Search Engine Marketing Conferences - SES Strategies San Jose 2004

Search Engine Strategies is one of the big events for search engine marketing and search engine optimization practitioners. The conference in San Jose was a great success. Central California is an excellent location for this type of conference because there is so much to do and see in San Jose right through to north of San Francisco. The party at the Googleplex saw hundreds of guests dance to hip hop music, play video games, throw balls to dunk Google employees, and there was excellent food and drinks for all. It offered some opportunities to meet other industry people and reps from SEO companies although the music was very loud.

The conference ran from August 2nd to the 6th at the McEnery Convention Center in downtown San Jose. Speakers, moderators and forum participants included Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch, Detlev Johnson of Success Works, Matt Cutts from Google, Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc., Greg Boser of Web Guerilla, Mike Grehan of Smart Interactive and Jonathon Glick from Yahoo. The forums were fun and interesting. These speakers are some of the best minds in the business and it is always nice to chat with them in person.

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The session on dynamic Web site optimization lead by Mikkel deMib Svendsen of Marketleap was interesting and revealed that most SEOs are still experiencing a lot of difficulties in optimizing dynamically generated Web sites. The consensus was that it's not as effective as everyone is hoping for and that the solutions available today aren't laudable. Another session on advanced link building techniques uncovered some interesting techniques and tactics. Overall, the depth of the content of these conventions tends to be moderate however good tips and slips do pop out for SEO veterans to gobble up :).

Matt Cutts of Google didn't provide any hints as to Google's "secret sauce" however it is interesting to hear a Google rep's position on optimization issues and of Google's business and product goals. It was easy to see the adversarial position that SEOs and Google have, yet Matt presented Google's perspective as a search service provider and that they weren't a vindictive company. Yet, he reiterated Google's view that if you're "evil" your site may be booted out. He indicated his list of do's and don'ts which was more detailed than you'd find at Google's webmaster info page.

Here's some of the things he suggested,

• if the content is unrelated or off-topic, don't put it in
• become an authority on a topic
• maintain natural linking patterns throughout your site
• don't use guestbooks
• avoid poor quality link exchanges
• information quality of site is important but he didn't comment on how Google would evaluate quality information
• avoid link farm participation