It
has been some time since I've attended a Search Engine
Strategies conference, (mainly just because of our own busy
training event schedule) but with Chris Sherman's Search Engine
Strategy conference being conducted in Toronto on May 4, I
managed to put some time aside to attend. As our readers may
know, both Robin Nobles and I used to attend these conferences
more often and Robin would often be speaking on a panel at these
events too. As we have grown busier and busier, we just have not
had the time to attend these events the way we used to. However,
my recent visit to the Toronto SES conference on May 4 proved to
remind me of how much fun these conferences are as well as very
nice networking opportunities to meet people and pick up news
from the search engines themselves.
May 4, Toronto
Ontario Canada at the Metro Toronto Convention Center was a
little smaller conference than say the one in New York, but
enjoyable all the same. Presentations of the day ranged from
between fair to highly satisfactory and it was a pleasure to
walk around visiting the various exhibitors.
Registration was
nicely set up, where you walk in to the counter and pick up your
pre-registration passes. I was handed a traditional goody bag
with conference materials which included a very nice workbook
outlining the day's activities. I can remember in the early days
getting hand outs, but the workbook was a nice touch.
First Session:
Cleaning Up Spam
Moderator: Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of
SearchEngineWatch.com
Presenters:
Shari Thurow, GrantasticDesigns
Anne Kennedy, Beyond Ink
Mathew Bailey, The Karcher Group
Attendance
for this first session was by my own estimate, approximately
about 65% to 70% but keeping in mind that there were 2 other
different sessions in progress at the same time, including
"Introduction to Search Engine Marketing" with speaker
Danny Sullivan and "Search Advertising Clinic" with
Andrew Goodman.
Presentation
by Shari Thurow was fair and mainly focused on case studies of
how not to Spam. Anne Kennedy's presentation was a compliment to
Shari's and I thought Anne did a very nice job. One observation
I have always had about this type of session, is the speakers
really don't have too much time to speak on the topic, with 3
people presenting and often the presentation time is around 10
to 16 minutes (or less) in order to leave some time for
questions and answers.
One can never assume that all SEOs understand the implications
of Spam and by the end of the presentation with Matt Bailey,
between all of the presenters, there had been numerous examples
of what not to do, how not to Spam and the consequences of
performing Spam.
Best
overall tips from the sessions, in my own opinion, were from
Anne's presentation where she admonished everyone not just to
"avoid Spam" but to avoid even the "appearance of
Spam." How many Webmasters ever even read a Search Engine's
guidelines?
e.g. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
e.g. http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In the Questions and
Answers portion of the program, I appreciated that Anne Kennedy
took the time to explain for example to explain that there are
acceptable uses for a "landing page." In these types
of sessions in the past, I think far too much time has been
spent proclaiming things like "All doorway pages are
wrong!" but never taking the time to really help the
audience understand what is right and proper.
In the early days of
law enforcement, when they were teaching officers how to detect
counterfeit money, or how to tell the difference between a phony
dollar bill and a real one, there was one effective strategy.
The most effective way was to teach people how to detect a
genuine dollar bill. In other words, once you have studied the
real genuine thing, once you know it and understand it, you'll
never ever be fooled by a phony one. However, you can study
thousands of phony dollar bills and still never learn to
determine a genuine one.
In other words, I
think this session could benefit with more focus on how to build
a quality information rich page (rather than just focusing on
giving examples of Spam.) Once the audience understands how to
do the job properly, they'll never feel the need to turn to Spam
nor would they ever have anyone else pull the wool over their
eyes again. Just an observation, but interestingly,
there were even some "self proclaimed" Spammers in the
audience, who wanted to simply admit it and had questions about
how to clean it up. I guess that's a great sign that the message
delivered by the speakers had been effectively received.
End
of Session One: Cleaning
Up Spam
Next it was on to
visit a few of the exhibitors for a few minutes before the next
session.
The exhibitor layout was quite close by and yes quite a few
familiar folks were there. I actually ran into several of our
own past SEO Mastery Workshop students who were in town for the
conference. One of the nice things about these conferences is
meeting other SEOs and people you know as well as meeting a few
new contacts too.
