19 things I learned at PubCon Boston 2006 (Webmaster World)

Here are a few things that I learned at my first PubCon, in no particular order:

1. Not everyone that’s online has a technical background. Don’t act like they do.
2. To sell more effectively, trigger emotions in favor of your product or service.
3. One-page-wonders can be effective sales tools.
4. It is necessary to have external links to your site’s pages (from related sites with high-quality content.)
5. Always be split testing improvements to your pages.
6. Make your pages W3C compliant.
7. Submit sites to Google Sitemaps.
8. 301 redirects are necessary for moved pages and frequently requested non-existent pages.
9. Perform your due diligence on sites before acquiring inbound links.
10. Create content that catches eyes quickly on SERPS (both PPC ads and organic summaries.)
11. “Better late than lousy”
12. React and counter attack against bad Public Relations.
13. Follow the $$$ but work in markets where you have interest.
14. It is possible (and ambitious) to obtain control page #1 of SERPS for specific search terms.
15. Study what your competition does and use it to improve your competitive advantage.
16. “Create pages for users, not search engines”
17. Properly send a 404 header when using custom 404 error pages.
18. Don’t have any dead-end pages on your site. Always have a way to continue to other areas of your site.
19. Site menus are seen as content, use them wisely.

I will be touching on a few of these points in more detail over the next few days. Be sure to check back later. Who knows? You may learn something new too.