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Over the past few days, more and more articles and posts from SES San Jose 2008 have been written. I’m sure there will be more stories to come out of the event, but this seems like a good time to recap the conference.

A quick Google News search for “SES San Jose” finds 276 articles from the past month – 138 when the duplicates are removed. A search in Yahoo! News for “SES San Jose” finds 114 articles from the past month. A query in Google Blog Search for “SES San Jose” finds 5,554 blog posts that mention “SES San Jose” from the past month, 337 when the duplicates are removed.

A little content analysis reveals the top 10 stories from the past month that were triggered by a keynote, panel, session or workshop at the 10th annual SES confence. Seven of these stories were ones that I predicted in my post on the Search Engine Watch Blog entitled “SES San Jose tip sheet for bloggers and journalists.” But three of the top stories came as surprises — even to an SES veteran like myself. Here, in order, are the Big Ten.

Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, SES & Search Engine Watch. (Twenty-three articles and 72 unduplicated blog posts, including “SES San Jose Photos – Paparazzi Style” by Lee Odden of TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog.

Tuesday Morning Keynote by Satya Nadella, SVP, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft. (Nineteen articles and 69 unduplicated blog posts, including “Is Microsoft’s Vision of Search Enough to Catch Google?” by Rob Hof of BusinessWeek. Rob wrote, “It would be dangerous for anyone to write off Microsoft. Its determination was on display today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior VP of search, portal, and advertising platform group, told the crowd that he sees searchers moving from merely typing keywords into Google to getting tasks done.”

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru of Google. (Ten articles, 74 blog posts and a YouTube video entitled “Matt Cutts on Big Brand BlackHat Sites” on the ChrisDaviesCa Channel. Chris happened to be sitting next to Matt, Google’s head of webspam, when Matt weighed in about big brand sites that have been banned for black hat seo practices during the Black Hat/White Hat session during SES San Jose 2008.

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land. (Eleven articles, 41 unduplicated blog posts and a video interview by Mike McDonald of the WebProNews Video Blog entitled, “SES: Staying Focused On Search.”) Danny said that social marketing and all sorts of other things can be useful, but it’s important to get back to the search marketing basics.

Universal & Blended Search. (Four articles, 42 unduplicated blog posts and a video interview for the SESConferenceExpo channel entitled, “Johanna Wright of Google on Google Universal Search.” Johanna gives some insight into how vertical search results are blended into universal search results and advocates a thoughtful approach to making information accessible to Google through use of sitemaps and detailed descriptions.

Keynote Roundtable: Why Does Search Get the Credit for Everything? (Four articles and 38 blog posts, including “SES roundtable: Search shouldn’t take all the credit” by Ellen Keohane of DM News. Ellen wrote, “Search marketing often gets credit for the final sale or conversion, even when it shouldn’t, according to a roundtable discussion today at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose.”

Opening Keynote Presentation by Lee Siegel, author of Against the Machine. (Two articles and 27 unduplicated blog posts, including “Trust: The Backbone of Consumer Satisfaction” by Kevin Lee of ClickZ.) Kevin wrote, “In an afternoon keynote, Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine,” predicted a backlash against the Internet as it has evolved. His book (which I’ve partially read) discusses how there are unforeseen consequences due to technology, and the Internet is responsible for largely unforeseen positive and negative effects on individuals and society.”

Thursday Morning Keynote: Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick. (One article and 27 unduplicated blog posts, including “Dan Heath 2008 SES San Jose Keynote” on WebmasterRadio.FM.) Listen to Dan explain Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die as he delivers his 2008 SES San Jose Keynote. Dan offers six key factors for sticky ideas, plus offers numerous supporting examples.

Orion Panel: How Much Search is Enough? (Three articles and 19 unduplicated blog posts, including “SES San Jose 2008 - Where’s Money For Search Going?” by Manoj Jasra of WebProNews. Manoj wrote, “How much Search is enough? Aaron Goldman of Resolution Media, Steven Kaufman of Digitas, Robert Murray of iProspect and Bob Tripathi of Discover Financial Services were posed that very question by SES’s own, Kevin Ryan.”

Orion Panel: Technical & Information Giants. (Six articles and 15 unduplicated blog posts, including “Technical & Information Giants Keynote - SES San Jose 2008” by Jason McElweenie of The SEM Blog. Jason wrote, “WOW. Let me repeat that. WOW….This was a great panel of some very huge icons on the web today. Bravo SES!”