The Exhibitors at
the Toronto SES Conference included:
-
Google
in Booth 107 (naturally, it's always a pleasure to drop by
their booth)
Drop by www.Google.ca or www.Google.com
- Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
-
MSN
Search Booth 205 http://www.sympatico.msn.ca
With Sympatico broadband services, MSN's Hotmail,
Messenger and Search services
Check out their
safety center to help users protect their computers,
children and personal info.
-
ActivAction.ca
Booth 101
This is a network of Canadian web sites distributing
contextual advertising
100% Canadian, Canadian sites, Canadian keywords and
Canadian dollars.
-
Direct
Marketing News in Booth 206 www.dmn.ca
-
GenieKnows.com
in Booth121 www.genieknows.com
Helps you make wise advertising decisions. Touch the magic
lamp.
-
plus
more exhibitors than I had time to visit, so I had to move
on to the next presentation.
|
|
Here, an
attendee at the Search Engine Strategies
conference in Toronto, Mr. Greg Mate stops by to sit in
on an Eye Tracking demonstration conducted by SES show
exhibitor Cesart.com.
What is the objective of eye tracking? This
sophisticated technology actually allows you to identify
exactly what your Web visitors may or may not see on a
Web page when they visit. The whole secret of this
technology can help you pinpoint and correct design
weaknesses in a Web page. |
How does it
work?
In the picture on the right, I've highlighted the
built in sensors which track eye movement as a subject
looks at a Web page. In this fashion, the system works
to record eye movement and helps determine what elements
are seen on the screen when a test page is loaded. This
profound technology records the details and can
then |
 |
|
|
produce what
is called a "heat map" showing various color
coded hot spots which represent how a visitor looked at
the page. By understanding how people are actually
looking at a page, you can understand how to position
material and key elements for maximum
advantage.
This technology was also spoken about in the upcoming
session which I was about to attend called
"Understanding and Influencing Searcher
Behavior." |
Next Session:
Understanding and Influencing Searcher Behavior
Moderator: Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of
SearchEngineWatch.com
Presenters:
Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro
Bonny Brown, Director of Research, Keynote
Attendance:
Standing room only
The focus of
this presentation seemed very popular and is certainly a session
I did not want to miss. It was largely exploring the latest
technologies for eye tracking and offering results from a
previous study. What is eye tracking? It's the ability to
actually track and measure what a web visitors sees on your Web
page. The study presented was based on how people were viewing
search results on Google with aggregate heat maps that
represented exactly what the audience tested saw (what they
looked at within the search results) as well as (what they
actually clicked on).
Interestingly enough, there were
some interesting patterns that occurred. The hottest spots were
the top left hand corner then across to the right and then
moving down the left hand side in viewing patterns tended to
create what might be considered a pattern shaped like the letter
"F".
 |
This is not an
image used from the presentation or a heat map. It's
just a conception of the typical F shape viewing
pattern.
Other interesting things
touched on: (not illustrated here)
- Major hot spots were
in the top left hand corner
- Minor hot spot over
the Google search button
(obviously peoples eyes were stopping there)
- Actual exposure drops
off dramatically below the fold.
- An interesting mild
hotspot at the bottom of the page nearly like an
anchor when people scrolling down.
- Prime real estate is
in what they call the golden triangle in the top
left hand corner.
|
Other
interesting results were revealed around the fact that some
changes were quite different on the second visit to the search
results.
-
Much
less of the golden triangle left
-
On
second visit, people were tending to be reading much more
(and being influenced by descriptions)
-
Evidence
on second visit, that a number 4 listing with a good
description was being viewed more than a top listing.
There were also some other details
discussed concerning "semantic mapping" which was most
interesting. Obviously I cannot deliver the presentation
here, but I highly recommend this session to you the next time
you attend the SES conference. It did go into more significant
detail on how PPC advertising is being viewed as well. A
fascinating study, delivered to a full room of attendees.
