Search Engine Strategies London: Final Day Thoughts
This year I was lucky enough to get a chance to go to my first Search Engine Strategies conference, held at the Excel centre in London’s Docklands. Unfortunately, I could only make it today, the final day.
I thought I’d write up a few of the thoughts on the sessions I attended, the speakers, and my overall impression of the conference.
My initial impressions of the conference were of a definite end-of-show feel - the expo hall had been cleared, and there was little ceremony to the arrival. Registration consisted of a badge being handed over and it was up to me to find out where my first session was. Those on the registration desk would have been able to see that this was my first day in attendance and perhaps given me an idea of where to go.
The first session I had chosen to go to was called Search Marketing in Regulated Industries. This promised to be interesting to those of us in the heavily regulated environment of the Financial Services industry, although in reality, there was little of any practical use from the 2 speakers that I stayed to watch. The first speaker talked about tobacco advertising, which for me, and as far as I could tell most of the 30-odd other people in the room, was of no interest. The second speaker did have more relevance to the financial services industry, but again it missed the mark as far as I was concerned. Although I’m not a big fan of walking out mid-talk, as I can understand how off-putting that could be for the speakers, there was little to suggest that I should stick around for the end of this talk, seeing as one of the speakers hadn’t showed up and moderator Jeffrey Rohrs had already suggested the talk would finish early. I wasn’t hopeful of much debate from the audience.
Also, the promise of unearthing a few gems in My SEM Toolbox had become too great. Having only got there halfway through, I found the room so packed I had to sit on the floor. Although most of the tools discussed were standard SEO fayre, there was definitely more of a hands-on feel to this session, much greater participation from the crowd and I came away with a bit more information on how to gather and manage SEO data.
Following the morning coffee break I attended the Putting Search in the Ad Mix session. This was possibly the slickest of the presentations I saw, and gave some useful, if again not too practical, insights into how search can integrate with other advertising, both on and offline. Glenn Alsup of Viewmark gave some insights into the kind of data that needs to be tracked, Vivek Bhargava came up with some interesting ideas on how to use search and presented them in a humourous way. Stephanie Carr of The Search Works was veru slick in her presentation about integrating pay-per-click campaigns, although I thought XSEO’s Matt Paines’ talk about link buying wasn’t particularly on-topic, and was a little incoherent at times. Matt’s speaking style is not to my tastes - perhaps a little too laid back at times, I found I wanted to hurry him up a bit during his sentences.
Over lunch we got to see a little bit of Yahoo!s new ad platform, Panama, and were able to talk to some of their PPC guys.
Following lunch, the Web Analytics & Measuring Success Overview gave us chance to see Rand Fishkin, quite possibly the nicest man in SEO, speak. He is obviously very passionate about the subject, and I got the impression that he could have talked for the whole time had he been asked to. On the panel we also had representatives from 3 analytics companies who did not present but were involved in some interesting discussions about stats measurement and the effects of AJAX.
Last but certainly not least was the Link Baiting, Buying Links & Other Tactics session, which featured the very passionate Nick Wilson, talking about viral link building (it’s not link bait!), Dave Naylor, who brought both passion and comedy to proceedings, along with Alan Webb of Abakus and Matt Paines, whom I spoke about earlier. This was by far the most interesting of sessions for me, and was probably kept ’til last to keep most people from wandering off after lunch (but why no Rand on the link baiting panel?).
All-in-all, I had very mixed feelings about the day - I don’t feel that I came away having learned all that much, but it was good to see some of the big SEO bloggers talk, and to realise why they have made it to where they are, and why the rest of us haven’t.
As I mentioned earlier, there was definitely an “end-of-term” feeling to proceedings (perhaps I’m just miffed about not being able to bag any freebies from the expo?) and I felt that the organisation of the event could have been a little better. For example, there didn’t seem to be much cohesion between some of the talkers - subjects were sometimes slightly off-topic for the session or different speakers covered the same ground. I understand it must be difficult to coordinate the presentations of such busy people from all parts of the world, but the event is not cheap, and you expect to get a fair bit of professionalism for your money. I guess it’s also a bit of a nightmare finding the right level to aim the speeches at when your audience is as wide-ranging as it appeared to be today.
I also get the feeling (rightly or wrongly) that you really have to be there for the full show (and the after-show parties) to really get the most out of the event - something that is difficult for those of us who live a fair distance away from London to achieve.
Would I go again? Definitely, but I’d try to be there from the start next time. I’d also perhaps not expect to learn too much from the event but use it more as a chance to network. I guess if you’re reading the blogs of guys like these on a regular basis, then there is little that a conference such as Search Engine Strategies can teach you, but for those in other industries or perhaps new to SEO, then they’re probably a great introduction to some of the information and some of the characters.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under SEO, Conference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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