SES NY 2007
This week I’m in New York visiting clients and attending Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies 2007.
The major players are well represented in exhibits as well as panel experts and if Google & Yahoo didn’t have people on the panels, the quality of the sessions would have suffered. Thankfully they sent quite a few of their managers and various engineers and business leaders.
This was my first time attending this conference as I didn’t think I’d be able to learn any actionable best practice strategies, but I was wrong. One of my primary goals in attending was to make sure we’re helping the major search engines to efficiently find our members content while ignoring content that shouldn’t be indexed (example: the *print an article* view). Our long-standing SE strategy has been to simply add lots of fresh high-quality content, provide a fast and positive user experience and make decisions to ensure long-term success (skipping all short term fads).
It was good to hear from many pay-per-click advertisers talk about the type of quality they want from their PPC investments. Remember the quality landing page thread from last year? Many of the same concerns are still important to providing a positive user experience. The last thing we want is poor quality content leading to a poor quality website as it violates the trust of our users and those who bring traffic to our members content.
We’re not involved in paid search abritrage (the act of creating revenue by purchasing traffic on a PPC basis and then immediately selling it through affiliate marketing or other revenue means), but it’s clear that the most egregious offense in terms of advertisers and end-users are MFA’s (Made For Adsense) sites. If you’re an author that drives traffic to a MFA site, this is your early wake up call that you need to find a way to add unique value with your site beyond the ads.
Rain: It’s raining pretty hard this morning and what do I find as I leave my hotel to go to the conference? Vendors selling umbrella’s for $5… never mind the fact that they charge $3.50 to store the umbrella for me in the coat room while I’m in the conference (so I gave the umbrella away). Other timely but very uninteresting news is that the Imus protest is only a few blocks away from the venue.
Updated April 14th 2007 7am: Now that SES NY is over, I always like to read what everyone who was there blogged about: Check it out
It is great to see the number one Online Article Submission Site on the Planet has a Fearless Leader who is always expanding his knowledge base. Indeed it is great that even though you only expected to find perhaps crumbs of knowledge that might lead to immediate actional upgrades, that you were able to gain so much more insight to take EzineArticles to the next step.
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