Conferences

Since my padawan wouldn’t get off his ass and do this, I felt it my duty to be a dick. Someone had to. Actually I’m just pissed I’m not there.

So with Shoemoney sporting the SEO Sucks t-shirt, I’ve made the one I’m wearing to Pubcon. Complete with a cardboard cutout of Chris Winfield.

Just joking Shoe, but someone had too

PS: Streko is demanding a link so here it is.

Update: Since I’m a whore, here a little promo. And yes, I do use the tools.

If you’re offended…STFU already. That’s shut the fuck up already for you idiots who have been living in a cave. It’s an analogy. Or metaphor. Or something, I skipped English a lot. Maybe I should say “Yea, I do a little blackhat, but I can whitehat circles around your ass.” There’s been a week of useless banter about SMX advanced last week. In reality, this sums up my position but I digress. We’ve got there’s no such thing as advanced white hat SEO, advanced SEO doesn’t mean spamming, to blackhat SEO isn’t advanced blah blah yadda yadda.

Here’s the deal yo…advanced can mean anything. Most “SEO’s” that I know come from a marketing background. What that basically means is most blackhat is going to be advanced. As soon as you start spouting auto generated content via arrays, PHP scrapers or whatever then it’s advanced for them. On the other hand “SEO’s” that come from a developer background (or marketing type SEO’s who have a solid grasp of what developers can do and have some minions) find the majority of “blackhat” things mentioned at SMX pretty basic shit. Then you’ve got the guy who’s never been to a conference. PR sculpting, bot herding, advanced analytics is all going to be advanced for them.

Rob (evilgreenmonkey) in particular got pointed at several times about his presentation in the “Give It Up” session. I know I’m not supposed to blog about it for a month, but since when do I listen. Basically he said that the coyote keeps getting screwed by ACME and their crappy dynamite. Yea, did you really think I was going to piss off Danny Sullivan and bring the Hammer of Injustice down on me? Again. But really what he said wasn’t anything even remotely new to anyone that does any blackhat already so get over it people. There were a few things that you usually hear in the corner of the bar, and in my opinion, that’s great. Knowledge is power, or didn’t you forget to read Meditations? Was some of it blackhat? Sure. Was any of it bad? No. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen. If you listen, you’re at a supposedly “advanced” conference so you should know the risks.

Now, on to the ever controversial post from Bruce Clay because apparently I get under Lisa’s skin. That’s okay Lisa, I like you anyway. Here’s the part that got under my skin:

Black hats get under my skin because (a) they’re not SEOs (b) they very often provide a bad experience for users and (c) they make the rest of us look bad by association.

Right. (a) Whatever. I don’t need an SEO label. Call me a Search Engine Humpty Dancer for all I care, I’m still really good at it whatever color the hat it is. (b) we often provide a better experience for users than all you holier than thou (Shari Thurow) whitehats. For example, say I’m delivering targeted content to my return users based on their browsing history. This gives them far more targeted content and a better user experience, but it is considered blackhat cloaking to Google without question. There are plenty of examples of better user experiences that break Google guidelines. (c) If you look bad by associating with me and the rest of “my kind”…well you’re probably right about that one but I don’t think it’s because we do SEO in a certain way. I think it’s more because we call out things as we see it.

From a client perspective I’d rather hire someone who is well versed in blackhat to control my website than a whitehat. The majority of us conduct business with full disclosure about the risks of everything we do. I know some idiot whitehats that make us all look bad too…one’s been living in a cave. Come on Doug, go ahead and comment so I can ignore you some more.

Moving on…SMX Advanced was a good time. If you weren’t hanging out with us a lot then you’ll be confused. But here is a little something for Rhea, who is one of the coolest people around and always willing to share knowledge and battle the douchebags. (And she worked her ass off for that press pass Loren, you should give her one for PubCon too).

And for Brian, who seems to have brain malfunctions around Rhea…but he really does know his shit. It’s a Mute Lion. Blind Cheetah. Impotent Cat.

