SMX Advanced, Seattle – Day 2 of 2

It’s obviously not the second day of SMX Advanced – events rolled over me before I could upload my thoughts on the second day. By the end I was pretty exhausted, what with jet lag & staying up late for the Yahoo and Google Dance NW evening receptions – happy it was only a two-day conference. At the end, Danny had everyone pose for a goodbye picture – I somehow ended up in the first row (third from right, in white hat & blue shirt)!

Others have posted much (including a helpful 12-point summary), so I’ll just mention my defining moment of the second day. It was when Danny was talking about the impact of Google’s new Universal Search (US). There had been announcements about US a couple of weeks before the conference, but I was so busy I just made a mental note to research it after SMX completed.

Danny saved me – and probably many others – the trouble. He was all set with examples and a viewpoint. As he showed us one Google search after another (such as one on “shakira” that displayed clickable video images together with text-based results), I sat in amazement with one word forming in my mind: “uh-oh.” As Danny explained, this Universal Search is going to change – if not everything, at least a lot – in SEO. (Here‘s a good summary of his discussion.)

Mike Grehan, who was in attendance, wrote on this last week. His analysis:

What does it mean for SEO professionals moving forward? It means we’ve finally reached point where better marketing counts — and not H1 tags. I want my company’s site pages to be found with links to audio/visual presentations and images and blogs and…well, everything that can provide the best user experience, ever.

I’ve already shown US results to clients who have had difficulty understanding why we’ve been encouraging them to embrace blogs and social-network media (the corporate gears grind slowly). Seeing the Google results right in front of their faces has, I think, been an “uh-oh” moment for them as well.