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Day 3 at SES Conference & Expo 2008 San Jose
August 21, 2008 by Erik Cunningham
On my third day at SES Conference & Expo 2008, the sessions I attended were focused primarily upon organic search engine optimization and social media.
The day’s sessions were a large contrast to my experiences on Day 2 which revolved around search marketing and pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
Here’s an overview of what I learned.
Day 3 Agenda
Organic - SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
10:30am - 11:45pm
Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing opened the session with a description of his company’s experiences with toprankblog.com. He recommended that bloggers let their goals for their blog drive their content. He also suggested that bloggers should find ways to automate the optimization of their content as much as possible and promote their blog by linking to and commenting on other blogs in their community.
The panel preferred WordPress to any other blogging platform 3 to 1 but recommended that bloggers choose the platform with the highest availability of tech support.
Daron Babin from Webmaster Radio gave a different SEO perspective. He admitted that he hates blogs, and opts for article syndication and RSS feeds instead. When promoting his company through feeds his favorite outlets and tools are Feedburner and MeFeedia.
Searcher - Searcher Behavior Research Update
1:00pm - 2:15pm
The focus of two of the four presenters at this session, Pavan Lee from Microsoft and Bill Barnes from Enquiro Search, was the branding benefit or “lift” created by the presence of a brand’s name in multiple locations on the same search results page. “Lift” was defined as a percentage increase in the likelihood of memory recall and recognition of the brand by internet users in the study.
Enquiro’s study revealed that the presence of a brand name in the top position of both paid and organic search results led to a 16% lift in brand association and 8% increase in purchase consideration in non-branded searches. The study also revealed that brands, large or small, can benefit by being associated with other popular brands in the same industry.
In Microsoft’s study, Pavan revealed that the appearance of a brand in organic search results can lead to a 30% increase in brand awareness when combined with both text and display ads which is a larger increase than the sum of each of the placements individual effectiveness.
Organic - Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
2:45pm - 4:00pm
The main conclusion drawn from this session on duplicate content was that duplicate content can be created unintentionally in an infinite number of ways and corrected by 301 redirects. Best practice suggestions for avoiding duplicate content included the removal of session ids from internal link URLs, the use of related plugins for blogs like WordPress, and the implementation of server rewrites in cases when multiple paths lead to the same data (eg. paths involving locations).
Social Media - Facebook, Feeds and Micro-Blogging
4:15pm - 5:30pm
The day’s final session was an overview of the features and benefits of popular social media and micro-blogging sites like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. The most notable recommendations from the session were from Andy Beal and Dave Snyder. Andy advised that, even if brand owners don’t have the time to participate in activities on these sites at the present time, they should claim their brands as a defensive measure.
Dave suggested that social media and micro-blogging sites are great tools for “online reputation management” and that, in addition to monitoring what others are saying about a brand, brand owners should be careful what they say when participating in “conversations” on these sites.
That brings day 3 at SES Conference & Expo 2008 to a close. Please watch for my final report on this year’s conference in San Jose in the next couple of days.
— SEO — Tags: micro-blogging, organic seo, rss feeds, social media
2 Comments »
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Sounds like you got a lot out of the conference. What area did you get the most out of?
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Hi Melinda and thanks for your comment. I enjoyed the social media sessions but probably benefited most from PPC and SEO tools panels.
P.S. - Sorry for the late reply. There was a comment bug in the last WordPress theme I was using but I rolled out my own and it seems to be working fine.
Comment by Erik Cunningham — September 6, 2008 @ 11:10 am
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