SES San Jose 2008
Mary Bowling | 25 August 2008 |
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Fellow Blizzard SEO, Carrie Hill, and I are back in the office after a whirlwind week at the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Conference in San Jose California. Organizers estimated that about 6,000 Internet marketers attended this flagship gathering in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
Plenty of Search Engine staffers were on hand from MSN, Yahoo and Google, both as speakers and attendees. The infamous Google Dance was Glow in the Dark themed this year and had us rubbing elbows at the GooglePlex until way after dark.
The big themes at this year’s conference were:
Landing Page Optimization from Tim Ash and Post Click Marketing, which Carrie spoke about on a panel with Scott Brinker of Ion and the inventor of Google Optimizer, Tom Leung packed them in. These critical concepts focus on what happens after a visitor lands on your website. Do they immediately leave? Which other pages do they view and how long do they spend on them? Do they buy something from your website or call you? Tracking and tuning visitor behavior and continually testing pages and click paths can bring a big lift in conversions on a website. If you’re not doing this yet, it’s definitely time to get on board.
The Long Tail of Search Marketing, how to get more and better customers with less money and effort, was another recurring theme at the conference. It was discussed in sessions about everything from keyword research to on page optimization to pay per click advertising to shopping carts to Local Search. If you’re not taking advantage of this powerful concept, you’re probably paying more than your competitors do for the same number of sales.
Social Media Marketing was the third hot topic of the week. While many hands-on sessions talked about the how-tos of making the most of social sites, the main takeaway was that Social Media marketing is no longer a cutting edge concept. It’s now a mainstream tactic that everyone should be using in the best way possible for their particular business.
We’ll delve deeper into some of these topics, so stay tuned for more.
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August 26th, 2008 at 4:19 am
Greatly enjoyed your presentation on marketing to The Long Tail, as well as Carrie Hill’s presentation in the Post-Click Marketing session! I look forward to seeing you at future shows!
August 26th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Hi Scott,
It was an honor I hope I’m lucky enough to repeat in the future! Thanks for making me feel so welcome!
~Carrie
August 26th, 2008 at 9:16 am
I missed the Long Tail presentation, but strongly believe that this should be standard curriculum for all search marketers. In his book (possibly the best business book I’ve read in years), Anderson uses high-flying case studies like Netflix, Walmart and iTunes — but the beauty of long tail economics is illuminated small business as well.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I am gald to come across such a nice post which is brief,to the point and very informative. Learned many things from this article. Thanks a Lot :)
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
I usually not a jealous person but I am now. I had to leave the west coast to go to Chicago for a big family event. I really wanted to attend. I am glad that so many of my fellow SEO’s got to attend and have been sharing their experience and made me feel I had been there. Thanks .