NOTE FROM RAND: The following blog post comes courtesy of Maria Balayan, who graciously volunteered to cover the SMX Buenos Aires conference in late October.

I’ve been living in the US since 1999, but I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Every time I go to Buenos Aires I lose my routine of being online almost 13 hours a day. I miss the internet connection but I am able to enjoy other things like family, food, friends, and good weather (I live in Buffalo, NY, so imagine how long and cold winter is for me).

On my last visit to Buenos Aires I had the opportunity to attend the Search Marketing Expo, the first one done in Latin America. I was lucky because I planned the trip without knowing that SMX was going to be held there on October. As soon as I found out, I asked Rand if he thought I should attend. Since I was going to be in the city, Rand thought it was a great opportunity that I couldn’t miss. I am writing this article for SEOmoz and giving you my personal opinion and experience about the event. Thanks Rand!

About the location:
Puerto Madero - The location couldn’t be better. Puerto Madero is one of the most attractive neighborhoods of Buenos Aires (and one of the most expensive, too).

About the Audience:
On the introduction, Tomy Lorsch (one of the organizers of SMX) showed slides of cartoons representing the target audience of the event. The categories were: web developers, web designers, online marketers, SEOs, and…women(?). I was shocked by the low percentage of women (less than 10%) in the audience. I knew we were going to be the minority but I wasn’t expecting such a low percentage. One positive side about this: there wasn’t any line at the ladies room. :-) At SMX Buenos Aires I met cool people with great personalities who really knew their stuff.

Contributions from Speakers:
Alejandro Zuzenber (from Google) on Cloud Computing: The presentation was about the evolution of the internet, how fast it has grown, and how internet access and production costs have declined over time. He also talked about Universal Search and he recommended the use of Google Labs. Some interesting data he told us (when I asked him about Google user’s profile) was that Google's search share in Latin America is 80%, which I found really amazing considering that in the US it is around 57% (September 2007, Comscore search engine share ranking).

Dr. James Shanahan: His session was about combating click fraud. He explained 2 kinds of click fraud, the advertiser side and the publisher side, and why the Cost Per Action (CPA) approach may be the best solution to combat click fraud. He also mentioned that “most of the keywords hovering around $100 are for personal injury lawyers or lawsuits” (one example he gave: mesothelioma). It was one of the best presentations in terms of the quality and amount of information shown on slides. He provided interesting approaches, statistics, and examples.


James Shanahan’s Presentation – SMX Buenos Aires

Ricardo Baeza-Yates (from Yahoo): He talked about web spam detection. It was interesting and a little bit more technical than the other presentations, so developers were the perfect audience for his session.


Ricardo Baeza-Yates’s Presentation – SMX Buenos Aires

Victor Rottenstein: Interactive Workshop. He recommended resources, tools, and a methodology to start an SEO analysis. One of those sources was SEOmoz’s article about search engine ranking factors.    

At this roundtable session I was able to talk with people on how useful SEOmoz tools are and in which way they can give you a good idea of your website’s strength and the possibility to compare it with other websites. Nico, another SEO on the table, thought that the SEOmoz Quiz was really good. That was a good example of spontaneous offline viral marketing for SEOmoz.

An Unexpected Surprise:
The organizers had the ability to overcome an unexpected situation. An interactive workshop about SEO analysis had to become an offline exercise forced by the lack of internet service in the area at that moment. The positive side was that we were forced not to check emails and interact with others instead, which I think was the most important purpose of this event.


Javier Velasco (Yahoo Research, Universidad de Chile): He talked about user experience and website permeability. It was a good presentation, with examples of Chile’s newspapers and how they evolved over time regarding a search tool within the website (e.g. where this tool should be located and how should it work).

Francis Petty (Lanacion.com): It was an entertaining and practical discussion about the use of 301s, flash, cloaking, urls, sitemaps, white hat, and black hat, among others. I found this presentation the most entertaining of the day.

Emiliano Elias (inZearch): A valuable discussion about flash websites. I liked his slides and presentation skills.  A new spanglish term was born in SEO terminology during that panel: “cloaking whitejatero,” meaning: a white hat way to do cloaking (using flash). Could that be really a white hat strategy?Those presentations based on examples were among the best. People like examples because they make concepts easier to understand.

Congratulations to Tomy Lorsch, Rafael Fernández Tamames, Mariano Amartino, and Marina Torchiari for the location, the food (very good food), and everything that had to do with SMX Buenos Aires 2007. 

Spanish summaries about SMX Buenos Aires 2007
Here are a couple of blogs in Spanish that give more detailed information about what was covered by the speakers:

• SeoCharlie (Charlie traveled from Costa Rica to cover the event)
• Ruido Digital (Pablo provided live blogging from the conference)
• David Yanover
• Victor Rottenstein (SEO analysis, one of the speakers at SMX). You can see his presentation on his blog.
  

Best things about attending an SEO or SEM event: 

• Doing networking
• Personal interaction with references of the SEO/SEM market (the speakers)
• Face to face interaction, something that blogging doesn’t provide (there is an interesting blog post from Rand called Welcome to the Jungle that shows a really nice graphic about the differences between face to face interaction and blogging)
• Learning new stuff
• Knowing what others are doing (even competitors) and seeing how advanced you are on the field and where you should focus your future training
• Meeting potential clients
• For those single women doing SEO (not my case) or web design, attending these conferences could be a great opportunity to meet men J
• Food! At the SMX in Buenos Aires the food was really good: they provided breakfast, lunch (with Freddo ice cream for dessert), a coffee break, and networking cocktails

I enjoyed having the opportunity to see and talk with people who are in the SEO business in Argentina, and it was incredibly productive. The coolest thing about attending a Search Marketing Conference was doing networking, not virtual but personal networking. 

Tips for beginners attending an SEO or SEM event: 

• Before assisting, I recommend you to do a little research about the speakers so you will be familiar with their field and you can have a couple of questions for them in advance.
• Read SEOmoz Blog and other SEO/SEM sources before attending. Be sure you are familiar with basic terms because not knowing just one word could prevent you from understanding a lot of other things. I felt very confident with all the information I learnt reading SEOmoz months before attending. Experience also gives you a good base of knowledge, so the more experience you have, the more comfortable you will feel too.
• Take a digital camera with you: taking snapshots from slides (if you are allowed to) saves you a lot of time. Unfortunately, I discovered that when I realized I had low battery on my camera, so I wasn’t able to take a lot of pictures from all the presentations. L
• Don’t be afraid to ask the speaker if you didn’t understand something. That is the purpose of you being there. If you are too shy to do it, approach them after the presentation.
• Take with you a lot of business cards. Have enough of them! A lot of them! You never know how many are you going to need. I remember when I took a real estate license course at Buffalo, the teacher told us that he used to leave some business cards on tables when going to a wedding. He did that before leaving a wedding, one strategy he had to promote himself. I also remember he said that including your picture on business cards was really a plus, which is not common in other fields, but I realized how useful it could be when I couldn’t remember the face of one of the people I got cards from.
• When doing networking, first listen, then talk. Your competitor could be there too and you may or may not want to give away valuable information about your business.

FROM RAND: Many thanks to Maria - here's to hoping that some of the mozzers can make it to some of the Spanish-language SMX events in the near future. I've heard from Tomy that Madrid may be ready next spring, and that's definitely high on my list of must-go places :)