I was at SMX Advanced in Seattle basically to see some friends, and to discuss with a few trusted folks about my upcoming year. I didn’t really attend sessions, and as someone who didn’t attend sessions I discovered something. There were alot of people who didn’t attend sessions, but were there just to interact with others.

I love the SEO industry, even though I am almost entirely out of it now with my gadget/widget strategy stuff. Almost every successful widget spread I have seen has been very Google guideline friendly (white hat) and is orientated around the user, or based on actual interaction that helps or entertains users.

I love the discussion that occured around the wonderful Lisa Barones post “SMX Advanced goes to the darkside“. Her article discusses that the flavor of SMX Advanced was a bit Grey hat.

I liked the discussion because (as always) Dally Sullivan is open to discussing critiques, which I admire, and I liked the discussion because it really highlighted some of the basic reasons why I got into gadgets in the first place.

A couple years ago, I would answer the questions of new webmasters alot. They always were, basically, “How do we get on top of Google results?”.

They were never, “How do I do more business on the internet?” or “How do I make more money on the internet?”.

It was considered a given that search engines were the best way to do this, so the questions were always orientated around “being on top of the search engines”.

I started to ask myself “What if there were no search engines?” and “How do I create an online presence that does not depend on Google or search rankings?

If you have read my article “The Hitchhikers Guide to Linkless SEO” you know what direction of thought I ended up going in.

I realized that you do not need search engines at all to create major brands and millions of users.

Think about this. You use Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon right?

You didn’t find those in a search engine, you use them because of interaction. You read about them or were invited by someone or they were suggested to you.

No search engine needed.

Twitter, StumbleUpon, and other social media is not dependant on search engines. They would be the same success they are even if Google didn’t exist.

This isn’t sinking into the search community very quickly, but you really don’t need search engines for everything.

This needs to sink in, particulairly for advertisers. How you advertise is changing and how you bring people into contact or awareness of your brand is changing.

It is really simple, and it is called “Word of Mouth”.

Social media is, in it’s essense, “word of mouth”. Understanding that is key for internet marketers.

Back to SMX Advanced. Danny Sullivan knows his shit well. I would challenge him to offer sessions that offer real ways for businesses and advertisers to actually interact with social media instead of teaching people how to “use” social media for links or other SEO goals.

The goal isn’t links in social media. It is interaction. It is word of mouth.

If the only thing you use social media for is link creation, then you are missing the point.

Advice like…

“If you make a profile on several social media websites, you will get several links which may help your ranking.”

Is the same thing as…

“How to get reciprical links, or Wikipedia links, etc., etc.”

The most advanced and forward looking marketing looks at social media not as an opportunity for links, but as an opportunity for interaction and brand awareness. I would love to see Danny, Brett, and other conference organizers embrace this idea more and see it reflected in their sessions.

I like that Danny has the SMX – Social series and I would recommend them as the most effective sessions you will likely find on leveraging social media.

But at the same time, those sessions are also of the same flavor that gave Lisa pause about SMX Advanced. How to “trick” or “linkbait”, I hope to be proved wrong on that, but we will see.

I will be leaving the trail to attend a few things in the next three weeks. I hope to see you there, and also this will be the window of opportunity to get some face time with me if I am working on your projects. Contact me asap to arrage meetings, here is where I will be…

May 12th – Palm Springs (personal stuff)

May 15th – Sunnyvale, CA – Yahoo HQ – I will be at the Yahoo campus for an evening of drinking, er, I mean developer stuff

May 28th 29th – Google I/O -  I am looking forward to several goings on there, especially the MySpace/Open Social stuff, and of course the Google gadgets stuff as well.

Jun 3rd 4th – Seattle, WA – SMX Advanced - I will swing by Seattle for the SEOmoz party, and also maybe get a networking pass for the event.

Jun16th – New York, NY – WidgetWebExpo – I will be doing a session there on Widgets and SEO

I also want to mention that Smx Advanced will be having a developer day which programmed by Vanessa Fox, who has over 13 years of experience building websites, documenting APIs, and reading comic books.

Vanessa is starting a new thing Nine by Blue, which looks at the relationships between development, SEO, and online marketing silos and how the data from each of these areas can be used holistically to learn more about customer behavior. She also is features editor at Search Engine Land, a leading online journal covering the search industry. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search.

In addition to the above, she is also quite hot

There is a real benefit for companies to send their developers to this event, and I want to add that I personally think that if you are a developer and you are tinkering with the idea of broadening your horizons, this is a good event to go to. If you are thinking of working with me I would say the developer days would be required. (hint-hint)

Although this developer day is naturally orientated towards SEO, there are some very important basics to understand before starting a large project that will be useful to just about any development team out there.

My compliments to Vanessa for starting this.

That about does it, after that I will be back on the trail.

I am in Las Vegas for PubCon, which to most is an event where you can attend cutting edge sessions led by industry leaders.

