Online Marketing Blog

I promised myself I’d slow down on conference speaking last year and while I’ve turned down more offers this year than ever before, (and been turned down myself the one time I formally pitched) some really great opportunities have popped up.

Here are the upcoming conferences I’ll be speaking at for pretty much the rest of this year not including private company engagements:

Aug 20, 2008 – Search Engine Strategies, San Jose
Presenting: “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds”
Presenting: “News Search SEO”
Media Sponsor
TopRank is sending 4 bloggers to cover the event (Thomas, Jessica, Dana and Ashley)

Sep 18, 2008 – OMMA Global, NYC
Panel: “Digital Asset Optimization”

Sep 20, 2008 – Blog World Expo, Las Vegas
Moderating a Panel: “SEO and New Media”
Media Sponsor

Gone are the days of the whole family, ages 6 up to 50, sitting around in the evening watching the same television show, focusing in on the same characters and – consequentially – the same advertising messages. What a typical family evening looks like these days is the elementary age child playing hand-held video games, the teenager finishing homework online, and the parents reading the evening paper. And all of this is going on while each individual person is sitting in front of their own television set watching whichever show or video they want.

Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies Expo in San Jose got off to a really fruitful start with Danny Sullivan giving us a lottery tip. His session, Introduction to Search Marketing, gave us good examples on how to buy tickets and win big in the search engine lottery.

Emphasizing the importance of title tags, meta tags, meta keywords, Danny explains many ways to optimize a site to be found more easily by all visitors, human or otherwise. He discussed how to research the best keywords to place in the content for your site, stating that if you don’t have enough time to do a huge amount of keyword research, “go with your gut”. You know your users. You know your site. What would you search for to get to your site?

Tomorrow a.m. I get on a plane and head on over to the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.  This one promises to be a really great show.

My Monday is packed with meetings and the release of several emargoed announcements that are sure to make a splash. I’ll be covering sessions and having press meetings during the day Monday through Wednesday and covering some of the after-conference activities by night. Joe Morin has been managing a handy official party schedule if you want more info on that.¬† It can’t be all work and no play, can it?¬† If you’re smart though, the best work is done after the conference sessions.
Be sure to check out the conference coverage both here at Online Marketing Blog and especially over at Search Engine Roundtable. Here’s the Quadruple Coverage schedule of sessions being covered by Barry, Ben, Chris and myself.