In an attempt to attend the talks that were relevant to the various projects I am involved in I found myself bouncing around from Technical SEO, Keyword Research, Paid Search, Social Media, Ecommerce, Analytics, Blogging and Local Search.

Technical SEO
Relevant to every website the session Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz focused on the do’s and don’ts when it comes to the use of URLs, domain names with research done into how the use of each affected a sites ranks in Search Results. The insight gained and lessons learnt would be perfect for 24.com and the related verticals.

Keyword Research
Keyword research is the one of the most important aspects of SEO and even though the session was aimed at beginner SEOs no harm is done in doing a refresher. The various tools and techniques that can be used to find the perfect keywords to target on our various sites mainly remain the same but a few gems were revealed. Keyword research once again applies to all sites from Property24 to BuscaPé.

Paid Search
Paid Search is the perfect compliment to organic search engine traffic and Google is not the only way to advertise your business online. The biggest take away from SMXEast for me was the various tools that can be used to efficiently manage paid search campaigns across Yahoo!, Bing and Google. I was also introduced to new forms of paid search by some of the exhibitors at smxeast. An simple process was also revealed to reduce your PPC spend by 15%

Social Media
There are a vast array of Social Media sites within the group, attending the Social Media sessions demonstrated how Social Media enhances brand awareness and actually has a direct impact on your paid search campaigns, increasing click through rate for brand and long tail phrases

I live blogged the Pumping up Wordspress for SEO session and many others in attendance tweeted and live blogged all the sessions over the 3 days. You can read a synopsis of the live blogging here.

Looking forward to attending SMX Advanced in 2010.

Each participant was asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors along with specific questions about hot issues in the SEO field. This document, representing the collective wisdom of expert practitioners, is, in my opinion, one of the most useful resources for SEO practitioners of all varieties, helping to provide transparency into what matters (and doesn’t) for best practices in search engine optimization.

The document contains five important sections:

• The Overview – offering the most high level view of the ranking elements
• Complete Rankings Data – ranking factors were rated by SEOmoz’s panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, they’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts most strongly agree that the factor is critical to rankings. It also include some interesting Geo-Targeting data.
• Link Building Tactics- this is where you should start when embarking on link building campaigns.
• Additional SEO Data – insight into critical (and sometimes contentious) debates in the SEO field
• Contributors – Here you can find all the experts consulted during the exercise and also what this valuable data really is to SEOmoz: an enormous link building exercise

Already, there are over 200 links pointing to the SEOmoz article page in under 16 hours.