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Here’s the twelfth in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

OK! This is Matt Cutts. Its Monday, about 1:00 AM, which means Search Engine Strategies, starts in about nine hours. And fictional reader Todd Smith writes in and says:

“How would you recommend doing Search Engine Strategies? What tips or tricks can you give us, because I am going to the conference for the first time and I want to get the most out of it.”

That’s a great question, fictional reader Todd Smith.

First off I would say, go ahead get checked in. You are going to get probably a bag with like 14 pounds of stuff in it. I would go through there, pick out basically just a little sheet of paper, that’s like four pages, that’s like, here are the sessions. And I would pretty much take the rest of the stuff to the hotel. You have probably checked into a hotel that’s right near the convention center, so just drop everything off at the bedroom.

Here is what I do. I take a back pack (showing a backpack). I also take my little pad of paper to write down feedback. Its a JamSport backpack. You’ll notice that its the exact same kind of backpack that Sawyer uses on Lost and if I were going to be trapped on a desert Island, this is what I would want too, because there is actually two completely different pockets. So you can put food and water in one. You can put your laptop and charger kind of stuff in the other. So if your water leaks, you are not going to destroy your laptop. Its water proof. Works very well. You bring your laptop, throw that sucker in there along with the schedule and then if you go on to the Expo and if you pick up some collateral brochures, throw them in there and you are in good shape.

I would probably sit down and circle the sessions that would be of interest to you. For example, to me, the talk about Search Landscape; Bill Tancer of Hitwise is going to be there. So I would like to be a fly on the wall and ask them some questions about, “do you use paths in your metrics?”, “what do you do with AJAX?” and stuff like that.

Also on Monday, I think the lunch with the sitemaps team is going to be pretty interesting. Sitemaps team just rolled out, on Friday, lot of new changes and infact sitemaps has been renamed to the Google Webmaster Central. So its now a general webmaster console. So major probs to them for doing that, so may be I will talk about that little bit more in future.

And then on Monday, I have the focus group back at the Googleplex, so I have to leave and go home for that.

On Tuesday, I think, the ‘Auditing Paid Clicks’ session should be really interesting.

On Wednesday, I wouldn’t miss the Q&A with Eric Schmidt. And I am biased because I am on the panel, but I think ‘Search Engine Bloggers’ one should be pretty interesting too. Nothing but Q&As, so you don’t have to worry about powerpoint or anything like that.

There is a lot of parties. Its always fun to do the parties. The one thing that I would definitely try and get to do is our Google Dance, that’s Tuesday night and I’ll go ahead and tell you a little secret that not everybody realizes. Its the fifth Google dance. So we will have music, DJ, lot of food and all sorts of fun stuff.

The part that most people don’t know and we will try to get signs up, but I think this was a little too late to be on the main Search Engine Strategies program, is that we are going to have another, meet the Googlers, session during the party. So its mostly engineers, but we will also have a couple of product managers. People from all over the company, you know, quality, the ad side of things, webspam, people who have expertise in adsense, click fraud, all sort of stuff and that will be going on during the Google Dance. In fact the middle part of the Google Dance.

So, if you are looking at the cafeteria, where there is probably loud music. It’s sort of up on the second floor, all the way to the right. It’s a room called ‘University’, its like a little minitheatre. And we’ll probably have 10 or 12 Googlers, mostly engineers, answering questions.

So, if you want to take a break from the loud music and the dance seen and talk search for a while, please stop by and say hello. That’s probably where I‘ll be. We’ll hopefully have signs, but I’d love to see a lot of people coming and ask us questions.

You know those are the sessions that sounded really interesting to me, but if you are not a search engineer, who’s been doing it for a few years, you might find other sessions completely interesting. You know, search engine algorithm research, or if you are a marketer, you might want to go to completely different sessions.

The one tip that I would give is, I would probably say, go ahead and sit in the back. Because, you know, if for whatever reason, somebody starts going all ’salesy’ or something like that, you can just duck out, and the amazing thing about Search Engine Strategies is, you do have four different tracks going on at one time. So if one track isn’t interesting, or one particular speaker isn’t your cup of tea, you just duck out, go look at another one. And if nobody is good at that moment, you just sit down and do some wifi or something like that.

Over all have fun. The more people you talk to the better. if you see my ugly mug around and if I am not walking into a panel or getting ready for the next presentation, Please come up, say hello, introduce yourself. I am horrible about names and faces. You may have to remind me, “Hey, I am IncrediBill, we met in Vegas”, or something like that. But usually after a couple of times, I get it down. And, I love for as many people as possible to come up and introduce yourselves.

So, if you are going to be Search Engine Strategies, Sanjose, I hope you have a good time and I hope we’ll see you there.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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