Best & Worst of Search Engine Strategies New York 2007
Dan and I went to Search Engine Strategies New York this past week. Overall it was a really great conference and I'd recommend it to just about anyone who's interested in search and on-line advertising.
Here are some highlights from the conference (these are just the best and worst for the sessions I went to)...
Best Sense of Design
This easily goes to Marc Schiller, CEO/Founder of ElectricArtists, Inc. - his presentation was absolutely stunning.
Worst Sense of Design
Let's just say there were a lot of people who could have won this category... It seems safe to say that SEO is focused on text, not so much on design. I wished I could have seen more that were good at both...
Best at "User Experience"
This would have to go to Critical Mass for their work on rolex.com. The site was so focused on the user experience that it had SEO issues, but the prioritization of user experience is appropriate for a client like Rolex.
Presenters with the Best PageRank
Nokia (9)
Save The Children (8)
FeedBurner (8)
Performics (a division of DoubleClick) (8)
Critical Mass (7)
Comedy Central (7)
Netconcepts (7)
Jupiter Research (7)
BlogAds (7)
I know PageRank isn't all that important, but it is a rough estimate of effectiveness/credibility in the SEO world.
Best @ Analytics
Laura Thieme of Bizresearch was pretty impressive with her practical handle of analytics and knowledge of all the various analytics packages. However, her mention that she drug tests her employees made us wonder about her a bit...
Worst at Following Their Own Advice
When I was looking up pages to link to for the various speakers I was amazed that most of the speakers hadn't done anything to manage what's shown in the SERPs for their own name. It was rare that I could find any sort of bio page or home page for them - which is odd given the industry and how I kept hearing that you needed to manage corporate on-line reputations.
This prize also goes to all the presenters who have canonical domain issues. How many times did I hear to pick either www.domain.com or domain.com and enforce your choice with a 301 permanent redirect - yet I'd say better than 1/2 the presenters don't do this with their own sites. I was almost tempted to link to the 'wrong' URL, but figured there was no point in it since I was using nofollow.
Best at Doing What They Do Well
Obviously, Google is in this category, but Feedburner seemed right on target as well...
Worst Product Knowledge
I asked a guy at the WebTrends booth about technical training for their product since I'd tried to get my head around it last year and found it a horribly confusing experience despite the fact that I'm pretty good at that sort of stuff and don't have problems with their competitors. He told me to go to http://www.webtrends.com/training, but that URL doesn't exist. IMHO, he should have been able to tell me that there are 5 days of technical training - a 3 day course and two specialized 1 day courses and the total cost for the 5 days is $3,000. [We won't go into what I think about the price given that the training wouldn't be necessary if their product were better designed.]
Best Success Story
I was really impressed with the strategy Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR took when his company did work for StubHub! (the results were pretty impressive as well). It was covered in the session on blogs and feeds.
A Note About Links
Just for the record I 'nofollowed' most of the links to presenters' sites in the blog posts on the various sessions. The exceptions were 1) really big sites, 2) people from the non-profit panel, 3) people who fed us a hot lunch (Bizresearch), 4) people/companies I've labeled 'best of' and 5) the person who wasn't afraid to take a political stand on his site.