Randy Pausch delivered the “Last Lecture” after he learned that he’d developed terminal pancreatic cancer.

His video became an Internet sensation, with over 3,000,000 views on YouTube. Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

You can find Randy Pausch’s home page here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

Randy Pausch died today at the age of 47.

He is survived by his wife, Jai Pausch and three children, Dylan, Logan and Chloe - to whom he dedicated his video lecture.

We’ve written a great deal about the education of a search engine marketer. Ron Jones’s column, SEM.edu, provides a wealth of information about learning the technical aspects of SEM and SEO.

Today we’ll take a brief look at the most important goal: achieving your dreams.

Here’s the complete video of the “Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch.

Yahoo researcher Peter Mika has written up an extensive article on semantic search. First he talks about the limitations to syntax-based search:

• It is almost impossible to return search results that relate to the secondary sense of a term—especially if a dominant sense exists—for example, try searching for George Bush the beer brewer as compared to the President
• The capabilities of computational advertising, which is largely also an IR problem (for example, retrieving matching ads from a fixed inventory), are clearly impacted because of the sparsity of advertisements.
• When no clear key exists, search engines are unable to perform queries on descriptions of objects. For example, try searching for the author of this article with the keywords ‘semantic web researcher working for yahoo.’
• Current search technology is unable to satisfy any complex queries requiring information integration such as analysis, prediction, scheduling, etc. An example of such integration-based tasks is opinion mining regarding products or services. While there have been some successes in opinion mining with pure sentiment analysis, it is often the case that users like to know what specific aspects of a product or service are being described in positive or negative terms and to have the search results appear aggregated and organized. Information integration is not possible without structured representations of content.
• Multimedia queries are also difficult to answer, as multimedia objects are typically described with only a few keywords (tagging) or sentences. This is typically too little text for the statistical methods of IR to be effective.

Mika says there are two approaches to semantic search: Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the Semantic Web.

Natural Language Processing “builds on the automatic analysis of text.” Semantic search company hakia is an example of natural language processing. Interestingly, hakia uses Yahoo search technology, including the recently announced Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your own Search Service). Powerset, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, is another example of NLP. These NLP semantic search providers “extract entities from text, disambiguate them against large-scale background knowledge sources (PowerSet uses Freebase, Hakia has its own ontology), and then record the relationships as found in the text.” Users can query by asking full questions, though many still use keywords.

Semantic Web “aims to make the web more easily searchable by allowing publishers to expose their metadata.” Mika says most publishers are willing to share their data if it results in increased traffic. Plus, semantic web allows publishers to avoid costs and quality issues associated with NLP. But last year, Yahoo researcher Mor Naaman declared the Semantic Web dead. Naaman’s reasoning was the limitation of microformats, but Mika says that the new RDFa standard would have greater capabilities.

What Mika wants to do is to integrate the best of NLP and semantic web. He says Yahoo’s SearchMonkey platform allows for this integration to occur.

To dig into all the technical nitty gritty, check out Mika’s full article, “Semantic Search Arrives at the Web.”

Last week the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on online advertising and privacy. Today, the Judiciary Committees of the Senate and House get in on the action as it relates to the recent Yahoo-Google deal.

The Senate hearing began at 10:30 am, but is largely eclipsed by a speech by the President as well as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s umteenth appearance on Capitol Hill. You can watch it live by clicking on “Live Webcast” here.

The House hearing begins at 1:30pm and the site has links to webcast video, though I personally couldn’t get them to work on my laptop. If you’re in the DC area, head on over to 2141 Rayburn House Office Building to observe the hearing for yourself.

Google Senior VP for Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will be appearing at both hearings and is planning to touch on the following:

• The agreement will be good for Internet users (who will see ads that are better targeted to their interests); advertisers (whose ads will be better matched to users’ interests, allowing them to reach potential customers more efficiently), and website publishers (who will see increased revenue from better-matched ads on their websites).
• Google and Yahoo! will remain vigorous competitors, and that competition will help fuel innovation that is good for users and the economy. Commercial arrangements between competitors are commonplace in many industries. Antitrust regulators in the US have recognized that consumers can benefit form these arrangements, especially when one company has technical expertise that enables another company to improve the quality of its products
• The agreement will not increase Google’s share of search traffic, because Yahoo will continue to run its own search engine and compete in online search.
• Yahoo! will make its instant messaging network interoperable with Google’s. This will mean easier and broader communication among a growing number of IM users, and enable users to choose among competing IM providers based on the merits and features of the services.
• A number of steps have been taken in the Yahoo! agreement to protect user privacy. As Google supplies ads to Yahoo! and its partners, personally identifiable information of individual Internet users will not be shared between the companies. Yahoo! will anonymize the IP address of a searcher’s computer before passing a search request to Google.