Next up is Think Tank in Sunny San Diego (Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diago, which of course in German means a whale’s vagina.) in September (invite only, email me if you’d like to come and I’ll make introductions) and then on to PubCon for some debauchery.

Everyone has a PubCon recap so I won’t bore you with the normal rundown. If you want the full coverage head over to Search Engine Roundtable and check out their PubCon coverage. They did an excellent job covering PubCon and SES Chicago (as if anyone was in Chicago). Let’s get to the juicy stuff from my crazed brain.

First off Rae, Carolyn, Vanessa, Jon & Scott, Rhea, and Nick you all kick ass and I’m looking forward to once again hanging out and consuming ever increasing quantities of fermented and/or distilled beverages. I briefly met a few others that I didn’t have much time to chat with. Jane Copland who hates her caricature and Tyler Pratt who doesn’t like people who draw his caricature. Bill Slawski and Todd were usually swamped since they’re so wildly popular. Dave who was occupied with a six foot tall beer. I chatted briefly with Andy Beal at the Gooruze party (and thank you to the Gooruze folks). We’ll have to find more of those six foot beers to consume sometime.

Second, many thanks to Dave at Purposeinc.com for holding the first annual SEO poker tournament. It was a blast even though I got my ass handed to me on a silver platter and was almost the first one out. Jim Boykin and I think someone said Neil Patel were out first. Maybe. My only consolation is that Dan Perry put me out (in like 3 hands) and he won the whole thing.

Now that I’m finished with shouts, here are some thoughts on the conference part of it:

First a small complaint…MORE WATER!! We stay up until 3am every night drinking and there is a 7 ounce water for lunch and most of the water bottles on the table are gone before I even arrived. Need more hydration!

Perl - PHP Session - Way too basic. I’m not that strong of a programmer, but explaining how to install Apache almost put me to sleep. The security part was fairly interesting but didn’t provide much actual info. The PHP part….blaaaah.

Link Building Strategies - One of the better sessions. Rae some good info on things to look for when outsourcing link dev. If she would have told me that about four years ago it would have avoided lots of mistakes. I took the jump in and see approach. With the amount of link buying I do nowadays I still hit some bad apples but she gave some great tips. Jim, Roger Montti and Greg Hartnett basically just said to stay under the radar.

Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies - This was also one of my favorite sessions. Todd had a great rundown on the type of links, distribution channels, and target markets involved and stressed to know what they are before you even start. Targeting those pansy’s that crank it thinking about the next ipod on digg are going to be much different than the tree huggers on Hugg or the political nut jobs that like tasers on Reddit (apparently tasers make the reddit home page every day?). Andy Hagans and Bill Hartzer spoke next. Andy pointed out you should submit to all social media at once for maximum penetration (penetration…haha) and to put a call to action at the end of posts to try and convert some of that traffic. I think he spoke about sex too. Actually I think they all talked about sex. Baby.

Link Buying - What a crock. Aaron Wall had the most information, which wasn’t much. Everyone else either changed their presentation or stuttered through a doublespeak “stay under the radar” speech. My most anticipated session was useless. Probably due to the evil influence sitting in the back.

Effective Domaining Strategies - Since I’m new to domaining I was anticipating this session as well. I’d give it a B-. Monte Cahn has some good pointers on what to look for now that the market is fairly saturated. Jeff Libert showed everyone a list of domains he bought this year letting us know there are still some good 3-word domains around. I felt like he did too much bragging about what domains he owned and how cool he was so that’s about when I tuned out.

Domainers Round Table - Eh. Opinions (different ones at that) on where the industry is going. It succeeded in confusing me on which directions I should be looking.

WereWolf Tournament - Missed it because I had to catch up on some work, but it sounded interested. And I did score a pack of cards anyway. I heard Matt did a black hat dance. Who’s got it on video dammit?

Search and Blogging Reporters Forum - Another decent session. A couple good tips and a lot of banter between Rand and Andy. Then Rand mentioned he keeps some stuff to himself. I’m so shocked.

Effective Affiliate Strategies - Blaaah. How to be nice to your affiliates, then how to become an affiliate. Move along.

