Last week I had the opportunity to speak on two panels at SES Travel, which was held in downtown Seattle. The conference was small (about 150-200 people) and focused entirely on SEO tips for working in the travel industry. There were representatives from Orbitz, Farecast, Kayak, FareCompare, Expedia, and lots of other travel-centric sites.

The first session I spoke on was Travel Writing & Content Creation. It was moderated rather spectacularly by Todd Saraouhan from GoVisitCostaRica.com--he offered up a lot of his own great questions to the panel during the Q&A whenever there was a lull or quiet stretch with the audience. Richard Zwicky from Enquisite talked about unlocking search trends. He stressed that you're blind if you try to analyze your keywords without using analytics, and that it's imperative to know both your organic traffic and your paid campaign. He used the Shelborne Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, as a case study. His company changed the site's design and implemented better paths to conversion and also corrected coding flaws, the site's navigation, and relevant content. The goal was to increase the hotel's number of bookings, and Richard was successfully able to increase the site's conversion rate 7x from the previous number. Monitoring the site's analytics helped by establishing baselines and determining what the site's required content was.

I spoke about various tips and things to keep in mind when creating content for your site, such as problems with using licensed content and how to get around it, who should write your content (editors, users, bloggers) and the pros and cons of each, become an authority/expert in one particular area and expand your site from there, and employ non-traditional content such as blogs, tools, videos, audio, photos, and widgets to attract users. I also shamelessly plugged The Simpsons movie and told audience members to go see it (apparently it worked--the film made $72 million over the weekend).

Anne Banas from Smarter Travel gave a lot of great tips on how to create copy search engines will like. She said that it's important to please the reader first and search engines second, but search engines like relevance, keyword usage, lots of text, and crosslinking. She also urged the audience to think like an editor--state the benefit in the headline, lead (the first paragraph), and body of your story. Also, be timely and add content based on what's hot at the time. Lastly, post new content often since search engines crawl more frequently if there's new, fresh content.

I really enjoyed being a part of this session. The panelists and moderator were good, and the audience was lively and interested in what we had to say. I even had a few "This question is for Rebecca"s thrown my way (which is simultaneously exciting and scary).

The second session I spoke on was Pack Your Tool Bag: Widgets, RSS, & More, moderated by Mary Bowling from Blizzard Internet Marketing. I spoke about widgets, namely what they are, their benefit, what to keep in mind when developing widgets, examples of interesting travel widgets, how to appeal to the blogosphere, and places to go to detect new and upcoming trends.I felt like I didn't do as well during this session because, in an ironic twist, I stayed up late to work on my 20-minute long presentation and got up early to put the finishing touches on it, and then felt tired and a bit out of it while I presented. Similarly, the audience seemed quiet and sleepy--the Q&A was a bit awkward and agonizingly quiet at times.

Benu Aggarwal from Milestone Internet Marketing gave a comprehensive presentation about SEM for web 2.0. She covered blogs, user-generated content, RSS, video optimization, mobile websites, and interactive maps. Benu said that web 2.0 offers a new opportunity for the travel industry to promote on the Internet, and while the adoption of web 2.0 in the travel sphere has been slower than in other markets, she feels that within the next few years it will be significantly adopted by the travel industry. She also did a good job during the Q&A.

Unfortunately, the sessions I spoke on were the only ones I actually attended because I was busy with client deadlines, getting my stitches removed, and preparing for my trip to Detroit (where I am currently) and Montreal (where I'll be Wednesday). I have no doubt, however, that the conference was valuable to attendees (the lunch alone was a vast improvement from standard SES fare). If anyone attended the conference and sat in on any other sessions, please share your thoughts/evaluation in the comments. I'd love to catch up on anything I missed.

P.S. I forgot to add that SES Travel was organized by the always lovely Elisabeth Osmeloski, who recently got a new job at Zonder Vacation Rentals. Thanks for putting all of this together so efficiently and smoothly, Elisabeth!