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)