Topics at the Search Engine Strategies Conference: What you can expect to learn?

Last Updated: 12/19/2003

The Search Engine Strategies Conference provided a tremendous amount of information to attendees. If you are new to the search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) field, you will learn a great deal in just three days. If you are an intermediate SEO/SEM, you will still learn a lot, and at the same time reinforce your current skills. But if you are an advanced SEO/SEM you will gain in other ways. The conference has something to offer to every one in the Internet field. The next paragraphs will review some of the tracks I had attended at this conference. For a more detailed and less organized review of the conference please visit my review of Day One, Day Two and Day Three. For a complete conference itinerary please visit http://www.jupiterevents.com/sew/fall03/glance.html. The remainder of this section will be a selection of sessions I attended during the three-day conference. Details of materials will not be discussed. Only an overview of the track and anything discussed that stood out will be mentioned.

Shari Thurow, a name synonymous with search engine optimization, was the single speaker for the Search Engine Friendly Design track. This track focused on how to design (code, layout and navigation of) a site in a fashion that is both good for your Web visitor and search engine spiders. The session's outline includes the definition of a search engine friendly web site design, the three search engine essentials and design considerations. The search engine essentials include something Shari calls the text component, the link component and the popularity component. This track is a must see for all 'newbies' to the field. Shari does an outstanding job of explaining the basics to any level designer and programmer. Shari Thurow wrote a very well organized book that goes into more detail then what she discusses at the track. I recommend that you read the book before going to the track. The book, Search Engine Visibility (ISBN: 0735712565) comes in both print and electronic versions and can be purchased at http://www.searchenginesbook.com/ or through your favorite online bookstore.

Andy Beal of KeywordRanking.com, Chris Copeland of Outrider Search Marketing and Dan Theis of SEO Research Lab presented the Search Term Research track. This track covered one of the most important areas of search engine marketing and optimization, how to best determine which keywords one should purchase and/or optimize their site for. Andy Beal discussed the importance of keyword research, how to actually select the keywords, the keyword research process, and the available tools to conduct keyword research, and gave very nice examples throughout the presentation. Andy also discussed some of the faults of the keyword research tools and some overall strategic decisions that need to be made during this process. Chris Copeland focused more on what needs to be done after your keyword research. Do you use organic optimization or paid advertisements? How do click-through rates differ when you tailor your description or use corporate name in the anchor text? Dan Theis took this presentation one step further by discussing the false self-satisfaction of ranking well for a specific keyword but (1) not getting click-throughs on that keyword or (2) not converting sales on that keyword. He also discussed other common mistakes of a search term researchers and how to avoid them.

Heather Llyod Martin of SuccessWorks and Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com presented Writing for Search Engines track. Balancing ones keyword density and readability within the content of your pages can be a hard task. Heather and Jill both explained how you could achieve a nice balance of both and rank well. Both described that you should not look at percentages such as keyword density, keyword divided by total words. You should first focus on making the page easy to read for the user and then look for ways to add your keyword phrases into the content. Both gave examples on how you can add these keyword phrases to your page copy. Heather was much more fluid and perky on the stage as compared to Jill. Both had very informative presentations but Heather claimed the prize for her speech delivery.

The final session for day one was the evening forum with Danny Sullivan. This session was an open-ended discussion where you can bring up any search engine related topic and Danny would talk about it. The first topic of discussion was obviously the Google Florida Update and Danny discussed it for a few minutes. He then began talking about the actual industry and where it was in the past and where it will be in the future. This was a very interesting and enlightening session and it gave the attendees the opportunity to be proactive in the conversation.

The morning keynote address for day two was given by Danny Sullivan. He discussed the Google Florida Update and the search engine industry revolution. Danny discussed his theory of "Invisible Tabs" and showed real life examples on how the search engines today are moving in that direction. It was basically a more organized presentation for what was discussed the night before at the Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan. The session was extremely interesting and thought provoking. For any of you expert SEOs, I recommend attending the keynote address at the next conference.

