pubcon vegas

PubCon Vegas 2007

Earlier in the month Danielle and I headed out to Las Vegas, NV for my very first PubCon convention. During our five day stay, I was able to sit in on nearly twenty five hours worth of sessions, network with some really cool people, and attend two of the best shows that Vegas had to offer. On this blog, I’ll be posting a rundown of each day. This is Day #2.

PubCon - Day 2

I’m not going to lie, I missed Richard Rosenblatt’s keynote speech on this day because we were out too late the night before. Since it was our first time in Vegas, we took advantage of the situation by staying up as late as possible :).

To kick things off, I skipped the first round of sessions to check out the Exhibit Hall where I picked up some really cool swag. I actually went in with an empty backpack in anticipation of this, and came out with it being completely full. I was a little dissapointed though that there were no vouchers this year beyond Joe Bucks. I was really hoping to score some Google, Yahoo, or MSN Adcenter PPC discounts. Oh well. Either way, it was a fun experience and I had a chance to meet with some of my current software venders, and have a good chat about PPC with both Google and Yahoo employees.

The first session of the day that I attended was called SEO Design and Organic Site Structure. Overall, the session was a good one and many tips were straight and to the point.

*Some* SEO D&OS Session Notes:

  • Use CSS whenever possible!
  • Design for your visitors first.
  • Try to use Div’s instead of Tables.
  • Get free follow links from Flickr picture descriptions.
  • Anchor text internally to distribute link juice.

Next I sat in on an Alternate Discovery session which explained how to optimize documents such as PDFs and RSS for the major search engines. It also covered Podcasting and Blog SEO. It was an interesting session, where I learned some new material - especially concerning the PDF files and RSS feeds.

*Some* Alternate Discovery Session Notes:

  • Google DOES NOT index RSS feeds.
  • (pod) Some social networks encourage feeds (think Facebook).
  • (pod) Use “Full Text” when configuring Feedburner feeds.
  • (pod) If you post a podcast, post the transcript as well.
  • (blog) Don’t pass link juice to Archives or Contact pages.
  • (blog) Make use of Tag Clouds.
  • (pdf) Good Structure is essential.
  • (pdf) Avoid duplicate content issues. Don’t make PDF exactly like website.
  • (pdf) These files *probably* pass link juice and PR.

This session was really cool. I thought that Stephan Spencer in particular did a really good job.

Final Thoughts

Admittedly, I was extremely tired after having only a couple hours of sleep, and still trying to deal with the two hour time difference. I headed out around 3PM that day to go get ready for Monty Python: Spamalot - which was awesome!

spamalot
Caption: Danielle and I next to a Tony Award.

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