Sebastian brings up a good point - one we've both discussed and I agree with - Conference Fatigue has set in for both Webmasterworld and Search Engine Strategies - the content from year to year is close to 95% the same thing - is the 5% that's new make it worth attending? 

Probably not any longer.   According to Webanalyticsbook.com:

"…I was just reading a bunch of posts with the summaries of the Pubcon sessions and I am pretty sure that besides networking (and meeting friends), I haven’t missed anything.

I wonder why the same people are always on the stage giving the same speeches over and over again.  And not only for one, two conferences, but year after year.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are very disappointed with conferences like Pubcon Pubcon.

All the more reason to go to Webmasterworld Pubcon in November, Danny Sullivan is going to be doing a Keynote there. 

"This will surely get tongues wagging, Danny Sullivan has announced he will be keynoting WebmasterWorld’s PubCon conference in Las Vegas - the same conference that competes with Search Engine Strategies.

Lots of denials that Danny’s joining up with Brett Tabke, but the two of them sure do seem to be getting along well. ;-)"

I’ll be at the Emetrics Summit in mid October - and i guess we’ll try for this one as well.

I only took one picture at Webmasterworld Boston Pubcon last week, but SeoBook took many at the Pubcon Wrapup Party and they’re worth a look.

The 2006 Boston Pubcon was great. It was rather small (with about 900 in attendance) but being rather small made it easy to connect with other people. You could go talk to Matt Cutts for like 10 to 20 minutes without having swarms and swarms of people surrounding you.

That’s larger than I thought - to me it looked more like 500-600 people. 

I never got to writeup the Webmasterworld Boston Pubcon wrapup party, the famous "pub" party that is part of the Webmasterworld conferences.  Not to worry, Lee Odden, of TopRank, did it for me.

Spent about 30 minutes talking with Lee Odden on Wednesday night, after Pubcon ended (but before the wrapup party) and really enjoyed the conversation.  Lee lives in Minneapolis, were I once spent 5 years of my life (1981-1986) so I have my share of stories about the Twin Cities, and it was nice to talk with someone doing PR and SEO in Minneasota.   I’m just guessing, but I have a feeling that one of these days, they just might have a Webmasterworld Pubcon Conference in Minneapolis or St. Paul…that would be a gas!   Just as long as it’s in the spring/summer  - I’d not want to do a conference there in the winter as it’s often 20 degrees below zero there, as I well recall.

Anyway… here’s the text of the article that Lee Odden wrote with links to this blog, www.webmetricsguru.com included.  Thanks Lee!

This year’s Pubcon in Boston was held at the Elephant in the Castle, a good sized Boston bar/pub.

Starting out in the lower level, the WebmasterWorld crowd eventually took over the main bar as well. If forgot my conference badge but Brett Tabke was in the doorway greeting conference goers and giving out (lots of) drink tickets so getting in was no problem.

There was plenty of networking with a little food/drink here and there. I think I need to upgrade to a phone with a better camera or just start bringing a camera to conferences so I can take more/better quality photos.

Matt Cutts was there for a little while before flying back to CA. As always Matt was talking to a group of webmasters answering questions. As a company frontman to the webmaster community, Matt’s a really good choice. He’s obviously very intelligent but also very friendly to everyone and approachable. He acknowledged getting the questions I sent him about user and toolbar data, so hopefully he’ll have time to answer those. A lot of people would like to get some clarification from Google on the use or non-use of that kind of information.

I ran into many more great people from the search marketing community and it was a good to do some catching up. Tempting as it was, I did not make it over to the Berkman Group meeting over at Harvard that Amanda Watlington invited me (and others) to. Too much work had built up over the past 3 days conference and if I didn’t tackle it Thursday night, I’d be working all weekend.

