Final day of SES NY 2007. There was a stronger crowd in attendance for the final sessions then I would have expected. A web-designer in the very last sessions was getting rather heated in her frustration with some of the material; why I have no idea? She’s actually my quote for the day (keep reading).
The final day was spent covering SEO, Usability, CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0… as Danny put it “I tried to jam as many buzz words as possible into the final sessions to get you in here…” Until the very end the content provided and presented was done so with structure, personal experience, case studies, samples and room for experimentation. Just because this was the final day we weren’t skimped on good material. Areas of note that will be expanded upon later in this blog space:

• Users will stay on your website as long as they find what they are looking for, but call to action is key. Multiple studies were presented with numbers backing up higher conversion with a more “graphical/textual” action as opposed to just a textual.
• When using a shopping cart function/feature, match expectations: how much does an item cost, how many can I purchase, and please let me buy the item right now if I want, do not push me off to a new location and risk me leaving altogether.
• General rule of thumb with online page design: things that look clickable should be clickable, and things that do not look clickable shouldn’t be clickable.
• As I scan my notes to add bullets here I just thought I’d mention (since I randomly wrote it down) that Danny Sullivan was a fantastic host. I enjoyed the sessions where he was on the panel more then those he was not. He was a great choice.
• We all love CSS for multiple reasons; faster page load time, ease and speed of visual changes, content position, cross browser display compatibility… one disadvantage mentioned was the limiting use of fonts (since not all systems have the same font library). There was also some Black-Hat conversation using CSS which I won’t comment on (I know, I am absolutely no fun whatsoever).
• Flash + Layered content is 99.999% always considered SPAM.
• In earlier posts and comments I talked about robots.txt. Once again, it has come up that engines would rather you not exclude the css folders so they can help better display content you are coding. As the Yahoo representative mentioned “We are doing our best, and continue to strive for you, as the user creating content and visual structures, we as engines should be displaying them as you intend. This is one of our main goals…”
• AJAX is a lot of fun. JavaScript and XML. AJAX is not a programing language. It’s also not something use you to clean your floors (just checking to make sure I still have your attention). AJAX is not supported by engines. A-Grade browsers do in-fact support AJAX because they are JavaScript enabled. More on AJAX and real world (ok, real world ONLINE) uses later.

And there you have it. Four days of Search Engine Strategies New York 2007 Conference. I’ve touched on just samples of content presented in the sessions and presentations. There are theories, concepts, statements that I do not always agree with. There are technologies I have yet to play fully with (I’m already jacked into Flickr and need to read more about FeedBurner). But you can be sure that anything we do with the things we’ve learned will be posted here on Search Perspective.

Final quote you ask? This was so random I had to stop writing to make sure I was hearing her tone and inflection… yup, she’s actually being hostile for some reason…

Audience Member During Q&A Portion

“…so I have a website where I’m using a background image but white text as an overlay… Google doesn’t see the color of my image… I’m a web-designer, I know what I’m doing… I will be penalized for having white text… but I know what I’m doing…”

Google Representative

“…um, we can see the color of your background image…”

I personally want to extend a huge thank you to all the presenters, SES as an organization, all the sponsors and booth participants and once again to Danny Sullivan for being a great host. Check back here for future blowouts on materials covered and exposed at SES NY 2007.