1MPACT LA - SEM Is Not Sexy
I think the most lively session I attended was Barbara Coll and Fionn Downhill's session on Search Engines. As experts in the field, they presented and then answered many questions on SEM, SEO, and PPC search. The title of this post refers to a comment Barbara made in reference to the fact that the search engines are pretty much text driven. They show natural and paid text results, with not fancy creatives to have fun with.
One hot topic is always the issue of results for your trademark and brand. Both agreed that you should not allow anyone else to own your brand or category. Fionn had lots of examples of companies doing it wrong, where they had great campaigns set up, but they forgot to include the organic search and/or PPC visibility into the mix. Ways to own the top ten natural results include organic SEO, press releases, affiliates, and articles.
They also volunteered to offer thoughts on what might happen over the next six months or so. MSN AdCenter (just launched this week) has great promise because they can do extensive demographic targeting that Google is unable to do. They see a big future in local/city based classifieds, personalization, community based search, and vertical (travel, book, etc.) search.
For larger sites and those with complex navigation (or SE unfriendly), they stressed the importance of site maps. These are simple text based ways for the search engines to index your site. Google and Yahoo both have tools to help the engines index your site, and the these tools also gives you feedback on your site, what is indexed, links, and more. This is something that is a required effort if you want to maximize your SE indexing and performance.
Two tools mentioned in the session were OptiLink for reviewing link quality and GSiteCrawler for creating Google Sitemap files.
