Search Engine Strategies is Over

• Posted by B Jones on April 13th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

SES NYC has finally come to an end. It was a great experience, and I highly recommend it. I think the best part about it was that I am coming away from the conference looking at things from a totally different perspective. I went in focusing on SEO, and have come away focusing on SEM. So SEO is important, but it’s just one part of a multiple course dinner. To be honest, things were going great before SES, but now, I can see so many more opportunities for making money online.

(watch your toes, because there’s going to be some major name dropping here)
The second best part of the conference was networking; getting to meet and see a lot of the familiar faces of the SEM world. I got to meet Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. I spotted his yellow shoes from pretty far back. I also met Mike Levin of Hit Tail (It was good to meet you Mike). I attended a few sessions on Social Search, and was surprised and stoked to see that Seth Godin was speaking at one of them. Afterward I thanked him for blogging about my site dnScoop.com. To which he replied, “did I crash your site?”. For me, his talk was by far the best of the Social Search Overview session. And if you haven’t already done it, make yourself a lens on his site, squidoo. I got to meet a few of the folks who have shows on WebmasterRadio.fm: Jeremy Shoemaker, who had 2 excellent sessions on Adsense optimization. Also Neil Patel, who spoke very frankly about the social marketing world. He made the audience laugh, and the rest of the panel cringe as he spoke very frankly about his SMM tactics. I briefly met Todd “Oilman” Friesen, one of the SEO Rockstars (The Best SEO podcast). Todd was on another panel with David Naylor, who gave a great presentation.

I also met lots of interesting people who were attending the conference to learn, like Brian, who had some good advice for buying domains.

I’ll just finish up by sharing something that really got under my skin during today’s final sessions. Greg Boser and Jim Boykin (who looks way younger in person than in pictures) were on the panel at one of the first sessions of the day today, and were both great. There were no search engine employees present at this conference, and Greg was generously sharing some of the more advanced (grayish) SEO techniques that I heard at the conference. Some extremely interesting stuff. If you don’t know, you should check out Greg’s blog, and also start listening to SEO Rockstars. So anyway, during the last session of the day, the Q & A on links, where one representative from each of the big engines (G, Y, MSN,and Ask) were answering questions. Some guy from the magazine, Practical eCommerse (which I will never buy), starts whining to the Google rep all about the technique Greg was discussing in the earlier session. Then he proceeded to publicly tattle tale on a site that he claimed was buying links. Come on dude. That’s just lame.

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