Search Engine Strategies News from San Jose -  The Best in the Industry
 Kim Roach


Search engine marketing has come a long ways since its early days
of pioneering entrepreneurs. This was made evident at the recent
Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

You can see the changes on the faces of representatives from
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Fortune 100 companies. You can hear
the changes when talking to the swarms of SEM consultants,
agencies, and software vendors. Indeed, if there was any one
place where you could feel the excitement of the SEO industry, it
would be at Search Engine Strategies.

The growth of this conference alone indicates the maturing of an
exciting industry. This year's conference hosted over 4,000
attendees.

The growth of search engine marketing could also be seen in the
packed auditorium listening to Danny Sullivan's conversations
with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Yes, my friends, our industry is growing and this is one of the
most exciting times to be involved in trends that are
transforming the face of advertising. We are changing the face of
publishing, with offline newsletters losing much of their
audience to online publications. The Internet is quickly becoming
the preferred news and information source over television,
magazines, and trade publications.

If you were present at this year's San Jose conference, then you
surely experienced hours of great content, wonderful people, and
a general air of excitement. If not, let me fill you in on what I
believe to be one of the greatest conferences this industry has
to offer.

Let's begin our journey at a session called Searchonomics. The
Internet, the numbers were quite exciting. David Hallerman from
eMarketer announced that online advertising spending was expected
to reach over 20 billion next year. By 2009, Internet ad spending
is expected to be bigger than radio ads.

If you sell products online, you may find it interesting that 74%
of online users are looking for more information about a product
or service. 66% of U.S. adults often or always research online
before buying and 55% of U.S. adults often or always research
online to find the best price.

Another hot topic at this year's conference was social search.
Chris Sherman stated that algorithmic search has plateaued and
that humans are still better at creating a more relevant search
system. Thus the popularity of social search, which is powered by
the wisdom of crowds.

There are a number of different social search platforms.

One of these is shared bookmarks and web pages. This can be found
at sites like del.icio.us, shadows, furl, and diigo. There is
another category known as tag engines. This includes technorati
and bloglines. In addition, there are also personalized
verticals, which include eurekster and rollyo. You are probably
also familiar with collaborative harvesters, which include sites
like digg, netscape, and reddit. The last category of social
search platforms are social Q and A sites. Some of the most
popular examples include Yahoo Answers, Google Answers, and
AnswerBag.

However, social search also comes with a number of potential
issues. They include ambiguity of language, lack of controlled
vocabulary, and spammers who try to take advantage of the system.
Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch.com believes that the ultimate
solution will be a combination of both algorithms and social
search. This will lend to the creation of "trust networks" and an
increased level of personalization.

One company that is leading the way in personalized search is
Eurekster. I had the pleasure of talking to Grant Ryan, CEO of
Eurekster, about the benefits of social search. This company has
created a truly customized experience for the end user based on
the wisdom of crowds.

Eurekster actually allows the user to train the search engine
over time. If you're a publisher, you can use a Swicki to create
a customized search engine for your own website.

To add a Swicki search engine to your own site, go to
http://www.eurekster.com.

Another session that I especially enjoyed was Search Algorithm
Research. In this session the panel presented some of the top SEO
research papers that provided insight into how different search
engines rank a web page.

Search engines are becoming much more transparent in identifying
what they are looking for when ranking a website. Of course,
we'll never know the exact algorithm, but there are always clues.
Listed below are some links to some research papers you may want
to check out.

The Original PageRank paper
(http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

Combating Web Spam with TrustRank
( http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/2004-52)

Topic-Sensitive PageRank
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/528512.html)

Topic-Sensitive PageRank: A Context-Sensitive Ranking Algorithm
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/578979.html)

Block Level Link Analysis
(ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2004-50.pdf )

Hilltop - search based on expert documents
(http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/)

Convergence of PageRank and HITS Algorithms
( http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~moorthy/Courses/RG02/Projects/eric.ppt)

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/kleinberg99authoritative.html )

Lexical and Semantic Clustering by Web Links
(http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/Papers/JASIST-04.pdf )

MSN Antispam detection - affiliate link patterns
(http://research.microsoft.com/SearchDefender/ )

Pagerank Revisited
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/brinkmeier06pagerank.html )

Undue Influence: Eliminating the Impact of Link Plagiarism on
Web Search Rankings
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/correct/739652 )

Site Level Noise Removal ( http://tinyurl.com/jqt4l )
SpamRank (http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2005/benczur.pdf )

Another informative session was News Search SEO. This session
went into detail on how to optimize press releases for maximum
exposure in the news search engines.

The key point was optimizing your press release for targeted
keywords. As I have discussed in a previous article
(http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/aug/7.html), press
releases perform best when they are optimized for the news search
engines.  They should be optimized in much the same way that
search engine optimization specialists optimize ordinary web
pages in order to achieve higher rankings.

Unfortunately, the keywords used in news search engines are
different from those used in the traditional search engines.

The panel presented a solution to this problem. Google News
Suggest (http://news.google.com/news?complete=1) allows you to
find keywords that are used specifically in the news search
engines.

Another emphasis was based around the benefits of  social media
press releases. With today's technology, you can now include a
variety of multimedia formats with your press release, including
mp3 files, podcast links, photos, and even videos. If you are not
using all of the tools available to you, then you are missing out
on additional exposure.

The last day of the conference was a flurry of activity as
thousands of people filled the auditorium to hear Danny Sullivan
interview Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. They discussed Google
privacy issues, click fraud, Google's recent partnership with
MySpace and MTV, Google Adsense, and the future of Google.

You can listen to the entire interview at
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060809-104024.

I hope this article has given you a small glimpse into what an
exciting event this is. If you'd like to get even more coverage
on the event, visit:
http://www.searchenginelowdown.com/2006/08/
ses-san-jose-2006-coverage-round-up.html

If you are involved with search engine marketing, I urge you to
make it to one of these conferences. Not only are they fun and
informative, but it is also one of the few times that you will be
in a room full of people who are passionate about the same
topics as you.




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Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews
(http://www.sitepronews.com ) & SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com)
newsletters. You can also find additional tips and news on
webmaster and SEO topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog
( http://blog.sitepronews.com/). Kim's email is:
kim @ seo-news.com