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SES Chicago 2007 - Organic Track Review
I attended SES 2007 in Chicago today and went to all of the orgranic/SEO tracks. Unfortunately I didn't experience any "WOW" moments the entire day.
Keynote Speaker - Seth Godin
Seth always gives a great presentation and this was no letdown. This one was about his upcoming book "Meatball Sundae" which was also given out to all attendees. It was more marketing than SEO but useful information to share with your marketing team.
Open Discussion - Moderated by Danny Sullivan
This was probably the best session of the day. It was all audience Q&A. I asked the second or third question which wanted to get advice about all the recent hoopla on using nofollow on "useless" pages to control internal link juice or pagerank. Unfortunately Mike Grehan, who attempted to answer my question, didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. Danny Sullivan did understand though and his thoughts were that no one has really shown strong evidence that it is helping with anything - which I agree with although I do believe Rand had a post a week or two ago where he mentioned an increase and that he would report more numbers later on. The lady on the panel gave a decent alternative which was to simply work on controling any leaks on your homepage which Rand's whiteboard Friday from 11/21/07 covers pretty well.
There was also a decent tidbit about real world experience with duplicate content. A few pages (up to a few hundred was mentioned) is OK but thousands is not.
Someone recommended the book, "Web Analytics - 1 hour a day" which I had seen in a previous sphinn post and had wanted to get but just forgot about it. I definitely will get it now since I do SEO and some analytics at work.
And finally the topic of mis-spelled words was brought up. The conclusion was that since Google does it (http://labs.google.com/britney.html) that it would be OK for most of us to do it. Our company gets mispelled a lot (but we do capture most of that traffic) however I think creating a "fun" page about the mispellings people make will certainly add value to the site.
Big Site Big Search
This panel had members from large companies such as Coca-Cola and Proctor and Gamble. They talked about the difficulties in measuring ROI for the web when you only sell on land.
Basically they talked about trying to get SEO and PPC people to talk to each other - especially if that work is outsourced to different firms. Afterall it is the clients data and if they say share the data it should be shared.
I've got a bit more notes that I took on this session but nothing really stands out as being worthy to write about or that 75% of you don't already know.
Sitemaps - Moderated by Danny Sullivan
When sitemaps first came out a few years ago I was a web developer for a small web design firm. I wrote an in-house sitemap generator for our clients that would start at a base directory and crawl every file in all subdirectories. I also wrote another one that would create a sitemap for our clients with database driven pages with unknown URLs - so I'm extremely familar with sitemaps.
Needless to say this session didn't offer anything I didn't know. The best piece of advice was, "Sitempas are used to discover pages, not improve rankings". Although one of the panel experts did report improved crawl frequency and improved indexation after submitting sitemaps. I can concur with his findings from back when I created them for an e-commerce client who had some pretty horrible dynamic URLs. We watched their index go from 50 pages to 300 to 1200 to 5000 and to 12000 over the course of about 6 months.
SEO & Developers, Get it Together
This IMO was the second best presentation of the day for the organic track. It really stressed the importance of communication between teams. The SEO team has to tell the programming team, "Hey, you shouldn't be using session ID's as a URL parameter" - and the programming team HAS to listen and trust the advice of the SEO. Since I've been on both sides of the fence as a developer and an SEO I can see where the SEOs are coming from. When you go to school for web programming they don't teach you that each page title needs to be unique - so you use the site name on every page. They don't tell you that every meta description should be a description of the page content - so you write a script that pulls in the description from the homepage.
Some example sites that have the right mix of huge amounts of programming on the backend with good SEO on the front end - Amazon, Netflix, and Nordstroms.
Another good piece of advice was to have the marketers write stuff so that it has the appropriate "benefit and call to action" and then the SEO can go in and tweak it for SEO benefits.
Overall I think there's enough good information in my notes that we can easily recover the cost of the convention by implimenting changes on the website at work. Although I've already suggested most of them but now I can say, "the experts said this and that" and that will most likely be enough to get the company to take action since they paid for the conference.
I dunno, this was my first conference and I guess I just expected to be going "WOW" at a lot of the stuff that was presented. Next time I think I'll suggest they send me to PubCon or SMX.
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