Seeing as how this is my first year to attend Search Engine Strategies, I may not be able to provide a good comparison between this year’s SES San Jose and the conferences of years past. However, I can provide a rundown of the major points from the sessions I attended this year (major thanks to The Boss for giving me the opportunity to attend). Since I’m an unbelievably slow writer and I have a lot of blogging to catch up on, I’m going to have to break it down day by day.

Search Industry Update

Sandeep Aggarwal (Collins-Stewart), Heather Dougherty (Hitwise), Kevin Lee (Didit), Sean Walsh (LuxuryLink.com), Jaideep Singh (Spock.com)

The key buzzwords that I heard repeated over and over again during this conference were “testing,” “long tail,” and “blogs.” It started with the Search Industry Update session in which the state of the economy was addressed and how it was affecting various industries.

The major points from this session: companies want to get more bang for their buck, especially if they’re on the advertisers side. Test landing pages, improve ROI and conversions, and be smarter with your advertising spend. Be the squirrel that saves some food for the winter ahead.

Igniting Viral Campaigns

Andrew Goodman (Page Zero Media), Jennifer Laycock (Search Engine Guide), Fionn Downhill (Elixir Interactive), Justilien Gaspard (Justilien.com), Chris Winfield (10e20)

This was my favorite session on Monday, probably because it was on a topic I was really in tune with. Chris Winfield started off the session with some basic principles in viral marketing. And BTW, they include blogs and other aspects of social marketing in this presentation which can be considered “viral.” Jennifer Laycock’s presentation included a thought process for starting a blog/viral marketing campaign and is offering to send it to people who email her requesting it.

The major points from this session: You can’t control viral marketing, but you can enable it. Blogs are good for your website, but must be planned thoroughly. Be remarkable. Create remarkable content that your audience will want to share.

Video Search Engine Optimization

Joseph Morin (Boost Search Marketing and Storybids), Chase Norlin (Pixsy), Steve Espinosa (eLocal Listing), Matthew Scheybeler (blinkx), Gregory Markel (Infuse Creative)

Video isn’t my area of expertise, but this session was filled with a wealth of valuable information. A couple of technical optimization tricks:

• Consider the length of your video and avoid 3-4 minutes in length. Might be too long for your visitors.
• Export your videos in SWF. Don’t use Active X controls. It’s just clunky.
• Utilize Google’s video sitemap feature.
• Host your video on a page and optimize the title and meta data on that page.
• Use analytics and look at visitor length on your video pages. Are they watching the whole video?
• Use thumbnails for your video. Really utilize the start screen.
• Tubemogul.com. Use it. You can upload your video to multiple video search engines via Tubemogul.

The major points from this session: In the world of today’s online marketing, optimization is good, but sharing is even better. Making sure your videos are set up to be shared can help it succeed (it doesn’t mean it WILL succeed, it just means it’ll help). A spike in traffic is good, but growth in traffic is even better.

Coming Up Next: Day 2

• Landing Page Testing and Tuning
• What’s new with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer
• Landing Page Utopia: Expert Roundtable