Last month’s 2,300-person SES New York was considered to be one of the top events of the entire industry. The most creative, innovative and dynamic people involved with the Search Engine aspects of the internet were all there, interacting with people like you and me.

Just deciding what level of the conference to participate in was a job in itself. I took the beginner’s route -- I visited the small-business seminars as well as the blog and new release from Google Adwords sessions and met a few of the people behind the web scenes.

Matt Van Wagner, a principal of www.findmefaster.com, showed how a bakery in his New Hampshire neighborhood, www.patisseriebleu.com , was able to transform its identity from an average bakery with a mediocre presence on the Web, to a specialty bakery by giving it all the right finishing touches. Van Wagner’s work was done after careful research and analysis based on feedback from customers and Web visitors alike. After going into detail with all the interested parties, one idea after another started to click – VanWagner found a niche for the bakery, in which they became an allergen-free bakery of choice, and they are now looking to make unique mixes (much more practical for shipping) and other products for business out of their region. Business soared, and they have never looked back. The research and Website redo brought an increase in in-store as well as Web traffic and phone orders. Just one of his cases is worth repeating.

Also on the panel, David Mihm, of www.getlisted.org focused on the need to create pages for each of the neighborhoods a business serves, and the value that this creates. Mihm was very focused on the many ways a small business can succeed and was very reasonable addressing the short-cuts to success as his website gets into as well. Mihm is really the "local guy". He lives and breathes it. Mihm says that 40% of queries have local intent. And then he backs it up: "100 million unique visitors per month search Yahoo with "local intent" - Frazier Miller, GM of Yahoo Local, 7/24/08.” One more crucial point Mihm made for those of you with retail stores is, “If you get any significant percentage of business from a physical storefront, you need to be in Local search results.” For local search can I say that “Mihm’s” the word?An extrapolation of this is that Mihm says Google has 500 million per month.

Google Adwords
Ariel Bardin, a product management director for Google, introduced the new interface of Google Adwords. He did say it will take some time to get use to, but it’s much more clickable than before, offering up many new features that customers had asked for. Recently there has been some press about a key member leaving Google as he felt that reacting to customers needs to fast takes away from what’s good overall, but I’m sure that's a philosophy that can be debated. For example, Bardin explained, you can run a query report and it will easily label what you have changed, visually letting you know what you have done in one eye span. Also, your data is configurable with Excel at many more points. Another nice upgrade is that you can change the CPC (cost per click) for all your choices by amount or percent. On a different note, one of his website tips is to have a link on every page to ask for feedback, a ‘Send Feedback’ button, for example. It can make a big difference.

Not just the speakers
A good conference is not only about the speakers. Many times you can learn a lot or even more from the people you meet there and the companies they represent. There were two that I felt were worth mentioning and are on the cutting edge. One is www.vitals.com -- used by hospitals to monitor the success of physicians and can give you an instant, free checkup on your doctor. The second company is www.reprelations.com, the backbone of many public relations firms, focusing on “reputation control” for celebrities, athletes, and corporations, are both worth a look.

The training
Bruce Clay, a definite established rock star in the Internet world, is the think-tank behind companies such as CNN which manage 1 million -- yes, 1 million -- pages of new content per month. He’s the wizard who makes it all come true for hundreds of companies world-wide. He was joined by Chris Hart who jumped in to elaborate on things which Clay touched on and emphasized those points which he felt would help the attendees (Hart took the time out at breaks and lunch to get to know each of us while Clay was answering questions). Hart is probably the next Clay-in-the-making. He took the time out to learn where each attendee was coming from, and was able to fine-tune the experience for each individual. Some of the new perspectives that I got from Clay and Hart were:

Running a “~” (tilda) search is one of the best ways to find what is natural in the index of those words most closely associated to what you need for your own SEO campaign. Use other forms of natural stemming words in your content like “smile, smiles, smiled and smiling.” The emphasis is in using the words that come up in natural conversation and make sense. Behavioral or personalized search based on your IP address will become more popular, and ‘private searches’ will also stem up as a result. Because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Code 508, each released version of flash (non-animated text is all that is searchable currently) will continue to get more searchable (of course you need to put contextual information around your flash object). In January and February Google didn’t notify people that it was experimenting to see how weighted averages for established sites worked, thus many went up and down in rankings in an indefinable way. Things went back to normal after that, with authoritative sites become more valuable (not a known spammer, known audience, trusted resource). Sites are defined as either research or e-commerce and the more your e-commerce site slides towards the research site, the higher the rankings. Integrating engagement objects such as video, images, blogs, maps, books, and music make the difference. FYI: Google has an estimated 150,000 servers to study billions of pages in the indexing cycle. Google will look at every page at least once every 90 days (and then if changes they will spider), but the more often you update the site, the more you will get spidered. Case in point: CNN has got to the point of being spidered every two minutes. YouTube‘s “Dove Evolution” has had 8 million views, and another one describing the social gravitas is the “Battle at Kruger” video, which was eventually made into a Discovery TV show. Omniture is something like Google Analytics on steroids The value of having keyword contextual terms in the URL, is when a link is made to your pages when the person linking to you uses the URL as the anchor text. Link to a non-profit and you also want to link to experts, but you don’t want someone lame to link to you (or back to them). Link Begging is very low return on investment. Maybe find a reason for them to edit that page and that might just tempt them to move forwards with you. Think about them before you make your presentation.

If you have any questions or comments, let us know. We’ll have more about the many ways the Internet can build your business in the future, but we need your feedback to know that it’s right for you. It’s YOUR PAPER – let us know!
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