I always feel the need to reintroduce myself after an extended period away from the blog. I'm Jane and I work here. For the last three weeks, I've done a lot of traveling and attended three vastly different conferences in London and Las Vegas. You may have heard of one of them a little more than you'd have liked to.

I also don't often know how best to recap conferences because the meat of the sessions is summed up so well by bloggers who are far more on-the-ball than we are. In regards to the live-blogging fiasco that erupted surrounding this installment of SEO events, I have little to add aside from to say that I'm not cut out for it. I lack the ability to listen and write at the same time, which means that I really should turn off Twitter and instant messenger... I respect that live-blogging anything takes a lot of concentration and that the writer has to concentrate virtually from nine in the morning until after five whilst everyone else complains about their hangovers and scribbles down bullet-point notes. However, I don't read live-blogged SEO coverage unless I'm writing a recap and can't remember what happened. Um.

So, instead of typing out my notes, I figured I'd write a personal account of the three conferences I went to instead: why they were worthwhile, what was less helpful and what I got out of each of them.

Few of you have probably heard of the first event I attended. At the Hilton Tower Bridge in London, the Future of Social Media show contained exactly what was on the tin: speeches about the future of social media. I spoke about how social media liberalises big businesses' advertising efforts: a good viral campaign, even if it begins as a television commercial or piece of print advertising, can cost far less and be far more engaging and effective than safe, traditional advertising efforts. I also managed to talk up Transport for London's initial viral campaign, managed by Ciarán's company, not knowing that a representative from Transport for London was in the crowd. He was quite pleased!

One thing that struck me as odd from the conference was the talk given by Ian Pearson, a "Futurologist" whose ideas made me go between feeling like he was absolutely out of his mind, to thinking that I'm boring and close-minded. Some things he said made a lot of sense. For example, the online world (which, in 1999, we called "Cyberspace"), the geographical world and the "human" world are separate, but are coming closer and closer together. I relate to this on a number of levels and I think that anyone who has seen the three come together will know what I'm talking about.

However, I didn't relate to the idea that we were all going to have contact lenses that will let us see the online profiles of the people we meet in the street. I do recognise that mobile technology has blended several forms of communication together: once upon a time, there was a distinct difference between email, text messaging and phone calls. In more recent times, we've added mobile Facebook applications, mobile Instant Messenger and Twitter to the mobile mix. We've also added Skype to computers. With my BlackBerry and with many "Smartphones," the difference between SMS, email, IM and all those other forms of communication is very blurry. I've heard many people say that they've dropped their text message plans because free mobile applications for email and IM have made costly SMS plans obsolete.

This said, I don't see a point in the near future where I'd want people accessing my information by looking at me. My face tells enough stories about what I'm thinking as it is; I don't see a point where I'd like to disclose my favourite quotes, taste in music or political affiliations to someone with the right contact lenses. At one point, I will admit to thinking, "How much would you have to have smoked to think that that's likely?" and then wondering if I was the 2008 version of the people who said the Internet would never take off.

When Rohit Bhargava gave a U.S. example of an unintentional reputation management conundrum involving the Olive Garden chain of restaurants and Kendra Wilkinson of Playboy fame, I was reminded of SMX Sydney. This European audience didn't know who Kendra Wilkinson was and they hadn't heard of Olive Garden. Never mind, London; you'll live without endless bread sticks. He called this the phenomenon of the "accidental spokesperson": Olive Garden bill themselves as a family restaurant and don't necessarily want to be associated with a woman who takes her clothes off for a living. To my mind, this disconnect between an example and an audience highlighted the remaining disconnects between the online and geographical worlds. At SMX Sydney, some of Rand's (funny!) jokes fell flat on an Australian audience.

However, a week later at SMX London, one piece of news was truly international in all worlds, on and offline. The conference began on November 4, Election Day in the United States. From the attention it was given in the UK, we could have been in a US city. Whilst it stands to reason that other countries are going to pay attention to the United States' elections, given the impact our government tends to have on the rest of the world, the Internet obviously played a huge part in this particular election. In almost every session I went to, someone made mention of the election--and these weren't always the American speakers.

