Search marketing conferences this year have been great! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed TRAFFIC Las Vegas, SMX West Santa Clara, SMX Advanced Seattle, and now SES (Search Engine Strategies) San Francisco. Today, I’d like to recap my experience at SES San Francisco this week and some of my exciting takeaways. SES was absolutely packed and it was a tremendous conference!
SEM Automation Is Hot
My Friends Craig and Alex From Click Equations at SES San Francisco
If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you know that I’m a huge fan of pay per click automation. I even wrote a FREE 12 page SEM Automation Buyer’s Guide. SEM automation is constantly on my mind, it’s the only way to gain the leverage to succeed when you’re managing multi-million dollar PPC campaigns.
Excitingly, SEM automation was everywhere I turned in the expo hall! It was truly remarkable. SEM automation is hot! It was really great to see both old and new friends in the automation game. I got the opportunity to sync up with the Marin Software team. I met the amazing ClickEquations team for the first time in person. I even had the opportunity to learn about American Express getting in the game with their new OPEN SEM platform. I was totally floored when I learned about that!
Being a Celebrity Executive Is Cool
PPC Ian and My Friend Dan From Marin Software
The keynote yesterday by Jeffrey Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak, was awesome! There were several takeaways around people management, especially motivation and turning organizations around. However, that’s not what impressed me the most.
What really impressed me was Jeffrey’s delivery. This guy is truly talented. He’s basically an expert presenter and actor. As my personal career progresses, I’m setting my sights high. I’d love to become a celebrity executive one day and pick up some acting skills myself. It’s really captivating stuff! It’s also a completely different skill than my Stanford Computer Science roots. I’m definitely a leader and expert people manager. I’d also call myself a stellar presenter (just check out my Stanford Graduate School of Business speech all about online Marketing). However, Jeffrey takes it to a whole other level!
I Picked Up A Few PPC, SEO, and Blogging Tips
To close out, I’d like to highlight some of my lower level notes. I was writing very quickly yesterday and jotted down some awesome stuff, a lot of it very actionable.
It Was Great Catching Up With Mike From Yahoo
Perhaps most excitingly, I learned about the concept of citations in Google’s new organic caffeine algorithm (launched in June). Apparently, Google is now looking quite a bit at social networking sites and how many times your website or blog has been cited (mentioned or linked to). This is really great to learn from an SEO standpoint. It’s not all about links anymore, you also need to focus on citations! As a side note, I’m a big fan of blog commenting. While most comments have a nofollow tag on the link (unless you get on the top commentators), I’ve long been a believer that Google gives these nofollow comments some kind of weight. Now, I’m seriously thinking these comments could be counted as citations!
I was also really excited to learn about Google’s definition of a blog: Any website with a feed. When I typically think of a blog, I think about your typical WordPress blog like this one! It really opens doors when you start thinking about a blog as any site with a feed. Basically, you now have the option to add a feed (or feeds) to your "static" website and turn it into a blog. The speakers were making the point that this could have an SEO benefit because Google’s new caffeine algorithm is giving weight to blogs because they offer up to date information (caffeine is all about the real time). At the same time, I think this only makes sense if you update your site (and feeds) regularly. Otherwise, Google will now view your "blog" as one that doesn’t get updated frequently (which is worse than a static website that doesn’t get updated, in my opinion).
Yahoo is doing some seriously great stuff. Shashi Seth dazzled the audience with his discussion of Yahoo’s focus on the front end of search. The last 12 years, in his opinion, have been all about the back end of search. Now, Yahoo is partnering with Microsoft so Microsoft can take over the back end of things. This will allow Yahoo to focus on what they do the best: Optimizing their front end user experience. Shashi pointed out that there’s far more to the search results page than the actual results themselves. Yahoo will still be really focused on search, more from a front end perspective in terms of adding valuable experiences to search that aren’t there right now. Something else that blew me away: The "trending" topics on Yahoo’s homepage now account for 5 percent of searches on Yahoo.
All Images In This Post © PPCIan.com
Thumbs up for the pictures and great recap of the event! Enjoyed reading it.. keep it up!
Is it possible if you can change the background of your site to white and font to black. The natural way. Can you please name one popular site that has black background. It is so hard to read and even harder to read those green color when one is reading in RSS feed with white back ground. I like your blog but is not very color friendly.
Dino,
Thanks for the comment! Very much appreciate it! I’m happy with how the pictures turned out this time, got some really great ones. Fun times for sure.
All the best,
Ian
Dotcom Note,
Thanks so much for visiting PPC Ian and for the feedback. I actually think you delivered this feedback before and want to assure you that I take it seriously. In fact, I just did a round of blog updates with my friends at Unique Blog Designs. We actually had some background color testing in the queue of projects and we tested some alternatives. However, we quickly decided that any change in background color really took away from the existing personality and character of PPC Ian. In short: PPC Ian is keeping its look and feel. I’m personally a HUGE fan of it and it was my direction from the beginning to go with these color choices.
Why did I go with these color choices? I wanted to be different and edgy. As a corporate PPC guy, I’m very used to your standard website or blog with white background and black text. And, there’s nothing wrong with that! It converts, it’s easy on the eyes, it works. However, in my spare time, I wanted to go out there and do something a little more fun, something that wouldn’t necessarily work design-wise in the company setting. Hence, my idea was born!
In terms of other popular sites out there with a black background and white text, I’m really happy you brought this up in this particular post. Why? At SES San Francisco, I heard the former CMO of Kodak, Jeffrey Hayzlett, speak. In their re-branding of the company, they made Kodak.com a black site with white text! Now, if that doesn’t validate what I’m doing, nothing will. Not only is Kodak a big company (that has a lot of UI experts) but they are a big company very in tune with user experience and imagery.
I’d also like to point out, as a Stanford computer science guy, that in the early days computers used to have a black background with white (or green) text. I guess I’m going back to my roots as a programmer. I thank you for visiting my blog and for the feedback. I have one last option for you besides my blog and RSS feed: Check out my new mobile theme!
All the best,
Ian
Interesting to learn about Google citations. It really validates the importance of employing Social Media and Community Managers to improve SEO.
Conferences are also great for swag … I like the Google Rubix’s Cube keychain, and Bing pen you brought home!
Nicole,
Thanks for the comments! In addition to the Google keychain and Bing pen, I also got that awesome Sedo t-shirt! 🙂
Ian
As someone who has sent employees to SES NY in the past, and upon return have received positive feedback, I’d recommend SES to anyone looking to learn more! It’s great to hear from an employee that the sessions were very educational, that does mean that there is a lot of effort put in to the actual content that is being presented making it educational. Great to see such efforts being put forth in our industry.
Ian,
Agree it was a great show, thanks for stopping by the Y! booth and sharing your insights. It was a pleasure catching up!
Thanks Mike for stopping by PPC Ian and for the comment! It was really great catching up (I think it had been nearly 2 years!). I’m such a huge fan of Yahoo, you guys are doing some really great stuff. Let’s stay in touch!
All the best,
Ian
Builder,
Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for the awesome comment! I have not been to SES NY before (usually stick to the West Coast conferences) but definitely would like to go one of these days.
All the best,
Ian