Search Engine Strategies at San Jose Report

Elixir Systems attended the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose last week. It was a very busy conference attended by over 6,000 people. There were sessions to attend, exhibitors to visit, networking to catch up on, parties to hang out at and an opportunity to catch up on all the latest development in the search marketing field. This month’s newsletter includes information absorbed during the conference. For more coverage check out the Elixir System Blog.

Webmaster Radio Interviews the Elixir CEO Fionn Downhill

WebmasterRadio.FM is an interactive, Internet based radio network aimed at webmasters and offers an all-star line up of radio shows hosted by the most respected names in Internet business. It aims to provide information from the most successful marketers and technology experts in the world.

Fionn Downhill of Elixir Systems was interviewed by Chris Pirillo of Webmaster Radio at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose during August of 2005. Amongst many topics discussed there was talk on the Elixir marketing approach and the Elixir booth theme including the M&M display that caught the eye of many people.

She also discussed latest developments in search, why Elixir are highly regarded in the industry and what makes us unique.

What is Vertical Creep?

‘Vertical creep’ is not some new horror movie character!! However it is a term you will becoming across more and more in the search marketing world.

‘Vertical creep’ is a term used to describe the addition of specific results into the regular search results. For example if you look at the Google home page it includes search options tabs for ‘images,’ ‘groups,’ ‘news,’ ‘Froogle,’ ‘local,’ etc. Regular search results are beginning to include results from these various verticals.

How should you make use of vertical creep? You can capitalize on results within these verticals by targeting and getting included within the vertical results. These will in turn creep into the regular search results. Use vertical search as a strategy to influence the regular results for your search terms.

Competitive Research Session

The competitive research session at San Jose covered the research you can do using search engines to stay ahead of your competitors.

Search engines can tell you a lot about your competition, if you know what to look for. How do you use search engines to profile your competition, help you understand what links to gain, ad prices to pay, content to offer and customers to seek?

A great free tool is alexa.com. Use it to look up your URL and see your competitors, analyze traffic, and compare quality of traffic.

Also look at PPC ads for your keywords and check out what your competition is doing.

Look at the sites in the natural, organic listings on the different search engines to find out who is competing.

Use marketleap.com for a link popularity check on your site and your competitors. Including:

• The marketing opportunities
• The competitive landscape
• The types of competition
• What does it take to win?

To get a broad view of your competition you need to take a look at all competitive information including offline, paid search, natural search, and shopping engines.

Is your Site Designed for Success?

How your site is designed plays a large part in beating the competition. Coding, keyword density, URL strings, pages indexed, page rank, titles/headers, site layout and design, conversion process, site load time, dedicated host, and the site content depth are all ingredients that play a part in your site's success.

The competitive research session was very informative and gave lots of information that can be used to gain the competitive advantage.

What is Chasing the Algorithm?

Search engine algorithms are the formulas used by search engines to rank sites for search terms. Algorithm chasing refers to SEO tactics that revolve around observing algorithm changes and immediately updating your site content and the programming of your site to catch these changes. The focus of this style of SEO is position related and not big picture business goals. It is more like micromanaging your results and can be very confusing. It can also result in periods of good rankings and periods of bad rankings. We recommend a consistent steady approach to SEO as opposed to chasing the algorithms.

Copyright © James Peggie

James Peggie is the Marketing Manager for Elixir Systems – a search marketing company located in Scottsdale, Arizona. www.elixirsystems.com

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