It's certainly odd seeing people you normally only run into thousands of miles from home right in your backyard, but I'd have to say that for a one-day event, the Seattle gig was phenomenally valuable, not just for the audience, but for the connections.
Highlights included:
- Google's Adwords & AdSense reps getting grilled by the audience about several items, including the nefarious problem that opting out of running ads on a site in content doesn't opt-out of running those ads on the same site's search ads.
- Joe's presentation on average SEO salaries giving me a heart attack (since 6/7 of my staff was in the audience). Apparently, the lowest entry level SEO position ranges from $40-60K per year. The highest offer he recorded was $315,000 as an annual salary - which, I later discovered, was turned down.
- Heather's presentation on page design, content layout and conversions was very well received, but the audio staff noted that they killed her mic and still had no problem hearing her in the back of the room.
- My presentation on blogging and SEO (available online here in PPT) ran long and I was forced to race through my last 4 slides. Thanks on that go out to Michael Gray for noting the exceptional quality of blogging at Disney's Re-Imagineering blog - well received in the session.
- Google's sitemaps teams showing off all the damn cool stuff you can see with sitemaps. I'll ask Matt to get us included on Monday and give a walkthrough in the blog of the many nifty items (some of which I didn't realize were available).
- Dinner & drinks - just awesome. Far too many conversations started with "don't blog this Rand, but..." There is certainly some cool material out there in the search field that remains entirely under wraps. I'll try to share what I can over the coming week.
It's late; I'm tired and I'm going to bed. Unbelievably, my staff opted to stay at the bar and drink all night, but I had a car downtown and this week has been too many 4-6 hour per night sleeps.
Seattle was fun and even informational. :-) I feel a bit sad for those who didn't take advantage of the low price because a "highly-placed source" suggested future SEW Live events will be more spendy. Same source also promised a return to Seattle, as the audience questions were "far away the best we've ever had" at one of these events.
Yes, good to meet Rand and Matt "I hate tables" Inman and Rebecca and the rest of the good people I was able to meet.
Hi all,
First, I want to personally say thank you all for coming out!
It was a great event, and we're really thrilled with the way it turned out.
That makes us really want to come back to Seattle in the future:)
To address the comments Matt McGee makes about a possible future return, all I can say for sure is "we'll see" how it shapes up, but yes, from the quality of the audience questions, we can see that there really is a good, advanced community of SEM professionals in the Seattle area. For that reason, it'd be neat to do something a little more formal, but less than a full scale SES show, but focusing on more advanced topics. So yes, it may be a bit more spendy, but still a reasonable cost.
Talk about covering your bases. :-)
Great to meet you, Elisabeth -- congrats to you and the whole gang on a successful event.
Yes, the sessions did all rock. It was a really good opportunity to hear many different experts in an informal but well attended program. It was also very interesting to see the high level of knowledge in the audience.
And lastly and large gratitude of thanks to the seomoz team for their generosity and for being the unofficial hosts of the evening!
It was such a pleasure to meet you Rand, and to meet so many other wonderful people at the SES event. I would have loved to monopolize everyone's time but there were so many people clamoring to speak with Rand, Greg, Heather, the Google Sitemaps Team and all the other luminaries.
As a Seattleite who does not get out of the state very often I hope that those of us who live here can get together more frequently.
Rand...I enjoyed meeting you and I also enjoyed your presentation. Seattle was my first SES event and I hope to attend others in the future...the information and networking was quite valuable.
Wonder who turned down the $315,000 annual salary :P
Enjoyed the presentation Rand, didnt think it was too long.
We did indeed close the bar, and we made sure to drink extra to make up for Rand's non-drinking.
A few pictures
Rand, I think I saw that you will be talking at the SES London. Will you also be doing the Paris gig?
Rand - interesting note on SEO salary ranges. Do you know if Joe's slides or info is available online anywhere?