Search Engine Strategies Conference

I went to the search engine strategies conference in San Jose today, and I thought many of you would be interested in my experience so that you can decide in the future if you want to attend.

I just went to the expo, I did not attend the parties or go to the conferences. I ran into ShoeMoney early in the day and he gave me the impression that the conferences were interesting.

The expo itself was littered with primarily three types of vendors - SEO firms, Pay Per Click Engines, and Stats software. It was very focused on e-commerce - I'm sure because if you are making a ton of money, then you can spend a lot of money on SEO services, PPC, and stat's software that will help you get a better conversion rate.

It was small enough that I was able to stop by almost every booth by noon, although early on I decided to stop visiting those pay-per-click guys because I'm of the opinion that the best engines are still overture (now Yahoo something) and google.

The MSN guys didn't seem to know why they were there. They didn't have a sales pitch, nothing about why there search engine was better, nothing new on the horizon that they wanted to fill me in on. I brought up virtual earth and they told me an API was going to be released prior to a big development conference next month.

I'm sure most of you have heard of Bruce Clay, Inc. - they are the guys who make the search engine chart that shows which engines feed eachother. I was most impressed by them - their rep spent probably an hour with me going over on page optomization techniques and showing me some of their tools which go for roughly $90/quarter. I was impressed with the knowledge the guy had for an expo rep, and with the time he spent with me.

Urchin had a very busy booth, but if you know Urchin at all, they didn't seem to have a lot of new info. Apparently, they have actually been slowed down by the google purchase because they've been working to get their code within google standards and re-organizing their employee structure as well. They plan on releasing their Urchin 6 product as a purchasable (currently only available "on demand" for a couple hundred a month) product before the end of the year. They are still working on compatibility issues on various platforms and the google purchase sidelined that effort pretty significantly according to the rep.

Of the SEO consultants, they all seemed to have really high pricing which might make sense if you had a large profit margin and the extra visitors would pay for themselves, but it seemed like a prime opportunity for newbies to shell out a bunch of money.

Topix.net was there, and they are selling text links now - not sure if that is new, but they didn't seem to have much literature beyond that. There was also fabulousdomains.com - which prices their domains based on type-in traffic levels and current revenue from adsense. The domain on their brochure was something like KentuckyLumber.com - not exactly a prime domain IMO. Text-Link-Ads.com or something close to that was there. Guess what? They sold text links.

Apparently, and I'm sure this has been covered elsewhere in this forum, but you can go to http://publisher.yahoo.com/ to request a site review to be a part of their network. They said they have some basic parameters like monthly visitor counts that will immediately disqualify many sites this early on in the game, but they didn't fill me in on their visitor count limit or their other parameters. They did say, however, that they offered more formatting options than google and were also planning on feeding content to publisher sites as well. Again, they didn't get too specific, but it sounded like a revenue share for their pay-pay-pay-and-pay-again-and-then-it's-just-one-more-quarter-for-a-click inclusion program.

They had a wifi area and free email terminals for conference go-ers. Many conferences have recordings available these days, but this one did not. There seemed to be a lot of events by vendors - the google dance, the great america yahoo thing, a few other things at bars, etc. , but the size of the expo itself was surprisingly small. Maybe around 100 booths. Like I said, I got through the whole thing by lunch time and I had a conference call during the first 45 minutes of the expo. The expo was $25 at the door, or free with pre-registration (I did the free reg.). The conferences were somthing like $700/day or $1800 for all days.

I thought about crashing a conference, but at the time I completed it, there was another hour and a half until the next one and I didn't want to wait around to find out if I could sneak in, so I just headed back to the airport and caught an early flight. San Jose stinks by the way. Of the rental car agencies, the only cars available were compacts for $99 for 1 day. A limo to the convention center was $80. I just cabbed it since it was only 3 miles away. My cell phone battery was dead by the time I got back to the airport and it was a minimum $5 charge to use the payphone! Even SFO and Kennedy aren't that bad pricewise.

To cap off my trip, I arrived at my black car with a black interior parked in the sun where it was over 100 degrees. I stood outside the car to let it run for a while with the AC on forgetting how bad the AC is on that particular car. I melted all the way home.

All in all I would definitely say it was worth the cost of a day trip for me. If the conference topics look interesting next year, I will consider staying for a few days to do that. It also provides a decent networking opportunity for like-minded webmasters.

 

Nice review, although I don't understand why would you rather goto an expo than to the conferences.

I wouldn't be suprised about the Bruce Clay rep... after all, they are #2 for "search engine optimization"...

