WebmasterWorld Conference - Day 1
It's always fun to see the people behind the names and monikers at conferences like these. There's something refreshing about talking face to face with all the people you hear about and communicate with online. There's way too much info to report on everything that happened, but I'll try to hit the highlights of the sessions I attended.
After the opening keynote address by Brett Tabke, I went to the "Big Site SEO" session. It was a fairly interesting session with speakers including Marshall Simmonds from About.com, John Marshall from ClickTracks, Joseph Morin from Autobytel, and Bill Hunt from Global Strategies (he does SEO for IBM). Bill Hunt's presention was the most informative in regards to the theme of optimizing large sites. One of the main points I got from Bill was that optimizing large sites requires the optimizer to attack the project from the opposite end that you would attack the optimization of a smaller site--that is, you need to start with reworking the infrastructure, then move to coding (templates, titles, etc), then content. He showed some impressive results from working with IBM to simply improve the URL/link structure to allow search engines to properly spider their site. After implementing those changes, the number of pages of the IBM site indexed by Google went from 10,000 to 2.2 million--with a corresponding increase in traffic of 62%.
The second session I attended was "Tracking, Conversion, and ROI". This one proved to be a very interesting session, although it was largely a push by a few metrics companies for their own products. (Urchin and ClickTracks). Dave Cadoff from FutureNow filled in nicely for Bryan Eisenberg who was originally scheduled to be on the panel. Dave gave a rousing speech about conversion and reminded us that "clicks are people" and that we need to remember that as we're working on improving conversion rates. He also emphasized that conversion is a process, not an event. Another very interesting comment he made was that everyone in the session could improve our conversion rates by an order of magnitude, that is, if your conversion rate is 1%, it could be 10%, if it's 2%, it could be 20%. Pretty bold statement, but the guy is obviously passionate about conversion and he even said he is a "persuasion expert".
After lunch, and some meandering around the display booths, all 1,000-plus attendees went to the super session featuring some famous algo-busting SEO lengends. They discussed the history of SEO, successes (including Oilman, who made over 4 million dollars selling Viagra over a several month period in 1999) and failures. They were all very strong advocates of highly aggressive SEO and all seemed very hopeful about the entry of MSN's new search engine.
The final session of the day was about Local Search. This one ended up being very interesting as they discussed the current hype and reality of local search. Lots of good info including Matt Cutts of Google using KeyHole to zoom in on a satellite picture of the conference center and adjacent Hilton hotel. If you haven't tried Keyhole, be prepared to be blown away. If Google thinks highly enough of a technology to buy it, it must be something amazing--and that's true once again with Keyhole. Matt said not to expect to go to Google Local tomorrow and find Keyhole integrated, but I can see a time in the not too distant future when you can zoom in on a satellite picture to see where your hotel or restarant is.
All in all, the conference got off to a pretty good start. Today should be even better with the much-anticipated "Search Engines & Webmasters" panel featuring representatives from several major search engines.
After the opening keynote address by Brett Tabke, I went to the "Big Site SEO" session. It was a fairly interesting session with speakers including Marshall Simmonds from About.com, John Marshall from ClickTracks, Joseph Morin from Autobytel, and Bill Hunt from Global Strategies (he does SEO for IBM). Bill Hunt's presention was the most informative in regards to the theme of optimizing large sites. One of the main points I got from Bill was that optimizing large sites requires the optimizer to attack the project from the opposite end that you would attack the optimization of a smaller site--that is, you need to start with reworking the infrastructure, then move to coding (templates, titles, etc), then content. He showed some impressive results from working with IBM to simply improve the URL/link structure to allow search engines to properly spider their site. After implementing those changes, the number of pages of the IBM site indexed by Google went from 10,000 to 2.2 million--with a corresponding increase in traffic of 62%.
The second session I attended was "Tracking, Conversion, and ROI". This one proved to be a very interesting session, although it was largely a push by a few metrics companies for their own products. (Urchin and ClickTracks). Dave Cadoff from FutureNow filled in nicely for Bryan Eisenberg who was originally scheduled to be on the panel. Dave gave a rousing speech about conversion and reminded us that "clicks are people" and that we need to remember that as we're working on improving conversion rates. He also emphasized that conversion is a process, not an event. Another very interesting comment he made was that everyone in the session could improve our conversion rates by an order of magnitude, that is, if your conversion rate is 1%, it could be 10%, if it's 2%, it could be 20%. Pretty bold statement, but the guy is obviously passionate about conversion and he even said he is a "persuasion expert".
After lunch, and some meandering around the display booths, all 1,000-plus attendees went to the super session featuring some famous algo-busting SEO lengends. They discussed the history of SEO, successes (including Oilman, who made over 4 million dollars selling Viagra over a several month period in 1999) and failures. They were all very strong advocates of highly aggressive SEO and all seemed very hopeful about the entry of MSN's new search engine.
The final session of the day was about Local Search. This one ended up being very interesting as they discussed the current hype and reality of local search. Lots of good info including Matt Cutts of Google using KeyHole to zoom in on a satellite picture of the conference center and adjacent Hilton hotel. If you haven't tried Keyhole, be prepared to be blown away. If Google thinks highly enough of a technology to buy it, it must be something amazing--and that's true once again with Keyhole. Matt said not to expect to go to Google Local tomorrow and find Keyhole integrated, but I can see a time in the not too distant future when you can zoom in on a satellite picture to see where your hotel or restarant is.
All in all, the conference got off to a pretty good start. Today should be even better with the much-anticipated "Search Engines & Webmasters" panel featuring representatives from several major search engines.
posted by Dave @ 8:35 AM
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