SMX Sydney (un)wrap-up

Note: All recollections, observations and opinions have been coloured by excessive alcohol, sausages and geeky SEO “in” jokes.

The SMX Sydney franchise has just rolled through Sydney and every SEO/SEM person in the country (who could afford the ticket) descended on Luna Park for two days of fun, frivolity, hanging with international SEO rock stars and “in” jokes about user agent cloaking on large (supposed) white hat sites. It’s impossible to do justice to the numerous quality presentations that took place during the two days so the following highlights are based on highly average note taking and (often imperfect) working human hardware (memory – thanks Gord).

Adam Lasnik from Google’s Webmaster Tools team delivered a great presentation on webmaster tools. A key point gleaned is that it’s possible with webmaster tools to set country preferences for sub domains and even folders via the webmaster console which is super smart if you have one domain that targets multiple regions and territories via sub domains or folders.

Gord Hotchkiss delivered two sessions: one on PPC tactics; the other on how users interact with the SERPs. For me this was one of the highlights of SMX. Every savvy search marketer in Australia and New Zealand should be paying for and using his firm Enquiro’s research weaponry as it goes so much deeper than search and is based on how humans are hardwired to scan and consume information. FWIW Gord is also a super nice guy and made my average first time moderating efforts not too uncomfortable.

Danny Sullivan delivered a number of sessions. For me the highlight was his overview of search and where it is heading. He produced excellent and frequently hilarious quotes. When asked about mobile search, saying “oh yeah its going to be massive in 2006” and comparing Microsoft’s entry in the search space as a car race with Google powering ahead, Yahoo trying to race whilst fixing up their vehicle and Microsoft standing around saying “Is there a race on?”. Pretty damn funny (for us search geeks).

Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ, one of the most high profile people in search today, delivered sessions on link building, social media marketing and the beginner’s guide to cloaking (last one’s a geeky in joke). Rand was as excellent as you would expect and super friendly when hanging out with the Australian proletariat of SEO and SEM. My personal highlights of Rand was pretty well any time he presented and definitely any time he was near a microphone with Danny as they seemed to morph into a digital marketing odd couple arguing about anything from Firefox installation techniques through to the merits of smaller “themed” domains as opposed to one authoritative site.

Ciaran Norris from Altogether Digital spoke about copywriting for SEO/Search and social media marketing and social media optimisation. Highlights for me were the case studies on the Tefl campaign and the Brylcreem campaign and some other seriously kick arse creative. My take is that without a good idea and execution you can have every trick in the box and your bad ideas will die a lingering horrible death in the public domain. If you are trying to do viral SEO/SMM/SMO do it like this and this and whatever you do don’t employ a semi-talented overhyped rapper with no legitimate connection to your brand to produce garbage like this.

Monty Hubesch from Aussieweb delivered an enlightening session on his approach to landing page design. I found this to be an absolute gem of a session in that I love people in search sharing the outcomes of their testing for the greater good. From what Monty was saying this real ugly landing page for a waste water company has delivered a significant improvement in conversions for his client and contributed to a massive spike in turnover. For me I like the fact that Monty is combining NLP techniques e.g.: content for people who process info differently. This session showed that it just wasn’t the big name internationals who had the gold.

Other highlights/thoughts:

• Don’t get some of the most incisive/knowledgeable SEO minds on the planet to review your site live if you are doing anything suspect or seriously pushing the SEO envelope (no names).
• Don’t be a lazy dev and use user agent cloaking (covered here).
• Do digest pretty much everything Gord has to say about information scan patterns, establishing your brand’s persona and intuitive design.
• Do talk to people even (gulp) the big names, as in my experience they were very friendly and shared their time freely (whilst probably battling hideous jetlag and conference burn out)
• Do ask questions. Just not stupid ones.
• Do read the programme carefully and don’t disappear whilst you are meant to be moderating, effectively stitching up a highly stressed conference organiser (profuse apologies Barry).
• The last thing I would say is that if you have even a remote interest in search that you should definitely go to SMX Sydney next year as it’s worth the cash and it has raised the benchmark significantly in terms of what we in Australia can expect from a search conference. Congrats and thanks to Barry Smyth for getting it done yet again. (And no that is not an affiliate link.)