Final
interesting facts from this session?
Canadians are more hesitant to purchase online than are
Americans.
Canadians tend to do a little more research before making a
decision to buy.
Lunch Break
Next it was off for a walk across the lobby to a luncheon
provided. Very nice enjoyable boxed lunch with several choices.
I ended up sitting around the table enjoying lunch hour with
some of our students as well as one attendee who was visiting
all the way from Spain. Boxed lunches were quite a good idea for
this event.
Next Session: Search Term Research
Moderator: Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of
SearchEngineWatch.com
Presenters:
Cam Balzer, Search Strategy Performics Inc.
Christine Churchill, KeyRelevance
Attendance: Was at about 85 %
showing good interest in the subject.
Christine Churchill delivered a
fine presentation covering her favorite Keyword Research tools
with honorable mention to Wordtracker, Overture and Nichebot as
well as the Teoma engine. This was a good session covering the
basic and traditional keyword research techniques, which the
audience did seem to enjoy and benefit from.
Cam Balzer offered up a nice
session which I though complimented Christine's session. Keyword
research, as all of our readers know, is extremely important and
this session is recommended.
Next Session: Meet the Crawlers
Attendance: Full house
Quick Tips from the Search Engines
themselves which included representation from Ask Jeeves, Yahoo,
MSN and of course Google:
Many of the tips, news bits and advice
overlapped so here were a few points:
Ask Jeeves:
Yahoo Search:
-
Has 372 million users
-
Delivers over 3 billion pageviews
per day
-
Good relationship with Rogers
-
Use good authoritative links
encourages deep crawls
Google:
-
Mentioned that there are "over
100 different ranking influences."
-
Suggested Page Rank was still
important
-
Keyword Proximity
-
Bolding
-
Keyword phrases in Headers
-
Link text
-
Site Freshness
-
Don't cloak
-
Don't use hidden text or hidden
links
MSN Search
-
MSN provides slightly different
results to Canadian searchers than American
-
MSN's future objective will be to
better focus on answering questions
-
Use descriptive Titles
-
Use a Sitemap
-
Make sure you offer original content
-
Links to your site are important
-
Don't use Java redirects - Do use
301 or 302 redirects if needed
-
Don't hide links or use hidden text
-
Don't get involved with link farms
-
No more than 150k of page weight
-
Nothing can replace high quality,
original content
Final
Session of the day:
Moderator: Mike Grehan, CEO Smart Interactive
Presenters:
Keith Hogan of Ask Jeeves
Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link.com
Eric Ward CEO of EricWard.com
Attendance:
Full house
Highly
interesting session conducted by Moderator Mike Grehan, with a
dash of humor and and excellent lineup of guests on the topic of
linking strategies. All presenters did an admirable job. In the
picture below, Keith Ward offers a few important points in
summary to his presentation.
Eric Ward (speaking) and Mike Grehan at
the SES Conference in Toronto May 4, 2005 |
Tips in Summary
from Eric Ward:
- Seek links because links
help people find you regardless of your search
rankings. Any ranking boosts that happens to follow a
link campaign is simply a bonus.
- Don't pick target sites
purely based on traffic, pick them based on content
match.
- Web based links are not
the only links that help build your audience. Think
newsletters, ezines and discussion posts too.
- It is impossible to
quantify the effect of links alone on search engines.
- Bulk e-mail link
requests get deleted, pick up the phone.
|
For more details on the recent Toronto
Search Engine Strategy conference, feel free to read some of the
live coverage comments posted at the Search
Engine Watch Forum.
Wrapping up this day, I can say it was a
most enjoyable event and I am glad I made time to get away from
the monitor. I expect to attend more of these SES conferences in
the future. I had forgotten how much fun they are and it is
always a pleasure to meet our readers and students at
conference.
Check out the next upcoming Search
Engine Strategy Conference dates here.
About John Alexander
John Alexander is the Co-Director of
Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together,
they
teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive
"hands on" search
engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe.
John also teaches online
search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com,
and he’s a member of Wordtracker’s
official question support team.
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