Yesterday's keynote at Web 2.0 Expo featured an interview of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google Inc. by John Battelle. John asks such great questions. I really enjoyed the session, but I kept finding myself distracted by Eric's horrific outfit; it was reminiscent of Mr. Rogers (remember "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood?"). He needs a fashion consultant. Heaven knows he could afford one. ;-) I doubt even Bill Gates would be caught dead wearing that sweater and tie combo.

And what's up with Eric not knowing what "Punch the Monkey" was? Guess he's never surfed the Web?

All right. Enough of the useless banter. I'll cut to the chase...

What's the key takeaway from Eric's keynote? For me, it was what Eric sees as the two key growth areas: Mobile and Local. Whether or not you want to be on Google's radar and get acquired by them, this was an important statement. Sure, web search is where the action is currently. But if you aren't ALREADY delving into mobile search and local search, you're already behind. Mobile and local will be HUGE. Mark my words... er, mark Eric's words.

Watch the WebProNews recording:

I'm here at the Web 2.0 Expo. Sat in on the session today "An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts".

Before I get into the content of the session, I have just a couple of remarks. These come from me and not from the session presenter...

• Badges and widgets CAN be amazing link bait. If it's a useful widget and if it's launched properly AND if the widget incorporates links back to your site in the right way, it can go viral and start building up your link popularity and PageRank.
• Inherently the widgets placed on other people's websites aren't helping your PageRank. That's because most widgets are based on AJAX, JavaScript, or Flash -- and links that are inside a Flash movie or within a JavaScript program are not treated like normal links by the search engine spiders. You need to think out-of-the-box if you want to capture PageRank from the page on which the widget is placed. That's not to say you won't get PageRank from bloggers talking about your widgets on their blogs, because you will. It's just that the widget itself won't (typically) pass PageRank.
• I think plugins (e.g. WordPress plugins) should have been included in the presenter's list of viral web components. Plugins can be amazing link bait. We at Netconcepts are starting to witness this for ourselves with our SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress. I'm hoping to get to the point that the plugin page on our site beats out our home page in terms of PageRank score. Which is a tall order when you consider that our home page fluctuates between a 7 and an 8!

Anyways, here are my notes from the session...

• An emergent phenomenon is web sites with "portable" content and functionality.
• Forrester Research says portable content is a key trend.
• There is limited business value in being on a single site.... YouTube and Google are showing the industry what's possible.
• There's a trend towards the "atomization" of content. Small pieces are easier to reuse and more general purpose. Microformats are the smallest pieces.
• Exploit Jakob nielsen's Law of Web User Experience, that "users spend most of their time on other websites". Design your products and services to leverage this fact.
• Spread your product beyond the boundaries of your site: badges, widgets, gadgets, apis, syndication.
• It should be end-user friendly.
• Build on the shoulders of giants: leveraging widgets and APIs from Yahoo, Amazon and thousands of others.
• It's automated mass servicing of markets of low demand content and functionality (The Long Tail).
• Widgets are small applications or bits of functionality that can be embedded on the web -- can be AJAX or Flash.
• Badges are displays of content pulled under the covers from other sites.
• Gadgets are more formal widget models from Google and Microsoft.
• There's a widget standard under consideration by the W3C.
• Netvibes offers a universal widget architecture.
• Google and Microsoft have their own gadget initiatives. Both have a developer community.
• Ease of consumption and distribution is critically important. Copy and paste is best -- e.g. a single line of Javascript or object/embed tags for Flash.
• Connect to their underlying sites to provide value.
• Have a business model baked deeply into it -- driving site traffic, content consumption, advertising, etc.
• Widgets are often virally self-distributable, triggering network effects.
• Build a simple "dashboard" and applications (aka mashups)
• Google Gadgets directory is broken down into desktop gadgets and web-based gadgets.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets gadget is an excellent example of a widget for your website.
• Microsoft's gadgets directory is in the Windows Live Gallery.
• Huge directory of widgets at widgetbox.com.
• Google's AdWords widget is probably the most successful widget in history. It turns the entire web into Google's ad platform (The Long Tail of content/advertising). Purported 80% of Google's revenue comes from advertising, and 80% of that 80% comes from displays within the widget (i.e. from Google's "content network"). Key aspects of the widget: good user incentive, extreme ease of use, strong viral feedback loop.
• Widgets and badges are your front end to your APIs.
• Key design considerations include: Scalability (cost effectiveness, reliability, exploitation by others, global reach, security), Clearly thinking through the cross domain issues (sharing of personal data, will it work on mobile?, selectively allow users' personal data such as pictures or video, no security holes), IP issues (do you have a license to redistribute the content you have, can others violate the IP protections of others? and if so, what will you do about it when you put other businesses at risk with your widget?, do you widget make it hard for others to take content out of the widget?), Ease of consumption (really must be a simple copy and paste to deploy), Leverage network effects (encourage every viewer to share it with others, letting users copy the widget), end user motivation (must do something useful for them, hsaring interesting content, providing shared access to their personal data such as photos or audio or even paying them, e.g. AdSense)
• According to Programmableweb.com, there are currently over 1700 mashups.
• Small pieces, loosely joined.
• Reuse the web palette.
• Service level agreements (SLAs) will get much more interesting in a highly composite world.
• Get experience now: begin trials to offer your capabilities via services.

