Welcome attendees of the SheBlogs Conference! I’m about to go onstage to discuss SEO and blogging. It is a tough act to follow the excellent keynote speech by Guy Kawasaki about Enchantment. His new book was given away to everyone here at SheCon courtesy of Citrix and looks like a great read.

His point about being trustworthy is very salient. Perhaps it goes without saying, but you should not believe everything you read on the Internet. That goes for everything you hear at conferences too. Before going to see someone’s panel, you should search for them online. That’s why I wanted to reward the curious with a sneak peak about my topic. I’m going to talk about my experience applying enterprise SEO skills to my food blog.

Hopefully you found the right Adam Edwards. It is difficult because I have a much more common name than Guy. Plus I have not invested as much into personal SEO as perhaps I should, since I am always busy doing that for my clients. However, I encourage you to read my profile on LinkedIn and decide if the session is worth your time. Finally, if you read this far, you might also be interested to learn more about the full service social media agency where I work or the immigrant integration non-profit venture that I advise as part of its board of directors.

Please drop me a line if you read this!

Another recent online power grab involves Facebook’s changes in privacy SEO. Most of the information gathered in social networking is used to improve the relevancy of advertising presented to you (be it behavioral or retargeting).

Yet Facebook’s recent changes in layout and linking unveil an even more ambitious plan. They want to become a hub for all brands, products, and artists on the web.

It’s true that you can hide all of your fan pages in green that fit into Facebook’s pigeon holes of activities, interests, movies, books, or music. There’s a good chance that most listings here will have their own fan pages, except for books which should list authors instead.

(Mark’s profile information that is publicly available; the interests in green can be hidden but the section in yellow must be visible to everyone, even outside of Facebook, if your settings allow visibility in search engines)

However, when you log in, you can discover some interesting user experience decisions that determine the data displayed above.

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Prospective clients often ask me how you can prove there is a potential for improvement when there are countless competitors or seemingly no room for growth. This is particularly important to the field of search engine optimization (SEO), which some feel is harder to forecast than advertising. My mentor, Mike Levin, often talks about how there is a finite number of searches happening everyday. You might be able to slightly influence that level through publicity, but generally marketers all fight over the same piece of the pie in their industry.

(Shigeru Miyamoto holding a Nintendo Wiimote, photo from Sklathill)

But what if you could grow the pie instead? The Nintendo Wii is one of the most famous case studies for this very idea. Miyamoto-san looked outside of the current market and connected with a non-traditional audience. Now more people are playing games than ever before.

How can you visualize that latent potential?

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Last night I gave a short talk on web traffic analysis to a data mining class taught by my friend, Dr. Aleks Jakulin, at Columbia University. Sharing the podium with Dr. Hilary Mason from Bit.ly and Blaz Fortuna from the Josef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, I decided to present a primer on the web analytics industry and leave the science to the experts.

It is a rare 400 level course with no prerequisites, so some students come from a statistics background while others study mathematics or business. What could I say that would be useful to all three disciplines? The main point I wanted to get across was simply the importance of acting upon your insights, regardless of whether you pursue such interests for academic or financial reasons.

I still find this to be the largest problem within web analytics today. At HitTail, we championed the idea of actionable analytics in 2006 (and even before that in Connors’ client offerings). Now, suddenly other companies keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

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