This coming December there are two overlapping SEO conferences of note:
- Webmasterworld, Las Vegas, Dec 4-7
- Search Engine Strategies, Chicago, Dec 3-6
Which one is better?
That depends on who you are. I have never been to any SES but from what I hear they (the US-based events) are great for SEOs to connect with potential customers, not to learn anything of value from an SEO knowledge perspective. SES targets:
- Online marketers
- Executives
- Business owners
- SEM/SEO professionals
- Media planners/buyers
- Webmasters
- Direct marketers
- Agency professionals
- E-commerce managers
Webmasterworld targets a smaller set of the above and draws its audience from its forum, which is mainly populated by affilliate marketers and SEOs. The main feature of the latter is that the participants are doers — the hands-on experimenters, experts, algorithm-speculators, and note-comparers. In short, you get useful knowledge there, provided you know enough to recognise the experts from the speculators.
I know many people who attend both SES and Webmasterworld, but SES happens many times a year across North America, so they have other opportunities. If they ran one after the other, I could have attended both. 😀 Which one do you prefer?