PubCon Day 3 – Content Creation, Topics, and Search

Day 3 of Pubcon started out a little slow for me due to Day 2‘s night out with friends. The morning sessions where missed but had the chance to grab three great panels.

– Real World Winning Tactics for Content Creation
– Search Bloggers: What’s Hot and Trending?
– Super Session : Search Engines and Webmasters – aka: The Search Engine Smackdown

On Day 3, it was my intent to lead off of Day 2’s question to Rand and concentrate on good quality content. The Content Creation panel shared a lot of valuable information and some good takeaways that I applied to real estate topics are:

– Must haves: Strategy, standards, schedule, passion, positioning, and professionalism
– How the text is written can have a tremendous impact on search positions and conversions.
– People in the research for phase are seeking information and resource centers can be great way to move them into the buy phase.

Combine Rand’s advice of doing the research and making highly relevant information and becoming the source, content can be highly targeted and informative all the while being well written. After I get back to Marysville, I am going to create a schedule outlining targeted topics for 6 months. Lot sales, market reports can be done on a quarterly basis, events and activities can be done monthly, and other topics can be used when necessary.

Trending topics was filled with another decorated panel in a roundtable format. I found the information useful and focused a lot on the tech side of SEO content. I didn’t take notes in this one because my brain was busy piecing together the previous panel’s discussion and Rand’s suggestion.

The Smack Down was killer! The attendees got a huge glimpse into Bing’s and Google’s upcoming features. My notes had to be taken on my Blackberry using the Facebook app (the Word software is not free on the Storm).

– Site load time isn’t currently a factor Google uses in the search engine ranking algorithm but will probably be a factor in the future – from Matt Cutts but not in those exact words.
– Meta tags are not a factor in Google’s algorithm and are not even looked at.
– Google Caffeine will be rolled out after the first of the year – there will be a data center in the Google’s rotation that will be running Caffeine (which one was unclear).

The session left me with a great feeling and excitement about attending PubCon. It is also really exciting since none of my competitors are even remotely close in understanding SEO, SEM, and social media. Well I’m off to Harrah’s to collect off the 49ers win last night. Next post from good old Washington – heard it is snowing a lot in the mountains and the resorts are opening up.