By Chris Phillips
Two of my fellow co-workers and I attended PubCon last week in Las Vegas, NY. It was my first time at PubCon,
and my first trip to Las Vegas.
The Conference:
PubCon was a good time. It was set up to have several tracks you could attend
so people of all levels and backgrounds (SEO, PPC, Webmasters, Online Sales
etc.) had something to attend. Some time slots had several sessions that seemed
interesting so it was hard to decide which session to attend. By day two I
started going to the sessions that had the speakers I wanted to hear, and that
seemed to work the best for me.
Some speaker’s presentations were a little too much like a
sales pitch for my liking, but most speakers did a good job of presenting good information
for the audience. Hopefully next year they will fix the Wi-Fi problem (for some
reason the conference only supported 100 users at a time).
I found it interesting that there were several points of
view sometimes between speakers on the same topic, which made it interesting.
For example, Li Evans presented on how Barack Obama leveraged social media to
win the election, and another speaker presented how John McCain’s link building
efforts were successful, even if he didn’t win the election. No matter what
your political view is, the fact remains that more and more of the general
public is now becoming aware of the online community and how much of an impact
it can have.
There were a lot of great people at the conference, some big
SEO names, Greg Boser, Matt Cutts, Li Evans, Neil Patel, Barry Schwartz, Vanessa
Fox, and some other big names from the 3 major search engines… (too many to
list here). I really enjoyed meeting and socializing with other internet
professionals.
My Takeaway:
I felt most of the speakers of PubCon seemed to speak in line with the general consensus
by search marketing professionals: The internet is changing faster than ever. It
seemed most speakers agreed we have moved away from just tracking rankings and
moved towards quantifiable goals, conversions, etc.
Universal search has changed the search landscape already,
and all aspects of universal search need to be addressed to fully take
advantage of online opportunities. Social media continues to play a larger role
in the search landscape year after year. Businesses and corporations need learn
how to be accepted in these online social groups (not try to force their way
in) in order to fully take advantage of social media. Successful social media campaigns can send several times the amount (and quality) of traffic to a website at the fraction of the cost of PPC or other types of advertising.
SEO and link building is still necessary, and is
a key foundation to get your website to perform at its best. Tracking rankings has
become a less effective way to measure success because search engines have
incorporated local search features that display different results based on
where an internet user is located, what else they are searching for, and more.
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