SES NYC Notes

• Posted by B Jones on April 11th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

Just thought I’d share a few notes from Search Engine Strategies.

Session 1:
Intro to Search Marketing (4 stars - for beginners)
Speakers: Danny Sullivan

This session was extremely basic, but Danny Sullivan is a pretty entertaining speaker, so it was pretty fun. I would highly recommend it for beginners.

Session 2:
Podcast and Audio Optimization (4 stars)
Speakers:
Daron Babin, CEO of Webmaster Radio
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services at Feedburner
Amanda Walington, Ph.D.,APR, Searching For Profit

I don’t publish a podcast, but I’m a fan of Daron Babin’s Webmaster Radio, and also am very interested in RSS and Feedburner, so I was guessing that this session would be really good, and it was.

Amanda Wallington spoke about a lot of the technical aspects of optimizing a podcast. It turns out that you can actually optimize your MP3 files with ID3v2 tags, which are used to store metadata in within MP3 files. There’s a place for a title, description, transcription, album art, and more, and they can all be edited with MP3 editors like Audacity or even Apple Garage Band.

Daron Babin spoke about several issues related to producing quality podcasts. He advised those thinking about starting a podcast to invest in a good microphone. He also had a really neat take on optimizing podcasts, which was that, since the recording should eventually be transcribed and included in the ID3v2 tag, you need to be very careful about the words you speak, and the, because you are essentially creating content right then and there. (I think it sounded a lot cooler the way he said it)

For obvious reasons, bandwidth is a huge issue for popular podcasts, and Daron recommended using a content delivery network like Akamai to host your podcasts, but be warned, it’s not cheap.

Rick Klau shared some great statistics that Feedburner has collected from over 100,000 podcast feeds that they publish for users. 2/3 of all people who subscribe to podcasts use iTunes, which is really useful to know. He also said that only about 1/2 of the people who listen to podcasts subscribe to them. The other half either don’t know how to subscribe to podcasts, or don’t want to, so they just download the mp3 files manually.

Rick also gave a great tip that I will surely use, and that was to optimize your rss page for users. Lots of us proudly display our big orange RSS icon, and assume people know what it is, but most have no clue. Most browsers do format RSS feeds, but they do it in a very dull way. He showed an example (that I can’t find now) that used XSLT style sheets to display the RSS feeds in a very user friendly manner that matches the rest of your site.

Lunch With Google Webmaster Central (3 stars)
Danny Sullivan moderated this Q&A session with the Webmaster Central (sitemaps) team. Matt Cutts wasn’t there this time, but Danny Sullivan answered a few questions as Matt, using a cutout of Matt’s head on a stick (very amusing). Vanessa Fox did most of the talking during the session. Pretty much any interesting questions were answered with the standard Google answers, like “Being in the supplemental index really isn’t a bad thing.” or “We only show a sample of backlinks for our link: search”.

A few interesting things I learned:
- Google can follow Meta Refresh redirects if they are set to 0 seconds.
- Link Juice can flow through links that are redirected, eg., if a site uses a redirect script on all outbound links, Google can still follow them.

Session 3:
Mobile Search Optimization (2 stars)
Speakers:
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC
Cindy Krum, Blue Moon Works
Rachel Pasqua, Director of Mobile Marketing, iCrossing

Since I enjoyed the Podcast and Audio Optimization session, I decided to check out Mobile Search Optimization, another Multimedia & Mobile Track session. The title sounded interesting enough, but the session was borderline depressing. None of the speakers seemed really excited about mobile search. Gregory Markel had really good things to say about Google Voice Local Search, Google’s local-business voice search available via phone at 1-800-GOOG-411. The info from this service is from the Google Maps/ Local info, and you can have your business included by adding it at Google’s Local Business Center.

There were a few good tips about mobile page optimization:
1. Since navigation can take so much space on a mobile site, you should add page navigation at the bottom of mobile pages instead of the top, so visitors can see content instead of the same navigation when they come to a new page.

2. People hate to scroll on mobile devices, so use jump (internal) links that link to the navigation and the top of the page every so often.

3. Popular mobile search terms tend to be shorter than traditional search terms (around 2 words).

Session 4:
Advanced Paid Search Techniques (4 stars)
Moderator:
Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speakers:
Jon Kelly, President, SureHits
Sharon Crost, Account Director, Red Bricks Media
Eduardo Llach, Founder & COO, SearchRev

I hadn’t planned on attending this session, because I really don’t do PPC, but it ended up being great. I actually missed Eduardo Llach’s talk, but was able to catch Jon Kelly, Sharon Crost, and the whole Q&A section with all 3 speakers plus Jessie Stricchiola. I must say, I was extremely impressed with all of the speakers in this session. Jon Kelly spoke about how to generating, and testing large lists of long tail keywords, for example, “car insurance quotes in Houston Texas”. One good tip was that when working with a big batch of long tail terms in PPC, usually the terms with the highest click through rates tend to be bad. He gave the example of using the term “mobile alabama home loans”, expecting traffic for loans in the city of Mobile, but ended up getting people searching for loans for “mobile homes” (like a trailer).

I liked the strategy of Sharon Crost’s firm, Red Brick, which relied on SEO to use along side PPC. The idea is that if you can rank for keywords in organic search, you can bid more on the same terms, knowing that most searchers will click the organic listing.

Another cool factoid was that 80% of searchers click on the top 4 organic results in the search engines, which shows just how important SEO is.

SES NYC Day 2 Preview
Day 2 is going to be really tough because there are so many great sessions to choose from, but here are my picks so far. If anyone has any suggestions about which sessions I should attend, I’m all ears.

Session 1:
Choice between 1) Link Building Basics, 2) Web Analytics & Measuring Success, or 3) Sitemaps & URL Submission
leaning toward #3

Session 2:
Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

Session 3:
Choice between: 1) SEO Through Blogs & Feeds or 2) Earning Money From Contextual Ads
leaning toward #2

Session 4:
Contextual Ads & AdSense Clinic

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