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!

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…

• 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</font

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!

And you know what’s best about meeting good ole’ friends at those events? Yeah, meeting them, having booze and getting introduced to THEIR friends… it’s about networking and actually the non-plus-ultra is if your friends actually do the “elevator pitch” for you, so all you have to do is stand there are smile, hand out some cards and then get back to those folks actually

Shimon Sandler was introduced to me, and while I didn’t recall the name I found that this is actually a really respected SEO consultant in the scene … well- in fact I read on his blog and a ton of this comments eg on Jim Boykin’s link building blog.

One of Shimon’s interesting posts on his blog is that Job-Definition of what an SEO actually does… I love those posts (just like Todd/Stuntdubl also ALWAYS releases those posts where I just think RESOURCE… it’s a RESOURCE… man, it’s great and I’ll be back)

You know when I look at Shimons definition of what an SEO consultant does I actually have to remind myself to finally revamp, rewrite and (hell) get rid of the typos in the copy of my own SEO company site – and yes sure – I want to sync the content in AT LEAST two languages english and german, after all that’s one of my USPs here… and I even got some spain and italian domains for Cemper.Com as well last week …

Shimons’ definition will serve me well as a blueprint, an information architecture for my new copy… 16 points that describe the basis SEO process… very nice..

and best of all, Shimon even gives away a “standard proposal” he sends out to his clients, including specifications for deliverables and EVEN the charging model … he starts with a retainer fee of $2000 for his services, that’s 20 hours work … but still charges what is above that.. I think that’s pretty cool to buy… after all that’s just 4-5 hours a week … half a day… I bet he spends HALF of that already for communication and reporting on some clients…

(hint hint hint to all clients and managers – let your people work

What I’m missing there is some detailled spec on WHAT/WHEN Shimon reports on his link building, link buys, etc… my impression in general is that link building is a bit under-sized in the whole post – after all links are 95% of the game, once you made sure in the first month that the site-structure and content does not suck as it usually does in the beginning when an “agency” created that nice ALL-FLASH loaded site…

But where do these clients come from? … hehe.. Shimon is a nice guy… giving away a “sales blueprint” with some sort of checklists to ask prospective clients is definately worth a read…

The “questions for SEO clients” are even a bit sophisticated… assuming you KNOW you have an SEO client… you know which question saved me HUNDREDS OF WASTED hours over the last 3 years?

Nice site you got, promoting all your products, services, etc. blabla

So – what would it do in the bottom line for your business when you get from NOWHERE to number1 in Google? do you know much you actually make per sale? and how much can you spend to increase the number of sales?

Oh – you don’t know?

Frankly, I met/got called up by so many folks that do “internet marketing” just for some sort of “branding value” or their ego to be up in ranks that they have NO CLUE if they can spend 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 EUR per time interval… well – that’s where I usually end the call… sorry – but people that got no idea on their spends usually have no idea on their goals, or just don’t care… neither of these is a reason to do business…

But anyway, you know it’s REALLY funny – bumping into friends on conferences is one thing, but getting to know the next “indirection” of the network just by chance is in fact the MAJOR reason for me to go to these conferences and to to spend $350+ a night for that sneazy little room in the hilton… Staying as close as possible to the even gives you those extra 15 minutes AT LEAST twice a day where you can meet up with a lot more people that if you would stay ANYWHERE…

Too bad I’ll miss out on the SMX in June and the SES In August – but I’ll then have my studies and master’s finished (be sure to checkout the online survey !)

After this bit longer break I’ll do these

- DrupalCon in Barcelona (September) – NICE weather

- SMX social media special (October) in New York City again, YEAH - rocks

- WMW in Las Vegas (the classic in November)

and then maybe even some SES in chicago… or I might just hang out with my friends there… not sure

Then I’ll sing – “I just can’t get enough…”

For novice link builders

SeoLogs Father’s link building guide — Badi Jones put together a nice roundup to start explaining your old daddy how to build some traffic to site … worth a read and a digg, and while it’s not 100+ ways to build links it’s something you can READ and talk about easily to non-SEOs

Why Link Reciprocation Kills your Ranks is a bit lenghty but greatly detailled post about why doing recip link exchange not only is worthless but can kill your rankings

Linking out is important and was just confirmed again by Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin as they took care of where their users link out to .. Jim re-visited the whole co-citations and outlinking as he already explained it in big detail last summer… now everybody should be aware that outlinks are important for a site’s trust rank … the times of page rank hording are really over, I agree with Jim

For advanced link builders

Blog post services not detectable is the common sense of Rand’s post about a Chicago session… well frankly that’s only true for THOSE blogs that are REAL blogs and not only setup to feed PayPerPost, blogvertise and other “pay per blogpost” services

Aaron chimes in suggesting to get high quality reviews at ReviewMe – a service I still have to try.