On that first day, I teamed up with Andrew Girdwood and Ciarán to speak about various facets of social media. I detailed how the "rules" of viral marketing and social media marketing have changes in the past twelve months, due in part to widgetbait and fakebait. As per usual, a dodgy internet connection ruined everyone's videos and I was difficult and showed up with an OpenOffice presentation instead of PowerPoint.

As seems to be the norm at quite a few non-American search conferences, there was a heavy focus on "international" SEO. Honestly, this should send a message not to SEOs but to search engines. When speaker after speaker has more and more information on the things you can do to geo-target content (and when that information contradicts itself or comes from search engine reps' unofficial statements), it's time to provide some real non-US options that we can count on to work. I recognise that "international" SEO got off to a bar start when ".com" was recognised as an international yet US-centric TLD, whereas .us was hardly used. At the same time, everyone else was meant to use their ccTLD and / or host in the correct place. However, surely it's time for an official document detailing all the best internationalisation practices.
Despite the trouble that international problems can cause, SMX London had some great speakers tackling the issue. During the time between the Future of Social Media and SMX, I stayed in Surrey with Base One Search's Lisa Ditlefsen. She did a great job on the European Search Marketing Challenges panel, along with our fellow SEO Chick Judith Lewis. Later in the show, I would see Lisa's fiancé Jon Myers working frantically on his laptop during a session.

"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm finishing my presentation. I'm up next!" he replied.

Later that evening, I got to attend my second LondonSEO party, although I feel like I've been at all of them due to the text messages I often receive when a LondonSEO event takes place! Many thanks to Rob Kerry of Ayima for the work he does in putting those events together: in my opinion, he's helped create a very positive, friendly atmosphere amongst UK SEOs in general, but especially those in the greater London area.

Obviously, the US election results were pouring in during the event, and we were all into our BlackBerries and iPhones in search of updates. Ciarán and I encountered an epic Google fail when we tried to search for election results on a BlackBerry and were presented with a BBC link. Clicking it, we began reading details of a difficult night for the Democrats, only to realise that we'd been given a link to a page from November 2, 2004. Query Deserves Freshness obviously wasn't working all that well that night (or else, we'd provided a terrible query, but I'm blaming this one on Google).

I fully believe that Blow Your Mind Linkbuilding Tactics was scheduled for 9:00am on Day Two for a reason: The organisers knew that a fair number of people would both attend LondonSEO and stay up late watching the election results, and they wanted to give everyone a good reason to show up. Putting Jay Young, Lyndon Antcliff, Tom Critchlow and Wiep Knol on a panel about links was a pretty good one.

For the most part, the audience seemed fine with the tactics presented... although there was one question about the risks of being sued by clients if buying links went wrong. In my opinion, the panelists' answers reflected the thoughts of many SEOs: sometimes, buying links isn't an "option." Either it's appropriate and necessary or it isn't. In a field where link buying reigns supreme, it's likely that a company will have to buy links also (pending extraordinary circumstances). However, it's a bad idea to do it out of laziness or greed when no one else is doing it and the footprints will be extremely easy to track.

Later that day, the Search 3.0: Local and Blended Results panel (featuring Jon Myers again, whom I can only assume finished his PowerPoint presentation over lunch ;) ) presented both some UK and international perspectives on local blended marketing, much of which panelists at Pubcon would repeat and add to. It seems that we often focus too much on the blended listings and forget about the real estate on the rest of the page, some of which is always taken up by directory listings. Entering those directories leaves a site with the opportunity to be listed in a blended result, with their own domain, and in a directory. Three links, obviously, is better than one.

And then we had the Expert Site Reviews panel. Everyone loves watching someone's site get torn apart, don't they? Especially when one Live representative (Nathan Buggia) and two Googlers (John Mueller and Matthew Trewhella) are the panelists. Unfortunately, the panel ran out of volunteers half way through the session and Vanessa Fox decided that SEOmoz should be up for review. Sh*t!

