I took a few photos of PubCon 2010 at the Las Vegas convention center, you can see them all in this slide show above. At the end of this slide show is Day One Keynote speaker, New York Times Technology Writer, David Pogue playing music and singing his #1 You Tube – iPhone Video.
Day One – Keynote: David Pogue
David was enlightening and entertaining as he highlighted the MEGA TRENDS in the tech industry.
He discussed his wireless everywhere prediction, mobile phone applications such as TWITTAROUND which lets you point your phone at a building ad see who is tweeting at that time. His prediction that phone calls will be FREE, was backed up by some good facts about the convergence of Skype, Line 2 and Google Voice into one service that can provide calls to any phone in the world, including land lines, cell, and skype.
The best point David made was that all those communication inventions haven’t gone away. TV was supposed to replace radio, But it never did. There will always be phones, radios, tv, the internet and what ever else is next. Just every new technology crows out and provides a smaller channel for legacy technologies.
Nice job David, too bad you had laryngitis AND you had to sing.
Session 1:
Science of Social Media Marketing
Dan Zarrella
An excellent expose of growth and market share charts to back up his scientific hypothesis.
To summarize, Google and Facebook have approximately the same number of views, but Facebook is on a much steeper growth trend than Google. He has created a report called “The Science of Retweets Report”
Dan also discussed other social sciences.
Twitter – Targetting Retweets and Influentials
Brett Tabke
Brett spoke about retweeting and how to be cool about targeting influential twitterers. He made the case for ‘getting’ your social network ‘before’ you need it.
I’m not sure if Brett brought up that a re-tweet could get your page indexed in Google in 82 Seconds or not, but that was a general thought for the day as this conference in general was largely discussing twitter and its effects on all things business including promotion of press releases via your relationship with expert journalist in your industry.
Session 2:
The Best Tactics in Landing Page Optimization
Tim Ash, Brad Geddes, Kate Morris and Joanna Lord presented their thought on landing pages and getting your estore products promoted and sold.
Pages with less clutter and more social ties do better than cluttered pages. Make sure you have a ‘Like’ Button on your product pages.
Session 3:
Twitter – The Latest Topics
Warren Whitlock, Dan Zarella and Chris Winfield spoke more on how important it is to have twitter be an integral part of your company marketing strategy.
Session 4:
Sarah Evans, Lisa Buyer, Sean Jackson and Victoria Harres spoke on strategies on getting your Press Release noticed by building up your twitter network with top people in your industry especially journalists in your industry. Sarah had a great story about the Chicago Earthquake. She tweeted in the middle of the night that she thought there was an earthquake. By the next day, due to her twitter network picking up that tweet, she was mentioned in new stories across the country. As a result, she picked up several new clients due to the publicity.
Session 5:
Why Google Doesn’t like your backlinks
Mac Leod spoke on google and the value of your links.
Day 2
Keynote Group
Melanie Mitchel, Chris Brogan, Sarah Evans, Scott Stratten, Brian Clark
Session 1.
The Convergence of Social Media & Search
Aaron Shear, Rebecca Murtagh, David Wallace, Bill Hartzer and Tony Adams discuss ways customers are finding companies with social advertising, search and relationships.
Bing is adding social connections to search results based on how many people clicked the “LIKE” button.
Google results include social profiles, which help you and your company dominate page 1 of results. Creating a barrier between you and bad pages from complaints etc.
Session 2
Keyword Research, Selection and Optimization
Photo: Amanda Watlington
Hosted by Stephanie Leffer, featuring Amanda Watlington, Stoney deGeyter, Marty Weintraub and Ken Jurina.
Make sure you are documenting and being methodical in your KW research, consider it a science.
Use Negative KW in your Google Adwords campaign and turn on broad match. For the best results have a huge negative keyword list. For example, job should be a negative keyword if you are not an employment service. Very good presentations. I look forward to the slides.
Mentioned Scrapebox, Kwyword Scraper
Session 3
SEO Design and Organic Site Structure
Taylor Pratt moderated Scott Polk, Tec Ulle and Michale Martin
Hyphens are preferred because they are easy for humans to read and add to the legitimacy of your page.
