Half’s SEO Notebook

Earlier today I read Susie Bright talk about “the elephant in the Blogher living room”, so I was somewhat surprised to just find out Vanessa Fox was also there. That they have two completely different take on the convention is obviously a no shocker. But it doesn’t hurt to run a little comparison, does it? This bit’s from a post written by Susie I dug up a few minutes ago off Google Blogsearch:

This post is for the women at the Blogher conference that I just attended. We had a session about sex and blogging that I thought was the best, and most controversial session of the gathering.

I decided to throw together an Un-Official, Un-Authorized, Blogher Sex Survey!

And here’s the post I was reading earlier this morning:

I’m home from Blogher, the women’s blogging meet-up, that happened this past weekend. 750 women bloggers… kind of shocking. We all came out of our cubbyholes.

I’ve never been to an IT gathering of any kind before. I live on the coast next to Silicon Valley,but I’ve never been to San Jose except to drive to the airport….I had no idea that a group of female computer nuts, blogging women, were so revolutionary…In our sex blog workshop at Blogher, several women raised their concern of writing about sex publicly, in any context. They were fearful of ridicule, discrimination, and dismissive stereotypes…The conference was astounding for the authority of its women speakers. You can find “pretty” girls anywhere— how often can you find ones who can rewire your whole world?

Susie Bright made an appearance along side Melissa Gira, Logan Levkoff (meow!), and Halley Suitt on Let’s Talk about Sex on Saturday July 29th, 2006. In her post, Susie goes on to quote Guy Kawasaki, who effectively tells readers who object to reading “non-business, non-tech, non-male subjects” to take a hike.

On the other hand, Vanessa Fox seemed to carefully craft her post to meet her target audience - mostly geeky male webmasters trying to get our sites back in Google’s index, I suppose. Yet she sounds inspired. 750 women, many of whom “provide unique perspectives and content on topics”, of which Susie Bright is an outstanding example, means improving Google and helping female bloggers understand Google better will lead to their unique voices being exposed to a wider audience.

I just got back from BlogHer, a conference primarily for women about the technical and community aspects of blogging. As a woman who blogs, I had a wonderful time. As a woman who blogs about topics of interest to site owners, I gained some new perspectives…The panelists understood visitor awareness. They told the crowd to look closely at their sites to determine how unique they were from other sites out there. They talked about getting visitors to care. This thoughtfulness leads to great sites, which in turn can lead to great search results…Given all of the dedication these bloggers put into their sites, they are of course interested in attracting visitors. Some want the joy of sharing; others are interested in making money from their writing. Here are a few tips to help make your site easier to find, whatever your motivation:

She goes on (as you probably already read) to emphasize high quality links, crawlability (echoing Matt Cutts), and the ease of verifying site ownership for Google Sitempas via META tags. What kinda touched me was the human passion I sensed behind all the techno talk, which to me is a hundred times more motivating than a few checks in the mail (though those don’t hurt either).

P.S. Interesting though that the cocktail parties and such were sponsored by Windows Live Spaces and Yahoo, not Google. BTW, here are some of the women who attended Blogher - definitely some lookers in the crowd.

Update Aug. 4: BlogHer photos on Flickr, tip from Village Voice’s Rachel Kramer.

Update Aug. 8: Yahoo!’s Havi Hoffman on BlogHer: “Personally, I think the noisy aftermath is a testimonial to the extraordinary range of people who participated.” One more tidbit: “Yahoo! slipped a purple pen and notebook into the schwag bag. We dressed the pool deck in purple and served plenty of our famous Yahootinis at the closing night cocktail party.” I want one of ‘em Yahootinis.