Why pay to attend a pricey tech conference when you can chill outside the doors to a presentation and work the crowd as they head for the free lunch?

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There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago really, where one could go to a show like SES and come away thinking that there just weren’t many women in the industry at all. Rebecca Lieb once joked to me that there was never any lines for the women’s restrooms at search conferences.

I suspect that’s why a few years ago the women of search started organizing a little ladies-only luncheon. No doubt as a reprieve of sorts from being surrounded by a bunch of nerdy search-dudes all week.

Times have changed though. Especially in the past couple of years. Now there are almost as many women as men at these shows. The Women’s Luncheon is still alive and well though - they just need bigger tables now.

So if you meet the criteria, which I suppose consists of being; a) involved somehow in search and b) a woman, you should go check it out.

Li Evans from SearchMarketingGurus.com tells me all you need to do is hit the SES San Jose Women’s Luncheon page and follow the instructions to RSVP.

Maybe I’ll crash it this year… or just go in drag under an alias.

I’ve been attending search engine, webmaster and various sundry internet conferences for several years now. Been there. Done that. Got lots of t-shirts.

Danny’s new Search Marketing Expo Advanced was, for all practical purposes as far as I was concerned, just another search engine conference. However, on the flight back with plenty of time to do nothing I was able to think a bit about this show - and as a matter of fact, it was really really good.

Just about every show has it’s strengths and weaknesses. So I figured in order to sort of illustrate the reasons why I was so impressed with the SMX, I’d break down my criteria into what I consider the main components for a good conference. So here they are:

Attendees
Crowd
Speakers
Facilities/Food
Location
Weather
Content (quality thereof)
Length
Afterparties
Vibe

(If anybody can come up with a clever acronym using ASFLWCCLAV, do let me know.)

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I was unfortunately unable to attend the one day SEW: Live show in Columbus, but we were able to send a crew up to cover the show (and they did a great job I think). As we progress with the video coverage of events, we are always trying to learn and come up with ideas about to how best to publish or present the coverage.

In the past, we’d released a video or two per day each day after the show. For this show though, we blitzed the coverage in a major way and decided to try releasing it in big chunks. Go check out our SEW: Live Columbus collection of coverage and be sure to let me know what you think.

For example, would you prefer a steady flow of one or two per day or, do you (like me) think it’s a lot better to blast out as many of them as you can as fast as you possibly can?

As most of you know, the WebProNews crew was in Chicago last week providing mad amounts of coverage, video and otherwise. Like the Vegas PubCon, the “theme” of Chicago’s SES had to do with social media optimization or SMO (there’s another acronym for the list) and linkbait. The sessions covering topics like how to make your site more appealing to the linkbait/SMO crowd (write compelling content) were always full.

However, linkbait and SMO wasn’t the only sessions with packed houses. Of course, whenever there is a block of sessions devoted to link building strategies, they are always full - although I only attended two of these. Another topic I was happy to see covered was multimedia optimization. Explaining how to make your online video or podcast search index-friendly is very valuable information, especially when you consider just how much these areas are growing.

Another area I was pleased to see covered was mobile search optimization. Thanks to a informative presentation by Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works a great deal of ignorance surrounding mobile SEO was cleared up quite nicely.

While there were indeed some quality sessions, the prevailing mood from a lot of attendees was of the “meh” variety. Many felt the sessions could have been more advanced instead of repeating the material from sessions past, something I completely understand. I would, however, remind people that not everyone attending these conferences are experts. The crowd’s interaction with the panel during the link Q and A helps proves this thought quite effectively.

All in all, I had a good time at Chicago’s SES, but I think that had as much to do with the people there as much as it did the conference sessions:

Lee Odden - just a quality, quality individual who does some really good work with his blog and his company. Lee also has a great deal of SES coverage, including a number of video interviews done with his Sony Cybershot camera. The video quality of his interviews is surprisingly good, considering they came from a digital camera.

Rand and Rebecca - I had to opportunity to hang out with a couple of the SEOMoz folks for a few hours after the conference wound down on Thursday and these two are some of the best people you can meet. Both are incredibly friendly and knowledgeable. I’m really glad I got the opportunity to get to know these two a little better… even if Lee prevented us from eating sushi. And hey, Rebecca’s an Arrested Development fan, something that pretty much guarantees an individual’s coolness.

