Michael and I had the opportunity to attend the SMX (Search Marketing Expo) last week in sunny Santa Clara, CA.

Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive spoke about SEO and usability.

(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Yank out "The Art of War" or just use common sense; either way, it’s plain to see that knowing about your competitors can help your business.  At a session titled "Analyzing the Competition," speakers suggested areas to research and acceptable ways in which you can do so.

I was interested to hear the presentations in the Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search session at the SMX West Conference yesterday in Santa Clara, and the five presenters didn’t disappoint.

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Day 3 of SMX West kicked off with a group keynote titled Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade moderated by Search Engine Land’s Executive Editor Chris Sherman and Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro.

The panel of speakers included representatives from the major search engines – Brad Goldberg of Microsoft, Larry Heck with Yahoo! and Peter Norvig of Google – discussing where they see search going in the next decade.

Will search as we know it will survive?

Holistic. It is what it pretty much sounds like: a focus on the whole, rather than one piece of the whole. At SMX West, the discussion surrounding search is no longer just about securing your place in a same-for-everybody top-ten list of search results. The discussion is about being everywhere; it’s about establishing a case for digital omnipresence.

Fickle yet valuable, traffic from social media sites represents a way of generating lots of page views in a very short, and profitable, period of time.

Managing your organization’s online reputation is no easy feat. It takes a lot of organization and keen eye for strategy. There are lots of people, in-house and out, that are talking. Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal has some tips for knowing who’s saying what about you.

(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)