I’m blogging from the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference in Seattle - the inaugural event of a new series of search marketing-related conferences put on by Danny Sullivan’s new company. Besides that, it’s also supposed to be “advanced,” in that a lot of the intro topics covered at SES conferences aren’t being discussed.

Instead, there are two tracks, one for organic optimization, and the other for paid (PPC) search. So far there’s been lots of quizzing of Google’s SEO public face, Matt Cutts, on a variety of issues, as well as discussion of search personalization, gaining visibility through exploiting social networks, duplicate-content issues, and new developments in PPC networks such as Microsoft’s adCenter.

All the “celebrity” SEOers are in residence and on the speaking agenda, and there’s live-blogging and Flickr-posting underway. Though there haven’t been any great revelations so far, I have to admit it’s great to hear Matt Cutts, or Yahoo’s Tim Mayer, speak on the record about certain SEM issues, rather than weighing what all the industry blogs and forums are guessing about. Today’s social-marketing session was, by itself, worth coming to the conference.

As is typical in this industry, the networking and shop-talking opportunities are also, by themselves, worth the price of admission. Just got back to the hotel room from the evening Yahoo reception, at which I learned much from a couple of guys about domain-parking as a career strategy. Next up tonight, however, is the Google Dance reception, which should yield some quality schwag as well as more good discussions.