Also scheduled to appear are:

• Michael Callahan, General Counsel, Yahoo!
• Brad Smith Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Microsoft
• Matthew Crowley, Chief Marketing Officer, Yellowpages.com
• Tim Carter, President and CEO, Askthebuilder.com

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Yesterday, we looked at building the business case for going to SES San Jose. Today, let’s tackle optimizing your schedule for Search Engine Strategies San Jose.

For arguments sake, let’s say that you’ll be bringing four members of your team to the SES conference and SEM training. One is an SES newbie, another is an SEO specialist, a third is a PPC specialist, and the fourth is an SEM veteran.

Which Search Engine Strategies conference sessions and search engine marketing training workshops should each one attend – to ensure that your business gets the biggest bang for its bucks?

As I mentioned yesterday in yesterday’s post, “Building the business case for going to SES San Jose,” almost 88% of the content at Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2008 will be brand new! So, how can anyone presume to know which sessions to recommend to someone else?

That’s a fair point, so you may want to glance at the conference at a glance yourself before deciding which tracks are right for you.

But, I’ve attended 28 SES conferences since the spring of 2002. And I’ve learned that the key to getting the right member of your team into the right session is to see who is speaking as well as to read what the session is about.

For example, on Tuesday, Aug. 19, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m., the Orion Keynote Panel, Technical & Information Giants, will be moderated by Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch, and Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media. The speakers include:
• Matt Cutts, Software Engineer Guru, Google;
• Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land;
• Tim Westergren, Founder, Pandora;
• Robert Scoble, Managing Director, FastCompany.TV; and
• Kirsten Mangers, Co-Founder & CEO, WebVisible.

According to the session description, these search engine marketing industry giants will “discuss how the past will shape our future and attempt to answer some of the biggest questions in search. What are the most important changes in the space that you should be aware of? How will the decisions made today affect our marketing and communication efforts in the future?”

While it’s never been held before, I strongly encourage you to attend this session. In fact, run, don’t walk, if you want to get a good seat.

In other cases, you’ll want your team to split up to cover as much of the four-day SEM conference as possible. To help you get started, here is an optimized schedule of Search Engine Strategies San Jose for an SES newbie, an SEO specialist, a PPC specialist, and an SEM veteran.

Day 1 - Monday, August 18, 2008

9:00am-9:30am
Whole Team: Conference Welcome & Orientation

9:45am-11:00am
SES Newbie: Search Industry Update
SEO Specialist: Universal & Blended Search
PPC Specialist: More Customers, Fewer Costs - Why Marketing to the ‘Long Tail’ Makes Sense
SEM Veteran: Mobile SEO: Death of the “.mobi”

11:15am-12:30pm
SES Newbie: The Next Wave for Online Video
SEO Specialist: Igniting Viral Campaigns
PPC Specialist: Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Which Campaign Sold What?
SEM Veteran: Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives?

1:30pm-2:30pm
Whole Team: Orion Keynote Panel: How Much Search is Enough?

2:45pm-4:00pm
SES Newbie: Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO)
SEO Specialist: Storyteller Marketing: How the Art of Storytelling Matches Up With the Business of Marketing
PPC Specialist: Everything But Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options
SEM Veteran: Enterprise Search: Running Your Own Search Engine

4:30pm-5:30pm
Whole Team: Opening Keynote Presentation
Lee Siegel, Author of “Against the Machine”

Day 2 - Tuesday, August 19, 2008

9:00am-10:00am
Whole Team: Morning Keynote
Satya Nadella, Senior VP, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft

10:00am-11:00am
Whole Team: Expo Hall Grand Opening

11:00am-12:15pm
SES Newbie: Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
SEO Specialist: Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
PPC Specialist: Landing Page Testing & Tuning
SEM Veteran: Shopping Search Tactics

1:30pm-2:30pm
Whole Team: Orion Keynote Panel:: Technical & Information Giants

4:00pm-5:15pm
SES Newbie: Search Advertising 101
SEO Specialist: Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by Numbers
PPC Specialist: Landing Page Utopia: Expert Roundtable
SEM Veteran: Research Online, Purchase Offline

5:15pm-6:30pm
Whole Team: Networking Cocktail Reception

7:00pm-11:00pm
Whole Team: Google Dance
Buses depart for the Google Campus from 6:30pm