Abhilash and Ben Wills - Abhilash might be the most charismatic individual I’ve met in some time - not only that, he has the knowledge and experience to go along with it. Speaking of knowledge, Ben is something of a wunderkind himself. I’ve known Ben for a couple of years now and that’s something I’m really thankful for. These guys are two of best people you could meet (check out Ben’s video interview discussing the video optimization session).

Brian Mark - Brian’s an admin at WebProWorld and it’s always nice to see your “co-workers” give excellent presentations, something Brian did in the shopping search session. I didn’t realize leveraging these comparison shopping engines was that complicated.

The above list is certainly not comprehensive… in fact, I forgot to mention Paul Fischer (thanks for sharing the cabs and hanging out with us, your company will be missed) and Becca Anderson; two quality people I’m certainly glad to be friends with. Be on the look out for my video interview featuring these two. It should be up in a week or so.

All in all, I had a great time in Chicago and I still managed to learn some new things about the search industry. Keep up with social media optimization. It can do wonders for your site marketing efforts. Also, it would be wise to embrace the mobile industry. More and more people are using their mobile devices to surf the web, which means more and more people will be using these devices to search. Having a site optimized for the mobile user will only help your cause.

Normally, during most conference sessions that cover linking strategies, the participating audience pays close attention. However, at the link Q&A session during the 2006 Chicago SES, things got a tad contentious - that is until Abhilash Patel and Rand Fishkin got their respective turns at the mic.

Before we go on, I don’t want to paint a picture that the session was filled with arguing between the audience and the panel (which was quite good, consisting of Yahoo!’s Tim Converse; Google’s Adam Lasnik; Eytan Seidman from MSN; and Ask.com’s Vivek Pathak). However, a couple of audience members didn’t appear to like the answers they were being given.

One person in particular decided to argue about the need of sub domains, indicating he knew more about his given field than the search engines did… and perhaps he was right. However, when it comes to sub domains, I always remember something Danny Sullivan said at a previous conference - if a sub domain could stand on its own as an individual site, then creating one is fine. If not, just use the normal web page structure… but I digress.

While this session may have had a tense moment or two, there was still some really solid information provided:

- The panel was asked about relative or absolute links when it comes to internal linking with your site. They all said absolute (while many of you probably know this, it’s good to hear the engines confirm it).

- Contrary to the belief of many, Google is not against the buying and selling of links for advertising purposes. They are against it if it’s done to manipulate rankings and/or PageRank.

- Adam Lasnik was asked why Google doesn’t show more or all of the backlinks during this type of query. His answer was revealing, which I’ve paraphrased below:

Google doesn’t show as many backlinks because they don’t want people to focus as much on the linking aspect. They, of course, want great content, however, they are considering showing more links, but nothing has been confirmed.

The session’s best questions were asked by Rand and Abhilash.  I thought their points added a lot in terms of audience participation. Rand’s question concerned the way the search engines treat pay-per-post blog entries, something he has already blogged about.

Abhilash also had a great question about 301 redirects. He asked whether or not 301s pass the age of the link along with everything else they ferry.

Adam’s reply indicated that he wasn’t sure if every single aspect of the link is carried over by the redirect. 301s will carry the established “link love” and PageRank, but there’s some uncertainty about all aspects of the link being carried over.

Like Rand said in his post concerning pay-per-posts, it’s certainly nice to see the panel being so open and forthright with their answers. The only area that they made off-limits were questions concerning their ranking algorithms and that’s entirely understandable. All in all the link Q&A was again informative even though the atmosphere was a little “hotter” than usual.

So I don’t sound like a broken record (or a duplicated web page), I’ll briefly go over the duplicate content session at the Chicago SES conference. The reason for my abbreviated entry can be blamed on Lee Odden, who wrote an in-depth article about the same session and its featured on the WebProNews front page.

Another reason has to do with the coverage we provided during the Las Vegas PubCon, which also had a duplicate content session. By and large, the information from Chicago wasn’t that different from the Vegas conference. However, there are some important points that should be reiterated.

First, a great deal duplicate content is accidental and a result of numerous links pointing to the same page. To a search engine bot, this represents duplicate content. If a page has a normal canonical link pointing to it and another, perhaps dynamic link, doing the same, search engines will interpret this a being duplicate and they will act accordingly.

