April 22nd, 2010 by Glenn

This is my live blog of Day 2. Here's my live blog of Day 1 of SMX Sydney 2010…

If you couldn't make it down to Sydney for SMX, and you still want to hear what's being said, shortcut or bookmark this post, and I'll try to keep you updated.

The same warnings apply today as applied yesterday. Only more so. SEO focussed, ugly battle, sausage fingers, petite laptop, typos, mad keyboard pounding, inspiring speakers…

Now to it…

Session 1: The State Of The Search Union (Chris Sherman, Andrew Goodman, Gillian Muesigg, Alex Parsons, Marty Weintrub)

• GFC resulted in more business in search marketing.
• Marty Weintrub's company (aimClear) pays entry level employees twice what they could earn in a traditional regional ad agency, because he knows that after those employees work for him, they could work anywhere else in the world for twice what he's paying them!
• Marty: Cost of buying brand awareness has never been lower.
• Engagement is now being measured and KPI'd (e.g. blog comments instead of unique visits to your blog).
• Marty: AdLabs keyword research tools include social/demographic info. At the moment, it's all MSN/xbox users, so not relevant data. But when Yahoo data is rolled in, these tools will become some of the most important tools in the world
• Are we going to see increased privacy restrictions? Gillian: Australia will be more comfortable with decreased privacy than other cultures, due to sense of self and confidence in Australia. Gillian reckons humans aren't naturally private, it's a social thing. Who says? Research to back this??? She says 2 generations from now, everyone will be completely comfortable with the small village — everyone knows everyone — environment, just on a global scale. Andrew: Privacy is artificial and it won't last. In everything we do (joining Facebook, buying something online, attending a conference), we're giving permission to be advertised to. The data is so available. But, once again, who says privacy is an artificial construct?
• Engagement metrics will give advertisers the ability to not only target their customer, but also the people who influence that customer (e.g. friends).
• Gillian says we (the audience) have been doing search marketing for 3-5 years! What?! Why does she think this?
• What's the big issue 5 years from today? Alex: Something to do with mobile. The opportunity to have a screen with you all the time (something between an iphone and a laptop), knows where you are, you can be online all the time. Marty: Shifts in government regulation. People will be pissed when it's not all free anymore. Andrew: What someone has figured out to give away for free. Gillian: My God, what have we done (with these deep databases)? Mobile. Ubiquitous nature of it all.

Session 2: Developing a crawlable infrastructure (Michael Motherwell, SEO Rainmaker – MMIT Consulting)

• Ha! Mike: "What does 'developing a crawlable infrastructure' mean?"
• Search engines will eventually try to fill in forms and parse JS.
• Mike makes only the 4th mention (for the entire conference) of content.
• "There's only so many things you can touch and do…" Very 'Mike'!
• Selenium ff plugin (record a series of actions and re-perform it to test).

Session 3: Rich Applications (Danny Dover, SEO Consultant – SEOmoz.org)

• Danny makes only 5th mention of content for entire conference.
• Typical info about Flash, Silverlight, etc. Don't do it, blah blah. No talk about having Flash + HTML alternative (degradation).
• I asked whether Danny has ever been penalized for using Flash and an HTML alternative. He said no, but he doesn't like it because you have to do the work twice.

Session 4: URL rewriting, redirection & canonicalization (Greg Boser, Founder – 3 Dog Media)

• "Canonicalization is the biggest, dumbest, ugliest word, and I even hate saying it."
• Google's blog post saying not to rewrite URLs was, according the Greg, the most irresponsible blog post ever. Usual reason: Clickthru of rewritten URLs is MUCH better. A rewritten URL can provide additional information to searchers to reinforce that your listing is the one to click on.
• Agree: It's more important to make your URLs reflect the user's current position within your structure, than to include lots of keywords.
• If you're on a Microsoft IIS Server, you can use ISAPI_Rewrite 3.0 to run a regular Apache rewrite.
• Basic discussion of canonicalization and the canonical link element.
• Greg's testing suggests canonical link element doesn't work quite as well as a 301 (assume he's talking about passing link juice? or whether Google heeds it?).

Q&A

• If you have a WordPress blog, Google will grab words out of a post, and throw it into your WP search to try to extract related content.

Session 5: CMS Considerations (Brent D. Payne, Director, Search Engine Optimization – Tribune Interactive)

• Sorry. I missed this one. Not happy about it either. Brent assured me it was going to "kick ass"!
• BUT I missed it because I was talking with Google's Greg Grothaus — picking his brain for about 20 minutes. So there was an upside.
• AND Greg delivered a great one-liner about why search engine conferences aren't as advanced as we'd like them to be: "Because the speakers don't know, and I don't tell!" I like Greg.

Session 6: LAMP & Microsoft Stacks (David Cropley, Web Developer – Amplify)

• Hmmmm. Not sure if I'm in the right session here. David's making penguin jokes; apparently that has something to do with Linux. Is Linux some sort of floor covering? ;-)
• I didn't even know Microsoft sold Lamp Stands.
• Glad we get the preso material for this one. Straight to our developers!

Q&A

• Brent Payne: "I didn't answer your question at all, but I talked a lot."
• Brent Payne (Tribune) uses Cindy Krum of Rank-Mobile for mobile SEO. That's because she's a legend. She gave me a signed copy of her new book: Mobile Marketing… Good call Brent! And for the record, those two links are NOT affiliate links, and I have no financial arrangement with her. I just think she's awesome.

Session 7: Time To Think Seriously About Mobile Paid Search? (Cindy Krum, CEO – Rank Mobile)

• BUGGER! I had a huge list of points from this, and somehow lost the entire thing. Bloody WordPress!!! In any case, everything Cindy covered is more than covered here: The New Mobile SEO: What You Need To Know.

Session 8: The Site Clinic (Mike Motherwell, Lucas Ng, Cindy Krum, Greg Grothuas, Gillian Muesigg, Danny Dover, Todd Freisen)

SEO site clinic review panel -- SMX Sydney 2010 Day 2

Goodness.com.au

• Todd: "When you're the subject of a site clinic, you have to stand up and take the full brunt." Mike: "And frankly there's a lot of brunt to be had."

Britax

• Jim was just plain rude. It was ridicule, not review. Bad work. If that keeps happening, Barry, no one will volunteer their site!

Done Dirt Cheap

• Todd: "Content's not fun anymore. You have to actually go out and get real content."
• Can't believe Todd recommended outsourcing content to O-Desk (or whatever it was). $1 per piece. Why? Just for the sake of content volume? Long term solution? Will that content really add value to the user?

Appliances Online

• They like the design. That's ours! (Well, the bit they liked, anyway.)
• And so is the copy on this page.

Session 101: Harbour Cruise Networking Event (Me, a Crown, and a couple of hundred fellow search geeks… again)

<end live blog for the day>