Search Engine Strategies – San Jose – Day 4 and WRAP UP

The day was a relatively short day with only three sessions including: Content is King!, Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic and Site Clinic. Each of the previous 3 days we had 4-5 sessions, depending on whether or not there was a keynote speaker at 9am. These made for some very long days. Fortunately, we were able to hook up with some people who were a lot of fun. Monday evening we dined in the small crowd company of 12 … Tuesday we went to the Google Dance with a few thousand other people, and Wednesday dined with another small crowd of 12, and then proceeded to hang out with them for the rest of the night. All and all not a bad trip … Now on to the purpose of the post, that is to report on the sessions I attended:

The best session of the day: Content is King!. The bites that I came away with include Jennette Cezanne’s statement that “What do you want the visitor to do? Make THAT the easiest thing to do” She stressed that design and SEO work together. Dave DeVries from Microsoft provided 5 steps for great content. Finally, Ben Lloyd gave us a couple of really good case studies.

The second session, Ad Copy & Landing Page clinic was really good too. I enjoyed the clinical aspect of the session, where attendies provided their keywords and had their ads and landing pages evaluated. I have a full page of bulleted tips to work with.

The final session of the day, a Site Clinic, was disappointing. Participants from the room put their business card in a hat and their sides were drawn (not really at random) and then evaluated for suggested improvement. I didn’t really find anything tremendously useful here, but I heard the same echo from most all the other sessions, and that is TEST different pages, TEST different calls to action, and TEXT is most important.

Wrap Up:
I have so much information in my head and in my notes, I don’t really think I can get my head around it all. I’ll be digesting and applying everything for some time!

Some of the fun people I had the pleasurable opportunity to meet include:
Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com, Patrick Schaber of LonelyMarketer.com, Darcy Hill of TrafficLeader.com, and Jennifer Laycock of SearchEngineLand.com.

I look forward to meeting and hanging out with this gang again next year, and/or anytime they chance to find themselves in Pole Position Marketing territory!