This is coming to you from cold, snowy Chicago at the Search Engine Strategies Conference 2009. I have to say at the beginning that the hotel this conference is at hosted is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!! But not only that, the sessions today have been very insightful.
KEYNOTE: This morning the keynote speaker was Jeff Jarvis who is the author of What Would Google Do? He spoke in response to Rupert Murdoch’s plan to hide his sites from Google. Murdoch claims that Google is bringing poor leads to websites, but Jarvis responds stating that “Google gives [you] 100,000 opportunities a minute to create loyal readers and generate revenue for FREE” and “it’s your fault if you don’t know what to do with them.” The remainder of the time he spoke on the changes of how news is reaching all of us and how the “Gutenberg era is over.” He gave a quote from a college student in New York that summed it up pretty well — “If the news is important, it will come to me.”
FIRST SESSION: “Search Analytics” with speakers Jim Sterne, Matthew Bailey, and Dennis Mortensen. I learned the most from Matthew Bailey who talked about how to segment your data – if you don’t segment you aren’t going to learn the right information from your analytics data. Dennis Mortensen spoke on what a lot of people would consider a radical idea – instead of search engine optimization we should be looking at search engine de-optimization. Don’t worry about having the highest ranking for a search term, but instead de-optimize to get lower in the rankings. This will allow you to have better leads and in the end more conversions. He did make the disclaimer that this will not work for all industries or companies, but it was an idea to think about.
SECOND SESSION: YouTube & Video Optimization with Greg Jarboe. YouTube receives 10 billion video views a month which is the same amount of search queries Google receives in a month. He gave 3 basic steps to do when creating a YouTube campaign – Discover, Watch, and Share. The biggest thing is that if you create a video that people are watching it won’t be worth anything if people don’t share it! 45% of videos are discovered from a video site like YouTube but 44% of them are found on blogs that have videos embedded on them.
THIRD SESSION: Link Building Basics with Debra Mastaler. She gave a quick overview of why links are important along with some tools that can help with with building links. She mentioned having a link policy on your site – tell people they can link to your site, but give them an incentive to do so (a free t-shirt, for example) and then use a press release to announce the incentive.
FOURTH SESSION: 20 Secrets of Top-Converting Websites with Bryan Eisenberg. He was a very energetic and entertaining speaker and even though I could give you all 20 secrets I don’t want to give them all away! He spoke on how to create your landing pages so that they will cause more visitors to convert. A few secrets that spoke out to me were:
- Reinforce the offer sitewide – from the ad, to the landing page, to the form they fill out, to the thank you page make sure the same message is shown throughout including images, colors, text, etc.
- Make your forms engaging even up to the thank you page. He made a good suggestion – put specials on the thank you page – never thought of doing that!
- Appeal to multiple persona’s and segments. Realize that every person that comes to your site is going to have different needs and is going to act differently, so make sure your landing pages appeal to different types. One site that does this well is http://www.mint.com.
FIFTH SESSION (and final for this long day!): Beyond Googling: 5 Years Later, it’s a Different Audience with Bill Scott, Javed Panjawani, and Anne Kennedy. Each speaker spoke on where they believe search is going.
- Javed Panjawani from WolframAlpha believes that computation is the new trend in search – it is more of a personal type of search and WolframAlpha just released this type of technology this last May and has been very successful with it.
- Bill Scott from EaselTV sees suggested discovery as the new trend in search making search more of relationship-based. He said that search is going to start to be more relevant and that the consumer will be the one controlling their results instead of the search engines.
- Anne Kennedy sees search being more visual and mobile. One research found that people get info from visual data 28% faster than from reading text and the iPhone browser is the 4th most used browser in the world.
I know that these are only summaries of the sessions, but if I were to type up everything I learned I would be finding a book publisher! Check back tomorrow for a rundown of the sessions I’m attending and pick up a few more tips.