The reason I am here is more just to see people who make my heart bubble with happiness. I am also here to gamble, to drink, and to flirt with as many women as humanly possible. And giggle. I want to giggle too.

The only actual business I am doing here is to hopefully find a couple of people to team up with on some of my upcoming projects.

As always, if you are seeking good info on this conference, you should not be here (I will pretty much just be posting dunk pictures and stuff). For actual coverage of this event and the sessions I suggest the Bruce Clay blog, Search Engine Round Table, and SEOmoz. I stole these pick from Rhea

I am offering up three free buy-ins to the Charity SEO poker tournament.

To be clear about this, I am paying for these seats, so the money will go into the pot.

The SEO poker tournament will take place at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas on Dec 6th after the Microsoft party – Full details here. The free seats you can win means that I pay your reservation fee and the 150 dollar buy-in.

You pay nothing

The winners and all the game participants will receive a sweet t-shirt.

You also get to play poker with some of the all stars of SEO.

The Players:

To see who has signed up so far go here (we will update the list at least daily)

Go to the Facebook event page to check out the buzz.

How to Win the Free Seats:
The contest and all the details can be found at SEOmoz. You will have to leave a comment over at SEOmoz to enter this contest. Not sure how to play poker tournaments? Learn online sillybutt, try online poker lowdown for some articles.

Update: there is now one more seat available that was kindly offered up by the folks at BuyBigTires

Thanks!

Wondering what to do with Open Social?

What I see as the biggest opportunity in Open Social is rather simple.

Regardless of what industry you are in, if you have a website that offers profile pages to your users, and have a large user base… then congrats, you can implement this idea.

The first major community in each industry who implements Open Social into their user profiles will score huge.

Let’s look at some of the benefits that this can provide for both your users, and your own brand growth (and hey save some money on publicity too)…

Let’s use an example. I am going to show you my SEOmoz profile page and use it to highlight some ideas and to illustrate some opportunity…

How to profit off of farting…

In my profile my tagline is “farting feels good”. Why did I choose that? I am not sure, but probably because I didn’t want to come across as a stuffy self important schmuck. What ever the reason was does not matter one little bit, what matters is that I wanted to show my personality in some way.

Members who care about a community often try to show their personality in their profile pages, this desire can be be fulfilled much more if you offer Open Social gadgets to a user. On SEOmoz I know I wish I had the ability to link to more than one of my sites, well what if your linked in profile, or Sphinn profile, or other info that was retrieved from other places right into my user profile on SEOmoz? Yum.

What if my last three posts on my blog were displayed? I would like that. That would totally, utterly rock. What if my blog posts could be read right there on my profile. Well I would like that and so to would SEOmoz. It benefits the user (me) and it benefits SEOmoz as the amount of time that people spend on my profile (part of their site) would increase dramatically. Every one of your users also has friends, and I would certainly tell my friends and link to a profile page that I enjoyed.

That sounds complicated…

Nope, it ain’t. To provide Open Social gadgets to your user profile pages you must become a “container” which is simpler than you think. Let us move on to the part where Google pimps your website.

It mayhaps be a good thing when Google is linking to your brand from their documentation. I would say that this type of free promotion is far and few between. The opportunity for it won’t last long…

But it is there now.

Even if you are not specifically pushed as a “partner” you know what? You will probably be mentioned in the development example documentation.

More on my spiffy profile page… let’s scroll down just a tad on my SEOmoz profile…

There is a chunk of real estate on every SEOmoz profile page that is not being used at all.

Hmmm, What can we do with this space?

Although a gadget would fit purrrrfectly in there, I would not suggest that at all. I would sugest something more like moving the “About Me” stuff to the unused space, thus leaving a honking huge area for a Google Open Source container to the right…

If this was done it would damn near be the same layout as Facebook huh?

To illustrate this lamely, look at the image below, which is what I would see as a rocking hot and effective user profile page.
Open Social ready SEOmoz profile….

I do want to mention that I often use an example of SEOmoz or Sphinn, but I only do so because most people in my sector are familiar with these websites. I am not actually making specific suggestions for X brand or Y brand, I am just using them to illustrate some points.

Google Gadgets and Open Social Similarities

The single most important factor of how many users a Google gadget has is…

Date of implementation. Any Google gadget you put out today will do better than a Google gadget that someone else puts out tomorrow.

This same exact trend will likely exist with Open Social. Do whatever you are going to do today. Get started right now.

“Well, we are a corporation, and we make decisions that go through processes.”

Yeah, well so do your competitors.

Hmmm.

The two recent announcements about Open Social and the ability to add Google gadgets to Blogger have some things in common. I speculate that the biggest thing they have in common is the Google Gadget Syndication Directory.

What is it?

It is a “face” of the Google gadget directory that lists gadgets that can be placed on other webpages. The first actual cross platform/product use of it by Google is the new ability to add gadgets to Blogger. I have a hunch it will be used a couple of other place too It has mostly only been used as a place where people who wanted to place a Google gadget on their webpage could grab the code.

