Online Marketing Blog

During SES New York I heard that this year’s Pubcon Conference will be held the same week as the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference. This wasn’t by choice, as neither conference will benefit from happening at the same time. I believe it had to do with how the Las Vegas Convention Center situation worked with Pubcon and things happened that required the Pubcon event to be moved to a different date than originally intended.

SES Chicago is 12/3-6 and PubCon Las Vegas runs 12/4-7.  This is a really tough call because Pubcon only happens once a year and SES Chicago is in our back yard. However, I do plan on having TopRank staff at both events

I’ve had a standing request for an interview with Bruce Clay for about a year now and we finally decided to just do a short one on video, which works for me and I think it will work for you as well.

Bruce Clay is one of the best known brands in the world of search marketing and if you attend Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld Pubcon or ad:tech conferences, you’re sure to see him and his team on the exhibit hall and/or presenting to attendees. Thousands of people have used his SEO tools and participated in his company’s SEO training programs.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7148079713264516081
Matt Cutts of Google was nice enough to take a minute to do a quick interview on his way out from the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. This was something we had coordinated via email before the conference, but I was lucky to catch him at the last minute.

Matt gives his take on Pubcon parties as well as the “Site Review” panel and sticking up for the mom and pop sites that make silly mistakes because they don’t have good information. Thanks for taking the time Matt!

Update: I want to be clear that Matt is NOT “ripping” on Yahoo and Microsoft in this clip as you can see – he just decided to go to parties that were open to all Pubcon attendees.

I have to say, the Pubcon conference last week was one of the better search marketing conferences I’ve been to. The overriding impression from just about everyone I talked to was that the content was great and the networking even better.

Below is a roundup of Online Marketing Blog’s blog posts, photos and videos from the WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas 2006. I have to say thanks to everyone that let me put my Sony CyberShot to the test and do these 1 minute “interviews”. :

Videos
Brett Tabke – WebmasterWorld
(Happy about the conference, speakers and the next one in Vegas)

Greg Hartnett – Best of the Web
(Pubcon has been very good to BOTW and those black shirts are marketing genius)

I now have 5 of the 6 SEO interview videos I’ve shot here at the Las Vegas Pubcon.

Greg Hartnett – Best of the Web
Kevin Lee – Did-It.com
John Marshall – ClickTracks
Greg Jarboe – SEO-PR

I also have one with Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads but the file is too big for YouTube so I’ll have to get it up to Google Video this weekend.

Now we’re heading over to the actual “Pub” part of Pubcon at the Nine Fine Irisishmen bar at the New York, New York casino. Hopefully we’ll get more SEO videos there.

One of the key components of the presentation I gave this morning at the Las Vegas Pubcon conference presented the idea of press release optimization and social media news releases in the context of push and pull. But before that, it’s important to understand the market opportunity with news search.

According to a report released by comScore, half of all internet users visited news sites in June 2006. Of the most popular news web sites, Yahoo News is #1 surpassing CNN, MSNBC and AOL News.

There’s also an increase in the use of social media both by end consumers and the media for tracking information that interests them. This includes: blog and news search engines, social news, social bookmarks, podcasts and video. The thing that ties all of this together is RSS. RSS enables people to subscribe to the kinds of content from the channels or formats that they are interested in.

Wow, what a party! Yahoo had a very private, invite-only party last night at the Palms Towers in the Playboy suite.

Thank you to Yahoo PR for letting me bring Karen and Jolina from the TopRank team. This was their first conference and Karen’s fist time in Las Vegas. There were only 100 or so people invited to this party from a conference of several thousand, so it made quite an impression.

The Playboy Suite was quite a place. Here are a few photos:

I’ve got to run to do my next presentation but will post more photos later or you can check my Flickr page. Nice job on the party Yahoo!

One vendor you’re sure to see at virtually every SES and Pubcon conference is web analytics company, ClickTracks. I had the pleasure of speaking at a few DMA conferences at the same time as ClickTracks founder John Marshall and found him to be one of the most enthusiastic evangelists for web analytics in the industry. On top of that he’s really a very good guy.

John and his VP of Marketing, Michael Stebbins took out a few ClickTracks’ freinds for dinner on Tuesday night and it proved to be some of the best conversation. I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of networking after the daytime sessions are over.

I was very torn between attending this session and Big SEO, but I got a bit of both. Here’s the official session description:

“Today’s search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.”

This topic could easily have been broken down into at least 2 different sessions as these are somewhat disparate topics and no one really talked about blogs per se. Speakers included: Owen Byrne from digg, Rick Klau from FeedBurner, Chris Tolles from Topix.net and Niall Kennedy.

The WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference kicked off today with a short introduction to the conference by Brett Tabke and an opening keynote by Guy Kawasaki.

Apparently Guy really wants links as he sandwiched his very thoughtful and humorous presentation with requests for links so he can boost his Technorati ranking. Apparently he’s been hovering at around 46 and wants to hit the top ten.
He started off describing his backround working with Apple and Steve Jobs and very enthusiastic slant towards all things Mac. HIs recent book, Art of the Start is a best seller and serves as an interesting lead-in to his presentation, “The art of innovation”.

After what seemed like a very long flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas, Jolina, Karen and I have finally settled in.

I bumped into Jeremy Schoemaker when getting off the plane РI had not met him in person before and he seemed like a nice fellow.  On the way to the ground transport and not paying attention to where I was going exactly, we ended up in the limo area seeing Jeremy again. A towncar seemed like a pretty good idea considering the notoriously long waits for taxis here in Vegas.

I’m taking it light this evening and we will be heading over to the Las Vegas Convention center early am.¬† I’ll be posting some Pubcon conference coverage, some photos and a few videos as the week progresses.

Our public relations firm consistently uses the PRWeb Podcast service for our clients, but I’ve not taken advantage of the service very often for our own PR efforts with TopRank.

Yesterday for the second time ever, I personally used PRWeb’s Podcast service that’s available when you select a $200 or higher option for press release distribution. As with the first time, I was totally impressed.

The process is pretty simple. You order a press release to be distributed and pick the $200 level. As you go through the process of enabling or activating the various options for the release, you’ll have the option of scheduling a PRWeb Podcast. Pick a date and time that works for you and you’ll get an email with the phone number and access code.