 

I hit up the expo this time because it was free. I didnt' want to pay $1800 for conferences without having any background on the event. I still wonder about the cost and whether or not the money wouldn't be better spent on a quality SEO consultant's time. Oh well. I don't have to figure that out until next year.

 

lol... should of asked shoemoney to invite you a round of conferences, that is like 5 minutes of adsense earnings for him

 

LOL!
I thought I saw teeshirt on the expo floor with that.


Well I just got back from spending the day at SES too, though I got there later in the afternoon so I didn't have much time to walk the floor. The thing you miss out on by just going to the expo is that you don't get the chance to hang out with attendees, or chat with vendors away from the booths (less sales speak, more insider scoop). Unless of course you hit the parties.

I caught up with Sitetutor cause I knew he'd been working the floor (heh) and would have some cool contacts. I'm sure he'll be posting more on that when he gets home.

The conversations going on outside of the expo/conference rooms were definitely the most interesting part to me and my motivation for going. I also cruised into the evening Q/A session with Danny Sullivan which I'd totally recommend. He polls the crowd a lot, and it was surprising to see how many said they WEREN'T able to spend all of their marketing budgets simply because of the lack of good search engine traffic stats and tools.


Word on the street was that the ASk Jeeves party and the Google Dance were very entertaining and great places to network. Besides the food and the beer is free!

 

Thanks for that review. I'm looking at going to the NYC event next Feb 27 March 2 . It should be interesting being right around when everyone expects YPN to be officially launching. I can probably only do one day of conferences though.

 

Here are some more reviews and recaps on the 2005 San Jose SES...

SEO Roundtable has conference recaps.

Instant Position has daily recaps. They only have day one up, but are supposed to put up more over the next few days.

 

Thanks for the review Nevets, good info, nice summary and plenty of info, thanks.

 

i told him he could have probably snuck in.

cool write up nevetS.... I am not a very good writer or I would try to some up some of the confrences i went to. Maybe I will try anyway and people can just make fun of my poor grammer

 

Nice info,
Did anyone actually learn alot that was worthwhile?

 

Briefly here are some of the highlights i experienced.

1) got to witness a throwdown between google adsense people vs yahoo ypn people and the ceo of engadget dissing them both hardcore. that was awesome.

2) got about 5 contacts now (numbers and emails) of people inside google adsense.

3) learned TONS TONS TONS TONS TONS TONS TONS about API's from different vendors. I had alot of one on one time with a amazon and ebay engineers about there api. ALot of time with cj.com people about what would work best with what im doing.

4) found a shopping system for a new store front I am going to launch and also made tons of contacts for wholesalers

5) 1 class i went to all they did was show all the patents google has then they broke down exactly what they meant. basically im screwed. (jk)

6) tons of other stuff I will go into alot of detail but i dont want to jack nevetS thread.

7) ohh ya... discovered googleguy was bullshit and hmmm in the words of a google engineer - "googleguy is anyone anywhere on any forum who makes intelligent posts based on what google has patented" and also found out who google guy was that posted on wmw sew seochat and other places

8) ohhhhhh also got alot of 1 on 1 time with adsense reps who went over my site and helped me improve my ctr by almost 2%!!!!!!

 

thanks for the review.. it has been informational. it sure is useful to attend such conferences.

 

if you guys were there and didnt say hi i hate you !

 

That's mostly what someone else I know did. Not me though...and sorry you hate me (cause I didn't contact you)...but I don't even know your real name.

IT was all fairly whirlwind for me, but I did witness an entertaining conversation between Google's Thomas Korte and a young woman from PlasticSurgery.com about Google's ban on Adword campaigns for sites with medical nudity photos such as plastic surgeons. She really grilled him, and then about four other people got in on the action.

I should have counted how many times the word boobs was said, mostly by guys of course (they all wanted to know what the traffic stats were for it).

 

No not Mike that little sneak.

 

That didnt stop nevetS from going SHOEMONEY!

I am just kidding tho I dont hate you. Its just cool to put some faces with names.

 

So Google has their Google Dance photos up....but I don't see any of Mike doing karaoke, which I heard involved him wearing a robe and doing Elvis moves. I can't believe I missed it.

 

Hmmm... just a bunch of pictures of strangers, lol, they should of at least included some kind of caption under each photo

 

Didn't they say that you have to be more than 4 clicks away from nude pictures in order to be accepted?

 

That was awesome I only have one pic of right before I went on stage.

I've posted it here already: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=278865&postcount=14