It’s been nearly two weeks since the SMX Advanced conference was held in Seattle, but it’s about time for my recap. Barry and I arrived in Seattle late Sunday night, so we missed a pretty good Microsoft party. While that’s a bit sad (and I’ll try to make the next one), the conference series showed that there was much else to be enjoyed.

There’s a great amount of conference coverage. My BFF the Lisa and her partner in crime (she’s actually a real person after all), Susan, covered all the sessions, and my newest Florida friend, Rhea Drysdale, blogged on Search Engine Journal. Andy Beal and Jordan McCollum also filled some gaps over at Marketing Pilgrim.

Carolyn Shelby and I both blogged for Search Engine Roundtable, and our SMX coverage of each individual session is linked below for your enjoyment and edification:

• You&A with Matt Cutts
• Duplicate Content Summit
• SEO, Meet SMM
• Personalized Search: Fear or Not?
• Keynote with Satya Nadella of Microsoft
• Debate: Is Bid Management Dead? (Disclaimer: As I said on Search Engine Roundtable, this was the hardest thing to blog. Ever.)
• Pump Up Your Paid Search
• Beyond the Majors

The phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” has been brought to a brand new level on the World Wide Web.

Consider the mindset of your users. A penetratingly ugly website design can negatively impact your site and visitors, despite the fact that there may be great content — and especially if you’re a relatively new player in Internet Marketing.

I’ve encountered a few sites, including those of family members, that have been begging for a good Internet Marketing campaign. And I’d like to help. However, I personally feel that these sites don’t necessarily only call for good marketing. Many of these sites need something else. Upon looking at website design and usability, I realize how these two important elements truly go hand-in-hand with a successful campaign that can really translate traffic into results. In today’s day and age, a successful website needs incoming links, the ability for people to want to talk about your site — and to be acknowledged among peers.

Cameron recently discussed how social media optimization focuses on more of an “on-page” effort which entails “improving the design and usability of the website so that it becomes more compelling to users” [emphasis is mine]. A relatively new site needs more than just good content to be compelling. Design and usability are key.

Given that I’ve only recently become involved in Internet Marketing, it still is something that I am learning more and more about, and there are a lot of blog posts and books that have helped me along the way. In light of my anti-Digg post, I wanted to take this moment to appreciate the best [blog] posts in the Internet Marketing world of the year — those that have significantly increased my awareness of this exciting field. That said, these are mostly how-to and tips/secrets posts, where some come from a beginner’s level and others are more advanced. I’ve done a lot of digging (this was mostly by hand rather than from existing bookmarks!) and am hoping I have included a huge chunk of them, though I realize that this has been a tremendous undertaking and there are simply too many blog posts out there (thanks, guys!). Since I started reading SEO blogs mid-year (and I can’t possibly read all of them on a regular basis), I know I’m missing more! If anyone has any essential posts to add, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Without further ado, here are some of my favorite posts of 2006.

I read with interest about Dean Hunt’s bizarre Google request where an online store owner threatened him via email since Dean’s blog ranks better than the store for a particular keyword term. He writes for a partial SEO-themed blog, yet he needed more advice from individuals on a number of forums (with a link to his story, of course, one of which was removed).

I wrote about the story myself (since I think it’s a good lesson regardless), but I can’t help but wonder if this was all a scam. I mean, after all, Dean wrote on October 4th that he will be creating a viral campaign with the intention to promote his site via related sites. And since his site is still really in its infancy (138 blog posts in 6 categories since June), I don’t think that his blog could truthfully rank better than an established online store.

Without providing the search terms in question for verification, nobody is really able to believe that Dean is actually telling the truth.

Well, maybe Matt Cutts can — if Dean really told him.

So — which is it?

SEOs worldwide were shocked by the Search Engine Strategies Chicago Keynote of earlier today given by Jason Calacanis, who said “SEO is BS, if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly.”

Despite the fact that many SEOs did get offended, I’m beginning to wonder if Calacanis had other intentions by making that statement. Really, the content of his speech was worth “linking to” and discussing. His name is getting out there. He essentially is “attacking link attention with controversy” (thanks, Rand) and giving himself a lot of publicity as a result. I think Graywolf is really proving the point.

If you have “good content” or something that’s worth talking about, people will refer to you. People will talk about you. That’s how you build reputation. On the Internet, that may very well be called SEO. And I bet that Calacanis cleverly orchestrated his speech with this exact intention.

I wonder how many searches in Google/blogsearch will yield an exact result for Calacanis’s quote. I bet there are quite a few thus far.