Danny Sullivan has founded a new company that is to arrange search engine marketing trade shows.

The founder of Search Engine Watch and the main man behind the Search Engine Strategies conferences has made his final move against the owner of SEW and SES, Incisive (see our article The Fall of Search Engine Watch for more information).

The new conference series will be called The Search Engine Marketing Expo series - SMX for short.

(Given Danny’s love for science fiction, we would guess that the SMX title is inspired by the British science fiction magazine SFX.)

The first show will take place in Seattle on June 4 and 5 next year.

Danny’s new company Third Door will also be responsible for the new Search Engine Land site on searching and search engine marketing.

In another interesting move, the new company has announced Search Marketing Now or SMN, a series of search marketing webcasts. This is apparently not a replacement for Danny’s search engine podcast, the Daily Searchcast, but much more feature oriented online radio shows.

All this means that Danny Sullivan and his companions now cover the same field as Incisive’s Search Engine Watch/Search Engine Strategies products — and more.

Incisive will find it very hard to compete with Danny Sullivan in this arena, unless they find someone with the same competence base and the same fame as Danny.

There are people like that out there. However, Danny has already recruited several of them — including his intended heir at Search Engine Watch: Chris Sherman — to his new conglomerate. Others are too busy running their own search engine marketing companies, while a champion like Brett Tabke of Webmaster World already has his own conference series.

Incisive is not giving up, though. Search Engine Watch is still running strong under the new leadership of Elisabeth Osmeloski.

UPDTADE DEC 7 2006: Webpronews reports that Rebecca Lieb has been promoted to editor-in-chief of the Incisive ClickZ network. Lieb will take over for Danny Sullivan, “providing editorial direction for the Search Engine Watch website.”

She has a SEW blog post on this matter: Moving Forward with Search Engine Watch :

“It’s a very daunting honor to be charged with the future of Search Engine Watch — Danny’s not-so-little baby — as editor-in-chief. It’s a change fraught with emotion and sentiment; for many of you readers, as well as for Elisabeth Osmeloski (who’s remaining with the site) and I.”