What snowy weather we’ve had. I actually got out in it for a bit last night to visit with my cousin. It’s amazing because apparently, snow isn’t a big deal to Chicagoans. They’ll get out in it regardless. With that being said, I’m just glad that everything is here in the Hilton where I am staying. So the SES conference is just a quick, warm trip down the elevator.

I know we have all had our minds on personalized search this year at one point or another. This is what inspired me to attend the session on personalization, user data and search. In this session the panelists talked about how user behavior drives personalization. One of the panelists, Bill Barnes presented a very compelling case study that put things into perspective. This case study consisted of an eye tracking test. This test showed that more searchers looked at personalized results longer and clicked on these results more than that of the regular results.

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Now that I have had a great night sleep, I am back at it again and ready for Day two at SES Chicago.

After getting lost a couple of times and going to the wrong ballroom in the Hilton, I finally found the International Ballroom where Seth Godin would be speaking. I was highly excited to hear Seth Godin speak about his infamous “Meatball Sundae” book.

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Boy, oh boy have I had a day! This is the first time I am attending a Search Engine Strategies conference so I must admit that I was nervous, to say the least. But once I arrived in the windy city early this morning, there was no turning back.

The first conference session I sat in on was a meeting with the Analytics “players.” In this session there were representatives from Google—of course, Omniture and Unica. All representatives did a good job discussing what their products offered. However, the Omniture representative, Chris Knock took it a bit further. He talked about some of the key metrics to dig in to. His whole point was that just looking at the metrics given to you within your web analytics application doesn’t tell you everything you should know. He talked about going deeper by looking at bounce rates, time on site, page views, etc. and then calculating even more detailed metrics like leads initiated, leads completed, lead conversion ratios and lead completion ratios.

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One morning in late July in the midst of my morning routine to start my day, I turn to my wife and say, “I need to go to California next month for SES.”  Being as far away from the Marketing field as one can be as a Personal Banker, she replies, “What is SES?”  That is the question of the day.

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Are paid links evil? Well that was the question posed in one of the sessions at the SES Conference in San Jose this year and I’ve got to tell you, it made for a heated discussion. On one side you have the search engines who say yes paid links are evil, we will find them, they will be discounted, and you will be noted. On the other side you have seasoned SEO professionals who know they work, know they can be done in a manner that can go undetected, and who claim it should not be up to the engines to police and discount this technique.

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While scouring the web for all things search related we came across this blog posting about our SES NY 2007 Pocket Guide:

Normally, I skim through the items in the popular but very lame and standard SES tote bag. This time TMP wins for the most useful item found in that bag… you guys win big for this!

Thanks Cartoon Barry. We are glad it was helpful and useful.

For more information regarding the SES NY 2007 conference check out the posts here on Search Perspective, or to see the pocket guide in action check out our SES page.

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).
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