About my visit to SMX 2009 conference

I was very pleased to attend SMX West in Santa Clara, CA. This was my first SEO conference. It was well worth the visit.

I met quite a few of the movers and shakers in the SEO business. The vendors at the show were a bit out of my league, though. They wanted to meet people with big scale customers, the ones with 50,000 - 3,000,000 on their subscriber lists. Alas, my customers are in the 100-1,000 range.

Even so, I soaked in their conversations and some of their presentations.

The main conference talks were good but more targeted to the beginner SEO crowd, I felt. That's ok, too. You always pick up on new ways and ideas listening to people who are in the trenches day in and day out.

It was fun to hear the Google guys talking about SearchWiki with Danny Sullivan moderating. I did not know about SearchWiki before that. I suggest you take a look for your own edification and business survival.

SearchWiki summary: using this new tool you can customize your Google search results. You can add, remove and rearrange results and comment on them. You need to be logged into your Google account to use this. Your personal changes will not affect how others see their search result (SERPs).

In my opinion, this product will affect SEO in the future, but not in the near future. To gain a foothold the product must become popular and that can be a long stretch or even failure. But SearchWiki is something you need to be aware of.

Here is the Google page on SearchWiki: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html

Here is a video tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-c7vQrOV0I&feature=related

With my always handy FlipVideo I created some videos. Here you can get a feel for what a large conference like SMX and others looks and feels.

The Google booth in the vendor area:

A free presentation by a vendor:

Greg Cryns
20000 Credit Card Debt