Day 3 - Wednesday, August 20, 2008

9:00am-10:00am
Whole Team: Special Session

10:30am-11:45am
SES Newbie: Building a Search Friendly Site
SEO Specialist: SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
PPC Specialist: Ads in a Quality Score World
SEM Veteran: Getting Vertical Search Right

1:00pm-2:15pm
SES Newbie: Link Building Basics
SEO Specialist: News Search SEO
PPC Specialist: Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Issues
SEM Veteran: Searcher Behavior Research Update

2:45pm-4:00pm
SES Newbie: Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations
SEO Specialist: Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
PPC Specialist: War of the Search Worlds: Unifying Your Global Search Marketing Program
SEM Veteran: SEO Rehab & Intervention

4:15pm-5:30pm
SES Newbie: Maximizing SEO Returns With User Generated Content
SEO Specialist: Dealing With New Technologies
PPC Specialist: Advanced Paid Search Techniques
SEM Veteran: Black Hat, White Hat: Playing Dirty With SEO

5:30pm-7:00pm
Whole Team: Domain Auction

7:00pm-11:00pm
Whole Team: SearchBash
Just blocks from the Convention Center from 7:00pm till late!

Day 4 - Thursday, August 21, 2008

9:00am-10:00am
Whole Team: Morning Keynote
Chip Heath, Author of “Made to Stick”

10:15am-11:15am
SES Newbie: The Business Case for SEO Content Development: Turning Words Into Action!
SEO Specialist: How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Department To Get Stuff Done
PPC Specialist: Effective Contextual Search Management
SEM Veteran: Site Clinic

11:30am-12:30pm
SES Newbie: Fast, Free & Easy Tools to Get You Going
SEO Specialist: Trademark Issues: What SEMs Should Know
PPC Specialist: Creating a Cohesive Search Strategy Across Multiple Business Units
SEM Veteran: Site Clinic

1:30pm-2:30pm
SES Newbie: How to Choose a Search Vendor
SEO Specialist: Best Kept Secrets to Search
PPC Specialist: Post Click Marketing - Converting Search Engine Traffic
SEM Veteran: Affiliate & Search Marketing Square Off

2:45pm-3:45pm
SES Newbie: Organic Listings Forum
SEO Specialist: In House SEO: Lessons Learned & Victories Won
PPC Specialist: Search Advertising Tools
SEM Veteran: Site Clinic

Yes, I know that I included special events like the Google Dance in the schedule above. But, trust me on this: You’ll learn as much talking to the Google guys and girls at the Google campus as you will by attending any of the conference sessions listed above.

Before you register, take a hard look at sending some of your people to the SEM and SEO training workshops on the day following the conference. They are designed to provide in-depth training in a small class setting.

You may want to send your SES newbie, SEO specialist, and PPC specialist to one or two of these half-day workshops.

Day 5 - Friday, August 22, 2008

8:00am-12:00pm
SES Newbie: Successful SEO: The Essential Elements - Part 1
SEO Specialist: Optimizing for Universal Search
PPC Specialist: Search & Analytics Workshop: Using Analytics to Increase Search Effectiveness

12:00pm-1:00pm
Whole Team: Lunch Break

1:00pm-5:00pm
SES Newbie: Successful SEO: The Essential Elements - Part 2
SEO Specialist: Search Engine Marketing Metrics and Myths
PPC Specialist: Making Pay Per Click Pay - Best Practices in Pay Per Click Advertising

If you optimize your schedule for SES San Jose, then you will increase the likelihood that your team will return with more than enough new search engine marketing opportunities, better search engine optimization techniques, and different pay-per-click advertising options to provide your organization with a very healthy return on its investment.

See you there.

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Google has updated its article entitled, “What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?” Included in the update are the benefits of SEO as well as guidelines when choosing an SEO company or consultant.

The benefits mentioned in the article are:

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Google also offers up 6 questions to ask a potential SEO vendor, but back in March, our own Marty Weintraub posted 48 questions you should consider when signing up for search marketing services. And earlier today, Aaron Shear discussed upsells agencies use to keep clients on board.

When hiring an SEO agency, it’s always important to know enough SEO to make sure your vendor is pursuing the best practices. Google’s article is a good place to start and of course, stay tuned to Search Engine Watch for news and tips in the SEO industry.

Let’s look at how you can tell if you’re already a technical writer. Or if you want to become a technical writer.
The first question, of course, has to be: What is a technical writer? There’s…
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