PubCon Wrapup: Battle of the Free Stuff

I came away with quite a hefty bounty of goods from this year's PubCon. The exhibit hall featured about 30+ companies all interested in getting the word out on their products and services. You know what that means... FREE JUNK!

Yes, I slummed my way around the exhibit hall collecting as much free stuff as I could. My favorite by far was the mysterious glowing Google sphere (shown above). Yahoo had a neat magnetic construction kit (also shown).

Opera had the coolest t-shirts... Wore mine home on the flight back. Did-it.com had a very interesting little stuffed animal frog that would belch out "Did-it... did-it... did-it..." when you squeezed him. Good for some laughs when hidden in my wife's purse.

My favorite vendor was probably the Opera guys. After spending some time talking with them, I've decided to run their banners on a few of my sites for free. They offer a great free product and they deserve the support!

PubCon Recap Day 3 - Spam Hunt

This being my first PubCon, I did not know what to expect from the much talked about dream panel of Matt Cutts (Google), Tim Mayer (Yahoo), Danny Sulllivan (SearchEngineWatch.com), Greg Boser (WebGuerrilla) and Todd Friesen (Range Online). They participated in a session called "Interactive Site Reviews and SERPS Quality Control". I discovered this was basically code for "spam hunt"...

Folks from the audience would submit business cards with their websites on them. The panel would then randomly select sites to review and provide feedback. Matt Cutts was most entertaining as he ran his toolkit of secret Google programs to uncover the dirt on any and all sites that got in his path. Site owners were given the microphone to introduce their site and what they are looking for help on. The panel in turn would offer suggestions and then, in most cases, expose hidden blackhat tactics on almost all the sites... It was all done in good fun and I found it by far the most enjoyable session.

Some learnings I took away from it:

1. Yahoo Penalty - If you have a penalty assigned to your site, Yahoo may not show the "cache" link of your pages, and the titles may appear in lower case. Both are a sign that you may want to consider evaluating your site for any problems.

2. Dashes in a URL are better than underscore. Not sure how important this is, but Matt Cutts did make this comment as a recommendation during one of the site reviews.

3. Yahoo Deep Crawl - Having an authoritive inbound link will encourage Yahoo to deep crawl your content.

4. Google Supplemental Results - One audience member asked about their pages showing up randomly in the results. Sometimes there, sometimes not. Matt Cutts theorized that they were most like on the fringe and jumping back and forth between supplemental and regular results. He mentioned the solve the problem, just get your pagerank up (more quality inbound links) and that should push you out of the supplemental.

Gotta run and catch my flight!

PubCon Recap Day 2: YPN Ad Targeting Tips and More

Day two of PubCon was quite entertaining. The speakers kept me entertained the most, as most of the content was review for me. My favorite moment was when ContextWeb VP Jay Sears started bashing Google's Adsense program for being slow to crawl a page. He kept saying their technology could determine the context of a page in 20 nanoseconds. He then went on to demonstrate this by running a web-based backend query tool from ContextWeb that returned XML version of the context of any URL. He would click the button and about a second later the XML would return and he would blurt out "See... see... that was about 20 nanoseconds!". Funny thing was... he was being serious... ;-) I'm interested in getting one of those nanosecond stop watchs he must have been using. I did note the Google Adsense rep give a slight smile while he was doing this... Very entertaining.

But I did take away a few interesting tidbits. I'll highlight them below:

1. How to Improve YPN Ad Targeting - Cody Simms from Yahoo gave a nice overview on things that the YPN crawler might look for when trying to determine the context of the page, and hence what ads to show. Some points worth noting:

• Try to integrate keywords into the URL. YPN likes that.
• Be sure to use strong anchor text keywords on pages that LINK TO the page with the ad in question.
• Description text that immediately follows these links is also looked at to help determine context.
• For homepage, if you page does not change very often, try sprinkling some dynamic elements on the page to help wake up the YPN crawler to re-visit your page.
• For pages that are constantly changing, try using their category targeting.
• If you are specifying meta keywords for a page, make sure they are also used in the content of that page. Otherwise it is considered spammy.

2. Google Adsense Recommends Enabling Video/Image Ads - Apparently their inventory is rising for these types of ads. They predict it will only continue to rise and publishers who have these type of ads disabled may be missing out on revenue.

3. Google's New Video Revenue Sharing Program - Google is working on a revenue sharing model that will allow users who embed media like videos from YouTube, etc on their site to earn a percentage of any ads that are shown before or during the video. I think this is an awesome feature and look forward to hearing more about it.

