This post comes from Chris Richardson at SES San Jose:

I attended the Search Term Research & Targeting session, which featured a Q&A with John Slade, Yahoo! Search Marketing's director of Product Management.

The session focused on ways to use search term research to help your search engine marketing efforts succeed through free or paid listings.

John provided good details on some things to do to manage your search engine marketing campaign:

-Tailor your terms toward potential customers. This entails matching the keywords you are targeting toward what your desired customers are searching for.

-One thing john was adamant about was that SEM is not a “set it and forget” it market. He strongly advised to always examine, tune, and learn about your campaign and adjust accordingly.

-Ensure your users are taken to the page that has the content they are looking for, ie your landing page.

-Steal from the best. Learn what your competitors and suppliers are doing and mimic or at least emulate it.

-Holiday seasons are another good time to adjust your campaigns. Not every consumable item people are searching for stays in season, ie halloween costumes.

-John also urged to make use of the various tools to manage and track your keywords; tools like Word Tracker...

After that, the session commenced with a Q and A, which was aimed at basic users. This is where I departed.