Late Sunday, August 6th (or early Monday, August 7th), Matt recorded another video about tips for the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. I know that SES already passed, but I figured I'd transcribe the video, anyway. Once again, my comments are in italicized brackets.

Tips for SES

This is Matt Cutts. It’s Monday, about 1 am, which means SES starts in about nine hours. Fictional Writer Toutsmith writes in and says, “How would you recommend doing SES? What tips or tricks can you give us, because I’m going to the conference for the first time, and I want to get the most out of it?” That’s a great question, Fictional Reader [yes, I’m aware of the discrepancy between "writer" and "reader"; don't shoot the transcriber.] Toutsmith.

First off, I would say, go ahead, get checked in. You’re going to get a bag with like 14 pounds of stuff in it [and a ginormous SES t-shirt; seriously, am I the only person who wears a size small in this industry?]. I would go through there, pick out, basically, just a little sheet of paper that’s like four pages, it’s like, "Here’s the sessions", and I would pretty much take the rest of the stuff back to the hotel. You’re probably checked into a hotel that’s right near the convention center, so just drop everything off at the bedroom.

Here’s what I do. [Matt bends down below camera frame, and emerges with a backpack]. I take a backpack. I also take my little pad of paper so I can write down feedback…but, it’s a Jansport backpack [my my, he loves to drop those brand names!]. You’ll notice that it’s the exact same kind of backpack that Sawyer uses on Lost, and if I were going to be trapped on a desert island, this is what I would want, too, because there’s actually two completely different pockets.  [Below is a photo of Matt lounging on the beach, as Sawyer would, catching up on some reading with his beloved backpack by his side.]

You can put food and water in one, you can put your laptop and charging kind of stuff in the other. So, if your water leaks you’re not going to destroy it over your laptop; it’s waterproof, works very well. Bring a laptop, throw that sucker in there along with the schedule, and if you go into the expo and pick up some collateral brochures, you just throw it in there and you’re in good shape.

I would probably sit down and try to circle the sessions that look the most interesting to you [and any that Rand Fishkin is speaking at, of course]. For example, to me, the talk about Search Landscape. Bill Tancer from Hitwise is going to be there, so I’d love to be a fly on the wall and ask them some questions about, well, "Do you use paths in your metrics, what do you do with AJAX", stuff like that.

Also on Monday, I think the lunch with the Sitemaps team is going to be pretty interesting. The Sitemaps team just rolled out on Friday a lot of new changes, and in fact Sitemaps has been renamed to the Google Webmaster Central, so now it’s now a general webmaster console. So, major props to them for doing that, and maybe I’ll talk about that a little bit more in the future. And then on Monday we’re having a focus group back at the Googleplex, so I have to leave and go home for that.

Tuesday, I think the Auditing Paid Clicks session should be really interesting. On Wednesday, I wouldn’t miss the Q&A with Eric Schmidt. And, I’m biased because I’m on the panel, but I think the Search Engine Bloggers one should be pretty interesting, too. Nothing but Q&A, so you don’t have to worry about Powerpoint or anything like that.

There’s a lot of parties [I can confirm that!]. It’s always fun to do the parties. The one thing I would definitely try to get to is our Google Dance. That’s Tuesday night, and I’ll go ahead and tell you a little secret that not everybody realizes: it’s the fifth Google Dance. So, we’ll have music, DJ, loud, food, all sorts of fun stuff. The part that most people don’t know—and we’ll try to get signs up, but I think it was a little too late to be in the main SES program—is that we’re going to have another Meet the Googlers session during the party. It’s mostly engineers, but we’ll have a couple product managers, people from all over the company, you know, quality, the ad side of things, webspam, have people who have expertise in Adsense, click fraud, all sorts of stuff, and that will be going on during the Google Dance, in fact the middle part of Google Dance. So, if you’re looking at the cafeteria, there will probably be loud music. Up on the second floor and over to the right, it’s a room called “University”. It’s like a little mini theater, and we’ll probably have 10 or 12 Googlers, mostly engineers, answering questions. So, if you want to take a break from the loud music and the dancing and sort of talk search for a while, please stop by and say hello. That’s probably where I’ll be. We’ll hopefully have signs, but I’d love to see a lot of people come and ask us questions. [Rand and Matt attended the Meet the Engineers segment and said that poor Matt Cutts was constantly being swarmed by various Cuttlets.]

Those are the sessions that sounded really interesting to me, but if you’re not a search engineer who’s been doing it for a few years, you might find other sessions completely interesting. You know, Search Engine Algorithm Research, or if you’re a marketer you might want to go to completely different sessions. The one tip that I would give is that I would probably say go ahead and sit in the back, because if for whatever reason somebody starts going all salesy or something like that, then you can just duck out.

The amazing thing about SES is that you do have four different tracks going on at one time. So, if one track isn’t interesting or one particular speaker isn’t your cup of tea, you just duck out and go look at another one. If nobody’s good at that moment, you just sit down and do some wifi, something like that. Overall, have fun. The more people you talk to, the better. If you see my ugly mug around [ugly mug? I know someone who begs to differ!] and I’m not walking to a panel or trying to get ready for the next presentation or something, please come up, say hello, introduce yourself. I’m horrible with names and faces, so you might have to remind me, “Hey, I’m IncrediBill! We met in Vegas!” or something like that [translation: You're probably not important enough for me to remember], but usually after a couple times I get it down, and I’d love for as many people as possible to come up and introduce yourselves. So, if you’re going to be at SES San Jose, I hope you have a good time, and I hope I see you there!