The second day of SES London 2008 gets underway, and with the number of sessions today I just hope that the visitors don't end up with heads as foggy as the weather outside. I realise that exhibition organisers want to give visitors as much time as possible to check out the exhibitors' stands, but having hours of breaks and relatively few sessions on day 1 compared to day 2 being almost too full of content with barely any time to catch one's breath, doesn't strike me as the best way to set the timetable.

I'll try not to mention it again, but I think this conference might have felt like better value for money as two, rather than three, days.

Keynote - Nick Carr (and friends)

Kevin starts with a rather shocking announcement that Nick Carr has been unable to make the show due to a collapsed lung. He has, however, recorded a video discussing the events of the last few weeks (Micro-hoo and all that). 

Nick argues that Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is an indicator of a huge shift in the way that the internet works and, indeed, in the way that the global economy does business. He points to the way that the arrival of centralised power sources allowed the industrial revolution to step up a gear, as it removed the need for localised stores. He then suggests that computing in the future will be centralised in so much as services will be provided via the web, whilst the software companies will become media companies, funded by ad revenue.

This is certainly a fascinating argument (and one that I'm sure is explained in a much more eloquent way in his book, The Big Switch). However, it's interesting that the idea of the cloud has taken a knock recently. That's not to say that it won't happen, just that it may take a little longer than some think.

Nick also touches on the way that the internet is influencing the spread of wealth. When a company like YouTube can be bought for more than $1 billion dollars when it had less than 100 employees, it does make one wonder how the hell the rest of us are going to get a piece of the pie. However, as with all these things there are holes - he cites Skype as being an effective company due to the number of employees, but it's also one that had to admit recently that it was overvalued by $1 billion.

Nick's speech was definitely thought provoking, and Kevin now invites an all-star panel, including Mike Grehan, to discuss what the Micro-hoo deal (if it comes off) is likely to mean for search and the web in general. Paul Doleman of iCrossing feels that this isn't actually competition for Google, considering how the two companies have already managed to combine the software capabilities of Microsoft and the social excellence of Yahoo on several projects. In other words, it's not just about search.

The rest of the panel, whilst not putting it in exactly the same way, tend to agree that this is way bigger than search. (Although Mike suggests that it would be better for humanity if he ran all the major engines. Hmmm.) What he does point out is that Google is in many ways in the utility business, providing services, whereas for the last few years Yahoo and Microsoft have concentrated on content/media. What everyone agrees on is that merging the two cultures would be very difficult. The words sh*t and Sherlock spring to mind. 

Another thing the panel seems to agree on is that where this deal could succeed is in the merging of display, search, & any other form of advertising or media to provide consumers with the best possible experience. Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now points out that search is likely to look very different in 10 years' time, and also that search engines have come and gone in the past, so trying to say that Google will rule for ever is almost certainly pointless.

What no one touches on is the validity of the other potential partners that have been mentioned since Yahoo suggested that it didn't want to accept the Microsoft deal. I ask the panel what they think of these offers. They don't even mention AOL, but Paul & Bryan seem to agree that a tie-up with News Corp could be very interesting. 

When the issue of privacy crops up, Mike points out that companies are currently allowing the engines to crawl data that they almost certainly shouldn't (like this). Several other members of the panel suggest that whilst privacy is an issue, if the sharing of personal or behavioural data results in a better consumer experience, then people are likely to welcome it. Stats I've seen back this view up, so it seems like what's needed is a mix of education and better use of this data. 

Session 2: News Search SEO 

Greg Jarboe starts this session with the rather startling suggestion that anyone who missed his session at last year's SES on optimising press releases didn't miss anything, as the whole ball game has fundamentally changed. He demonstrates this by showing that when the Microsoft bid for Yahoo was announced (yes, that again) it showed up as a huge spike in Google Trends but, more interestingly, the news stories and blog posts covering the story showed up on page 1 of the SERPS, thanks to Google's Universal Search (yep, that again too).

But despite this, the official press release from Microsoft was very hard to find in the SERPS (yet managed to spark over 10,000 stories). The lesson here? It's not enough to just optimise releases - you need to move into the sphere of old-fashioned media relations, focusing not just on mainstream media, but also blogs. Personally, I think this is obvious but not that easy. I'd suggest that the type of people attending this event are simply not going to have the PR muscle to build relationships with The Guardian or the BBC. Where I'd argue there is scope for our industry is in crafting content for clients on their own blogs that will then be picked up by the mainstream press due to its relevance.

Next up is Lee Odden, who explains his theory of Pull PR, which is essentially the intersection of PR (traditionally a method of pushing content out) and SEO (which is about pulling people to your content). Within the first few minutes of his presentation, Lee refers back to Frederick Marckini's keynote from yesterday on at least three occasions. I know that I raved about Frederick's speech, but I do have a feeling that the rest of the conference could just end up being sessions where people take much longer to explain ideas and themes that Frederick covered in a matter of minutes, and in a much less engaging way than he did. I just hope that I'm wrong.

