SES NY Day 4 - Wrapping It Up, Along With Some Random Thoughts

by Scott Allen

The SES conference has continued to be a great experience. Last evening, after the conference sessions were over, many of us headed over to Spotlight Live in Times Square for the SearchBash event. At the coaxing of friends, I got up on stage and did a cover of “When I Come Around” by Green Day, a little throwback to my days in a rock band. Good times.

I attended some excellent sessions today, most notably being the “Usability & SEO: 2 Wins For The Price of 1″ and “Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions” sessions. Anyone attending the latter will know why that made the list. Sorry, inside joke. :)

Unfortunately today was the last day of the conference, and all good things must come to an end.

Random Thoughts and Reactions

As promised, Iâ€™ll share some of my own random thoughts and tips that came to mind during the sessions I attended this last week. I was a bit surprised in some sessions when certain elements or obvious tips (at least obvious to an SEO professional) were left out, and on occasion, there was flat-out misinformation that I need to comment on.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) / Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social Media Marketing can often drive traffic more quickly at the beginning of an internet marketing campaign than SEO alone. It’s less stable than SEO, but has a quicker start time. However the most effective strategy involves integration of SEO and SMM.
A surprising lack of mention of Sphinn.com. (It may have been mentioned at other sessions, but it wasn’t mentioned at any of the Social Media sessions I attended.) That’s a must-use site for internet marketers. I wonder, is Sphinn a dirty word at SES?
As I mentioned in my last post, several of the speakers from ad agencies (and certain search engines **cough** Yahoo **cough**) spoke of Social Media like it’s a new thing. Amazing.
One speaker mentioned that if you are going to utilize SMM heavily it is essential to have a good web host (so it doesn’t go down if you get “Stumbled” or “Dugg”), but I would add to that - if you’re blogging on WordPress (which many SEO/SMM-conscious bloggers are), install a good cache plugin, such as WP Cache, to lighten the server load when the Social Media traffic slams your site.

Social Media Marketing - What is it and What is it Good For?
(Day 3 - Wednesday, March 19, 2008)

Jory Des Jardins of BlogHer mentioned that commenting on blogs is a great way to rank for your name. It immediately struck me that this is terrible advice. Most blogs utilize the rel=”nofollow” tag on comments, so there would be no SEO value in that. Some blogs have removed the nofollow from comment links but these are too few and far between to be handing out this advice without any clarification. I acknowledge that there is a certain amount of disagreement on the value and implementation of nofollow, but based on everything my colleagues and I have seen, we believe it is enforced.

Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization (SMO)
(Day 3 - Wednesday, March 19, 2008)

Tamera Kremer of Wildfire Strategic Marketing shared this golden nugget: You can use Social Bookmarking (Del.icio.us, etc.) to augment your keyword research. My reaction was: This is a brilliant strategy! She basically was saying that you do this a couple of ways. One is to search for a keyword you are looking to target (keywords you associate with your brand), and then see what comes up and what other keywords people are tagging those pages with. The second is to take a look at the site you’re trying to optimize (and competitor sites) and see what pages are in Del.icio.us, and how they are currently tagged.
The last point sparked this thought: Del.icio.us works extremely well as a search engine. If you want to find relevant results, start there. Especially where modern culture and society are concerned. I’ve found some of my best results this way.

Web 2.0

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
(Day 3 - Wednesday, March 19, 2008)

Only one speaker clearly explained the importance of unique URL’s when optimizing Web 2.0 sites. That’s an extremely important point for those newer to SEO.
The speaker from Google was terrible, and offered a lot of bad information, including advice on dynamic URL’s. He was advising the crowd to use a specific type of dynamic url (”/page.php?query=value” type URL’s) when he should have been advising them to use URL rewrites and search engine friendly URL’s (”/page-query-value.php” type URL’s). Unbelievable.
Every single speaker left out this very important point for JavaScript and AJAX: Many developers over-use client-side scripts (AJAX, JavaScript) for functionality that can be accomplished with server-side scripts (PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, etc). When optimizing for these sites, try to accomplish as much of this functionality with server-side scripts and use the client-side scripts as a last resort. The value being that when scripts are processed on the server side, the results will be output as html, which is readable by search engines. I explain this in more depth in a previous post on AJAX SEO.

General Observations

Surprisingly, many speakers continue to utilize PowerPoint presentations that are extremely hard to follow: white background, tiny text crammed together, and lack of images. At this level, I would hope they put in more effort than this in their everyday business presentations, especially when pitching new clients! Wow. To be fair, many of the speakers did have their act together and had solid presentation visuals, that were easy to follow. I have to say that a few even did an exceptional job, and kudos go out to the following for having great presentations that were well-done and extremely engaging: Chris Winfield of 10e20, Matt Bailey of SiteLogic, Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide, and Liana Evans of KeyRelevance.

Well, that about wraps it up for my random thoughts and reactions. Till next time!

Tags:
SES NY | seo | sem | smm | smo | social media marketing | social media optimization | AJAX | WebGeek