SES San Jose LIVE / Day 1: Wise Men, Hookahs, & SEO Magic

Update: now with photos!

Welcome to the grand experiment: the Ask.com liveblogging of SES San Jose.

Photos, and more thorough proofreading, will come soon. For now, strap in, 'cause here we go...

 

The Search Landscape

The quarterly Search Engine Strategies Conference landed in San Jose today and hit the ground running with a welcome from conference programmer and search guru Danny Sullivan. Favorite quote: "Good content is something you want to look at for more than 30 seconds." He kicked off the day with a thorough overview, rattling off answers to audience questions at the end like Ted Williams at the batting cages.

Up next: our own Erik Collier as part of the Universal & Blended Search panel.

 

Universal & Blended Search

(Quick rant: isn't calling the panel "Universal search," when that's the brand name of our competitor's product, a bit like shopping at the "Campbell's Soup and Grocery Store?" Fortunately, Commerce360's Bill Slawski noticed it as well and retitled his presentation "Universal 3D Search" to help balance things out.)

We heard from Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR, who called blended search "the biggest change since the Florida Update" and pointed out the PR dangers of the related images that inevitably show up in blended search. To accentuate his point, he showed a blended search on Hillary Clinton that featured three very unflattering photos of Hil as sample image results. Republican stealth gaming? Who can say?

Another interesting point of Greg's: Apparently the New York Times trains their journalists to optimize their articles to get to the top of a News Search page.

Reps from Google, Yahoo, and our own Ask.com said their pieces as well. Google's David Bailey talked largely of simplicity, in a folksy, accessible way. Yahoo's Tim Meyer strung his preso across Yahoo's four pillars (ranking, comprehensiveness, freshness, and presentation) and showed how they leverage their in-house content (music, video) in their blended search results.

As for Erik, he started his Ask3D preso with "I'm Erik Collier, and I'm from the scrappy innovator of search, Ask.com." Damn right. Erik gave the crowd a tour of Ask 3D and showed how we blend multimedia search results into our Smart Answers, right-rail content, binoculars application, etc.

My favorite bit of the panel was during the Q & A; when asked for their top tips to optimize videos for search, David and Tim gave the standard reliable ones: write description text, put the keyword in the file name, etc.

When the mic was passed to Erik, he agreed with all the tips, but added one more: "Make a kickass video." Thus making his the only Q & A answer to draw applause from the crowd.

 

...But will it sell more hookahs? One site owner I met today intends to take Erik's video advice to heart: Ronnie Roman,  President & Hooka Master of Hookah and Shisha Central, one of the leading online retailers of hookahs and shisha (the tobacco used in hookahs). (Caveat: they may be THE leading online retailer, I can't find it in my notes). Ronnie started the business as a one-man operation in 2000 and the company has gone to a 20 employee company with three separate retail sites, a 2000-item catalogue, and a thriving wholesale and distribution business. Clearly, not every town can have a local head sh--um, hookah retailer, so Ronnie credits much of his success to Search. His conversion rates from search engines are something like 2 or 3 times higher than from referral sites. Currently the #3 result on both Ask.com and Google searches for "hookah," Ronnie leverages white-hat SEO techniques to put his company even higher in the search rankings: keywords in the page content, making sure his site's being indexed properly, redoing dynamically-generated product URLs so that they have the product names in them, etc. Certainly as a result of the info he's gleaning at SES this year, he's looking into creating a company blog, creating more of a presence on social networks-probably a lot of cool factor to having a hookah store as your MySpace friend-and he's thinking of making "hookah videos" for the site and YouTube. He didn't elaborate on what kind of videos they would be, but any chance they would look like these?

 

Personalization, User Data & Search

The next panel I made it to, Personalization, User Data & Search, touched more on the money part of SEO than I expected, but I still came away with valuable info. Gordon Hotchkiss hypothesized that Search Optimization will happen around themes, rather than keywords, taking advantage of long tail searchers. For this reason, he sees a rapid buildup of sites devoted to awareness of products, rather than purchase, and advised that companies focus on recommendation tools, mash-ups, widgets and other devices that push for awareness and interaction with the brand.

Sepandar Kamvar of Google reiterated this as well, by suggesting that companies "build useful gadgets" and "design & optimize for the user, not just the keyword."

 

Searcher Behavior Research Update

I caught a few choice nuggets at the Searcher Behavior Research Update panel as well, specifically in terms of some research findings regarding Local search. In terms of Local search, claimed Stuart McKelvey of TMP Directional Marketing, it's an offline world.

I'll spare you all the statistics, but he summed up his preso with these points:

• The primary conversion action from local search is an offline purchase
• Many consumers use the Internet for researching, not buying
• Online drives a significant amount of walk-in and phone traffic
• Printed Yellow Pages are still relevant-and in fact are surprisingly valuable

Gordon Hotchkiss, this time as a panel moderator, talked for a bit about a multi-panel "Portal" approach to search, giving some props to Ask3D in the process. He called it the search engine that has gone most aggressively to the multi-column layout, hinting that this sort of layout is very much on Google's mind right now.

 

A friendly warning... ...to the guy in the green shirt who sat next to me at the second panel and ate roasted almonds for 20 minutes. Next time, choose a snack with no aroma or I will turn that shirt red. Thanks!

 

Good times and good learning, all in all. Tomorrow's a big Ask.com day, starting with Jim Lanzone's keynote speech! I'll be there.

 

Ken Grobe
Product Content Manager
Ask.com