Look into MICROFORMATS – Read “Microformats Made Simple”
Move toward CSS3, explore WCBP features in Chrome, that’s where we are going
Session 4
How to Start and Grow a User Generated Content Community
Paul Edmondson
Social Media in the Public and PR Sector
Mike Chapman
Session 5
Super Session with Matt Cutts
Day 3
Keynote: Tim Mayer
The future of Search: Mobile, Social and Verticle
Session 1
How SMBs Can Use PR Campaigns to Grow Traffic
Hosted by Taylor Pratt with Guillaume Buchard, Lisa Buyer and Sean Jackson of Copyblogger Media
Write ‘socially-suited’ articles, ask the media for a link, create 120 twitter channel to help with re-tweets, optimize before you publicize your press release. Add a video to every press release. Video is cheap and easy, use it often. Like button everything. Lisa Buyer mentioned Muckrack, haro and pitchengine. Also Foursquare was mentioned, again.
The power of the retweet, 82 seconds to indexing in Google. – I think Guillaume said this but can’t remember. Someone said it damnit.
Sean Jackson talked about authority and how much it matters. First he defined authority broadly, then he sought to include any relative authority to the press release. Authority conveys authority. HEADLINES matter the MOST, limit them to 72 characters.
You need a quote from an authority in EVERY press release. Each press release should be 400 characters and include links.
PRNewswire is #1 best for SEO distribution. TIP: Send Word Doc with Links to E-Releases email address and save $300 in linking costs.
Businesswire and Marketwire are both good. BW owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
Always thank people who RT.
Make it easy for reporters to find you and your stories.
Read: Jeff Crilley, Free Publicity.
Session 2
Real World Low Risk High Reward Link Building
Lee Oden Moderates Greg Harnett, Dixon Jones, Rae Hoffman and Aaron Shear
Dixon recommends you organize bloger tweetups in your area to get links.
Look for companies going out of business and reclaim links in general. Majestic seo can help you find links
Monitor bankrupt companies, post on Yahoo Answers, Run “Good Will” websites, Use Clique Hunter and speak at conferences.
Greg started “Best of the Web” and recommends nitche directories, google places, (he mentioned my friend David Mihm)
Yes you can have multiple director listings for the same domain.
Read Searchenginejournal ’20 places to submit your blog’ mentioned the Librarians Internet Index
Aaron said look to Zappos and how their employees twitter. Also to reach out to bloggers.
Rae said to write about bad service to get attention and if you have clients, ask for a link.
Session 3
Tools for Competitive Intelligence
Todd Friesen moderated Michael Gray, Michael Streko, Matt Siltala and Andy Beal
Matt mentioned Spy on Hubs, PrWeb, Yelp and Digg to spy on competition Also SEOMoz and authority labs are good tools to review your competition.
Andy said to follow your competitors employees and other company social accounts. Read fan pages, create private twitter lists so completion doesn’t know your are watching them.
Andy also mentioned domaintools.com and oodle.com.
Michael Strecko recommends you take a look at the competitions code. Get their Robots.txt and go to places no robot can go. Monitor twitter with dotheyfolloweachother.com, Look at what domains they own. Call them on the phone as a customer.
Graywolf recommends Blekko.com a new search engine and Quarkbase.
Session 4
Community Hacking: 96 Baiting Strategies you can employ
Aaron Sear, Todd Malicoat, Gill Hartzer and Gillian Mussig
Bill recommends using link bate in the post titles. For example: Breaking News. Look for hot trends and blog about them. Provide giveaways, offers and deals. Social media participation is the key.
Gillian who is the co-founder of SEO MOZ talks about motivators:
Fear, Vanity, Guild Greed, Comedy, Shock
Top 10, list trends and news-bated posts.
Todd Malicoat likes linkbait on Facebook ads. Quarkbase and #followfriday
Session 5
Competitors from the Darkside – Rogue SEO Tatics
Joe Laratro moderated Steve Plunkett, Carolyn Shelby, Giovanni Gallucci, and Brett Tabke
They spoke of linkwheels and xrummer and recommended you do not use them.
Stumbleupon Bookmark every page in your website by every employee
use Youtube and Flickr often
Also FB and Twitter
He spoke of gaming Linkedin, bookmarking Demon, Twet Adder, Subvert and Profit
Get a page ranked then 301 redirect.
Know the rules, read Peter’s Evil Overlord List
Domignostics dot com features a twitter seo package amazingly! The difference is that they manage many hundreds of twitter accounts and they “push” your tweets through as re-tweets and replys through the other accounts under management. Instant popularity! Instant Google follow throughs. Their site is still under construction, but I checked backed recently and saw that this service is available right now