Back from PubCon, Jessica Lee and Bruce Clay point out some of the highlights of the conference. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, was the featured keynote, and he shared his opinion that, despite some attention-seeking claims, SEO is not dead. Liveblog coverage of the keynote recalls Matt’s logic: SEO is not dead because SEO is a type of marketing. And marketing appeals to human nature and that’s never going to go away.” Marketing, it seems, only evolves. Jessica points to a move toward holistic digital marketing strategies, and the introduction of Marketing Land, a new sister site of industry gold standard news site Search Engine Land that will cover the growing realm of Internet marketing, including social media, affiliate marketing, email marketing and more.

Then Aaron Landerkin, software development manager, walks through how to use the Keyword Suggest Tool in the SEOToolSet suite of diagnostic SEO tools. The tool gathers keyword data primarily through Microsoft. It looks into adCenter numbers, including demographics for people searching for keywords, and categories in which a keyword is classified. This comes in handy, for instance, if you’re trying to target keywords that are broad and part of many categories as it helps to know what categories the search engine associates it with. To use the tool, enter a seed word or set of seed words and get suggestions based on one of three factors: 1) related searches; 2) larger keyword phrases that include the seed words; and 3) other words advertisers bid on when bidding on the seed word or phrase. Info on average cost per click, click through rate and categories are also presented.

Wrapping up the show, Aaron, Virginia Nussey and Michael Terry discuss currently proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress that would greatly hamper protected speech rights online. It creates a slippery slope that could lead to popular sites going out of commission as they would have to police content to the point where it’s not profitable to run the site. Content would be required to be taken down with as little as a copyright holders say so. The act appears to be stalling in response to public pressure.

The Bruce Clay team has been attending a number of conferences recently. In our latest newsletter, Lisa Barone and Susan Esparza debated the benefits of attending both large and small conferences. With marketers facing the continuously evolving online space, attending training and conferences are vital investments. Along with staying up to date on trends, tools and methods, conferences and training are also great opportunities to network and increase brand awareness.

Then, the Bruce Clay IT Manager Aaron Landerkin sits down with Robert to talk about the role of IT at an SEO/SEM company and the unique challenges IT must meet in the marketing industry. As IT Manager, Aaron’s tasks include updating and managing tools and programming projects, checking the status of internal networks and servers, and creating custom tools and reports for analysts and clients. Aaron’s experience as an SEO has been helpful, but not required.

Finally the hosts discuss industry news. According to a Hitwise report on the most searched for brands of last year, it appears that Google is overcoming the address bar as far as navigation is concerned. One of the most searched for brands is YouTube, which has racked up 73 percent of the online video market. Requiring such a high amount of bandwidth, it makes our hosts wonder if YouTube is partly causing global warming… just kidding!