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The SEO industry has become quite a competitive industry. Agencies are fighting over the clients with the deep pockets, web sites are fighting over the best rankings on the best converting keywords.

Now imagine you are a top SEO, and also speak at conferences like SMX advanced. You sit in a panel about link building. You can do two things…

1. Share all your best knowledge and hope there are potential clients in the audience
2. Or you can preach all gray & black hat tricks out of the book, and tell the audience that these still work

The first will get you some potential clients dropping their business card after the session, and you probably have given away all your tricks.

The second could have a more competitive effect, where you could find yourself in a pretty good position if it all works out.

Let me explain; In the panel, Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques, were a couple of people who have been, or it seems, experimented with buying links for competitors sites. The intention was really to burn those sites in the ground or messing up the link profile so they could buy some good links as well, and have their site better ranked. Smoothening the level playing field. Now if you do that a couple of times, this might cost you quite a lot of money.

Divide & conquer

If you are a A-list SEO link builder, speaking in a panel, you might be able to influence the audience opinion on controversial tactics like link buying.

You tell everybody that it works, and you definitely should buy as many links as you can, because it works.

By convincing the audience that they have to spend more on buying links, you can wipe out your competition through just one conference speech. (remember, Matt is in the room!)

This is why I thought the panel was pretty smart, at least if this were their intentions… The smartest SEO expert is the one that makes all the others believe something, and then benefits the most of all the following behavior of the sheep. As lambs to the slaughter…

I decided not to live blog the SMX Social Media Marketing after seeing all the people with laptops on their laps. Instead I spent the time listening, networking, taking some pictures, and here and there dropping a Tweet through Twittermail.

My Tweeds can be found at: Twitter/The-Next-Corner

My pictures can be found on my flickr acount. You can use these pictures if you like them, and if you do, you can drop a link back to either this blog, or my flickr account.

The conference was a lot of fun, although at night I was pre-occupied with my mind and in conference calls most of the time. I did went to the cocktail drink on Tuesday night, which was great. Next time I’ll make sure I don’t pick up that 9 o’clock phone call…

In my opinion the best presentation was from Sarah Hofstetter off 360i. Finally somebody who is speaking at a conference who understands marketing through the blogosphere. She was not only a good presenter, but also used real cases, which make the presentations much more lively. Rest of the presentations were goo, but some were pretty basic. I guess that I have been reading too many blogs lately

Most of the sessions have been covered by the high profile bloggers/SEO’ers.

Check out the articles of Rebecca Kelley and Vanessa Fox.

• Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Linkbait: Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking and Tagging
• Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Keynote Q&A: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Evangelist: The Marketer’s Role in SMM
• Live Blogging: SMX Social Media - Micro Communities

Later my main takeaways. Now I have to walk to the gate to catch my flight to Paris…

I arrived today in New York for SMX. The Search Marketing eXpo is focused on Social Media Marketing.

SMX Social Media is a two-day show where marketers will learn to harness the power of consumer engagement. It covers how social media sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Netscape and others are serving a new and growing audience that wants to discover information based on community interests, voting and sharing.

I already found out the power of StumbleUpon on one of my sites, but there are a bunch of people working with all the social marketing sites and gain a lot of traffic.

These social news or tag sites are also heavily being used as link building tools. Just read the following pieces of evidence on StumbleUpon:

1. Why StumbleUpon sends more traffic than Digg
2. How to draw StumbleUpon users into your blog
3. Dugg vs StumbleUpon – Sharing traffic sources Day 2
4. Analysis: Stumbleupon’s top 50 Stumblers
5. 7 reasons why StumbleUpon traffic is the best on the planet
6. The Other monkey in the Jungle
7. How I increased traffic by over 500%
8. Run a Stumbleupon advertising campaign for your blog
9. StumbleUpon I love you
10. When you link to me, nice things happen

From the agenda of SMX:

SMX Social Media will explore current opportunities and future developments, offering both fundamental and advanced panels on topics including:

• Social Media Marketing Essentials
• Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Evangelist - The Marketer’s Role in SMM

See the complete agenda

It’s going to be interesting the coming two days.

BTW: Like to Stumble Search?