I have been asked to speak at CFUNITED Conference rather last minute on Advanced SEO - Beyond Meta Tags, and Search Engine Safe URL's.

So it will be fun to attend the best coldfusion conference out there this year. I am looking forward to meeting some of my blog readers, and colleagues that I have not yet met, and catching up with those I have. I also plan on attending the Blog readers and writers BOF.

So - Advanced SEO, eh?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has some bad PR (no pun intended). It is considered by some a black art, Simeon Bateman says:

"I consider SEO a black art that should only be talked about on stormy nights while people dance around the fire."

I think there are two sides to SEO, and to use a parlance that geeks can relate to lets call them the Dark Side, and the Light Side. My talk will be about the Light Side, which is more commonly called Organic SEO.

We will however discuss the dark side because lots of legitimate web sites suffer from penalties because they are doing something that a search engine may interpret as dark. One very common example of this is the duplicate content penalty.

The bottom line is: if you know a little bit about how search engines work, and how they penalize you - you can do pretty well.