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.

If you are an industry leader in any sector, you likely have a large and varied web presence. Your gadget options have changed dramatically with the introduction of Open Social. Prior to Open Social, most brand gadget strategies would need to create several gadgets for the different facets of your business. With Open Social the new options are significant enough to rethink your current direction.

In the world of SEO I will use the example of Third Door Media.

They have SearchEngineLand, SMX, SMN, and Sphinn. Each of these brands have different types of user and user behavior, but they also share many similarities.

Lets look at characteristics of these brands which could be “gadgetized”.

Notice that each brand has some specific characteristics that would be ideal for gadgets. Let’s start with SearchEngineLand (SEL in the diagram).

It is a news site, so therefore the display of news via feed would be an obvious choice, and there is also a regular podcast. These are very easy gadgets to implement. One might think, well let’s make a gadget that displays news and plays the podcast, right? I would say yes last week, but this week Open Social is here. It changes things.

Examine what similarities exist within the different facets of your brand or brands.

Points to ponder:

• For Third door media, I would say that most of the users of Sphinn (a social SEO news voting site) are also users of SearchEngineLand, so there would be good reason to make sure that a Sphinn gadget included the functionality of SearchEngineLand.
• Virtually all of these brands share the characteristic of networking. It is likely that most users of these brands are using LinkedIn which is now part of the Open Social world.
• Gadgets offer an excellent opportunity to promote your lesser used brands.
• With Open Social, it is very possible to create a single gadget that users of each brand will find useful and enjoyable. This creates a natural cross promotion of brands.

Prior to Open Social, gadget creation was a very specified art. You looked at one specific functionality and said “We will make this a gadget”.

The most dramatic change I see with Open Social is that gadget planning must now begin by looking at the entirety of your business and examining the whole pie, prior to its pieces.

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

I want to thank everyone who entered and I received alot of clever and funny stuff. I received one that was more interesting than the rest, and was incredibly cool.

The winner is Steve Cantrel. Please contact me and I will set you up with the info you need to attend.

He is interested in local search from an entirely different angle than most of us, and in a way that parallels many efforts I am making. He is not pimping his own websites or interests, he is (as a employee of a cultural affairs organization) tasked with pimping….

Museums

His straight forward, professional entry eloquently described some challenges that museums face in the search engine world, and they are very similar to the challenges faced by the non-profits and NGO’s that are my passion. Local search does indeed play a large role in the solutions to those challenges. SMX Local is the best place to learn about those solutions.

I was not expecting to choose a professional letter, I usually don’t like professional anything. I was going to pick whatever entry made me laugh until I farted. But Steve’s was just to interesting to me. I had to pick it.

It was such a random thing to receive this entry, that I will probably end up working with him some to create some documentation and “how-to”‘s for museums and other things in the public sector (if he is okay with such a thing), who truly do not have the budget or personnel to stay competitive in search.

As an example, a large percentage of international tourists come to New York for museums, or the statue of liberty (Ellis island) yet when searching in Google for “NYC Attractions” you are not going to find the museum sites or the Ellis Island website are you?

Thanks to all who entered, there were alot of funny entries and I loved them.

Win a free pass to Danny Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo in Denver, Colorado on October 1st and 2nd. This is a great conference that is focusing on Local and Mobile search.

I won a free pass to the first SMX in Aaron Wall’s SEObook, contest, so I figured it was my turn to ante up. I contacted Danny and set it up.

This is a full conference pass worth 1,195 dollars. but… You have pay for your own travel.

To win the free pass you have to do what I did, which was leave a comment or send an email (if you are shy) to me explaining why you should get the pass.

Humor, serious, clever, real, whatever… just let me know why you want the pass and I will choose the winner on Thursday.

Send emails to guidelineguy@gmail.com

Good luck!

For most companies and organizations attending search conferences the benefits are clear to them.

But what about people who have not attended conferences or do not see a direct benefit? In many cases the people who “would like to go but can’t afford it, or can’t justify the expense” are the exact people who can benefit most from it.

I remember a few years ago when I was working with hostels on their websites I told them all the same thing, the search engines want to rank highly the actual local businesses, but often don’t. The search engines would prefer to list the actual local business, but can’t do that very well because of the nature of their algorithms.

Well that was a few years ago, and the search engine still want to show the local businesses, and they now have ways to do it.

The example I used back then still works today. I used to live in Old San Juan in Puerto Rico. Old San Juan is very small, and is surrounded by an massive stone walls, the architecture is Spanish from hundreds of years ago.

There are only 5 hotels actually in Old San Juan.

If you search Google for “old san juan hotels” you get almost three million results.

Where, oh where did those other 2,999,995 websites come from? Why are only two of the top ten results actual hotels?

The answers to those questions are the reason that SMX Local and Mobile in Denver is worth it.

I know how to do things for cheap that simply amaze people. An example using Old San Juan again – I lived in an old and lovely building on a gorgeous and charming street with a large stone patio which over looked the sea.

It cost me less per month than one night at the hotel on the same street cost. (my rent was 350 dollars)

What I am getting at is I know how to get my bang for my buck, and I have mucho experience with local businesses and search engines.

If I were Danny Sullivan, I wouldn’t call this event “SMX – Local and Mobile” I would call this event “SMX – Screw the schmucks that have been screwing you for years“.