Quality Score the new pagerank – thoughts about publishing the Adwords Quality Score to advertisers… that’s the next big thing in Link Valuation IMHO… and I agree with Aaron that the Quality Score is influenced by the organic results… Amazon and ebay DO pay less for advertising their products than any PPC arbitrager … makes sense to me

Indirect linking is a concept I’ve been talking about for months to my clients – and since Chris want’s to talk about better natural link building anyway, I felt can talk about this idea in public anyway … after all the audience of this blog is pretty limited anyway – so enjoy if you haven’t already

Domain Trust concept vs. page trust – with presell pages on .edu domains being sold for some time (and I heard they sell like hot cake) it becomes obvious that the concept ob using an old domains trust to power your younger site is some that simply works!… Aaron Wall thinks the concept of domain trust will be lowered or narrowed down pages on those domains that are REALLY old and got a lot of links…

I think Google is going to have to reduce their weighting on domain trust and place more on how well the individual page is integrated into the site and integrated into the web as a whole.

Well frankly that’s how it already works today – the more links the better, the older the page, the better it is if you get a link there… I think Aaron’s point is (and I agree) is that the overall influence of an old domain is SO strong, that it creates a real incentive to buy old sites as Jim and others do on a large scale

Getting links from .edu and .gov sites is a very valuable thing, as even the SEJ talks about recommendations for .gov link hunting — however I wouldn’t call using pages like this and this for paying money to get a .gov link under the radar … I’m sure none of these sites pass any link value

For the black hats

Forum spammer software – while I don’t link to it, you should know that there’s software out there that cracks captcha security , fakes user accounts by auto-registering that on free-mail services and of course does all that crap via 100s of anonymous proxies … and that’s just the start … oh – and of course blog spamming software that cracks CAPTCHAs and other protection is out as well – but IMHO there’s more attention on fighting blog spam than forum spam… does PHPBB and Vbulleting have an akismet plugin? I assume no.

Forum Private Mail spammer software – the end of spam free forums is near – software to send out MASS-PMs to all registered users is available and it’s the same principle as with email spam… send out 1,000,000 PMs to get 10 or 20 buys…

Video spam – again something I won’t endorse with a link, but the cat’s out of the bag that posting stuff on YouTube helps your rankings – no wonder – it’s a great trusted domain … getting a link from there is like getting a link from Yahoo or an old .edu site… and if it’s not for the link juice, it’s for human traffic… there are companies out there selling this service already

(note – all these blackhattish things won’t result in high quality links, despite the title… it’s more a high-tech armed link spamming toolkit I would put such stuff into … DO NOT USE SUCH STUFF AT HOME OR GET YOUR SITES BANNED)

New link Builder tools for all

Of course you have to checkout Jim’s new updated SEO tools

Michael provides a couple of handy bookmarklets – reminds me I need to reveal and update my own “SEO Bookmarklets”: once again (heck I couldn’t even find the page they are located on… how could YOU ? … TODO)

If you ever wondered about the perfect link then Jim’s team member wrote a little story about his experiences with Jim’s take on it…

it it were’n so much fun I would travel that far

And meeting with so many cool people really rocked … I’ll follow up with a name list as I post the pics with them a bit later today (hope I’ll make it to the deadline of the Pubcon drinking game

Meanwhile a couple of nice and interesting things happened that really deserve a quick link dump – (in an unordered quick link dump fashion)

Jim Boykin’s son was born – welcome to the Sandbox Nate Boykin

Greg Boser became 40 and I had the honor to hist pretty cool party in the G-Lounge of the Palms casino… as you will see later I got some nice shots from there

Todd Malicoat/Stunddubl relaunched his site’s design and finally takes commments again

Tony Spencer confirms cross-linink still burns … well – good thing I got so many (don’t ask me about a number different IPs and IP-Class networks for all my projects

I got approved to the Multivariate Testing Tool of Google called “Website Optimizer” and will play with that soon… too bad I just recently launched *my onw A/B split testing infrastructure… oh well – it could have been worse to implement an own multivar-tester

Best of the Web got yet another promo running – you can SAVE 25% using the promo code SAVE25 (that’s an easy one to remember fortunately as I read in some mag during my flight)

And I got WAY too many emails still unanswered, from clients, friends and partners… and I haven’t even done these, not to mention follow ups with new contacts from Las Vegas …

So I’m ending here now – get ready to see more soon.

Some of that will be

A FULL AND HONEST review of Snapnames my experience from buying a total of over 50 expired / preferred list domains at snapnames after finding the with the DRT and I got a lot to tell about them… some old and crusty domains were cheap to get but the overall impression and workflow with snapnames wasn’t as nice… and then there is domain kiting …

A FULL AND HONEST review of sticking with Brad Callen’s “NICHE REVOLUTION” club, a somewhat closed membership program that gives out two “info products” (AKA ebooks and audio books) to market yourself -including some creatives… presuming you know a lot about keyword research, PPC, link building, SEO etc that’s a nice thing to play with… obviously people start dropping out as they lowered the price from $97 to $47 already – a sell out?