Let me show you some of the differences between the syndication Google gadget directory and the iGoogle one (and why you should care about it)

The first big difference is that the Syndication Directory has less gadgets in it because it only lists Google gadgets that can be placed on other pages. To illustrate this, let’s use SearchEngineLand. Lets do a search for “searchengineland” in the iGoogle gadget directory…

Okay, we see the SearchEngineLand has two gadgets to offer to anyone who is hungry for high quality search engine news, that is super.

Now let’s look at the same search in the Google gadget syndication directory….

No results. Poop. How did that happen? Before I explain how that happened let us explore the very real consequences of not being represented in the Syndication directory. Let’s say I am in Blogger and I want to add something to my sidebar, I click “Add Gadget” and then I search for “SearchEngineLand” and you know what? I don’t find anything….

Oh well, guess I won’t add SearchEngineLand to my Blogger sidebar. Now imagine all the other different places that will start to use the syndication directory who won’t be able to add it either.

Why aren’t the SearchEngineLand gadgets (and thousands of other gadgets) in the syndication directory?

Well, one thing is that the syndication directory does not list Google gadgets that are feeds anymore. Hmmm. I speculate that this is because the feed reader type of gadget is something specific to iGoogle, and that the Open Social APIs will have a different way of using feeds for gadgets. But whatever the reason is, it is important to be sure that your brand is represented in the syndication directory. Or else sneaky people like me might take advantage of it

Now let’s look at SEOmoz, even though they have a couple gadgets listed in the iGoogle directory, they only have one in the syndication directory…

The SEOmoz Gadget I made a couple of days ago is sitting all nice a pretty as the ONLY result for the term “SEOmoz”. Which means if someone searches through Blogger…

Think about that for a second… If you are familiar with the syndication directory, you will find there are many opportunities. The syndication directory is here.

I think gadgets are a great way to highlight the resources you have that might receive less action than they should. Instead of giving you only my kooky thoughts, I thought an example was in order…

There is a blog called SEOmoz (you might of heard of it). They have many great resources that people may not know of or are not taking advantage of. Lets make a Google gadget that highlights SEOmoz’s other stuff….

This gadget displays randomly SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday videos, it has another tab that will show random videos from Rand and other Mozzers, yet another tab will display YouMoz, the user generated blog featuring articles by SEOmoz members, and the final tab is just some links to SEOmoz content other than their blog (like their tools and articles).

This gadget is actually a test of sorts and is a pre-cursor to a SearchEngineLand gadget I want to create (it would also be cool for conference coverage… hmmm). I am experimenting with hosting gadgets on Google, rather that my own domains. This is the first gadget I have made that is hosted entirely on Google.

To add the SEOmoz gadget to your iGoogle page just click “+ Google” tab thing, or you can also add it here.

This gadget can also be customized and placed on a webpage or blog post (like it is above) by going here.

Howdy, I video blog this because I am too tired to write it (I have been up for like two days and I want to go to bed)…

The articles I mentioned in the video are…

Matt Cutts on changing hosts

Rhea’s 8 things

Shana’s Sphinn link love fest

SEO 2.0′s 12 blogs

Vanessa Fox has been in the world of current real world SEO for about two months and questions Rand Fishkin and his vast experience of actually working as an SEO.

I hope this is a link bait ploy of some type, if not Vanessa has made a goof here.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Vanessa, but frankly, she lacks any current real world SEO experience. She has not made the hard decisions that accompany our trade. She does not know the sweat, terror, or agony of having to make actual important decisions based on the limited information that her former employer provides.

Rand Fishkin, on the other hand has, and has done so for years. Day in day out, he has sweated, sacrificed and built his name and reputation successfully on his ability to navigate the mirky waters of SEO.

I really appreciate her input on the quiz, I told her so on her blog.

But it is shitty of her to title her post that or anything that labels the SEOmoz quiz as “completely wrong”.

She was a Google employee until two months ago, not an SEO.

I actually feel bad about this.

Vanessa if this a link ploy of some type, please email me. If it isn’t, please don’t cause I am pissed at the moment.

Update: My point is that as a recent Google employee I feel it irresponsible and disrespectful to Rand to use that title. It is not bad she wrote an opinion, I respect her opinion and I am glad she wrote it, I just wish it were more respectful and tactful in it’s execution.

Okay the most widely anticipated event in search is now upon us, we have waited months for it… No, not the PageRank update, I am talking about…

The SEOmoz Comic Strip

Rebecca Kelley of SEOmoz does comics good and her newest comic strip does not disappoint. I have made my comic strip debut in them! Sweet, you can see to the left how pleased Lisa Barone is about it.

Here it is, the SES San Jose comic strip.

If you haven’t read them yet, here are the comic strips for prior search conferences