Are you in the local seattle area and interested in the technical side of search engine optimization? E.g. Implementation/ operational best practices, design patterns, site reviews, etc? Then you should come check out one of the upcoming events being hosted by Jane & Robot in May. Each event will have a couple 15 minute talks by a local expert, time for Q&A, and then a couple in depth site reviews. (not to mention free beer and snacks!)

Tuesday, May 13th @ 6pm

Solo Bar, 200 Roy Street, Seattle
Sponsored by Microsoft, so they’ll be providing lots of swag in addition to food and drinks. Vanessa Fox will be talking about how a search engine works, and someone from Microsoft will talk about ASP.Net and Silverlight best practices. Then we'll do the Q&A, site reviews and have general networking time.

Sign up at Upcoming.org: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/594441 

Thursday, May 29th @ 6pm

Google Seattle office, 651 N 34th St. Seattle
Sponsored by Google, so expect a lot of primary-colored furniture. For this session we'll focus a bit more on diagnosing issues with your site, and look out for a few interesting guest speakers.

Sign up at Upcoming.org: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/622645 

Did you know that search engines drive nearly 30% of all page views to web sites? And that's just an average, the number can be much higher for smaller sites, and ecommerce sites. That's a lot of customers, possibly even more than the number of firefox users coming to your site. That begs the question - do you spend as much time testing your site for search as you do for FireFox?

Over the past year I've done several talks for web developers on SEO, covering how search engines work and some best practices, and I have been really surprised how low the awareness has been. Everyone seems interested, but there tend to be a lot of misconceptions about SEO (e.g. "I want to build my site for people not robots", or "SEO? No, I'm not a spammer"). Well, to help put those misconceptions aside, I've been working with Vanessa Fox at the SMX conference series to create a 1-day event on SEO for web developers. Here's the agenda:

I had the good fortune to be asked to come to the UK Mix07 event this year to do a session on Search Engine Optimization 101 for ASP.Net Developers. Due to a mixup (e.g. I can't read), I had also prepared another presentation on Using the Live Search Web Service to Create a Customer Site Search. Check them out and ping me with any questions:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101 for ASP.Net Developers
• Using the Live Search Web Service to Create a Customer Site Search

A couple days ago Google quietly deprecated their SOAP API in favor of their newer, more fully featured AJAX API. Despite the rhetoric on the web, this is not a referendum on SOAP. Here's why I think they made the change:

Do you know who’s linking to your site? What about that product or feature you just launched, is anyone talking about it?

I just got back from Webmaster World in Las Vegas, where there was a lot of talk about backlink. I had not used them before and it was mentioned that there were some limits to the Google back link tool, and the MSN tool was difficult to find and use. So this weekend I hacked together my own little back link tool using the Live Search API. Then I spent some time thinking about how this information could be used by a modern marketing professional - here's what I came up with: