SES San Jose 2008 - think Brezels :-) and link shoutout

The SES in San Jose was the third year I’ve been there (2005-2008 minus 2006) and I tell you,

it was only about the networking… meeting old buddies and friends and meeting TONs of new people represented more than 90% worth

for me to fly over 22 hours from Vienna. The sessions were simply repeats or just weak rehashes of what I’ve heard at one of the previous conferences…

Well – attending 3-4 conferences a year ONLY makes sense for networking, especially if you’re up to date and work 24/7 in online marketing anyway.

So while there’ve been PLENTY of talk and blogposts about the SES and it’s sessions on the web now, the most valuable nuggets of information I got came from all those off with SEO rockstars like

• Jim Boykin (congrats Jim on your success again, you got a great team – cheers to all Ninjas and thanks!)
• Greg Boser (thanks Greg for all the time and insights)
• Dave Naylor (this was SUPER-INTENSE content, every sentence like gold, no fluff, just facts – thanks Dave!)
• Shoemoney (had fun at dinner! and love the USE ME t-shirt pic man!)
• Neil Patel (wow, didn’t know you work so much into Europe – and thanks for the dinner dude)
• Loren Baker
• Chris Winfield (nice to meet you Chris)
• Lauren Vacarello (was great meeting you again Lauren – I enjoyed the chat we had)
• Dave Davies (thanks for sharing your consulting experience with me)
• Todd Malicoat (awesome party! actually the ONLY real party – in European standards… or what is an open bar that closes after your first drink… LOL)
• Tim Ash (loved the website optimizer session – and congrats on your recent successes you told me about – looking forward to … )
• Aaron Wall (was nice to meet you and your wife at the party the first night)
• Bob Rains (wow, I was puzzled to hear your Malta story… but great move BTW! and thanks for the awesome dinner, too!)

• many more include Avi Wilensky and his great sister Sheara, Becky Ryan, Pascal, Mediadonis, “Chris Boggs”, Jens, Marc, Tim, etc…

But that wasn’t it all …

I even met so many new great guys that I’ve a hard time keeping up to follow up with all of them via Mail, LinkedIn, Xing … just got my inbox down to 289 unread today, so I thought it’s time for this post

Cheers and a link shoutout to

• Francois – man you rock – had a brilliant time w you and Monte, looking forward to work with you for some time to come – and see you in Vegas
• Lydia – was great meeting you Lydia, I found it pretty interesting that you are yet another US SEO to work into Europe… time to pay a lot more attention to the markets over here I guess :-)
• the Playboy team :-)
• sooo many german SEOs and sailors like Jens, Marc, Andreas, Axel (need to dig up those linkbacks) – awesome to find we share a hobby… remember our plans?

• David funny how we met finally so long after the last session – thanks for sharing so much details as well

I took quite a couple nice shots, but I’ll try keep up even more with my mails now as I’m off for sailing next week,

and I still got more interviews coming up tomorrow…

Interest in our persona links was massive… even stronger than after the SMX in Seattle… to bad we’re booked out until October…

So this week I already hired two new linkbuilders for our persona building service and will interview many more til Friday. Based on the maths I did I also had to increase prices a bit to maintain our quality – since we also started to increase the work and time we spend with each persona …

but you know, if you spend money on time to build good personas, it’s worth every penny…

after all you want NATURAL looking personas, for relevant and NATURAL looking links…

Cheers!

Links for 2008-08-20 [del.icio.us]

• Pricing strategies to get more profits | Small Business Trends
• Green like Trees or Green Like Money? Foot In Mouth Disease, Content Writing for the People

Back to San Jose for the SES

I’m back to San Jose, CA for the SES 2008.

The SES in 2005 was the first US search engine conference I’ve been to and now four years later I’m back, still knowing that I will learn and profit from sessions which cover 80% of the stuff I already know.

Main reason for that is because of the people I meet here and will meet again, not solely the sessions.

