Search Engine Strategies has grown as fast as the major search engines. During the next year, not only are there three U.S. conferences, but eight country specific conferences in Europe and Asia. In addition, there will be specialized conferences: Local Search Edition, Multimedia Edition, and Financial Edition. This first day of Search Engine Strategies 2006 in San Jose highlighted the demand for search engine marketing. There was a large contingent of first time attendees, and I overhead conversations about trying to understand the complexities of online marketing. There was a good mix of marketers and technologists, and many who could speak both languages in this relatively new field.

There were five different tracks which allowed attendees to choose different sessions by their focus--either Organic Search or Advertising, Basic or Advanced. In one of the sessions I attended, Danny Sullivan, the founder of the conference, spoke on the fundamentals in the Introduction to Search Engine Marketing, which remain basically the same. Interestingly, several of the companies he has used for several years as examples of poor design still have not changed their website design to improve SEO--an indication of the blinders facing marketers. Shari Thurow of Grandtastic Designs, spoke on Search Engine Friendly Design, which is also user-friendly design!

Research on the web is an evolving art, with search term research with being very powerful for market analysis, competitive analysis and site search evaluation. Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance and Dan Thies, SEO Research Labs showed their current toolkit of keyword analytical tools and how they are being used to improve client revenue.

Interest was high in the Social Search track organized by Chris Sherman, associate editor of Search Engine Watch. However, use of social publishing to reach an audience for consumer marketing purposes is not clear, though both Yahoo and Google are exploring. I attended the panel session on communities, talking about blogs, wikipedia and tagging, with Chris Sherman predicting 12 to 24 months for opportunities to evolve. An audience query about Pay Per Post sparked a lively debate among the panelists about the reputation of bloggers who would (gasp!) accept money. But isn't this conference about making money using search engines?