The Las Vegas air was waiting for thousands of search marketers to fill its void. And we did. This was my first PubCon attendance, and although much of the information presented would be valuable to most noveau-seo, I would have to say that much of what I heard here could be learned with a little trial and error and elbow grease (which I’ve always said is the best way to learn).

But what was good about this conference? In my opinion, we now have some definitive statements from the guys at the search engines themselves - things that don’t trick the engines, but will dramatically increase our rankings.  And most of the time, a few minutes of a code tweak can mean a world of difference in ranking.

Good

• I think Matt Cutts lost some weight. Thoughts?
• In the duplicate content session, Google, Yahoo, and MSN all weighed in on some easy and quick ways to eliminate duplicate content confusion. Central point here was mainly comprised of two things: 1. Avoid parameters and session ID’s. Engineers may love ‘em, but this is where you - as an SEO - need to step forward and say, “NO! I will not take this kind of abuse.” Instead, says the search gurus, you should try to track your visits through cookies, and 2.)Take the extra two minutes it takes to do your www. to non-www. redirect (or vice-versa). I mean, really? Why do people not do this from Day 1 of launch?

• Paid links. Do they work? Are they legit? This was, by far, the most heavily attended session of the conference. I’d like to think it’s because most people want to know what NOT to do, but somehow, I don’t think it was the case. SeoBook’s Aaron Wall gave some pointers on how to campaign for links without directly “paying” someone for the link, as did SEOMoz’s Rand and John Lessnau from LinkAdage. I especially found Aaron and Rand’s advice to be helpful. Among the things mentioned were charity donations, article syndication, widgets, contests, and site acquisition (I got the sense that this was mostly for the links, rather than the site itself).

Bad

• Don’t submit a site with paid links to the site review session whose panel contains Matt Cutts. I think a few sites (I won’t mention any names) made that fatal mistake, despite the fact that Matt’s computer was mysteriously inoperable. (by the way, does anyone know what tools he uses. I would pay a fortune to know and/or receive the .exe files for them).
• I got the sense that a few PubCon attendees saw the conference as a springboard to promote themselves. Besides the fact that this is a conference for SEOs ( who generally don’t purchase Widget A from Site Alpha), I didn’t see any reason why some site reviews had people expounding on the infinite virtues of their products. Let’s hear how you got all those links for a change. 

The Ugly

• How do you get 5 million+ unique visitors a month with such an ugly site.
• Why does it cost $14.95 to get to the top of the Stratosphere?

So I’m going to make a historical analogy. Recall what the early days of newspaper journalism were like? Gutenberg’s printing press was a relatively new contraption. Newspapers were sprouting up like sugarcane in Hawaii. The country was in a media boom… a print media boom, that is.

Why is today like the Gilded Age once again? We’re beginning to see the maturation of online media. In the late 1880s, the heated battle between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal was at its apogee. The battle is best depicted in Citizen Kane. How does this compare with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace and Google’s buy of YouTube? Quite well. And it could forebode the future of these young, immature media.

Print media, back then, was more “yellow” than “yellow” will ever be again in history - and thank God for that. The haphazard speed at which things happened in the Gilded Age encouraged bombast, inaccuracy, and sheer irresponsible journalism. It was the PT Barnum of reportage - always out for the sucker.

Online media, today? Much like print journalism in its yellow, gonzo era. But we’re coming out - and I’m not the only one to think this. Forbes had a report today posing the somewhat-rhetorical question: Is Content King Once More?

So is content really king now? Haven’t we been saying that for years of web media - and yet, each day is another video of a drunk David Hasselhoff, or a college girl taking a bath in macaroni and cheese. Each day provides yet more evidence that our culture doesn’t care about carefully constructed content any longer, and all they look for is a quick and dirty diversion?

Of course, these questions, too, may remain rhetorical for some time. And Forbes is merely posing the question as one of the few old media conglomerates that has managed to succeed online.

One of the most popular plugins for Wordpress is the All in One SEO pack by Semper Fi Web Design. Appropriate to its name, this plugin handles all of the nitty gritty details of SEO for those of you who don’t have the time - or the money - to improve the crawlability and ranking of your site.

Remember, despite its moniker, the All in One SEO pack still requires a bit of strategic thinking on your own part. You’ll still need to input a custom title and meta description for the home page (which is essential), and you should also exert control over the plugin options, when necessary (for example, some posts will require you to input a custom permalink that’s separate from the default permalink; this is vital for proper indexing in some cases).

The All in One SEO pack works flawlessly, and you’ll find that it’s quite intuitive.

In addition to its full range of options for title formats (for tags, archives, search titles, and more - even), you’ll find that the plugin gives you the ability to auto-generate meta descriptions, use NOINDEX for sections that pose a duplicate content issue, and provide custom titles, descriptions, and meta information for individual posts - if you so desire.

This is, by far, the best plugin for SEO I’ve seen out there, and I highly recommend adding it to your Wordpress install.

Each Week, we’ll review a popular open source plugin - whether it’s the latest add-on for Mozilla, or some sweet little bell (or whistle) for Wordpress.

Thanks to a post seen on Matt Cutt’s blog, we’ve been taking a look at Mitcho’s “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.” The thing is: It’s not “yet another” plugin. This little powerhouse has a plethora of interesting features.

My favorite option was the ability for admins to view the ‘relatedness’ score of the posts. I’ve always wondered how these little gizmos score the posts. Much like the mysterious Google algorithm, I’m sure they take a variety of factors into consideration, but as far as I can tell YARRP looks more closely at the title and body text using a SQL query keyword analysis.

Of course, another reason I love this plugin is the fact that you can alter the algorithm yourself! You have the power of Google at your fingertips! Don’t like the way posts are scored? Simply disallow tags or categories in the YARRP scoring algorithm!

Not fond of the total number of posts being displayed (heck, if you like to produce a lot of content, your related posts could start to get multitudinous!) No problem! YARRP allows you to select the total number of posts to be displayed.

You can also place the related posts box anywhere in your Wordpress template. This is invaluable if you prefer to have your related posts displayed as a floating div in your post, or even in the sidebar.

Overall, upon testing the plugin on my own experimental blog, I’m having great results. There is a heated debate in SEO circles whether or not interlinking will help you SEO-wise, but I’m sure it couldn’t hurt, and I’ve personally seen well-placed related links bring me up in the rankings.