It’s the end of an era. Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand reports that Yahoo has decommissioned the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool.

Although I no longer use it (I prefer the Google Adwords Keyword tool as my free keyword tool), I think it was one of the first keyword tools I ever used and one I have recommended to novice SEOers about, oh, about a million times.

It’s good news that we have more and better tools to use for keyword research (a very important part of any SEO strategy), but still I am a little sad to see it go.

This is not a summary of what I learned, just some random thoughts on the conference itself. I am not an SEO insider. I do inhouse SEO and do not mingle with the big players.

First off, this was far better than Search Engine Strategies conferences. I’ve attended 2 SES in the past (last one in December of 2005 — wow, times flies) and those confs are just too broad, too long, and the food is just terrible. At least it was last time I attended.

SMX Advanced was far more focused. Even if there was some serious black hattery, At least now I know what SEOs are really up to.

On the Presenters

• MS Guy — not the right guy for the panel. All I will say is you should not be on the Bot Herding panel if you don’t know whether MS Live search honors the NoFollow tag. Everything he said after that I ignored because he had no credibility.

• Yahoo peeps — very nice, but really did not tell me any thing I did not know or offer anything up that was truly exciting.

• netconcept guys — really enjoyed their presentations and learned some stuff. And I will be mining their http://www.netconcepts.com/tag/articles for data.

• Matt Cutts — OK, even though he makes me mad sometimes and I don’t think he always gives the full story, I was pretty excited to see him talk. Interesting how everyone was talking smack about him, but still his session was packed.

• Danny Sullivan — I brushed past him in one of the sessions. it was like walking past a pop star. Not that I think he acts that way and I have seen him at other conf, but I feel like I should ask for an autograph or have my picture taken with him. I am not so gauche as to ask, though,

• I won’t call out the individual non-search engine rep presenters here, but I have two main comments on the sessions overall

1. What about a good user experience?
   How about using blogs for something other than spam? Because as the blog manager for dW, I spend a fair amount of my time cleaning up the spam people are using as some sort of sick black hat SEO campaign. How does that improve the user experience?
2. Some of the black hats were a little too irreverant for my tastes
   At one session, someone used an extremely offensive and homophobic example. Not cool. I think that if it had been racist, even in the mostly white audience, someone would have said something and the presenter would not have gotten the laughs and implied approval he did. That example left a bad taste in my mouth about the conf. But then, what do you expect from black hat spammers?

Thoughts on Seattle
This is only my second trip to Seattle. Compared to Portland, Seattle is more hilly, bigger, and with more water. Otherwise exactly the same.

To save money, you don’t need to stay right at the conf center. I stayed a mile away and took the free bus (free during all the hours I was riding around and within the area around the conf center).

I also did a fair amount of walking. Pike Place is super sketchy after 5pm and so is the area around the conf center. I still had to walk a few blocks from the bus to the conf center, so I would not recommend public transportation in these areas after dark.

Not sure what I am doing wrong here. Both OpenID plugins I have tried have blown my blog away. I want to support this technology, but I also want my blog to load.

Anyone have any OpenID wordpress comment authentication plugins to recommend?

Great list of pro and con articles and tools for twittering at SEO 2.0 blog: Twitter Dilemma: To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Pros, Cons, 50+ Links & Tools.

I was late to the twitter party and I admit it can be a huge time waste. The best use I have found for it is site status updates — the text alert functionality. But mostly I use it to report what I am eating for lunch and dinner (and sometimes breakfast). And because most of my team is in another time zone, it takes the place of the rambling hallway and doorway conversations I used to have with co-workers. And now I have these discussions with people I don’t even work with too. So that is fun.

Is there an overall value? From the list on the SEO 2.0 blog, obviously there are a lot of opinions on that. The post has a lot of twitter content I have not yet come across, so it makes a nice reading list for those of us trying to determine the value. Is twitter good for findability? Well, certainly it is good for claiming your online persona and associating hundreds of thousands of posts with your name. And considering that nothing ever posted on the Web can ever completely be removed, do I want what I ate for lunch on a Monday in January 2008 preserved for all time? Good question.

This is why I love the interwebs:

I totally agree, except I don’t get the part about the snicker. But that’s probably because I am not hip.

Recently, on my advice, our site turned down a submission for an article on link building. My gut reaction when asked about any article on link building is that is too much a gray area of SEO and we shouldn’t even open ourselves up to that. I admit to an invested interest here in keeping things white hat only. My position has always been if you build good pages with compelling content the link building will happen organically. This is easy for me to say because I work on a large corporate Web site with a huge online presence.

But there is value in link building, if done carefully. My guide has always been Aaron Wall’s post on good link building and bad link building.

And I just saw Eric Enge’s post up on SEOmoz: So Many Ways to Pursue Links and So Little Time and I’ll be adding that to my link building resource list as well.

There are eight solid tips in Enge’s post that reflect the same white hat values as Aaron Wall’s post (and I am sure many many others), with some new ones as well — for example, links on edu and .gov links are often overlooked as a good source for establishing authority. This post covers everything from Social media to PR to the blogosphere.  All good stuff. But Enge also doesn’t lose site of the goal.  His final paragraph includes this comment :

Match your content to the target and you will have a much greater chance of success.

I concur.  Keep your end result in mind and your link building will be successful. Don’t spray your links all over the interwebs and expect your target audience to take the action you want them to take.  Instead, take some time to match your link to the audience,  get quality links, and good things will happen with your linking campaign.

