Online Marketing Blog

The big year of 2007 is winding down and there are more than a few conferences coming up. It’s been a busy year for TopRank speaking events with our involvement in the search, direct marketing and public relations industries. Here are our remaining speaking events this year. We hope to see you there:

Nov 1, 2007 – Bulldog Reporter’s PR University – Teleconference
“Boosting Web Traffic: Best New Ways PR Can Supercharge Websites to Drive Investors, Journalists and Customers to Visit Online”

Nov 30, 2007 – Advanced PR Technology Conference – San Francisco, CA
“Press Release Optimization” and “Corporate Site SEO”

Dec 4-7, 2007 – WebmasterWorld Pubcon – Las Vegas, NV
“Public Relations” and “SEO Blogger Panel”

This week will be some light blogging for me as I’ll be on vacation for the rest of the week. We decided it would be a Cirque du Soleil – fest so where better to go for that than Las Vegas? We’ll see 3 of the Cirque shows there so hopefully it will satisfy any urges for peculiar French inspired circus acts for a while.

While in Las Vegas it’s possible, but unlikely, we’ll run into some of the search marketers speaking at the Shop.org conference. In fact, there’s one session on link building with Stephan Spencer and Eric Ward who I am speaking on the same topic with at the DMA07 show “Desperately Seeking Links” in Chicago Oct 16. Other SEMs on the Shop.org linking panel include Neil Patel from ACS and Rebecca Kelley from SEOmoz.

A lot has changed in the search marketing conference industry in the past year. The biggest news being the addition of Kevin Ryan to oversee Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies along with the departure of Danny Sullivan from SES to start his own venture, Third Door Media and the Search Marketing Expo or SMX series of conferences.

Additional news includes the success of new conferences like MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit, programmed by David Berkowitz as well as the reduction in conference dates for Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon down to one (albeit, temporarily) in Las Vegas. With the number of new and niche conferences popping up it begs the question as to whether the market demand can support so many events?

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

Have you noticed the number of regionalized or small scale search marketing conferences that are popping up?Jill Whalen has been running her High Rankings Search Engine Marketing seminar for a few years now (disclosure: I am a speaker for the Mpls event and my PR agency works with Jill) that is very hands on focused. The speakers all share a very similar philosophy about search marketing so there are not the mixed messages you get at larger events.

Danny Sullivan has started his SMX event (is that name a subliminal play on Search Marketing Sex?) starting in Seattle this summer as well.

There’s also Elite Retreat with a $5,000 price tag that includes: Guy Kawasaki, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Shoemaker, Kris Jones and Neil Patel. The marketing is getting slick on this one along with the all-star speaker lineup.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Lawrence Coburn

I first met Lawrence Coburn when we presented together on a Public Relations panel during a WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Boston. Lawrence told a great story about being at the right place at the right time and taking proper advantage to build publicity for his web site, RateItAll.com.

At the recent Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Lawrence presented on a panel about viral marketing where he focused on using widgets as a way to drive traffic and links. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this session since I was presentingon a different panel at the same time, but Karen and Jolina did and they came back with excellent feedback. Multiple people mentioned this session to me actually, including Rand Fishkin in this video interview.

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 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.

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”.