Tanner Hobin

Day 3 and 4: SES

Posted on December 26th, 2006 under Search Engine Marketing. | Comments Off

Ok, so I know it’s been about 3 weeks since the Search Engine Strategies conference ended, but here’s my day 3 and 4 update anyway.

Day 3:

Linking Strategies
This was a very insightful session exploring new and previously used link building strategies. The panel basically reviewed what to look for in a site to link back from, as well as the increased importance of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) regarding internal links. One of the more interesting portions of the session was about gathering orphaned links through expired domains. Personally, this strategy seems a little black hat, but whatever works for you.

SMO (Social Media Optimization)
The new realm of search engine marketing is SMO, and it’s here to stay. This session explored the growing number of sites devoted to social media. Sites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, and Yahoo Answers have revolutionized the online experience by bringing people together. Anyone can publish to the internet and collaborate with the world. There is a huge opportunity for search engine marketers to use this tactic to spread the word online. I like to think of it as buzz-marketing via the web. Digg It!?

Link Baiting & Viral Search Success
I really enjoyed this session because it brought the previous two sessions full circle. Basically, linking strategies and SMO can be categorized into one area which is Link Baiting and Viral Marketing. This session went over some important issues to consider when starting a link baiting campaign. Some of the issues include the lack of real staying power, inability to accurately measure results, and the inability to control your call to action. However, one particular benefit did stick out, the advantage of leveraging negative feedback.

Blog & Feed Search SEO
I enjoyed this session but felt like it was more of a refresher. The panel went over the obvious advantage of having a blog and maintaining an RSS feed. There were some great tips regarding where to distribute your blog and feed.

Day 4:

Big Ideas for Small Sites & Small Budgets
This session was pretty fun. No specific ideas were discussed. It was mostly case studies of what has worked well for other sites. The panel did however reiterate that a user friendly site is for the most part search friendly. Search engines are simply trying to replicate human judgment, so if your site has a logical layout and speaks the customers language it will be search engine friendly. I realized in this session that coming up with that big idea is tough, but it really doesn’t have to be if you just concentrate on filling a void.

75 Minute Search Abs
I know, it’s a weird name but worthy of being the last session of the conference. This session was basically a search engine optimization free for all. Some great tips for maintaining an optimization came from this panel. One tip is to check Lynx to see what the bots see. Another is to check a pages code to text ratio to help avoid code bloat. Yet another is to make sure an pdf file on a site has relevant meta data for indexing.

There you have it, Search Engine Strategies Conference at a glance. Or at least the part of the conference I attended.