eKnowWaytions

You make me wanna go to recap… I say yeah yeah yeah. So here we go. SMX Munich 2010 Recap. What was good, bad and ugly?

Good: Discussions between Panels, different opinions, seeing former fellow students, meeting some more austrian SEOs, food, inspiration…

Bad: Show offs, aircon/temperature at venues, very slow wi-fi

Ugly: Mikkel deMib Svendsen’s Suit, the Westin Grand silhouette

But lets start to cover SMX Munich 2010  from the beginning…

It all started with a quite dissappointing Keynote from Microsoft’s Jordi Ribas. It was more like a Bing commercial and not really about the ‘future of search’ (official keynote topic). So it basically just could’ve become better. And it became better. Way better actually. With Marcus Tandler (mediadonis), Uwe Tippmann (abakus) and Ben Hendrickson (SEOmoz) talking about SEO ranking factors.

Whereas Uwe (Pageload) and Marcus (CTR) presented in a quite funny way without telling something brand new, Ben pretty much took the bun. 10.45 in the morning and he threw numbers and charts at us. Holly shit…actually, after starting with a joke (‘you all know my boss Rand who is a great speaker…so i’m wondering if they know who they invited with me…’)  he seemed to be a little nervous and made it really hard to follow what he was talking about (nevertheless it looked quite interesting!). As time went by he seemed to feel more comfortable and pretty much rocked the spam panel who took place on day 2.

Sidenote: As usual there were questions at the end from the audience. The first question was: “Is SEO dead?” – Man. We almost threw stones at this guy. Why did someone like him even got into SMX? Next time somebody asks such a dumb question we’re gonna kick him out of the index. Immediately ;-)

After those 3 talking about ranking factors it was linkbuilding time with Mario Fischer (websiteboosting), Mikkel deMib Svendson (deMib) and Sebastian Wenzel (Text-Link-Ads.com). While Mario Fischer and Mikkel deMib (man, what a suit! golden times!) presented in their well known and loved way, Mr. Wenzel looked quite bored and came to the conclusion that in text links are the only way to go. So go out and buy them…

After the break (awesome food btw) Peter Schaar (chief privacy officer) hit the stage and was talking about cookies, tracking, IPs, etc…in a veeery boring way. No slides, no preparation and always the same talking. I didn’t really like it but others thought it was good. So maybe that was just my personal opinion.

The next session was about Linkbuilding again. Christoph C. Cemper (cemper.com) and Eva Rausch von Traubenberg (Deutsche Telekom) did a hands on talk (Eva) and showed golden linkbuilding rules (Christoph). Especially Eva’s presentation was quite nice. Well done.

webmasters on the roof - final show at smx munich 2010

The indisputable highlight of the first day of SMX Munich 2010 was, without any doubt, the last radio show of the webmasters on the roof. Live outta the Westin Grand Ballroom. Unfortunately the ballroom was only filled to about a third (guess due to the fact that not only SEOs attend the #smx but also a lot of ‘normal’ marketers) – but more than 2.000 online participants crashed the WotR chatroom. Rock’n Roll!

Besides the two hosts Mediadonis and FridayNite SEO Stars like Mario Fischer, Johannes “SISTRIX” Beus, Mikkel deMib and Ben Hendrickson entered the stage to discuss live topics like linkbuying, google caffeine and so on (don’t trust Matt Cutts..). One of the best webmasters on the roof episodes ever with standing ovations at the end. Epic SEO moments. Thank you guys!

The second day started with a nice session regarding ‘universal search’. Marcus Tober (CTO Searchmetrics) did a nice intro and prepared everything for the other 6 universal search specialists. After Christoph Burseg (TRG) talked about Google News and Tom Alby (uniquedigital) about blogs, I moved on to another panel since pictures and videos where a huge part of my thesis.

The next panel was about conversion rate optimization with presentations by Moritz Haberman (blogzwonull), Stefanie U. Dürr (google) and André Morrys (Web Arts AG). Moritz and André took two pretty different approaches (conceptual vs. neurological) and Stefanie tried to show some hands on case studies until her voice was gone ;-)

The last but one panel was about inhouse SEO. Florian Stelzner (XING) was talking about his life as inhouse SEO and showed some DOs and DONTs. Very cool! Olga Dick (Siemens) showed some slides but actually did not tell anything interesting (of course that’s my opinion again). Marcel Sarközy (Sixt) gave a very interesting presentation and showed how he handles SEO within a very huge company with a lot of different target countries. So all in all: Cool panel!

The last stop on this year’s SMX Munich 2010 was, for me, the ‘ask the SEOs’ panel with Mario Fischer (SEO of the year), Jens Fauldrath (Deutsche Telekom), Christoph Cemper and Uwe Tippmann. It was once again about linkbuilding, google penalties, linkbaiting ideas (T-Porn for example :D ) and even more. Great end for a – all in all – very nice event.

Hope to see all of you guys again soon. Cheers.

Another short recap (in German) can be found over there at the seo garage and (also in German) at SEO München.

Related posts:

1. SEOkomm | First Austrian SEO Conference
2. public by default | re:publica 2010 recap day 1
3. re:publica 2010 – day 3 recap
4. re:publica 2010 recap day 2

Tags: SEO, SMX

This entry was posted on Samstag, März 27th, 2010 at 04:12. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.