I’m sitting in the audience at the Expert Technical Review Of Your Website session at SMX Advanced in Seattle. Most people are attending the Give It Up! session where some of the big names in the SEO industry are spilling their guts on some of their industry secrets. Those of us who are attending this website review session, however, are being treated to a live SEO analysis of sites submitted by the audience by moderator Vanessa Fox (Features Editor, Search Engine Land) and panelists Nathan Buggia (Lead Program Manager, Microsoft), Evan Roseman (Software Engineer, Google)
Mohit Srivastava (Co-Founder, Faves.com), Derrick Wheeler (Senior SEO Architect, Microsoft.com, Microsoft).

Falling in with the prevailing theme of Developer Day, the advice is not in the form of search engine manipulation, nor high-risk SEO tactics, but rather is a focus on ensuring sites have a solid underlying architecture with a logical linking structure, clean markup, and quality content.

It was clear from the number of people in attendance at the Developer Day sessions today, that there is a healthy interest from the SEO community in addressing architecture-level issues, which I am personally thrilled to see. I was surprised to be facing a packed room (plus overflow) when I joined fellow panelists Thomas Deml (Senior Program Manager, Internet Information Services, Microsoft), Nikhil Kothari (Principal Architect, Microsoft),
Duane Nickull (Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems), and Jeff Pollard (Chief Technology Officer, SEOmoz, Inc) to discuss search-friendly architecture across the Microsoft and LAMP stacks, and some fantastic advice on using Flash and Silverlight while still offering crawlable content to the search spiders.

To anyone that was on the fence about attending SMX Advanced this year, I definitely recommend attending next year if you have even the slightest interest in the development side of search engine optimization. Even if development isn’t your cup of tea, there are also invaluable sessions on organic search, paid search, and the business of SEM.