Organic Site Reviews - Some fucktard got up and gave them an affiliate site with a shit ton of blogspot links. And Matt was on this panel. Idiot. Boser and Graywolf tried to talk him out of it but he wouldn’t listen. The only thing that was cool was how quickly Matt’s CIA tool works. It took him about 20 seconds to tell the guy he only had 3 links counting. The dude shut his mouth after that.

Tools of The Trade - Good for beginners I guess. Next time Todd, let’s just swap some internal tools and we’ll call it a day.

PubCon Classic - W00t! Great time.

There are some people I missed and didn’t get to meet. I spotted them several times but either they were busy and I didn’t want to knock someone over to say hello or I was conversing with someone else. Lisa Barone was elusive, I missed Patrick, Rebecca must not like me ;), I met Tamar briefly before she hopped a private jet, and Esrun was out spamming stuff and I forgot to IM for a meetup. Next time I’ll buy you guys some beers and shots as a bribe to say hello.

Oh yea, and one final shout out to “that guy who knows about SEO” who explained to Rhea and cshel what SEO was at the poker table because he didn’t know them. That’s funny. (His name is Brian by the way girls) Thanks for hanging out for the week…it’s a good thing you chickened out of that bet too, I’m about to take over your spot

UPDATE ** Shit fire, I knew I’d forget people… Tim Dineen from indeed.com and I had some interesting chats this weekend. Sorry Tim!

Forward: I’d like to welcome the esteemed Chris Richardson to the Wonderland that is TheMadHat. We all know Chris from WebProWorld and he will be joining me as a writer on this blog occasionally. So give him a big welcome and listen to what he has to say!             - Aaron

What’s up folks? Long time, no see. I haven’t covered the search engine industry for a little while now, but thanks to Aaron’s kick-ass Mad Hat blog, I’ll share some of my thoughts on the SMX New York conference that just ended a couple of days ago. Great job of organizing the event Danny; next time, however, please get some better chairs. Even though this subject was brought up during the first day of SMX NY, it needs repeating.

It’s hard to enjoy the knowledge when your ass is numb.

First off, all of the speakers were great. They had some really good information and strategies to consider when tackling the social media aspect of marketing your product, and make no mistake, a well-done social marketing strategy can benefit your site’s “profile” in many ways.

One of of the main discussion points was leveraging Digg correctly. This can be done a number of ways, however, one of the more popular and successful ways is through the use of lists. Top-10 lists are a hug favorite of the Digg crowd, so find one that’s pertinent to your field get to listing. If you are travel agency, think of some top-10 lists that affect your company. What are some of the best airports in world? What are the worst (Chicago-Midway)? What makes them the best/worst? Topics like these are a good way to attract the Digg/Propeller/Delicious crowd.

Another good way to penetrate the Digg market is befriend a power Digger or two (or 10). If a Digger like Neil Patel takes a liking to your work, there’s a good chance you can make the front page. However, just be sure your web servers can handle the impending stress. There’s no point in developing an awesome, witty Top-whatever list, only to see your site die when the crowd comes running to see what the hub-bub is about.

Leverage social sites like Facebook and MySpace. These sites can go a long way in furthering your networking opportunities as well as your product’s marketing presence, a fact pointed out quite eloquently by Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works. Cindy’s segment concerning Flying Dog’s leveraging of MySpace was very educational. I can also speak about the benefits of Facebook when it comes to networking. So can Aaron.

As Rand Fiskin pointed out, learn about the micro social sites that apply to your industry. With a little due-diligence, it’s not hard to find a community that will, in all likelihood, have some positive implications for your site. Engaging these audiences can pay noticeable dividends.

OK, this is a good stopping point for today. I’ll be back on Monday with some ideas you should consider when it comes to blogging and linkbaiting. Like Rebecca Kelley says, it’s good when you are a master baiter. I’d like to thank Shelby Garlock, the search engine maven herself, for putting up with me, especially during the Chicago-Midway debacle (nice crowd management Southwest) . She’s a brilliant Internet marketer, so keep your eyes open for her.

