Tanner Hobin

Ok, 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.

The SES Conference is going GREAT! Day one was very hectic. I registered around 8:30 and got a bag of goodies.

The first session I attended was entitled Video Search Optimization, and all I have to say is WOW! All the experts are tagging Video as the next great online experience. The greatest part is that many people are producing Videos but not properly optimizing them, so the market is still wide open.

The second session was titled Meet the Video Search Engines, and this was even more interesting than the first session. I learned that YouTube.com is not a Video search engine at all. Hmmm, so what is YouTube.com? It’s simply a platform for loading videos to Google owned servers. Where as sites like AOL Video Search, SearchForVideo.com, and Blinkx.com are all video specific search engines. The really interesting part of this session surprisingly touched more on video optimization than the first session. Mostly because the video search engines are pioneering voice recognition programs that are used in conjunction with search algorithms to transcribe the audio from a video and produce relevant videos for a specific search query. Really cool stuff, and this section of online marketing is so new that its like SEO was 8-9 years ago. Basically, if you get in early you own the market segment.

Finally I had a chance to eat lunch, and it couldn’t have been a better group to dine with. I had lunch with the Google Webmaster Central Crew. They went over the basics of webmaster central tools, Google sitemaps, and showed off some new tools. The best part about lunch was that Danny Sullivan was the luncheon moderator. If you don’t know who Danny Sullivan is, you better look it up. The guy is an SEM Guru.

After lunch I attended a session titled Podcast & Audio Search Optimization. Very similar to the first two morning sessions; its considered a very hot area of online marketing, but there are some different issues faced by Podcaster’s compared to video. Basically, I learned that the correct encoding format is critical to being indexed properly. The good news is that the session provided a ton of free tools that I will post later. If you can’t wait just email me. Another big name was part of this session; Daron Babin, the CEO of Webmaster Radio. If you haven’t listened to the station, you’re missing out. The guy is a genius.

Finally, the last session of the day was Ad Testing: Research & Findings. This session was extremely detailed. We got into some really cool heat maps and analytics. My notes are all jumbled. I’m not sure if it’s because it was late and I was tired, or I couldn’t make sense of the info. Basically, I learned that A/B testing and Multivariate testing is essential to a successful ad campaign, and it’s a never ending cycle.

Ok, it’s late and I have another day of this stuff tomorrow.
I’ll provide another update tomorrow.