Here are links from coverage on the WebmasterWorld 2006 Boston Pubcon conference:

Online Marketing Blog

Malcolm Gladwell
Blogs, RSS and Podcasts
YPN Party
Pubcon Boston Day 2

WebProNews

Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters
Link Building Clinic
Link Building Campaigns
Super Bloggers of Search
Blogs, RSS and Podcasts (my stuff published at WPN)
Malcolm Gladwell Pubcon Keynote (my stuff published at WPN)
YPN Party (my stuff published at WPN)

Search Engine Lowdown:

"The Super Bloggers of Search"
Optimizing for ENORMOUS Clients
Blogging, Podcasting and RSS feeds

Matt Cutts:

Boston Pubcon 2006, Day 1

Marshall Sponder

Malcolm Gladwell Keynote
Super Bloggers of Search
Google Sponsored Lunch
RSS, Blogs and Podcasts 1
Leading Brand - Leading Site - Marketing Magic
Conversion Tweaking
PPC 101

Vinny Lingham

PPC Engines and Programs
Malcolm Gladwell Keynote
Contextual Programs
Super Bloggers of Search
Leading Brand Leading Site

The next WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference is the big one held in Las Vegas November 14-17. I’ve been invited to speak again so I’ll see you there.

I was not at this session at Webmasterworld about organic site review but Vanessa Fox (who I spoke with a couple of times at the WMW conference) was and made some pretty good notes - and I’m including those notes here.

Flash-based sites
It’s not only Googlebot who doesn’t watch a 20 second video load before the home page comes into view. A lot of users don’t either. Some users don’t want to wait that long; other users don’t have Flash installed. If all of your content and menus are in Flash, search engines may have a harder time following the links. If you feel strongly about using Flash, just make an HTML version of the page available as well. The search engine bots will thank you. Your users will thank you. Feel free to block the Flash version from the crawlers with a robots.txt file, since you don’t need your pages indexed twice. If your home page is Flash, put the navigation outside of the Flash content. You could offer a choice on the home page so users can choose either the HTML version or the Flash version of the site. (You might be surprised at what users choose.)

I see so many sites ramping up on Flash without thinking through the consequences.

Yahoo! Search Vision

Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge

• Index Friendly Pages
• target a page for a specific keyword
• page specific metatags
• Yahoo Slurp
• Yahoo Seeker
• Yahoo Newscrawler
• Yahoo MMAudVideo/1.0

We added Local and Navigational Active Abstracts

Yahoo Site Explorer - explores the site and shows all the backlinks

My.Web 2.0   is a good way to give reccomendations that a site is good and it’s also a good way to get traffic.

My Web/Flickr - include Flickr pictures and it will help visitors return to your site.

Publisher Tool: Y!Q  (extracts keywords from your site and initiates a search based on those keywords). Y!Q will initiate a search using the content of your article.

Personalization: Yahoo Mindset

Yahoo Search Blog and next.yahoo.com (prototype site)

Ask.com outline

• links and text
• visual relevancy
• what NOT to do
• crawling tips
• advanced suggestions

Focus on the User Experience

• users want high quality original content
• link to quality pages of interest to your subject
• link to your topic community
• high quality subjec specific popularity can outweigh global popularity
• use descriptve text to link
• search engines can’t makde sense of image basked linking
• periodically review where the referrals are flowing from
• text is very important

Visual Relevance is the key to getting picked

• users tend to click those results that are visually more relevant

Basic Don’ts

• re-direct gateways
• artificial sites that point to the main site
• invisible or hidden links
• cloaking
• misspelled anchor text
• link farms

Crawling

• Ask and most search engines don’t accept cookies
• Session ids should not be included in the url
• Javascript - spiders are not good at understanding Javascript

Spelling

• users misspell terms in 10% of their queries

Custom 404’s and FAQ pages should  be used

Google - Matt Cutts

Chrysi Philalithes - MIVA

Miva is not  a destination site - we place our ads on many different sites and we’re trying to attract the right customers for our advertisers site.  We try to reach users in the before, during and after stage of their search.  We target people in all three stages (before, during, after).

All of our ad programs are different and each search engine you need to look at your unique keywords and create a different creative for each one (as your audience will be different for each search engines).

When advertising in multiple countries and languages (English like the work "cheap" where as Germans like product names).

