Today, On Day #2 of SES San Jose 2009, the conference finally seemed to get down to business. That is, after all the attendees and exhibitors stumbled in late (thanks to our friends at Webmaster Radio and last night’s Search Bash). Today the tracks started at 9:00am and continued all the way through to 5:00pm. With an hour lunch for networking, followed by an hour keynote presentation given by Nicholas Fox, Director of AdWords, the day was filled with many “things to do”. In retrospect, today was the day we all got serious about the conference. Even the exhibitors I asked all seemed to have had a much better day than the day before.
Here are some more observations about day #2:
- After a very slow start, people started showing up and participating in the activities of the day.
- Less people seemed to be here today, than yesterday, but most of the tracks were “mainly” filled.
- Paid search, organic search, and local search still dominate our topics of interest but many in the Industry pondering where are we going to next?
- Conversion optimization via landing page testing finally becoming an integral part of an SEM’s playbook.
- Site structure, coding, and c0ntent still making the largest on-page impact on SEO campaigns
- Link building, content writing, social media still making the largest off-page impact on SEO campaigns
- The focus is finally on our customers and the next phase of search is being built to provide better targeted and relevant ads.
- Facebook and Twitter are the only two Social Networking sites being talked about (haven’t heard about MySpace once, in fact)
- The lunch set up was great for networking opportunities but sadly we were unable to go back for seconds today.
Tomorrow, is the final day of the conference. And while I am looking forward to going back and teaching my staff/implementing new strategies for my clients, I always wish these conference would be a day or two longer. This event, unlike others I attend, has a very positive vibe – one where all of the marketers talk, learn, and share with each other. Competitors are not competitors here just attendees out here to learn for the benefit of their businesses and their clients. Long live search, long live SES!
