Squidbyte Blog

Last week SMX made it’s yearly visit to Sydney:

Key points to note were:

• Twitter for business reasons is growing at a dizzying rate
• Yahoo! and Google notice much spam being created by auto generation of content based on cycling words out of dictionaries etc.
• The Australian industry is not only growing but maturing significantly as people become more experienced
• Conditional 301 redirects (thanks Greg Bosser)
• Rank Fishkin is a very smooth talker
• Mobile sites can be done in three ways
  1. create completely new site (i.e.  http://m.domain.com) in addition to your existing site
  2. browser dection that sends mobile users to specific mobile CSS files as opposed to fully fledged CSS for a desktop/laptop
  3. do nothing at all and wait for everyone to access your site via iPhone (or clone) that uses a fully functioning browse

A quick heads-up to some people that I met in San Jose this year.

Emilio from Blogsvertise – thanks for the great dinner and wine.
Dave Mihm – Dave does some great work for small businesses and builds some killer websites.
Lucas Ng from Fairfax Digital (SMH, Drive, RealEstate.com.au).
Roger Montti – another wine buff, aka Martini Buster
Natasha Robinson from News (MySpace Video, American Idol).
Patrick Sexton – aka Feed The Bot and has some really insightful thoughts on the direction of the web and what it means to the average person (whomever that may be).

This Saturday, just gone, I returned from a whirlwind trip to San Jose, California where I attended the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference. I attended the same event in 2004 and, probably as no surprise to most people, it just keep getting bigger with around 7000 people in attendance.

SES comprises all things internet but has a big focus on search engine optimisation as well as search engine marketing. If you want to play the SEO/SEM game, this is where you need to be.

In the next few days I’ll be giving more detailed updates on the goings-on and some insights into where things may be headed in the industry. So, watch this space.

Squidbyte finally becomes a blogger….God help us all.