I hate to be negative about Yahoo. I like Yahoo. I still use their e-mail and I always include it in my list of “other search engines” when giving SEO best practices. Such as, “this will optimize your page for Google and other search engines like Yahoo.” And I do not want them to be eaten by Microsoft or Google. A few years ago I thought Yahoo would be the Web 1.0 search engine to go vertical and reach the niche markets Google seemed to have no interest in. At one point (it was a very small point, I admit) I thought that Yahoo could truly compete with iTunes in podcasting. Their offering had so much more customization and community enablement than iTunes had then (2005 or so) and still has. But I just don’t see that happening now with Yahoo Podcasts or Yahoo Audio search or whatever the name is now.

But now Yahoo has come out with two “new” functionalities that just make me wonder why bother.  As for Open search/customizable entries, I tried subscribed links when Google first offered them. The cool factor was very high and creation was really easy. But if I could not get a bunch of people to sign up to get my subscribed links displayed in their results or install it as a gadget and if it would never become part of the standard Google results, then there isn’t much use for it. At least from the basic SEO stand-point, it does not help me reach the unaware user. I am not sure how Yahoo is going to use this or how these links will be developed, but I agree with Philipp Lenssen that at the very least Yahoo should try and take this somewhere if they are going to do it at all. Google can afford to toss something out there with no support; Yahoo is not in a position to do that.

As for the invitation to join (visit?)  Yahoo buzz I got in my Yahoo mail today, I will admit I just don’t get it. I have not yet gotten on the bandwagon for sites like Digg and Reddit, so I may not be in the target audience for this. However, I do see the value of existing social  news sites, but what I don’t see is the value of yet another site for “buzz.” What I want is a site that will separate the truly valuable news from the random buzz. I get that from trusted sources — that is, blogs and twitter. This is my version of trusted sources, maybe someone else will value Yahoo Buzz.

One of the reasons I like twitter is the forced brevity. Having only 140 characters helps me focus what I want to say into small portions. I think of Twitter as a snack, while blogging is a meal. Maybe not always the most filling meal, but much more substantial than a tweet. But in theory, a twitter could say more than a blog post — if done well enough.

Twitters were initially very hard for me. But I am getting better as I go along. I am hoping twittering is also helping my summarizing skills. Last week a colleague requested I create a quick and easy SEO guide for a team outside my dept to use. Easy, I thought, I already have 7 years of beginner SEO guidelines, tips, and helpful hints. I would just quickly run through all my existing documentation and create a cheatsheet.

But summarizing 7 years of SEO knowledge was not as easy as I thought. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Every tip seemed valuable to me. And the more sections I created, the more places I realized information was missing. Strategies I considered common knowledge that I never documented but only kept in my head were creating obvious holes in the documentation. I had to write new documentation to cover the basic stuff I thought everyone already knew. Funny how that works. Sunday afternoon I sent off the multiple page SEO guidelines. I know there will be editing.

I came out of this with some new information of my own on the value of documenting everything as well as my own need to be more succinct. I know a lot of stuff about SEO, but I really need to work on my summarization skills.

This whole post as a tweet: document everything as clearly and as succinctly as possible and make it easier to assemble this info quickly

Now that I have a better understanding of how it works, (thanks Turbotodd) I am all over this OpenID thing. Doesn’t hurt that all the big players are sigining on as well ( Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! join OpenID Foundation Board.)

Having one place to sign in and one account to maintain is a great concept.  And in my first experience using it, I did not need to read the accessibility-unfriendly captcha field to sign up.  I know I have trouble getting those captchas right and I also have also heard from people who use pagereaders or have other accessibility concerns, that if they come across a captcha they just won’t sign up.  So, I am thrilled to find another way of handling verification.

I am, however, having a hard time imaging how large enterprises are going to incorporate it. Especially considering the security concerns big businesses already have and my experience getting existing permissions systems to play nicely with other apps.

If we can all adopt it, I think OpenID would be a  big step forward in  authentication.  I hope to see it happen.

Because I have been working on the Web since 2000, no one needs to prove to me or anyone I work with the value of a Web site. SEO is a different story. Some people get it and some people don’t. And as with most things, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

What also can be a dangerous thing is having a Web site that is not optimized. For over a year I have been living in and repairing a fixer home. I spend a lot of time online researching methods, products, and finally retail establishments where I can buy the products to apply those methods. I have no trouble finding sites to help me establish the correct methods to help me fix this house. Product sites vary in usefulness, but what I have had the most trouble with is finding information on the brick-and-mortar establishments where I can buy these products. Some sites do actually have Web sites, and I can just imagine the salesperson that sold these frame-based sites 4 or so years ago.

I can imagine the case they made to the small to medium business owner that they needed a web presence. That all they needed was a simple site and the salesperson would take care of the rest of the details. And I am sure they did. And then the site was either never quite finished or never updated after the initial publish. And so they sit there, languishing on the web and surfacing in my searches for obscure retail plumbing parts. These sites have incorrect information on hours, phone numbers, and even addresses sometimes. They rarely offer any detailed product information and if they do, the links to the product sites are broken. This pains me. And it makes me, the potential customer, angry.

And if there is more than one choice in retailer, I am going to choose the one that looks like it was created in the 21st century and if it is optimized they get bonus points. And when I say optimized, I am not talking about anything other than not using frames and having individual pages with actual title tags. These are simple things here and I am not just being picky because I am an SEO professional. These are also the things that “normal” people look for and unsurprisingly, that will cause a site to rank well in Google or other search engines.

This is what makes the differences between having a broken down web presence that is nothing more than a placeholder and having Web Presence that leads your users to come to your store and buy things.