Cameron Olthuis

My hat’s off to Danny Sullivan and the entire Third Door Media team for putting on a fantastic conference. In my opinion, SMX was easily one of the better, if not the best, conferences in our industry. It was the little things that made the difference too. For example; warm buffet style lunches instead of box lunches, snacks and drinks at all times, and the open parties to name a few.

My only complaint for the entire conference was from the last session called “Give it Up”. This session was the one where presenters were supposed to give up their favorite SEO secrets or tips. Unfortunately only half of the presenters had anything useful to say. A couple of them had no real tips or advice or gave the most basic SEO advice I could imagine. The ones that did give good tips though were awesome, so I guess that makes up for it.

Here are some pictures from the “Better Ways” panel which was a blast.

A couple months ago Jason Calacanis started running his mouth (as usual) about how SEO is bullshit.

90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman. These are guys in really bad suits trying to get really naive people to sign long-term contracts. These clients typically make horrible products and don’t deserve traffic–that’s why they’re not getting it organically so they hire the slimebuckets to game the system for them

Neil was obviously offended by this so he offered an open challenge to Jason.

So to you Jason, I offer the following challenge: I can take your blog and increase your daily search traffic by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect.

Neil has apparently won the challenge and improved Jason’s search engine traffic by 21%.

Good job Princess!

Update: Last.fm’s chart looks good…

Last year I wrote a couple of posts on how getting on TechCrunch isn’t a viable marketing plan. While a TechCrunch write up can certainly be a great kick-start to your marketing campaign, by no means is that traffic spike alone going to make your company a success.

A good comparison would be getting on the homepage of Digg. They will both result in a huge spike in traffic, attention from key people, a few sign ups, and a bunch of links from other bloggers but the problem is that after a few days you’re back where you started. Ok, so maybe you have a little more traction but it won’t be enough so you need to keep moving forward. Unless you have a solid PR strategy and this will be an ongoing campaign you need to have a more well rounded marketing strategy, one that results in a graph that is up and to the right, not spikes.

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I love it when big companies get called out for having a crappy online marketing strategy (Blockbuster).

I’d also like to add that their natural seo sucks; if you’re a company like Blockbuster how the hell do you let someone like DVD Avenue out-rank you? I bet I could fix that problem in about 5 minutes. Blockbuster, if you’re listening here’s a freebie: put your main “money keyword” in your title tag. Replacing parts of that image with real text wouldn’t hurt either, in fact just recode the entire HTML, it’s awful. Sometimes I wonder how some of these people still have jobs.

This would also be a good time for Blockbuster to respond if they’re monitoring their buzz. We’ll watch the original post to see if there’s a response. I’ll keep you updated.

Lee Odden posted a great list of must read marketing blogs. I would add one to the list, Eradicate Perplexity, a brand new blog from my friend Scott Orth. I had the chance to get to know Scott at SES Chicago, he’s a very smart SEO and I’m sure you’ll be hearing his name a lot this year.

Update: I didn’t realize Scoreboard Media was missing from Lee’s list. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorites. Read a couple posts and you’ll see why, the style of writing is second to none. Lee, if you reading this take a look, you’ll like it.