Search Engine Strategies Chicago Coverage Day Two
During Day Two of Search Engine Strategies Chicago, the Search Engine Roundtable crew; Barry Schwartz, Chris Boggs, and Benjamin Pfeiffer, have been making their rounds of the search sessions and also covering what’s been going behind the scenes. Here’s a rundown:
News Search SEO (very press release oriented) : Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR is on the podium talking about how many fixate on Google News and ignore Yahoo News and AOL News. Now Yahoo! news is number one! Yahoo! news is number one. SEOs and PR people need to focus less on outputs and more on outcomes. Getting high rankings helps, if searchers read your release. Having searchers read your release helps, if it enhances your brand awareness. Enhancing your brand awareness helps, if it drives traffic to your site. Driving traffic to your site helps, if it generates leads. Generating leads helps, if they convert into sales. Optimizing press releases activity varies by industry from 1% to 18%. The number one industry catching on to SEO PR releases is the computer/electronics industry…
Creating Compelling Ads (Moderated by Andrew Goodman) : Creative evaluation is all based on goals. Are there two main types of creative, Google or YSM? Or many more? The answer is only the two main formats are important, they can be recycle into MSN and others. Step 1 of 3: Titles: Most important part of a listing. If you do not catch the attention of the searchers, all is for naught. Use KW in title, but recommends against Dynamic Keyword Insertion tool…it can hurt as much as it helps. At YSM, simple: customize all keyword titles…
Business To Business Tactics : Chris Sherman opens up the sessions discuss briefly about the B2B space. Is search marketing effective in this space? Is it counter productive? He says yes it is effective.
The first speaker up is Karen Breen Vogel from ClearGauge, and starts by talking about her company and what they do. They help leverage the internet to acquire and retain customers with a focus on establishing benchmarks and improvements to ROI. They are not technically a search marketing company, they are an eMarketing company….
SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia, and Tagging : Nick Wilson couldn’t make it last minute, so Jim Boykin and Aaron Wall jump in for him. Why is tagging is important: Search engines have tended to index and search a global space not on a local space. My space comprises the documents I am interested in and the documents of other users that I trust and want to follthw. Tagging allows you to relocate info quickly. Yahoo! My Web caches pages you tag… Brief history of tagging and info retrieval (bookmarks, dmoz, yahoo, search engines, self regulating, and then tagging itself). Just slap a tag on something and now its value become social and not individuals. What tags do really well is aid social discovery. What is tagging?…
Meet The News Search Engines : There are about 25 people in the room. Andrew Goodman jokes about how we have a small by hyper interested group. I have attended this session before, and it’s been good but I hope they present some interesting information this time around..
Nathan Stoll from Google is up first to talk about Google News. He is going to present some historical background for Google News and where it came from. He will continue to discuss how Google News functions, no trade secrets unfortunately, but a nice overview of how it works…
RSS, Blogs, and Search Marketing – Join The RSS Revolution! : Danny opens the session saying this is the “Blogging is Dead” panel, nice joke to jumpstart the session.
Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit is up first to discuss all three elements of the session. Blogs in the last year have gone from the warm puppy to not so much. She quotes some humorous quotes from places like BusinessWeek and Forbes. Next there are quotes of the same places slamming blogs as evil. So why the debate about Blogs? The good is that they can rapidly spread the “meme”. They can provide a personal or human face to corporations. Can provide valuable feedback through comments and trackbacks. They are bad because they can spread misinformation, rants, and wrong information….
Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines : I was looking forward to the “Google Print & The Copyright Debate” session but it was cancelled. 🙁 So now I need to go to a session about blog and feed search engines; they are all filled with spam anyway. Detlev is modding up this session. I believe Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo! was unable to make it, so someone may take his place…
Successful Site Architecture
Successful Site Architecture : Came in late due to speaking in the previous session…as I entered Derrick was speaking about making sure that you do not accidentally get a site that is still under development indexed. If your development server is not password protected, you should ensure that the Robots.txt exclusion code is in the site’s pages, just in case Google or another search engine was somehow to find it. This also applies to using Sessions IDs, but in the reverse. You should turn Session ID requirements off in order to not dissuade the spider from indexing your content. Be careful with cookies, they sometimes also attach session IDs, which will hurt. Some sites require cookies to be turned on in order to view content. If this is the case, the search engines will not be able to see the content. Derrick shows quite a few examples of sites that were well-ranked before sessions ID’s/cookies were enabled/required…the results in the “after” showed tremendous loss of rankings and traffic.
