SEO Blueprints

I went to SES last week in New York. I attended Wednesday and Thursday sessions and hung out at the bars Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. I am going to list some of the interesting and notable aspects to my experience.

The most interesting session I attended was Danny Sullivan’s forum. He not only knows the industry, but is great with the crowd and knows and references other experts in the crowd if there are questions more suited to those experts. He answered everyone’s questions, and for the bad questions, he handled well and moved on without wasting too much time. I can’t say this about a lot of the speakers. Many had lectures that were dry and regurgitated material you could read in an SEOBook. Beyond that their speaking skills were often poor and they never really gave out much in the way of tips.

The conference is mostly solo SEO’s and agencies. Although more and more companies are showing up, the conference is still mostly made up of people in the industry. The ratio of brick and mortar companies to others is not very high. You can tell by the clothes. Suit and ties, or even business casual clothes are rare. There are mostly street clothes in the crowds.

Hanging out afterwards is a big (maybe bigger) part of the conference. Networking in the hotel bar and attending the parties and dinners may be more fun, but could also be more rewarding for your bank account. You run across experts and talk to people about what they do and it’s a great way to build relationships.

The click fraud session was heated. I hear it was much more so in the last conferences, and this tame it was tame in comparison, but it still had a lot of life compared to many of the other sessions. The panel is well versed in the issues and although I actually slept through Shuman’s initial lecture, the Q&A got pretty interesting…

The location was a good fit. The conference was held in midtown on 6th Ave in the Hilton. The Hilton has many many conferences and handles them pretty well. I hear next time they will be doing it at the Javits Center which is bigger, but far away from the restaurants, bars, and everything else. I hope this isn’t the case.

Overall, I should say it was a good experience. It was my first SES and it opened my eyes up to the industry a bit more. If the conference comes to your area and you don’t want to spend a lot of money, even walking around the exhibit hall for a day talking to people is rewarding. There are a lot of people that just go and party with other SEO’s to have fun, but if you are serious about the industry, I would recommend attending the whole thing at least once if you haven’t already.

Filed under: Events, Internet Marketing Industry