Tips

• how to you measure success?
• keyword selection (select keywords to be a mix of generic and targeted)
• titles and descriptions (get the most out of your creative)
• when creating campaigns - make sure you have a call to action
• deep linking
• monitoring and optimizing (all the networks offer different tools to monitor effectiveness of campaigns)
• leverage the expertise and knowledge of the network

Case Study: Avis

• looked at titles and descriptons (book online now, ie)
• target sesional trends
• traffic increased as did profit.

Two Products

• Pay to Click  - give customers a choice of calling or clicking
• pay to text ads - place text ads under the text message - more common in the url.

End of Session

Jed Nahum of MSN Ad Center spoke about the unique capabilities of MSN AdCenter; AdCenter will eventually be the platform that will run all MSN Advertising and is expected to come out of beta during this Summer.

Audience: converting better (MSN and AOL) using this technology - we also think the quality of audience is desirable at MSN.

Fun with Audience Intelligence

New York Yankees vs the Boston Red Sox - (you need AdCenter to search) - there are more woman and Young men looking for Red Sox on MSN compared to the Yankees.

There was more I’d like to have written down here but my laptop was just booting up and I did to get a chance to write it all down.  I’m wondering if my audience study of Tattoo’s was seen by Jed?  It’s on this blog  - just search on Tattoos.

Achieving Search Marketing Success - Michael Levine - Yahoo!

 Continued explosive growth of Internet users and the increasing fragmentation of the audience and as people drop off from TV they are available often, on the Internet.

Yahoo home page, alone, gets 73% of the traffic off the Internet and Yahoo! Search Marketing reaches 92% of active search users.

The New Marketing Funnel World:

Consumers don’t care where they will be consuming media - but it’s important how you intersect that audience.  Demand creation when they advertise on the Yahoo home page - and unifying search to capture all the demand created by that advertising.  What we’re really trying to do trying to do.  

We did a test with Harris Direct on Yahoo - quite dramatic and people who saw the display on Yahoo created 91% more activity on the Harris Direct site.   Search is the most common way people are finding out new information on websites - search, without a doubt, absolutely dominating.

What role does search play in the buying process - improving the search campaigns.

• think about the long tail - leveraging the things you got to sell
• a/b testing and multi variable testing
• partnership with optimost, etc - testing out the conversion funnel

Federick Vallaeys - Google AdWords

• pick right keywords
• pick righ ads
• right network

AdRank changes - combination of max CPC + Quality Score.

• have many adgroups
• have multiple creative in each adgroup
• take full advantage of different match type
• broad match (all relevent keywords)
• negative keywords (mask out variations that you don’t like)
• phase match (excludes all expanded keywords)
• exact match (control exactly how your ad is shown - but it’s tougher because you have to come up with each term you want to show up for).

New AdWords tool released in the last month

You can show your ads on Google and on contextual networks - and now you don’t even have to show on the regular search results.  Site targeting has also been set up.

• show on site x, y, z (show range of daily pageviews)
• list topics that are relevent
• demographics your trying to reach

In each case, you get a list of sites to advertise on.   

Google Analytics can be used to with measuring  traffic and conversions.  New features in AdWords reporting to help find specific information on.

Alex Bennert - Beyound Ink  - Getting the Second Click

How you can use your log files

• single access pages (user intent not met, bad page design or dead links)  - Either they came via SE and did not find what they thought - going to Fenway Park to see the socks and want to see if my seats are good)  Type in "seating fenway park" to Google and here’s what I get - a page that gives me nothing.
• Signle acces pages - exit pages

User intent not met

• use log files to identify entry pages witha high abandonment rate
• there are two things to look at in Single Access page - if they stay 5 seconds and they left because they were not interested.  Also when they read longer and did read the copy you might find there’s no call to action so they left.

Bad page design

• brade up the content

Poorly Formatted content

Poor Navigation (big wide text is a strain on the eyes).

• be consistent in location and appearance
• use convention - don’t get cute or creative
• offer multiple navigation methods- there’s no such thing a the average web user

Multiple Navigation Methods

• primary navigation
• site map
• embedded lilnks
• site search

It’s important to have all of these methods as different people navigate in different ways.

Lack of Credibility and Dead Links

Comment: The speaker was good but I found she jumped around a lot and it was hard for me to follow all her slides and get the most I could have - I’d have rather she was a little slower in her persentation.