This last week I attended the SES conference in San Jose, California. I grew up just north of San Jose in the wine country of Napa, so it was good to be back. I had high hopes for the conference, the networking of like-minded folks, the exchanging of SEO secrets, etc. Well, the networking was good and I was able to meet some really cool people. I particularly enjoyed talking to Michael and Zack from forcloser.com. But the conference as a whole was lacking in my mind.

Here are the reasons why the SES conference will never really help experienced SEOs.

1. Search engine sponsors like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ask Jeeves have paid to be a part of the conference and they are going to take time to promote their products and services. This may be helpful to the novice, but to the experienced SEO their advertisements may not be that helpful on the SEO front.

2. SEO marketing firms are sponsoring the show as well. They need to be given their fair share of time in the conference as well. And, of course, they are allocated time to promote themselves as well. Now if I’m a SEO firm and I’m presenting to other SEO firms would I really want to reveal all the SEO tricks that give my company a competitive advantage? Or course not. So, the attendees get fluff, but not the real meat of SEO.

3. SEO specialists are invited to the SES conference as well. Now these are the guys that I really wanted to hear. But once again, does a SEO specialist really want to reveal his cool search engine manipulation tricks to all his potential competitors? No! And if I were on the panel I probably wouldn’t either.

However, there are some really good reasons to attend regardless. The SES conference does offer a lot of really good information on the SEO industry as a whole. The conference has great parties. Yahoo’s party at Great America’s amusement park was a blast. They shut down the whole park so that just the attendees of the conference could go on all the rides. We hit all the major roller coasters with no lines! Google’s dance was cool with, tons of music, dancing, food and conversation. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to talk to the Google engineers and ask them questions that they’d usual never answer if their boss was standing near by. And finally and most importantly, as I mentioned above, I was able to network with others in the industry.

Will I go next year? Yes. How could I miss those cool roller coaster rides?

• The Google Adsense Bubble by Adam Sorensen
• Why People Buy (Your product solves a problem) - By Leo Talbot
• Why people buy - The lifestyle factor - By Leo Talbot

This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2005 at 12:02 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.