Go To SES Berlin Or SES Chicago For “A Ranking in the Top Three”

As you plan you schedule for the rest of the year, consider attending SES Berlin, which will be held November 24-25, 2009, and SES Chicago, which will be held December 7-11, 2009.

For a sneak preview, watch the interview with Matt McGowan, VP Publishing at Incisive Media, by John Mulligan of SEO-PR. They talk about the upcoming SES Berlin and SES Chicago events.

McGowan says after having SES shows in various cities in Germany, including Hamburg and Munich, it was time to schedule one in Berlin. He says attendance is expected to be around 500 for SES Berlin in November. And SES Chicago is expected to attract thousands of marketing executives, managers, professionals, specialists and consultants in December.

Matt McGowan, VP Publishing, Incisive Media previews SES Chicago and Berlin '09

Now, why should you go to one of these shows at the end of the year?

There are a dozen reasons, which I will roll out over the next several weeks. But, let me begin by singing the SEO version of "A Partridge in a Pear Tree."

If you read my article in Search Engine Watch back in January 2007, you already know the words. If you didn't, they are: "A Ranking in the Top Three."

If the search industry didn't change so rapidly, then you could attend one or two Search Engine Strategies conferences a year and stay up-to-date on the latest market trends.

But, Google issues two to four press releases a month and two to four blog posts a week that impact your search engine ranking or represent a new marketing opportunity. For example, Google Fast Flip was announced just this week.

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.

At the same time, Google provides aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, and Newsweek. And it gives you the ability to share content with your friends and community.

Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is both serendipitous and personalized.

Google has also made a mobile version of Fast Flip with tactile page flipping for the iPhone and Android-powered devices, so you can browse on the go.

And, Microsoft isn't shy about making announcements early and often, either. Just this week, Microsoft introduced a new Visual Search feature on its Bing search engine to make Web content more visually appealing. Although not directed at news, it displays some categories of search results using thumbnail images instead of text.

So, if you attended SES San Jose in August 2009 and don't go to another event until SES New York in March 2010, I estimate that you'll be about seven months behind the eight ball when you get there.

Now, if you don't mind letting your search engine rankings drop below the top three listings for several months -- or if you aren't worried that your competitors will take advantage of new opportunities before you find out about them -- then happy holidays.

However, if falling behind in a rapidly changing world does concern you, then take a serious look at attending SES Berlin, which will be held November 24-25, 2009, and SES Chicago, which will be held December 7-11, 2009.

If anyone asks you why you're going, simply sing out that you want to get or need to keep "A Ranking in the Top Three."