Competition is good. I think SES and SMX and PubCon and SEO Days and many small SEO roundtabel-like seminars are all good as options, and I look forward to someone actually making a conference that is valuable for “advanced” SEO topics. All this activity should make SEO more accessible, and perhaps help weed out the nonsense, helping the good stuff get the higher profile it deserves.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-value-of-attending-conferences

Since you haven’t been to an SES — or perhaps other conferences — it’s probably harder for you to understand why SMX Advanced I expect will be much different and, yes, definitely good for the advanced search marketer.

First, many events have concurrent sessions. It’s GOOD to have them. It means if you don’t like or are interested in one session, you’ve got an alternative rather than than thinking great, I paid this money, but there’s nothing to go to. I can’t stress enough how common this.

Duplicate content is a huge concern. If you’ve got it all sorted out, know the workaround, great. But understand the focus of this session isn’t to talk about the workarounds you and others know and have had to deal with. The focus is for advanced search marketers like yourselves to be have a conversation with the search engines on how duplicate content issues SHOULD be handled. I those coming to the session know the solutions but are sick to death of them. If you want to help shape some future direction here, this is an opportunity.

As for the companies participating — you’ll see the confirmations all go up shortly. Google and Yahoo are confirmed so far for that and many other sessions. You read Matt’s blog — he actually already said he’d be at the show. But getting the info posted will help you and others.

As for social media as SEO, lots of advanced people are failing to understand the impact social media can have on rankings. You got it covered, great. If not, check out the articles here:

http://searchengineland.com/guides/social_media_optimization.php

You set on all that, hey, I’m with you. Any of that makes you think “oh” or wow, maybe there is search activity going on at these places I’ve dismissed, the session might be helpful to you.

On personalization — you want stats on penetration, effectiveness, utilization of personalized search? When only one major search engine has really shifted to having it for all of like two months? Folks are still digesting things — but plenty of advanced people are indeed freaking out about how personalization might change the landscape for them. If you think bookmarking is social and not SEO, then you’re making a huge mistake. That’s because bookmarking is a key factor on whether Google is going to rank your pages for various individuals. That is just one of the things we’ll be discussing — and yes, it sounds like you’d get something out of it.

The penalties session is again a summit oriented thing where search marketers can help drive how they’d like penalties better handled. People know work arounds or ways to guess at what problems might be. Are there better things they’d like search engines to do. I’ve conducted many summits like these — and search marketers in them have helped shape the emergence of stuff like the NOODP tag. That’s the opportunity here — if you’re advanced, if you consider yourself a leader, you can come lead in a session like this.

As for pitch sessions — no, none of the sessions will be product pitches. I don’t have a reputation for doing conferences like this, but I’ll work to make that clearer.

On Give It Up, plenty of noted SEOs that will be posted later this week. You don’t see names simply because I’ve been busy with the SES event this past week. I agree names are important to those who, like you, may not be familiar with my reputation in producing search conferences. So you can check them out shortly.

Paid search doesn’t seem to be your thing, so I won’t get into those sessions. But sounds like it’s a good think I’m running those concurrent sessions. And of course SEO is not PPC. They are two separate parts of search marketing as a whole. Some people do all of one; some do all of other; many go between. That’s why we are running two tracks.

As for the debate, no, the audience really won’t be potential clients. Actually, most of those people are probably going to be sick of having to argue and defend their profession to the outside world. The debate is meant to be both fun yet educational and generate some buzz. I can’t promise it will match what seems to be your “Is it worth $100 per hour” criteria for each and every session. I can only tell you that I do believe many people will find the conference experience as a whole to be well worthwhile.

I hope you find the comment helpful. Your comments definitely help me think more about what I need to explain to those who might not understand the value of this particular new show. If you don’t make it, well, I’ll hope the reviews might convince you next time.