Thursday, May 10, 2007

Search Enigne Watch LIVE Columbus- What I learned from the Big Dogs

I attended the Search Engine Watch LIVE conference in Columbus yesterday, and was shocked at the amount of fairly simple web marketing tactics that I had not thought about. Fairly simple ideas such imagining a search engine has a human brain, finding niche keywords that will get conversions instead of the keywords you think the masses are searching, and having extremely clear expectations of what a success really is before ever looking at analytics. These suggestions are not brain surgery, but rather ideas that always need to be kept in mind when carrying out a web marketing campaign.


The most memorable thing that I took away from the conference was not the technical processes behind getting high Google page rank, local directory space and PPC conversions. It was that although these processes are not exactly easy they are not the most difficult part of making a companies web marketing strategy work. The most difficult part of a campaign in my opinion is knowing a company well enough to combine the methods into the exact mix that will get the conversions for that company. Finding this mix can take extensive trial and error. Try doing this for hundreds of small local companies, with little budget and few clear campaign expectations and you have yourself a chore (welcome to our lives).

If you are interested in some of the strategies and learning more about what was discussed at the conference check out the speakers on the Search Engine Watch agenda. All of the speakers were excellent and very insightful, but a few stood out. I really enjoyed Sage Lewis' discussion on social media and blogging, (very nice guy) and Jeffrey K. Rohrs, who's SixDegreesofBacon Blog will have you rolling.