I'm here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Today (actually yesterday now that it's after midnight) I sat in on the SEO Workshop being presented by Todd Friesen ("The Oilman") and Greg Boser ("WebGuerrilla").

This session turned out to be a lot of fun. It was reminiscent of their "SEO Rock Stars" radio show on Webmaster Radio. I cracked up when Todd plugged their show and explained the name of the show by saying: "Yes, we really are that arrogant."

Much more of the session than I was expecting turned to "black hat" or "gray hat" SEO tactics -- things that are outside the search engine guidelines. Both Todd and Greg believe in being pragmatic about SEO. Greg analogized SEO to speeding: nobody goes the speed limit; just don't drive recklessly swerving in and out of traffic so you get in a wreck. He "hates the guidelines" and longs for the good ol' days when the engines didn't have such idealistic guidelines and if you went too far, you were simply "torched forever and you're gone." Greg's guiding principle: "I don't want to upset my mother" -- i.e. he gauges whether he's gone too far based on whether she'd be unhappy with the search results because they're useless. They say the search engine guidelines are simply that: guidelines.

Hmm. I'm not sure I'd take that tack with an audience of webheads from Web 2.0 startups. An audience of SEOs at SES (Search Engine Strategies) is one thing, because they can be discerning about how far to take various bits of advice. But Web 2.0 geeks? That aren't savvy enough about SEO to know when they are playing with fire. Greg and Todd made compelling arguments for playing with conditional redirects (serving different destination URLs to Googlebot than to humans). But the 4 major engines had specifically warned against doing that in the session "Search Engine Q&A on Links" last Friday at Search Engine Strategies in NYC. So you'd better REALLY know what you're doing if you're going to play with that stuff! Todd and Greg also testified to the benefits of cloaking. One of their client's sites was cloaked for 3 years -- a new ecommerce platform was purchased and launched by the client, but the old HTML-based site was served up selectively to the bots because it ranked so well. I'm sure that was worth a pile of money to his client. But boy if you get that wrong (like not keeping up to date with all the ever-changing list of IP addresses associated with Googlebot), things could go very badly.

Todd made the point that if you are a big brand or company, you're not going to get kicked out of Google. Or at worst, maybe it'll be for a day. He cited eBay and the NY Times as examples of sites that won't get banned despite operating outside the Google Guidelines by serving millions of "related search" results and/or cloaking. Todd also cited Yahoo's new spam-reporting feature within Yahoo Site Explorer as evidence that the engines (and Yahoo in particular) aren't very good at webspam detection: "they're asking you to report the spam because they can't find it themselves." I was ROFLMAO when I heard that one. I doubt Yahoo would find that as funny though. ;-)

Speaking of Yahoo... Greg told the audience that he has consulted for Yahoo. Wow! That surprised me; impressed me too. Nice one, Greg!