4. Google and Yahoo on NOFOLLOW - A question was asked by an audience member about the use of NOFOLLOW to instruct the search engine crawler to not index the destination page of their own site (internal link). They wanted to use it to help tell the crawler that certain pages were duplicate content and to ignore them. Both Google and YPN reiterated that NOFOLLOW should only be used to say the link is NOT ENDORSED and could be potentially spammy. Don't try to use it for any other reasons.

That's it for now! I'll do one last follow-up post tomorrow if I can. Off to the free continental breakfast... =)

PubCon Recap Day One: SEO Advice From Google

Well the first day of PubCon is over. I must say I learned quite a bit more than I thought I would. The most memorable take-away was during my first session. The topic was Big SEO and Search Engines.

Google had a representative there who spoke last, after AOL and Yahoo bored the crowd to sleep. Google's Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik gave a brief 10 minute overview of what he thought "mattered" when it comes to site design for making Google happy. He called it the SNACCC approach:

S: Speed counts. Slow site response times can hurt you in rankings. People don't like them and neither does Google.

N: Navigation. Ease of navigation from relevent content is very important. Make sure you navigation is self-explanatory.

A: Accessibility. Reasonable URL lengths. Alt tags should contain useful information. A good test: How would your site translate in a audible-translator for vision impaired?

C: Clarity. All links should be easy to see and underlined. No two links on a page should go to the same page.

C: Comfort. Text is easy to read. All images include a height/width specification. This helps avoid jumpy images when a page loads.

C: Consistency. Google loves consistency. Read into that what you like...

Last but not least... Keep all your related content under one domain! Sub-domains are okay, but don't go breaking it out into 10 different domains/sites. Your site will build up more value and trust if you keep all the content under one umbrella.

Next up... my recap of day two.

PubCon Countdown...

I'm off to Vegas tomorrow night for my very first Publisher Conference (Pubcon.com). In years past I had tried to go, but my "day job" always seemed to get in the way. Not this year. Business is going well and I have the extra time.

As I mentioned before, I will be doing a post-PubCon series outlining what I have learned. I'm guessing it will be a lot like testing out affiliate programs. Lots of crap and stuff I alread know... which a few gems of information hidden in each day or conversation.

I have also been considering Shoemoney's "EliteRetreat" (eliteretreat.info) next month in beautiful San Antonio. My only hesitation is the timing of the event. It is pretty close to the holidays and I'll most likely be out of town already. Well that and I have not yet decided how I feel about sharing so much about my business with a group that has the money and resources to compete with me if they chose. Not that I think that is their goal, but I have to guess if they stumble across some sites they find interesting with potential, the wheels will start churning in their heads as well.

The cost of the EliteRetreat is also a negative. I believe they are charging around $4800/person for the event and that does not include travel/hotel expenses. They are limiting seating to 35 lucky contestants. With my bad math, that equates to $168,000 for 2 days work. Subtract out lunch and conference room fees for 2 days ($10,000?) and divide it by 5 (number of panelists) equates to about $15k/day for each panelist. That's about $30,000 each panelist will walk away with. Seems a bit steep in price markup to me.

Of course they (the panelists) will all be putting a lot of prep time into it which gets factored into the cost, as well as their travel expenses, etc. But I think they could have got aways with charging half that price and still made a decent profit. Just my 2 cents.

Pubcon Las Vegas

I'll be making my first trip out to a Pubcon (Publisher's Conference) this year. For those of you who do not know what Pubcon is, here is their tag line:

The leading edge event for sharing real world information about SEO, SEM, and general Site Owner/Webmaster issues.

The bi-annual event is hosted by Webmasterworld, and brings together experts from all the major players in the web publishing/advertising world like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and more.

They have a variety of tracks to attend for learning tips and tricks for just about anything. My tentative agenda is below. I plan on doing a blog write-up for the more useful sessions I attend:

Tuesday, November 14th
PPC Ad and Landing Page Optimization
Affiliate Strategies and Content Strategies
Feeding the Engines - Writing Copy
Ad and Landing Page Site Reviews

Wednesday, November 15th
Contextual Advertising Optimization
Site Structure for Crawlability
Optimizing your Site For Higher Conversion Rates
Super Session : Search and Research on a Rail

Thursday, November 16th
Forums and Communities : Building and Optimization
Spider and DOS Defense - Rebels, Renegades, and Rogues
Interactive Site Reviews and SERP Quality Control Forum
Super Session : Search Engines and Webmasters - aka: The Search Engine Smack Down

Then of course you might find me poolside during any breaks/downtime... =)

If you are interested, stop back after November 17th and I'll have started posting my recaps.