That's right folks; I've been tapped by Stanford University to participate in their Web Publishing Course on Monday, Nov. 13 & Tuesday, Nov. 14. The goal of the course is to help business owners, website managers and corporate executives learn the ins and outs of building and marketing a successful site. I'm particularly excited about some of the other guest faculty members, including:

• Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology
• Kevin McKean of Consumers Union
• Matt McAlister of Yahoo! Developer Network

My specific subjects include:

Harnessing the Power of the Blog
Blogging can drive traffic to your site and create a community of passionate, dedicated users. It can also be a black hole into which you sink time and money. How do you harness the power of the blog without losing control of your editorial mission?

Secrets of Search Engine Optimization
Search engines present both challenges and great opportunities for site designers & developers. Learn how the search engines judge a Web page's quality and importance, how to improve your site's ranking, and what it takes to draw more visitors from search engines.

As regular readers know, I'm a huge fan of both of these subject areas and with an hour on each, I believe I'll be able to provide excellent value to the participants.

The course is geared towards those new to the field of web publishing so there might not be a big crossover with SEOmoz's audience. It's reasonably intensive - all day classes and lectures with some time for group site reviews (which I'll be assisting with). The course is $1,980, but they've given me a single $500 discount to pass on, so if you're interested, just shoot me an email. If you've just gotten started in the web business or are thinking about, this conference is a great chance to do some high-level hobnobbing and get a great entry-level education on the subject. My guess is that for most knowledgable SEOs, this won't be of great value (I know I must sound like Adam Lasnik talking about Google's government SEO courses).

From the Stanford courses in November, I'll be flying directly to Vegas for Pubcon, so I'll miss only the first day. My Vegas speaking schedule is looking like a lot of fun, too - possibly a blog pundits on search panel :)