SES Toronto – Introduction to Search Engine Marketing Part 1

Blog, Conference Live Blogs, New Media & Tech | 18. Jun, 2008 by Rahaf | 2 Comments

SES Toronto – Introduction to Search Engine Marketing Part 1

So I’m at the SES Toronto conference where I’m going to brush up on my Search Engine Strategy skills. I’m here thanks to the kind invitation of Byron Gordon of SEO-PR. The conference is packed with people, and I’m excited to hear a lot of the presentations.

I think I’m going to start at the very beginning, and pop into Introduction to Search Engine Marketing. I’m happy to note that the conference is making an effort to be green, so the papers I received were minimal, and the bag is perfect for carrying groceries. (It’s not another laptop bag!) Best of all, I found a hardcover of the book Meatball Sundae, written by marketing superstar Seth Godin.

Ok, let’s start at the very beginning, with an Intro to the basics of SES:

The Panel Description:
“Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) is a general term that encompasses the entire field of web search visibility, including paid search ads (sometimes called “PPC” for pay-per-click) and improving visibility in unpaid organic search listings (generally referred to as SEO, for “search engine optimization”). This session will provide a broad-ranging and concise survey of how search engines work, where to prioritize your time and effort, and key marketing concepts. The session is particularly useful for newcomers to the field, and first-time SES attendees.

Moderator:
Speakers:

Highlights:

On Basic Terms:
  • Search Engine Marketing: A General term that encompasses the entire field of web search visibility. It includes improving unpaid organic search listings. SEM also includes paid search advertising (called PPC for pay per click)
  • Universal Google Search: Results from multiple specialized searches will appear within the main Google Web search results instead of showing up as a separate box at the top of the search results page. (So if you look up the Blue Jays, part of the search results will include videos and picture thumbnails)

Understanding the Secret of Google:

Jarboe: Google uses more than 200 signals, including it’s Page Rank algorithm to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. Google then conducts hypertext matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted.

  • PageRank, which is the nick name for complex stuff that’s built into the algorithm. Who you link to, and who is linking to you determines how important your page is.
Trying to beat the Google Genius
Jarboe: Every time you think you have it figured out a shortcut or loophole, Google goes back and fixes it. Look at the words on your page, they [Google] are getting more clever so it’s not just the words on the page anymore. Google recently acquired a company that does “latent semantic indexing” and what they try to do is figure out synonyms. So by looking at your page and understanding the synonym of the words on it, the algorithm can come up with a relevant search answer.
On Updating Your SEO skills
Jarboe: What we want to do is give you an outline, and I wish I could tell you that you’ll know it all by the end but I can’t. So what we will say is that when you’re through here you will have the outline. It’s an outline because you have to continue to fill it in.
All of this stuff is moving, it’s not like history. This is a series of things happening. So we’re going to through them, by the way the second half of that didn’t need to be on this slide a year or two ago, so not only are the basic shifting internally, but they keep adding things as they go along. We need to give you a sense of what you need to know and how you can go about learning it.

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2 Responses to “SES Toronto – Introduction to Search Engine Marketing Part 1”

  1. Matt McGowan
    19. Jun, 2008 at 12:13 pm #

    Wonderful to have you at the show… please be in touch with any feedback.

    All the best – Matt (VP Marketing, SES)

  2. markez linda
    01. Mar, 2009 at 9:06 pm #

    Very nice information. Thanks for this.

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