Search engine marketing has come a long ways since its early days of pioneering entrepreneurs. This was made evident at the
recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.
You can see the changes on the faces of representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Fortune 100 companies. You can hear
the changes when talking to the swarms of SEM consultants, agencies, and software vendors. Indeed, if there was any one place
where you could feel the excitement of the SEO industry, it would be at Search Engine Strategies.
The growth of this conference alone indicates the maturing of an exciting industry. This year's conference hosted over 4,000
attendees.
The growth of search engine marketing could also be seen in the packed auditorium listening to Danny Sullivan's conversations
with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Yes, my friends, our industry is growing and this is one of the most exciting times to be involved in trends that are transforming
the face of advertising. We are changing the face of publishing, with offline newsletters losing much of their audience to online
publications. The Internet is quickly becoming the preferred news and information source over television, magazines, and trade
publications.
If you were present at this year's San Jose conference, then you surely experienced hours of great content, wonderful people, and
a general air of excitement. If not, let me fill you in on what I believe to be one of the greatest conferences this industry has
to offer.
Let's begin our journey at a session called Searchonomics. The Internet, the numbers were quite exciting. David Hallerman from
eMarketer announced that online advertising spending was expected to reach over 20 billion next year. By 2009, Internet ad spending
is expected to be bigger than radio ads.
If you sell products online, you may find it interesting that 74% of online users are looking for more information about a product
or service. 66% of U.S. adults often or always research online before buying and 55% of U.S. adults often or always research
online to find the best price.
Another hot topic at this year's conference was social search. Chris Sherman stated that algorithmic search has plateaued and that
humans are still better at creating a more relevant search system. Thus the popularity of social search, which is powered by the
wisdom of crowds.
There are a number of different social search platforms.
One of these is shared bookmarks and web pages. This can be found at sites like del.icio.us, shadows, furl, and diigo. There is
another category known as tag engines. This includes technorati and bloglines. In addition, there are also personalized verticals,
which include eurekster and rollyo. You are probably also familiar with collaborative harvesters, which include sites like digg,
netscape, and reddit. The last category of social search platforms are social Q and A sites. Some of the most popular examples
include Yahoo Answers, Google Answers, and AnswerBag.
However, social search also comes with a number of potential issues. They include ambiguity of language, lack of controlled
vocabulary, and spammers who try to take advantage of the system. Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch.com believes that the
ultimate solution will be a combination of both algorithms and social search. This will lend to the creation of "trust networks"
and an increased level of personalization.
One company that is leading the way in personalized search is Eurekster. I had the pleasure of talking to Grant Ryan, CEO of
Eurekster, about the benefits of social search. This company has created a truly customized experience for the end user based on
the wisdom of crowds.
Eurekster actually allows the user to train the search engine over time. If you're a publisher, you can use a Swicki to create a
customized search engine for your own website.
To add a Swicki search engine to your own site, go to Eurekster.com.
Another session that I especially enjoyed was Search Algorithm Research. In this session the panel presented some of the top SEO
research papers that provided insight into how different search engines rank a web page.
Search engines are becoming much more transparent in identifying what they are looking for when ranking a website. Of course,
we'll never know the exact algorithm, but there are always clues. Listed below are some links to some research papers you may
want to check out.
SpamRank
Pagerank Revisited
Site Level Noise Removal
The Original PageRank paper
Topic-Sensitive PageRank
Combating Web Spam with TrustRank
Block Level Link Analysis
Topic-Sensitive PageRank: A Context-Sensitive Ranking Algorithm
Hilltop - search based on expert documents
Convergence of PageRank and HITS Algorithms
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment
Lexical and Semantic Clustering by Web Links
MSN Antispam detection - affiliate link patterns
Undue Influence: Eliminating the Impact of Link Plagiarism on Web Search
Rankings
The Independent Search Engine & Directory Network paid inclusion program can't be
matched by Google, Yahoo! or MSN. We offer:
Another informative session was News Search SEO. This session went into detail on how to optimize press releases for maximum
exposure in the news search engines.
The key point was optimizing your press release for targeted keywords. As I have discussed in a
previous article, press releases perform best when they are
optimized for the news search engines. They should be optimized in much the same way that search engine optimization specialists
optimize ordinary web pages in order to achieve higher rankings.
Unfortunately, the keywords used in news search engines are different from those used in the traditional search engines.
The panel presented a solution to this problem. Google News Suggest allows
you to find keywords that are used specifically in the news search engines.
Another emphasis was based around the benefits of social media press releases. With today's technology, you can now include a
variety of multimedia formats with your press release, including mp3 files, podcast links, photos, and even videos. If you are not
using all of the tools available to you, then you are missing out on additional exposure.
The last day of the conference was a flurry of activity as thousands of people filled the auditorium to hear Danny Sullivan
interview Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. They discussed Google privacy issues, click fraud, Google's recent partnership with MySpace
and MTV, Google Adsense, and the future of Google.
You can listen to the entire interview at
blog.searchenginewatch.com.
I hope this article has given you a small glimpse into what an exciting event this is. If you'd like to get even more coverage on
the event, visit:
SearchEngineLowdown.com.
If you are involved with search engine marketing, I urge you to make it to one of these conferences. Not only are they fun and
informative, but it is also one of the few times that you will be in a room full of people who are passionate about the same
topics as you.
About The Author
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and
SEO-News newsletters. You can also find additional tips and news on webmaster and SEO
topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog. Kim's email is: kim @ seo-news.com