Luckily, they didn't find terribly much wrong with our site, aside from the fact that we're linking to a couple of not-so-clean neighbourhoods in a few blog posts and that all of our alt tags on our About page photos said "Arden." The panel had some great suggestions about our video optimisation, as well as a few ideas about our title tags and whether "SEOmoz" should be placed before or after the title of the page. There are arguments on both sides of that one: as an established brand in the SEO industry, seeing "SEOmoz" at the beginning of the title tag may draw people in. However, this could have the opposite effect for people who've never heard of our company, so we could be disuading new readers from clicking on our links in search results.

I flew back to the US just in time to learn a lot about jet lag and fly directly to the one place you don't go to get over jet lag. Pubcon Las Vegas is set against a slightly different backdrop than the New Connaught Rooms of Covent Garden or the Tower Bridge Hilton, but most conference halls look similar and the only real difference at Pubcon is its size. Even though it seemed as though the conference was smaller this year than last, Pubcon is still an enormous event. The fact that we showed up at the wrong part of the Las Vegas Convention Center on the first day didn't help me find my Pubcon feet, either. I maintain that they should keep Pubcon where Pubcon has always been (at least since 2006)!

I hate to bring up the "advanced SEO" discussion again (but I just did, of course!): it just struck me as odd that the Top-Shelf Organic SEO panel began with a very introductory "what is SEO" discussion from Jill Whalen. Having also been a speaker at Pubcon, I know that speakers are provided with quite a lot of preparatory material and that Jill was likely asked to speak about some very elementary stuff. However, I wonder when speakers and organisers alike will stop bringing basic material into advanced sessions. The session was billed in a strange way: the description managed to call it a 101 panel and an advanced panel at the same time. Is that really the best idea? Shouldn't "super-advanced" and basic strategies be broken up a little more?

One thing SEOmoz had never done before at Pubcon was to bring a booth. With tools like Linkscape, having a booth was good for both answering questions about the product and demonstrating it live.

The SEOmoz booth is swamped with attendees. Danny and Ben rock the green shirts. Thanks to toprankblog on Flickr
 

We have only previously had booths like this at SMX shows. I found the crowd at Pubcon very different to that at SMXes: at SMX, many people already know who we are and are more interested in finding out more about the company than they are interested in being "sold" a product. We expected this before we went to Las Vegas, but Pubcon attendees were a tougher crowd. Most of the people I talked to about Linkscape wanted to know why they should purchase our products and services above someone else's (and they'd name who else they were considering). A lot of people also asked about how Linkscape can be tied into our other tools, which I think is an excellent question. It adds to the evidence that we should write a guide to our toolset.

I enjoyed Pubcon's Local and Mobile Search panel, although I thought the speakers overlooked a large feature of mobile search: that of the mobile browser wars. The panel spoke a lot about iPhones and the (fascinating) optimisation tactics for that particular device, but as a rabid BlackBerry user, I think there is plenty to said for non-iPhone products and the full-web experience people expect from third-party browsers. I use Opera Mini on my BlackBerry Curve: the browser that comes with this BlackBerry is a terrible piece of software, but Opera Mini allows me to view entire web pages and zoom in on the part of the page I want to see. There was so much talk about devices, but I really think that the panelists missed out on discussing how different browsers will change the face of mobile search as much as mobile-optimised websites and search engines.

This isn't to say the panelists didn't have good information: Shailesh Bhat, Senior Product Manager for Yahoo! Local, covered basically everything I never knew about Yahoo!'s local capabilities. He mentioned that people on mobile devices aren't looking for links: they're looking for information. I believe this is especially true on more limited devices. Before Opera Mini, I didn't want to click through from a results page on my mobile because I had no idea whether it was going to load properly. I wanted the answer to appear within the search results. Yahoo!, at least, wants to provide those answers in their mobile results.

Another rather interesting point? Mobile search queries show a high level of local intent, although not always explicitly. Queries like "travel," "weather" and "movies" often appear without a geographical specification but are inherently local. This is where sites and mobile carriers / devices have to work with search engines to show their location, and search engines must deliver local content when a user doesn't help them with a localised query.

