expertSEM

I attended my first conference this weekend, SMX Advanced, or the Search Marketing Expo for those of you who are acronym-challenged like I am. As you might expect, the majority of presentations were based around search, such as “Mythbusting PPC Urban Legends,” “Duplicate Content Solutions,” and my favorite title of all “Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me – A Broad Match? Exact Match? Negative Match?.” However, with the constantly noisy trend of social media, a few tracks were devoted to mastering the art of corporate twittering and proving the value of social media as well.

The first session I attended was “Keyword Research Artistry,” an in-depth look into tools and tactics for developing the most relevant keywords for your search campaign. The first presenter, Christine Churchill (KeyRelevance), had an impressive list of tools she uses, everything from Google Trends and Yahoo! Buzz to Facebook Lexicon and WikiRank. Using these social media tracking tools is a great way to determine what words are being used by the online community today, which when combined with search volume and positioning tools can give a much more robust keyword picture.

So considering my position as both a Social Media and SEO Account Manager, I figured what better presentation to hear than that on “Twitter Tactics and Search Marketing.” I certainly found this session useful, especially when Joanna Lord (TheOnlineBeat) gave us her extensive list of Twitter tools at an alarmingly fast pace (she even used a slide to remind her to breathe in the middle). For those of you unfamiliar with the Twitter language, you might get a kick out of some of the names: Tweet Later, Tweetbeep, Tweetmeme, Twit(URL)y, Twibs and TwitterHawk just to name a few.  But seriously, the amount of tools out there for Twitter alone is so over-whelming; it was nice to have someone as experienced in this space as Joanna to recommend those that have been tried and true. Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) also did a nice job moderating, interspersing a few comedic lines as well as some of his own expertise in this arena.

Getting ready for my presentation - "Proving the Value of Social Media"

After an over-sized lunch (it was buffet-style after all), it was time for Proving the Value of Social Media, presented by yours truly, as well as Tony Adam (Yahoo!), Ben Straley (Meteor Solutions) and Edmund Wong (iCrossing). To be honest, I was a bit on the nervous side for my first conference presentation that I wasn’t entirely able to retain information from the other presentations. However, I’ll be recapping my portion in an upcoming blog, so stay tuned!

Answering questions during the Q&A portion of the session. Tony Adam (on my left) looks thrilled with my answer.

One last session of the day, “Beyond the Usual Link Building.” It’s a tough position being at the end of a long day, but once again moderator Danny Sullivan got the crowd going for the 3 panelists Hamlet Batista (RankSense), Arnie Kuenn  (Vertical Measures) and Chris Silver Smith  (KeyRelevance). The panelists had some interesting suggestions on obtaining links such as widgets and contests, as well as some big don’ts when it comes to legitimate link building. This was obviously a topic of interest at the conference, as every seat in the largest hall was full, as were many of the aisles.

Andrew passing me Link Juice (get it, passing the link juice? Ok, maybe I was the only one who thought this was funny)

Before heading off to a much anticipated dinner and reception, it was time for the keynote presentation with Matt Cutts from Google. This was one of the most interesting portions as you might imagine, as people on the floor got to ask Matt questions regarding the infamous Google Algorithm. The most common topic dealt with page rank sculpting, or using no-follows on selected internal links so that the remaining links on the page carried all the weight. Not so, explained Matt. Now while he did not go in to detail as to why that is no longer a useful tactic, he did recommended against using no-follows on any links pointing to pages other than those you sincerely don’t care to rank, as the whole of the link juice does not actually get dispersed to the remaining links. Good news for those who were about to spend a good amount of time on this type of strategy, bad for those of us who already did.

All in all, a very successful first conference. I was able to give my first conference presentation without any major mishaps, and I learned a lot more about both search and social media in the process. I  was also given the opportunity to demo some new tools by SEOMOZ before jetting off to the airport, so I’m excited to give those a spin in the real world. Hopefully there will be many more conferences to come (hint hint).