I’m working on catching up on all my emails and feed reading since my SES San Jose trip. It was a lot of fun and educational too.

Here are some visuals:

Refreshments

Networking

Partying at the Google Dance at Google’s Offices

Inside the Googleplex looking for ranking insider tips or Matt Cutts.

Stalking Matt Cutts.

Totally BFF with Matt Cutts now.*

TopRank Blogging Team, minus the boss.

The boss getting interviewed by NBC.

Many more photos at the TopRank Flickr account and session recaps at the Online Marketing Blog.

As I sit here at SES in San Jose with my MacBook Pro, battery power is one thing I’m keeping an eye on. I did some research before coming on how to save batter power, but I’m looking for more tips.

Here’s what I have so far:

• Turn down the screen brightness as far as it can go and still be usable.
• Turn off BlueTooth
• Turn off Airport when not in use.
• Turn off any applications not in use.
• Turn Quicksliver to only re-index every day, not hour.
• Optimize the energy saver preferences.

I’m off to SES San Jose for the week. If I don’t make any posts, you’ll know why.

If you happen to be out at the search engine strategies conference, keep an eye out for me and say HI! You’ll be able to notice me with my shinny new MacBook Pro!

One good thing, or bad depending on how it turns out, is that when I go to conferences, I’ll go pretty much anywhere the group goes. Get a bunch of different and you never know where you’ll end up. While at SES in Chicago I found myself at two restaurants I wouldn’t normally try.

The first on was a Thai restaurant. Now if you ask me where I’d like to go eat, I’d say KFC or out for pizza. Thai however has never been on my radar but I went anyways.

I feel like I’m on a tour of the Midwest. We left out Minneapolis home on Friday and traveled to Iowa City for my wife’s family Christmas. It was a great time and we had lots of good food. As soon as that was over we drove back to Minneapolis and I hopped a plain to Chicago. I’m here for SES (Search Engine Strategies) and it should be a good conference.

So, if I don’t get back to your blog comments, form posts or email in the next few days, you’ll know why.

Now linking is not monkey work. You can’t just do it and be successful. To bad too, because that’d make me a lot happier. And maybe I could get a monkey!

Nope, it’s an art really. Figuring out how politely convince other sites to link to yours, in the correct way, for the right price takes lots of time and effort. Unless your Justilien.

I met Justilien at Search Engine Strategies in California and have been keeping in contact with him ever since. He’s supposed to be telling me his secrets but that’s not happening. However he does have a Website Marketing Strategies blog up now that may give out a few tips here and there.

Are you obsessed with smilies? Well Smiley Central can help feed your addiction.

While I was out at SES, the Ask people mentioned Smiley Central because it’s one of their projects. Now I wouldn’t usually trust something like this, but since it came from the Ask Jeeves company, I felt at ease.

I got Christi to download the Smiley toolbar and test it out as it only works on a PC. We first found out it didn’t work in Yahoo Mail with Firefox. With a little research we found out we had to get the eWebMail Color and Graphics Firefox extension to make it work in Firefox. Once it did we were all set to have some fun!

Please know that these notes are in raw format. Some may not make sense to you, but they do to me. This is a recap of last weeks events.

Organic Listings Forum

Email Yahoo is index issues happen
My Yahoo 2.0 blocks sites & takes notes
Search results may be influenced by others
Konatical (sp?)
Google hats pop-ups - toolbar could be reporting them
Buying links ok, schemes are wrong
301 redirect from well established site could get you out of sandbox?
Loosing rankings does not equal sandbox
Sandbox happens because of sudden link gain / unnatural happenings
Cblock, anchor text, registered name all could be looked at with unnatural happenings
Google toolbar knows everything you do, other toolbarls probably too
Duplicate = Exact copy for the most part
About.com has good directory structure
Multiple domains, same content, confuse
Links most important
Server speed also can play a part

Please know that these notes are in raw format. Some may not make sense to you, but they do to me. This is a recap of last weeks events.

Executive Roundtable
with each major search engine

Cragg Silversteen (sp?) - Google
Gerry Campbell - AOL
Jim Lanzone - Ask Jeeves
Bradley Horwits (sp?) - Yahoo
Ken Moss - MSN Search

Please know that these notes are in raw format. Some may not make sense to you, but they do to me. This is a recap of last weeks events.

Keynote Conversation
with Steve Berkowitz, CEO and Director of Ask Jeeves

Has reduced ads with acquisition
Working on new innovative products
Not just a Q&A engine
Name is probably changing
Working on evolving products
The butler is safe for now (not going away)
Smilie Central is an Ask site
Toolbar privacy important. No spyware or adware
Sponsored search program on the 15th of August
Likes Google relationship / partnerships OK
Increased innovation for 2006 / a better search and my jeeves
If you work for Ask you work with 44 different companies and you can move around in any of them.