So I thought I’d do a little roundup and commenting right now…

First cemper.com most important company news:

I am already working with my first austrian employee Sandra for weeks – she’s a freelancing student to help me out in addition to a ton of other freelancers from India, US and elsewhere that I already employ…

And frankly, after some weeks I must say – she’s doing great… Sandra studies Information Management here in Austria which is actually a study just about the stuff that I do – Search, Document Retrieval, etc… a bit of everythingn… I am feeling lucky I found her so quick …

well, also I’m actually also looking for new office-space here in vienna… let’s see..

Some more seo/marketing stuff

Pagerank update

Google updated it’s pagerank snapshot some days ago… nothing new and as Matt Cuts says about pagerank

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point.

and Jim diggs out some great pretty frustrated comments by Roger / Martinibuster

OVERKILL TO PROVE MY POINT THAT BACKLINK SEARCH IS NOT ACCURATE
Matt Cutts at SES London

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001073.html

I am not saying that buying links will not help a site rank better
I am not saying that buying links will help a site rank better

The GREEN BAR on the TOOLBAR is NOT PageRank.

hehe…

Feedvertising

Text-Link-Ads relesead their “Feedvertising” program for placing links in RSS feeds last week … and I was probably one of the first to notice, as I couldn’t perform some search functions on their site during the rollout ( but they fixed their bug in seconds… )

it only supports wordpress blogs at the moment, but I need to test this program ASAP, because I believe your link would get into the feed and by that get syndicated automatically to a ton of readers – AND scrapers hehe… and that could mean a fractal link spam explosion

PayPerPost

The paid blogging service seems to gain momentum… while I think the idea is great, I certainly doubt that it might impact overall quality of some weblogs… and of course – it’s pretty easy to get a list of all sites that are registered there… and …hmmm – blacklist them for not passing any link love ??? what do you think?

Stompernet

after Andy Jenkins sent out a ton of viral-style videos and really did a good job in marketing their “SEO Consulting network” seems to have been sold out the first day… if you read in their mails they got some 40k subscriptions… which is a REALLY valuable list of SEO interested people… I wonder how you would value that… I’d say you could use that list to send out offers on a regular basis – list valuation $500k or more

Nichrevolution

Brad Callen’s membership site that provides you with PLR articles, audio and e-books and a ton of sales copy to build “information product sales” sites… yeah – I’m in… an I’ve already started building up some sites using his content and products… I wonder when I will make the first sale of that Gardening Ebook … but it’s a nice thing as it gives me some stuff to try to sell that I would otherwise NEVER have produced… and that’s like a cool playground for all kinds of experiments with SEO, PPC, split testing and much more …

more of my own stuff

My community research thesis is lacking a bit behind… I really love the topic and read tons of stuff, but I need to speed up with writing

CEMPER.COM finally got a new design … pretty fancy and thanks to ram for that… I still got a bug there if you find it and are the first to post, I will give you a free permanent link on a site you will LOVE !!!

Looking to implement a cool affiliate program using drupal – this takes a ton of time as there are 40+ products out there… but as it seems the current match is between IdevAffiliate (which I know and promote for some time) and “Post Affiliate Pro” which seems to have the better support and those guys are even located in Bratislava – only 1 hour from Vienna… cool. I will let you know.

And I am actually looking for a nice billing/invoicing solution and a workflow/helpdesk tool to integrate into my workflow – for better customer support … as you can imagine – that WIDE area of products and soso-products takes ages to wade thru… and just when you thought you found it, you encounter the next problems… I even already purchased one solution just to find out with the great support that it maybe won’t suit my needs… but hey -I got the license, I got the code – I could maybe fix it …

Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans released their famous 101 ways to get links on seobook last week… it already got almost 800 bookmarks on del.icio.us

But yesterday Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl released his 12 types of linking which is a way better structured document creating a typology of links that you could actually use to spin off another 150 types of getting links document or so well, no – but I like his document even a bit more…

Note, that the SEO for firefox was updated recently to use the Yahoo API, the MSN API and the technorati API… a great thing, as a lot of people, including Jim boykin and me saw that ugly “Yahoo 999 Error” which translates to a temporary ban for your IP address…

We got a convertible and spent a great time driving all the way to the parks, had great views, great talks and laughs and almost ran out of fuel at night… even the GPS sucked as it had no detail data about the park, so we went back to the old school paper map to find the fuel station…

All went good and I finally arrived back to the hotel at 2:30, to pack all my stuff, worry about carry on luggage worth of $10k (DSLR Nikon D200, tons of expensive lenses, Sony Laptop) that I’d need to check in (and probably break) and go all the way back to Austria… Fortunately all went good, I could take my carry on with me as ususal.

I uploaded a lot of great pics of that Yosemite Trip to My Flickr Account

As you probably can imagine, spending 15+ hours with great guys like Jim or Dave was a really enlightning experience and apart from a great load of fun we could discuss a lot of SEO and business topics in depth…

I enjoyed this a lot and want to thank Dave and Jim here for that! Cheers Guys!