Ok, sure, you could drop a couple of big ones and attend the SES conference next week, but you’d be missing the really cool stuff. Yup, the best information is shared by those who go by secret forum handles and tend to congregate in the bar, rather than go to the various sessions.

However, if you’ve decided to go to the actual sessions during the day, there is still hope for you. Joe Morin has put together a complete list of after-conference parties going on during SES. Make sure head to a couple of them.

I’d normally offer to meet you there, but I’m skipping NYC this year – shock, horror! That said, if someone wants to drop me a note about one of the super-double-secret parties going on, I might be persuaded to make the trip.

If you’re new to search engine optimization, and not really had time to build up experience with what works and what doesn’t, you’d be smart to head over to SEOmoz’s new Search Engine Rankings Factors study.

SEOmoz asked 37 SEO experts to vote on various factors that impact (or don’t impact) an optimization campaign. If you’re a believer in the “wisdom of crowds”, you’ll probably find a lot of value in studying the aggregate opinions of others.

I’d really wanted to spend more time looking at the full launch of Google Optimizer (announced last October), but sadly have been tied-up with clients this week.

Instead, ClickZ does the heavy lifting and provides a great overview of Google’s full deployment of the multi- variate/variant/variable (who knows what the correct useage is) product that allows web site owners to test the effectiveness of various page items.

“The main problem we’re trying to solve is to get people out of the dark ages in terms of how they develop pages,” Tom Leung, Google’s product manager for Website Optimizer, told ClickZ News. “All too often, they’ll just put a page together and maybe the designer will do a few mock-ups, and they’ll point to the one they feel is going to be the best one.” Leung says the goal is to help marketers convert their Web sites into a “living laboratory” and expressed the hope it will improve the usability of the Internet overall. Sites will, theoretically, provide more of what online consumers are looking for.