SMX Advanced - Day One

I feel like I’ve got my money’s worth already at the Search Marketing Expo, and there’s still a whole day to go. Great speakers and really smart and interesting conference attendees from around the globe - over half of my conversations were with people who flew in from Scotland, Germany, Japan, and Denmark, just for the conference. I felt like a travel wimp, having traveled only a few miles on the 26 Express bus to get to the event on the Seattle waterfront.

According to their web site, “SMX Advanced is for the experienced search marketer who wants to enjoy sessions conducted at a high-level and continue to stay ahead in the fast changing world of search. If you’re fluent in search marketing, SMX Advanced is where you can converse with others who speak your native language.” I’m happy to report that, despite my focus on my massage practice for the past five years, I can still hang with these folks and even occasionally make useful contributions to between-session chats.

I parked in the “organic track” (presentations geared for people who are trying to get listed in the organic, as opposed to paid, search results at Google, etc.) room, which was also the location for Danny Sullivan’s opening remarks, his keynote interview with Microsoft bigwig Kevin Johnson, and Danny’s “You and A” with Google’s Matt Cutts. If not for the great food and exhibits downstairs I might never have budged from the room.

Kevin Johnson, President of Microsoft’s Platform & Services Division, likened Microsoft’s position in the search world to where they were with server software 15 or 20 years ago, a niche player dismissed by their competitors (back then wags were saying that NT stood for “Not There” or “Nice Try”) and struggling to gain market share, but they stuck with it and are now a multi-billion-dollar player in that segment. He thinks that by focusing on searches with “commercial intent” and by improving the user experience that MS will gain ground in the search space. Time will tell. . .

The first session was “Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques.” Roger Montti opened the session with some great advice on how to identify high-quality potential link sites. Jay Young of Link Fish then shared his unrepentantly dark-grey-hat take on the subject. As a fan of white-hat search marketing I was a little taken aback at his urging us not to fear Matt Cutts and to go ahead and buy links and to “spam the shit out them” with comment spam, but I must say it was very refreshing to see such candor (which I told him when I ran into him at lunch; I also told him that I’d love to see him debate Eric Ward sometime about link-development tactics, a conversation which might go something like this one at SEOmoz a while back). Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts then weighed in with one of the densest presentations I’ve ever seen, rattling off insane amounts of detail on identifying and getting links from good sites, as well as tips on blogging and using social media to get in-links to your website.

Next up was “Bot Herding,” a session which focused mostly on PageRank sculpting, the practice of tweaking your (mostly internal) link structure with “nofollow” attributes in meta tags and links, JavaScript, and other methods to transfer “link juice” to important pages on your site. This session was technically interesting, but, as Evan, the Google engineer on the Q&A panel (and later Matt Cutts) noted, this is a second-tier strategy. Your time can be much better spent on more fundamental search engine optimization tasks (developing good content, e.g.).

The “Buying Sites for SEO” session was geared toward folks interested in buying sites to get links to their site and/or to build existing site networks. Much of this session was devoted to ways to conceal your affiliation with a site you have bought for SEO purposes. I was much more interested in the general principles of how to research and ascertain the value of a web property.

The day wrapped up with a “You and A” (get it? like a Q & A) session with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team. As is always the case with Google presentations, the SEO crowd didn’t get the inside dope we’re all hoping he’ll accidentally spill at some point, but he did clarify a number of Google policies and reiterated the consistent Google message, which he succinctly put at one point as this litmus test: “Would a user be annoyed if they landed on this page.” This gets at the underlying theme of everything I’ve ever heard from or inferred about Google: just do what’s right for the user, and you’ll stay in Google’s good graces.

Tomorrow is Developer Day, so it should get even geekier. Until then. . .