Lee does have some very useful tactics on how to practically optimise PR content, including the idea that you should coach people who are likely to be interviewed on how to make sure that they use keywords when they are; this will mean that those articles, which essentially promote your brand or your client's brand, have a better chance of ranking highly against the relevant term. He also reiterates a point Greg made, which is that including images with releases makes journalists' jobs easier and improves your chances of being featured. To combat duplicate content issues, you should always host a press release on your own site before sending it out via the news sources, being sure to highlight the fact that version on your own site is the original one.

The final speaker is Tim Gibbon of Elemental Communications. If nothing else, it's nice to hear a British accent at a British show, as so many of the speakers are American. It's not that the speakers from the US don't have great content, it's just that there are so many great talents here in the UK, it's a shame that more of them aren't being given the spotlight. (And no, I'm not bitter that I'm not speaking. No really, I'm not!)

Anyway, Tim reiterates the fact that it's not enough to send out press releases - it's much better to have PR-worthy content on your own or your client's site. This is a tactic that we've had great success with at Altogether Digital, with blog posts being picked up by national newspapers & trade publications alike. It's not necessarily for everyone, but if there are people who have the desire and ability to write, then you could be well rewarded for allowing them to do so.

In the Q&A Greg highlights a site called NewsKnife, which tracks all the sources that Google News is pulling content from. He also suggests that it can be a painful process to submit a site to Google News, but my personal experience is that as long as you follow their guidelines, it's pretty simple and doesn't take that long.

Session 3: Search Term Research and Targeting

The third session of the day has a pretty big crowd, due no doubt to the inclusion of SEOChick Lisa on the panel. Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance is the first speaker (or at least I think she is - it's so dark in here that it's hard to tell) and gives a personal example of how assuming that the language and jargon that are used within a company are the same ones that a customer will be using can be a very dangerous one. It's a basic point but one that deserves constant repetition, as so many people still assume that they know what words their customers are using.

Christine goes through some of the basics of how to go about keyword research, which I won't go into here, as they've been covered elsewhere on SEOmoz (and other sites). I'd have to disagree with her suggestion that journalists are good sources of keywords because they understand their customers/readers. They do, but when they're writing in print they're able to get away with using jargon due to the context which print brings, which doesn't exist online. In other words, I can read a word in a magazine article and understand it, but it still might not be a word I'd use when looking for information on that subject. Read this if you don't agree.

However, her suggestions of mining forums, blogs, and even customer services teams, to discover how people are describing your company, products or industry, are great ones. 

Maxime Grandchamp of Trellian also covers off a lot of the basics of keyword research: how to build up a list, targeting typos, etc. However, he does it in the form of a (very good) sales pitch for the KeywordDiscovery tool which Trellian sells, so I'm afraid to say that I drifted off a bit. If I want to buy a product, I'll come to your booth - please don't try to sell to me in a conference where the tickets cost the best part of £1,000 (even if mine was free).

Lisa comes on next, and she moves on from how to carry out keyword research to how to make use of that data. She points out that carrying out keyword research can bring up sites or companies that you wouldn't even have thought of as being competition; your offline competition may not necessarily be the same people that you need to worry about online (and, in fact, it's often nimble little start-ups that take ownership of competitive sectors online).  She also demonstrates how keyword research can be wasted if care isn't taken over how they are used in description and title tags. After all, these tend to make up the main body of a listing in the SERPS and are, to all intent and purposes, a free ad, so make sure that they are unique and crafted with the user in mind.

The final speaker is Tor Crockatt from Microsoft adCenter, who I recognised from her time at Espotting/MIVA; she's ridiculously intelligent and always gives good PowerPoint presentations. She soon covers the reasons that keyword research is important, but in such a way that she makes it seem entirely different to what's been said by the other speakers. Equating relevance to the fact that search is, by its very nature, a pull medium, is a great way of putting everything into context. Her keyword algebra, on the other hand, is something that makes perfect sense, but is way too complicated for me to try and explain here. You really need to hear it in person.

She also covers the dangers of not being aware of how your keywords might cross into other industries (with a lovely example of how a hotelier in Bergerac had been confused when he received traffic from people looking for a British TV show) as well as things such as the use of multiple elements in a single search phrase, all of which have meanings of their own and so need to be carefully considered when using keyword insert tools. Whilst I understand that SES has to appeal to a variety of different skill and experience levels, Tor's presentation was on such a different scale of complexity (and quality) that I would have liked to have seen her have a session to herself, and think that the audience of such a session would have benefited from her being allowed to spend more time going over the topics she covered.

As the session moderator says following her presentation, "Who here doesn't wish that Tor was their grammar teacher when they were at school?" I certainly do, and think that there are a lot of people here who could do with Tor as their teacher now.

Ciarán is the SEO & Social Media Director at online marketing agency Altogether Digital. He's got some thoughts on the Microsoft/Yahoo deal himself, but won't bore you with them here.

Postscript from Rebecca: Part II of Ciarán's SES London Day 2 coverage, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: SES London Day 2, Part 2, is over on YOUmoz.