In Vegas, in the hotel room at the Renaissance. Couple of things that might help the newbie thinking about coming to Pubcon.

The Renaissance is great. Best thing about it is the location to the Convention Center. You can walk back to the hotel, get a coffee, and be back before the person, who is rambling on during their power point presentation, finishes. It is a bit pricey. Even at Brett’s rate I still had to pay premium on Friday night and then again on Monday when I came in early. Some buddies stayed at other locations and really didn’t seem to miss a beat. One thing about not having your hotel right next door is that you actually stay at the convention center and probably get a little more for your money. Being so close allowed me to nap a little too often.

This is my fourth Pubcon and things have grown exponentionally over the years. This year was packed. Yahoo and those guys didn’t throw a public party because of all the folks. Figure they thought the tab was going to be too high. There were private parties, which added a bit to my sort of declining feeling about the whole experience. It’s starting to fragment off into who’s who and “who you know” and “rockstar this” and “rockstar that”. Nothing against the rockstars, most of them are completely down to earth and are just getting pushed up to the mantle as this thing grows and grows. But none the less one feels a bit isolated for the core which was easily accessible in the earlier PubCons. I wish Brett would limit the size or give preferential treatment to webmasters who have signed on as paid members of his forum and have been around for a year or more. (This idea is attributed to Tim Macdonald from The Found Agency)

One takeaway I’ll share with you is from Alex Bennett from Beyond Ink. She shared, in her Tools from the Trade Session, some neat little plugins from RankQuest.com and http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus .

The RankQuest Tool is a tool bar which allows you to see things about the page without having to jump back and forth between a number of sites. It will do Validations, Text to Link Ratio, Keyword Density, Alexa Stuff, Search Engine Saturation, etc, etc. All based on competitive analysis. It’s pretty handy. Also comes with a link checker to help you snuff out old links that have become abandon.

The Quirk Biz tool is pretty cool as well. It slides right down into the bottom right of your window. Gives you Page Rank, Alexa, Highlights NoFollow Links, and a whole score of other intelligent analysis tools.

If you want the real lowdown as far as the session are concerned then you have to head over to SeoRoundtable.