20 Top quotes from SMX Munich and A4uExpo Amsterdam

_{Pic.1 SMX Munich: Webmaster on the Roof Allstars Live panel - Marcus "Mediadonis" Tandler, Mikkel DeMib Svendsen, Bob Rains, Rand Fishkin, Ralf "Fridaynite" Götz, Johannes "Sistrix" Beus. (Photo: Simon Harlinghausen)}

20. "It's not about the conversion rate optimization tools, it's how you use the tools."
(A4uexpo, Conversion Rate Experts in "The conversion clinic")

19. "Good project management is the key to successful testing of landing pages"
(SMX Munich, Lennart Paulsen, Takken GmbH in "Optimization of landing pages & conversion rates")

These two quotes reflect in my opinion the most important things about conversion optimization: Wrong test setups, wrong interpretation of data and also too short A/B test are the most common errors when people try to optimize their conversion rate.

18. "Words are your conversion rate weapons"
(SMX Munich, Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer in "Optimization of landing pages & conversion rates")
 
17. "A landing page is never finished, you can always squeeze something more out of it"
(SMX Munich, Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer in "Optimization of landing pages & conversion rates")

16. "If my webdesigner designed this, I would ask him, to take the needle out of his arm"
(SMX Munich, Prof. Dr. Mario Fischer in "Optimization of landing pages & conversion rates")

15. "Maybe we need a little disclaimer here, because hacking is illegal in most countries"
(SMX Munich, Mikkel deMib in "Webmasters on the Roof Allstars - Live Panel")

14. "Don't use bid management as an autopilot for your campaigns. It's only a consultant."
(SMX Munich, Oliver Zenglein in "Bid Management 2010")

I totally agree on this: I tried a lot of different bid management systems and I would never let the bid management do my work. Good systems can be very usefull organizing your campaigns and helping you with making decisions, but it never replaces the SEA manager.

13. "This is important for merchants: if you use the canonical tag right, an affiliate can never get good rankings with the affiliate url!"
(A4uexpo, Dave Naylor in "Extreme SEO")

12. "Affiliates prefer a good conversion rate over a good commission"
(A4uexpo, Mark Russell in "Affiliate Managers Toolkit")

11. "It's not about selling to one person, but creating lifetime value with all persons"
(A4uexpo, Ton Wesseling in "Conversion optimisation & persuasion architecture")

10. "If you increase the number of words in your query, the results normally get worse."
(SMX Munich, Stefan Weitz in "Keynote: Search isn't search")

I really have doubts about this one, but I am using Google, not MSN :)

9. "2.7% of links are nofollowed, 73% of those are internal! So nofollow is used more often internally than externally"
(SMX Munich, Rand Fishkin in "Keynote:Lessons learned building an index of the www")

8. "Only 3% of the page responds are 301 redirects. 6% of the page responds are other redirects"
(SMX Munich, Rand Fishkin in "Keynote:Lessons learned building an index of the www")

Rand brought a lot of numbers to Munich. For me the most surpirsing ones were those two. It seems that in the web most people still use the wrong type of redirects (yes I know, there are reasons to use other redirects than 301 :))

Besides that rel=nofollow is used more often for internal links than external links. Interesting if you think about the reason why the nofollow attribute was created: fighting comment spam.

7. "The best link bait ever is probably one of my best friends who decided to have a sex operation. Now that's a f*****g link bait that works!"
(SMX Munich, Mikkel deMib in "Webmasters on the Roof Allstars - Live Panel")

6. "Microsoft should start attacking small children"
(A4uexpo, Dave Naylor in "Extreme SEO")

The quote was an answer to the question "What should Microsoft do to become no. 2 again?" Dave explained this quote a little later: he means that he (or "our generation") will never use Live, but kids could use Live. So Microsoft should get influence on our children.

5. "Do you build nofollow links? Yes, you should! Because you don't care about pagerank, do you? And even more YES, because normal users don't care about NOFOLLOW either. So if you don't have nofollow links it could be a footprint"
(A4uexpo, Christoph Cemper in "Advanced Link building, how to find and get those juicy links in 2009)

A very good presentation by Christoph Cemper. For a conference he really went deep into the subject.

4. "It's a strange situation: Users relying more on search, but expect to be disappointed"
(SMX Munich, Stefan Weitz in "Keynote: Search isn't search")

An interesting keynote and actually it is strange: after e-mail search is the most popular application on the internet, but the users are still not very positive on search and 1 out of 4 queries is succesful. Besides better search quality Stefan Weitz also plead for improving the user experience. I'm wondering why Microsoft is not trying this? Especially in Germany with their 5% marketshare they don't have much to lose!

3. "Newspapers are the blackhats of 2009!"
(A4uexpo, Dave Naylor in "Extreme SEO")

2. "F**k inspiration, get links"
(A4uexpo, Marcus Tandler in "Extreme SEO")

1. "Adapt paranoia as a lifestyle"
(SMX Munich, Rand Fishkin in "SEO & Social Media Marketing")

A very interesting presentation about Social Media Marketing. But why did I choose this quote as my personal no.1? Because I think that this reflects not only to Social Media Marketing, but also to "classic" SEO. Do whatever you want, but keep your mouth shut!