Speaking of Yahoo again... Todd loves Yahoo's paid inclusion program (Search Submit Pro). That's because with it, Yahoo "gives you a complete pass on the off-page factors". Yahoo tells everyone publicly that Search Submit Pro doesn't improve your rankings, but it's not true according to Todd. Although you shouldn't expect a rankings lift with big money terms like "credit report" or "data recovery," it will lift your rankings on most non-ultracompetitive search terms. Nonetheless, I'd exercise caution with this one. That's because, as Todd admits, when you stop paying all your listings in the SERPs "will mysteriously vanish and it's really hard to get them back in for free." A bit of evil advice from Todd (I think he was only half-serious! ;-) ... "Submit your competitor and then turn it off". I was again rolling on the floor laughing at that one! I've heard of "Google bowling" your competitors into "Supplemental hell", but now I guess you might call this one "Yahoo bowling!"

Attendees got a little dose of conspiracy theory. Todd and Greg don't trust Google and their "don't be evil" mantra -- and they weren't afraid to spread a little hysteria into the audience. Google Analytics is one service they are very suspect of. They go far as to advise you don't use it: "giving your ROI data to the company you're buying your ads from -- that's just assinine." Personally, I trust Google. So much so that I'm on their waiting list for the Google Implant (beta). ;-)

Greg weighed in about the Open Directory, referring to it as "a dilapidated piece of crap." And the ODP editors? -- "they take bribes all the time." I'd love to know who the editors are that I can bribe and how much it'll cost!

Their recommended SEO tools were useful. For example: TouchGraph. They gave a very cool little demo of the tool in action. Todd said: "It's like Diggswarm, but actually useful. Is Kevin Rose in the room? He's going to kick my ass." LOL!

Some of the other free link research tools recommended:

• Yahoo's Site Explorer
• Netconcepts' Link Checker
• WeBuildPages' Neat-o Tool
• SEO for Firefox
• Tattler

Hmm. That's funny, this list of tools (except for the last one) looked mighty familiar. So did some of the previous slides. I couldn't resist... I got the microphone during Q&A, and I alluded to the slides, saying "Thanks for the plug for Netconcepts on that Tools slide." Well you won't believe what happened next! They admitted it to the audience that they lifted one of my decks from our website and then customized it! OMG!!

They praised me for making such excellent Powerpoints available online. Umm, thanks... I think! Geez!

Actually I'm not mad. Perhaps I should be, but they fessed up and poked fun at themselves for it -- in front of 300 people! -- so no harm done.

Just don't do it again, k? Or if you do, at least keep my Netconcepts logo on the slides!

What other nuggets did they share? Todd shared that Endeca can be a secret weapon for SEO when you know how to make it work for you. I concur with that statement, totally. For example, with our (Netconcepts') client Northern Tool, we were able to blow past previous search traffic records by deploying our GravityStream technology on top of Endeca Guided Navigation. Todd said that one of their (Range's) biggest SEO successes was with Endeca. Todd gave a word of caution though: "Out of the box, Endeca is just a piece of junk for SEO". The good news though is that, if you know what to ask for, "they will customize."

They also recommended Google's "Domain Park" program if you are a domainer with a bunch of domains you want to monetize.

They also advised folks to stay out of Google's contextual advertising space so that you don't get your AdWords campaigns onto the domain parking pages, because it is junk traffic that doesn't convert.

What was the most interesting revelation of the day? That Todd was a Viagra webspammer before working for Range. I knew he was a reformed black hat SEO, but I never knew what industry. Greg joked that in Todd's space, "PPC" stood for "Pills, Porn and Casinos" rather than "Pay Per Click." Todd regaled us with tales of "churn and burn" SEO going after Viagra rankings -- he could make $10k in a week, and all it cost him was a day of his time and $7 for a domain name -- then the site would get banned and he'd move on to using another domain name. "Viagra" would have to be the most competitive keyword in SEO bar none (well, with the probable exception of "sex"). Todd *must* have been a "rock star" at SEO (but on the Dark Side of the Force of course! ;-) to make such a good living from it. So the name of his Webmaster Radio show really IS fitting and merited. I highly recommend downloading some audio recordings of previous SEO Rockstars episodes; even Matt Cutts has been known to listen to their show!

Rock on!