In the session "You and A with Matt Cutts," Danny Sullivan and Matt started off by talking about the Lyndon Antcliff story involving a 13 year-old boy who stole his dad’s credit card to buy hookers. The story was widely reported and later revealed to be a hoax that was used as link bait.

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

Last week I attended the SMX Social Media Conference in Long Beach California, here are some of my thoughts about the event.

For Internet marketers trying to reach the unique audiences at social media sites such as Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon, the place to be on April 22 and 23 is Long Beach, California, for the SMX Social Media conference.

SMX Social Media was established by Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, who has been the go-to guy for Internet and search engine marketing for over a decade. He has a reputation for producing quality shows that deliver useful, timely information to attendees, some of whom even begin implementing his ideas during breaks in the conference.

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?

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.)

When someone searches for the term "dog," they’re very likely interested in our furry friends.  But a few folks might be curious about digital on-screen graphics, and won’t want to dig through stuff about rottweilers and retrievers.  So personalized search remains as important as ever.

Whether you’re looking up a pizza parlor’s address, a picture of J.F.K, or a video of Maria Sharapova’s dog, the big names in search want their main engines to help you out.  A session titled "The Blended Search Revolution" looked at how they’ll do this.

Amit Kumar of Yahoo spoke about the company’s plans to create an open search platform to allow site owners to provide their most relevant content to searchers.

Day 2 of SMX West 2008 was kicked off with a keynote by Louis Monier, formerly with Google, eBay and Alta Vista and currently Vice President of Products for Cuill, an up and coming search property.

Monier made it clear that his address would be on search history and future aspects and not on Cuill.

Local search figures prominently in predictions for the future success of online ads. Businesses should start now at gaining good placement for local searches.

Just a quick post here on some simple tips that David Bailey of Google advised in this morning’s session on “The Blended Search Revolution” at the SMX West conference in Santa Clara:

Universal search presents retailers an opportunity to reach searchers with more information than a few words of plain text.

The big thing in search brings more than text to searchers. Images and video figure in the universal search plans of the major engines.

Danny Sullivan giving his keynote address at SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. He discussed the evolution of search from strictly web page results to the current blended results that he refers to as Search 3.0 and the coming Search 4.o, personalized search.

The Search Bowl capped off the first day of SMX West 2008 with Danny Sullivan moderating a search history game show style competition between teams from the Big Four search engines – Google, Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo! – along with an SEM All-Stars team.

Well, as usual, Google kicked butt and took home the trophy.

Search Marketing Expo West is three-day search engine marketing conference, organized by Third Door Media. Beginning from February 26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, the conference will cover topics that involve not only fundamental and basic issues, but also up-to-date topics on future developments, forward-looking keynotes from leading authorities in search marketing and technologies.

As many of you already know, last year Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman kicked off the Search Marketing Expo (SMX).

The conference series started with SMX Advanced in Seattle and it was a hit. Compared to most conferences, people actually came away learning new information as well as actually being happy with conference food for the first time (no more boxed lunches).