SES London: Keynote Address by Danny Sullivan

Speaker: Danny Sullivan (Editor at searchenginewatch.com)

I arrive 5 minutes late, when Danny is already speaking. I got held up at King’s Cross Station, shame on me for booking a hotel at 20 mins by tube from the event site.

Danny talks about what search engine marketing is and how great the “reverse broadcasting” medium of search really is. Contrary to traditional broadcasting (tv, radio, print, etc) which is untargeted and rather wasteful, reverse broadcasting is about listening to searchers explicitly expressing their immediate desires. All this makes search engine marketing ( a combination of SEO and search advertising) an extremely efficient tool for marketers.

What search marketers do
Identify key desire broadcasting stations (major search engines, important niche players).
Come to understand how to feed and optimise these stations.
Deliver the customized message.

He goes on to stress the difference between search marketing (ads showing up in e.g. Google after the users has entered a search term and thus expressed his or her desire) and contextual marketing (ads showing up on pages about a certain subject, if a user is reading an article about something this does not mean they have explicitly expressed a desire).
A frustrating fact for marketers in this matter is that neither Google nor Yahoo in their reports make a distinction between the two. They just put all earnings together without breaking out contextual or display from search.

He then talks about the 3 generations of search (the third being the current one):
1st generation: crawlers looked at the words on the page
2nd generation: link analysis
3rd generation: vertical and personalised. This does not mean that link data is abandoned: it is just that trusted ones are used more.

What is vertical search?
The focus is narrow so this means less off-topic junk
You can sort in different ways, use different display metaphors

What is personalised or social search?
Results are being reshaped based on what you personally do or visit, what others you know do or visit and what people in aggregate do or visit. This helps to solve the spam problem. In this context, he recommends that optimisers turn off personalized search in Google when checking the ranking for their own site because the fact the people tend to visit their own site a lot might make it look to them that it is ranking higher than it actually is.

Key notions for success in generation 3 search is to watch the important verticals in your industry, have great content and have especially great titles and descriptions (for click-through purposes).

Danny stresses once again that he expects more balance between SEO and paid search for the future, as people are beginning to understand the PR impact of search. He also predicts more lawsuits over click fraud and trademark issues.

Technorati tags: ses - search engine strategies - search