SMX London 2008 – Day 1 Summary

So day 1 at SMX London 2008 has ended..

It was a crazy long day, lots of fun and very interesting. Below are the day’s highlights, from my personal perspective.

SMX London 2008- Day 1

The first session began right on time, with the moderation of Chris Sherman hosting two Microsoft speakers: Nathan Buggia and ZhaoHui Tang. They both spoke mainly on MSN/Live however the products and tools they demonstrated, even though developed by the Microsoft team are relevant to all. The discussion was mainly around the Microsoft adCenter Excel Add-in, the Microsoft Ad Labs with their nifty researching tools and the MSN/Live webmaster center (similar to Google webmaster central)

The Global Search Universe

The next session I attended had Andy Atkins-Kruger, Robin Goad and Linus Gregoriadis discussed international aspects of the Internet usage, insights to search behavior and some interesting data with regards to the search industry in 2007 vs. 2008. While staying at the high level and not drilling down to the very details, the session was very informative, insightful and all speakers provided great value. here are a few slides I took with my mobile and I thought are worthwhile:

Fundamentals of Search Advertising

After lunch came my turn 🙂 After Chris Sherman’s opening words, I gave the first presentation in the “Fundamentals of Search Advertising” session, a short overview of what I sometimes call “PPC Thinking” – or more practically: “5 steps to mastering Google Adwords Campaigns” (Dowload my SMX London 2008 PPC presentation here). Next to me where Alan K’necht, who spoke about looking at keywords data from the web analytics standpoint, Kelly Gillease who showed tecniques on pulling the rght reports and digging te gold from the tons of data and concluded with and Richard Gregory of Latitude who spoke about some new and exciting concepts and up to date changes (thanks again for dinner).

International SEO

The last session I attended was International SEO, moderated by Vanessa Fox and hosting Andy Atkins-Kruger, Duncan Morris and Heini van Bergen.
This was a very interesting and highly professional session about handling international website from the SEO perspective. What domains to use? what sub domain/ sub folders/ local TLD policy to implement? how to technically make sure all works as it should to maximize the international search potential? A lot of these questions where answered and I must say with very much detail. One thing that caught my eyes specifically was to issue of adding the office addresses to localized versions of pages (similarly to local search guidelines) in order to enable the search engines to sort out the regional relevance of the page properly – I’m sure going to implement this.

After that we headed to a drinking party hosted by LondonSEO.org (thanks fr the beer) and followed by dinner with some friends and a night walk in the streets of London. The rest I really do not remember…