Other tidbits to be aware of:

- Search engines do not want duplicate content because it slows the information delivery process as well as causing unnecessary clutter.

- if you have numerous domains for one page, use 301 redirects

- choose one canonical domain and link all internal pages on the site to this domain

- exclude landing pages for ads using robots.txt

***These tips are courtesy of Jon Glick of Become.com

Additional tips (courtesy of Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs and Mikkel deMib Svendsen of deMib.dk) to consider:

- use your robot.txt or the appropriate meta tag (for dynamic sites) to exclude pages from being indexed

- dump all session ids in a cookie for all users, this can eliminate the session id duplicate content issues

- mainly, be on the look out for multiple URLs leading to an individual page, don’t wait for the engines to deal with, take care of it yourself…

This last point captures the theme of this particular session. Multiple URLs pointing to one page is one of the major causes of duplicate content because it gives the impression there are multiple occurrences of the same page even if the developer did not have intend to produce duplicate content. Be aware of these URLs and use the appropriate “fixes” to address the situation.

…Stays in Vegas? That’s the tagline for Sin City, but I don’t think it applies to last week’s PubCon. A lot went on in Vegas and a great deal of it was captured for its prosperity. Here’s a little cross section:

DrinkBait: Doing It For The Buzz! (Flickr)

Apparently, not everyone enjoyed Matt Cutts…

Lee Odden made an interesting discovery… (Lee has more photos)

Speaking of, here’s Evil Lee Odden

Barry Schwartz’s Recap

There’s much more, of that, I’m sure. As I mentioned, the prevailing theme of Vegas PubCon was link bait. What is considered good link bait? Well, the above list is a good example. Anything that can make someone throw a link your way is a good definition of what this phenomenon is. And remember, link exchanges aren’t doing aren’t doing much good anymore because the engines have been taking steps to deal with a link they determine to be non-relevant. Some more severe than others.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

At the Syndication Conference in San Francisco there are a lot of believers in RSS as a replacement for email marketing. I can’t disagree more and finally … I found two speakers yesterday who still believe in email. Now, I have a vested interest here … my company iEntry Inc. which publishes WebProNews derives about 70% of our revenue via email ads in our newsletters. We have RSS feeds too!

Speaking on a panel were Jim Brady, Vice President & Executive Editor, Washingtonpost.Com and Andrew Eisner, President, Bayview Consulting. Andrew previously worked for PC World. I also spoke to both of them later at a reception held by Yahoo.

Jim stated that RSS is only responsible for a small percentage of Washingtonpost.com traffic and even a smaller percentage of ad revenue. Washingtonpost.com started accepting ads in RSS feeds earlier this summer. Jim noted that “there just isn’t that much demand from advertisers yet”. He also made it clear that the site is integrating RSS just about everywhere and believes that over time RSS will be a significant factor in pageviews and revenue … but just not now.

And that is precisely the point of this post. RSS has the potential to be a marketing force … but it is only potential. That means folks… it is not guaranteed to happen. It’s just a prediction.

Andrew later told me that he still reads news via email newsletters …. sorting them very effectively in Gmail. He also thinks that RSS has great potential but it is not more powerful than email at this point.

In my opinion RSS is a great concept in that it enables easy syndication of content …. all types of content, not just text and links. But the promise of RSS as a marketing tool that is better than email is only a theory … not a reality. I think it is more likely that RSS and email will ultimately co-exist as powerful marketing vehicles.

The fact is they serve different purposes for marketers. Email is a broadcast medium that can deliver content and marketing messages quickly to large … but targeted … permission based audiences. And because email is used by EVERYONE on the internet on a daily basis it is a powerful way to communicate with people. RSS is a news distribution medium with many users who don’t want to see advertising. Of course, as syndication matures beyond the early adopters RSS could become a prominent advertising medium.

So, when you hear the hype about RSS … don’t believe that email is dead. It is actually on the rebound with less spam, higher open rates and increased subscriptions to newsletters.

Email doesn’t have to die just because RSS has come along… and in my humble opinion it won’t.

The Syndicate Conference begins Tuesday in San Francisco. The conference focuses on the latest B2B trends with blogs, podcasts and other sources of syndicated content. All very hot topics!

I will be there primarily to learn and to stay on top of these trends as marketing strategies. I will also be sending in reports for publication in WebProNews. Hopefully, San Francisco will be a little warmer than Chicago or Lexington.