SES San Jose Day 2

(more catch-up…)

Started Tuesday at the “Creating Compelling Ads” session at 9 am, which was very good — lots of information in an area (PPC) where I’ve only spent minimal time, since most of our OWT clients are focused on organic traffic and haven’t adopted the PPC advertising tools just yet. The main point that both Phil Stelter and Darren Kuhn emphasized is the need to TEST all your ad creatives so you can learn which ads are most effective, and thus, get the most out of your advertising dollars. I’ll try to post detailed notes when time allows…

After that it was on to the “Writing for the Search Engines Session” at 10:45, which was also good — but mostly to confirm that what I’ve been doing and encouraging clients to do is along the right path.

And then in the afternoon I took in the “Search Engine Algorithm Research” session, which included the best presentation I’ve seen so far this week. That was from Jon Glick, who used to be a search big-wig at Yahoo!, and now works at Become.com, a shopping search engine. Jon’s days at Yahoo give him great insight into how algorithms work, which he shared with the nice crowd in the ballroom. Great, great stuff. A lot of it was information we often speculate about and discuss on message boards and the like, but when it comes from someone who used to do this stuff at Yahoo and puts it all together in a single presentation … terrific. If you’re at SES, don’t miss his PPT slides on the SES web site. If you’re not here, I will definitely post the notes I took when time allows.