An interesting topic coined “barnacle SEO” discussed using websites that “cement themselves” to Google page 1 SERPs: mainly sites like Merchant Circle, Superpages, Yahoo Local and others. By optimizing (and even promoting these pages) through traditional SEO and backlinks, you can ensure multiple page 1 Google listings for a brick-and-mortar business, since they will all act like legitimate doorway pages pointing back to you.

This further emphasized how important it is to embrace local marketing. It’s a relatively new feature with low competition, and an easy way to dominate search engine rankings for local searches including “[keyword] city,” “[keyword] zipcode,” “[keyword] town,” etc. Of course, this is entirely worthless if you’re an affiliate marketer, or are working solely on the web without an actual office space that has its own street address.

Another hot topic was the new canonical tag, which is supported only by Google at the moment. This tag allows you to indicate which page should get the initial “credit” amongst others that are using duplicate content. It’s a must-use tag if you’re copying and pasting a press release on multiple websites. Engineers for Google, Yahoo and Bing were present to answer questions. Google released an early statement that the canonical tag would not be recognized across different domain names after an angry venting from an audience member, which prompted room-wide applause.

Exhibitors, for the most part, were search engine marketing and link building firms. Notable firms (at least to me) who’ve shown up were Moniker.com, PRWeb, Website Magazine and last but not least – Microsoft sent a small Bing team to increase awareness for the new search engine…definitely one of the more notable website releases for 2009.

My day concluded after attending a keynote presentation from Ben Huh (the guy who created the whole “I Can Has Cheezburger” meme). As much as I personally cannot stand that website, you have to have nothing but extreme respect for Ben. He achieved what we all have wanted to do our whole professional lives: invent a subculture and a website that has created a permanent mark on internet culture. Best yet, as he motioned, the content is user-generated and virtually requires nothing more than managerial babysitting. As with most successful people, I am fascinated by tales of their failures before the huge success had ever happened: he mentioned his highs and lows, credit card debt issue, business mistakes, and eventually, the turn-around that led to a massively visited site with a huge amount of advertising and merchandising revenue.

Overall, SMX is a great show to attend. If you ever plan on going, be sure to attend the seminars. I was really happy to see that the general theme was for intermediate to advanced SEOs and internet marketers, cutting out all of the mindless newbie stuff that we already know. The lectures in the main expo hall are mostly self-promotional, with little value for those not looking to buy a new SEM service, though. This certainly is not a cheap show to attend, with one ticket costing around $650 – make sure your company can flip the bill next year!