Day 2: Search Engine Strategies Conference
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006Ok, day two was awesome. Busy, but awesome.
The first session was Bulk Submit 2.0. This session mostly focused on the new sitemap.org format agreed upon by Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The interesting part of this session explained that bulk submitting through sitemaps is the new preferred way of submitting a site. No more single domain submission. They also went over techniques for optimizing a sitemap which is very important.
The second session was Landing Page Testing and Tuning. This was a very informative session. The panel went over tactics for A/B and Multivariate testing of landing pages. They also went over some current issues with regard to testing. For example, because analytics is not as easy to gather for organic testing results, PPC testing is really the easiest way to test pages for the majority of people at this point. It is also the easiest to control with regard to traffic.
The third session of the day was Fun with Dynamic Web Sites. As the title implies, this was a very fun session. Basically, the old rumor about dynamic sites having trouble getting indexed was thrown out the window. In fact, the panel gave numerous examples of dynamic sites that rank higher than static sites. They did give some parameters to stay within when developing a dynamic site. Basically, it’s all about the URL structure. Too much session ID’s and the crawlers get confused. There are also some duplicate content issues to watch out for when building out dynamic pages.
The final session of the day was Beyond the Single Site Mentality. It was really a tough decision to choose this session over the other great sessions offered, but this interested me because of the great success I’ve had with in depth landing pages. The panel went over two main case studies. The first was of a Phillips campaign for a men’s razor. It was a micro site they developed that had a separate vanity domain, and had the same look and feel of the flagship site. The results of course were great. Traffic was shifted from the micro site to the flagship site. The second case study was from a very niche product that had a small market. So small that they decided to make it seem larger by creating multiple micro sites and optimize each micro site for a single keyword. None of the sites had the look and feel of the flagship site, and they also had completely unrelated domain names. The results again were great. So, the conclusion I came away with is that micro sites work; it’s just a matter of structuring the micro site to your specific needs. Also, the obvious benefit to a micro site is that they are much easier to manage from a search engine marketing perspective.
Tomorrow should be another very involved day, so I’m going to bed.


I’m a search marketing, social media and web development professional from St. Louis, MO. Aside from the aforementioned, I enjoy home brewing, charity work, studying history and anything related to technology.