Since there were two of us attending, I set up a meeting with David Carrillo at TSA L.A. the week before to discuss which sessions to attend to maximize our coverage. We generally agreed that he would attend mostly social media sessions while I would attend SEO sessions. From there my decision-making process was further boiled down by several criteria:

•  How knowledgeable am I on this topic?
  • I know what areas I have expertise in and what areas I need to work on. It didn’t make sense for me to attend a session where I’d just hear more of what I already know.
• Can I apply knowledge from a different discipline to my own job?
  • I attended several in-house SEO training sessions because, since TSA is a client service agency, I wanted to get a better idea of the difficulties in-house SEO’s face on a day-to-day basis. I figured that having those insights would help me to better service my clients, because I’d gain a better understanding for what it is that they really need. What I learned is that my job is to make their job easier, and when that in-house SEO’s job is easier my job is easier.
    • It didn’t seem like many other PubCon attendees had the same idea, because when the speakers asked how many people at the session were in-house SEO’s, everyone in the audience raised their hand except for the two of us. These turned out to be the best sessions that I attended during the entire conference.
  • I also attended a PR session. PR is under-utilized by many SEO’s, who typically focus on traditional link building tactics. Thanks to this session, I’ve come up with a strategy that I can now propose to my SEO clients that revolves around “occupational targeting” with PPC activities. At the end of the day, my SEO goal has always been to drive qualified traffic to good content. PR is a great, scalable way to get the word out to influencers, who could potentially talk about my sites on social networks or link to my content. These are the types of citations that can’t be purchased so don’t ignore this aspect when it comes to promoting content for SEO.
• Speaker bios
  • If there were multiple sessions that I was interested in during the same time slot then I looked up the speaker bios to determine which to attend.

Overall, there was a lot of insightful information to be gained from PubCon both at the training sessions and through professional networking. Go in with an open mind and use this opportunity to expand your knowledge because PubCon is a great investment in your professional education.

Everyone would agree that links are an important ranking factor in SEO.  And typically, inbound links from sites with a higher pagerank (PR) are assumed to be worth more than those from sites with a lower PR.  But by how much?

Ted notes that Toolbar PageRank is a logarithmic measurement and previous research suggests that each incremental PR level is worth 5.5 times the previous level (e.g. a link from a PR6 site is worth 5.5 PR5 links.

He then conducts a study of his own to measure the correlation between a site’s PR and the number of inbound links.  His results are quite remarkable and should help any SEO value the amount of effort required to obtain a link at different levels of Toolbar PageRank.

For a more thorough overview of the value of inbound links and a complete explanation of Ted’s research on the topic, make sure to check out his article on Search Engine Land.

As you develop your site, try everything in the book to see what works and what doesn’t. Here are some ideas you can try to get started:

• Have a non-branded site initially then try creating some brand guidelines later on to see how branding affects your overall performance.
• Learn how social networking can be integrated into your SEO and overall business strategies.
• Try tweaking your title tags 20 different ways including copying the competition to see what happens.
• Write good link bait to see how organic linking works.
• Develop contacts by leaving quality comments on other people’s blog with a link back to yours.
• Develop a consistent voice that works for your site and blog.

You should try to set goals for yourself based on trying to sell something or give something away. Or if you have hobbies then try to create an audience for yourself. Check your analytics religiously. Trust me, that part can be addicting. Have you noticed an increase or decrease in site visitation? Are you getting more email inquiries or blog comments lately? If you can attribute any of those behaviors to anything specific, then that can be a very powerful weapon to have in your knowledge arsenal.

It may take several years to get any traction but having your own website is kind of like a business professional going to school to get their MBA. All working SEO’s have technical expertise in their own discipline but imagine how much more value you can bring to your clients if you knew how your work fits into the bigger picture. Having your own site is basically a big sandbox for you to develop your craft. Much like how the Sistine Chapel wasn’t Michelangelo’s first piece of art, your client’s site shouldn’t be yours.

While clients may have contracted us for SEO what they are really looking for is business advice, not just SEO tactics. Once a client believes that you are on the same page as them then it is much easier to sell them on your SEO strategies. After that point, what color hat you wear is irrelevant.