July 26, 2005

Site Clinic - SES San Jose 2005

Our Site Clinic session is so popular that we usually repeat it a couple of times during our shows. But for SES San Jose 2005, Site Clinic happens only once, at the very end of the show on the fourth day. What's up with that -- and what's it all about, anyway? Good news, all around.

Site Clinic is a PowerPoint-free zone. Come grab a seat, and veteran clinicians Jake Baillie of TrueLocal and Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance will take volunteers to have their sites reviewed for search engine optimization advice, going live on the web to review and check on things. Put up your hand, and you might be one of the lucky ones.

Jake and Christine have paired up plenty in the past for this session -- and in New York, they pulled our second highest session rating, a 4.8 score with 5.0 being perfect. They won't disappoint you. And moderating things with be the hard-working editor-in-chief of Search Engine Guide, Jennifer Laycock.

So why does this session come last? Because many, many questions get answered in other sessions, some of which have live review components as well. It comes last so that the real stumper questions can get dealt with.

Why no repeats this time? We're trying a new Usability Clinic that I'll tell you more about shortly. We also have the new Pimp My Site! session, which will put a new twist on Site Clinic by seeing how a site can be overhauled in advance. I'll also be coming back with more about that session soon, as well.

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Vertical Creep Into Regular Search Results - SES San Jose 2005

The Invisible Tabs are coming! The Invisible Tabs are coming! That's what I was shouting about back in 2003, a term I made up to try and communicate the fact that vertical search was coming fast into "regular" results.

I spoke once in a SES keynote in 2004 about wanting to shake marketers physically by the arms to help them understand the dramatic change that will happen when vertical results usurp the "normal" ones. It came up again at our Evening Forum in SES New York 2005. If a picture will help, then see my recent article on how Yahoo's My Web results are an example of this change.

The battle to help search marketers understand the changes vertical search is bringing continues with at our SES San Jose 2005. The Vertical Creep Into Regular Search Results session features Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR who has long been preaching vertical religion to help further illustrate how things are shifting and what search marketers should do to react.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro, a self-confessed eye-tracking junkie, will follow pushing some of his eye-tracking data to show how searchers are interacting with regular results when vertical listings are integrated into them.

Brian Mark from Toolbarn.com will then share how by going vertical, he also ended up getting better visibility in regular listings.

Yahoo will then share some comments on how they are integrating vertical results into listings, with Google invited to take part and do the same as well.

After this, we've got about a half-hour for Q&A and discussion.

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