Search Engine Strategies, Chicago 2005
Day 1
I arrived at the Chicago Hilton on Sunday afternoon, shortly after a Bears/Packers game had been played in Chicago at nearby Soldier Field. It seemed as if every other person downtown was wearing some Bears-related clothing, and 1 out of 3 of the remaining where sporting Packers gear. Obviously quite a football town. I was very fortunate to run into Mike Grehan, the CEO of Smart Interactive, and go to dinner with him and a few others. I will be speaking on two panels with Mike, so it was nice to be able to get some more views about SEM from such a well-known expert.
Monday morning arrived and SES Chicago 2005 was underway! The first two sessions I attended were somewhat related, based on the subject matter presented: Video Search and Podcast Search. Knowing very little about either subject at the onset, I was very pleased to learn that it is not as difficult as I thought to get such content indexed and listed within various search engines. Starting with Video Search at 9:00, Chris Sherman, the Associate Editor of Search Engine Watch, welcomed everyone to what will be a fun and learning-filled week in Chicago. He introduced the first speaker, Suranga Chandratillake, from blinkx. Blinkx.tv is a Video Search Engine and a video delivery platform. He spoke about how content gets indexed within blinkx. They use META information placed by the content owner, speech recognition, Visual analysis, text on page, date, “and more.”
Suranga’s introduction led nicely to the next presenter, John Thrall, the Head of Multimedia Search Engineering at Yahoo! John is a man who seems very excited by his work. He detailed how Yahoo crawls thew Internet and uses RSS feeds to add video content to its index. He then stated something that would be echoed by the next two speakers: the page that the media is hosted on must be relevant to the video in order to rank well. “Hmmmm, sounds familiar to standard SEO,” I thought to myself; you need accurate and descriptive META information, and contextually-related content on the page…what is next? Linking? John answered my question with his next point, and explanation of “Media RSS.” His strong hint was that using this is “ a good way to get listed quickly.” He also added that products such as Flickr and Feedburner can automatically generate Media RSS.
The last two speakers, Karen Howe of AOL and Jon Leicht of SiteLab, provided more interesting experience. Karen gave an overview of the AOL product “Singingfish” in which 60 million streams have been indexed. Like blinkx, they also crawl the web, with highly-focused crawls into areas where “deep pools of content” can be found. They support many different META fields as well. John gave a nice summary of how they heave helped people get content indexed, and recommended many of the products and methodologies that the prior three speakers had.
The next session I attended was very similar. Titled “Podcast Search,” it turns out that one main factor is shared between video search and podcast search: the use of detailed META information in order to get content indexed. However the consensus also seemed to be that META data is not enough, and the most trustworthy method of properly indexing content was through the use of voice recognition software, which has its own limitations. This session was also moderated by Chris Sherman, and Suranga spoke again, joined by David Ives of tveyes, inc., the creators of Podscope, Joe Hayashi of Yahoo!, and Dick Costolo from Feedburner. These speakers all seemed to agree that META was important, and shared the sentiment that voice recognition software still needs major improvement. Joe also explained how the rating system used in Yahoo’s Flickr can really help propel a podcast to the top of a search. So he recommends having friends and acquaintances go in and vote for your content, if you want it ranked highly. If only he could promise this would be the case forever, I thought.
Lunch was a bit of a blur for me, as I was busy catching up with my blogging duties for Search Engine Roundtable. I did get a chance to briefly say hi to a few familiar faces, but essentially spent most of Monday either writing or walking to the next session. The first afternoon session I attended was actually the one that Barry (aka Rustybrick) was blogging. I noticed about halfway through that he was typing away on the other side of the room, so I ran over to “Global Search Landscape,” which was where I was “supposed to be.” As a quick recap of the high points that I heard in the first session, which was about targeting searchers with paid ads based on demographics, it was essentially an MSN-glorification session, deservedly so. It seems that the new MSN AdCenter really provides advertisers with far more information than either Google or Yahoo currently can. This includes information about demographics, geography, and time of day/week searches are more likely to occur for specific keywords. This is some very nice techno logy and I look forward to creating an MSN campaign soon. He advised that you (a search marketer) can be considered for the slow release into the US market by filling out the requested information at advertising.msn.com/msnadcenter.
The Global Search Landscape was aptly moderated by Nacho Hernandez of ihispanic.com, arguably the leading experts in the field of Spanish language SEO. He was joined by panelists Lucas Morea of Latin Edge, Andy Atkinskruger of Web Certain, and David Temple of TopRank. Although I was late, I got a recap after the session from my friend Nacho. Andy made two major points along with his nice review of the Internet marketplace in other countries, some developing and others simply still growing in terms of Internet-usage population. His first recommendation was to use the following model to measure a new market: Probability of Ranking + Internet Audience + Market Size. He followed with a suggested methodology using “trans-optimization” in order to optimize a foreign language site 1. Keyword research 2. Glossary 3: Translation 4. Optimisation.
Lucas spoke about the Latin American market and the various nuances associated with different forms of Spanish, as well as the much larger search “head” than “tail” in many Latin American countries. For those unfamiliar with these terms, a “head” means a less-specific search of one to two words. The longer a “tail,” the more modifiers are added to the search phrase. David concentrated on the Chinese market, considered by many to be one of the most bountiful markets on the Internet. He advised that even though many character sets seem to be the same, there are slight nuances which must be caught in order to avoid wasting time and money of Internet advertising or web presence, according to Nacho.
The last session I attended was a fundamentals session called “Search Advertising 101.” This session was moderated by Andrew Goodman, who is quite a good golfer, as some of you may remember from my San Jose recaps, and the speakers were Dana Todd of SiteLab and Matt Van Wagner of Find me Faster. I will not go into detail about either of their presentations, since most of the information is already available within the Instant Position tutorials. However, I will offer some highlights. Dana advised two very important things: organization and measurement. You must set base values and goals, ensuring you think on a business level. What actions do you value as a company? Leads? Visitors? Phone calls? Measurement is very important as well, and Dana recommends using as many measurement systems as possible to track conversions. Also, she reminds that searchers prefer uninterrupted logic. An advertiser should land people on the page that is most specific to their query.
Matt followed with an equally impressive overview, geared towards beginners, on the subject of search advertising. Two of his major points echoed those of Dana: he suggests monitoring performance and making adjustments methodically, measuring often, but not getting “analysis paralysis,” which causes the lack of any action due to an over flux of information. He also describes searchers as being “informavours,” or “wild beasts looking for information.” He warns that if they lose the scent, they will leave, repeating Dana’s comment about landing them on relevant pages. He also presented some good case studies about companies that had turned to PPC campaigns to help get them out of the red successfully.
Well, that was Monday. I was exhausted, but joined Ben Pfeiffer of RankSmart for dinner at the first Pizzeria Uno. Two slices were all I could eat! We waited an hour for the pizza, but it was well worth it. Ben is also the associate head honcho at Search Engine Roundtable, and we along with Barry make up the “triple play” blog coverage available at seroundtable.com. More to come tomorrow, including whether or not I bombed my presentation!