Optimizing Flash and Non-HTML Content track was designed to teach us how to take Flash or other non-HTML content and optimize it for search engines. The speakers for this track included Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative, Shari Thurow from GrantasticDesigns and Karen Howe from AOL Audio Video. Gregory's focus was on Flash content and how you cannot optimize it for search engines. The point of this track was to discuss how you should optimize Flash documents or implement "workarounds". Gregory gave ideas but quickly dismissed each one saying that he tried it and it didn't work. Shari gave a nice presentation as she did in the past; Shari's focus was on optimizing PDF documents. She eloquently gave examples of how you should optimize your page's content and the actual PDF document to rank well in search engines. Again, her book covers most of this discussion. Karen presented the most interesting component of this track, optimizing rich multimedia content. AOL recently purchased Karen's company, a search service that is designed specifically for rich media content. She explained the advances of this technology and how rich media designers often leave out the Meta data that is so crucial in determining the relevancy of the content. Overall, this track was disappointing - maybe the title should be changes to "Workarounds For Flash and Non-HTML Content". There was no discussion about how to use the "noscript" or "noframes" tag. When the question was brought up during the Q&A session, Shari said that you should not use the tag - make an HTML equivalent site. The session was about optimizing for non-HTML content, not about realizing that you cannot optimize for non-HTML content.

One of the best tracks at the conference had to be "Link Building" presented by Paul Gardi from Teoma/Ask Jeeves, Mike Grehan from iProspect, Eric Ward from EricWard.com and Marissa Mayer from Google. Paul Gardi explained how link popularity works on Teoma, which happens to be very different from how PageRank works on Google. Mike Grehan then gave an enlightening overview of the science behind Teoma's "link equity" structure. Eric Ward gave a nice presentation on how to get good quality links and then discussed some philosophical points on PageRank that was very interesting. Marissa Mayer discussed how Google's PageRank works with a nice one liner, "links are proxies for human judgment of page value". She explained that PageRank is not the only component to how Google ranks a page and should not be the single most sought after goal for a search engine optimizer. Make sure to catch this session at the next conference, it's a must see.

One of the new tracks, Getting Local is one of the hottest topics today in the search engine industry. The speakers for this track included Dick Larkin from TransWestern Publishing, Cheryle Pingel from Range Online Media, Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement, Richard Holden from Google and John Ellis from Overture. Getting Local was more focused on the paid side of search engine marketing then the organic side. The Google and Overture representatives both gave demonstrations on how their pay per click models work with the local component. Very impressive stuff; and it is a safe bet that the technology to target local customers will continue to grow and be enhanced. The other two speakers discussed how they pick keywords to target the local traffic to their sites. Overall this presentation went well, and you should expect more information at the next conference on Getting Local.

Meet the Crawlers has always been and will always be one of the most attractive sessions at the conference for a search engine optimizer. Where else can you get representatives from the top search engine all in a single room? The representatives for the search engines included Jon Glick from Yahoo! Search, Steve Gemignani from Loosmart, Craig Nevill-Mannig from Google and Paul Gardi from Ask Jeeves. Each speaker went over some of the new and exciting features that were added to their engines. Yahoo! showed off its new SmartSort feature in the Yahoo! Shopping portal. Yahoo! also pointed out that Inkotmi inclusion could possibly also get you listed in the Yahoo! Shopping portal. Looksmart is working on an interesting new method to crawl updated pages or fresh content. Instead of crawling pages on set intervals like many of the crawlers do, they will look at an individual page and then determine based on how often that individual page is updated, how often they should send out their robot to that page. Google now allows you to type in UPS, FedEx, airline reservation, patent and more numbers and will automatically give you the information you seek. Paul Gardi again discussed Teoma's unique method of determining link popularity but he also showed how Danny Sullivan's invisible tabs theory is making its way into Ask Jeeves.

Overall you can expect to learn a great deal from the Search Engine Strategies conference. There tends to be a lot more sessions for novice SEOs/SEMs but there is something for all levels at this conference. Most of the basic information you can easily learn by reading Shari Thurow's Search Engine Visibility book, but the conference does give you the ability to hear from the best. For a more detailed review of the conference, please visit the Search Engine Roundtable Weblog and the posts for day one, day two and day three.

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