August 22, 2003

Day Two of the Conference
Day Two of the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose was to accelerate the pace with the offering of three different agendas for search engine optimization professionals and marketers to choose from. This is part Two of the conference's report from San Jose. Please click here to read part One.

Danny Sullivan's keynote address
While Danny Sullivan started off his address with a comical look at the recent acquisition upon acquisition in the industry, he soon got down to the real future of search. With over five billion searches conducted in the month of June alone, Danny confirmed there is no doubt that the search engines are here to stay. He also decided to look into his "crystal ball" and made some predictions of what is to come in the industry. Some important observations included:

Yahoo will probably launch its new search engine sometime in 2004 with a combination of AltaVista, Inktomi and AllTheWeb technologies. AOL is likely to continue its partnership with Google as this remains a non-competitive relationship for them. MSN should also be ready to launch their own crawler in 2004, with the possibility of purchasing any of LookSmart, Ask Jeeves, FindWhat, or even Google (!) for that matter, to help speed up the implementation.

Advancing to the subject of audience reach of the search engines, Danny Sullivan explained how Google's current reach of 76% of all searches would be diminished in 2004. He predicted that Google's total audience would reduce to around 51% with Yahoo at 25%, MSN at 15% and the other engines making up the remainder. Discussing the future popularity of the search engines he suggested that Google might become a victim of its own success with both reporters and users experiencing a certain amount of "burn-out". With tongue-in-cheek, he also predicted that Ask Jeeves would probably make valiant attempts to become the "Avis of search engines" by positioning itself as the #2 preferred search engine.

He also believed that LookSmart would position itself as the most popular supplement to primary search results, continuing its current trend of being a provider to other search engines. Turning to paid placement and paid inclusion, Danny expected to see growth and development in this side of the industry as search engines look to increase their Advertising revenue from their search results. Citing results from an IAB survey, Danny Sullivan didn't believe that search engine users would object to paid advertising as 64% of them are already aware that it exists and 52% of those do not care, so long as the paid advertising is relevant to their search.

Drawing from his previous journalism experience, he estimated that in the coming years search engines would increase the amount of paid advertising shown on a search results page from an average of 25% to around 70%. Danny wrapped up his keynote address by answering a question on everyone's mind: "Will SEO still be important?" He strongly believed that search engine optimization (SEO) would still be a very dominant part of the industry as there will need to be a balance between paid ads and organic listings.

Trademarks
An important part of Day Two was the Search Engines & Trademarks session, concentrated on information that would be of interest to those involved with the legal aspects of a company's campaign. There were also some interesting comments that stood out from this session. The recent incident where eBay asked Google to remove any sponsored ads that included their trademarked name, drew claims of hypocrisy from some of the panelists. They pointed out that while eBay did not want companies to bid on the word "eBay", one could go to Google and search for trademarked names such as "Barbie" and instantly see paid ads for the product on sale at eBay.com.

Many of the conference panelists also touched on cases that are currently working their way thru the legal system. They suggested that, while it is fair for a company to use trademarked names in comparative examples, this area is becoming more of a "grey zone" when simply bidding on a competitor's brand name. The best advice from all of the panelists was to seek legal advice before bidding on the trademarks of any company.

Spam-related issues
Something new to SES San Jose was "Cleaning up the Mess"- a look at how to remove spam that had been left by another SEO company. Many of the panelists discussed techniques for identifying spam including viewing Google's cache of the site and the source code. In addition, Matthew Bailey of The Karcher Group offered an assortment of techniques for spotting spam and rectifying it. Some of these tips included:

With Google's PageRank fluctuating wildly over the past couple of months, he urged SEOs to not automatically assume that a low or zero PageRank meant a penalty on the website. However, if you do determine that a site has been banned by Google, fixing the problem and then sending an apology email to Google outlining the problems fixed and promising not to do them again, was the best approach to getting a ban lifted. Bailey also suggested viewing the website with a text viewer such as the one located at http://lynx.browser.org/ to determine how a spider might be viewing the site.

Other panelists also touched on the fact that some sites might not be banned but instead could be using some techniques that were preventing them from getting listed. These included:

A recently redesigned site that had switched from static content to dynamic. A newly implemented Robots.txt file might also have an adverse effect on a site's ranking if not correctly edited. The new use of cookies or session IDs might also be to blame for a websites sudden drop in ranking.

All of the panelists suggested that businesses should review their SEO contract being considered to ensure that they would not be taking any risks. A clearly outlined "anti-spam" policy was considered to be among the top things to look for when choosing an SEO. Finally, doorway and gateway pages were being viewed as one of the worst things an SEO could implement in an "organic" optimization program. However, as Danny Sullivan pointed out, using doorway pages for PPC was totally fine and acceptable. Although, he confirmed that using them for "crawler" listings would be bad for anyone's website.

Search engine statistics
It would appear that a new search engine statistic or survey is released almost every week these days. The Search Engine Ratings session promised to shed some light on exactly where all of this data is coming from and what can be done with it. First was James Lamberti of comScore Networks to provide details on how his company collects information and what they know about search engine use. Lamberti explained that comScore uses data collected from more than 1.5 million online consumers who agree to have their Internet activity monitored passively. Unlike some consumer rating companies, comScore is able to track various types of Internet activity including searches, click-rates and conversions.

Benefits of this was revealed when Mr. Lamberti offered two stunning statistics:

15% of Google visitors do not actually go there to search. He gave an example that many people have Google set as their homepage when they launch their browser. This registers a visitor for Google even though no actual search was carried out. Additionnally, it also revealed that 20% of consumers surveyed attributed their searches to the wrong search engine. For example, they may have said they went to AOL, but the data tracked by comScore showed they actually used MSN.

The remainder of the panel was made up of experts from Nielsen/NetRatings, Hitwise and Statmarket. While none of them could agree on percentage share of search engine users, between them they offered some very interesting statistics:

While Google may be dominant in the US, in Japan, Yahoo receives 74.19% of all searches. There were a staggering 5.5 billion searches carried out worldwide in June 2003, up 28% compared to the previous year. In 2002, more than 25% of all online product purchases originated from a search engine. While 96.9% of US searches are carried out on US search engines, only 56.6% of UK searches were done on a UK search engine. In fact, the US Google is more often used in the UK than Google.co.uk.

Finally, the end of the ratings session also marked the end of the second day of Search Engine Strategies, San Jose. Day Three brings Google co-founder Sergey Brin to the Keynote address podium and advanced topics of search engine marketing and search engine technology are also introduced.

Day One      Day Three      Day Four

Note: This is a condensed report originally produced by Andy Beal, v.-p. of Search Marketing for Keyword Ranking.com

        

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. The keywords you think are the best may be totally different than the ones recommended by WordTracker. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.