Just yesterday I met Brent Csutoras when shopping for some food and Monte Baumgartner of Promopeddler past midnight to recap our business strategies and exchange ideas til 3.30

I showed off our cool link building backend and some sample links to Monte and I think he was pretty impressed with what we do and how we do it. We really do have a pretty cool toolset that we built, that does automate so much manual admin work around researching and building/hunting links or even developing Personas for SEO on the web. And research for common backlinks or forward links is only a smart part of that. The interesting part is how I queue those link targets for lnk builders, keep track of their reseach and the actually built links – and their stats. And report those to the client – up to date to the minute.

Today I’ll meet SEO stars like Jim Boykin Eky and Danny Adam Sussman and Brian of BOTW Greg Boser or Pascal Fantou and Marcus Tandler and many others like Lauren Vacarello, Frank Watson, Todd Malicoat (who I didn’t happen to find pictures of now) at the

www.imcharityparty.com

I know for sure on this years Google Dance I will get some more great insights and clues from Google people “not” answering very specific questions and a lot of personal chats

See you at the SES

Altough Danny Sullyivan started his own thing with SMX after departing from SES, he’ll give a keynote at the SES here this year! That’s cool!

I bet when coming home I’ll have the next information overload … and I won’t have much time to diget that, as I’ll just be in the office for over a week before we drive for a leisure trip to Crotia for a Regatta training…

Sex of linkbuilders, automatic internal link building, quantum physics and PR and URL search as traffic source

Some nice posts I want to point you to

• a classic post by Roger/Martinibuster about the sex of linkbuilders... "seems like getting a request from Georgina, Bunny, or Debbie has a better chance than one from Hank, Frank, or Bruce." old but very funny
• new Wordpress plugin by Gab for automatic internal link building great stuff and was just recently updated
• Patricks Quantum physics and Pagerank... sorry, this is over my head... but interesting to see what some people spend time with
• Monte still uses indians for linkbuilding (to some extend) ... well, some clients were burnt in India, we were burnt in India.. not something I'd vote for, but still nice post
• bit older, but nice analysis on how mainstream media link out ... I'll put all those sites into our common forward links tool now to see which link targets to approach first :-)
• using url search top get thousands of visitors... nice idea
  

Also, we just recently posted german translations of some classic authority posts from top bloggers like StuntDubl, Jim Boykin and Aaron Wall on the german spin off MarketingFan.at that you might want to check out

101 Link Building Tipps by Aaron & Andy

Backlink Quality by Jim

Link Types by Todd

and then there' comment and trackback spam again...

• It's been almost FIVE years now, that some guys called me a trackback spammer for pinging them without linking to them ... oh well, we all started somewhere :)
  

• Blue Hat SEO just released a plugin to do that automatically on a large scale
  

• Just in Time ShoeMoney starts to blog about how to improve his comment and trackback spam fight on his blog
  

• It appears that now in mid 2008 not much has changed in the spamming world since 2003, expect that _some_ bloggers use NOFOLLOW and _more_ of the links get caught in filters and algos... but it appears by just scaling up their bots, some people are still successfull to boost their spammy sites... ATTENTION: Not something I would recommend of course!

ENJOY!

Links for 2008-08-07 [del.icio.us]

• Link Development Persona: Male Versus Female

Dammit - I broke the RSS Feeds last month

Some weeks ago we had to perform some emergency fixes (thanks damn Trackback spammers) to this blog and with that I broke the RSS feeds completely, redirected readers of the blog to the weblog.cemper.com feed.

Sorry for this.

here are the proper feeds urls again, in case you removed them from your reader.

MarketingFan.COM RSS Feed

MarketingFan.AT RSS Feed

Oh – and while we’re at it – you can follow my microblogging on Twitter at twitter.com/cemper

Links for 2008-08-04 [del.icio.us]

• StatsRemote :: Home :: The ultimate webmaster tool - All your stats at a glance!

Links for 2008-08-03 [del.icio.us]

• Hosted Marketing Pages (HMP) aka PreSell Pages | SocialSEO.com

Links for 2008-07-29 [del.icio.us]

• My iPhone calendar will not sync with Outlook 2007
  man, am I happy that I still run OL 2003 - only appointments entered in iPhone are not synced back... not AS WORSE, still buggy

Links for 2008-07-24 [del.icio.us]

• Language Switcher WordPress Plugin, from Poplar ProductivityWare
• Unique Blog Designs