Alex Porter from Location Three Media brought up the idea of local-specific search engines, as opposed to the local options provided by the Big Three. People do use these sites and they shouldn't be ignored. This also ties back to the idea that directories and local search engines can show up in Yahoo!, Google and Live's regular results and provide a company with more domination of regular search results pages. Alex also spoke about measuring what results a site is getting from its mobile efforts, as it seems that many people don't know exactly how much traffic or how many conversions they get from specific local queries and results. Things like specific landing pages and phone numbers go a long way to keeping better track of local activity.

But enough about them. Let's talk about me. I spoke on the Five Bloggers and a Microphone panel on the afternoon of Day Two. Here I am, watching Twitter on my BlackBerry instead of listening to Mike McDonald:

I actually wished that we'd been asked some more controversial or challenging questions during the session... things seemed to veer towards the US election (remember that from about 2,000 words ago?) and Twitter. And then there was the person who stood up and asked a rather detailed question about PPC, to which this organic SEO and her fellow blogger panelists stared dumbly back. I have actually never been in a conference session before where the moderator actively un-asks the question. That said, the audience seemed to agree with the decision.

I really like the Q&A format of sessions like that blogging panel. They're easy to listen to (I was in the audience for the same session last year) and they're equally easy to take part in. I only have two requests for next year: can I be on it again, and can someone ask some difficult questions ;)

Later that evening, SEOmoz staged its second SearchSpam / Werewolf party at the convention centre. Thanks to Juliano Motta for some of these great pictures.

Rand and Danny moderate the game.

SEOs (and Matt Cutts) with their heads on tables.


Demonstration of werewolfiness from Rand.


I get caught playing with my phone again.

I'd have thought that the hard night out in Vegas would have deterred people from showing up before lunch time the next morning, but Twitter will confirm that it really was standing-room-only in Rand's Linkfluence: How To Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk session on Thursday. The problem with sessions like this--at least from an SEO's point of view--is that you know Matt Cutts is sitting in the back (right behind me, as it turned out) and that he's got that book on his lap. That book is a vortex of fear. It has swallowed more websites whole than 2001's dotcom crash and the Digg effect combined. He sits back there, on the floor due to a lack of chair space, noting things. Everyone knows that the panelists aren't going to reveal their best paid link building tactics, only to watch them disappear, character by character, into an SEO black hole.

It was during this session that we all managed to break Twitter: "#pubcon" was the highest trending topic in its search engine and I saw numerous requests that we all give it a rest, as the site went down in flames at about midday. We didn't, of course. Then we'd have had to start listening to Rand.

That afternoon, I sat on the Community Hacking: 96 Baiting Strategies You Can Employ session, although it honestly took jokes about drunk blogging to get a laugh out of a crowd who looked like The Vegas had them in its grasp and wasn't letting go. It's a tough gig when it's 3pm and you're speaking to a room full of people who've probably averaged four hours sleep every night for the past three days. This said, people told me that they found my information useful: I spoke about the various things we've done on this blog to gain links to our site. Whether approvingly or not, we're known for it. However, we use the blog for more than "linkbait": I want to coin the rather awkward "content-based link building," as linkbait has such a controversial past and bad name. We do quite a lot with the blog that drives links to other parts of our site... according to the search engine reps at SMX London, we don't do a bad job of it either!

When everyone leaves the convention centre, Pubcon is only half over. That night, Microsoft and Webmaster Radio staged a bloody fantastic Search Bash at the Rain nightclub inside the Palms. There were sparkly wrist-bands and glow sticks. There were acrobats. There were hosts Darren Babin and Brandy Shapiro Babin dressed as Neo and Trinity.

They say that Pubcon is a four-day conference, and of course they're including Friday's "pub" event in that number. This was my third Pubcon and I can safely say that 2008's Friday was far better than in 2007 or 2006. They do a great job in Las Vegas of providing a wonderful conference and a great week, but slowly wearing away at your soul so that you're absolutely delighted to leave the town at the end of it all.

It's been three weeks on the road for me now, and after emptying a suitcase that smells like an ashtray, I hope to not live out of it for a little while. Thank you so much to all the conference organisers, my fellow speakers, conference attendees and my random friends all over the world for making the last twenty days so great. Of course, I could write ten blog posts (or novellas) about what I've done and what I've learned in the past few weeks, but if you've read this far, you're probably dying for me to stop. I'll see you all again next year :)