Search Engine Strategies 2005 Overview

Sean Mulholland, JWTSC SEO Group

After attending the 2005 Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose I couldn’t help but notice how much the crowd has changed. I’ve been attending SES for several years – before search was ‘hot’ if you can imagine that – and in earlier years SES was comprised of mostly techie types looking for tips and tricks to optimize websites for organic rankings. Paid search was in some ways relegated to the back room, and topics such as linking, tags, keyword density, and the difficulties of optimizing dynamic websites filled the air.

In 2005 SES feels like a completely different crowd. Pale IT guys were still in attendance, but well dressed marketers made up much of the crowd. Not only were the attendees different, but the conference was too. The expo area was rife with ‘booth babes’ and ‘Win a free [insert trendy gadget here]’ contests. But the real difference was in the content. Now the tech side of SEO only got about 20% of the show, the rest was all marketing. It’s about time.

Search Engine Marketing is just that – marketing. All the technical wizardry of rankings, impressions, clicks, etc. all serves a greater goal, whether it be recruitment, product marketing, lead generation, etc. But now we’re starting to see more traditional marketing goals being applied to search. Marketers are using search as a means to a greater goal, i.e. to introduce or reinforce a brand to online users, optimize press releases for better placement on news search engines (40M+ readers), and management or repair of a brand or company image.

Emerging technologies such as Blogs and content syndication through RSS all had multiple sessions devoted to them at SES. How does this fit in with search? Well, there are Blog and RSS search engines, but the real reason they’re here is because SES has shifted from a purely techie conference to a marketing conference, but since the Blog and RSS side of online marketing is quite technical, it’s only natural that the same professionals working with search would pick up on this as well.

So what were the major takeaways of SES 2005?

BRANDING THROUGH SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

It’s common knowledge that a well ranked site is seen as an authority on its topic, but now marketers are starting to see the value of putting their brand in front of the millions of eyeballs looking at search engines every day. New product introductions factor search into their marketing efforts, recruiters are starting to optimize their careers sites and post pay-per-click ads along with Monster and HotJobs listings, and established brands are optimizing their sites to increase their online presence.

PRESS RELEASES AND PR

A recent Pew Research Center study shows that 44% of people surveyed check news online at least once a week. Sites such as Yahoo News and Google News are major news aggregators that reach over 30 million online news readers each month, but how do you make sure your PR is on top? Just like traditional PR firms pitched stories to editors, now we pitch stories to news search. What makes a good pitch? A well optimized release. A well optimized press release can put a story in front of millions of readers, and it also has tertiary benefits for regular SEO as well.

BLOGS AND CONTENT SYNDICATION

Like search, Blogs are hot. A post on a blog can spread like wildfire across the Internet, instantly evangelizing a new product or broadcasting the failure of another. Participating in this new frontier can yield great benefits to a marketer. Recruiters can help their company to befriend new talent and sell a positive company image. Marketers can use Blogs to participate in conversations with their customers to improve existing products and launch new ones.

With RSS content syndication, marketers are able to syndicate their content across the web. That means that by updating your RSS feed, all those subscribed to the feed will be updated as well. A recruiter with a jobs RSS feed can update his feed and it will automatically be syndicated to satellite sites and candidates who have subscribed to the feed. A marketer can update his feed with new products and get the same effect. Even better is that there are dozens of RSS aggregator search engines which will auto update their listings with your feed.