Local search is often talked about, but I do not think that small businesses are getting the picture, the picture for small and local businesses is…

Search engines want you to rank well

If you have a business that suffers from search results full of larger companies, business directories, and people you have to pay some way to mention you then 1000 dollars isn’t crap much to pay to learn how to use local search opportunities to your advantage.

Example?

Let’s take a small hotel in Miami. It doesn’t rank well for the terms “miami hotels”. Because it doesn’t rank well it has put it’s property on places like Orbitz and Expedia, heck, they can even even in Hotels.com and all they have to do is pay 10-20 percent of the reservation price, and since it makes good sense to keep the beds full, whats wrong with that?

Hmmm…

A small hotel in Miami probably costs 150 a night at least. Let us say this small hotel has 25 rooms.

Thats about 4000 a night in the beds are full. Hmmmm, that 1.5 million dollars a yearish.

Hmmm, that means that the 10 to 20 percent a year you give to booking engines is costing you 150,000 to 300,000 per year.

If you are an enterprising hotel manager, you may want to recoup some of that dough.

Local search is the way to do so.

Local search is money in your pocket that used to be in other people’s pockets.

I used a hotel for an example, but just about every small business in just about every sector knows the frustrtion I am talking about. The whole “Why do those $%#@’s outrank me?” for my own ^%&$# city????”

Did you know that with local search there are steps you can take in less than two hours that will significantly improve the direct traffic your website gets?

The tools exist right now to outrank the bastards that used to outrank you.

If you are not familiar how to best use Local Search to your advantage you will benefit from SMX Local.

Wanna know something else?

Many of your competitors are basically at the same place you are, they are also thinking that they “would like to go but can’t afford it, or can’t justify the expense”. The majority of them will not attend.

This is good.

For you.

Go.

These are some photos from the Google party and the SEOmoz party

There are more photos of SMX out there, mostly on Flickr.

The Microsoft Party

SMX kicked off with a party thrown by Microsoft. I had sorta envisioned this party as the place where I was going to meet everyone, pick some brains, and introduce me, me, wonderful, fabulous me to the world of SEO.

Then I realized the drinks were free.

I drank and drank and tried different drinks just cause they were pretty colors. A well dressed couple in front of me ordered martinis. When my turn at the bar came I instructed the bartender that “I wanted something yellow” (I got to have a drink for each color that you can find in a bag of Skittles.)

Some of the worlds foremost experts in the SEO industry now know me as the guy who showed them how to make a fart noise with nothing but your hand and your armpit.

The party was actually very impressive and wins the coveted SEOish Award for least wait time at the bar but it sucks that there wasn’t any t-shirts. Somewhere between free drinks and no wait time at the bars, I fell in love with Microsoft.

It was really great to see everyone drunk. Susan and Lisa (or as Lisa would say, “Lisa and Susan“) of the Bruce Clay blog only wrestled each other twice, which I am told is a new record.

This party is where I learned two important lessons. First thing I learned was that everyone is actually as nice as I have heard.

The second thing I learned is that blackhat/whitehat is not the real distinction of the search industry. There is a far more powerful reality. There exists only two types of SEO people, and depending on which one you are will ultimately define who you will end up networking with most.

The types are “smoking” and “non-smoking”. I would mention the non-smokers, but they suck. The smokers rock, we rule the SEO world.

After the party ended a good crowd of people went to the Fairmont hotel bar and drank more. Good stuff.

YOU and A with Matt Cutts

After a nice breakfast and alot of coffee, everyone went excitedly into the “YOUandA with Matt Cutts” session. Matt then asked Danny to strip, which Danny did. (SEOfangirl, you should have been here…) Really, he took off his suit on stage, he took off his pants on stage, but after that Matt and Danny sat down and started the session. This session was covered in depth at Search Engine roundtable by Tamar, who did an incredible job in her coverage of SMX. This session was covered well by Susan Esparza at Bruce Clay as well but I heart the WebProNews coverage of it where Navneet Kaushal of PageTraffic was kind enough to link to my site in his coverage.

What I liked about this session was that I got to shamelessly promote my Google guideline site ask a question.

I asked about the Google webmaster guidelines and why were they so damn vague. I explained to Mr. Cutts that if the Google guidelines were not improved within 24 hours, he was never going to see his cats again. (Google updated the guidelines the next day and Matts cats were returned safely to their home where they then meowed.) After I asked my question, other people started to ask and discuss things other than me and I lost interest. Especially the real estate stuff… grr…

Duplicate Content Summit

The representatives of four search engines (Ask, Yahoo, Google, and MSN) explained duplicate content in a manner that would be deemed duplicate content by most search engines.

This session was good, but the best part for most people was after they stopped talking when they started answering questions and really spent alot of one and one time with people. (Thanks for that) I honestly can say that everyone who wanted a minute or two or five with each representative got to have it. I was really impressed by this.

The representatives were… Vanessa Fox of Google, Amit Kumar of Yahoo, Peter Linsley of Ask.com, and Eytan Seidman of Microsoft.

More coming soon (I need to get more beer).

Everytime I try to sit down and write something I am either drunk, tired, or both. I simply do not have the capacity to write anything in any real sense during this event. I have been meeting people left and right and I like talking to them and I guess that is why I am here. So basically I am saying that I will cover SMX after the fact and will give some good insights on it later when I am sober and not surrounded by people I respect.

The best live coverage of the event is at BruceClay, where Lisa and Susan are doing an impressive job covering in very real detail, just about every word of the sessions, truly.

The real scoop fom SMX is that you can attend the sessions in damn near real time at the blog on Bruce Clay.