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Search Marketing Tips from SES 2008 San Jose - Day 1
August 18, 2008 by Erik Cunningham
This week, I’ll be attending my fourth Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA. I’ve been blessed to attend the conference every two years since 2002 and have enjoyed it every time. I’m staying at the Marriott which shares a wall with the San Jose Convention Center. The close proximity allows me to run up to my room between conference sessions (and blog) if I want to, which is great.
I passed on the SES Conference Welcome & Orientation this year. I figured, “If I don’t know what’s going on here by my fourth trip, I have bigger problems to worry about”.
Speaking of problems, I noticed there weren’t any free conference t-shirts in the goody bags this year. I better hang on to my old ones from previous years. They might be collector’s items!
I did receive two free books however which more than makes up for the missing shirt. “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath & Dan Heath and “Against the Machine, Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” by Lee Siegel were both included with our conference materials. I look forward to reading them both in the weeks to come.
The conference this week offers five different search engine strategies related tracks that attendees can follow - World View, Search 2.5, Search Industry Track, What’s Next? and ClickZ Track. After looking at the conference schedule, I plan on attending sessions from at least four of the five tracks offered.
Here’s a quick overview of my experiences on Monday (day 1) of SES 2008 San Jose and some tips from the sessions I attended.
Day 1 Agenda
What’s Next? - More Customers, Fewer Costs - Why Marketing to the ‘Long Tail’ Makes Sense
9:45am - 11:00am
I was surprisingly wide awake for this first session. Here’s what I took away from the presenters:
- At least 30-40% of all internet searches are made with “local” intent
- Long tail search terms are cheap options for paid placement and easy to rank well for in SERPs because of limited competition
- Many websites (especially ecommerce sites) receive the majority of their traffic from long tail search terms
- Conversion rates are higher for long tail search terms than generic search terms because they are more specific to the user’s intent
- SEOs can optimize for the long tail search terms through dedicated content pages combined with internal link anchor text and by including the terms near back-links in blogs, local business listings and Google Maps
What’s Next? - Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives?
11:15am - 12:30pm
I’m new to the topic of semantic search but I left the session with a better understanding of the general concept behind it. Semantic search is intended to be an improvement upon today’s standard of keyword search. I thought Erik Collier from Ask summed up the philosophy behind semantic search best when he said that users shouldn’t have to rephrase or reorder their query to get the results they’re looking for.
Semantic search will one day allow searchers to use natural language in their search queries rather than “caveman talk” as Kevan Ryan, the session moderator so eloquently described it. In the next few years, queries like, “Bruce Willis Movies” will be replaced by, “What movies has Bruce Willis starred in?”.
From an SEO perspective, semantic search may shift the focus of code and content from keywords to context. Dust off your thesaurus boys and girls. It looks like SEOs will be using a lot more synonyms over the next 5-10 years.
Another important element of semantic search, according to Amit Kumar from Yahoo! Search is the delivery of structured data content from website publishers to the search engines in the form of Microformats and RDF(a) Markup. RD… what? I’m not familiar with either of these formats but I hope to publish a post on the subject after I’ve done some research.
Keynote Panel - How Much Search is Enough?
1:30pm - 2:30pm
Unfortunately, this panel discussion on locating and securing funding sources for search marketing didn’t afford me much more than a couple of good photo opportunities.
The session did feature an all-star panel. But listening to a group of SEOs discuss financial issues on the first day of the conference wasn’t enough to maintain my interest. Sitting in a low lit room right after lunch didn’t help matters either.
What’s Next? - Everything But Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options
2:45pm - 4:00pm
I really enjoyed this session on advertising alternatives to Google AdWords. I was most impressed by Sage Lewis’ entertaining, practical and straight-forward presentation of what alternatives for paid advertising exist and which offer the lowest CPC (cost-per-conversion).
From the study results that Sage showed us, the three best advertising solutions from a CPC perspective were Looksmart, Ask, and SuperPages. The “Big 3″, Google, Yahoo! and MSN offered more traffic, but at a much higher cost per conversion.
Sage wrapped up his presentation by recommending that advertisers run tests of their own with different providers and seek referrals from colleagues that have done the same.
Keynote Presentation - Lee Siegel, Author of “Against the Machine”
4:30pm - 5:30pm
I skipped this last presentation so I could organize the day’s information while it was still clear in my head. And as I mentioned earlier in this post, we received this book as part of our conference materials and I was afraid that the author might give away the ending.
That’s it for Day 1 at SES 2008 San Jose. I hope to post my experiences from Day 2 tomorrow or the day after.
— SEO — Tags: long tail marketing, search engine strategies, semantic search, ses 2008
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