Amazing panel at Pubcon 2007 Moderated by Silicon Entrepreneuer Guy Kawasaki

A fantastic Day 1 at Pubcon 2007 – WebmasterWorld in Las Vegas was wraped up with an amazing panel Moderated by Silicon Entrepreneuer Guy Kawasaki from Truemors, Matt Cutts from Google, Tim Mayer from Yahoo!, Rahul Lahiri from Ask and Eytan Seidman from MSN

Here are some random notes I took and and Twitters I sent from the panel:

Tim Mayer “At Yahoo, our Goal is to get customers from To-Do to Done in 1 search”

What do you think of Mahalo? Matt Cutts from Google “Initially it was marketed as a Search Engine? Now it is more of a Search Service, more like a search directory, it can provide value e.g.: search for cheap travel provides good results’

How would you do search if you were starting from scratch?
Matt Cutts:
1. Make a compelling service. Have something interesting to say a dot-com called Vallywag started with rumors about 2 people dating at Google = major conciousness. Do investiative reporting, really good scoops.
Get contenet about companies people are interested in Google Apple.
2. Start a blog -the easiest way to build a site and to get links. Word Press is pretty well SEO’d. WordPress Version 2.3 content has all unifed single place.
3. I would do SEO make sure things are crawl-able

Matt Cutts and Tim Mayer confirm it is beneficial to have keywords in your URL, Mayer points to Amazon as a good example

Matt Cutts if your URL’s have numbers in them, create a 301 redirect and send them to a page with keywords in the URL

Matt Cutts “The easiest way to double your money is to double your conversions.”

Matt Cutts “Pay Attention to Local. If you search for plumber and get an ad for plumber that’s OK. Find a plumber down the street that’s way more relevant.

Rahul Lahiri ASK.com Pay attention to ROI at every step. If you get a lead on your site and they sign up for you eNewsletter and you get a sale later, know the ROI at each step.

Matt Cutts We do try really hard to find niche expert sites (for top results). We’re constantly looking at ways to change that. And we have some changes in the pipe to improve the diversity of results so you won’t see the same site in 8 different results.

Matt Cutts “People say I need a link to get ranked. Put it the other way around…develop great reasons for people to link to you, spend your time developing that.”