My first experience with SES has brought about anxiousness and excitement. Since I’m rather new into the SEO world, hearing from the experts about SEO has been quite exciting. In my day one experience I attended four sessions.
The Search Landscape
This was my first session for the day, bright and early at 9 in the morning. This session had speakers from competing traffic analysis sites giving information about the current search landscape. Topics covered included the market share of each engine (no surprise Google is getting bigger), what areas of search are growing, and how to use analysis for your own site. This session had a few interesting points. According to HitWise, Yahoo! has gained nearly 17.2% in its number of searches over the past year. In addition, the top four engine represent nearly 98.5% of all searches. According to comScore, searches on MySpace outweigh that of AOL and Ask.
Search Term Research and Targeting
This session was a crash-course in keyword research and targeting. The lecture showed many useful tools when doing keyword research, such as KeyWord Discovery and WordTracker. I found the lecture useful, adding to the knowledge I already know about keyword research. I also found the Q&A quite useful in hearing certain companies discuss their problems with their own keywords.
Benchmarking An SEM Campaign
I found this session to be least useful among my day one classes. The lecturers were mainly interested in benchmarking purposes for PPC, which didn’t exactly keep my interest. Key topics discussed included determining return and site visibility.
Search Engine Friendly Design
Shari Thurow taught this very useful afternoon session. This session discussed ways to ensure your site is search-friendly. She mentioned the five fundamentals design rules that will create a successful site:
- Easy to read
- Easy to navigate
- Easy to find
- Consistent in layout
- Quick to download
In addition, Shari touched a bit on redirects and site navigation. I can’t exactly say that the presentation was new to me, but it reinforced much of what I’ve learned about successful site architecture.