SES Conference Recap: Chicago, 2005

The following are a few of my conference notes and key take-a-ways:

Day 1 Notes

Searcher Behavior Research Updates

My first session of the day was "Searcher Behavior Research Updates" and I just about walked out within the first 30 seconds. Mark Neal of Galleon, the first speaker at this particular session, actually stood at the podium and stressed how important it was to have your website listed on the first page of the search engine results... as if everyone in the room didn't already know that. In fact his whole presentation was just that. He explained the benefits and so forth for being on the first page which is completely mind blowing seeing as though this whole conference is based around that general concept. Obviously we all understand this idea or we wouldn't be at the show. We definitely didn't need Mr. Neal's 15 minute presentation to tell us so.

Just so that I am not completely bagging on Mark Neal, he did provide this interesting statistic:

"90% of all visitors delivered from search engines are from the first page".

I new that that the percentage would be high, but, never did I think that it would be as high as 90%. An interesting piece of information I thought.

Another statistic that caught my attention during that session was provided by Jon Stewart of Neilson Net Ratings and it was this:

"62 million searches typed a website name directly into a search box this year, representing 40% of the online universe"

So what does this mean? It means that there is a large amount of lazy search engine users who just type in "www.yahoo.com" or "www.google.com" into their browser's home page search box instead of taking their mouse and clicking in the main URL box. Another interesting piece of info.

Search Term Research & Targeting

My second session was "Search Term Research & Targeting" with Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance and Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs. This was a decent session with lots of good keyword research suggestions and tools.

Search Engine Friendly Design

After lunch I checked out the "Search Engine Friendly Design" session with Shari Thurow. Honestly the presentation itself was enjoyable and informative, but I didn't really like how Shari presented herself and in fact I never do. She comes off as being very arrogant and cocky... maybe it's just me though.

Ads Beyond Search

For the last session of the day I attended "Ads Beyond Search" presented by the ClickZ Forum. As the name hints on, the session discusses other marketing ventures and opportunities outside of Search Engine Marketing. Overall, this session wasn't anything impressive.

Day 2 Notes

Keynote: Danny Sullivan

I started off day 2 of at the SES conference by attending Danny Sullivan's Keynote presentation. As usual he focused his speech on the Search Engine Marketing industry and where it had been, where it is now, and where he foresees it to be in 2006. You've got to give it to Danny... he can draw and entertain a crowd even at 9:00am in the morning and after a long night at the bar for most of the attendees. He is truly a great speaker.

News Search SEO

My first session started at 10:15 which was "News Search SEO" with Greg Jarboe and company, and it in its own right was pretty interesting. It offered lots of cool PR info and tips for getting your content in the top news engines.

Landing Page Testing & Tuning

After lunch I attended the "Landing Page Testing & Tuning" seminar which turned out to be pretty informative. This wasn't the first time I've attended this session as I've seen it once already in San Jose. As with last time, I found myself learning something new and of value that could be used to improve my client's optimization and design efforts. In fact Tim Ash of Site Tuners, who in my opinion is one of the better presenters at these shows, offered some great slides on what to do and what not to do in your website development. Ash provided ideas and concepts that I never thought about until he pointed them out. He's definitely a speaker that I would encourage everyone who attends these shows to see.

Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines

Later on in the afternoon I attended the "Meet The Blog & Feed Search Engines" session where Scott Johnson of Feedster unveiled their brand new an upcoming website redesign. I thought it was very cool for him to reveal it for the first time ever at the session and if I would have thought about it then I would have taken and published pictures of it. I am not all that familiar with the company or its products, but he introduced a few new search features that even I could appreciate. The new design should prove very useful among its everyday users. Sorry I can't provide you with an exact day for the launch of the new site, but I'd expect it to go through shortly.

Day 3 Notes

My SEM Toolbox

I very much enjoyed the "My SEM Toolbox" session. During this discussion speakers Jim Boykin, Paul Bruemmer, Todd Malicoat, and others laid out some of their own personal tool sets and kits for saving time on many common SEM projects. In fact Todd Malicoat, author of Stuntdubl, one of my favorite Search Engine Marketing related Blogs, provided this link to his tool box: http://www.stuntdubl.com/tools. Enjoy.

Evening Forum: Danny Sullivan

I attended an evening forum presented by Danny Sullivan. This was a relaxing and humorous discussion-like session which allowed attendees to pose questions to Danny or directly to the audience. In fact a representative of Yahoo! Search was also attending and found himself on the spot answering many Yahoo! Search related questions.

Day 4 Notes

Organic Listings Forum

My first session on Thursday, the "Organic Listings Forum", was headed up by an all-star team of marketers staring Bruce Clay, Todd Friesen (aka Oilman), and Mike Grehan. This was a tremendous session in which the panelist discussed many of today's most popular SEO issues such as the Google Sandbox theory, duplicate content problems, and industry standards.

Bruce said something interesting during the session:

"Google has improved by about 95% in their ability to detect if an incoming link is 'good' or 'bad', (based on unknown criteria) and has actually created a list which is referenced before credibility or weight is given to the website."

In other words, SEO marketers can go out attain as many links as they desire, but Google may or may not consider them all for when determining ranking... which is actually quite fair if you ask me.

Meet the Crawler

I attended the "Meet the Crawler" session. At this presentation, representatives from Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and everyone's favorite butler Ask Jeeves touched on the similar issues discussed in my previous session and also on their abilities to crawl, index, and present Internet content.

Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud

My last session of the conference was "Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud" which, much like every other time I've attended this session, was a panel discussing (or not discussing for that matter - referring to Yahoo! and Google) the same click-fraud type issues and reporting no new ways of preventing it. Google and Yahoo! representatives claimed that they were not entitled to speak on many of the questions presented because of ongoing legal cases that their respective company's were involved in... which left for a pretty dry session.

If interested, I've published my 2005 SES Chicago Conference Photos on Flickr.