I attended PubCon in Dallas last week. I have attended several Search Engine Strategies (SES) and Search Marketing Expos (SMX) over the years, but this was my first PubCon. PubCon is driven by the folks at WebmasterWorld, which is the leading source of what is happening in search and is a different crowd than either SES or SMX. I went to PubCon to get a fresh perspective on the SEO universe and I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed. I picked up especially good information on reputation management and Black-Hat SEO that I haven’t gotten anywhere else.
I was eager to connect with some of the people associated with WebmasterWorld. I was extremely pleased to meet Ted Ulle (Tedster), a prominent poster on WebmasterWorld. I attended Ted’s session on Information Architecture [take away: limit choices to seven or less]. I also attended sessions with Tim Ash and Bryan Massey on Landing Page Optimization [take away: test, test, test…] and the session on Local Search Marketing by Kate Morris was especially good and uncovered several recent additions to the AdWords interface.
It will take some time to digest all that I learned, but I will discuss key finds with my customers and begin to roll out key changes for their sites in coming weeks.