to visit for a few hours - I talked with some guys from SEOmoz for a while. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Advertising also had prominent exhibits at SMX. However, the rest of the exhibitors were mostly SEO firms and landing page optimization firms. While interesting, I came to SMX as more of a webmaster than a SEO - so those exhibits didn’t interest me as much. However, I did try to talk to most of the exhibitors to get a sense of what goes on in the Search Marketing world.
The Presentations
I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to attend the presentations at SMX. There were three tracks of presentations at SMX: Organic, Paid Search, and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Business. I attended the organic track for all three presentations - the discussions were more relevant to what I do.
I will discuss what each of the presenters said about each topic. Here are the topics that you can expect on the blog:
- Session 1: Blow your Mind Link Building Techniques
- Greg Boser moderated this discussion about link building. In this discussion:
- Roger Montti discussed building .edu links
- Jay Young discussed various link building techniques, including shady methods of building links
- Stephan Spencer shared his views on link building techniques
- Greg Boser moderated this discussion about link building. In this discussion:
- Session 2: Bot Herding
- Search Engines may not find the best way to index your content online. How can you help search engines index your content effectively? In addition to the actual presenters, developers from Google, Yahoo, and Live Search answered questions during the Q&A session. Rand Fishkins, owner of SEOmoz, led this discussion with the following topics:
- Michael Gray discussed the importance of PR sculpting, or distributing PR healthily within your site
- Adam Audette rebutted Gray’s opinions by presenting eight arguments against sculpting PR
- Hamlet Batista described methods of cloaking for white hat SEO reasons
- Stephan Spencer finished the discussion with additional methods of bot herding
- During the Q&A session, Nathan Buggia insisted that Windows Live Search did NOT adhere to rel=”nofollow” - instead, it only relied on meta noindex. Thirty minutes later, he corrected his statement and said that Live did adhere to Nofollow.
- Search Engines may not find the best way to index your content online. How can you help search engines index your content effectively? In addition to the actual presenters, developers from Google, Yahoo, and Live Search answered questions during the Q&A session. Rand Fishkins, owner of SEOmoz, led this discussion with the following topics:
- Session 3: Buying sites for SEO
- Instead of buying links, sometimes it may be a good idea to buy an entire site for SEO. This discussion, instead of discussing the SEO benefits of buying a site, focused more on methods of evaluating sites to buy and how to direct traffic and link juice back to your site. Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts led this discussion with the following presentations:
- Jeremy Schoemaker sent in a video to substitute for his presentation - he could not make SMX Advanced
- Jeremy Wright of B5media (which owns Problogger.net) talked about how to valuate sites
- Gab Goldenberg briefly discussed how to find good sites, buy them, and keep their existing ranking
- Todd Malicoat discussed additional methods to find sites, contact site owners, and value/buy a site.
- Instead of buying links, sometimes it may be a good idea to buy an entire site for SEO. This discussion, instead of discussing the SEO benefits of buying a site, focused more on methods of evaluating sites to buy and how to direct traffic and link juice back to your site. Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts led this discussion with the following presentations:
I definitely learned a lot from SMX Advanced 2008 - it opened my mind to many forms of SEO and how to achieve them. It also showed me how sleazy some SEOs can be when trying to get to the top.
This is an ongoing blog series about SMX Advanced 2008. I will continue this series tomorrow with the discussion of Roger Montti’s presentation on organic link building.
If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Krazyness to keep up with SEO information from SMX 08. Thanks!
Related Posts
- Building .edu links
- SMX Advanced
- Aggressive Link Building Techniques
- SMX Advanced - Lots of Schwag
- The Great Kraziness Experiment
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