Stephen Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts kicked off the morning’s presentation. Besides learning that Stephen’s 16 year-old daughter earns $40-$60 per day off ads on her Neopets Cheats blog, Stephen gave a great overview of tips when optimizing your blog.

We all know that as images are combined more and more with regular SERPS, image optimization is even more critical than ever before. Sure, we optimize images with alt tags and proper naming, but this session went deeper into what else is important while optimizing images for rankings and traffic.

Day 2 of SES was kicked off with an informative session on ad testing and the importance of setting the tests up right in the first place.

Anton Konikoff, Founder and CEO of Acronym Media was the first to present what he calls “Keyword Driven Marketing”. The concept is pretty straightforward – as marketers we need to decode the customer’s intent behind the search and match the keyword and subsequently the ad to this intent. Sounds easy, right?

I was running around the convention center the whole day today, making sure the magazines where in the bins and that the booth was set up so, regrettably, I was only able to make it to one session.

The session was dedicated to universal and blended search, a topic of interested to many marketers these days. The big takeaway for me from this session was that universal search is still in flux and even the leading industry experts don’t have all the answers.

We all know the Pay Per Click (PPC) basics such as setting up your campaigns and ad groups correctly, keyword expansion, ad text best practices, and how to bid to a positive ROI, so in this advanced session we were taught how to multivariate test elements in campaigns, tap into long tail terms, use dynamic keyword insertion properly, and manage portfolios of keywords.

If you operate an e-commerce business, you’ll know intimately well the balancing act constantly playing out in your mind and in your strategic and tactical planning processes. As you plan your next move to take your web business to an even higher level of performance, you’re confronted with multiple and many times competing opportunities.

I won’t begin to tell you how often prospective clients want to skip the research phase and go straight to site optimization and setting up PPC campaigns. Are you one of those companies simply because you don’t know where to begin to benchmark your site? This session did a great job laying out how to determine how visible your site is, how effectively you are reaching your target audience, and how to determine your ROI.

For years, I’ve wondered how can people attend all those SEM industry conferences and still get some work done. Now that we’re not only attending those conferences but also exhibiting at a number of them, I know their secret. You DON’T get any work done.

I wrote a week or so ago about customer reviews and wanted to follow-up that post with some new research…

Conversion rate optimization has grown to buzz word status within the online marketing industry. Some of the original “conversion marketing” firms like Future Now, Inc. has spent significant time over the past ten years educating the market about the importance of improving conversion rates. At a time when “getting traffic” was the primary focus, most companies overlooked the value of conversion rate optimization.