Great job all around to the SMX crew and thanks to Aaron for giving me a platform to share my views. Take care and I’ll see you on Monday.

Chris Richardson

Disclaimer: These posts are not meant to be a recap of the sessions like the ones over at Search Engine Journal, but more of a MadHat interpretation of some of the things discussed and the things I found interesting and most important. End of disclaimer.

This session was one of my favorite sessions of the conference. I thought Rand did a wonderful presentation (even if it was 45 slides, they were 45 good ones). The speakers in this session consisted of Rand, Cindy Krum from Blue Moon Works (never heard of them until right then), Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl, and the little kid Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising.

* Rand started off this session by going over some differences between Social Media Marketing and Viral Marketing and ways to succeed in both. It was an easy to understand presentation and also was more advanced than his normal “what is SMM“ speech at SES. Anyway, here is what you should pay attention to:

Social Media Marketing
- Profiles on social media sites
- Building many friends and relationships through various networks
- You can build solid inbound links through profiles on many social networks
- Social networks are very good arenas for reputation management
- Social media is also an excellent place to control your branding

Viral Marketing
- Linkbait, Linkbait, Linkbait

Rand followed up with an explanation and breakdown of different properties you can actively promote each type of marketing and explained the nuances of each. Here again is the breakdown (and these sites are in order of importance):

Social Media Marketing
1. You Tube (I’m a little confused on this one…I always thought this was more of a viral arena. Rand, if you’re listening it would be cool if you could explain that again for us)
2. Wikipedia
3. Yahoo Answers
4. Yelp
5. LinkedIn
6. Flickr (Extra Bonus: Comments are not no followed!!!)
7. Craigslist
8. Facebook
9. Amazon ?? Reviews ??
10. MySpace
11. Technorati (Extra Bonus: Nofollows are again missing on the ?? main picks ??)
12. Judy’s Book
13. Newsvine
14. Twitter (Rand was harsh about them…said they were worthless)
15. City Search
16. WikiHow
17. Squidoo

Viral Marketing
1. Digg
2. Reddit
3. StumbleUpon
4. De.lico.us
5. Netscape
6. Techcrunch
7. Newsvine (Newsvine made both lists)
8. Boing Boing
9. Fark
10. Engaget
11. Techmeme
12. Lifehacker
13. Yahoo Picks (If you can make it. Very tough)

Great presentation Rand, you are in my top 3 list of favorite speakers this week. Disclaimer: This was NOT a monetary review of SEOmoz…they’re just hot shit.

* Old man Niel Patel was up next and went over ways to succeed on social media marketing. These are in no particular order and again the stuff in the parentheses are my thoughts.

1. Add tons of friends (In my experience most people will add you as a friend as long as you’re asking for an add in a relevant network. I never add friends when it would make absolutely no sense. For example, the other day someone added me to their friend list and wanted a connection that was a yoga instructor, didn’t have a blog, and had no interests in SEO or anything else I was interested in. This was most likely a spammer and it was on MyBlogLog, but you get the point.)

2. Participate. (This one is the most difficult for me personally. It’s time consuming and you really need someone working on this full time with all the networks out there).

3. Become a top user. (Kind of goes along with #2).

4. Use their features against them. (This is my favorite. Must be the spammer in me. He didn’t go into much detail on what features to use against which network…but imagine you have 2000 MySpace profiles…that’s another post in itself).

5. Create a social brand. (Larger corporations need to pay attention here. This is one that can do you a lot of good or do you a lot of harm if done incorrectly. There are some companies that do this well, and I wish I could think of some off the top of my head, but that part of my head isn’t working as I write this today).

* Todd from Stuntdubl briefly touched on some reputation management things like naymz and tagalag, and mentioned testing social media sites for value. Everything in this life revolves around testing and then testing some more. I wish more people would recognize that. He mentioned once you determine the value of some of these sites, start building inbound links to them, thereby controlling the results for your identity and/or brand.

* Cindy Krum had some good examples of using social media to control your brand (Starbucks of course). She gave examples of using widgets and web apps inside of social media networks to strengthen brand and build loyal users.